Common Ground by Justin Trudeau
My rating: 3 of 5 stars

Someone recently compared Justin Trudeau's mind to a teenager's bedroom. This autobiography shows he's been busy lately cleaning it up. Almost believable in its persistent tone of sincerity, it made me forget for a while that the Trudeau era was a time of massive deception.

First there was Trudeau-mania. After It subsided came a wave of national depression and cynicism. In its aftermath, COMMON GROUND – which Trudeau ends with a long, boring blast of Liberal feel-good rhetoric -- left me depressed, cynical and in need of a good stiff drink or dose of lithium.

Definitely the boy, or his publicist, can tell a story. There's no denying Justin's life has been marked by tragedy: his parents' very public divorce, his mother's descent into mental illness, the death of his younger brother in an avalanche. These candid moments are genuinely moving and the book's greatest strength. Justin has lived through many of the challenges of his generation and his team understands he can draw on the youth vote in the next election if he can just get them off their cell phones and drugs.

Judging by how many people seem to like it, Team Trudeau has scored a coup with this book, remaking Justin's image from pampered Golden Boy into a roll-up-your-sleeves, school-of-hard-knocks underdog, ready to bare his chest and rebound from every overhand punch in the televised charity bout of Canadian politics.

Maybe that’s why in this pre-election scrum, the son treats his late father with kid gloves, never implying Pierre was anything but a kind, involved parent. It's the best we can expect but it does make me wonder how much the writer has repressed.

The opening lines to his eulogy at Pierre Trudeau's funeral were more ambivalent and ironic: "Friends, Romans, Countrymen --" and a pause just long enough for the audience to fill in the unspoken: "I have come to bury Caesar, not to praise him." Canadians have got used to saying that Justin is "not Pierre" or even a close second. In COMMON GROUND, he almost manages to turn this lifelong failure into an asset. Throughout, he never stops praising the father he could never please when he was alive.

Notwithstanding the roses, pirouettes and wide-ranging sexual appetite, Pierre was deeply committed to bringing up his three sons. Still, many found him distant, cold, and detached from the lives of ordinary people -- whereas Justin, an average student, supposedly has the popular touch. Closer to his jet-setting mother, he occasionally flirted with politics. At McGill, he loyally campaigned against the Meech Lake Accord and, perhaps more tellingly, volunteered with the Sexual Assault Centre. Gravitating to youth work, he kept a low profile as a teacher in British Columbia, rooming for a while with a now-convicted pedophile and also sitting on the board of the Katimavik Centre founded by his father's friend Senator Jacques Hebert.

His eulogy at Pierre's funeral in September 2000 catapulted him into the public eye at 30. The Trudeaus are used to displaying emotion in public, from "Just watch me" during the October Crisis to the one-finger salute in Salmon Arm, but even by their standards Justin's performance by his father's coffin was an embarrassing cliff-hanger: a rambling 9-minute speech that began, almost surreally, with a trip to the North Pole and ended with "Papa, je t'aime" and a handkerchief moment.

There is a lot in the family history to suggest their charisma is rehearsed in secret to distract from those old rumours that Pierre and Margaret came together in the 1960s under the auspices of the Air Force and programmed with LSD at a farm out in BC. During her recent breakdown, Margaret was hospitalized at McGill's notorious Allan Memorial Institute under the care of Dr. Dimitri Pivnicky, father of Mila Mulroney.

Canada's elite is so small, perhaps it was inevitable that Justin would end up as Liberal leader. This book goes far in dispelling any notions that his ascent was automatic or effortless. On the way up, Justin spent time pounding the pavement of his Papineau riding, the poorest in Canada, standing around grocery store parking lots handing out leaflets and introducing himself to locals, many of whom were still hostile to the memory of Pierre. Justin -- or his staff of writers -- would have us believe that he sweated his way up slowly up from the bottom of the political heap to become our Future Prime Minister, the only leader capable of coaxing alienated and apathetic youth back to the ballot boxes and bring in a whole new era of tolerance, prosperity and national unity.

I was touched and impressed to read of Justin's struggles in a down-and-out Montreal neighbourhood I know well, until I realized his handlers have found a perfect way to repackage his image. Much as the Katimavik kids he once mentored spend time in community service en route to high-paying careers elsewhere, Justin emerged from his short season in Hell to grab the leadership, champion pipelines and more Draconian surveillance laws. Pierre, who gave us the War Measures Act, would be proud to welcome his prodigal son back to the club.

