[NON BLOG] To my fellow Islanders

I'll be on PEI during Christmas vacation from the evening of the 22nd to the afternoon of the 26th. Since the 22nd is my date of arrival, the 26th my date of departure, and the 25th has an obvious sanctity, this leaves the 23rd and 24th free for me.

[BRIEF NOTE] The Guardian on Jamaican Homophobia; Or, A Reason Not to Vacation in Negril

Back in August, I picked up on the growing international campaign against Jamaican popular musicians whose songs regularly feature and approve of violent homophobia, and the way that this homophobia is evident in Jamaica (Buju Banton, a singer singled out for criticism, was also involved in a home invasion of a gay household in Kingston). In November, the organization Human Rights Watch released a report (Hated to Death) which described in sickening detail the ubiquity of homophobic crime in Jamaica as well as the prejudice against AIDS patients, and warned these two prejudices interact in such a way as to accelerate the spread of HIV/AIDS.

Jamaicans haven't gotten the message and aren't likely to, as Alexis Petridis suggests in The Guardian in his article "Pride and Prejudice".

The reasoning behind the homophobic lyrics is unlikely to find much favour with OutRage! [Music promoter Dennis] Howard says that he has advised artists to "censor" themselves because Jamaica has always been tolerant of homosexuality and the dancehall DJs lyrics give a false impression. "Yes, there is homophobia here, but coupled with that homophobia is a tolerance. We are one of the most tolerant societies in the world. In every community, there are identified homosexuals that are tolerated. There is an anti-gay stance in Jamaica, but it has never been seriously violent. I'm not going to tell you it hasn't been violent, but not so as people die.

"I think a lot of this hysteria and paranoia is being fed by organisations like J-Flag, in their zeal to assert themselves and assert homosexuality in Jamaica, and also the fear that they are persecuted, which they are. But nobody don't kill them. Homosexual deaths in this country are perpetuated by homosexuals. There are famous cases in this country where people are murdered by their lovers. They are heinous and vicious, they cut up people, stab them up, cut them up and throw them all over the place, but nobody talks about that."

Petridis goes on to document how the Jamaicans he met shared Howard's opinions in broad detail, believing their country to be exceptionally tolerant towards sexual minorities save when they made absurd intrusion, claiming despite the evidence that homophobic violence was rare and was actually the result of gay passion killings, arguing that the current international campaign was motivated by racism, and so on. The article left this reader with the distinct impression that if one had the misfortune to be born non-heterosexual in Jamaica, the best course of action would be to buy a plane ticket and claim refugee status in some place where you weren't so likely as to be murdered. And, perhaps, if you care about human rights, that attending a Jamaican resort isn't such a good idea. Cuba or the Dominican, anyone?

You know, I'd like to think that I've an inherent right to life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness. A pity that others would disagree with me.

[BLOG-LIKE POSTING] Why Tradition Needs Criticism (Whether You Like It Or Not)

Last Saturday, the Books section of The Globe and Mail published a gloriously snarky review of Malachy McCourt's latest book--Malachy McCourt's History of Ireland--by Irish/Canadian author John Brady. Brady's problem with McCourt's work is that the Irish-American's history of the ancestral Emerald Isle author is far removed from the actual realities of the Irish past and the Irish present, that it is a non-viable fiction with little connection to what Ireland is like now and precious little to say on what the country should become.

We're not "there" any more. That "there" done gone. [. . .] It's gone into the great forgetfulness that Vaclav Havel warns against, a nostalgia that comes with our rationalized, prosperous, conformist, packaged ways.We already are tourists in our own country, many of us. The theme park is us (D4).

Two weeks ago, I announced my happiness with the ongoing decline of traditional rural cultures worldwide in the face of urbanization and the spread of urban cultures. vaneramos raised some good points, and certainly urbanization clearly isn't a cure-all, indeed urbanization can create new problems. I stand by my initial assertion that urbanization is, done correctly, a good thing, particularly from the perspective of the individual. Virginia Woolf was quite correct to note, in A Room of One's Own, that a degree of economic autonomy unavailable outside of urban settings was necessary for people to become autonomous actors, in the realm of cultural production specifically as in life generally. And quite simply, I expect that urban life is certainly more fun: I'm skeptical of the suggestion that Malaysians, as a fellow student contended in a long-ago globalization seminar, really want to be peasants working on rice paddies when they have the option of working eight-hour workdays in an air-conditioned electronics factory and then doing whatever fun things one does in urban Malaysia. I do grant that my initial post was a bit of an overreaction, inspired substantially by my experience on Prince Edward Island and the way that Island culture is positioned by the unspoken consensus of Islanders.

