Student Action to Global Citizenry: The Voluntary Heart of Community

Optionless from Nora Younis on Vimeo.

"I recall the brutal massacre of Sudanese refugees in Mostafa Mahmoud square in 2005 when security forces violently interfered to dismantle their protests in front of UN Refugees Agency Office resulting in killing dozens of protesters including women, children, and elderly people." Ahmed Awadalla, Cairo-based Global Voices blogger (also published on Daily News Egypt)

Introduction

The focus of my volunteerism is with those who currently experience oppressive marginalization in the inhospitable host country of Egypt, who in 1951 made reservations to refugee rights chartered by the UNHCR Refugee Convention, also known as the Geneva Convention.

El-Wafaa Refugee Culture Centre was founded in 2006 in Ain Shams, a neighborhood in the outskirts of Cairo known for its African migrant population, by a group of committed Darfurian community leaders in order to address challenges within the refugee population in Cairo, with a focus on refugees from Darfur. The mission statement of the El-Wafaa Centre is to alleviate suffering of vulnerable refugee communities in urban areas.

Background

Egypt’s reservations to the UN’s Refugee Convention withhold national responsibility with regard to refugees within their country accessing public relief and humanitarian assistance. There are no refugee camps in Egypt. African peoples seeking asylum in Egypt continue to be unjustly marginalized based on race, ethnicity, religion, etc.

Initiated in July 2006 by local community within the African forced migrant population of Cairo, El-Wafaa Centre was physically founded in September 2006, with the assistance of Student Action for Refugees (STAR), a student-run organization at the American University of Cairo. Then president of STAR, Jennifer Renquist, now a foreign officer with USAID, organized the orientation of new students at El-Wafaa Centre, as well as the donation of books and stationeries to the center’s library, remaining a principal need.

I was introduced to this world in 2007 as a young student of literature and language at the American University of Cairo, after volunteering for STAR as an outreach English teacher. I soon met the director of the Refugee Culture Centre, named “El-Wafaa” (The Fulfillment in English) after teaching an intermediate level English course to an incredibly diverse class of migrants, asylum seekers and refugees from all over Africa.

The director of El-Wafaa, Abdel Rahman Siddiq Hashim, is from Darfur, Sudan, educated at a Sudanese university in English. He is a respected and humble community leader, known by many Cairo-based African refugees as “Teacher”. Abdel Rahman’s activism was far-reaching and all-inclusive, welcoming students into the education center, also serving as a cultural and community resource center, without discriminating ethnicity, religion or politics.

During my initial ten-month stay in Cairo, I became deeply involved in the refugee community beyond the interests of Student Action for Refugees (who soon abandoned and undermined local leadership), including organizing independent classes through the El-Wafaa community, running a food bank and managing library resources. Since then, I have poured over the role of the international community as a last vestige of light for the urban refugees of Cairo. In 2010, I returned to Cairo through a fully funded research endeavor with support from a Peace Studies consortium at the University of Calgary, where from I graduated the same year with a B.A. in the Social Sciences.

Highlights from the 2010 research period in Egypt include directly funding the El-Wafaa Executive Director’s return trip to Sudan to register El-Wafaa in Sudan, as well as with a Darfuri NGO network, to assess the situation of refugees returning home to respective countries of origin after living in Egypt as a refugee. Other successes included a film screening and discussion evening on related issues at the inner city Sudanese-led NGO Tadamon, offering charitable funding to vulnerable women-in-need, engaging Sudanese youth students in a music and culture recording project, and personally meeting and attending a course with Barbara Harrell-Bond, founder of the Refugee Studies Centre at Oxford University, the world’s first institution for the study of refugees.

Through my studies, research, and experiences in activism and fundraising since 2007 to the present, I have concluded that it is truly up to international civil society activists to help community leaders foster educational and cultural activities in their communities. UNHCR and local NGOs in the region have proven insufficient, whether as seen in the outcry of the Mustafa Mahmoud demonstration in 2005, or the current state of life for refugees during the unstable political turmoil in Cairo, today.

Their is a great need to support those who appreciate and enable the sustainable establishment of human rights organizations in Egypt providing proper services to any and all people, with a focus on African refugees.