Maybe Justin plans to harness the energies of his own generation that has lived through lots of divorce, psychiatry, drugs, and sexual experimentation. Maybe the secret violence that marked Pierre’s career has kept Justin out of politics until now.

So what draws him into the political mainstream at this time? Could it be a sense of civic responsibility? The obligations in which children of the elite so often find themselves entangled? The Trudeau family curse?

The strong undertow of tragedy makes COMMON GROUND a compelling read. The younger Trudeau navigates dark waters with some of the same aplomb his dad displayed shooting the Canadian rapids, while lesser men opted to portage.

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The Man Next Door by Ann Diamond


Ann Diamond's The Man Next Door (Bootleg edition)

"A wonderful memoir of life with Leonard Cohen in Montreal and Greece through the heady 60s, spiritual 70s and cynical 80s - the music - the lyrics - the drugs - the government's mind control experiments - brilliant table talk by a woman who knew him well. Cover art by Tigana."

"I'm still recovering! And I mean that in the best way possible…All my favourite texts knock the ground out from beneath my feet. Not only did it topple me, it might be the most engaging memoir I've read. You make subtle gestures towards the devil in the details with a very sharp labrys…pure artistry.>> -- Andrew Roberts

That was one great read. More gentle on our hero and maybe less paranoid than stuff written in the past. The story really does hang together and connects with my own memories of Montreal. But what I really want to know is, where can I see a picture of the Chinese man flipping through the air?-- Tom Hochmann

"It is a most unique book , from a most unique perspective , and shines a light in the dark - there is nothing like it. I found it all compelling, never bored, no urge to skip, held by the words on every page. Things I have wondered about LC, from the things dropped in his songs, things he has said fell into place ." -- JIM FRIESON, Japan

"Well done. And timely. "Manufacturing the Dead Head" over at Gnostic Media and Dave McGowan's work and now your work are all meshing like a perfectly synchronized Rolex Submariner wrist watch. --- Agent Rooster Cogburn

"Fascinating insight from that period from Ann Diamond, as usual." --- Kitty Hundal

“Never touch your idols: the gilding will stick to your fingers." --- Anonymous .......

"The ending will shock you." -- Ellen Atkin

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Goodreads Book Giveaway

The Man Next Door

by Ann Diamond

Giveaway ends January 21, 2015.

See the giveaway details at Goodreads.

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I'm Your Man: The Life of Leonard Cohen by Sylvie Simmons

My rating: 3 of 5 stars


This biography, like the earlier one by Ira Nadel, is the next instalment in the fairytale of Leonard Cohen's "life," and repeats some of the same errors, omissions and obfuscations. I hate to be unfan-like, but some of us read biographies to find out, err, the "truth" about famous people, not to wallow in their personal myth or worship in their cult of personality.

Leonard Cohen is one of those 20th century singers who made it to idol status after a long, sometimes bitter struggle.  It would be nice if someone, someday, actually peeked behind the curtain of stardom and exposed some of the more transparent fables.

Let's begin with his McGill undergraduate days, when he came close to flunking out with a 56.4 grade average at graduation. "He did much better in math" though, -- yes, perhaps because Leonard was infinitely more calculating than his naive schoolmates who actually studied. At age 17, he began supplementing his income by volunteering for Donald Hebb's notorious, CIA-funded, sensory isolation experiments, for which he got paid a lucrative $20/day. These led to days and weeks spent in flotation tanks on LSD. It's a miracle he managed to remain sane enough to write poetry -- but then, the CIA has long had a soft spot for poets and writers. They often make great spies.

Even in high school, Leonard had shown a tendency to embrace violence. His first short story, published in the Westmount HS yearbook, was titled "Kill or Be Killed."

At least Simmons asks the obvious question -- "How did Leonard get away with it?" -- while glossing over the answers. How does a 21-year-old McGill Law School dropout with barely passing grades get into graduate school at Columbia? Simmons admits "Enrolling at Columbia had really been a cover, something to keep Leonard's family happy."

Cohen friend Mort Rosengarten told Simmons that wealthy Montreal Jewish families did not want their sons becoming artists and intellectuals -- rather they were expected to enter the family business and churn out elegant suits and ties for the elite. Nevertheless, while rebelliously "floundering" in New York, Leonard founded a literary magazine called The Phoenix -- a perfect way to get close to the Greenwich Village poetry scene and its beatniks who ignored his formal, McGill-influenced verse.

