Writing with your Shadow on Halloween

            It was a good night for Halloween. It was not too cold but cool enough to send a chill down your spine when it was needed. It was clear enough to see the white clouds moving like ghostly puppets of the darkness above them.

            My arrival at the church of St Stephen in the Fields for the monthly Shab-e She’r poetry event always seems to correspond with Bänoo Zan having a cigarette across the sidewalk from the front door.  I approached her while singing “Smoke, smoke, smoke that cigarette!” But before I could get to the second line, “Smoke, smoke, smoke until you smoke yourself to death!” She confessed that she had given up giving up. I acknowledged that it’s a hard habit to break although I have no personal experience nicotine addiction. I recounted how both of my parents had smoked before I became a teenager and that my father had suddenly quit, never to start again but that my mother kept on smoking for the rest of her life. She said that it was her father that smoked and her mother that unsuccessfully nagged him to quit. I didn’t tell Bänoo that my mother died of cancer when she was 55 because that information seemed to set the wrong mood for the occasion. Maybe there should be a special annual holiday for telling depressing stories. (Depressmas?) 

            When we went inside, Giovanna Riccio was sitting at the reception desk with Laboni Islam. I hadn’t seen Giovanna since the last time she was at Shab-e She’r at the end of April. She said she’d just gotten back from Halifax where Dalhousie University had presented him with a lifetime achievement award. She asked me about my courses this year and when I told her I was taking 20^th Century United States literature and Early Medieval Philosophy she told me that she had majored in philosophy and that I was still one of her great loves. I expressed disappointment about having gotten a C-plus on my recent essay about Augustine of Hippo and against his argument that one can have knowledge.

            I asked her what had happened to her and George back in May when he was scheduled to host the Haiku Canada Conference dinner at the University of Toronto’s Mississauga campus. I’d heard that they’d gotten lost and wondered if this was a chronic problem for George like the way he kind of gets lost when he’s lecturing. She explained that it’s more a matter of George being late as usual and then taking a wrong turn only to end up in Georgetown.

            When I went to take a seat I saw Cad sitting behind me. I acknowledged him but not enthusiastically because he’d recently said something on Facebook about “destroying” me, which I did not appreciate reading from a friend. I would really like to see him learn how to behave himself on social media but that may be an impossible dream. I guess I’m forgetting the essay that I wrote a few years ago in which I argued that social media is a type of mind reading because people just can’t help expressing their thoughts in that medium no matter how self-damaging the expression of those thoughts would be. 

            I saw also that Cad’s roommate/sort of girlfriend, Goldie was there for the first time, but sitting in the back. I said hi to her and sat down.

            A tall young woman arrived, dressed as a white witch, complete with a peaked at the top and wide brimmed white hat. Even her hair was so blonde that it was almost white.

            There was a much smaller turn out this time, with less than thirty people, as far as I could tell. Bänoo got things rolling at 19:05. She introduced Rula Kahil, who would be photographing the event with her phone. Bänoo suggested that the featured poets of the night would be a step towards healing the rift between spoken word poets and written word poets. She assured us that at least one language would be spoken during the readings. She announced that Maggie Helwig, the minister of St Stephen in the Fields has told her that they could rent the space for Shab-e She’r for at least one more year. Then she called Laboni up to do the Native land acknowledgement.

            The first open stage poet was Kate Marshall Flaherty, who began by announcing that Quattro Books is launching the “Canada’s Best New Poet” contest and that there will be three winners of the prize of having each a book published.

            Her poem was called “Sel” – “I will never scold an onion for making me cry … The salt content of tears is the same as blood and the sea … Grey Dead Sea salt is the same as pink Himalayan salt, so far from home … They dissolve the borders… Let us not wait for another boy to be washed up on shore …”

            Kate is right about tears and blood plasma having the same salt content as tears but the ocean is 4 times saltier than tears and the Dead Sea is 40 times saltier. Only 12% of Dead Sea salt is sodium chloride while Himalayan salt is 97.41% sodium chloride, so they are not even close to being the same, other than both being salts.

