Peru: Kingdoms of the Sun and the Moon

Peru: Kingdoms of the Sun and the Moon               

Seattle Art Museum, until January 5, 2014

Closed Mondays and Tuesdays

Audio tours free–download app from website (http://www.seattleartmuseum.org/), download podcast from website, audio guide wands available at SAM (also has extended visual descriptions)

Reviewed by Candace Fertile

The Seattle Art Museum is the only United States museum to have this exhibit, and with over 300 works, Peru: Kingdoms of the Sun and the Moon is a delight for anyone interested in the history and art of Peru. The exhibit covers more than 3000 years of human activity and includes treasures of Macchu Picchu, royal tombs and modern folk art.

The lavish use of gold and silver for ornaments and utensils reveals the wealth of the Inca and other ancient civilzations, along with their attention to detailed beauty.  Animals feature widely as does the human body. A  gold forehead ornament from the Mochica culture, about 100-800 CE, has a cat’s head and octopus tentacles. The cat’s fangs are great. Sculptures of human genitals presumably celebrate fecundity and the wonder of conception and birth. The art works are both earthy and other worldly, a splendid combination of the known and the mysterious.

One of the most intriguing pieces is a quipo, an arrangement of knotted cords in order to keep records. It dates form 1450-1532, and is elegantly arranged in a fan display, although it was likely meant to be purely functional. It has 226 strings, and no one but the maker can decipher its meaning. Some communities still possess quipo, but their system of counting is lost. For a civilization with no written records, quipo were a valuable innovation.

Artists of the past were skilled in metals, ceramics and fabrics. Once the Spanish arrived, the art became Catholic and often seems gloomy to me. Attempts were made to blend cultures, but the dividing line is death. The ancient cultures had a different attitude, and that is seen in their art and artifacts. The pre-columbian works are the most interesting , I thought, along with photographs of people.  Hans Brüning’s late 19th century photos and Eduardo Calderón’s 21st century photos are arresting.

One disturbing display is a video of Chancay tomb raiders who call themselves “Pirates of the Huacas.” Once these raiders loot a tomb, any archeological knowledge is lost forever, but, because there’s money to be made, they don’t care.  There’s something mystical about their activities as drugs are involved, but the destruction is permanent. The black market in art works thrives  presumably because of poverty and the collectors’ greed. This display is an effort at educating people about the danger of raiding and stealing art.

The Seattle Art Museum once again delivers an informative and beautiful exhibit.

Candace Fertile is a Victoria reviewer.

Bullfighter flashes cape at gender

Matadora

By Elizabeth Ruth

Comorant

327 pages, $21.95

Reviewed by Chris Fox

            Matadora is Elizabeth Ruth’s third novel. It follows Smoke, her second novel, which tells an entransing tale of a small Ontario tobacco town in the late fifties, and Ten Good Seconds of Silence, her first, which now that I’ve read Matadora and Smoke, I will soon seek out. Both previous novels were finalists for a number of literary prizes.

            Matadora shifts to 1930s Spain, but Ruth’s interest in history remains. As Smoke took literary and healing energy from the exploits of The Purple Gang, notorious in prohibition era Detroit, Matadora gains gravitas by invoking the Spanish Civil War. Similarly, Ruth remains interested in the gender queer. In Smoke, a transman steals the show, but in Matadora, the ambiguous, ambitious Luna is the show. She is a wonderfully realized character that we first meet, appropriately (The Sun Also Rises) at sunrise, with the silhouette of a Sangre Caste bull behind her. She is leaping from a wall, spurred by the absence (since birth) of her mother, and sure, at that moment, that she can fly.

We are also introduced to Manuel, who acts as Luna’s double and foil throughout the novel, a character device that serves Ruth well. He is the first-born son of the ranchero owner and meant to be a bull-fighter, but he aspires to be a poet – an ambition as unlikely as Luna’s desire to become a matadora. Both seek flight from their given lives and offer each other what help they can. Their bond, like Luna’s wilful talent, is blood-borne, provoking reconsideration of nature/nurture debates.

