But I did not use the words "boycott" or "picket" even once ! That would be what? A Sartre-complex ( the one-man boycott of the Nobel ? ) Oh — no Simone ?
Pass me that next batch-a-leaflets, will-ya ?
***
The TEXT is in a baseball glove on the wall of the East Wing of the Annex Gallery of Galley Connexion located in The Fredericton Playhouse. The phrase in qustion is in a poem:
" ... an East Indan cobbler ... "about the fate of a baseball glove - but where? In New Germany, Nova Scotia ? The author appears to be the Jordan Trethewey of www.vagabondtrust.com and winner of a STU "Robert Clayton Casto Prize in Poetry" - so a poet. I hung the gloves on the wall as a volunteer for AG and GC, but only heard the TEXT read at the vernissage - and walked out. And according to a poster you may have seen, am a member of the selection committee ... but where are the minutes of THOSE meetings ? Ah - I see, so THAT's how it works ( I'm from away, you see ... )
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Do ex-pats from Zimbabwe still say that they are from "Southern Rhodesia" in 2013 ? Do some of them call themselves "East Indian" here in Canada ? In Toronto? In Memphis, TN ? Or are they only called that in some parts of the US and Canada by certain others with old habits ? Which of our old lexical habits is contemporary poetry bent on preserving here in NB ? Just a free-for-all of art-for-the-heck-of-it take-it-or-leave-it ? So why have editorial readers at The Fiddlehead and The Malahat Review ?
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In 2013, which current Canadian poems or critical reviews in English refer to Gérald Godin (1938-1994) as a "French-Canadian" poet ?
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In 2012, did Americans ask if Natasha Trethewey was "East Indian" ?
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vagabondtrust.com reports that one of the two writers hung in the Annex Gallery is now on the board of Gallery Connexion - but is not, I believe, the author of the baseball-gloves piece on the east-side of that public gallery.
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It is not personal.
I did not invent Canadian English usage - but I take notice.
'Halfbreed' was there before me.
But in 2013, when speaking to us of someone we do not know,
how is "East Indian" any better than "halfbreed" ?
What could that epithet's place be in "found art" in a public gallery ?
So the shoe-repair guy was no shoemaker ... what does his being one of "them" have to do with this art ?
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a text for the Annex of Gallery Connexion in Fredericton ?
"Hell no, she's not !" he retorted - and so loud that everyone on my bus must have heard him. "Take another look. See ? She's East Indian !"
and we all know what the elision is in the above snippet, don't we ... because this is Canada and no one in Freddie thinks that Annex Gallery text's 'cobbler' was Mi'kmaq ...
***
If the "cobbler" of the text posted at Annex Gallery proves to be about someone from Trinidad, will the text change to "West Indian" ? What would "Caribbean cobbler" have conveyed that
" our cobbler (some former cricketer?) "had not ? Does it "lose" or just "drop" the issue of skin tone ? Is not the point that this leather worker was unfamiliar with baseball gloves ? That the child did not explain himself clearly ?
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A 4-city map problem for most Canadians: Mumbai, Hyderabad, Chennai, Bangalore.
If Kolkata is in West Bengal, why was the East India Company "founding" a city there (Sam Pepys was still living ... but a company was no longer a conspiracy to evade royal taxes ?) ?
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What is the Chandrasekhar Limit ? Is it where the railway stopped in Lahore? But if the expansive system didn't begin in Tamil Nadu in East India (excuse me, South India, east coast) ... (a tale of the largest white dwarf and ...) Dates: 1930, 1937, 1953
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How close is Scotland to naming a Singh or a Gupta or a Park or an Ng as Scottish Makar ? Or do they deny that those who came after the Picts were immigrants ? And the Orkneys ? The Okinawa of Scotland ? Nations and national identity - so far from the vision of Stefan Zweig, Romain Rolland, the very flawed Hermann Hesse ...