            Bänoo called me next. In the spirit of Halloween I posed as someone else, not visually, but in voice. I explained that when my daughter was small I used to get her to make up stories that I would write down. I mused that in a sense I was the grandfather of those stories and I told everyone that I was going read one of her pieces, called “Scary, by Astrid” – “It all started on a day when the wind was howling and then a ghost came out of the window with all of the monsters you could imagine and then a vampire came upstairs into someone’s bed and sucked their blood and then instead of becoming a vampire they became a ghost and then sucked their blood and then it kept on going until everyone in the whole town was turned into ghosts and they kept getting bigger and bigger until the universe got destroyed with the world and then a vampire hunter came along made by god and killed all of those vampires including you and me and then that’s how the story went.”

            Julia Yusupova, the aforementioned white witch, read a poem entitled “White” – “What is white? Where would white wander? Wallowing in walkways … with whom will white walk? Wastrels and well-wishers … When white withdraws … white is warm … This wonderful web is worthwhile weaving.”

            Nick Micelli, before he came to the stage removed the golden colombina mask he’d been wearing in the audience. He shared with us that he’d made himself late for work writing his poem “New Harvest” – “Beautiful loving creature and whole all in one unity / power, I’m told … The old world of selfish desire is dead … Death fades all life under the earth … We are all one / the blossoming word … That wealth is our common possession today … Towers of glory no longer.”

            From Rula Kahil’s poem – “From the death of the fog that settles within … In the heart of the soul, the wound resides … I hold onto the pain, the anger and the resentment … His prophecy of forgiveness … People driven by the alibi of the predator unforgiven.”

            Bänoo pointed out that she was wearing a top decorated with Persian imagery and wondered if she was culturally appropriating herself. She said she didn’t have an answer.

            Weda Shareqi read “Sorrow” – “How it feels … How it takes your heart … and how it makes your tears drop … allowing your soul to bond with it.”

            Bänoo announced that on November 28^th they will be celebrating the 5^th anniversary of Shab-e She’r with not only two features but also two musical guests. Because of this the open stage will be slightly shorter than usual.

            At this point it was time for the first featured reader, Ayesha Chatterjee. Bänoo told us that she is the former president of the League of Canadian Poets and that when she was in charge she made the organization more diverse.

            Ayesha opened with a poem called “The Mask”, about a piece that her and her husband bought in Mexico – “It is in the rosewood … the smooth beauty … not extraneous … in the eyes … in the fragrant mouth … gaping.”

            She told us that her poem, “The Past Makes Its Way Through” mentioned the koel or Indian cuckoo, which has a beautiful, honeyed call so loud that it rises above the city noises of Kolkata. Also in the poem is the raat ki rani, a night blooming jasmine – “ … a voice rises through the air … clean as a koel’s / Nothing can stop it / The sirens …have paused / There it is, breathing raat ki rani / through imaginary curtains, turning / your throat to dust.”

            Ayesha shared that she is from Kolkata where they don’t have a Halloween tradition but it might be starting to catch on now. But this time of year many of the world’s cultures have other festivals to mark the coming of winter. “We celebrate Kali Puja (October 19). Kali is the goddess of death and destruction and do not mess with her.” Her skin is depicted as black which that does not denote a skin tone but rather the absence of colour. She is shown as fierce, with her tongue hanging out, wearing a skirt of hands and a necklace of human skulls.

            Ayesha confessed that she has no sense of smell and it is said that people that are close to death lose their olfactory sense. She wondered then what it means for her to have been without it her whole life.

            From “Kali” – “I cannot smell life either … what we have in common … I was distracted by the drums.”

            She informed us that Mexico celebrates the Day of the Dead on November 2. The traditional flower that is part of that holiday is the marigold. Ayesha has a poem called “Marigolds” but it is about digital technology – “Everything is for sale /especially the front page … so satisfyingly other … Fold the paper over like marigolds.”

            She let us know that the tuberose in Bengal is also associated with death. When her grandmother died there was a delay for her cremation and so she was kept in the house, surrounded by tuberoses. From “Etude in Tuberose” – “We carried … weapons to ward off / hungry souls … she filled / the house with her smooth / waxy petals / even after she had gone.”