Ruth has done terrific research, especially into the details of the making of a matadora. She even introduces “anti-taurinos,” early animal rights activists. (Interestingly, the Spanish word implies that they are anti-bull, not anti-bull-fighting, which is indicative of how aficionados (mis)understand the raising, training, and killing of bulls for loving and respecting the animals. Somewhere here lies my only reservation in recommending Matadora. Despite the many clever metaphoric uses of bull-fighting in the novel, the more primary focus is on actual bull-fighting, which I think some readers may find difficult. I myself wondered how I would write about it; however, I did find the novel’s attempt to convey the aficionados’ and matadors’ perspective worthwhile. Daring the bull has a long and mythic cultural history, and Matadora draws on that heritage. When Luna explains the mystery of it, as she often does, I almost understood.

Moreover, in a clever last pass, Ruth has Canada provide Grace, a young Canadian who has come to help fight Franco. Unlike Luna, who spills blood in the ring, Grace transports blood to the front. Of course she is an anti-taurino. Matadora stages a confrontation between what is bright (Luna and her suit of lights) in the darkness that is bull-fighting and the gaze of the New World struggling to understand the Old. Grace is drawn to Luna, but remains judgemental and although the novel offers Luna Grace, Luna chooses to be only matadora. It is enough for her and probably enough for most readers. Ruth has given us a very well-crafted novel.

Chris Fox is a Victoria writer, editor, and instructor.

 

Boyden hauntingly explores body

The Orenda

By Joseph Boyden

Hamish Hamilton

496 pages, $32

By Diana Davidson

Joseph Boyden’s The Orenda is a novel about: the birth of Canada as a nation, the complex hierarchies and trade arrangements that defined Huron and Iroquois Nations at the time of first European contact, the devastating hubris of colonial enterprise.  It’s also a story about people’s capacity for resilience, revenge, and grace in moments of extraordinary loss.

For me, The Orenda is a book about the body.  I am haunted by Boyden’s exploration of the corporeal in his third novel.  Maybe this is a sign of the skilled job Boyden does at creating flesh-and-blood characters on the page.  Maybe this shows how well Boyden recreates the harshness of survival in seventeeth-century ‘Canada.’  As with other great contemporary novels about colonial histories (Beloved, Book of Negroes, Kiss of the Fur Queen), bodies in The Orenda are always both personal and political. 

The most intimate and central relationship of the novel – between a Huron leader and the young Iroquois girl who becomes his daughter – begins when Bird kidnaps Snow Falls after killing her family in a retaliation raid and drags her back to his Wendat village along with the Jesuit Priest Christophe.  Snow Falls tries to resist her captivity with the only means at her disposal – her own body – by starving herself, pissing in Bird’s bed, sleeping.  Later in the story her pregnant body holds the tenuous potential for the community’s renewal after epidemics and conflict bring devastation.

            The Orenda has many brutal scenes.  I disagree, however, with Hayden King’s criticism that “the inevitable conclusion is that Indians were really just very violent” (in Muskrat Magazine).  Boyden is careful to show us, through the French Priest Christophe’s reaction to the torture the Huron inflict upon the Iroquois, that these rituals do not indicate “savageness” but rather civilization.  The French Priest sees the complicated performance of torture as proof that the people he futilely tries to convert are more similar to the people of his homeland (who burn witches and heretics at the stake) and to the great inquisitors of Spain than he had realized.  Brutality becomes a universal human trait.

What is perhaps most compelling about bodies in The Orenda is that this is also a very spiritual text.  The title itself is the Huron word signifying that all things have an essence (which translates most closely into “spirit”).  The corporeal and spiritual are intertwined for Bird, Snow Falls, and their community in a way that Christophe (and later his flock of Jesuits) try to deny and separate. We see this connection in the medicine woman Gosling’s ability to heal by knowing the natural world (herbs) and the spiritual (rituals that draw out illness).  We see this disconnect in Christophe’s resignation to starvation and torture, his focus on the afterlife, and even his celibacy that the Wendat women find ludicrous.

