I think us here to wonder, myself. To wonder. To ask. And that in wondering bout the big things and asking bout the big things, you learn about the little ones, almost by accident. But you never know nothing more about the big things than you start out with. The more I wonder, the more I love.
– Alice Walker, The Color Purple
Read More »by Diana L. Gustafson
“What’s death got to do with it?” Our museum tour guide grins as she makes the irreverent reference to Tina Turner’s best-selling hit. Patty knows how to grab the attention of Gen X tourists clustered around her in the grand centre block of Toronto’s Royal Ontario Museum. In a former life, she was probably everyone’s favourite high school music teacher.
Patty leans in. “Death simultaneously intrigues and repels us.” I know she’s speaking to me. I signed up for the afternoon tour because I was curious about burial rituals practised in ancient times. At least, that’s what I tell myself. Easier than facing tough questions haunting my messy life. I soon discover that each pause on the tour unearths relics of my struggles to make sense of love and death.
Read More »It is wrong to expect a reward for your struggles. The reward is the act of struggle itself, not what you win. Even though you can’t expect to defeat the absurdity of the world, you must make the attempt. That’s morality, that’s religion, that’s art, that’s life.
– Phil Ochs, as quoted in The Complete Phil Ochs: Chords of Fame (1978) by Almo publications
Read More »by Daisy Solace
It’s 2013. I’m 11, living in Saudi Arabia, and anticipating House of Hades’s release with bated breath, counting down the days. It’s all I talk about, my best friend is getting sick of me. I’m insufferable, and I like it. I haven’t been into Percy Jackson for very long — just about a month by this point, but it’s found its space in my head and settled there.
As a kid who had always felt ALONEALONEALONEalonealonealone, it’s nice to read about a boy who’d changed schools so much that he has no friends, except for the one whose job it is to protect him. It’s nice to read about a boy who knows the truth: that the best people have the rottenest luck. It’s nice to read about a boy who, despite this, fights. After rows upon rows of pleasant protagonists, there’s a certain level of solace (pun intended) in Percy Jackson. He’s not easy. He’s not agreeable. He’s angry, rowdy, and, as Percy would come to say in the musical, impertinent. As a fellow impertinent child, I’m delighted.
Read More »I was going to die, if not sooner then later, whether or not I had even spoken myself. My silences had not protected me. Your silences will not protect you. …
What are the words you do not yet have? What do you need to say? What are the tyrannies you swallow day by day and attempt to make your own, until you will sicken and die of them, still in silence? …
And of course I am afraid, because the transformation of silence into language and action is an act of self-revelation, and that always seems fraught with danger. …
We can learn to work and speak when we are afraid in the same way we have learned to work and speak when we are tired. For we have been socialized to respect fear more than our own needs for language and definition, and while we wait in silence for that final luxury of fearlessness, the weight of that silence will choke us.
– Audre Lorde, The Transformation of Silence into Language and Action (as found in the book Sister Outsider)
by L. A. Ballesteros Gentile
There’s so much in it—the word sometimes: nostalgia and yearning and tenderness and regret… And so simple, too, so obvious: two four-letter words past the stage of hyphenation that portmanteaus often travel in fright.
Read More »Every single empire in its official discourse has said that it is not like all the others, that its circumstances are special, that it has a mission to enlighten, civilise, bring order and democracy, and that it uses force only as a last resort. And, sadder still, there always is a chorus of willing intellectuals to say calming words about benign or altruistic empires.
[…]
Rather than the manufactured clash of civilisations, we need to concentrate on the slow working together of cultures that overlap, borrow from each other, and live together. But for that kind of wider perception we need time, patient and sceptical inquiry, supported by faith in communities of interpretation that are difficult to sustain in a world demanding instant action and reaction.
Humanism is centred upon the agency of human individuality and subjective intuition, rather than on received ideas and authority. […] humanism is the only, and I would go as far as to say the final resistance we have against the inhuman practices and injustices that disfigure human history.
– Edward W. Said (1935 – 2003), Palestinian American academic, literary critic and political activist, author of Orientalism (1978), The Question of Palestine (1979), Culture and Imperialism (1993), Out of Place: A memoir (1999), Reflections on exile and other essays (2000) and many others.
[Source: A window on the world, 2003, on guardian.org – text adapted from the introduction to a new edition of Orientalism, published by Penguin]
by Marie-Eve Bernier
I never cared for hockey. Sure, as a Canadian (truthfully, more of a Québécoise), I was aware of hockey but failed to appreciate its beauty and never quite understood its meaning. I would continue to be oblivious about it for far too many years.
Read More »And I say to myself: a moon will rise from my darkness.
– Mahmoud Darwish
Utopia is not a kind of place but a kind of time, those all too brief moments when one would not wish to be anywhere else. Is there an instinct, a very ancient instinct, for breathing in unison? The ultimate utopia, that.
– Susan Sontag, In America
The Amazine Community 