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Now ask yourself where in Western Canada I would say "Ukrainian cobbler" ... Yorkton? Canora? Kamsack? Are there still men called "Ukrainian farmer" in Saskatchewan ? Have the the descendants of the Irish and Scots in Yorkton ceased to mock those who arrived later? And in Edmonton? Winnipeg? Montreal ? Oh, you don't know where to get off the metro in a traditionally Ukrainian-Canadian ethnic neighbourhood in Montreal's Rosemont ? ( My ethnic Chinese MD in MTL was from Vietnam and our very dark-skinned pediatrician was from North Africa - not West Africa - and our "black" obstetrician was from Trinidad, not Africa.) That British mathematician whose daughter is a Canadian MD and who always remembered the birthdates of my chidren ... what could induce me to put him into a poem as an "East Indian logician" ? Whatever would I be saying - as a western Canadian from the parklands of Saskatchewan ? As a software developer with so many years with developers in and from India ? What would I be saying ? What would that MD in Fredericton conclude ? My pharmacist ? What are THEY to call ME ? Was Michael Hallett at McGill "that White British" philosopher of mathematics ? So as not to be confused with whom ? Who calls whom "East Indian" where and why in Canada ?
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Which Canadian poet has said the Neil Devindra Bissoondath is an East Indian writer ? Does he "cobble together" his texts ? Which art exhibit currently hanging in Fredericton is "cobbled together" ? What makes a New Brunswick taxpayer who repairs shoes an "East Indian cobbler" ?
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Fredericton Playhouse fears to censor the arts - so that Fredericton art lovers can benefit from unedited poets placing text in supposedly "Found Art" - so I ask again : what was the birthplace of the "East Indian cobbler" ? Who all is "East Indian" in Canada ? Someone from Dhaka ? Someone from Trinidad whose parents are from Dakha but were born in India? A Canadian-born Jain ? A Canadian-born Sikh ? Any member of staff or board of either Gallery Connexion or Fredericton Playhouse ? Who among the people of Fredericton fled Uganda ? Or fled Bellingham, WA ? No one in New Brunswick? Or was it that supposedly inept shoe repair person ... and when will the director of the Playhouse apologize to their spouse, children or grandchildren for this supposed work of art mocking someone who was an NB taxpayer and who are themselves NB taxpayers and whose taxes support the Canada Council Corporation ?
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Would Fredericton PlayHouse object to the text on the wall of their Annex (Gallery Connexion) if what it said was "some immigrant" instead of "East Indian" ? What does the racialist epithet add to the text other than inviting "our" [ read, real New Brunswicker ] agreement ? Why not "some hapless cobbler" ? "that inept cobbler" ? But was he even a "cobbler" ? Did his sign say "Shoe Repair" or "Shoemaker" ?
"There stood a carpenter (see, that one has a hammer); there stood a cook ( see the spoon ? )"[From an old saw often heard in a western CDN province of immigrants as small farms failed and the rail lines were torn up to make way for Cargill trucking to crumble the roads which had run along the great social success of rural electrification ... ]
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Is that shoe repair person who is libelled in the Annex Gallery "poem" still living in Miramichi (?) or even closer to Fredericton ? Will a member of his family come to Annex and "read" this item ? Who will explain to the "poet" that gloves are not used in cricket such as are used in American baseball and softball ? That a shoe repair person may not be a shoemaker ? That glove making was a trade ? That tack is not used for fishing, but for riding ?
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Is Rajasthan in East India ? Is Tata an East Indian computer programming out-source company ? Uninformative epithets and why poetry matters to culture ( very old word, "culture" ... enough to make you "furrow" your brow ... ). See : Zoroastrians on the subcontinent and the wandering musicians of western Europe (into and out of India ?) See: Y-chromosome and mitochondrial DNA for clines and clades in human populations and human migrations. The East India Company and Amerigo Vespucci : whose Indo-what ? Proto-Indo-European language(s) and mounds of culture.