This tension between the physical and spiritual ultimately ensures that Boyden’s characters are complex people who we can love, hate, mourn, and, perhaps forgive.  In light of the irreconcilably violent history of our country, this potential of forgiveness as a very human quality rather than a supernatural one is, in my opinion, The Orenda’s greatest achievement of many.

Diana Davidson’s debut novel Pilgrimage is about women and men on the Lac St. Anne Settlement at the turn of the twentieth century.  On November 19 at 7 p.m., she will be in Victoria, speaking with local writer Pauline Holdstock, at Russell Books.

 

Biography turns lens on famed photojournalist

Photo credit: Kevin Doyle

Review by Liz Snell

“They say real men don’t cry – that’s crap.” Photographer Ted Grant, 84, wasn’t afraid to get emotional in front of a packed auditorium during the launch of his life’s biography.

Grant’s biographer, UVic graduate Thelma Fayle, met Grant as his student at Camosun College. Years later, she hesitantly emailed him to ask his help in photographing someone for an article. Since then Fayle has conducted over 50 interviews with Grant. She saw the necessity in honouring his legacy: “Everyone knew his work but nobody knew his name,” she said. “My goal in writing this book was to honour a hardworking Canadian artist.”

Recognized by many as “the father of Canadian photojournalism,” Grant’s contribution to Canadian culture was a particular emphasis during the launch. Whether through his story about his famous photograph of Pierre Trudeau sliding down a l banister in the Chateau Laurier, or his experience organizing photographers at Victoria’s 1994 Commonwealth Games, Grant’s connection to national history was evident. Grant had intimate access to famous lives and was even on a first-name basis with prime ministers.

Yet Grant’s presence conveys humility. He called much of modern concern with technique “garbage” and downplayed his own skill by emphasizing timing: “I’m a photographer, not a technician.” He advised photographers to “shoot someone when they’re listening” to capture the intense focus in their eyes, and to be “first to arrive and last to leave” to capture candid moments. His work exhibits a striking ability to portray someone’s unguarded essence.

His vibrant, wry sense of humour had the crowd laughing through most of the presentation, but he was also moved to tears multiple times during his talk, particularly when discussing a photo of his wife, who passed away last year. He noted, “I’ve shot over 100 babies being born, and I’ve cried at every one.”

His passion for photography was evident when, during a question period, a young photography student asked him for advice. At first he joked, “Go over to the medical building and become a doctor.” Then he said, “If it’s totally consuming and you love it, it doesn’t matter what you do, what hours you put in.”

He described photography as a “magical career” in which he’s been “constantly alive.”

Many recounted Grant’s popularity as a photography instructor. One of Grant’s former students told how Grant had staged his own in-classroom arrest, to test whether students would respond by pulling out their cameras, as a photographer should.

For Grant’s 76th birthday he photographed himself flying upside down in a fighter plane. He discussed plans for his 100th birthday, and joked that he’ll have the undertakers present so that when the news person announces his birthday, he can “drop dead” and the party will start.

While his photographs may be more recognized than his name, Grant emphasized the photographer’s duty take a backstage role. “If you’re unseen but you’re in the same room, that’s when you get to be appreciated.”

Fayle’s biography (published by Heritage Group in Victoria) finally turns the lens on Ted Grant to capture his own light.

Liz Snell is a freelance writer in Victoria

Poetry book fine travelling partner

The Book of Places

 By Yvonne Blomer

Black Moss Press

2012, 95 pages.

Reviewed by Arleen Pare

            Book of Places is a neat little square of a book that would fit into most back pockets, most backpacks, most travel bags going most places in the world.  It’s a fit travel companion too, covering not only geographic space, but also psychic space. Adulthood, for instance.  The Past.  And Japan, Thailand, Wales, England, Rhodesia, Canada, Nevada.  Exile.  Sorrow.

