Book Reviews by Author, A - L

I am addicted to reading, but rarely do I read comics. I'm glad I read this comic book with a difference it says a lot more and says it better than many weighty tomes I wade through. Andreas is focussed on the real problem- addiction to militarism. This dogma not only occupies the minds of general and presidents in the USA, but it grips nearly all politicians everywhere and the minds of most people. We rarely question the idea that there are alternatives to war – other ways to settle conflicts – and most important to change the conditions that militarism and war flourish in. This comic stimulates us to see the absurdity and waste of war and forces us to confront the need to create a non-military politics.

From the cost of war in taxes and services to communities to the greed of corporations, from the war on terrorism to the complicity of the media, it is all here in simple words with great graphics. This comic book should be in every school and makes a great kid gift.

Andreas does not stop with the telling, he gets right into action and resistance. He lists many references and organizations to plug into and there is no time to waste. On the last page he says: Think about it. Do something about it. Kick out the War Junkies! It is up to us.

Review by Theresa Wolfwood

“Even a small share of the military expenditure of the rich would, if appropriately attribute, make a substantial difference to the struggle against poverty …”

This report is the latest in an International Peace Bureau (IPB) series (see website above for information & ordering) that examines specific aspects of the obstacles and strategies on the road to peace making. It expands on the contents of War or Welfare? which IPB produced in 2005. All these publications provide useful information for activists who seek factual information to make our work more effective.

Whose Priorities? makes it clear that military spending, the economic metastasis of the cancer of militarism, robs most of our world of a dignified and security life, and steals resources from our finite planet. The subtext is: if you love this earth, work for peace.

The main text is well presented in easy to read articles and graphics that respond to the title question. The cover page features large photo of armed soldiers overwhelming a smaller photo of a woman carrying water: a good image to launch our enquiry.

It is truly mind boggling to try to grasp $USA 1200 billion — the annual world military spending (as the USA $ goes down, the spending continues to increase.) Social spending on human security internationally within a sustainable environment is neglected by most of the rich minority world. The USA spends half the global total of military expenses, followed by UK, France, Japan and China. Efforts have been made by well meaning governments and agencies to increase development aid, but loans tied to neoliberal aims and restrictions on trade diminish the value of aid.

Author Colin Archer, director of the IPB also points out that development aid is not usually (except by peace groups) linked to decreases in military spending; even when military budgets did decrease for a few years in the early 1990s, economic restructuring directed funds to debt relief and other projects, not social spending. Archer recommends an alliance of development groups with social movements including peace and disarmament groups is needed to realize policies. This will be difficult as many development organizations are dependent on government and ´charitable status´ making them vulnerable to criticism and funding cuts if they become political and lobby for change. Environmentalists need to be convinced of the links between resource waste, global warming, wars for resources and the justification for bloated military budgets. Peace, social justice, solidarity and democracy groups are more independent and could take the lead in alliances building.

Archer uses several examples, including perennially poor (but rich in potential) Ethiopia to show the appalling neglect of social priorities while militarism soars. He explains, “From a human security point of view, good basic education and healthcare, as well as adequate food and clean water are the crucial forms of security that a government should provide.” Few governments see those priorities and whose priorities matter are clear in the chart of the 10 leading corporations who benefit from military spending. Halliburton is #6, the company that most profits from the war in Iraq.

The discussion on strategy reflects on the power of institutions, governments and the media to influence citizens to think that war making is their priority as well. We need to think more about our imagery, our strategies and our means of communication in our campaigns for peace if we are to be more successful. Those who do not live in electoral democracies have the added risk of personal danger and even less access to public opinion. At the base of it all lies humanity´s inability to recognize new and creative ways of conflict resolution while developing a decent livelihood for all as we try to overcome powerful forces that profit from war and war preparation. It may well be that the fear of massive resource scarcity and global warming will unite many now separate interest groups.

The main part of this document is devoted to identifying groups worldwide which are active in creative campaigns which can inspire and inform actions by other groups. We need these examples because we rarely reflect on success; the need for coordinated resource sharing, networks like the IPB and better communication will help the cause of peace directed at social security and human dignity. IPB´s publications like this are valuable contributions to strengthening our movements.

While it is both a useful reference and guide for experienced activists and groups; Whose Priorities? could well be used in classrooms, workshops, and seminars. It could also be and to reach new activists and the yet to be active; it presents an attractive format for bookstores and literature tables of groups at meetings and conferences. It could actually be the basis of a workshop or course given in peace campaigns. The very existence of this and other IPB reports is an example of outreach and action in itself.
Women carry the heaviest load of military spending and suffer most from the loss of sustainable development.

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Theresa Wolfwood is the director of The Barnard—Boecker Centre Foundation, Victoria, BC, Canada www.bbcf.ca

Review by Theresa Wolfwood

There is a rich body of literature in Arabic; English readers are deprived of much of it by our disinterest and our historic political antagonism both to Arabic culture and our debt to it. We rarely have access to modern Arabic fiction in translation, particularly by women, so it is an unusual treat to read two books by this contemporary Egyptian writer and academic. Her books are not dry or academic but bold novels with strong characters whose lives and actions are lovingly detailed with daily life meshed into unfolding history.

This is the saga of a family, its friends and neighbours living what might be called ordinary lives in an extraordinary time and place. The time is 1492 in Spain; the family is Arab and the king of Spain sends his ships off to the unknown, seeking India, finding the American hemisphere. At home he wants to consolidate his power over the remnants of the Arab civilization in Spain that created a land of rich culture as well as prosperity and lasting architecture. Granada is lone holdout against Castilian power and the Spaniards break their promises to respect this city of Islam.

Within the matrix of dramatic history, Ashour describes the lives of Abu Jaafar, a bookbinder and a lover of books and knowledge, his family and community, their joys as well as their sadness and tribulations resulting from the oppression of their religion and culture. Life has joys in the most terrible of circumstances; happiness, even in short bursts, is essential for survival. People fall in love, some marry, children are born, daily life has its pleasures - food and books, even pets and gardens can be sources of joy in the most trying of times. And so this family creates a life for itself within a time when the king and queen, “forced all the people of Granada to taste the bitterness of defeat.”

I was fascinated by the different ways her characters react to the betrayal of their society and the capitulation of its leader. Some comply outwardly, but rage inwardly, rebel secretly by continuing their practices, hiding books destined to be burned, keep their stories alive at home; some retreat into mental anguish; others give in, the oppression is too persuasive and fearful. Some choose collaboration and opportunism. Some men take the armed resistance route and join rebels in the hills; others flee to North Africa. Ashour´s insight into how different personalities react is fascinating. Her skill in describing the minutiae of the oppression and people’s reactions are what makes her book great writing and absorbing reading.

Islam funeral custom is to wrap the naked dead in a clean shroud for burial. Christians prohibited that custom and dictated the dressing of the dead in their clothing. When I was in Iraq before the last USA invasion when the population was suffering under the cruelty of trade sanctions, one item that the Iraqis wanted and raged against its prohibition was shroud cloth (cited as a possible war material in the sanctions) to wrap their dead — of which there were so many due to untreated illness, malnutrition, contaminated water and depleted uranium. Ashour´s fiction and present reality are fused forever in my mind.

Although Granada, like all novels must succeed on the credibility of its fiction and its specific invention, it also, as does all good fiction, creates universality. Thus in this specific story of dispossession and betrayal, Granada resonates in today´s world where betrayal and dispossession form the reality of millions of Palestinians.

In 1527, this first volume of the Granada trilogy ends sadly as the barbaric authority of the Roman Catholic inquisition metes out its terrible verdict to Saleema, Jaafar´s scholarly daughter, who, like so many women of her time, receives the ultimate punishment for her wisdom, healing skills and independent thought.

This ending is made less unbearable by knowing that this is the only the beginning of a long story. I wait for the next volumes to become available in English. While Saleema faces her execution, her daughter is loved by her aunt who tells her the story of the tree of life. Thus life goes on and this family continues to struggle against history and fate to multiply, remember and to express humanity throughout all its fortunes and misfortunes.

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Review by Theresa Wolfwood

This is a slim volume and a seemingly simple story of a baker working for a despotic sultan on an island off East Africa at end of the 1800s. Amina´s husband was lost at sea so she waits anxiously for her son, Said, to return from a long voyage. He does return and is full of the history he has witnessed. He has been to Egypt, lived there with Egyptians and has witnessed the British invasion of Alexandria.

The fictitious island, set near Zanzibar, is a small lush fiefdom of a fabulously wealthy sultan with a castle full of Arabic servants and plantations full of African slaves. But his world is also changing; when the British navy comes in the name of Queen Victoria demanding the right to a military base on the island, the sultan knows he lacks the power base to say no.

Meanwhile the serfs, servants and slaves are organizing a revolt and the sultan gets a tip in the name of Siraaj, but he can find only a senile old woman by that name. Power supports and understands power: the sultan calls upon his new British allies to crush the revolt and the significance of the title name is revealed.

Siraaj is easy to read, colourful and vivid, but it is set in the complexity of global conquests by Europe to which the many characters respond to in various and completely believable ways to the changing times.

If water is essential to human society and our global economy it seems that a vast labour pool of unprotected and dispensable workers is just as vital. If we think slavery went out a few centuries ago, it is time to think again. Slavery exists today in many forms from child labour in agriculture in much of the world to sex slavery, organized as a global business in Asia, but also the result of wars everywhere to brutal physical labour in resource extraction and manufacturing world wide. This is a depressing overview of humanity's inhumanity, but we need to know and understand it. The business of slavery in business, Bale writes. We must examine and change our ways of investment and consumption. We have to delegitimize and deconstruct global trade agreements that allow the exploitation of people and we can join and work in anti-slavery, fair trade, pro-democracy and social justice movements locally and internationally. Bales, a British academic and expert on modern slavery, provides the necessary information for informed action.