Demographic

The target demographic of El-Wafaa Refugee Culture Center is any and all residents and migrants of Egypt seeking a safe and inclusive community resource center that specializes in language education services. The target communities are refugees and asylum seekers from African countries who seek to transition from Egypt to resettle in a more hospitable country, or move back home after losing many years of their lives to impoverishment, lack of education and opportunity for employment. Such social challenges are due to many causes, including misinformation and a serious deficiency of awareness regarding the nature of life in potential resettlement countries, as well as in returning to often conflict-ridden countries of origin.

Conclusion

Currently, the El-Wafaa Refugee Culture Center and its concomitant community initiatives are in dire need to generate sustainable activism (both local as well as international) to support the immensely wide gaps unfulfilled by the UNHCR, NGO, and academic, as well as faith-based service providers in Cairo.

On behalf of an international network to support the community vision El-Wafaa, led by the volunteerism of PhD student and Fulbright scholar based in New York City, Thomas Leddy-Cecere and myself, a freelance journalist and human rights advocate currently based in the city of Calgary in western Canada, we petition support.

Currently, the 2013-2014 budget for El-Wafaa Refugee Culture Centre to thrive in Cairo requires 1,280 USD (center rent, office supplies, external programs). Membership fees from refugee communities in Cairo seeking services are not adequate. International networks with preexisting solidarity groups in the U.S. and Canada are integral to the sustainability and overall maintenance of the El-Wafaa Refugee Culture Centre.

Related issues raised by the refugee community in Cairo include accessing micro-credit loans, contacting UNHCR, overcoming crises in housing and basic needs, among other areas of recurrent concern.

Anyone can learn more. If interested, please correspond with mind to the pressing need for immediate action. I would very much like to start a meaningful dialogue on this issue on behalf of an extended engagement with the urban refugee communities of Cairo.

References:

IRIN Middle East: Egypt’s turmoil makes life tougher for refugees

Muftah: Refugee Protests in Cairo

2010 Peace Studies Research in Cairo

Egypt’s Reservations to UN Refugee Convention

This blog was originally published at VolunteerCenter.com on July 29, 2013

• Please contact me @ mhanson1717@yahoo.com for a free informational brochure if interested in learning more about my initiative with refugees in Cairo, Egypt

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With the Executive Director of El-Wafaa Refugee Culture Center,  Mr. Abdel Rahman Siddiq of Darfur, Sudan 

Walking Away into the Bright Lights of Cairo

Partnership with the Bangladeshi Community

Global Youth in Cairo Apartment

With Student and Singer from Kordofan 

Twilight of Peace

With Student at St. Andrews Church in Cairo

A Creative Student at Arba Wa Nos Centre

Night Cafe with the Bere People of Sudan

American University in Cairo, Old Campus

Abdel Rahman Siddiq, the Teacher

In Honour of Community

El-Wafaa Refugee Culture Center Logo

With favourite tea-seller, Julia

With student from Central African Republic at Tadamon Centre

Sudanese Teacher Registers Students at the El-Wafaa Refugee Center

Cultural Heritage of Sudan

The Quintessential Meeting Ground, the Sudanese Restaurant

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From Behaved Freedom to Absolute Nonsense

I go from a behaved freedom to absolute nonsense
            Without friends yet steeped in family love,
I publicly play and proclaim the monetary divide
            In my rich eyes which disguise the poverty
            line’s frozen glare
In Canadian expatriate stench, painstaking
            To be fugitive without mind
            to the loosed volley
Cracking against the one shield fortress of Mattapoisett
            One place of rest made into settlement with guns
            and stolen disaster
Ripped from the bosom of Europe’s scheming
                      English name
            Now massacring the playful
            artistry of our own inborn life

On this impossible continent
            Freely taken from a gamble and faith
In blond-headed angels
            Whose divinity was parted
            by the bald imprisoned hallucinations
Driving out demons with Masonic symbology
            Over the infinite sands of civilization,
            breathed and created out of time
In the sun’s ravishing corner of a universe,
            un-tempted and forever at a loss
                     Between the child’s two eyes
                     closing
On death and the holocaust of our forsaken government
            Laughing at the trees’ roots

When stretched to the bottom of India’s or Africa’s wells
            Ousting up the belief in life as a drunken tragedy
                                    Yet, be not humorless
                                    nor without comic sophistry

In the dance and song
            Come alive by the sexual majesty
                                    In theatre’s delicate ways,

To present the creative being
as one with truth’s bold and upheld music
            Reflecting back in the caged mirror
                                    A creator anew

This poem was featured in my most recent self-published chapbook, Act or Confront

Introducing ContinuuMusic

Musical explorations within continuous evolutionary creativity. Discovering new world fusion - instrumental, improvised music.