But first, full disclosure: the author of The Book of Places, Yvonne Blomer, is a friend of mine. And while it is generally agreed that friends should not review the books of friends, in the case of Blomer, this becomes difficult.  Blomer knows almost all the poets and writers in Victoria, maybe in BC, and many are her friends. She has served as representative for The Federation of BC Writers, continues to host of one of Canada’s most successful reading series, Planet Earth Poetry; and she teaches writing at Camosun College. She knows writers.  Who possibly could review this book without sharing some writerly connection?

The Book of Places is Blomer’s second book of poetry. Her first, a broken mirror, fallen leaf was short-listed for The Gerald Lampert Award in 2007.  Her third, As if a Raven, has just been released.  She has published two chapbooks, has been published in numerous journals and anthologies, and co-edited, along with Cynthia Woodman Kerkham, the recent Poems From Planet Earth, itself a stunning anthology.

Places is divided into three parts, with each section occupying a slightly different landscape.  In the first section, for instance, Blomer offers the reader a range of physical places: a field with a woman in it; a desert with a man in it; a road with a boy on it.  All beautifully rendered: in the desert, the “light is pixilated / feather-patterned through dust.”   From “Woman in a Field:” The sun so bright, almost / bright enough to hold her there.”

And “Packing to Leave,” a travel poem, begins with the advice: “Take nothing. All this is someone else’s,” and ends with: “Take your toothbrush / Whisper into the hollows of the house / leave your name.”  Poetic advice, and haunting, the advice of a poet who knows her craft and who has left home.  Blomer is also an avid, no, make that a passionate cyclist. When she writes “Cycling home, Norwich,” she creates a cadence, a tone so true, so convincing, the reader is on the bicycle with her:

the way I let it soar and fall

around each aching corner. How

I barely look up at church, Medieval

stone buildings, the city hall

and falling down, dropping now toward taxi stand, market

I roll: body still, arched, ready

to spring loosely over bumps and bricks I know

are coming.

I must recommend this slim, squared volume, the perfect travel size.  The perfect trip.  And though Blomer has travelled much and far, about places, she admits, “I never knew/ how to leave/ and stay, all the same,” touching on one of the basic conundrums of life, whether in this place or that.

Arleen Pare is a Victoria poet and novelist.

Poet argues against simple readings

Poetry and Meaninglessness

At Gibson Auditorium, Camosun College, Lansdowne Campus

The Carol Shields Lecture

Delivered by Jan Zwicky

October 19th, 2013

Reviewed by Senica Maltese

As a writing student focusing on fiction and poetry, I had high expectations going into Jan Zwicky’s Carol Shields Lecture entitled “Poetry and Meaninglessness.” The lecture did not disappoint; however, it was not at all what I expected it to be.

The Victoria Writers Festival brochure stated that the lecture would explore how some contemporary poetry strikes us as meaningless and to what degree this assessment is correct. For this reason, I went into the lecture expecting to look at specific contemporary poems and to explore how they could be regarded as meaningless and how, perhaps, they nevertheless retained meaning. As I should have anticipated, this discussion resisted the simplicity that I predicted.

I firmly believe that we readers should engage with material that is “out of our league” and, for the most part, that’s what this lecture was for me. Jan Zwicky’s presentation, though clear, articulate and mind-blowingly intelligent, left me more dazed than enlightened. Her use of mathematical examples to explain our perception of our surroundings left me confused and grasping for the safe ground of the literature and poetry. As I was sitting in the auditorium at Camosun College listening to her speak, I couldn’t help but notice that I was the only person under 30 in the room, which may have explained why others in the audience were nodding and laughing while I sat paralyzed in the stands. However, toward the end of the lecture I began to get a more solid footing on the material.

I particularly enjoyed Zwicky’s segment about the joy that we derive from obtaining meaning, and how a harder struggle can result in greater joy.  The lecture genuinely impressed me when Zwicky insightfully remarked that we have become too satisfied with the “sugar rush” of understanding simple things. Zwicky insisted that meaning needs to advance and evolve into insight into realty, and that we should forgo “superficial pops” of understanding in favour of more durable insights. Zwicky concluded by asserting that writers, particularly poets, have a great responsibility to allow readers to experience their insights—in other words, that they must show the path to their insights in order that readers experience the insight for themselves. She stressed the importance of this evolution and cultivation of meaning in our modern day world, which is rooted in ecological and economic strife. Though this seemed a rather heavy note to end on, the lecture was still deeply inspiring and received a standing ovation.

