Wednesday, April 8, 2009
Audio of the Group's presentation
The group acknowledges Jose Sanchez's and Rene Mendizabal's assistance for this podcast
Saturday, April 4, 2009
Otherness
My name is Mike. I’m from Uganda, the pearl of Africa. I was African earlier, now I’m an African-Canadian. That makes me the other in a society that tries to hide the other. There are hundreds of people just as me, maybe a million, maybe more. Not all of them are in Canada, they are spread across the world.
I’m different because you want me to remain different. I’m different because you will not let me lose my hyphenated existence.
Let me illustrate to you what I mean by that by narrating to you a conversation that I heard recently between the Hollywood actor Morgan Freeman and Mike Wallace.
MW: What do you think of the black history month?
MF: I find it ridiculous.
MW: Why?
MF: You want to relegate my history to a month! What do you want to do with yours? Which month is the White History month? Tell me... come on!
MW: Well, ahem... I’m Jewish...
MF: Which month is Jewish History Month?
MW: No, there isn’t one.
MF: Oh! Do you want one?
MW: Oh! No! No! I don’t.
MF: No, I don’t either. I don’t want a Black History month. The Black History is American History.
MW: How are we going to get rid of racism…
MF: Stop talking about it, I am going to stop calling you a “White Man.”
MW: Yap!
MF: And I am going to ask you, to stop calling me a “Black Man”. You know me as “Morgan Freeman” and I know you as “Mike Wallace.”
You may watch the video here
Understanding Canada
You have read Mike Odongkara, a photo journalist and an immigrant from Uganda. As a first-generation African immigrant, Mike has a different perspective on the entire process and the serious adjustment that immigrants have to go through to settle in this new homeland.
Our team comprises Mike, Nelson, an immigrant from Peru, Mayank from India and I. My name is Yoko. I’m from Japan and have lived in Germany, too.
The main focus of our presentation is survival, and within this broad framework we will be discussing issues of seclusion, segregation, loneliness, suspicion, fear and emptiness. Our theme is about understanding the broad contours of Canadian mind as represented by two of this land’s pre-eminent writers – John Franklin and Margaret Atwood. We decided to study these two writers – separated by a century – because they have come to represent the Canadian spirit in its grand expanse as well as its intricacies.
John Franklin represents the spirit of adventure that began more than a century before him with the likes of Jacques Cartier. But there is something quintessentially different about Franklin in that. His diaries are not just plain recordings of what he witnessed, as was the case with the recordings of the previous European attempts to decipher this vast and varied land, but they are clearly meant to serve as travelogues – probably the first travelogues of North America for a European audience.
Moreover, the mysterious and tragic end of his expedition and his death has romanticized Franklin like no other explorer in North America.
Nelson, who has done extensive research on Franklin, says, and I quote, “John Franklin has more interesting mythology to him than biography.” End quote.
After Franklin, the other writer we discuss is Margaret Atwood. Atwood is a national icon in Canada, and enjoys a reputation that would be the envy of even rock stars. In a writing career spanning four decades and flourishing as it gallops into the fifth, Atwood is Canada’s best chance at the literature Nobel. Atwood’s writing encompasses all known genres.
What is unique about her is that she is the first one to talk about issues that become important later. For example, Atwood’s latest book is Payback: Debt and the Shadow of Wealth. Pertinent to our presentation is Atwood’s grandest work that gave Canada a canonical definition of literature and identity: Survival: A thematic guide to Canadian Literature.
Mayank researched Atwood and feels it’s impossible to encapsulate Atwood or give a parenthetical definition to her work. He says, and I quote, “It’s necessary to understand Atwood for all immigrants to understand Canada.”
Videos on Canada
John Franklin
John Franklin was eaten alive by his fellow explorers. It’s politically incorrect to say this about someone who is considered a national hero, but that really is the fact as ascertained by several expeditions that were undertaken to investigate what really happened to Franklin and his expedition.
It’s important to understand the mythology that surrounds Franklin to understand the Canadian mind. To most Canadians (and to people who see Canada from outside by reading its literature) Franklin is adventurer, who fearlessly went out into the great white wilderness.
