Malcolm Azania's Lodge by the Nile

From the Notebooks of Doctor Brain - Unnofficial Book Trailer, Version A

2010-04-09T14:14:00.001-07:00

The relationship between humans and dogs

2009-09-13T20:29:00.001-07:00

Dr. Gaylene Fasenko of the University of Alberta and I discuss the long, complicated and fascinating relationship between human beings and dogs.

FRINGEstrumentalists: Dale Ladouceur, Tippy Ogogo and John Armstrong

2009-09-09T00:14:00.000-07:00

Groove on these performances of Chapman stick, sampler and theremin. They're solid. Dale Ladouceur, Tippy Ogogo and John Armstrong.

Malcolm Azania on Education

2007-10-30T21:00:00.000-07:00

The following is a speech I delivered to a class of University of Alberta Education Students group in the Education North Building on September 10, 1998 (the picture is of the Old Arts Building). I was invited by Kathy Sanford, one of my former Education professors and one of the most influential teachers on my life.

Many of your professors will expect you to come up with a metaphor for what you suppose teaching to be. Now it’s true that metaphors can be excellent means for exploring ideas—they can provide enlightening comparisons and contrasts, can crystallise our imaginings into a coherent order. They can also be an irritating make-work project to cover someone’s ass.

Witness:

“Teaching is medicine.”

“Teaching is gardening.”

“Teaching is architecture.”

“Teaching is war.”

These may flow from other metaphors we hear frequently, such as:

“Young people are our greatest resource.”

“Young people are our most important commodity,” or even

“Young people are our future.”

Some of these are testimony to the artlessness of speech in the 1990s. Some demonstrate a materialistic view of the world—that children are a resource, like copper, bauxite or water, or that they commodities. Commodities are products built for the sole purpose of being sold, never to be possessed by their builders. So does that mean that parents are baby factories, who design and construct child-units for sale to… to whom? To corporations? And where in these is their own will, their desire, their own decision or consideration?

To say that young people are our future is once again to turn them into our possession and our crutch. Young people do not belong to us, they are not our food nor our products, nor should they be seen as our pension-providers.

This is why I don’t think much of most metaphors related to teaching or kids. I’d say that teaching is too big, too complex to be encompassed by a single metaphor. So why bother? Why not describe teaching for what it is? Teaching is the attempt to transfer facts, understanding, skills and strategies to others so that they can successfully manipulate their environments. If very successful, teaching will help learners to develop their own approaches, possibly radically new ones, in order to discover facts, skills and strategies for the manipulation of their environments.

So there is nothing automatically noble in teaching. Thugs can teach. Thieves can teach. Bankers can teach. It is not the fact of teaching—but the facts of teaching that are our concern.

We must make our teaching a civilising act. A moral imperative… where “moral” means the drive to maximise joy and minimise pain, to maximise liberty and minimise irresponsibility.

And we do this because we recognise young people for what they are. The inheritors of all human activity to date. Whether we wish to bequeath them the evils or the honours of the past is irrelevant… it’s done. But what we tell them and how we show them what is important is the most important task—not simple of our careers, but of our lives.

Because if we understand the human past as something far greater than the folly and the greed and the self-glorification of kings, generals, lords, popes, prime ministers, presidents and CEOs—that is to say, of anybody who is a “star,” and “star” spelled backwards is “rats”—then we begin to understand that human beings are at their most glorious when they realise that competition is the law of suspicion, division and collision, but cooperation is the law of civilisation. The human past is a rich collection of all the things we must never repeat and all the wonders that are the building blocks of global decency, compassion, justice and wonder. And all our hopes rest on what those who tell and show the young—do each day.

Liars and fools blame human nature, and point to war, greed, hatred and say, “Well, that’s human nature.” These same liars and fools are silent in the face of the billions of parents who sacrifice for their children, who tuck them into bed or feed them or say “I love you.” They are silent in the face of our most delicate and beautiful literatures, our most compassionate deeds or service, our most meaningful strivings for justice. Because it is beyond their ken to have faith. Because they are cynics.

Cynics are people who never cheer or celebrate, except to congratulate themselves for having successful predicted failure. The blood of cynics is purple, not red. It carries not oxygen, but despair. Despair is the betrayal of our ancestors and the abandonment of our descendants

But you will know teachers by their faith.

What is faith?

Faith in young people means belief in life, life’s power, in life energy. The ability to heal, the inevitability of joy. Faith is the exhilaration of that comes walking a winter field, surrounding by ice and cold wind, and knowing that beneath your feet sleep the seeds that will be the harvest of autumn and the forests of your children.