From “Powdered Myrrh” – “Insect preserved over millennia … The spirit of what? … Pure intelligence … leaving ashes behind.”

Ayesha recounted how she started writing poems about fragrances, perfumes and the sense of smell itself. She discovered that the first recorded perfume makers were women. When Chanel no5 was being developed they wanted to recreate the clean scent of the Arctic and of water at midnight. From her poem – “She’s afraid of water and the dark … Rich, oily thing with no reflection / new Moon is no Moon … I could suffocate you with what I see.”

            Ayesha divulged that although she was born in India, English is her first language. From “Somewhere Borrowed, Somewhere Blue” – “ … I shift my truths / like furniture in a rented house … what does it / matter if my memory draws blanks … I must be careful with my words / They are borrowed currency.”        

            She said she made up her own name for a perfume and a poem called “The Moon and Ginger” – “You grew up with it, this light / It swelled with your bones / Your words radiating moonlight … You thought it ossified certainties … ginger notes in the background / clearly, in darkness.”

            From Ayesha’s final poem – “Atar of Earth” – “Smell of first rains … Before the first rains the air tenses … a kind of concentrated fragrance … only just roused itself back into consciousness … All the shutters drawn in imitation night … The first heady drops hurtle through the air and we smell the earth.”

            Ayesha Chatterjee’s short poems are often well-crafted gems, alive with sensuality. They touch on her personal life just enough to draw from it imagery that only intimate experience can capture.  She manages to incorporate into her writing aspects of her feelings of cultural alienation but there is also a hint of avoidance that she uses, consciously or not, to evoke a sense of mystery.

            As usual, after the first feature we had a break. I went to the washroom at the back of the church adjacent to the gym, which for the first time since I’d been coming there had no meeting going on and so the lights were out and the space was spookily dark. While I was waiting for a free washroom, Johnny Trinh came to wait behind me and declared, in reference to the piece by my daughter that I’d read, “Great story!”

            There were three lazily moving little church toilet flies walking on the washroom wall.

            I went back to stand by my seat and Cy Strom came over to chat. He offered me some work for the last three Fridays in November. He told me that he was just getting over a case of mononucleosis and I was surprised to learn that one can only get it once. He said one is supposed to get it in adolescence. I reminded him that it’s called “the kissing disease” because it’s passed through the saliva.  He admitted that he might have gotten it from Bänoo.

            After the break, Bänoo decided that she would be the warm up poet this time for the final feature – “There is a voice that sings your song / opens your veins to your blood … who is not you … invites you to the allegory of the cave … in whose tales you are a myth … that claims you / abyss and wings and all… that is yours / when you cross / your borders … Take yourself out of its way …”

            Johnny Trinh began by telling us about Kanao Inouye, the first Canadian war criminal. He was in Japan when Canada declared was on Japan and his family was interned. He joined the Japanese army and became a torturer at a prison camp for Canadian soldiers. Johnny played him in a production of “Interrogation: the Life and Times of the Kamloops Kid”.

            From “It Cannot Be Helped” – “Nothing to be done / It’s 1941 … Grandfather … Why do we stay by the sea? / Voices on the CBC / guide us to concentration camps … The use of 9-11 … No one listened to the voices of love … I’m not gonna make it home tonight … It’s yesterday … on a hotel hospital floor … I can’t see mom, where’s my ball … It’s 2017, and in the name of an orthodox god it’s okay to kill the Gays … They stand for the man given right to kill one … love is love … Nothing to be done …”

            Johnny joked that he writes funny poems.

            From his second piece – “ … I am a lonely canary… I was once flying free … forced migration to the west … We have always been the expendable specialists … A Canadian heritage moment … Our sun drenched feathers are dyed denim blue … If I cannot die, let me speak.”