"For global community awareness" Vi An said at the TedxYYC event this summer to a packed house of 1500+ audience members, plus a streaming webcast to the entire world, before beginning a ten-minute set with co-creators Bijan Maysamie on Persian Santur, and Matt Hanson on xaphoon and percussion.

The debut concert of the ContinuuMusic trio is intended as a gift to the community. Often performing for charities and private events, ContinuuMusic has raised thousands of dollars for Ten Thousand Villages, Children's Health and Education in Iran, among other meaningful initiatives.

Inspired by their invitation to perform for TedxYYC at the grandest concert hall in Western Canada, ContinuuMusic is looking to sustain their creative efforts well into the future. Vi An is a professional artist of over 18+ years, an award-winning (Betty Mitchell) theatre composer with the Green Fools Theatre and recording artist with over 15 albums and hundreds of collaborative tracks worldwide. Bijan Maysamie is steeped in the classical tradition of Persian music. Originally from Tehran, Bijan is now venturing into fusion music for the first time, and is enthused as ever, at the helm of organzing this debut concert. Matt Hanson is a multi-instrumentalist, whose artistry draws deeply from a musical family with roots in Mediterranean and American intercultural tradition.

Dreamers Reconcile with Harsh Truths: S. Sudan and the Music of Memory

One thing that keeps me pushing these painful stories; the dreams I have. Sometimes, like, the voices of the dead that I have seen would tell me don't give up, keep on going, because sometimes I feel like stopping and not doing it, because I didn't know what I was putting myself into. (Emmanuel Jal, 2009)

What are your hopes and dreams?

I want to fly an airplane.

What else?

I want to be able to study in the daytime. And in the morning. And I want a day that I can just live…so I can build my house…where there aren't any problems that could destroy it.

Emmanuel Jal, age 9 (War Child)

On April 8, the Peace and Reconciliation Conference in Juba, the capital of South Sudan, began an unprecedented step forward in the nation’s history. On Monday April 15, South Sudan President Salva Kiir Mayardit suspended the conference indefinitely. Besides the $885 million contributed by the Canadian federal government to Sudan for humanitarian assistance between 2006-2012, many of the 4 million plus South Sudanese displaced have resettled in Canada to remain active in community rehabilitation. Activist groups, both based in South Sudanese communities as well as larger Canadian social organizations continue to sustain the meaning of reconciliation not only as an example for South Sudan, but for the globe.

            The most pressing issue with regard to reconciliation in South Sudan is creating an inclusive society where larger social participation is grassroots-oriented. In a country with one of the lowest literacy rates in the world, with over sixty unique spoken languages, democracy is a precarious notion for most. In an open letter to South Sudanese Vice-President, Dr. Riek Machar, David Mabior Atem of New Sudan Vision wrote:

Healing those long inflicted wounds against one another cannot be dealt with in 3-4 days as well as top down approach instead of bottom up approach…Another added advantage of beginning at grassroots level is the flexibility of language (dialects), which can result into high interactive and productive engagement.

            Dr. Riek Machar launched the official opening of the conference, which trains 200 peace and reconciliation mobilizers. “The newest nation on earth has embarked on a journey of healing for the national reconciliation,” the Sudan Tribune noted. Dr. Machar had also been married to British aid worker Emma McCune. International recording artist Emmanuel Jal, winner of the 2013 Calgary Peace Prize, had been rescued from Waat, South Sudan by Emma McCune as a Lost Boy. Jal took refuge in Kenya, eventually leading him to the UK, and Canada. Emmanuel Jal’s acceptance of the Calgary Peace Prize on behalf of all South Sudanese marks an especially significant moment in the common reconciliation efforts of Canada and South Sudan.

            “He uses himself as an example in his storytelling of how hard and difficult and long it's taken for him to begin the process of healing and of reconciliation with his former enemies, and that's the story that he told,” Consortium for Peace Studies director George Melnyk told The Media Co-op. “He's also very careful to not critique the South Sudanese who made him a child soldier.” The Consortium awards the Calgary Peace Prize to global visionaries working towards peace, beginning with Hiroshima Mayor Tadatoshi Akiba in 2006. The Consortium is currently the only post-secondary Peace Studies initiative in Calgary.