In his introduction to this beautiful memoir the late Edward Said says: what gives this book an unmistakeable stamp of profound authenticity is its life-affirming poetic texture . This is no surprise as Barghouti is indeed a poet of great sensitivity, he is the author of nine books of poetry; few of his poems are translated into English. For us in the English-speaking minority world, the idea that there is a body of Palestinian literature is probably as remote and unbelievable as the idea that there is a land and history of a country called Palestine. It is our loss in more ways than one.

This memoir of the painful consciousness of displacement is the first of his books to be published and widely available in English.   The series of vignettes of his life as a child in Ramallah, his student days in Egypt, years of exile in Europe and Asia, and his return to his birth city after thirty years, all in no particular order, read like prose poems.

Throughout the book are fragments of his poetry, scattered like the dead members of his family to whom the poems are dedicated. The poem about his grandmother is the most beautiful and serene:

On her last day
Death sat in her arms.
She was tender to him and pampered him
And told him a story
And they fell asleep together .

Other poems and stories reflect the bitterness of loss and exile as people die without their families to support and love them. He starts his tale when he reaches the border between Jordan and Palestine, in reality, Israel's Occupied Territory. Waiting for hours in uncertainty beside the small narrow Jordan (it is neither wide nor deep in spite of the Christian songs) almost without water. “ Nature had colluded with Israel in stealing its water. It used to have a voice, now it was a silent river, a river like a parked car.” He reflects that return to his home will not cure the permanent condition of displacement even as he realizes that his changed homeland is no longer a poem or abstraction; it is real soil, trees, people and homes.

Even as he muses and sometimes agonizes about the plight of an exile, Barghouti colours the pages with the vivid detail of daily life in a real land that is not a real country, reinforced by the border soldier in his yarmulke carrying a shiny gun. Barghouti says: His poem is my personal history. His gun took from us the land of the poem and left us with the poem of the land . He sees the faults of the victim, he says: we were not always a beautiful scene, but this does not absolve the enemy of his original crime. The occupation means that although life was not paradise before, the occupation means powerlessness now, the absence of ability to mange one's own affairs - from walking in the street to access to food and water, the lack of freedom to travel to relatives and friends in a nearby village - and if one leaves this land, the possibility of return denied

Politics is the family at breakfast, he says. It includes the missing, the absent children, and the price of food. Real politics are thyme cakes and beans. The looming missing figure is the poet's older brother who died young, alone, in Paris.

“A motherly man....Who dared to kill beauty's last cry for help?

The story becomes an elegy for this loved brother, every corner and gateway is a tribute to his lost genius. When he reads his poetry to villagers, one asks him: What I the most beautiful thing you saw since your return to the homeland?” He replies : your faces. The faces of his lost family are always with him .

In those faces he has found the truth of his displacement; this is where he has been displaced from. He knows it. A prize for school work, a tea set, the subject of historic jokes, has disappeared. Return from exile always means irrevocable change. The river changes as well as drying up.   But it also means the joy of old friends, shared reminiscence, learning of the secret goodness of the brother who paid school fee for girls from poor families, the pleasure of reading poetry to the people assembled in the square of his home village. But he says: The Occupation has created generations of us that have to adore an unknown beloved; distant, difficult, and surrounded by guards, by walls, by nuclear missiles, by sheer terror . This I can understand, in a global and more removed sense, we all live this way.

But it is for many of us, far removed beyond daily reality. I can leave my country, travel to nearly every nation in the world on a respected passport and always know I can return “home”, even though I organize and engage in public acts of resistance for social justice and peace. I was not born here, I came as a war refugee in my mother's arms, but I can call Canada home.  

Barghouti knows these bricks, trees, family faces, old friends are his home, but his country has disappeared. But he finds the joy in Palestine; the book has many funny stories. He says tragedy cannot produce only tragic writing. We are living in a time of historical and geographic farce. There is still dance, song, music and poetry – even TV- in a land where bookshops do not sell books.

In its very personalness and poetic expression, this is a very political book; it is an unanswered question for Barghouti and for us. For us the question is what are we doing to rid the world of military cancer? Where were we when it erupted in Palestine? Where are we now?

For Barghouti, it is to understand the reality of oppression and to express the truth that will overcome the violence and brutality, and yet to be rooted, even in exile, in the daily history of home. And finally, for the poet, it is the “life affirming” certainty that his son, born in exile, will see his father's homeland. But for us all it leaves the responsibility of the uncertain future of the millions of Palestinians in Diaspora, dreaming of the day they can return to a liberated homeland.

"Although world water supplies are dwindling and transnational corporations are working hard to reap substantial profits from that scarce resource, it is not too late to turn the situation around"

This quote sums up the authors'overview of the diminishing global supply of a resource most of us take for granted. But as new frontiers for capitalist expansion shrink and disappear, politically and geographically, the corporate world has turned in recent decades to the privatization of the commons and making commodities out of life’s necessities. Water is being consumed at double the rate of our population increase – mainly for industrial use. So people, and particularly people in the Majority World, are loosing this vital life force. Children go to dead thirsty; they die of dehydration or of water-borne disease because the water they do get is contaminated.

We seem to be working on many fronts in recent times - militarism, radioactivity, food, seeds, human rights, homelessness and the increase in wealth of a few as more and more become poorer. Social movements are growing too, and we have had many successes in the struggle to keep our commons - from Bolivia to Kamloops - people have prevented the privatization and sale of water resources. The authors state that the inequality of access to water can only be rectified by the elimination of economic and political inequality. When we work for one we work for the other. This is an issue that concerns all living creature and we need to be responsible stewards for those who can not speak for themselves, while we create justice for all.

Along with the serious background information in Blue Gold, the authors also give many actions and strategy along with success stories. An excellent overview and call for action. Have a drink of water, now, but from the tap, not a plastic Dasani or Aquafina bottle.

Review by Theresa Wolfwood

The title of this anthology of mainly young activist women from an academic discipline intrigued me right away. I often think of art & activism, sometimes connected, sometimes separate. But Art as Activism implies a relationship of deeper integration. The twenty–one contributors have been graduate students of the editor; in this anthology they express their creativity as activism – a process that reaches out to the community to participate in social transformation. In her introduction the editor, Deborah Barndt of the Faculty of Environmental Studies, York University, Toronto, reflects on the conventional understandings of art, activism and academia and writes, “ We question…the elitism and individualism of conventional art practices …We question how art has become increasingly separate from daily life, and even more commodified as a consumer good in the global marketplace…Similarly we question a narrow understanding of activism that frames mass protests as the primary mode of political action. How we think, converse, write, draw, sing, move…can unveil power relations and transform knowledge production ad everyday actions.”

We are still living in a cold war based mentality that dictates that art is made by trained professionals, art is not political, art is not related to community and art for social change is propaganda, so this book is a very welcome addition to our new awareness that everything is political and everything is connected. Barndt makes it clear that there are many modes and mediums of artistic expression, but most important for her in their relationship to the context in which they are produced and how they are presented to the community. Her important questions that we can recall and ask ourselves are “the why and for whom of artmaking.”

The answers that lie in these diverse essays are richly expressive of many issues, many places, many contexts and forms of art as activism. It is impossible to do justice to every contribution in a review; I choose a few favourites, another reader may choose others that offer some connection or insight with special significance for her.

There are good lessons to be learned from the first essay by Leah Burns who writes about her work with ‘at risk youth’ in Toronto. She is willing to reveal her own self–doubts and to acknowledge her position of privilege and power to the youth with humour…from the beginning when she has to answer the question, “Seriously…are you really an artist?” When the group is asked to make a mural for a food organization that wants it to look ‘professional’ and the staff suggests she can fix it up if it isn’t, she uses the opportunity to explore power dynamics with the youth. She sees her participation as an ongoing cultural conversation that others also participate in the determining of process and the finished work. When she writes about humour, she says it is based on interaction and cannot be done alone and that humour can be a way of connecting divergent to a collective consciousness of taken–for–granted knowledge.

I liked Heather Chetwynd’s essay on voice because so often the most obvious way people are oppressed is to silence them and rob them of their own voices. We speak in the name of children, old people, those who lack languages skills so often, never stopping to think we are stealing their rights of self-expression. Chetwynd writes about her experiences in exploring voices – from singing and chanting to progressing to the realization that “when we raise our voices, we challenge our perception of weakness, challenging those who have power over us and claiming our own power.” Song is the sound of social resistance through which many groups have expressed their stories, their history and their power.

Salmon Tales: Eco-art Activism, really affected me as a west coast person who grew up with neighbours who dip netted and rack dried salmon on the banks of the Fraser River. Penner, Mack and Bensted started with co-creating banners about salmon for a festival. They wanted to stimulate awareness of salmon–human relationships rather than salmon as a food commodity. The project “has now shifted towards community art, activism and education in a community context…we argue that visual art allows us to see and experience the world in a radically different way. It also allows us to focus on why salmon matter.” The banners illustrated in this book show how salmon as well as people have been colonized and that colonization of “the worlds above and below water” are connected and equally important. What began as an academic project has moved into the community, changing and growing and reclaiming community through stories and discussion as well as visual art. I hope it comes to Victoria soon and politicians who love ‘fish&ndashfarming’ go to see it.