It was wonderful to have the opportunity to engage with Zwicky’s insights into poetry, philosophy and human understanding in general. I suggest that anyone passionate about or interested in poetry attend one of her lectures, even if they think it may be “out of their league.”

Senica Maltese is a BA student focusing on Honours English and Writing.

Family conflict captures pain of past

The Widow Tree

Nicole Lundrigan

Harbour Publishing

312 pages; $22.95

 

Reviewed by Margaret Thompson

Nicole Lundrigan’s fifth novel, The Widow Tree, is a complex tale of hidden wrongs, of stillborn plans, of betrayal and fatal misunderstandings. Above all, it is about consequences and the long arm of the past. The author chooses a perfect setting for this unsettling story, abandoning the East Coast background of previous novels for a small village in 1950s Yugoslavia, a country which no longer exists, torn apart by festering ethnic and religious resentments after the death of Tito and the collapse of Communism.

The first chapter takes us far back to a military encampment in the Roman province of Pannonia. A centurion dreaming of home and retirement is uneasy, and acting on his premonition, he buries a pot filled with the legion’s pay: “You will be a man’s future, he thought.” The night brings a barbarian attack and the coins lie in their grave for almost two thousand years until they are dug up by three children half-heartedly participating in a student work day in the fields.

Such is the disarmingly simple beginning. The three children, Dorján, János and Nevena, are lifelong friends: the two boys plan to study engineering together; both admire Nevena, but János is determined to marry her some day. The discovery of the coins, though, immediately sets them at odds. Nevena wants to hand them in to the authorities; János wants to keep them. “We’re filthy rich,” he says. “Never again will we live under the frog’s ass.” The two boys decide to bury the coins in a tin containing a little money they have acquired.

The crack in their relationship caused by this dispute is the start of a relentless disintegration. János disappears, and so do the Roman coins. The mystery fosters jealousy and suspicion and terrible guilt. It unravels official brutality, old grudges, reprisals dating back to the war, a menacing litany of corruption and social inequality concealed behind the hierarchy and codes of the isolated village.

Lundrigan also shows us the other side of the coin. We see the fellowship of the women of the village, their strength in the face of adversity, through the relationship between the widow Gitta and Zsuzsi, Dorján’s grandmother. Tibor, a handicapped boy with good reason to hate János, is revealed as a kind neighbour. Even Komandant Dobrica, vile as he is, shines as a parent compared to his snobbish wife.

There are no winners in these conflicts and revelations, just survivors. Nowhere is this more clearly shown than in the irony of the scene where Gitta, János’ bereaved mother, unaware of the havoc he has wrought in her life, walks with the Komandant in the orchard at his ruined childhood home. Gitta thinks nothing will really change: “If they waited long enough, she was certain, everything would be back as it was before.” She is partly right; deception and betrayal have a very long half-life.

The author draws us through the labyrinth of village life, directing our attention to different characters in turn as their pasts collide with their present to mangle their future. The reader follows the dissection of these lives with a kind of fascinated horror—there is little comfort to be found—but the telling is so intense and the writing so compelling there can be no question of setting it aside before the end.

Margaret Thompson is a retired English teacher and past president of the Federation of BC Writers.  Her seventh book, a novel entitled The Cuckoo’s Child, will be a Spring 2014 publication.

 

Nisga’a poet challenges anthropology

The Place of Scraps

By Jordan Abel,

Talon

272 pages, $19.95

Reviewed by Candace Fertile

The Place of Scraps by Nisga’a writer Jordan Abel is a collection of poetry with an intriguing premise: Abel has started with Totem Poles, a foundation text by noted anthropologist Marius Barbeau, extricated passages, and created word pictures and images to explore the tangled relationship between cultures and the exploration of them.