            James Nguen, founder of Biluany Literacy and Water project, responded with deep concern in an Op-Ed piece in South Sudan News Agency, decrying the indefinite suspension of the Peace and Reconciliation Conference in Juba. “This unfortunate development shocked everyone in South Sudan and around the world. There were no further details why the project was suspended,” Nguen wrote to The Media Co-op via email. “If people reconciled, then there will be no petty tribal raids which the past 8 years cost South Sudan government and the international community millions of dollars.”

            Although the Second Sudanese Civil War, which ultimately led to an independent South Sudan, started in 1984, the world did not respond until 2004. The political situation in Sudan, and now in South Sudan as well, is very complex and is steeped in both European colonial history as well as Egyptian foreign policy. The legalities of genocide with regard to reconciliation have remained unparalleled in controversy ever since the United Nations adopted the Genocide Convention in 1948. “There was a genocide in Darfur, and there was genocide in South Sudan from the beginning,” James Nguen said to The Media Co-op. “In order to secure the CPA [Comprehensive Peace Agreement], they could not force Al-Bashir to step down without confidence that his successor would respect the CPA. Only one of the three agreements of the CPA was met, which included peace agreements with Abyei, secondly, and Blue Nile and Nuba Mountains as a third agreement.”

            The outstanding agreement to respect the right to self-determination with the people in the Nuba Mountains has especially intensified on the issue of genocide. Global activism in solidarity with the Nuba people has followed in the wake of the independence of South Sudan in 2011, including the End the Nuba Genocide Coalition. The only area not consulted in drawing the new national border, Abyei, is directly impacted and holds outstanding land disputes. Abyei territory is a priority for the Juba Conference.

            South Sudan’s independence was “the most significant redrawing of the map of Africa since the colonization,” Angel Batiste, Area Specialist with the Africa and Middle Eastern Division of the Library of Congress in Washington D.C., noted, before introducing the lecture, Cultural Heritage in South Sudan in November 2012. 

            During the Calgary Peace Prize events this March, Emmanuel Jal raised eyebrows concerning the latest news from South Kordofan, where another genocide in Sudan seems to be taking shape with unprecedented momentum. “UN people down in Sudan are saying there’s a possibility that in South Kordofan that the genocide there could be worse than in Darfur,” said Jal to an eager crowd at the University of Calgary on March 1, 2013.

            The diaspora is truly integral to peace activism for South Sudanese. “They actually support their family members more than even the government does,” Jal told The Media Co-op, referring to the diaspora of South Sudan and their role in the reconciliation efforts ahead. “If you’re educated, if you have a degree in whatever form, don’t go home to look like you’re going to be employed by the government. You go there as an employer. Go there and use the skills we have there and establish something, because the country is still new. Whatever you touch will prosper.”

            Since late last year over sixty genocide scholars and anti-genocide activists initiated a letter writing campaign in response to the genocide atrocities in the Blue Nile and Nuba Mountains. These letters have fallen on what South Sudan’s leading independent news source, South Sudan News Agency has called, “absolute silence”. The Atrocities Prevention Board (APB), founded by U.S. President Obama specifically in response to the lack of U.S. governmental initiative towards preventing crimes against humanity and genocide, became the most important, and also most unresponsive, target audience. This April, South Sudan News Agency published the latest letter, sent to U.S. Ambassador to the United Nations Susan Rice. An excerpt from the letter reads:

We never expected, though, to have our letter (and now letters) go unanswered… when we, scholars of genocide studies and human rights activists, fail to receive a reply to a letter that we first wrote back in December 2012 and have now sent five times to four different individuals affiliated with the APB, it, indeed, feels as if the APB and its focus/work is little more than “a sideline in our foreign policy.”

             Similarly, in recent news, the only head of state in the Americas to be tried for genocide crimes, U.S.-backed Guatemalan dictator Efraín Ríos Montt, saw amnesty on April 18 after the current Guatemalan president intervened to have the case annulled. “It was the first time that any nation had been able to use its domestic criminal courts to try a former head of state for genocide,” said investigative journalist Allan Nairn on Democracy Now!

