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Enough? The Baha’i Seven Are Still There**.

Posted by :James Howden On : May 28, 2016
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Category: At First Glance

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**(Lest We Forget)**

The campaign is over now.

There have been several concerted efforts to raise global awareness. One proclaimed the passing of 10,000 hours of unjust, of ridiculously tragic imprisonment of seven Baha’i leaders in Iran. Many fine words were said in numerous dignified contexts, but the “Yaran” – it means “friends” in Farsi – remained in jail. The five-year mark of their astounding 20-year sentences brought another crescendo of polite indignation, but these five years of loss, not only to the persecuted Baha’i minority but to all of Iranian society, moved the Teheran government not a bit.

Will a new logo be needed for nine?

Will a new logo be needed for nine?

In May of 2015, the hashtag #SevenBahaisSevenYears achieved not quite the currency of, say, #BlackLivesMatter (to say nothing of tags for TV shows or celebrity break-ups), but it circled the globe with awareness and a renewed call for justice. Earlier this month, #EnoughIsEnough and #ReleaseBahai7Now had their moments of trendiness as the Yaran’s captivity reached its eight anniversary.

The campaign did its best. More people than before are aware of the human rights situation in Iran, one that puts the Baha’is at the centre of the issue – not that they are the only, or even the largest, group that is oppressed and unjustly incarcerated. In fact, the Baha’i community wishes only to serve the broader population, and is dogged, even when its brightest young people are excluded from university admission, in its pursuit of education for all. Their “crime” is one, plainly and simply, of belief in the teachings of the 19th-century Persian nobleman known as Baha’u’llah, considered a heretic by Shiah Islamic clerics. All the noise about “sedition” and “immorality” and “spying” is nothing but bigoted, ignorant and baseless slander; religious intolerance is the reality.

So here I am. I tweeted and liked. Did my bit, I guess. Maybe so.

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Re-Distribution 7.5: Behrouz Prays for His Oppressors

Posted by :James Howden On : November 26, 2015
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Category: At First Glance

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I’ve gotten distracted, just like the world has. For a week last May, considerable global attention — at least, within the bubble of those with the willingness (or the freedom) to look up from their routine concerns — was paid to remembrance and advocacy for seven leaders of the Baha’i community of Iran. Wanting to join the movement, I had to get to know Behrouz Tavakkoli, so I wrote about him.

Behrouz is another man who is widely known and loved — and was taken from — among the Iranian Baha’is, one of the seven who were then entering an eighth year of unjust imprisonment in two Iranian jails.  He and his partners in “crime” were the focus for the international #7Bahais7Years campaign, and now that it’s seven-and-a-HALF years, here I go again. I hoped, back then, that my seven personal essays (this was the sixth) could be of some use in the worldwide protest, and maybe they moved somebody besides me, but the seven still grow old in prison. They are sacrificial lions, bravely enduring pariah status in a country that needs their kind more than it knows. So in case you missed, or would like to remember, my May series on the Quietly Magnificent Seven, prisoners of conscience in Iran for 7.5-years-and-counting, here was Issue No. 6…

They made a carpenter out of him. Behrouz Tavakkoli, in most ways, is probably okay with that.

They made a carpenter out of him. Behrouz Tavakkoli, in most ways, is probably okay with that.

I’ve been reading about Behrouz Tavakkoli. (I’ve known some “Persian versions” named Behrouz. They usually had to defer to the impervious pronunciation of Canadian-born friends and accept ‘Bruce’. Too bad, but Iranians have put up with worse. Declaration: I’ve never had a bad experience with a Behrouz.)

My favourite Bruce, singer/songwriter Cockburn, startled those familiar with his gorgeous acoustic guitar-picking and gentle, Christian-flavoured and granola-fed singing. It was the 1980s. As he became more aware of global poverty and the systematic injustice of so-called “first world” nations, songs like “They Call it Democracy” were wildly angry for a peace-loving Canuck. The most shocking one, of course, and likely the one that put him on an American blacklist for a time, was “(If I Had a) Rocket Launcher”. He wanted to “make somebody pay” for the terrible suffering he saw in Central and South American countries, which were ‘collateral damage’ during that ever-more–ridiculous global struggle (allegedly) between communism and democracy. (Remember the Cold War? Is it even over? Where and how is it being fought now? These are uncomfortable questions. Feel free to ignore them; most do.)