Abel employs the technique of erasure, and in some cases gets a poem down to punctuation, forming a cloud of tiny marks, reminiscent of fireflies or mosquitoes. The use of blank space on most pages is remarkable, opening up the possibility of a wide array of thought and feeling regarding what has happened to First Nations culture. And on pages filled with images and letters, the same opportunity is paradoxically presented.

A fragmented thread of narrative conveys the story of Abel’s life, in particular his contact with a totem pole from his ancestral village, which his mother has identified in a book and says he saw as a child. “But the recurrence of the totem pole in the poet’s life combined with an apparent failure of memory carries with it a multiplicity of emotions.” The carved pole connects Abel to his people, as does a spoon carved by his absent father and given to him by friends of his father. The concept of carving connects objects—the wood of the poles and the spoon—and words or images carved out of Barbeau’s work by Abel’s imagination. And one carves out a life of surrounding matter. Or possibly one is carved out of life.

This book is meant to be absorbed more than read. Abel does develop forward motion, but a reader gains much pleasure from going back and looking at random pages as visual art as much as poetry. Many of the pages present pictures of words or letters or images with words and letters in the background. Sometimes the letters are piled up as if a typewriter stuttered or a printer jammed, resulting in a heavy black cloud of repetition. The black and white pictures of totem poles, sometimes presented sideways or upside down, are arresting.

The Nisga’a and other carvers of poles did not try to preserve them. The poles eventually fell and rotted, returning to the earth in a natural cycle. When Abel finally goes to the Royal Ontario Museum in Toronto to see the pole his mother talked about, his experience captures an aspect of cultural difference: “The poet confronts the admissions staff member at the ROM, explains that he refuses to pay to see a totem pole that was taken from his ancestral village. . . . The staff member shrugs, verbalizes his apathy, and allows the poet in to the museum. The pole towers through the staircase; the poet circles up to the top. The pole is here; the poet is here.”

I love the symmetry of that line—“The pole is here; the poet is here”—just as much as I love the fact that the paper of this book is made from wood pulp, and this particular object will also form a step in a natural cycle of change, both concrete and abstract.

 

Candace Fertile is a Victoria reviewer who teaches English at Camosun College

Cleese kept crowd engaged

By Curran Dobbs

A master of black humour and vocal critic of “mindless good taste,” British actor John Cleese was nonetheless a class act in his one-man show, “Last Time to See Before I Die” at the McPherson Playhouse recently.

The show, while continuously infused with Cleesian wit, wasn’t strictly comedic. Regaling the audience with his life story, starting with how his parents met, walking the audience through his childhood and his pre-Python days, and movie career, Cleese offered bittersweet moments as he remembered with fondness friends and family who had passed on.  When Cleese recalled David Frost,  he started to tear up, infusing the show with some pathos and creating a humanizing element that would have been absent had the show been strictly comedic (or strictly dramatic).

Admittedly, throughout the show, Cleese didn’t seem too energetic, but after all, he is 73. Nevertheless, the time flew by;  when he announced that he had kept us for about an hour and it was time for an intermission, it came as a surprise. Considering my tendency to fidget and check my watch constantly when sitting for long periods of time, I was impressed.

The second half of the show was mainly a discussion of offensive or black humour.  Cleese talked about it being passed down from his mother, and explored reactions from audience members, mainly to Fawlty Towers and A Fish Called Wanda. Cleese reported that during the test screen for A Fish Called Wanda, the three bits the audience identified as the funniest bits were also the  bits that were identified as most offensive.  He also made much more use of video clips in his second act.  Many of the clips were familiar to Cleese fans, from the previously mentioned shows as well as Monty Python and the Holy Grail. Showing the clips took some of the strain and effort out of filling up the second half while entertaining the audience. Again, I sat through the second half without checking my watch.

The show ended with a standing ovation, with members of the audience eventually clapping in rhythm to The Liberty Bell song from Monty Python’s Flying Circus. The man hasn’t lost a thing at 73 – except the usual, youth, original hair colour . . . I would certainly recommend this show for anyone who appreciates dry humour.

 

Curran Dobbs is a local reviewer and comedian.