When John Franklin decided to explore the Arctic, many people thought that the long hike across the Canadian wilderness would be both dangerous and fruitless.
His first great expedition was a journey without precedent and with some relevant achievements. More than five thousand miles of wilderness were crossed and five hundred miles of unexplored Arctic Coast were mapped. The expedition also proved that findind a Northwest passage was possible.
However, the cost of that expedition was terrible. Eleven men died. Two were murdered. Although it would never be discussed in Victorian England, there had unquestionably been cannibalism.
For sure, Franklin and his men were brave, but they also were arrogant and neglected. Two expeditions were a complete disaster. Franklin was not well-prepared, he didn´t have enough knowledge about the Canadian wilderness and he could never learn how Inuit people would survive in such conditions.
It’s important to understand the mythology that surrounds Franklin to understand the Canadian mind. To most Canadians (and to people who see Canada from outside by reading its literature) Franklin is adventurer, who fearlessly went out into the great white wilderness.
When John Franklin decided to explore the Arctic, many people thought that the long hike across the Canadian wilderness would be both dangerous and fruitless.
His first great expedition was a journey without precedent and with some relevant achievements. More than five thousand miles of wilderness were crossed and five hundred miles of unexplored Arctic Coast were mapped. The expedition also proved that findind a Northwest passage was possible.
However, the cost of that expedition was terrible. Eleven men died. Two were murdered. Although it would never be discussed in Victorian England, there had unquestionably been cannibalism.
For sure, Franklin and his men were brave, but they also were arrogant and neglected. Two expeditions were a complete disaster. Franklin was not well-prepared, he didn´t have enough knowledge about the Canadian wilderness and he could never learn how Inuit people would survive in such conditions.
View documentary on John Franklin's expeditions
Margaret Atwood
Margaret Atwood’s writing career spans more than four decades, encompasses all known literary genres including the ones she invented – prose fragments and prose poems.
She is all things to all people and a national icon. Anthologist Eli Mandel notes, Atwood is a “feminist, nationalist, literary witch, mythological poet, satirist, formulator of critical theories,” and as David Staines pertinently says, “She is, above all else, Canadian.”
This essay examines the broad strokes on the Atwoodian canvas and attempts an understanding of the trends that influenced her and those that she influenced. In this endeavour the essay relies solely on selections from Atwood’s works in Volume II of Canadian Literature in English.
This attempt to decipher Atwood’s work is to understand it from an immigrant’s perspective; this writer does not possess the requisite felicity to be judgemental a body of work that is so vast and diverse and about a personality that evokes such staggeringly divergent sentiments.
Another caveat is also necessary. To compartmentalize a writer’s career into different phases is a wholly arbitrary exercise and often illogical. However, this essay does that in the belief that Atwood’s career does have distinct phases, a view that is supported by Atwood’s biographers such as Staines; although this essay does not follow Staines’ categorization .
This essay delineates Atwood’s career into four phases:
This essay delineates Atwood’s career into four phases:
1: The first phase is from 1961-1968 where Canadian landscape, exploration of the self and the craft predominate.
2: The second phase is from early 1970s to the 1980s when Atwood defines Canadian literature for Canada and the world.
3: The third phase is from the 1980s to mid-1990s when Atwood the activist is redefining the world to Canada,
4: In the last phase, we are witnessing the emergence of Atwood as a national icon.
Throughout the last four-and-a-half decades, Atwood’s work is anchored to Canada. The initial phase – which begins in 1961 Double Persephone and lasts till 1968 – is about craft. A decade later in Footnote to the Amnesty Report on Torture (1978) this despondency is mixed with – if not completely replaced by – trenchant indignation:
This is the second phase. Evidently, in a decade – and this is the Canadian decade that coincided with Pierre Trudeau’s tenure as the prime minister that in retrospect turned out to be epochal – Atwood has emerged from her formative shell, experienced a creative catharsis and transformed herself from a mere observer to a participant in the socio-political processes.