Oona Padgham has contributed an essay & interview on Arts in Detention: Creating Connections with Immigrant Women Detainees. Not a subject most us know or want to know much about. Padgham says we detain thousands of people in Canada who have committed no crime, in jails and hotels that are converted to jails. Families are separated; the children usually stay with their mothers in waiting process that may last months and end in deportation or residence in Canada. Padgham belongs to a group, No One is Illegal, which organizes in solidarity with immigrants of all status. This group started an arts group project with women and children in detention and in this essay Padgham tells the project story with three other women who worked with the detainees. Sima Zerehi says that art production is a way of communication for people who cannot always connect in a common language; Farrah Miranda says art gives the women a chance “to do something that is actually human.” The project includes women and children expressing their anxiety, fears and hopes but it also allowed for some of the women to start their own art projects. The political nature of the art workers and the group they belong was not hidden. Jean McDonald said the project reveal the needs of women detainees – some end up there because they reported a sexual assault or domestic abuse – showing the urgent need for a Don’t Ask, Don’t Tell policy for human service workers.

The project gave the women the opportunity to meet and work with one another, to distract them from their painful reality and uncertain future. Children could play together and women could share childcare. The art was integrated into the context of No One is Illegal’s community work and it was exhibited publicly as an outreach and educational action, but also to show powerful creativity of people we repress to our larger society.

Padgham writes that, “The art itself is an outlet for frustration and pain, but also an opportunity to express hope for the future and joy in life.”

Wildfire is a valuable and inspiring contribution to the culture of creative social transformation; a place where activists, artists, academics participate together in the struggle for a justice and peace.

Review by Theresa Wolfwood

This is a collection of essays, research and reports on ‘development’ as it affects the people who have to live with it and who had little to say about it. Plan Puebla Panama (PPP) is intended to be privatized, globalized economic development of a vast area from Mexico, through Central America to Panama that will only benefit capital and its collaborators. Many of the writers explain the details of this scheme and the anticipated social, economic and environmental results of such a neoliberal model – a plan that would among other effects, “administer poverty.” Other writers show that the flaws in the PPP are part of the flawed process of globalization, what Subcommandante Marcos calls, “ …A world of broken mirrors reflecting the ineffective global unity of the neoliberal jigsaw puzzle.” But fortunately many of the essays in this useful volume illustrate the wealth of ways in which peasants, indigenous peoples, cooperatives and workers are building different and sustainable models of self-directed development of all kinds – not just economic – building on community values and traditions.

Thus have been many setbacks to this PPP thanks to the resistance of indigenous cultures of Mexico from Chiapas and Guerrero to, most recently, Oaxaca. Worldwide the strength of resistance to neoliberalism reinforces Latin American resistance, as well as taking courage & strength from it. Trade agreements stall, dams are stopped, highway expansion is abandoned, mining companies face local opposition and many new forms of community and neighbourhood cooperation are forged. The profound rivers are the ever growing movements of peoples who have grasped their own future – perhaps for the first time in centuries and are overflowing with energy and ideas to create “another possible world” now.

In conclusion, Tom Hansen, Director of the Mexican Solidarity Network says, “ Since we are all literally immersed in the neoliberal model, it may be difficult to envision an alternative future based on values like equity and democracy, yet each of us has a small but important role. It begins with our daily decisions – what to buy, what to eat, how to live – and it extends to our collective and social responsibilities – how to organize, how to struggle, how to share…After all it’s our collective future.”

Review by Theresa Wolfwood

I found this book in a small radical bookshop in Saskatoon this summer, just as the invasion of Lebanon ended with a ceasefire after incredible death and damage had been wreaked in a few days. I know little about this country and even less about Lebanese women so I bought it with interest. And I learned a lot about Lebanon and its political history. What I also found was a very intimate story of a bright young woman from happy Lebanese family with a Christian mother and a Communist father and how she became a member of a secret resistance group, eager to assassinate for the cause; a cause which she saw as the independence of Lebanon.

This is a very personal memoir, like no other that I have read. This idealist woman, with a love of friends and family, a dedicated athlete, became a member of a secret resistance group opposing the Israeli occupation of southern Lebanon, including her home village, Deir Mimas, near the market town of Khiam where she was later jailed. Israel, the foreign occupying power, was fronted from 1978–2000 by The South Lebanese Army. The Israelis finally withdrew in the face of Hezbollah, and its efforts to re–occupy Lebanon this year were repelled by this same militant group.

A seemingly unconnected local event helped me understand the passion of Soha and her comrades who were willing to die and kill for Lebanon. I attend, in Victoria, a poetry evening with an “open mike”. One middle aged woman often reads poems about her Israeli–Hebrew culture. Recently the theme for the reading was “summer” and she introduced her poem as being about a friend";s summer camp. It was about camping in empty homes, the campers wore flak jackets and boots…the poem finally reveals that these happy campers were actually an invading army; the Israeli army occupying Lebanon using empty homes whose residents had fled before their invasion. That is a summer camp? Invading soldiers are campers? No wonder Lebanese people feel so passionate about the freedom of their country. No wonder a young woman would consider killing someone she considered a traitor to her country.

When the Israelis and their allies reached Beirut in 1982 and Palestinians were massacred in refugee camps by the Israeli forces, Soha was already immersed in the politics of her country; she saw the internal conflicts as well as the foreign aggression. She writes about her pacifism and abhorrence of violence throughout the conflicts and invasions, but began to believe that violent resistance was the only response. Her family had fled from the south, moved to Beirut and then had to leave their home again. She writes, “;My apprenticeship in politics sped up dramatically during 1982, that terrible year. The Israeli invasion gave me a bitter strength in my beliefs. I was fifteen, and I was ready to move into action.”

She sought out and joined the secret resistance force. She saw herself first and foremost as a Lebanese, a fighter for the freedom of her country. In 1986 she was sent to gather information in the occupied territory of South Lebanon which was being considered for separation and independence – while occupied by Israel aided by the South Lebanon Army under its leader, Antoine Lahad. She was soon in his home as an aerobics instructor for his wife. Then she decided and convinced her comrades in the resistance that she would be his assassin. After one failure of resolve, she succeeds and shoots him in his home.

She is taken away, beaten, tortured and imprisoned in Khiam. She learns eventually that she had not killed him. She had injured Lahad and he eventually recovered, with slight paralysis. At the age of twenty-one she is incarcerated in the infamous jail, controlled by the Israelis while their Lebanese mercenaries did the dirty work.

Most of the book is her personal story of survival and endurance during her years of abuse, torture and constant uncertainty. She works hard at staying fit and healthy so she can endure the beatings. She sets a goal for her release from detention as she calls it – because she is never tried for her attempt to kill Lahad. She wrote a journal on toilet paper. She endured, made friends, and helped others to keep strong. This account of her time in Khiam is an amazing record of determination and conviction.

Meanwhile, unknown to her, an international campaign for her release had been launched. Ten years after her incarceration, in 1998, Soha was released. She was thirty-one and had spent one-third of her life in prison. Two years later, South Lebanon was liberated and Soha returned to see Khiam, stripped of its terrible power. But she reminds us that, “there are dozens of Khiams around the world. Let us never forget them and finally, tear down those walls, once and for all.”

She remembers her experience and her commitment and maintains her spirit of resistance, “Because what I did, I did for tomorrow’s children, for that fragile time when they will play in the shade of trees, and the air will echo with their shouts of joy.” TW

When the Afghan MP, Malalai Joya, quoted from this book during her talk in Victoria, I looked for it and found it the youth section of the library.

On one level it is a simple & vivid story of a brave and adventuresome fish; but given the political repression in Iran and the author’s politics and the circumstances around his early death in a drowning ‘accident’s, it can also be read as a political allegory.

The Little Black Fish shows that it is impossible to completely suppress expression and resistance; the brave and creative will always find a way. This book can be interpreted as a call for independent thinking and action — a call to challenge authority and the status quo. Whatever the outcome of such adventures the author tells us that brave actions inspire even after death. That alone is a political statement for all of us. So do read it, then read it to and discuss it with the children in your life. TW

Victorians had the rare chance to hear Walden Bello discuss his thoughtful and constructive theories about globalization and the new global democracy movement at the Small World Social Forum in November. The New Internationalist magazine says,” Clear analysis and impressive scholarship have made Bello on of Asia's key progressive thinkers.” In Deglobalization, Bello explains the crisis of legitimacy in the institutions and actions of global financial powers – the World Bank, the International Monetary Fund, the World Trade Organization and the G-8. This set of organizations have imposed on the world – both states and people, a system that empowers corporations and their servant governments while it  weakens governments that try to serve the interests of people and impoverishes the majority of the world's population. There is little argument these days; we can see the results of these policies from Bangkok to BC, from Qatar to Calgary, and Victoria to Venezuela. Global capitalism reaches everywhere, even as Bello shows it is in crisis and failing its own objectives.

Fortunately, most of the world's people are not greedy, stupid nor passive. And an unpredicted and creative global movement for democracy, justice, peace and a healthy environment is sweeping the world. Bello is the scholar/chronicler/participant of this movement. Bello says we must deconstruct while we construct. We need to decommission the financial institutions while we build a pluralist system of governments.

This system will finance local development, based on human needs that de-emphasize growth rather than ecological equilibrium, will make decisions based on democratic choice, not the imperative of market forces, redistribute land and resources equitably for all and make sure that corporations and the state are constantly monitored by civil society.

Bello concludes by saying: a more fluid, less structured, more pluralistic world…will be enable nation and communities to carve out the space to develop based on their values, their rhythms and the strategies of their choice. This short concise volume is a guidebook no activist should travel without.