Anyone who knows Leonard knows he's a sharp and disciplined thinker, not the kind of unfocussed dreamer who would imagine he could make a living off poetry. How did he survive in New York as he moved from failure to failure? That's the question that never seems to get answered.

We do know that in 1959 he moved to London to work on a novel. During that time, he met Jacob Rothschild -- heir to a banking empire -- who suggested Leonard visit his mother, Barbara Hutchison, on Hydra. Barbara Hutchison had divorced Jacob's father, and was planning to marry the painter Nikos Ghikas, who had a mansion overlooking the village of Kamini. Simmons doesn't say more about that visit, which found its way into Hydra legend. Following in Henry Miller's footsteps, Leonard knocked on Ghikas' door but, unlike Miller, who was welcomed, he was told to go away. As Leonard told it later to friends on Hydra, he shook his fist and shouted "Curse this house!" Soon after, the mansion burned to the ground and remains a spooky ruin to this day.

Maybe the Rothschilds had a bone to pick with Ghikas over Barbara's desertion? Maybe Leonard was their messenger? Simmons does not go there. She repeats the official story of how Leonard met Marianne and settled down on Hydra, in an ex-patriate community of artists that included Marianne's husband, Norwegian novelist Axel Jensen and Australian writers George and Charmian Johnston. (Late in 1959, Hydra's artists somehow figured in a photo-spread in LIFE magazine -- which Simmons doesn't mention, perhaps because the article was not only precious and tacky, it raises the question of why an obscure Canadian folksinger would appear in so many painfully posed photos depicting Bohemian life on a Greek island.)

LIFE magazine was a flagship of the CIA "MOCKINGBIRD" program -- but that's a conspiracy theory so let's move on. Next we come to the famous Cuban Missile Crisis adventure. This story gets more absurd with each repetition. Simmons delivers the standard version of how Leonard returned to Montreal in the fall of 1960, broke and separated from the woman and child he planned to support with the proceeds of his talent. After co-writing two unsuccessful TV scripts with Irving Layton, he learned his first novel had been rejected by McClelland and Stewart. On March 30, when he would normally have been going over the galleys for The Spicebox of Earth, and looking for paying work, the cash-strapped Leonard suddenly boarded a plane in Miami and flew to Cuba, just days ahead of the Bay of Pigs invasion.

"It is no great surprise that Leonard should have wanted to see Cuba," Simmons explains. "Lorca, his favourite poet, spent three months there when the country was America's playground, calling it a 'paradise' and extolling its virtues and vices."

Sure. Of course. She delivers a repeat of Leonard's carefully-honed account of days spent stumbling in and out of bars and hotels, and how he almost gets arrested as a CIA agent by Castro's over-zealous militia. But wait -- what if he really was a CIA agent? What if, in a desperate moment, he volunteered for the notorious failed mission, organized by CIA director Allen Dulles, the evil genius behind the MKULTRA program at McGill?

After all, the young Cohen and spymaster Dulles were only a degree or two of separation from each other. Dulles even employed some of Cohen's mentors and professors -- like Donald Hebb -- albeit covertly. Some of their secret LSD research involved the creation of Manchurian Candidates -- mind controlled agents and couriers who could be sent around the world on various missions in the name of anti-communism.

It stands to reason, in a way, doesn't it? That a hungry young poet with a "fascination for violence" might have signed up to go to Havana ahead of the military invasion with the group of spies who assigned to the hotels and bars. Exactly the kind of operation the MKULTRA program is now famous for.

Ten years later, on New Skin for the Old Ceremony, Cohen decided to spill the beans in a song: "Field Commander Cohen" -- "our most important spy/ wounded in the line of duty/ parachuting acid into diplomatic cocktail parties." However, Simmons dismisses this joking confession as having "no justification whatsoever."

Readers who are not totally brainwashed will gag on this nonsense, but in a way, it's just so interesting -- and there's more.

Like Nadel before her, Simmons doesn't seem to know Leonard was on Hydra from December 1980 through September 1981. How could she, if he didn't tell her? Others -- like me, for example -- could have filled her in on the aftermath of his dismal 1980 European tour, which ended in Tel Aviv on late November. I met Leonard and his musicians as they landed in Tel Aviv airport. I heard the complaints and arguments in the hotel over the next two days. Simmons says Leonard took them all on a jaunt to the Dead Sea -- I think someone is pulling our leg here. I recall Leonard, holed up at the hotel in a string of meetings with Israeli journalists and mysterious officials, ending with a painful meeting where he threatened to fire the band and replace them with "$300-a-week Armenian oud-players." Except for Sharon Robinson, who was cowriting a song with Leonard, Passenger band members seemed angry and demoralized as they boarded the plane back to Texas.