            Despite ineffective government intervention, independent non-profit and charity organizations, spearheaded by leaders from South Sudan, continue to work towards a sustainable society through reconciliation efforts. Biluany Literacy and Water Project, a development initiative led by James Nguen based in Calgary, has been active for over three years in building wells and providing educational resources in South Sudan. “There is no sustainable infrastructure in South Sudan, and without a lot of assistance from the international community, trust cannot be rebuilt,” Nguen said to The Media Co-op. “The greatest struggle is to represent ourselves, to know who we are as one community. The war eroded our cultural values, our history, our society.” Nguen recently partnered with Gua Africa, the charity of Emmanuel Jal, to fund well development and to organize a conference in Canada to mirror the Peace and Reconciliation Conference in Juba.

            Since winning national independence, other organizations in the Calgary area, home to the predominant South Sudanese community in Canada, are working towards reconciliation. South Sudan Peace Building International Foundation Inc. (SSPBIF) is one among them. Secretary of the SSPBIF Kuir ë Garang is also a prolific multi-genre author of six books. “People in South Sudan tend to regard literature as ornamental, they don't see how it can help relate people, to help people find relations between one another, so they can get together and have mutual understanding through education,” Garang told The Media Co-op. “Through literature, we can better represent ourselves. Now up to 70% [of people in South Sudan] are dissatisfied with their government.” Garang is currently working with a publishing house and bookstore in Juba to open a forum on multiculturalism and diversity for professional writers from Canada and South Sudan.

            Rural South Sudan is reputedly the most marginalized and underrepresented, effectively causing the need for grassroots inclusivity in Juba’s Peace and Reconciliation Conference and beyond. Resource conflicts both at national (oil exploitation) and grassroots (cattle raiding) levels have been at the root of social disorder in South Sudan. Augustino Lucano, a South Sudanese migrant from the Equatoria region living in Calgary, shares an unrivalled success story in bringing together divided rural ethnic groups and organizing incipient meetings with government representatives.

            Lucano received personal permission from South Sudan MP Joseph Lokodo Kolombos to open a peace center in his home region of Equatoria after presenting to the MP a research paper inspired by an Initiatives of Change workshop. “The problem is that people in rural South Sudan are still very divided, they do not see a way to live together yet with the whole nation yet,” Lucano said to The Media Co-op. Lucano, a member of the Didinga ethnic group, lost two brothers in conflicts with the neighboring Toposa people. “The Maaji peace centre is located in the middle of Didinga and Toposa land, in a flatland valley, where both tribes can meet peacefully,” Lucano conveyed to The Media Co-op. “So far there has been no raiding at the peace centre in Maaji. First, it was necessary to establish the peace centre where resources could be shared, and then we can discuss reconciliation.”

             In February 2013, the South Sudanese Minister of Wildlife’s visit to the Maaji Peace Centre drew tears from elders and children alike who had never before seen a car, no less a government car. “It showed how marginalized these people had been in the national developments, and also that the government was starting to establish a relationship with rural people, including them in the dialogue of the upcoming Peace and Reconciliation Conference in Juba,” Lucano told The Media Co-op.

             2013 is quickly becoming a year of unprecedented global reconciliation movements. The Peace and Reconciliation Conference in Juba is especially significant to Canada with its direct relationship to the activism of the Canadian diaspora of South Sudan. With the first head of state in the Americas having faced genocide charges, a more intimate link can be made with Indigenous peoples’ history in Canada. Will Canada renew its role as a global human rights leader in the wake of mounting genocide awareness around the world? Ongoing debates in Canada, spurred by Idle No More, emphasize reconciliation with First Nations as an inclusive reconciliation with humanity. 

This article previously appeared for The Media Co-op on April 29, 2013

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the road to rome is paved in bones by RK

madness by RK

the human rabbit hole by RK

old west art by RK

papercut & stoned by RK

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conjuring a sense of the once roaming herds of mammals that lit upon the open horizons of our once naked landscapes - the frame drum evokes a sacred connection to our mammalian evolution through a heartened soul brethren with large mammals, and our precarious evolutionary stability as one of the most vulnerable types of living creatures on planet earth - in the piece, i speak of the charge of the electric pole of patriotic industry over the breadth of our continent as the sacrifice of ourselves, as male-female witch, burned on the flagpole of national identity, a sacrifice brought about by the all-devastating silence of voice, speaking of a way of life not bound to the dominant settler society, yet existing now only in negation to the sedentary ecology of consumerism and vacation, with regard to the lost history and memory of our true selves in communion with the deeper movement of life as we once knew it