Every once in awhile, involvement in the struggle becomes overwhelming, and an activist needs to recharge, and to remember what drew them into the movement at the start. One way to do this is to read a book that combines cutting analysis with alternatives and hope. There is an Alternative: Subsistence and Worldwide Resistance to Corporate Globalization is such a book

There is an Alternative is an anthology of essays by academics and activists paying tribute to the important work of German scholar and activist, Maria Mies. Mies is widely respected for her work, including Patriarchy and Accumulation on a World Scale: Women in the International Division of Labour (1986) and Eco-Feminism (1993), which was co-authored with Vandana Shiva. Her theories centre around alternatives to global capitalism, based in the lived experience and expertise of women around the world and efforts by indigenous cultures to resist colonialisation. She argues for a subsistence economy, rather than an economic model based on unlimited "growth", and shows how most economic models, including Marxism, fail to account for the unpaid work of women, the productivity of the earth, and the knowledge of indigenous cultures.

The beauty of a well written essay is that it is based in strong analysis and therefore remains relevant over time. The reader who begins this volume with the opening interview by Ariel Salleh with Maria Mies might be shocked to learn, as I was, that it was originally published in 1988. The ideas seem fresh and important as if they were written last week. The interview also provides a base understanding of Mies' theories; theories' whose influence can be felt in the essays throughout this volume.

Silvia Federici's article, "War, Globalization, and Reproduction" is another example of an article whose relevance stands the test of time. Giving several examples of colonization and war in Africa, she argues, "In many cases, what arms could not accomplish was achieved through 'food aid' provided by the USA, the UN and various NGOs …"(137). She uses Mozambique as a model to demonstrate a paradigm where structural adjustment leads to economic unrest and finally to justification for foreign military invasion. As I read her description of the relationship between food aid, structural adjustment and war, unnerving visions of cluster bombs and food 'aid' dropping on Afghanistan create a chillingly current echo to her theories.

A powerful aspect of the anthology is its diversity of subjects. Readers are taken to the streets of the Battle of Seattle in "Seattle: A Convergence of Globalization and Militarization" by Theresa J. Wolfwood, and then to Melanesia where indigenous people are fighting western-style land ownership in "Melanesia, the Banks, and the BINGOs: Real Alternatives are Everywhere (Except in the Consultants' Briefcases)" by Nicholas G. Faraclas. Further reading finds us in Kenya learning about the "fight for fertility" in which women struggle for control over their own reproduction, but also for control of fertility in farming, and access to land in "Women Never Surrendered" by Terisa E. Turner and Leigh S. Brownhill, or following Vandana Shiva to the Punjab in "Globalization and Poverty". Wherever the authors take us the message is the same: corporate globalization is a form of colonization that is devastating the earth, the lives of indigenous people, and the bodies of women. SC

 Review by Theresa Wolfwood

However flawed the UN of the 21st century may still be, it remains a crucial part of any potentially successful effort to mount a serious challenge to US empire. PB

Although this is mainly a book about USA foreign policy and the internal and global resistance to it, Bennis dedicates it: For the dead of Iraq and New Orleans who paid the price for empire.

And an empire that wages war on distant shores also neglects its own shores with disastrous results. The cost of war has to come from somewhere and in the USA it comes from the poor and public services.

Bennis writes mainly about the resistance to militarism and imperial expansion exercised by her government around the world. This is not an intellectual treatise, but history as it is being made by people everyday.

In his introduction, Danny Glover, actor and activist, says that although wars still rage and much early resistance by the UN and other governments have collapsed, “Yet the tripartite internationalism that challenged the beginning of the Iraq war is still an important model, though it will require a great deal of work to reclaim and recapture that moment. This book aims to help that process”.

This book does express the urgency and action around global resistance of the war and what we need now is to learn from our own and others´ experiences how to make that moment into – long commitment, to learn that war cannot be stopped on a weekend. Bennis makes the connection between many events – from Europe´s growing global flexing of muscle to alliances of small nations with social movements to help sway the UN and to scuttle the WTO &ndash particularly effective in Cancun, Mexico in 2003. 

We often do not recognize our successes until they are documented; Bennis does a good job of this and keeps hope alive for activists.  In particular Bennis offers real hope that the UN with the power of many governments allied with citizen groups can and will resist empire and, that the UN does not have to be the tool of the USA, as Madeleine Albright once called it, if informed and motivated people around the world are willing to persevere in their resistance to war, poverty and injustice. Then empire will surely crumble. – if we keep working at reaction and positive resistance – being and demonstrating the alternatives so other citizens will join us.

Activists need to integrate their community work with pressure on governments. Bennis writes: To change people’s lives demands change at the governmental level. It is therefore not enough for people to mobilize in the street: the mobilization must demonstrate enough strength to force those in power to change.

 Bennis speaks at World Social Forum, 2007. Photo TW

“…in spite of fears of abuse, Earth is still an amazing and beautiful creation…It deserves our best efforts. Enjoy it, love it and save it!” RB

Rosalie Bertell believes, as have many ecologists before her, that the current focus on economics is at the expense of ecology and the social environment. In Planet Earth, this internationally-respected scientist states that the most urgent problem facing humanity now is how to sustain Earth, our life-support system. To do this, we must find a new model of global living which is not based on military force in support of a hard, unbending capitalism. This book is a vital contribution to the search for new solutions and means to create change. She sees signs of hope in new social movements springing up around the world.

She begins with a detailed and devastating analysis of the wars of the last ten years of the 20th century. In Part II she provides an acute scientific basis for the madness of war and the destruction that science, harnessed to the military, is planning for us and our world. She discusses so-called natural disasters that are linked to human-caused climate change, the "down-to-earth problems with Start Wars," and the environmental crises spawned by war-making, including pollution caused by depleted uranium and chlorine-based herbicides. She examines the economic fallacy of the military providing jobs and prosperity. There is detail and fact here enough to convince any concerned citizen, particularly those who see saving the environment as a separate struggle, that the work of peace, economic justice and ecology are one.

In the chapter, Rethinking Security, Bertell brings it all together. She says that "global consumption of resources is exceeding Earth's restorative capacity by at least 33 per cent. War and the preparation for war drastically reduce the store of these resources still further, leading to a self-perpetuating cycle on which competition for raw materials leads to further conflict."

In order to redress this crisis, she says, we must tackle the question of security. We need to challenge the belief of many that military force is a 'necessary evil'. This new concept embraces a vision of social justice, human rights and the health of the environment. Security will be achieved through the protection and responsible stewardship of the Earth.

Bertell calls this 'ecological security,' based on a complex multi-faceted approach to the world's problems. Realizing this vision is a big job and required multi-faceted solutions.

Bertell has many insights and ideas on how to create such solutions. She cites the need to alter the core belief of military security. Change always follows a challenge to core belief. Consider the examples of civil rights, women's rights, gay rights and the new challenges in the work of children's rights, child soldiers and animal rights.

This book is full of examples and ideas. It is a book to hold on to, for repeated reference to information and inspiration. In her own words:

"It is my hope that this book will open up for the reader an historical matrix against which to view the present and future… I also hope it will spur the reader to become involved in peaceful enterprises. We must set up a co-operative relationship with the Earth, not one of dominance."

By Theresa Wolfwood

“It [the story of the earth] is larger than all of us, shaped by rules that antedate and superseded every economic, legal and religious doctrine humans have ever created.”

It is not often that a scientist writes a book about her area of study that can be easily understood and appreciated by any reader. Bjornerud is a geologist with a deep and broad love of our planet; she makes the history and existence of our Earth relevant to the important issues facing humanity today. She makes all the vital inks between resource depletion, global warming and the billions of years the earth has existed and reached a state of balance, now severely threatened. She writes that we have an ancient fear, “ … that we will one day wake up to find the cupboards bare. An old and frail Mother Earth will no longer be able to provide for her children.” A fear that becomes more present and obvious every day.

The history of the history of the earth is short; until a few hundred years ago, most societies wrapped geology into a rigid theological framework. Many people observed the earth´s surface, collected samples and fossils and interpreted it for exploitation and development, without questioning its formation and processes. Now geologists can use sophisticated measurement techniques to plumb earth´s depth, calculate its composition, to interpret slow and sudden changes and to date its existence.

Sitting on my shelf is a piece of tonalite gneiss, accompanied by a card that identified this specimen as “the Oldest Known Rock in the World”, dated 3.962 billion years old; an age that most of us cannot comprehend, even when compared to the less than 2 million years humans have had to ravish their home. How is it possible that we can have a fatal effect on a massive planet in such a short time — really only the last few hundred years?

With the basic geologic timescale, clear explanations, and vivid details with understandable metaphors, Bjornerud in elegant prose writes the complicated history of our planet and of our fortune to be one life form among many on this delicately balanced combination of age, heat, air, water and chemical elements. The earth is so old and so vast, we perch on its surface with little understanding of its place in the universe or what lies just beneath our feet. For this, she says, we must understand the language of rocks. Interpreting the landscape around and under us, she shows how the earth reached its present form after 4 billion years of activity, change and reaction until we have the continents we recognize surrounded by air and water. The heat of the sun rules our atmosphere, creating weather and climate, soil and even volcanoes that come from a place where heat has been stored for millennia. The solidity of our planet is deceptive; change happens constantly, the balance of forces is precarious, rocks form and other disappear to dissolve or to be transformed. She calls it a dance with underlying rhythms and idioms.

“Our bones evolved in the constant presence of gravity, and without this force to challenge them, they lose their strength. In the same way, without the force field of scarcity, a constant in our evolutionary past, we lose something of our full potential. Once we have enough to survive, we crave limits — the discipline of the dance…unchecked consumption and unchallenged political power are violations of ancient earth—law. The only uncertainty is what the penalties are.”

To understand the limitations and fragility of the earth is know that we are on a dangerous course that will take the power of informed and caring people to pull us back from the precipice where, like lemmings, we rush to the newest mall or war.

Bjornerud wants us to know and appreciate our home for its own sake; it will be here long after we are gone, even extinct. But she also wants us to appreciate it so that we can re—balance our place on this earth as we change it at an alarming rate. We are with our constant exploitation of our home and its treasures, changing it more profoundly now than nature itself.