            Johnny then turned to the subject of the Fort McMurray fire, which he said created a crisis for many migrant workers. Johnny began his piece by singing the first verse of “Fire” by Bruce Springsteen – “You’re riding in my car/  I turn on the radio / I’m pulling you close / You say you don’t like it / but I know you’re a liar / Cause when we kiss / Fire” “Fire makes the asphalt snap, crackle, pop … SUV after SUV, all in single file … Nothing romantic about the flames … Alberta looks a lot like Syria … The world’s on fire … It’s more than you can handle … I reach to change the station … Climate change … They deserve it … It’s been five hours … 500 kilometres to go … Trying to find space, now one of the few things we have left … The streets are full of animals running scared … They act more human every day … This is what it’s like to be a refugee … We finally hit an open road … I just need to feel the wind … I half asleep at the wheel … All I want to do is part my lips and part with a lump of coal in my throat …” He finished by singing a variation on another verse from Springsteen’s “Fire”.

            At this point Johnny called for Bänoo and they went to the back of the stage and around the corner out of our view where we heard a music player go on and off again as he showed her how to work it. Then Johnny returned to the mic, signaled to Bänoo, the music started and Johnny began his piece – “I’m a river … when she holds you … The lack of your touch … I’m weeping … Dear beloved, where are you? Wait and I will return … Moving to breathe, breathing to move … I climbed your limbs and rode your tidal force into the air … The frontier of you, the shoreline of me … I’m a river from the land of your touch … I taste the bitterness as I wade in my own tears … I fling myself into the … empty stillness on the floor … The salt has dried up the sea / see the ghosts of our duet … I float with nothing left to leave behind … I’m a river … swimming through … tomorrow …”

            The music continued and Johnny began another poem – “You say you are my father /Sometimes I don’t know what that means … I pick up the phone / voice mail / Happy Fathers Day … Full stop … I miss you … Silence  … I hope you’re well … On screen, on paper, in black and white … You say you want me to be happy … All we have are photos of us when I still looked like the son you wanted … You were raised by wars … I remind myself of the hand that slapped the queer out of me … My heart broke when you said I needed a wife … I am standing at the gate. I shake your hand. The first time we touch without hitting … pray for the day I never have to come back …” Johnny was crying at the end of the piece and he told us that when he saw his father recently he told Johnny he was bald and fat.

            Johnny’s last poem was “Wedding Vows” – “I was raised to love your skin … I will not be defined by my proximity to you … I’m not your best anything … You are my winter in these endless prairies … I can’t love you because there aren’t other options … The edges of your design … crude as my frost-bitten limbs … Rice boy willing to do good job for you … I do …”

            Johnny closed by declaring that, “It takes a community to build a better artist.”

            Johnny Trinh is an amazing performer and an impressive singer as well. When I listened to and watched him so powerfully share his work my impression was that this was very good writing. When I later looked at the text though it was clear that most of his work is not that well crafted and even a lot of it is clichéd, such as in lines like “I wade in my own tears”. He could have probably read an instruction manual to us and it would have sounded like a great poem. That isn’t to say though that some parts of his work don’t stand out. As is usually the case with slam poets, his most deeply personal pieces, like the one about his relationship with his father have impressively radiant moments. The line, “You were raised by wars” was particularly strong. Although most of his poetry was not great, his set was one of the most finely delivered spoken word presentations ever at Shab-e She’r.

            As usual after the last feature, we returned immediately to the open stage.

            Paul Edward Costa did not remove his sparkling columbina mask when he read – “Stargazing in a celestial storm … The skulls crawl gratefully … towards the flame…where they wait for disintegration.”

            Paul recited his second piece – “Vicious, elegant, hidden and ready … holding a deer’s skull … violence of reality … the poplar tree of Hades … immune to … ironic Twilight Zone interpretations … Malevolent manipulations … usually reserved for the gods.”

            Paul did his usual promo about himself and his publications and then he took a moment to comment that forest fires are getting worse. Fire season has increased from six to eight months. When he was looking north from downtown Vancouver someone had to point out to him that behind the smoke there was supposed to be a mountain.