***
Last year a STU professor read a piece at Molly's one Sunday in which we heard in a tale from Regina, Saskatchewan that "a big Indian sat down beside me" - I asked her whether she had learned from him if he was Lakota or Cree or from an Albertan tribe. I say asked. It was a challenge to her. At least one friend of hers pretends not to know me now. Kind of prominent local poet. So it goes. I should have asked if that "Indian" was from south India or north India ( and if you know about THAT bias on the sub-continent ...) Oh, narrative voice ... and government grant and sabbatical funds and ... perpetrating discourse. At least it was "big" and not "drunk" or "fat" or "dumb".
"A big man sat down beside me - he may have been Cree, maybe Lakota. I didn't bother to ask ... I look Scots with my freckles anyway .. and is he going to ask about my grandfather from Danzig and the red hair?"Imagine your own variant. That is the key. Get past the frozen language of racist discourse.
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If someone from Bangalore or Hyderabad or Chenai or Fiji or Trinidad wants to call themselves "East Indian" in Canada, so be it. The rest of us can take time to learn who people are and drop the racial epithets. The shoemaker in question may have been from Chile. If in doubt, read the travel journal of a famous Canadian writer in the South of the USA. A writer chooses some words with care. Most people in India are as Causasian as most western Europeans who call themselves French or English. For real bias, see the current Japanese attitude to genome studies. For a breath of fresh air, see the effort of Brazilian artists to use genome data to get past skin colour stereotyping in the marketing of entertainment. The Poles will one day use the genome to acknowledge the Polish citizens who as Jews passed for Lithuanians and Silesians and East Prussians and ... and now live as Catholics in Poland two and now three generations later.
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"East Indian" is not an expression that most Canadian writers can use in good conscience. End of story. Nor "West Indian". Nor "Indian". Not unless that is who YOU say YOU are. To pretend otherwise is to live in serious denial - and a country cannot afford to fund writers who are in denial of obvious, painful, social reality - or just ignorant, of say, the Bellingham WA affair and the "East Indian" community of Vancouver. Ignorance and sloppy linguistic choices account for a good deal of strife in the world. Writers need not contribute. Liberal, democratic societies need not fund it. When we choose to promote work, we endorse that work. Or is racism an idle controversy?
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Racism is not about flawed individuals. It is about language and social life. You don't have to be a racist to make a mistake in your choice of words. But words, published in the public forum, can be in need of retraction. In this case that poem needs some white-out until the poet can find the words that do not perpetuate a social practice - or introduce me to his family from Fiji or Trinidad or India or Pakistan or Bangladesh - and is that shoemaker still living? Where is he from? Who are his children? Was it a man? Was he gay? Was he born in Canada ? In New Brunswick?
PS Most shoe repair people are not cobblers able to make a shoe on a last - my last cobbler ( stretched my left shoe on his last in Minnesota ) was from the old country.
Schuster, bleib bei deinem Last !
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Polite Canadian racism? What, in New Brunswick, is an "East Indian cobbler" in a poem posted in a Gallery Connexion "annex" show at the Fredericton Playhouse? Clearly "P*k-y" would not past muster - or "P*lack". Who is "East Indian" on a Canadian street? Someone from Lahore? From Dacca? From Malaysia? From Fiji? From South Africa? What is at the heart and core of polite Canadian racism? "Indian" ? From people who do not even know that our language is Indo-Germanic? That "Hindi" is not "Hindu" ? Remember the killings after 9/11 of those who "looked Arab". What committee approved Canada Council and NB Arts and City of Fredericton Funding for this? Why not "stupid Indian cobbler" ? Ah, because in NB people at least know in French what THAT means. Put that in your cobbler - before we take to the cobblestones. Or are we idle yet again? Oh - but who was that "East Indian lawyer" ... who was "East Indian" only when in South Africa or when in ... ?
Every Métis Canadian who has been called a "P_k-y" on a Canadian city street and every Métis Canadian who passes for White knows EXACTLY what I am talking about. I certainly do. If you have a a friend or neighbour or fellow passenger who looks "Indian" - ask them who they are. They may just be Torontonian. Period. Or they may be from Goa and not from Delhi. The Brazilian pop stars who do this have had some surprises in the name of ending racist musical marketing and the ignorance of human variety and the diversity of human culture.
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