Simmons has him flying straight to New York from Tel Aviv, staying at the Algonquin Hotel, and buying Hannukah candles in preparation for celebrating the holiday with his children -- although Hannukah ended on December 10. (Nadel says he attended a religious ceremony on December 11). Neither biographer mentions John Lennon's assassination, two kilometers away on Central Park, which happened on the night of December 8, 1980. Leonard would have seen the streams of people in the streets, many holding candles and heading for the wake outside the Dakota where Lennon was shot.

In fact, though, Leonard flew Tel Avid -Athens on November 26. I arrived a day or two later and saw him at his house which he was preparing for his children's arrival, and several times over the following week. His Spanish translator, Alberto Manzano, also visited at Christmas for two weeks and took photos of Leonard in his kitchen, with Adam and Lorca, and around the port of Hydra. Those photos are displayed on Leonard's website.

If he was in New York on December 11, it had to have been a quick trip. He never mentioned it to me or anyone else. That's why when I reviewed Nadel's biography in 1995, I said the New York trip was one of many errors.

I have doubts about how biographies are constructed, especially when the subject is still alive and able to alter the facts of his own life. Both Simmons and Nadel shove the events of 1981 -- like Cohen's first meeting with Dominique Isserman -- to 1982. According to their account, which really sounds like Cohen's own summary, he spent 1981 somewhere in a state of creative limbo, penning "If It Be Thy Will" as a sort of prayer to his management.

I wonder why the year on Hydra, where he was ensconced from November 1980 to December, gets vaporized by these biographers? I think i know why. But if I told you, I'd have to kill you.

All right, I'll tell you. But you'll have to buy my memoir first, tentatively titled THE MAN NEXT DOOR, which is bound to get me in trouble but I don't really care anymore. And no, I'm not "objective" -- but neither are Simmons' sources.

I knew Leonard quite well from 1977 to 1983, when a strange coincidence brought me to his neighbourhood where I lived for the next 12 years. I studied with his Roshi during what I think was a decisive period for Cohen at least in terms of his relationship to Zen in America. I witnessed enough to notice the whitewashing (or should I say "chemtrailing"?) of Leonard's past that seems to be intensifying as he nears his 80s and near-sainthood.

I think the truth is way more interesting than the hagiographic PR we have been hearing for the past 30 years. Let's just say there has been more than one holocaust in Leonard's lifetime. There is much more to Leonard Cohen than his fans suspect, and therein lies a tale on the theme of "responsibility."



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NIKO -- by Dimitri Nasrallah

My rating: 4 of 5 stars


This award-winning novel opens very powerfully in Lebanon during the civil war years when Niko is a small boy and his mother is expecting a second child. The first two chapters are beautifully written in their drama and shock effect, and raise expectations for the rest of the book that seem almost impossible to meet. The tension and sense of tragedy are nearly unbearable as father and son travel the Greek islands seen through the eyes of these traumatized refugees desperately trying to rebuild their lives after unimaginable loss. Once Niko arrives in Canada, out of harm's way but also severely shaken by the loss of his father who has remained behind in Athens, he is adopted by immigrant relatives and forced to begin his life over in a strange country devoid of warmth, where survival is guaranteed but life has little meaning. With that transition to a safer, greyer world devoid of family values, the story of Niko loses much of its energy and focus as it becomes a tale of adaptation to a strange new environment. You could argue that this is inevitable, given that Montreal and Beirut are as far apart as tragedy and irony -- but I think some of the responsibility for the relative weakness of the final chapters (and particularly the climax, when Niko robs the till at Zeller's to go searching for his father, now a shipwrecked sailor with amnesia who has ended up in Chile after being found at sea, the sole survivor of a vessel that sank off the coast of Brazil...) belongs to the author, for failing to deepen and develop the character of Niko. In fact, from the shipwreck on, I stopped believing in a story that had seemed overwhelmingly real, and incredibly riveting up to that point. The geographic distance between father and son also becomes a distancing from reality, or maybe a literary nod to Gabriel Garcia Marquez rather than an authentic exploration of the refugee experience. The magic begins to feel contrived, as Niko suffers through adolescent exile marooned on Montreal's suburban south shore with an aunt and adoptive uncle who are pursuing their own materialistic dreams as immigrants and 'new Canadians." Both Niko and his father seem detached, in different ways, from their own inner truth. Maybe this is the theme, reflecting the psychic condition of post traumatic stress -- but I couldn't help feeling the novel failed to find a path to a conclusion worthy of its astonishing and unforgettable beginning.



