Discussed in this post:
5 Books (The History of White People; Other Council Fires Were Here Before Ours; Ojibwe Giizhig Anang Masinaa’igan; Austerlitz; and Nostromo);
2 Movie (10 Cloverfield Lane and A Girl Walks Home Alone at Night);
3 Documentaries (Crumb; In the Realms of the Unreal; Salesmen).
Discussed in this post:
3 books (Geronimo: His Own Story, How Forests Think, and Mausoleum of Lovers);
1 movie (Underground);
4 documentaries ((T)ERROR, Land Without Bread, Night & Fog, and There’s Something Wrong with Aunt Diane).
Part One: Dirty Water
As of January 1, 2016, there were 135 drinking water advisories in effect in First Nations communities (that is to say, on “Indian Reservations”), across Canada. This is excluding British Columbia, where another 26 drinking water advisories were in effect as of February 29, 2016. If you actually read through the advisories, you’ll notice that many have been in effect since the mid-1990s and have no sign of not being in effect any time soon. Altogether, over 109 communities are impacted. It’s hard to know the exact figures because many communities do not have a population listed but, based upon the information available, we can estimate that this impacts over 75,000 people. Over 75,000 Indigenous people living in conditions of poverty we tend to associate with some of the poorest nations in the two-thirds world — we are talking about people who lack buildings with heat or insulation (despite living near the arctic), who lack running water, and who cannot drink or bathe in the water that is available to them.
A lot of rich Christians are celebrating the forgiveness of their sins this weekend.
Discussed in this post: Two books (Quantum Physics by Humphrey, Pancella, and Berrah; and The Medicalization of Society by Conrad); three or six films, depending how you score it (Andersson’s Living trilogy, Vinterberg’s Hunt, and one disappointing one about David Foster Wallace) and three documentaries (Dreamcatcher, Running From Crazy, and Prophet’s Prey).
I have been thinking about Eduardo Kohn’s book, How Forests Think: Toward an Anthropology Beyond the Human along with Ye-weh-node’s teachings in Language of the Stones and elsewhere. I have been thinking about what Glen Coulthard says about the connection that the Yellowknives Dene feel with the land — that the land does not belong to them, but they belong to the land — and how this is a common belief amongst the various Indigenous Peoples of Turtle Island. And I have been thinking of the words I heard from a Sḵwx̱wú7mesh Elder who said, “We have different languages because we come from different lands. It is the land that gave us our language. We speak because the land gave us speech and different lands speak differently.”
[A few years back, I stopped doing my monthly book reviews. I’m going to try and get back into that as well as maybe doing some film and documentary reviews. Rather than doing formal reviews, I’m mostly going to use these texts or films as springboards for thought so I won’t always be providing very detailed analyses of whatever title happens to be under discussion. I’m sure google can lead to any number of more traditional reviews. Also, I’m happy to hear in the comments about what other people are reading or watching and enjoying!]
Books
1. A Brief History of Seven Killings by Marlon James.
Jamaica is more than Bob Marley as the CIA knew full well in 1976 when the Rasta who sang against downpression and isms was shot. Although Papa Doc Duvalier was firmly established by violence and terror and money in Haiti, the Cuban revolution had succeeded against all odds. Granted, Che was already dead for nine years but his witness and words — ¡hasta la victoria siempre! — lived on. In the mid- to late twentieth century much of the Caribbean was in flux and it was hard to know where the cards would fall. Would the the people manage to shake off the yoke of colonial imperialism, foreign powers, and client rulers willing to betray their own people for personal profit, or would those powers triumph and beat the people down in order to maintain ever growing disparities between the rich and the poor?
1. Sorrows, Joys, and Bullshit
First of all, there are the wounds, the traumas, and the irrecoverable losses. There are the children taken by the agents of government, the innocence taken by the hands of men, and the physical mobility taken by the front bumper and rear left tire of a careless driver. These wounds are the great sorrows. They are the ones that leave empty spaces on our insides and our outsides, where parts of our selves used to be but no longer are. Or, as is so often the case with deaths and dyings (for Death is not so much The End as our constant companion on the way there), they leave spaces inside of us filled with the presence of a person who is no longer with us bodily. Every day, you are present with me, but as an absence. Every day, I remember what I used to be able to believe, but believe no longer. Every day.
Second, there are the great joys. The moments of beauty that leave us breathless — waves smashing on rocks that send spray thirty feet into the air, the embrace of a lover, deer that come from the woods by the river and walk and stand and stare as though they are unafraid, and trees that remember and still sing of what there was to see before we were here. These joys are a balm upon our wounds. They are comfort in the midst of our sorrows. They are moments when we can rest or revel in these bodies that we are and that are, no matter how marked, still so very much alive.
First the great sorrows, then the great joys. Things go in that order. When we are hurt we awaken to the world as a place into which we have been thrown — a place that is foreign and alien and Other. Consciousness — of the kind that arrived all those years ago when a man and woman ate from a tree called the knowledge of good and evil — begins here. But it doesn’t stop there because, when we are loved, we learn that we can also call this world good. So first the great sorrows and then the great joys.