I have nothing so dramatic to say; nobody will pay. However, I read Mr. Tavakkoli’s story, and there’s no doubt: that’s anger rising up into my chest.

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Time Goes Fast, Learning Goes Slow *

Posted by :James Howden On : March 29, 2013
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Category: At First Glance

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Love this album.

* This is a line from from Bruce Cockburn‘s song “When You Give It Away”,  from his 1999 album Breakfast in New Orleans, Dinner in Timbuktu. Bruce is mighty, but this post isn’t about him. It’s all about me, folks. (Well, and maybe them, and her, and all of us, and maybe even you.)

I should know by now.

(I do know, as through an angry glass, darkly.)

I should know by now that vehicles on Dalian streets do not yield for pedestrians, but may accelerate around corners or slalom from one lane of traffic to another to get past them. I should know better than to get revved up, but I still do. It happened again yesterday, though I didn’t shout and flail. (Progress!?)

I should know by now that my freshman class’s leader wouldn’t really understand my directions, though he said, “Got it!” I should have known that he would go upstairs to ask the school administrators for an empty classroom, rather than just doing the quick walkabout I’d recommended to find a spot for a writing class that we’d had to re-schedule. (I knew they wouldn’t help him, since he was a mere student, and they likely wouldn’t have had any better answer for me. Such requests are, no matter how banal, always “very difficult”.) By the time I arrived, just barely at the time we’d agreed on, some of the group had dispersed because there were “no rooms available”. Yes, well, except for the one on the first floor, the one on the second, and the one on the third. I didn’t go any higher.

I shouldn’t have been surprised to learn, later that day, that our Canada-bound sophomore students are required to pay a 6500-yuan “service/counselling fee” to get their visas. That’s about a thousand bucks. That’s about two months’ rent for our well-above-average apartment. My surge of head-shaking disgust was surely redundant. I shouldn’t have been surprised, either, that the kids seemed entirely resigned about it.

I should know better than to have let my temper rise at dinner last night, too. He was only 20-something, and yes, he had too much to say, and he talked right over the friend to his right and was sublimely uninterested in hearing from the two women at our table. Four bottles of beer in an hour didn’t help him much, come to think of it, and I do have a son-of-an-alcholic’s distaste for those who find loud courage in a bottle. It’s true, also, that most of our students and young Chinese friends assume that Canada is paradise and that our lives are far more fortunate than theirs – which, in most ways, is nothing but true.

But he got so aggressive in bemoaning how hard it was to find a wife, how little he had learned in seven years of university, his not knowing how to do his job, how difficult it was, how long it would take him to save for a house so long as he turned down his well-off daddy’s standing offer to buy him one or two (which would, according to Chinese custom, make his wife-hunt much easier, sad to say). By the time he launched into you don’t know, you’re from Canada, everything is easy for you, I should have known it was time to bid a polite good night, but this spoiled prince-ling had hit a whole bunch of a cheek-chewing Canadian’s buttons. He probably doesn’t think a lot differently than many young men I know here, but he was rude and insistent enough that he got both barrels. I don’t like to be so salty and direct, and I wish I’d been able to do it without so much heat, but enough was enough and maybe I was burnt by a long day of learning what I ought to already know. We had spoken earlier of the value of directness, and maybe he learned something, too. We parted civilly, all of us, with mutual congratulations for frank discussion and the importance of seeing for ourselves, but I was still muttering to myself as I got ready for bed. I slept long.

I knew this wouldn’t be easy. There is so much education to be had! (Trouble with nations, trouble with relations / Where you gonna go for some illumination? / Too much to carry, too much to let go / Time goes fast, learning goes slow…*) As we approach the end of four years living and teaching in China, I know who the real student is. (Imagine: I complained a little in our first year that our living conditions in China were too comfy, that we weren’t really experiencing sufficient hardship to genuinely grow, to contribute usefully to this society. I hope I’m growing. I hope I’m giving something that China can use. But I should’ve known better than to tempt the fates as brazenly as that!) I wasn’t used to thinking of myself as a slow learner1, but I should’ve known that a stubborn idealist and a fiery perfectionist (those would be me) would take some bumps.