Placed Anonymity, like the chapbook, "A Sick Society Amuck" is inspired by the words of Jiddhu Krishnamurti, iconoclastic spiritual philosopher, who said, "truth is a pathless land". Truth lies in the anonymity of place as is, without meaning, as a river is in essence meaningless until commemorated by a name and story, whether of scientific or folkloric mythologies.

in a pathless land, how do we come to know the land, or know what is true, HERE? that exploration is the foundation for this four poem chapbook, eventually culminating in collectivist thinking, to aspire towards a basis of unity evading the muddled institutionalization of creative freedom

Placed Anonymity

Noocide and the Community Within: Legendary Voices on Ego-Dissolution

“I had a dream once that I was at an international conference, debating economics…” by Gilberto Gil, in support of Xingu+23

Dreaming, conscious & active, increases our potential for empathy and curbs egotism. The lucid consciousness of the dream sees from all perspectives through one perspective. The actions and emotions of every dream character are essentially rooted in the dreamer. This is our natural engine of empathy, and our natural organ of humility before the great diversity of human life, and the infinite spectrum of mental expression.

"You want to reclaim your mind," said Terrence McKenna, "and get it out of the hands of the cultural engineers who want to turn you into a half-baked moron consuming all this trash that's being manufactured out of the bones of a dying world." In this talk, McKenna also goes on to convey how we have lost touch with Chaos, and how older forms of ego-dissolution, such as ecological meditation and entheogenic use, are essentially about the meaning of sacrifice, which is the only thing that will solve our current problems. Ego is adamantly focused away from sacrifice, the role of contemporary humanity is to realign ourselves to a renewed sense of the diminished ego, and a healthy sacrificial attitude towards the greater reality, which is our immediate now of earthly presence. 

Chaos is within us, known through the act of dreaming, where the mystery-engine of narrative is spurred on through the natural inborn creative imagination, our promised birth-rite. The inner worlds of nature mirror this internal intelligence, which constantly breathes as an inhale and exhale of sacrificial flow, a reciprocity with the spiritual presence of subtle energy, generated through the noosphere. At once, as there is a crisis bearing towards ecocide and ethnocide (see my earlier post: Genocide and Extinction), there is also a crisis of what I will call "noocide", or the extinction of our natural capacity to think for ourselves, and look past the egotism of individuated consumer consciousness.  

Attention for the contents of dream narrative allow the mind to reorient within, to the source of dreaming that so inevitably follow outwards with the chaotic madness of global consumerism, expensive vacations, and a whole slew of energy misuse in the wake of ego-manufactured externalized dreaming. The inertia of internal dream substance, awakens the mind to the archetypal community that all share. As Jung said, "Who looks outside, dreams; who looks inside, awakes." We can also look for community within. 

Read my recent article on Media Co-op: Resistance to Canadian Oil Extraction in the Amazon Continues

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Can you hear life? by RK

Read the signs by RK

Flightless Cubism by RK

National Isolation by RK

Inner Light Cityscape by RK

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The forthcoming album, "Evocations: Exotic Settlers" is an evocative musing on the sound language nestled deep within the poetic substance of orated selections from a collection of works under the same title. In continuity with the theme of "exotic settlers", the album is an experimental narrative-sound art exploration into the imagination of a journey of settlement, both archaic and modern. Here, voice soundings are mixed with one instrument at a time, to convey a sense of the traveler, whose light pack is ideal for the road ahead, and whose voice traverses the simple grandeur of sonic revelry from a single instrumental accompaniment. Themes of travel are juxtaposed with settlement, both in the settlement of tradition and ecology, and the inner and outer journey to that destination. To settle on one instrument at a time is a metaphor for the inward/outward experience of settlement for the migrant, who eventually becomes an "exotic settler".

The choice to accompany the voice with a single-reeded bamboo saxophone or xaphoon instrument is based on my affinity for the African sound of the reeded instrument, as in African-American jazz roots. I put an old vinyl effect on the first improvisation to hearken to these early recordings. Also, the xaphoon is originally from Maui Hawaii, and so, the great waters of the Pacific Ocean that separate the North American continent from Hawaii, with its deep Aboriginal heritage, mirror the poetic river offering through the sound of the instrument as a metaphoric nostalgic passage across the western ocean.