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My little round-up

I did more roofing this year than reading, but looking back these were some of the books that most impressed me...

Dave McGowan, Inside the LC: The Strange but Mostly True Story of Laurel Canyon and the Birth of the Hippie Generation

McGowan's disturbing revisionist history of Laurel Canyon, birthplace of the Peace and Love Generation, begins with a series of stupefying revelations linking just about every sixties' rock icon to US military intelligence. Had he extended his search to England and investigated the role of MI5 in setting up the EMI recording label, he could have added Mick Jagger et al. to the list of rock stars whose careers were engineered in Cold War laboratories. He goes on to dissect the peculiar influence of mass murderer Charles Manson on key figures of the hippie aristocracy that sprang up overnight like magic mushrooms along Laurel Canyon Boulevard, which had a top secret military laboratory hidden away at the top of it. McGowan is an impeccable researcher and a superb ironist, which makes Inside the LC hard to put down, although it's still missing a final chapter.

I'm not even sure if I liked it more than Wagging the Moondoggie, McGowan's hilarious exposé of the Apollo Space Program, which made me scream with laughter, something I rarely do when reading conspiracy literature. By the end, I could not believe I had actually been fooled into thinking the moon landings were real.This is at least partly due to McGowan's exceptional skills as a satirist, but also to the absurdly faked appearance of the lunar landing module, the mystery of millions of photos gone missing, and other strange anomalies that he brings to light.





Kevin Annett, Unrepentant: Disrobing the Emperor

A young United Church minister, hired to bring the word of God to a remote community on Vancouver Island, startles his white congregation by reaching out to native people in the community. Opening the doors of his church to them, and listening to their stories, he begins to stumble on graves of murdered children. The church officials order him to stop. He follows his conscience, reaps the whirlwind, loses wife, children, reputation, career, prospects.Soon he has nowhere to go but downtown to Vancouver’s Lower East Side, where Canada’s victims gather. Kevin Annett’s UNREPENTANT: DISROBING THE EMPEROR is a sequel to his earlier memoir, LOVE AND DEATH IN THE VALLEY. Both are beautifully written, extremely gripping and unforgettable. Readers may notice haunting echoes of Russell Banks: opening scene of small-town innocence in pristine wilderness/ quick dissolve and deep descent into hell.

My other favourite reads of 2011 were in French:

LA CONSTELLATION DU LYNX, by Louis Hamelin, a partly fictionalized account published on the 40th anniversary of the 1970 October Crisis which revisits the events of that strangely under-investigated drama that led to martial law. Mostly based on interviews with major and minor players, it fills in background and draws links which were hidden at the time, and seem to prove that the FLQ kidnapping and the murder of Pierre Laporte were engineered from high echelons of the Canadian military, and carried out by an assortment of brainwashed punks, petty crooks and police informers, who were helped every step of the way by the authorities. Much more fulfilling than the official story, and also much scarier. Everyone really should make an attempt to read this and digest its stunning implications, although Anglos might have to struggle with the Québécois humour and some of the dialect. I actually read this in November-December 2010, but could not stop thinking about it through most of 2011.


WIERA GRAN, L'ACCUSÉE, by Agata Tuszynska, translated from Polish by Isabelle Jannès-Kalinowski. I went to a reading by the Polish author who came to the Salon du Livre this past November. Wiera Gran was a famous Polish-Jewish singer, who escaped the Warsaw Ghetto and after the war found herself accused (by none other than Wladyslaw Szpilman, the pianist of Roman Polanski's award-winning film) of having collaborated with the Gestapo. Well into her 90s, and living in Paris, she was still trying to prove her innocence. Fascinating.

LARA KRAMER: DANCING WITH MEMORY

Lara Kramer’s FRAGMENTS at NAC in June, 2011

Montreal dancer Lara Kramer’s investigation of her mother’s childhood in residential school – and the dance performance that grew out of it – began in 2006 when she was studying Contemporary Dance at Concordia University in Montreal. For a Creative Process class assignment, Lara began documenting her family lineage in an installation exploring her mother’s residential school experience in Manitoba during the 1950s and 60s.