In addition to giving Canada a canonical definition of literature and identity in Survival: A thematic guide to Canadian Literature (1972) and The Journal of Susanna Moodie (1970), “(Atwood was) involved with nationalist cultural concerns as an editor of Anansi Press (1971-73) and as an editor and political cartoonist.”
The third phase begins in the 1980s as Atwood’s work reflects the amalgamation of her experiences as an activist seized with the issues of human rights and a woman who is also exploring her role in a patriarchal society. “Her collected criticism Second Words (1982) contains some of the earliest feminist criticism written in Canada,” and the critically acclaimed novel The Handmaid’s Tale “(probed) the gender biases of historiography.”
In the last two decades, “Atwood’s original literary interests have not been abandoned, but they have taken on a darker shading.” Atwood’s amazing productivity is both a challenge to literary analysts, who are constantly re-evaluating her work in light of new sociological theories that gain currency every decade or so, and for the general reader, who uncritically wants to enjoy a good book.
An appropriate conclusion to the essay would be an Atwood quote on her fondness for poetry that sums up her cavalier brilliance, “I had no idea, that I was about to step into a whole set of preconceptions and social roles which had to do with what poets were like, how they should behave… I did not know that the rules about these things were different if you were female… when I was sixteen, it was simple. Poetry existed; therefore it could be written; and nobody had told me -- yet -- the many, many reasons why it could not be written by me.”
I think it’s important to understand Atwood to understand Canada, especially for a newcomer. This is because Atwood has not only defined what Canada means to Canadian, but has defined Canada for the world and is now making the world realize the world that lives in Canada.
Atwood's poems:
Atwood, the oracle
Conclusion
What is the summation of our group’s research?
We are going to present the conclusions now. The Europeans or the Asians often say, “Canada is a young country, and so the Canadian Study is boring.” This is a fallacy. Human beings develop much more quickly and dramatically in their first two decades than in their fifties or sixties; so do countries.
Let’s say, the arrival of the Europeans in Canada was the marriage of two different worlds. And then, Canada was born, not as a nation, but as an ideology. The baby Canada needed the protection or the patronage of the parents. And it started to toddle, and then reached puberty. It started to try to get away from the parents’ influence, but was still afraid of the mean classmates: Giant America and the powerful nature.
Canada was the lost soul. "Who am I?" It started to ask, to seek for its identity.
Canada has come to the age, and got matured. As an adult, now it has responsibilities for others, its roles, and it has to behave itself. But adults, as we are often so, are also changing. But we cannot grope our identities so freely like teens.
We are going to present the conclusions now. The Europeans or the Asians often say, “Canada is a young country, and so the Canadian Study is boring.” This is a fallacy. Human beings develop much more quickly and dramatically in their first two decades than in their fifties or sixties; so do countries.
Let’s say, the arrival of the Europeans in Canada was the marriage of two different worlds. And then, Canada was born, not as a nation, but as an ideology. The baby Canada needed the protection or the patronage of the parents. And it started to toddle, and then reached puberty. It started to try to get away from the parents’ influence, but was still afraid of the mean classmates: Giant America and the powerful nature.
Canada was the lost soul. "Who am I?" It started to ask, to seek for its identity.
Canada has come to the age, and got matured. As an adult, now it has responsibilities for others, its roles, and it has to behave itself. But adults, as we are often so, are also changing. But we cannot grope our identities so freely like teens.
Who am I?" Canada was still asking.
What Margaret Atwood has achieved is to define Canada and to give Canada an identity throughout her work. As a description of modern Canada, Atwood wrote “The Age of Lead” in 1991. In this short story, the main character, Jane, can’t take eyes off the TV show covering the discovery of the bodies of the Franklin expedition. Franklin and his men are, to her, the symbols of the change, and freedom. Jane is Canada: Deep in heart, it wants to change, but doesn’t know what to do.
Canada is still changing. It has its ideal view and the goal, and it’s trying to find its way to there. And we are part of the journey.
Last year, a result of a study was released. Among the developed countries, Canada ranked almost at the bottom in terms of the maturity or the functionality as a country, but came to the top in terms of people’s feeling happiness.
Canada is still incomplete. And its future depends on all of us.
Videos to enhance your appreciation of Canada:
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