“The magnitude of human actions on the Earth mow matches those of natural agents. We are changing the underlying beat of the global dance…if we wish to preserve our social, political and economic structures, which don´t weather surprises very well, we need to understand the range of possible outcomes. Fortunately Earth has kept a good record of what has happened in the past when biogeochemical upheavals have occurred. To read it, we need to speak the language of rocks.”

Bjornerud has written a story combining her passion and wisdom; this wonderful book is ultimately a call for all of us to understand what we are doing to our only home and to act now to save it. Learn and learn to dance with the rhythms of the Earth.

In Rogue State: A Guide to the World's Only Superpower, William Blum shows that in spite of the efforts of U.S. leaders to make their actions appear humanitarian and democratic, the U.S. has run a global protection racket based on four imperatives:
(1) making the world hospitable for globalization, particularly for U.S.-based corporations;
(2) enriching military contractors who donate generously to politicians;
(3) preventing the rise of any society that might serve as an alternative to capitalism; and
(4) extending political, economic and military hegemony over the world while creating a world order in America’s image.
Part I makes the connection between supporting terrorism abroad in U.S. interest (from Cambodia to Afghanistan, to the School of Americas and the CIA), and the criminal “justice” system at home. He documents military interventions since 1945; the U.S. still has military forces in more than 100 countries. Earth is not enough though, Blum quotes the Pentagon’s plan to wage war in space: “we’re going to fight in space. We’re going to fight from space and we’re going to fight into space.”

Part II covers U.S. weapons of mass destruction from Hiroshima to Depleted Uranium in Iraq and Yugoslavia. There is a long list of when and where the U.S. used chemical and biological weapons, at home and abroad – literally insecticides for people.

Part III is “The American Empire: Coming soon to a country near you.” Blum lists military and political interventions all over the world. The U.S. has stood as a true “rogue” in dozens of votes at the UN, often supported only by Israel, and a handful of other faithful allies, like Canada. The U.S. even voted against the right to food as a human right.

Even when the truth is revealed, “being the World's Superpower means never having to say you're sorry.” This powerful empire is based on repression abroad and at home. How do they get away with it? Blum says, “little is left to chance in the Selling of America.” The worldwide love affair with America is the result of a media as powerful as the military that glorifies the U.S. everywhere and in every form of media. Blum says most Americans do not yet recognize the consequences of their government's deeds.

To order, contact the publisher or send US$18 to W. Blum, #707 – 5100 Connecticut Ave. NW, Washington DC 20008-2064 for an autographed copy

A new book by Blum is an occasion. He has only written two earlier books of political analysis; Killing Hope: U.S.A. Military and CIA interventions Since WW2 and Rogue State: A Guide to the World’s Only Superpower. His exhaustive research combined with witty commentary make his books easy to read but powerfully authoritative.

In this latest collection of essays his fertile mind ranges across a wide geography of issues and events. On the subject of, “Interventions Are Us,” Blum reminds us of the USA bombing of a drug factory in Sudan and the support for a corrupt regime in Peru. Iraq and Afghanistan have overshadowed mendacity of USA foreign policy in the rest of the world but, interventions, force and threat are still the order of the day. Indeed we may ask what technique is being used now to make Canada a second home for BMD?

Blum does a wonderful job of using politicians own words to illustrate their deceit and lies. From Madeleine Albright justifying murderous sanctions to the justification for armed intervention in Iraq from the latest bunch of oil slicks back to the lies surrounding the bombing of Hiroshima and Nagasaki, he covers them all.

But the part that I liked and was new to me was the list of socialist governments in today’s world. We know about Cuba and Venezuela, but what about Tajikistan and Estonia?

In a scary essay, “Winning hearts and mindless”, Blum shows the depth and breadth of ignorance of the American people, concluding that the peace movement has the necessary and enormous task of overcoming this vacuum. As in his other books, there is a wealth of information and wit here to help that task; it belongs on the activist reference shelf with his other books.

Reviewed by Theresa Wolfwood

This is one of a series of small easy to pocket & carry books that also include Green Action & Political Animals. The New Internationalist is the global voice of inspiration and information for all of us in the work for peace and social justice; it produces an excellent magazine and many publications including The World Guide.

Peace is full of quotations from many lands & peoples – a bit heavy on men & USA presidents & generals but still it is a little gem and an excellent ethical gift for a person just starting out in the peace movement.

The photos and graphics are striking; my favourites are; the beaming faces of women in Burundi, great photos of historic demonstrations, a poignant scene of a woman in a Bosnian graveyard and the photo of Serb woman grieving during the NATO bombing with the stunning caption that that was the first major conflict with NO casualties on the winning side.

Some of the quotes are from ancient and historic texts from many cultures. Some are less known like the timely words of RH Tawney, “Militarism is the characteristic, not of an army, but of a society” and Aung San Suu Kyi who reminds us that, “the quintessential revolution is that of the spirit.”

When I spoke recently at an alternate armistice ceremony at the memorial to the Canadians who died in the Spanish civil war I quoted the words of Oscar Romero, remembering my visit to the 65 metre long wall of names of those who died in El Salvador’s civil war. The much revered priest said, just before his assassination, “…Peace is dynamism. Peace is generosity. It is right and it is duty.”

A pleasant part of our duty is to pass on images and words like those in Peace to new activists as a welcoming introduction to a culture of peace.

Brutus, Dennis. Poetry & Protest: A Dennis Brutus Reader. Edited by Lee Sustar & Aisha Karim. 2006. Haymarket Books. USA List also as: Sustar, Lee & Aisha Karim, editors. Poetry & Protest: A Dennis Brutus Reader. 2006. Haymarket Books. USA

Review by Theresa Wolfwood

“The perfume of freedom has burned my mind…”

When I finished reading this history of a remarkable and committed activist and the anthology of his sixty years of poetry, prose, and speeches, I regretted my own failure to talk with him four years ago. In a grassy field by the river in Porto Alegre, we were participating in the opening of the World Social Forum; I was carrying two of my handmade banners that many people wanted to photograph. A wispy gray haired man approached with a camera and asked me about the banners and chatted for a few minutes. He introduced himself as Dennis Brutus. I was speechless – a rare event – but managed to say: Are you the South African Dennis Brutus, the poet? Then, photos taken, I scuttled off in confused awe and never saw him again.

In my years of work in the international and local anti–apartheid movements and my pursuit of poetry that spoke to political reality, I discovered Brutus’ poetry and heard of his activism. But I knew few details of his life and work. This book of memoir, speeches, interviews and poetry is an excellent account of Dennis Brutus and informed my admiration of his courage, commitment and perseverance.

Classified as “coloured” by the South African government, Brutus’ parents were schoolteachers and they instilled a love of literature in their son; he also was able to get a reasonable education. At an early age he became aware of the injustice and inequality in South African society; an active boy, he saw the results in sport; non–whites had not the opportunity, equipment nor place to become good athletes. None were allowed on prestigious national teams. He saw the system in South Africa as a form of Nazism, developed and strengthened by the white South African government after WW2. Brutus was teaching school then and he began to challenge apartheid on many levels, including education and sport. He lost his job, was arrested, shot and jailed for his activism in 1964.

The accounts of his time in jail are horrific, the conditions were appalling and both guards and prisoners were dehumanized and brutal in this terrible system. Brutus, as were all prisoners, was beaten and tormented; but he still cared for others he saw as weaker and more vulnerable – young men who were tortured until they accepted rape and constant sexual abuse. He managed to express his feelings and observations in poetry that carries the smell and feel of horror.

In Letters to Martha, he writes:

“…To what separate limits are they driven
and what fierce agonies they have endured
that this, which they have resisted,
should seem to them preferable,
even desirable.”

In a series of stanzas entitled, Robben Island sequence, he describes the bleak setting and the soul destroying labour that prisoners on this infamous hellhole endured.

“ neonbright orange
vermillion
on the chopped broken slate
that graveled the path and yard
bright orange was the red blood
freshly spilt when prisoners had passed; …”

Some died, others were broken, but Brutus survived; perhaps poetry and political conviction helped him through.

“…Take out the poetry and fire
or watch it ember out of sight,
sanity reassembles its ash
the moon relinquishes the night.
But here and there remain the scalds
a sudden turn or breathe may ache,
and I walk soft on cindered pasts
for thought or hope (what else) can break.”

Brutus not only survived; after leaving prison and going into exile, he helped bring the conditions in South Africa to world attention. He organized massive and wide reaching actions that saw the government South Africa isolated and despised throughout the world. Brutus organized successful boycotts of white–only South African athletes’ attendance at the Olympics and many touring sport events. In the early 1970’s I remember I heard a news report on CBC radio – I was living in Yellowknife at the time – that my friend, Don Grier in Edmonton, had been carried off a football field and was one of many protestors jailed because they demonstrated against a white South African team playing in Canada, an act, no doubt inspired by Brutus and his comrades. Soon South African became isolated in many areas – cultural workers refused to go there, trade and tourism boycotts became widespread. The Rand sank in value.

Brutus was working hard throughout Europe and North America to expose apartheid. One group that got support, even from governments like Mulroney’s Conservatives in Canada, was The Aid and Defense Fund to help families of jailed and killed political activists and to provide legal assistance to those arrested for their political actions.

This was a group I was also involved in and we were able to funnel millions to the needy in South Africa and give them hope and dignity along with material assistance. Brutus writes that international support was crucial for the anti–apartheid struggle and its success.

When the jubilation over the fall of apartheid and the possibility of true democratic government in South Africa had passed by and world attention moved on to other issues –like the end of the ‘cold war’ and new trade liberalization agreements, Brutus and many others saw the beginning of betrayal of commitment to social justice by the new government they had worked so hard to support and elect in the new South Africa.