Faith is in every molecule that is you when you teach, defying decay and despair and saying, “Humans are too good to be dumped into the recycle bin of the universe… and are to good to be neglected, rejected, dejected, abandoned, imprisoned, laid-off, downsized, right-sized.” Human beings already are the right size. You teach because you know that without skill, ability cannot triumph. And you teach because you know that without curiosity, constructiveness and compassion, ability and skill are merely the tools of the greedy, the vain and the pernicious.

Teachers. We believe that we must do as at least as well as was done for us, if we can, better, and never do what was done to us.

Teaching means going into the classroom and working with kids and holding and folding and molding the joys and wonders and glories of the human mind connected to all past, present and future human minds! Don’t talk about the Internet like it’s something new. It’s been around since the first humans uttered the first sounds and made the first hand signs and carved the first characters. It’s human communication designed to store what was in order to make the greatest of what will be.

Vicissitudes—the changing fortunes of life. You will find many days that may nearly break your spirits. The parent who claims you are perverting his child by getting him to think for his own damn self. The child who makes it her pet project to make you miserable every minute or every class on every day. But there will be the kid who sees you at K-Days, or at Safeway, or takes away your plate at a wedding reception, the kid whose smile bursts like fireworks to see you again. And how often it will be the kid whose name you may not even remember, or the kid who you though ignored or hated you. Because you reached into the well of his own heart, and gave him to drink of the water or life. Vicissitudes. The changing fortunes of life.

Then there are the sissitudes. As in “sissy.” The colleagues who tell you or imply to you that you can’t do it that way because they’ve never done it that way and they’ve always done it another way and why would anyone want to do it that way anyway? Sissy as in those who have stopped trying or believing decades ago or who have believed the lies of those who want to tear apart our profession and have Bill Gates as each person’s personal Great Gazoo or guardian angel. Those people who think corporations in schools will make our country and our world a better place.

Defy them. Break moulds. Smash idols. Unlearn. Abandon false temples. And reveal. Reveal all the truths long suppressed. Revere the things that bring life and joy and make students sing in wonder. Read. Study. Make. Paint. Cook. Dance. Jump. Do. Not, “just do it” like that child-enslaving Nike. But be it. Live it.

Teach it.

Posted by Malcolm Azania.

Desmond Tutu on "God's Dream"

2007-10-28T23:00:00.000-07:00

Former Archbishop Desmond Tutu wrote recently:

WHENEVER I am asked if I am optimistic about an end to the Israeli/Palestinian conflict, I say that I am not. Optimism requires clear signs that things are changing - meaningful words and unambiguous actions that point to real progress. I do not yet hear enough meaningful words, nor do I yet see enough unambiguous deeds to justify optimism.

However, that does not mean I am without hope. I am a Christian. I am constrained by my faith to hope against hope, placing my trust in things as yet unseen. Hope persists in the face of evidence to the contrary, undeterred by setbacks and disappointment. Hoping against hope, then, I do believe that a resolution will be found. It will not be perfect, but it can be just; and if it is just, it will usher in a future of peace.

My hope for peace is not amorphous. It has a shape. It is not the shape of a particular political solution, although there are some political solutions that I believe to be more just than others.

Neither does my hope take the shape of a particular people, although I have pleaded tirelessly for international attention to be paid to the misery of Palestinians, and I have roundly condemned the injustices of certain Israeli policies that compound that misery. Thus I am often accused of siding with Palestinians against Israeli Jews, naively exonerating the one and unfairly demonizing the other.

Nevertheless, I insist that the hope in which I persist is not reducible to politics or identified with a people. It has a more encompassing shape. I like to call it "God's dream."

God has a dream for all his children. It is about a day when all people enjoy fundamental security and live free of fear. It is about a day when all people have a hospitable land in which to establish a future. More than anything else, God's dream is about a day when all people are accorded equal dignity because they are human beings. In God's beautiful dream, no other reason is required.

God's dream begins when we begin to know each other differently, as bearers of a common humanity, not as statistics to be counted, problems to be solved, enemies to be vanquished or animals to be caged. God's dream begins the moment one adversary looks another in the eye and sees himself reflected there.

All things become possible when hearts fixed in mutual contempt begin to grasp a transforming truth; namely, that this person I fear and despise is not an alien, something less than human. This person is very much like me, and enjoys and suffers, loves and fears, wonders, worries, and hopes. Just as I do, this person longs for well-being in a world of peace.

God's dream begins with this mutual recognition - we are not strangers, we are kin. It culminates in the defeat of oppression perpetrated in the name of security, and of violence inflicted in the name of liberation. God's dream routs the cynicism and despair that once cleared the path for hate to have its corrosive way with us, and for ravenous violence to devour everything in sight.