            Rex Ricardus, a middle aged man wearing a van dyke with a sharp chin beard, announced that this was his very first venture into public speaking – “Good evening eh … Mommy used to shout ‘Ricky!’ before she slapped me down … Here we be … Let my sound drip or let me slip … God said, ‘6 days on the road and I’m gonna make it home tonight’ … Piss jugs full … Dead skunk in the middle of the road … I come from a long line of White trailer trash … To be ‘piss poor’ was to collect family urine and sell it to the tanner … Not a pot to piss in … Who am I to withhold life giving love from those that smell funky … As my clan would have you believe, our shit don’t stink.”

            Cad Gold Jr. read – “Do you sleep naked? Do you eat humble pie? In what way are you designed? This world is yours, all with blemishes, radicals and whores … So live your life in tough guy boots … tryin to get laid and get paid …”

            Peyton read Of Love It’s Time” – “Harvesting the old ice box … Invisible darkness … Our curling embrace … That small bibliotheca where we first met … through a pane-less window …  I named you Emerald … The divan we sat on consisted of cumulus … I could never tame all of you … It felt as though we could have hidden infinity in our caressing … Time for everything for we are old now … When we parted … Early morning shuddering light …”

            Naiha also shared that it was her first time and so, as they had done for Rex and as is the tradition at most poetry readings, the ritualistic response is for the audience to applaud. From her poem – “Let me introduce you to the reason I am this fragile way … I came to this world in April, 1994 … You never learned to unwrap a box gently … You’re a manipulator … dictator … Burn marks all over my face … Voices in my head that sound like me but speak like you … You hand me the weapon of silence and I pull the gun on you …”

            Susan read with a calm, sinister and colloquial voice – “Halloween is the empowerment of children that will trick you if you don’t treat them properly … All this fuss with children’s aid … Got no use for boys … Only good for the dogs the boys are … She was good when she was young … Those were the days … I had all those girls trained just right … That psyche ward … Damn Children’s id … They should of left everything all right … I think I gots one … I think I’ll take this one to the woods … Oh yes, we’re in Halloween now … Children who get to trick you if you don’t treat them …”

            Richard Blackburn stepped onto the stage and took a few steps towards the altar and threw up his arms in response to the cross in a gesture of bored exasperation. Then he turned around and came back to the microphone, telling us, “Losing your religion is a lot like a divorce and it’s an especially messy divorce when you’re Catholic.”

            From “A Simple Bargain” – “Consider me well lost to your rape of children with a cross … Cluster fuck I made of things … for love however hard … Trade failing light for darkness.”

            Sydney White read a poem that she wrote to entertain her kids when they were young. From “The Sentry” – The child was so gravely ill that he would die … I dreamt that I stood watch at the lower wall … Stained glass glowed in firelight … Footsteps soft … There was no sound … An iron rod … the hands were clod … This was not a house of god … knew they wanted him forever … A cross was in my hand … I woke and stumbled to the child … As to his cheek my lips were pressed I saw a cross shine on his breast.”

            Mind the Gap recited – “Shadow cast upon the wall of the cave … Tonight I came here to dance not for you … Your warmth is not with me / I am every single flower … I do not feel the need for the wind beneath my wings anymore … All I want to be is clean water … There is no tap in the wall of this cave … It’s night, I come here to dance!” and with that she threw her arms wide and spun around one time.

            Chai reminded us that he is called “the poet of choice” but declared that “today there is no choice.”

            On the front of his t-shirt was the question, “Are we serial killers of species?” Chai went on to explain his t-shirts and that he has fifty of them with environmental poems on the front and back. He stated that he would give a t-shirt to anyone that is willing to wear it frequently enough to make it Earth Day once a week.

            He informed us that one could get anti-radiation pills from the Ontario Provincial Police in case the nuclear plant in Pickering has a meltdown.

            From Chai’s poem – “Just one globe, let’s not blow it … Just one world, let’s not waste it … Just one humanity, let us not starve it … Just one race, let us not discriminate … Just one species, let us not kill it.”

            Dave Walker began with an Ojibway greeting. From “Go Sit With Them” – “The government cars come down the road past a rusted water jug truck … Rez dogs chase the truck… Grandmothers and grandfathers dressed up today for match day … Two horsemen wearing Smoky the Bear hats … They make their mark on the paper and are given their treaty money … Some buy a joint … You got a match?”