Beginning with a reminiscence of life in Africa, poetic reflections written on hillsides in rural central Mexico, overlooking a wide lake in a small village, I remembered Africa. The words allude to Africa as the Mother of all Humanity, as Mother Africa, where all people can know their origins as one human family. If wondering, "What has Africa given to the world?" The answers are many, including the soul of contemporary music, but also our very biological evolution, as humankind. Africa has given us ourselves, our poetry, our music, our spirituality, our creative eye, as well as other aspects of ourselves not so likened to evolution such as our politics. Yet in the words I have chosen in "I remember Africa", I ruminate on the spiritual origins, beneath the flesh, "our skeletal humanity" where we are all one, where we are one with Mother Mater.

The second haiku-like oration, "Selflessness is the father of human survival" was written down after an impromptu spoken word over a city bridge, overlooking the grandiose ice sheets concatenate and break into the singular northern landscape. In Aboriginal folklore, passage across a river is a time of deep meditation in gratitude and honour for the life-giving waters. Traditionally, a sacrificial offering of tobacco, or a ceremonial smoke, is offered to the sacred life source of all creation. Yet, here, I offer the clear smoke of my worded breath, enunciating an egoless passage of impromptu heart resonance.

The other pieces featured in this chapbook draw from the barebones intensity of visceral experience re-felt through memory and the act of writing. In that process, the emphasis becomes one of awareness that drives one to act. To reflect, ruminate and contemplate the living significance of Africa in our own lives is to be moved onward in the struggle for life and for our humanity.

I remember Africa

The Future of Sharks = The Future of Our Oceans = The Future of Us

Watson and the Shark by J.S. Copley 

The stigma of sharks has been with me since I can remember, having my first memories only a driveway away from the Atlantic coast. I lived under the shadow of Martha's Vineyard and Spielberg's Jaws. The above painting shows the old, now antiquated, adage that sharks are killers and need to be killed. As shown in my previous post (Reflection on "Save the Humans" lecture by Rob Stewart), sharks are not killers, and indeed their threatened survival on Earth due to illegal shark fin harvesting is as crucial an issue as climate change in the continued survival of the human species.

Read my story of activism for a shark fin free world on Media Co-op

Also see related groups Shark Fin Free Calgary & WildAid

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Innumerable anemones, dim at the ocean floor, float and dance in the scintillating deep, a whirlwind of ocean currents spinning tendrils in the wondrous underworld of subconscious, inner space. The beauty of the sea is a palpable silence, a prenatal yearning within the sky’s reflective murder of inanimate light, into the shattered eye of a submerged mountain of a seemingly infinite myriad of species, blooming in the breathable space of instinctual lowering.

Samudramantham (Churning of the Ocean of Milk) by Anonymous 

The eye craves the strength of mammalian fear in the world beyond worlds. Octopi, shark and jellyfish sweep the wobbling invertebrate mind with a bodiless air of unlit terror. A shark darts and flees past in a show of wise defense, and the octopi bleed ink in a haze of warring tests far enough to provoke the mirage-lust end of human sight, and jellyfish, unnervingly absent as the mind’s eye sleeps in a soporific atrophy of inhuman might.

Still Life with Flowers, Shells, a Shark's Head, and Petrifications by Antoine Berjon

Memory entangles my feet with the concrete ingenuity of familial presence. At the opposite stance from my underwater lung, I breathe the damp air of a midsummer day’s stretch aside my grandfather’s elder chair. His sitting comforts me into a warm bottom, a deathless life of generative following, to stare back into the eyes of immortal sight, the human heights of belonging, and I am content, a mind at rest, awake, conscious, and filled with reverberating speech. 

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A dripping hunger instills those following to go beyond sleep and be
       In conscious wonderment, in the living dance
Dream today in a new and timeless breath,
       To stave off the mindless, parasitic asp
Climbing inside mind through dreamless eye-shutters
       Blocked by old-fashioned stone, brick and wooden carved hands

Holding my dancer, lover and beauty
      To the song of my dreams
Woman of my life
      Who holds no passion in sleep, and dreams awake
...
On the pedestal of a forlorn warning
      That no shore is safe in this dreamless state without dance,
Yet to sing and become a new dance and dream anew
      Before naked freedom announces song’s ending

excerpt "Impassioned Road to Being"