While Lara was growing up in the 1980s, her mother, Ida Baptiste, sometime told stories about her often traumatic seven years when she was torn from her family and forced to attend a Manitoba boarding school from age 4 to 11. Later, Ida lived in a foster home in Manitoba. http://www.blogger.com/img/blank.gif

In 1995, Ida suddenly left home. Lara was 14, her younger brother only 4. Losing her mother was Lara’s point of entry into a tragedy that afflicted thousands. Canadian government policy was to break up aboriginal families and force children to give up their language and traditional way of life: an official policy of cultural genocide that left its victims alone to heal the losses and wounds.

One Thanksgiving weekend in 2007, Lara interviewed her mother at her home on the Rama reserve near Barrie, Ontario. “Going to the root of my mother's childhood helped me to understand her as an adult. Prior to dance, in 2001 - 2003 I studied Early Childhood Education. I wanted to understand how early development shaped our lives as adults. I think subconsciously I was trying to understand why my mother was the way she was...and why she left.”

Transcribing the mother’s stories, Lara was able to “see my mother more objectively, as a person that these things had happened to.” The research process led to a script that used her mother’s interview text as voice-over for a solo dance work which Lara found “very difficult to be inside. I wanted to convey, not just my mother’s story, but the emotions of the other young children.”

Ida had attended school in Portage la Prairie (1954-56), Manitoba and was later transferred to Brandon Residential School (1957-61). In 2009, Lara travelled back to Portage La Prairie with her mother, and visited The Indian Residential School Museum of Canada where Lara held a residency to further her research for an eight-month project involving four dancers The end result, Fragments, is a full-length piece exploring themes of Abuse, isolation, fear, authority – using a contemporary dance vocabulary.

“Fragments was very much about my personal history with my mother, spiritually, emotionally, poetically, cyclically . The darker images and emotions of these young children come from my own wounds, from having a mother who abandoned me.”
She had always connected to her mother’s memories “empathetically. I always knew I was lucky to have parents, growing up in London, Ontario, in a housing coop where there were many native families.” Her mother was actively involved in the Native Friendship Centre and Lara’s interest in native politics started when she was young. A childhood friend lost her uncle during the Ipperwash crisis in 1995 in which a London police officer killed native man Dudley George”It was a pivotal time in learning how stereotypes and cultural attitudes contribute to violence against First Nations People,” she recalls.

“My mother was Ojibway/Cree and looked native. She was attacked from both sides because she had fair skin.”” Later, Ida studied Ojibway language and Native Studies at Trent University, reconnecting to her culture. As a dancer, Lara carries on that tradition – making connections through her work.

Being in the contemporary dance community “gives me the leverage to share this history, and have it received by a mainstream audience.”

In powerful scenes, the four dancers push desks, bully one another, and explore the limits of their prison-like world. In one sequence, a girl rises from a twisted posture crammed into her wooden residential school chair and begins to awaken to the truth.

While working with non-native dancers who knew little about the history of residential schools, Lara was able to get them to “embody the spirit of the children, connect to their voices, and touch the depth of it.”

A residency at Theatre Gesû’s Centre de Créativité led to the final crafting and a premiere in June 2009. The three-night run included a nightly artist talk where invited elders Morning Star, Delbert Joseph Sampson and Jean Stevenson spoke with the audience. Sampson, who is a Squamish nation traditional dancer and does ceremonial work with prison inmates, asked to do a ceremony at the studio. “He set up a shrine, brought regalia and did a ceremony for us; a very intimate process and exchange that cannot be put into words. He then danced for us.” Later the dancers danced for Delbert.

After that first performance at Theatre Gesu, Lara felt a huge weight lift from her shoulders. “I was no longer ashamed to be a native woman. Residential school had made my mother hate herself, and that feeling had infected me. But after sharing this work, I had more pride.”

“As a choreographer creating for an audience, I’m very aware of the dark subject matter. It’s all so politically charged, most Canadians just block it out. The challenge was to create dialogue, tell my story in a positive way so people are receptive to it. Native people have no problem understanding it: it’s part of our history. The dance space becomes a ritual space. It’s about dancers and audience living, breathing and connecting to that place and time.”

Often audiences are speechless at the end. “They come up in tears to thank me.”
More recently, in February 2011, Fragments was performed at the Talking Stick Festival, at Roundhouse Theatre in Vancouver. She’ll take it to the NAC on June 17, marking the two year anniversary of the first performance, as part of the Canada Dance Festival.