            From “Earth Woman” – “Miigwech (thanks) for everything you’ve done for us … I feel you wanting rest time … The leaves glow red and orange … Rest time is near … The creator calls me … lovingly holding this body of mine.”

            The final performer on the open stage, her face painted in black and white as a clown, a pink wig (or maybe her hair dyed pink), wearing a shiny black “police” hat, bright orange tights with black spikes in various places and bright blue, faux furry boots.”

            From her poem – “Restructure, rebuild, re-use … Disposability … direct … elementary at level one … Hitting bottom … Trigger, trigger, bam, bam … insanity … Need a fence to think … Clock is ticking fuckhead … One is not born with those stupid ideas … Fading, hurting, scared little egos … Who would’ve thought … it’ll get better.”

            Bänoo closed by warning us, “If you had a poem you wanted to share but didn’t, it’ll come back to haunt you!” She urged people to come back to read them next time.

            On my way out I stopped to ask Bänoo if the poem she’d read had been a ghazal. She said it wasn’t but she may have unconsciously incorporated ghazal elements into it. I’d been meaning to ask her for the correct pronunciation of “ghazal”, so I thought now would be a good time. She gave me the Persian version and then called Rula over to find out if the Arabic pronunciation is different. It sounded the same to me. I tried to imitate her speech and there proceeded a short lesson as I kept trying to say the word and she kept shaking her head. Finally she instructed me to begin as if I’m about to gargle and finally nodded after I’d tried it a couple of times. Bänoo gave me a hug before I left.

            Outside, Cad, Goldie and Sydney were gathered and deciding if they were going to eat something. Giovanna was standing about a meter away from them, I think she was using her phone to arrange for transportation. Goldie told me that she’d recently lost a considerable amount of weight and credited me with the achievement, based on some advice I’d supposedly given her. I pointed at Cad and told her, “You could lose a lot more weight if you got rid of this guy.” Giovanna smiled without looking up from her phone.

As Giovanna was walking away I gave her a hug but she seemed uncomfortable, perhaps because she felt vulnerable out on the street at night.

            Sydney started telling me about an article that I should read about the disappearance of the male and about chemicals in the womb that are feminizing male fetuses, then she immediately chastised me with, “Don’t give me that look!” She insisted that there are 30 toxic chemicals in the womb. I don’t doubt that there are lots of toxic chemicals in the womb, but there’s only one kind, namely phthalates, that has been linked, by only one large study so far, to the feminization of boys by exposure to phthalates in the womb. I’ve read the study and what they did was enroll over 300 women that gave urine samples while they were pregnant. After their children were older they filled out questionnaires about their children’s behaviour and then brought their children in for a play study in which the kids (up to the age of 8) were shown drawings of various types of gender play dynamics between girls and boys, boys and boys and girls and girls.  The study concluded that the male children of mothers whose urine had shown high concentrations of phthalates displayed more feminine behaviour. Obviously the study warrants many more studies that would have to be done to arrive at conclusive evidence. Certain fake news sites like Alex Jones’s Infowars have made it look like phthalates have been proven to cause gender dysphoria but that is not the case. It was noted by the researchers that the gender shifts were subtle and within the typical range, meaning that all boys display some feminine behaviour sometimes but these boys showed a little more of it. I think that other studies of phthalmates have shown actual harmful, non-gender related effects from exposure. If all phthalmates did was to cause boys to reach for dolls sometimes rather than toy guns, I wouldn’t consider it a health concern. It’s like going to a poetry reading and being influenced by Halloween to show another aspect of oneself through one’s writing that one doesn’t habitually show. On this night of Shab-e She’r the writing tended to be better than usual because of that.

             I rode home and had a late dinner. The Mike Hammer episode that I watched that night guest starred Nita Talbot who has quite a classy, scene stealing presence and is a very good character actor. She later won an Emmy for her hilarious role as the beautiful Russian double agent on Hogan’s Heroes.