Even as early as 1974 Brutus saw a deeper and more complex reality. He said then that the struggle was deeper and more complex than apartheid, “…the significance of the Southern Africa [he was including Namibia, Mozambique etc.] Liberation movement is that it goes beyond resistance. It is not resistance to oppression; it is not even liberation merely in the sense of freedom to govern yourself…It is not a local nor even a national struggle. We see ourselves as an element in the global struggle against imperialism….”

So although Brutus does not live in South Africa he connects all struggles and is still in 2006 deeply committed to justice in South Africa. He participates in and supports the new movements against neoliberalism and privatization in South Africa, the oppression by the World Bank and the IMF and South Africa’s new role as a sub-imperialist power for the USA.

He is criticized for his global view and for his long distance involvement; but he remains connected, optimistic and active. When speaking about cultural change he says that, “…that one of the things we are doing is to engage ourselves in the struggle to recover and rediscover our humanity…” He sees that resistance is part of presenting to society that there are other ways of being and that creative political engagement requires that we participate in the creation of ‘another possible world’ as the Social Forum process calls it. In an interview in 2002 Brutus says that, “The reality is that Africa has been recolonized. It is the neocolonial process that is now paralyzed” by conflicts in which South Africa arms both sides, so he concludes, “don’t send in the killer to clean up the killing. Find alternatives among themselves.” A call that was also eloquently stated by Wangari Maathai in her Nobel Prize acceptance speech in 2004 when she said that solutions to problems must come from us.

>The answers lie in all of us, not in powerful forces that help create the problem. This seems to me to be at the heart and to be the strength of Brutus’ life work – not only protest but constructive resistance that creates new ways of living together and serving liberation and justice, “in the struggle for the liberation of humanity in Africa and the rest of the world, in an attempt to achieve our full potential, our full dignity, our full humanity.”

This connected engagement is very clear when he talks about his poetry. He says he could not be a full time poet, that poetry is an outflow of his personal and political life. He says that the poet as a pet has no obligation to be committed to social activism – he believes that the poet as a human being, that all human beings have an obligation.

“We ought all to be committed because we are people, we’re all part of the same human environment.” He says he could not make a total commitment to poetry because it, “would do damage to what I now regard as essential to integrity for me. Which means social concern.”.

Although some of his poetry may seem fleeting and fragmented, when looked at in the total context it is part of a continuous flow of life, work, feelings and relationships. That gives it a vivid power and a particular strength.

Just after I met him so briefly he would have written these lines in: At night, after Porto Alegre: South African Airways 747

“In this dim winged cathedral
soaring above oceans of silvery cloud
far beyond Atlantic’s tumultuous heave
we move, star–girt distant
from greed’s debris, genocides, calcined bones
curled in our private shrines
or bent over light–pooled pages
to a new world, new earth, where finally
our dreams can be fulfilled.”

Much can understood of Brutus’ perseverance and productivity by reading an untitled poem in 1989 where he wrote:

“…the creative act is an act
of dissent and defiance: creative
ability is a quintessential part
of being human: to assert one’s
Creativity is also to assert one’s
Humanity. This is a premise on which
I have acted all my life and it is
the premise I have offered to others
As an inspiration.”

TW

Review by Theresa Wolfwood

“Children such as Alex and I lived in mystery…”

Butala is the much loved author of many books and plays; she is best known for her “Perfection of the Morning”, a memoir of her experiences for nature and landscape in southern Saskatchewan. Her writing is deeply rooted in the life of the prairies. If Saskatchewan could be called the quintessential Canada, Butala can be called the quintessential Canadian writer. All her writing has been imbued with the sense of continuity and hope of life despite hardships and failures. Her latest work, also a memoir of her experiences, is very different.

On a warm summer evening in Saskatoon in 1962, Alexandra Wiwcharuk paused during a stroll, before her night shift as a nurse, on the bank of the South Saskatchewan River. There she was brutally raped and murdered, buried hastily nearby while still alive. Her murderer has never been found. Butala says this terrible deed devastated not only Alex´s family and friends, but changed a whole community that had never known such a terrible crime in the small prairie city.

Butala went to high school with Alex, but was not a close friend, but Butala, like so many others, remained haunted by this death for more than forty years. She decided to write the story of the pretty and

popular young woman who died so young. She did not set out to be a detective and solve the murder, she wanted to write Alex´s story.

But her research lead her down strange paths, she was obstructed, harassed, followed by police, her phone was tapped, she was threatened and warned off. She does not find the murderer, but finds a chilling reluctance on the part of officialdom to be open about that crime four decades ago. It may be that the murderer is still alive and well in Saskatoon.

But the life and death of Alexandra Wiwcharuk is more than the account of promise destroyed by cruelty and horror, it is a symbol of the evil that is always present in human society. Of the mystery of Alex´s end she writes,

“By struggling to find Alex´s story and to tell it, I had entered the stream of life that had always evaded me, that my own fears had kept me from. Alex herself had awakened me, her beautiful promise, her terrible death, her rage at having life snatched from her, her determination that her story would be told. Alex herself had thrust me into life at last. What I found there had changed me forever. Now it seemed to me that darkness was creeping up…the real world, it turned out is almost too terrible to contemplate.”

Butala cannot forget her colleague and her murder; she has created a story that is a meditation on evil that forces us beyond the tragedy of Alex to a contemplation of evil everywhere in our world. It changed Butala as she wrote it and it will move and change her readers.

Review by Theresa Wolfwood

“If we had a keen vision of all ordinary human life, it would be like hearing the grass grow and the squirrel’s heart beat, and we should die of that roar which lies on the other side of silence.” George Eliot in Middlemarch.

History is made by everyone and recorded by the powerful. The silence of the poor, the weak, the illiterate – mainly women – is seldom noticed. Urvashi Butalia, an Indian feminist, writer and publisher, grew up in a family whose life was shaped by the Partition. The roar was suppressed but still there.

This 1947 event which divided India into India, supposedly a Hindu nation and into Muslim West Pakistan and East Pakistan, that later became Bangladesh. Ten million people crossed the border which divided Punjab into two countries. It is now widely accepted that about one million people died in this transport across invisible lines. It was a violent and bloody birth for new nations, based on religious differences; the messages of peace and love of all religions were lost in the frenzy of upheaval, movement and loss. The author says this data, including the widespread abduction and rape of women, is “the generality of Partition: it exists in history books.”

It even exists in travel guides. When I crossed the border from India to Pakistan, at the only open point, between Amritsar and Lahore, more than fifty years later, I choose not to go by train; our guide book described refugees fleeing for safety during partition using this train. When the trains arrived and doors were opened blood and bodies poured out. We walked across the border.

“…The truth is that this experience has been with us for a long time. Do you think these tapes will make any difference to the next set of rules?” These are the doubting word of one of the villagers the author interviewed for this book and they stay with her throughout; her doubt is infectious, I ask the same question.

She wrote the book with the hope, I think, that she, like all of us, can make a difference and affect the powerful: that the truth can make a difference. She wanted to record the private stories that only families know; the secrets that women had not broadcast, but held within them, scars on their souls. The author knew some stories but they seemed remote to her until in 1984 Indira Gandhi was killed by her Sikh security guards, again an orgy of terror and killing swept India and Partition did not seem so remote anymore. She has to acknowledge that Partition is still alive and present. In her efforts to understand and reveal the experience and meaning of Partition, Butalia searched for stories beyond written history. She went to the survivors, the families of survivors, to the stories passed down to find the other side of silence.

The stories, recorded verbatim, are heart rending. Honour is such a strong concept in this culture, that fathers and male relatives killed women and girls so they would not be raped by marauding men from the other religions. Women jumped down wells, some survived and live with memories of those who did not survive. Homes were burned, people abandoned villages, hospitals had no staff, and there was no one to bury the dead. Raped women were stigmatized when they bore the children of rapists. All this happened. And yet people did not really know what was happening; Butalia tries to set these stories in a context of known history and searches to explain why neighbours, friends and relatives will murder, rape and injure one another. The personal trauma remains fresh.

“We did wonder what was happening but we had little understanding of it. It was the big people who seemed to know what was happening.” said one person she interviewed. Most blamed people of other religions; some blamed their leaders or the English.

So will this book help to end hatred and fear? Will it help us disclose our deepest feelings about ‘the other’ and understand how we can all so easy turn against those with whom we share life and feeling? Why do aggressors become aggressors? Why do victims become aggressors? To be a victim is to justify one’s own violence? Is that the universal truth of all wars? She creates many questions, examines her doubts and yet continued in her recording. Words are all that many of us have to verify our experience.

The author is a feminist with a deep awareness of the official disregard for women’s lives and self–regard; she understands the marginalization of women’s experience, so she listened and tried to understand them, to place them in the history of their time and location, along side of official history.

She says that, “Although my book is not ‘only’ about women, I have come to the conclusion that, women, their histories, and where those histories lead us, lie at the core of it.” Many would not speak, or would not speak of the worst of horrors, silence takes many forms. Butalia writes about her work, “I believe this can only take us further forward in our understanding.”

It helps to know and read her stories of those who refused to be consumed by hatred, those who helped their friends and neighbours and who refused to commit acts of horror. These stories are part of the whole and yet, I still wonder, why can some people, everywhere, refuse to engage in horror and why will some embrace brutality with self–righteous relish? TW

When I was given this book by the editor, a world respected authority on biosafety, I knew it was about our biological resources and knowledge, but I was not prepared for the outrageous information about such a benign sounding concept. “Benefit Sharing” is yet another way in which politically and economically poor groups and countries are forced to render unto the Caesars of the world their biodiversity and natural wealth. This one issue is the metaphor for current imperialistic globalization. To read it is to be instructed in how we are sold out and what we can do about it.