I've mentioned David Weale before. Weale is a professor of history at the University of Prince Edward Island, a raconteur of stories of traditional Prince Edward Island culture before the modernization push of the 1960s (itself meriting a blog posting), most recently a children's author. I took a course from him--History 421, on the Mi'kMaq--and quite enjoyed the class and the man. I also agree with a cousin of mine--a chef, married with two kids said memorably--that Weale would like Islanders to be "fucking peasants."

Weale migrated to Prince Edward Island with his parents at a young age. Given how the most passionnate devotees to a particular culture or ideology tend to be converts, this might account in part why Them Times--his most famous book on Prince Edward Island, a collection of oral histories--idealizes traditional Prince Edward Island culture almost uncritically. One has to dig deep into Them Times to find hints that perhaps all might not have been well, to discover, for instance, a young woman who was chastely kissed by her beau and who felt so guilty for having sinned and risked pregnancy that she considered becoming a religious sister. One really has to go beyond Them Times, though. The unspoken wide gap between Protestants and Catholics was a major factor in island culture, as was (as Jim Hornby documented in Black Islanders) the quiet prejudice against racial minorities like the vanished African-Canadian community of Charlottetown and the tendency of North Shore hotels to suddenly find themselves full when Jewish visitors came by. For that matter, Cornelius Howatt: Superstar, co-authored by Weale with political scientist Harry Baglole, generally an intelligent defense of Island culture against an indiscriminate modernization, contains cringe-inducing passages where a stereotypically Chinese man from Hong Kong is introduced to show--or at least to try to show--the silliness of modernizing Island culture when taken to extremes. I don't think that Weale and Baglole were being racist, at least intentionally so; they were being stupid.

This glossing-over of the problems with traditional Island culture is annoying. I think that this strategy, replicated in tourism advertisements and local representations of culture which present the Island as a rural idyll unspoiled by urban life for the past century, at least, is a major why, over the 1996-2001 period, "Prince Edward Island lost more young adults than it gained. About 3,300, or 43%, of the 7,800 people who moved out were aged 15 to 29. Only about 2,200 people in this age group moved in." Who wants to live in a museum-society?

Brady notes in his review of McCourt that "history, as much as literature, deserves to be let out of the pedant's grasp. We are now more aware that the "us," that tribal unitary "us," was bogus" (D4). Ireland has never been a reactionary society, in fact it has been a revolutionary society as the experiences of individuals like Lady Gregory, Constance Markievicz, Edward Carson, Gordon Wilson, and Terence McSwiney show. The island of Ireland generally, and the Republic of Ireland specifically, has ended up providing societal models of global relevance. One need only note how the effort to resuscitate the Irish language has become a classic model of what to do and not to do in language planning, or how the new member-states of the European Union look to the Irish model to accelerate their economies' convergence towards EU-15 standards, or how the transformation of Irish religious culture might presage developments elsewhere. Ireland is a complex society on the cutting edge of modernity that has been in a constant state of flux, and Brady is entirely right when he says that "there are things from this soothing Come-into-the-Parlour-Danny-Boy voice that should not get under the radar. Continuities and identities [should not be] implied, and assumed" (D5).

So too Atlantic Canada and Prince Edward Island. Anne of Green Gables constitutes, in its way, a revolutionary text--it does deal with an orphan girl adopted into a non-traditional family who goes on to challenge traditional stereotypes of xenophobia and anti-intellectualism and the subordination of the female gender. The problem, though, is that the revolutionary implications of Montgomery's first novel for Island society are overlooked by commentators in favour of superficially bucolic features which make PEI look unchallenging. The revolutionary implications of most every social development in Atlantic Canada since Confederation have been systematically underplayed, the better to make for a stable and consistent and predictable set of outcomes. God forbid that any provincial government risk doing anything innovative of their own volition; experiments are too risky.

( A prediction. )

Traditional culture isn't bad by definition. Rural culture isn't bad by definition. When either is left unexamined--or worse, raised to the level of an ideal to be uncritically accepted--the results are stultifying. And in the end, it kills the old quite thoroughly. One need only look to the example of Nobel Prize-winning poet Frédéric Mistral and the associated félibrige literary movement in the Occitanophone south of France during the late 19th century, which produced a Provençal-language literature that, though vital, made the critical mistake of excluding modernity from its subject matter, of making a stand and trying to defend Provence against an urban, industrial, mass-culture modernity that spoke French. The bulk of Provençaux thought differently. The result? A Provence that has singularly failed to echo Catalonia's accomplishment of marrying traditional culture to modernity, in so failing becoming an assimilated provincial region of France.

Things didn't have to end up that way for Provence. I'd like to think that Atlantic Canada, and Prince Edward Island, can avoid that fate. The problem is that given current approaches to the problem, it doesn't look like that kind of critical take on traditional culture will be implemented in time. A cynic might say that it's too late to bother, but I haven't reached that point, yet.