God's dream comes to flower when everyone who claims to be wholly innocent relinquishes that illusion, when everyone who places absolute blame on another renounces that lie, and when differing stories are told at last as one shared story of human aspiration. God's dream ends in healing and reconciliation. Its finest fruit is human wholeness flourishing in a moral universe.

In the meanwhile, between the root of human solidarity and the fruit of human wholeness, there is the hard work of telling the truth.

From my experience in South Africa I know that truth-telling is hard. It has grave consequences for one's life and reputation. It stretches one's faith, tests one's capacity to love, and pushes hope to the limit. At times, the difficulty of this work can make you wonder if people are right about you, that you are a fool.

No one takes up this work on a do-gooder's whim. It is not a choice. One feels compelled into it. Neither is it work for a little while, but rather for a lifetime - and for more than a lifetime. It is a project bigger than any one life. This long view is a source of encouragement and perseverance. The knowledge that the work preceded us and will go on after us is a fountain of deep gladness that no circumstance can alter.

Nothing, however, diminishes the fear and trembling that accompany speaking the truth to power in love. An acute awareness of fallibility is a constant companion in this task, but because nothing is more important in the current situation than to speak as truthfully as one can, there can be no shrinking from testifying to what one sees and hears.

What do I see and hear in the Holy Land? Some people cannot move freely from one place to another. A wall separates them from their families and from their incomes. They cannot tend to their gardens at home or to their lessons at school. They are arbitrarily demeaned at checkpoints and unnecessarily beleaguered by capricious applications of bureaucratic red tape. I grieve for the damage being done daily to people's souls and bodies. I have to tell the truth: I am reminded of the yoke of oppression that was once our burden in South Africa.

I see and hear that ancient olive trees are uprooted. Flocks are cut off from their pastures and shepherds. The homes of some people are bulldozed even as new homes for others are illegally constructed on other people's land. I grieve for the land that suffers such violence, the marring of its beauty, the loss of its comforts, the despoiling of its yield. I have to tell the truth: I am reminded of the bitter days of uprooting and despoiling in my own country.

I see and hear that young people believe that it is heroic and pious to kill others by killing themselves. They strap bombs to their torsos to achieve liberation. They do not know that liberation achieved by brutality will defraud in the end. I grieve the waste of their lives and of the lives they take, the loss of personal and communal security they cause, and the lust for revenge that follows their crimes, crowding out all reason and restraint. I have to tell the truth: I am reminded of the explosive anger that inflamed South Africa, too.

Some people are enraged by comparisons between the Israeli/Palestinian conflict and what happened in South Africa. There are differences between the two situations, but a comparison need not be exact in every feature to yield clarity about what is going on. Moreover, for those of us who lived through the dehumanizing horrors of the apartheid era, the comparison seems not only apt, it is also necessary. It is necessary if we are to persevere in our hope that things can change.

Indeed, because of what I experienced in South Africa, I harbor a vast, unreasoning hope for Israel and the Palestinian territories. South Africans, after all, had no reason to suppose that the evil system and the cycles of violence that were sapping the soul of our nation would ever change. There was nothing special or different about South Africans to deserve the appearance of the very thing for which we prayed and worked and suffered so long.

Most South Africans did not believe they would live to see a day of liberation. They did not believe that their children's children would see it. They did not believe that such a day even existed, except in fantasy. But we have seen it. We are living now in the day we longed for.

It is not a cloudless day. The divine arc that bends toward a truly just and whole society has not yet stretched fully across my country's sky like a rainbow of peace. It is not finished, it does not always live up to its promise, it is not perfect - but it is new. A brand new thing, like a dream of God, has come about to replace the old story of mutual hatred and oppression.

I have seen it and heard it, and so to this truth, too, I am compelled to testify - if it can happen in South Africa, it can happen with the Israelis and Palestinians. There is not much reason to be optimistic, but there is every reason to hope.

Posted by Malcolm Azania.

Meeting Ward Churchill

2007-10-27T15:31:00.001-07:00

I had the pleasure of speaking with author, academic and American Indian Movement worker Ward Churchill last night. I'd been concerned prior to the meeting because my recollection of interviews with him and speeches by him I'd seen suggested he was fairly gruff.

Instead he was kind, thoughtful and generous with his time. We talked extensively about politics, of course, but later I asked him what artists, books or films he enjoyed. He cracked me up when he said the last film he'd seen and liked was Quentin Tarantino's Death Proof.

There is a very slight resemblance between Churchill and Kurt Russell, but that's just a coincidence. Anyway, meeting someone you've admired for a long time can be difficult, since not everyone is very nice.

But Churchill was extremely nice, down to earth, and decent. I can't recommend highly enough his book (co-written with Jim Vander Wall) Agents of Repression: The FBI's Secret War Against the Black Panther Party and the American Indian Movement.

Posted by Malcolm Azania.