Fragments will also goes to the Banff Centre in August, where Lara will be part of the Indigenous dance program, and also teaching there for 2 ½ weeks. She and her agent are planning a tour back to Vancouver in spring 2012 and hopefully surrounding areas like Yellowknife and Victoria.

She continues to be amazed at “the way dance is documented in the body. The transferring of material from one Interpreter to another, how it lives and breathes in the entirety of the body, and how it is transformed with every new dancer who enters the work. As a choreographer, I give them a lot of freedom to create. I want to see the fragility of the human spirit, as well as the strength of it.”

Imagining Montreal

In imagining Montreal, we have to consider the hidden history of a city that has experienced wave after wave of immigration – or, if you prefer, successive phases of invasion and colonization. Since the French first arrived and planted a cross on Mount Royal, followed by the English and Scots who built the banks, our little island has existed mainly under successive states of siege. Its original inhabitants, the natives, vanished from our streets long ago, returning occasionally as shadows to beg in Metro stations and sleep on benches. And our imagination has gone the same way as our indigenous people: it’s been displaced, marginalized, and survives on handouts from a society that has lost its memory, aka compass, aka soul.

Each new colonizing gang brought its own new diseases, neuroses and crimes for which each gang needed to create hospitals, schools and prisons. All these developments make up the history of a city we still appreciate for its natural beauty and diversity. As for the institutions that still compete to control the wilderness beneath the pavement – few of us feel very attached to them, or if we do it’s mostly for all the wrong reasons.

We have grown up in the shadow of massive crimes against humanity, which we have successfully forgotten thanks to “modern science.” Our sense of well-being depends on manufactured amnesia. Still, we’re human. So every now and then we remember something that we feel might be important enough to share with other humans. This is why some of us are so professionally concerned about “literature” and “art.”

In Montreal, art is everywhere. So is writing. Lately, certain people have become quite strident in their demand that our art, and particularly our writing, be recognized across Canada. The people making this demand are mainly writers who feel under-estimated, and the arts administrators who live to make writers feel better about being poor and ignored. But lately, there is a sense that Montreal writing is not getting the audience it deserves. When a Montrealer wins a literary prize these days, it’s like the Canadiens winning the Stanley Cup. Except that hockey is such a simple game, compared to writing, where more and more “winning” is the result of promotion. So these days, our arts administrators are doing their part, to promote our city in the world where art and literature really matter.

The trouble is, these winners from Montreal rarely write about Montreal. They write about crossing the ocean in a little boat, or growing up in Maine – themes which are considered suitable for an international audience. As Montreal grows on the literary map, Montreal content seems to be disappearing --

When we write about this place, where we just happen to live, we are trying to make some sense of our lives and experiences here. Like it or not, most art is autobiography. And it’s also political. Anglos would not be so strident in their demand for recognition, if they didn’t feel a sense of opposition to the established order. In Montreal, when you are looking for an establishment to be opposed to, you can choose between two possibilities. One is English, the other French. Some Anglo Montreal writers feel they are drowning in a sea of French.

I never felt that way. I was always grateful to be living in a French speaking environment while enjoying some of the privileges of speaking English. I didn’t mind if Quebec separated. I always knew I could pick up and move someplace else. Looking back, I realize how wishy washy I was – and how lucky. Like anyone with a interest in underdogs, I wanted the French of Quebec to succeed, against all odds, in creating their own future against a backdrop of colonization. I stood around for several decades, and watched them do it. In the meantime, I wrote about my life in this place. I wrote stories, or imagined stories I would one day write …

Some of our stories are necessarily trivial and riddled with kitsch, which is why we need critics, or inner critics, to prevent us from believing in them. Like any city, Montreal is the scene of great dramas, if you can see past the situation comedy, the stereotypic images sold in souvenir shops around town, the maple leaf badges, bagels, Expo hats, hockey sweaters, churches, oratories that make up Montreal’s revolving circus of secular and religious kitsch. If you can deconstruct the testimonies of our talkative drunks, psychiatric patients, street musicians, journalists, poets, and even an internationally-recognized singer who still roams our streets on occasion, granting interviews which all sound pretty much the same – then you have a chance of Imagining the real story of Montreal. Meanwhile we have our festivals, newspapers, literary events, television stars, actors, small and large theatre companies competing for audiences in the Centre de Spectacles. Taken together, Montreal is a fascinating travel package that promises endless entertainment that only visitors can afford -- but never mind. The show goes on, and most of it washes downriver in spring.