 

1 And, if more evidence were needed, I’m headed for another adventure in old-boy basketball Sunday night, playing students again in the same gym from which I took an unscheduled hospital trip in January. Some guys never learn, and sometimes that ain’t so bad.

Buddy Wasisname and the Other Fellers

Posted by :James Howden On : October 5, 2006
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Category: At First Glance

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FDA (full-disclosure alert): that title is a false lead and a limping excuse to drop my current favourite band name into this and nearly every other conversation. Buddy is a Newfoundland band, three guys that play a mixture of goofy, hearty and sentimental songs from down home. (They would seem to have a solid touring career, playing across the Maritimes and for the Newfoundland diaspora all over Canada.)

But that’s not what I’m writing about. (And I haven’t even heard the lads play, so that’s all I have anyway. Reminds me of the opening to a Cockburn song: Woke up thinking about Turkish drummers / Didn’t take long, I don’t know much about Turkish drummers / But it made me think of Germany and the guy who sold me cigarettes / Who’d been in the Afghan secret police who made the observation that it’s hard to live…) Buddy reminds me that I listened to a trio of terrific Canuck writers last night at the local LitWit extravaganza, one of whom was a rumpled, denim-clad Newfoundland writer named Kenneth J. Harvey.

For son Will and me, Harvey was the intriguing highlight of the evening. Faded jean jacket, flushed cheeks under several days growth of beard, a plain black ballcap pulled low over his eyes, he looked the part of the shy, beery, but soberingly clear-eyed Buddy over in the corner, down to the local Legion Hall. I knew little about him, other than that he’s just now becoming widely-known in Canada despite quite stunning “writer’s writer” international praise for over a dozen books. The guy’s a writing machine, though perhaps not an eager seller. Even by Newfoundland standards, he keeps a low profile (he lives in an outport), and didn’t do terribly well with the excerpt he read from his new novel Inside. (Maybe it was his cold.) But the lead character, an old ex-con, started to become real in my head anyway, and in the following Q&A, Harvey was by turns blunt and eloquent, raw or funny, and always and distinctively himself. We bought the book. We bought him.

The Other Fellers are superb writers, and better performers. Steven Heighton is a prolific and adventurous writer (the new novel is Afterlands, an acclaimed re-creation of the harsh aftermath of an American North Pole expedition) and as cowboy-handsome as he is serious. His was the only book I didn’t buy last night – my library groans with unread but enthusiastically purchased books – though a previous Heighton reading had inspired me to buy his poetry, which I never do. He requires himself to write riskily, to drive himself batty but fascinated by not knowing where he’s going, by writing without a map or a safety harness. I could learn from that. I am.

Trevor Cole is a guy I’ve been meaning to read since Norman Bray in the Performance of His Life was short-listed for the 2004 Governor General’s Award for Fiction. It was his first novel, and I happened to be writing happily, feverishly and anonymously for the GG herself at the time. I was intrigued (and royally ticked off) by his “overnight” success; it turns out, though, that he’d been a prominent magazine writer before that, if one paid any attention to business, which I emphatically didn’t. (And in other news, I confirmed in the signing line last night that my bride’s vague memory of having gone out with Cole once or twice was true. Long ago, friends. No, my competitive irritation comes from his having made the jump to hyperspace so far ahead of me.) Perhaps more important (and more interesting!) for you to know, he’s one of those rare authors with a radio voice and real performing skill. His new novel is The Fearsome Particles, which sounds great, and not only because of his acting. He’s a fine builder of sentences and characters, with turns of phrase that are inventive and often deliciously wry. Because I’m cheap, and because I think this might be a writer I’ll follow closely and therefore feel the obsessive and über-controlling need to read him in sequence, I bought Bray in paperback.

This was one of the Ottawa International Writers Festival’s series called “Writing Life”: three snippets of new books and an engaging conversation with and among the three people who made them. It’s been another good Feast of Words and I’ll be dining again tonight. And if you like writers and writing, you can hear some of the best Canuck authors reading their stuff on a cool new site. (My pleasure.)

Words AND Music?