Burrows explains in her introduction that when “access to genetic resources and fair and equitable sharing of the benefits arising out of their utilization” was negotiated by Parties to the Convention on Biological Diversity, she realized this was going to be a painful and ugly deal.

In today’s world everything is a commodity, even though many of the writers in this book want to believe that life is sacred and cannot be owned, most acknowledge that the powerful are stealing and patenting many life forms from seed to human cells. For indigenous peoples who see no separation from their lives and the life around them, the theft of their biodiversity is most devastating.

The eleven writers are themselves a diverse group comprising scientists, activists, lawyers, scholars from all parts of the earth. They clarify this complex subject and some offer possibilities for citizen directed change. TW 2005

Theresa Wolfwood

“…any every tide teaches the lesson/impressions of water on sand/and then erases it/ to make this garden/you must stay here.”
from Garden in sand. P 19 - Still Life under the Occupation.

The best of poetry is rooted in place and passion; for Carole Chambers her passion is the place. She lives and writes on an island off the east coast of Vancouver Island. Hornby Island is a very special place of sea and ever changing sky and lush green and secret crannies. I live there part time and first met Carole at her day job in the post office. She is finely tuned to her physical environment and also to the social environment of this beautiful place, seemingly remote, but very connected to the larger world.

Chambers poetry is both specific and local and universal at the same time. Her images are powerful and her language honed to rock and sea, forest and garden.

In Echolocation, Chambers writes far and wide from the wars of Yugoslavia to the barbarous hunting to extinction of the Beotek by British gentlemen who gathered after church, “to hunt the savages/who knew how to live here.”

She also recalls her experience as one of a thousand citizens who gathered to protest logging in Clayoquot Sound on Vancouver Island. When she is arrested by a mountie just doing what she had to, Carole mourns, “…. It is human to be afraid/of an unknown future/ to look after one’s own./We thought we had forever/against the green.”

About 10 years ago I had the pleasure of hearing Carole read The Great Rift at a glorious mixed media performance of music, song, dance and word on Hornby Island, a uniquely local production about the beginning of humanity in Olduvai Gorge. This epic poem, is included in Echolocation; I still get chills when I read it. The final words are about all creation and a paen of hope for life.

“…the ancient fault/ imperceptibly separates land from land/and will again allow the sea to take/its tithe of the dying/to feed the hatching world,/without end.”

Her ear hears the bees in the garden and she muses and warns against our destruction of the earth.

“…If we anger the bees/they will desert us/and our bellies will swell/with the emptiness/of our creation”

Chambers is a prophet of incredible power and vision; her poems are jewels of language; they are also psalms for our time.

I don’t often review a best seller, but that is what this book by Chomsky has become recently. Although well known to political activists and students of political thought around the world, Chomsky, prolific and active as he is, has never been a popular best seller. That has changed with Hugo Chavez recommending this book to the world at the UN General Assembly.

He said. “It’s an excellent book to help us understand what has been happening in the world throughout the 20th century, and what's happening now, and the greatest threat looming over our planet…The hegemonic pretensions of the American empire are placing at risk the very survival of the human species. We continue to warn you about this danger and we appeal to the people of the United States and the world to halt this threat, which is like a sword hanging over our heads.”

That sent many diplomats, politicians and curious listeners running to the bookstore. For many of us who have read Chomsky for years, it is an amusing, but heartening sight to imagine. This is a important book; the more people who read it, the better. As I write this I am organizing a vigil besides navy ships at Navy Days in Victoria. And Chomsky could not be more relevant & serious. Canada has become an extra wing on the USA eagle, while the USA soldiers on in Iraq; we are on ground for its strategy in Afghanistan. Chomsky, author of nearly 100 books over his long career is seldom wrong and is always full of insight into the machinations of the USA government.

Chomsky shows us how the present USA policies are rooted in the past, Bush II is no new aberration but he has built on the success of his father & his predecessors and the end of “the cold war” and the development of what the military planners call “full spectrum dominance.” With a powerful military–industrial complex (General/President Eisenhower’s phrase) ruling the White House and a president programmed to look like a simple Christian guy, the USA is hell–bent on global control. Most recently the 911 bombings of New York & Washington have provided a heaven send opportunity to be even more ruthless in pursuit of its goal.

Chomsky like many radical thinkers and activists is optimistic, putting the onus for creating a better world onto to activists and politicians everywhere who have integrity and commitment to believe and act as though ‘another world is possible.’ His works are a vital part of the matrix of our activism.

TW

Churchill, an enrolled Cherokee, is an activist in the American Indian Movement, a professor and a prolific author of many books and articles on the aboriginal peoples of the Americas. This book is well documented and has exhaustive references and bibliography.

His main thesis is clear and unequivocally stated: the crime of genocide does not belong to any one group, that is has been perpetrated on many groups from Armenians to Romas and that the longest enduring genocide has been against the native peoples of the Americas. This genocide is denied in official history – both in the USA and Canada. Native peoples are still the poorest and unhealthiest groups in both countries. In South America as well, the Mayan civilization is only now being recognized as a contemporary culture and in Bolivia in 2006, an indigenous person just became the first native President of a country.

Yet the genocide continues in the USA, as Churchill documents in detail. The government of the USA refuses to sign the International Convention on Genocide and still officially denies ‘this most horrible of crimes’ in its settled territory. Churchill states that since the bombing of Hiroshima, the start of the nuclear era of human history, the cold war up to the present, the resources, lands and health of the native peoples have been sacrificed for USA global imperialism. (In Canada also: see my review of the film, “Village of Widows”) Impoverished bands are bribed or ignored as the USA uses native land to mine and dump radioactive materials.  In November 2-8, 2005, the Guardian Weekly of the UK carried a story about the massive toxic storage dump on Shoshone land in Nevada.

This book is placed not only in the Americas but in a context of genocides in Europe and Asia; the scholarship is impressive and comprehensive. It is an excellent reference for anyone needing a matrix for hemispheric history as well as the history of killing and oppressing whole groups of people.

Missing is any analysis or awareness of the gendered genocide of aboriginal women – now reaching massive proportions in the USA, Mexico and Canada where only  a women’s movement is responding to the genocide of the poorest and most vulnerable of native society. The fate of “Stolen Sisters” is still only whispered about.

Genocide in all it forms must be acknowledged and although history cannot be undone, we need to act with awareness and understanding so that it does not continue in new military and economic forms.   TW

Inside The Bottle: An Expose of the Bottled Water Industry tells us that bottled water is relatively new to Canada - it was introduced by the big corporations, like Nestle, from Europe. Then the cola companies, seeing their sales of sugary soft drinks stagnate as a result of health concerns, got into this profit able market. They had the great advantage, Clarke says, of already owning the facilities and having almost free access to municipal water (just like us, they can take it from the tap!) In Canada, 20% of drinking water is now bottled; its consumption exceeds coffee, tea, milk and apple juice. It's more than fad now. Massive marketing with sophisticated and deceptive appeals to health and fashion consciousness keeps pushing up sales. Aging baby boomers and schools are a major focus of this advertising. Clarke says, "It is also one of the most unregulated industries that deal with people's basic health needs."

Clarke details a complete breakdown of the privileges, marketing strategies, prices and profit potential of bottled water. The book is worth the reasonable price of just for his clear and illuminating charts and tables alone.

This book is also a great resource for data on corporate water operations in North America and, most important, for stopping the corporate capture of a public resource. If we ignore the right of all people to safe and adequate water, properly managed as part of the public commons, we will soon face privatization of this public domain which surely will lead to increased pollution, limited access and higher prices. Water is a public and political issue for us all. It is the ultimate commons.

The excellent, well referenced background on community resistance and specific actions in Inside The Bottle send a compelling call to action to us all. So read the book and start organizing!

This morning on radio, I heard a USA government lawyer proclaim the intention to grant no rights to foreigners in the USA, warning us we may be subject to detention without any contact, food deprivation and various forms of abuse, even if we are in the transit area of an airport. She ended her speech with the blatant statement (lie) that the USA does not torture.

I felt a chill as I realized I may never again see my friends in the USA who are too frail to travel, that I cannot visit or meet with the many committed activists who are trying to change the path of their country, I just will not risk it now.

In the dense, information- and analysis-packed book, by Coates, this latest development is described precisely on the back cover, “American military doctrine has been transmuted into Full Spectrum Dominance, or unchallengeable superiority in any contest on or in land, sea, air, space or information.” This frightening statement comes straight from the USA Department of Defence statement of May, 2000. (see page. 130)

Since the end of the so-called "Cold War", the USA has been emboldened to proclaim its intention of global hegemony, an intent that was always there and implicit in the capitalist drive to expand - it thinks no longer need worry about opposition or counter-balance.

Coates has collected a number of essays that examine the USA hegemony, the faltering power of the UN, the wars of the last 15 years, the erosion of peace and human rights globally and our efforts to change this dangerous slide into repression we seem to be headed for.

These papers were intended for discussion by the Network for Peace and Human Rights that has been meeting in Europe since 2002. As such they help for any activist looking for insight and direction in the work of peace and human rights – inextricably bound together in these “parlous times”.

The continuing nuclear proliferation today with the USA holding over 10,000 nuclear weapons while it shakes its fist at Iran, the development of new ‘nuclear weapons’, those using U-238 as a steel hardener, while treaties on nuclear proliferation and weapons in space are all abandoned by the USA present great instability even though nuclear disarmament is, to many, yesterday’s issue. Unfortunately not.

While those with full spectrum vision and understanding cannot see any threat against USA hegemony that calls for military dominance, the USA government leaders are moving into a shady world of unreality where the threat of “terrorism” can be used to subdue any opposition and trample human rights.