Personally I can’t Imagine Montreal without thinking of secrets. And since secrets are usually dark, I can’t Imagine Montreal not floating in copious amounts of darkness, lit by the lamps of gambling and prostitution. Other writers have noticed all this before me.

Secrets make for interesting stories – this is a truism, and our rulers also know this. That’s why in recent years, so much effort and money has gone into colonizing and sanitizing our literary scene, ridding it of its darkness and obscurity. Exposed to the light of day, washed with Sunlight, deprived of its mysterious potential, it resembles every other literary scene on the planet, except that it appears much more self-conscious and provincial than the ones I would really like to be part of.

Why is the end result so predictable? Montreal used to be a good place to hide out and write, in secret. Nobody was looking over your shoulder, ready to snap up your manuscript for the Commonwealth Prize or the Giller Award. What was true then is still true today: to write truthfully about Montreal, you need to go far away from Montreal. And once you’re away, you tend to forget the trauma of having lived there. I believe Mavis Gallant would agree that this was true, even in her day when she was going around exhuming Butter Box Babies and upsetting the authorities by writing about it.

It was only when I left Montreal that I started to see it as a voluntary ghetto with high walls that were built by its own inhabitants –or at least certain inhabitants, who wanted to protect the spoils of conquest. In British Columbia, where I kept my radio constantly tuned to Radio-Canada so I could pretend I was still in Quebec, I rarely missed my freelance life of poverty in Montreal’s expanding literary scene. Montreal is not Quebec. Neither is it a real City State, as Montrealers like to pretend.

Living out West, I suddenly realized the principal reason nobody out there cares about “Montreal writing” is that Montreal writing does not much care about anything outside itself. Montreal writing has existed for decades in its own little ghetto – and much of it was written by men at McGill who secretly worked for British intelligence.

I rarely hear French writers complaining about their lack of outside recognition, certainly not with the sense of bitterness and outrage that rejected Anglo writers seem to feel. French writers expect to be ignored. Another way to put this is: they have learned the lessons of “independence.” Not so, we Anglos.

Complaining about being ignored by the Rest of Canada is now a Montreal Anglo tradition which I helped start it in the 1980s, when I was trying to get published. There were few publishers in Montreal back then, other than a couple of small magazines at McGill. Several Toronto editors told me there was no English writing coming out of Montreal, even though I was in Montreal and had just sent them a manuscript in English! Either I was dealing some deeply-held religious mindset (although it felt more like a longstanding unwritten policy of ignoring Montreal because it wasn’t Toronto.) I happened to have additional advantage of having lived in Southern Ontario in the mid-seventies and worked for Southam, so I knew all about their tendency to paint all Quebecers as criminally insane, in order to create scary headlines and sell their newspapers to an incredibly straight-laced public.

Or was all this part of something more insidious? E.g., a CIA-style operation to divide and rule Canada by forcing Anglo Montrealers to emigrate en masse, and thus reinforce our collective amnesia? Silence and Exile – were they doled out to us as our punishment for having witnessed one of the most bizarre military psy ops in Canadian history – the October Crisis of 1970?

By the early 1980s, there were a few of us losers still hanging around, writing in English in the Plateau. Our local media (which mainly boiled down to the Gazette) owned in Toronto and staffed by up and coming journalists from Saskatchewan, were not supportive. Their deluded mission in those days was to drag Montrealers kicking and screaming out of the Dark Age left behind by the separatists, and any leftover wet dreams we might retain of “independance.” A dirty French word, that independance –because of how it suggests “dance” as opposed to “dence” as in dense, or density, more of an Anglo virtue. Or what about that equally dirty phrase, “Vive le Quebec Libre” –a shocking obscenity that Mordecai Richler never got over, while Norm Webster was still traumatized by it in 2007, four decades later.

Those of us who lived here back then, and had even had the bad taste to be born and grow up here, had nowhere to go with our little stories and scribbles. Nobody out there wanted to know what it was like to be electroshocked at the Allan as a child or teenager, or tricked by the RCMP into taking LSD and throwing Molotov cocktails at the Montreal police. If, in fact, we even remembered those strange incidents from our past. Had we been encouraged, back then, to “write what we know” we might have eventually ended up piecing all our memory puzzles together, and arriving at the inevitable conclusion: telling the truth in Montreal can get you in trouble, if not outright killed.

This is something we have had to learn the hard way. It’s also why we have produced so few really great writers who can speak to the ROC. Because collectively, we lost our minds ca. October 1970.

Of course, all that is about to change...