Posted by :James Howden On : April 5, 2006
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Category: At First Glance

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I woke up this morning with a full-colour version of an old and quite likely vain imagining playing in my head. (Playing with my head, it felt like.) It already has a title: How Long Will That Take In OldDog Years? First, though, it will be serially published, let’s say in Guitar Player magazine. Each month will chronicle some of the daily highs and lows, as well as account for this musical pilgrim’s progress in learning one of the standard riffs. We’ll start with the main rhythm from “Smoke on the Water”. And some month down the road? The Walsh solo from “Hotel California”. And one thing, anything, from Bruce Cockburn. “Foxglove”. Anything from Speechless. Yeah, in my dreams…

I want to learn how to play guitar. (There, I’ve said it. You’ve read it. “The temple is already built!”) That thought has been banging around in my brain for years, and it must terrify me. I’ve never taken even the remotest step towards it. It frightens me almost as much as writing does, except that when it comes to words I know lots of the basic repertoire. I just suffer from performance anxiety and bad habits. That, and a deep melancholia about the place of my scribbling in the parade. (As if place matters. Join the parade! Even if you’re the guy with the broom walking behind the elephants…) In any case, I’m trying to learn how to follow what Julia Cameron writes in The Artist’s Way: “Creativity is a spiritual practice….The stringent requirement of a sustained creative life is the humility to start again, to begin anew.” And the courage, Ms. Cameron. And the courage. “The beginner’s mind,” says the guru. “A culture of learning,” says the International Teaching Centre. So.

Humility and courage, the Right Stuff, remind me of one of my favourite Far Side cartoons. (And where is Gary Larsen now?) It informed me when I was making a second stab at marital sustainability, and it sits above my writing desk now. The cartoon shows a dog on a unicycle riding on a high-wire. In the spotlights’ glare, our wide-eyed pooch juggles four balls, keeps a hula hoop whirling, holding a jug on his head and a cat in his mouth. The caption: “High above the hushed crowd, Rex tried to remain focused. Still, he couldn’t shake one nagging thought: He was an old dog and this was a new trick.”

This writing trick is a hard one. A recent article in the Globe and Mail discussed the publishing trend that may have begun with Peter Mayle’s A Year in Provence, and which continues apace with Joan Didion’s The Year of Magical Thinking, among many others. It’s a diary. (I can write a diary!) It recounts, more or less, a substantial, natural and imaginable block of time. (I can imagine a year!) It’s become something of a publishing cliché, but it seems to have staying power. (I hope I have staying power, and I know I can do clichés!)

How Long Will That Take In OldDog Years? This crazy notion reminds me of that lead-balloon anti-joke about heeding an ambition. Self-Doubting Desire complains: Do you know how old I’ll be by the time I learn to play the guitar? The Voice of Pragmatic Encouragement answers: The same age you will be if you don’t. (Borrowed that one from Julia Cameron, too.) I like it. Such dedication to a long-delayed dream scares me. (Yeah, so?) Okay, how about A Year and Six Strings? Or maybe Because A Red Miata Seemed Too Obvious: My Mid-Life Quest for Guitar Glory. I am Title Guy. Now I just have to Do the Deed and Write the Rambling Memoir. (Cool.)

Remembrance Day. A Touch of Bruce.

Posted by :James Howden On : November 11, 2005
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Category: At First Glance

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I almost forgot to emerge from my second-floor grotto for 11 a.m., but the Green Lady had the day off and she helped me remember. We don’t watch a lot of television, but the dear ol’ CBC had the national memorial on screen, and we were able to tune it in. Diana held one wire of our 19th-century TV antenna, and I held the other. Neither of us needed to stand on one foot this time; my left hand was raised, her right, and our wee bouts of sobbing as the wreaths were laid did nothing to disturb our tenuous grasp on the signal. Another thing to be thankful for, along with Silver Cross mothers, Parliament’s eternal flame and those faithful old fellows. Thanks to them, thanks for all.

Another small bout of gratitude, too, because Radio One programming, which we’d turned on for better sound, went straight to Sounds Like Canada and did it ever: Shelagh Rogers was interviewing Bruce Cockburn. He has a new album, which I’d like to take credit for. I’ve been thinking for a long time that he should put out an album of his brilliant finger-picking instrumental pieces. Well, not that I ever told anybody, but I guess they picked up on my brainwaves. (Mighty buggers, they are.) Speechless is the new album, a bunch of the best guitar work Bruce Almighty has done along with a few new pieces. He sat for half an hour and played some, talked some, in studio. Superb in both languages.