The later part of this useful text covers the important connections between the major concerns of today, peace, poverty, human rights and resource control. Torture may become the defining and connective issue that will challenge the empire. Coates points to many areas and directions we are working and need to increase our efforts.

The book ends with the ever-inspiring words of Arundhati Roy. “Our strategy should not be to only confront Empire, but to lay siege to it…..To shame it. To mock it. With our art, music, our literature, our joy our brilliance, our sheer relentless…The corporate revolution will collapse if we refuse to buy what they are selling – their ideas, their vision of history, their wars, their weapons, their notion of inevitability. Remember this: We be many and they be few…”

Case Studies of how women in major conflict zones, in Ireland, Israel/Palestine and Yugoslavia have come together to work together peacefully.

Review by Theresa Wolfwood

This is another gripping story of women from the Mauritian writer of The Rape of Sita. If that book was in lush forest colours, this tense drama, set in a prison as cyclones approach, is stark black and white overshadowed by a sky of deep intense mauve of the impending tempest. The tension builds inside as the cyclone nears outside.

Three women are thrown together in a gaol cell. At first, suspicious and unfriendly to each other, they gradually develop friendship and support. They talk about their varied experiences; not too different from any women´s in or out of prison. And to relieve the tension and appalling conditions of incarceration, the women talk about food, exchange recipes and become connected to women´s lives everywhere.

Chapters are interlayered with quotes from the Criminal Code and the power of ´justice´ meted out to the powerless becomes a caricature of how governments and official in power can twist and warp the laws with impunity.

Juna is, supposedly, she thinks, inside because she tried to organize a union. But she is accused of drug dealing. I didn´t understand anything about my arrest. Neither reason nor procedure. Neither motive nor charge.
To me, it was a bolt out of the blue. I am a person who doesn´t understand very much about anything, come to think of it. Except for computer systems and what I call the common map of all human language—they hold few secrets for me‏everything else is very hard for me to come to grips with. Any number of things are bolts out of the blue to me. I feel hurled into the world myself. Just like they have hurled me into this cell. As if I´m a bolt out of the blue myself.

The older woman, thrown in the cell designed for two, Mama Gracienne, has made a confession under torture. Her crime? Murdering her daughter – but she is so confused she doesn´t know if or when she did it.

The third prisoner, is just a girl, Leila, who is imprisoned for being “out of control” whatever that means is never clear, except that someone did not like the way she behaved; she calls Mama Gracienne a loon because she seems so vague and confused.

There is a fragile unity among prisoners against the guards and police who have power over their every minute. They despise the “blue ladies”; they become a family in their small cell, united in their determination to defy authority.

What is usually seen as a disaster, an act of destruction, slowly emerges as the saviour of the prisoners, the opportunity for freedom. The cyclones become the possibility for mutiny, the realizations that there are greater powers than those of police and prisons.

“Three generations sitting on the cement floor of a prison cell waiting while a cyclone approaches....
And then I say a funny thing. I say: They won´t rob us of this cyclone, they won´t.”

The staff panic, doors are left open and prisoners dance and laugh their way to freedom. Juma continues to write their story with a mascara stick on pink toilet paper. A story like no other that could be a story of many women in many places. Lindsey Collen, I am waiting for your next story.

Review by Theresa Wolfwood

It starts with a poem full of questions that resonated in my thoughts as I read this wonderful story and forced me to examine my own behaviour and actions.

“What action for you	...Will this act
Would be moral	Make history progress
Would be true	Or allow us
Would be good	To slip back
Would be right?	Into the mud of the past?...”

Recently I ´met´ Lindsey Collen on a conference call and although I knew her interesting letters in New Internationalist, I was not aware of her novels. I immediately found The Rape of Sita & Mutiny, both written a few years ago, absolutely timely and fascinating. Collen is an activist in Mauritius, probably the only hyphenated activist-novelist in that small island nation. Her latest letter from Mauritius in NI is about an unusual and well-organized strike by fishers.

The Rape of Sita is a like a story told to a small group of friends in an intimate space – a fire lit room, a shady grove of trees or in a tent by moonlight; it reflects how most women think, the main story, the details of the lush setting, the feelings of the characters, many asides to bring in other voices, related information and description – because to a good story teller everything is related and everything is relevant.

Even though the story is told by a man, Iqbal the Umpire, he is a respected community figure and wants to be a woman. Is that common among men who relate to female sensitivities or it is an inchoate form of womb-envy? But the book is really by a woman who understands women´s fears and vulnerability.

Sita is a powerful woman leader on a tropical island with a history of resistance. She comes from a family of independently minded warriors from the struggles against colonialism. These struggles erupt throughout the story. Sita works beside her husband, Dharma, an organizer who loves her as an equal. Much of her strength comes from her legendary mother, Doorga, who is capable of shaming men into buying her a drink, because women are paid less, and if they don´t she beats them up.

Sita grows up to be a perceptive and courageous activist. The rape, the central crisis of the story, occurs when she leaves the island for a women´s conference. Her rapist is someone she knows (most rapists are known or related to the woman), her host at travel stopover – now separated from his wife.

For years he has feared Sita, so he fantasizes about the classic means of oppressing her – sexual attack. Sita is unprepared and throughout the act, all the thoughts of self–doubt, self–loathing, and disbelief, mixed with desperate survival reactions pour through her mind even as she becomes physically numb.

She returns home to join Dharma at an important meeting and doesn´t mention her trauma; the pressure of political organizing overwhelms her private feelings. “Did she have time to announce a rape? Worse still. Did she have space? Worse still. Did she have time and space to absorb it in herself? Of course, she must have had time to tell at least herself? Why didn´t she, reader?”

She then buries her memory of rape for many years until she can barely function and even considers suicide, no one can reach her. And this reader believes she didn´t tell about the rape because women are conditioned, even strong, progressive women, into thinking their sexual humiliation is not as important as the “struggle”. We deny to ourselves that it is a vital element of the struggle.

Finally, “she drove into it with her whole self... She bumped into an illusive, heavy, dense, presence.... The hole...It was Anger. It was Rage. It was Fury.”

She knows she has buried something – and typically for women – she thinks she has buried a violent crime of her own.

“What she had found: Rage. The rage of the history of wounded womankind. And with it: Slavery. The slavery of humans historically doomed to be unable to move.”

So the story moves from universality, the symbol of one woman´s oppression becoming the symbols of many oppressions, and back to the story of Sita whom I desperately want to triumph, to shed her rage and guilt, to not let it defeat her. So I read on....

The narrator recalls that time and timing are important, Sita has created a time bomb and when the time is right she explodes her memory. She considers travelling back and murdering her rapist. “Would this act of murder stop men thinking they could rape women the world over?” She rejects that idea. Her shame and guilt, confronted, wither. When a woman in need comes to her she understands that violence and oppression can be overcome if we reach out to others, we help as we are helped. In community and union, mutual solidarity among the oppressed will triumph over evil. Even in defeat, there can be victory.

And for the narrator who wanted to be a woman, he recognizes that we are all woman and man as he is. If we love ourselves as we are, we will all have freedom and equality.

The Governor-General's Award Winner opens his wide-ranging account of the importance of water with a page of quotes. The one I remember is: Millions have lived without love. No one has lived without water.

De Villiers has written a comprehensive survey of global water resources and use, the effect of climate change on water and human intervention in water distribution and its geopolitical results. He writes about Canada and NAFTA, water in Africa and the Middle East. In the end he presents the necessary solutions – conservation, new technology, and most important the recognition of the political importance of water and how it must be shared to avoid water wars. This is an excellent primer and reference for one of the most important issues of our time.

Maggie de Vries is a writer and teacher; she is also pretty and blonde. She and her beautiful sister, Sarah, grew up in a loving family. But Sarah was a woman of colour and was harassed and tormented as she grew up in our bigoted society. She was murdered in 1998 after a short and often brutal life without developing her special writing talent.

It is the circumstances of Sarah’s death which finally shocked Canadians and made her a public figure after she vanished. Sarah had become a sex worker and an addict, following her trade on the streets of Vancouver, living, sometimes happy and sometimes sad, in a community of sex workers who watched in horror as Sarah and other disappeared.

Initially the police were not interested – a woman can leave, go where they want, why suspect foul play…she is only a prostitute. That was the response until more and more families complained and went public – too many women had vanished. Finally the police responded; the trail of disappearances led to a pig farm outside Vancouver. DNA tests confirmed remains of many women, including Sarah. The count is over fifty now. How many would still be alive if police had acted as swiftly as if they were sports stars or businessmen?

Maggie de Vries tells a story of broken dreams, love, perseverance, pain and violence. Maggie kept in touch with Sarah, helped care for her daughter and never gave up on Sarah, in life or in death. After the appalling truth was revealed and the deaths were discovered, Maggie needed to tell this story. Sarah deserves to be known and remembered as a bright, loving and talented woman, loved and mourned by many.

Last summer I visited the memorial to the Montreal women, murdered in 1989, in front of Vancouver’s bus/ train depot. While I walked the circle of benches and read the donor names on the bricks, some people asked what I was doing. I stopped to explain. They asked: Why not a memorial to the women of the pig farm? There is a brick in the circle that reads: “ In memory of the women of Vancouver’s Eastside. We dream of another world when the war on women is over ”.

Maggie describes the ceremony of the placing of a bench in a park nearby in memory of Sarah and others. One day something of Sarah’s will be buried in her family’s grave in Ontario. But this story must not be buried, we need to create a social and public memorial to these women and all the women who today end up without hope or recognition in the dark canyons of our unspoken cruelty and prejudice. We must confront our own dark chasms and work for justice and safety for our marginalized sisters. It is our responsibility to end the war on women at home and everywhere.