The Elixir of Life

            On Thursday morning I memorized the third verse of “Mes idées sales” (My Dirty Thoughts) by Serge Gainsbourg and finished revising my translation. 

            I weighed 85.8 kilos before breakfast. I had time to eat a few grapes and to drink a third of a cup of coffee before leaving for class. 

            After parking my bike in front of University College I pulled out my lock and saw that it was covered in avocado guts. I assume that after shopping last Saturday an avocado had gotten loose in my backpack and been mashed. After going to the classroom and putting my jacket in my spot, I immediately went to the washroom with my backpack. I used about fifty paper towels to clean my laptop power cord, my ratchet wrench, and the bottom of the inside of the backpack. I got it fairly clean before going back to class. 

            There were two presentations for our final class. 

            Isabelle presented on The Colonial STI. Seasons of Migration and Intersections of Patriarchal Colonialism. This was another feminist analysis of Season of Migration to the North. The effect of race and gender on the characters. She asked us to consider what the differences would have been if Mustafa’s victims had been male. 

            I think that if the victims were changed from the literary trope of “female” to the literary trope of “male”, both Mustafa and the narrator would need to be presented as female for any tension to be created in the story. 

            Patriarchal colonialism.

            She quotes the “Rivers of Blood” speech by Enoch Powell against the immigration to Britain of people from former British colonies. According to Wikipedia “The expression "rivers of blood" did not appear in the speech but is an allusion to a line from the Sibyl’s prophecy in Virgil's Aeneid which he quoted: "as I look ahead, I am filled with foreboding; like the Roman, I seem to see 'the River Tiber foaming with much blood'." The speech caused a political storm … leading to his controversial dismissal from the Conservative Shadow cabinet. 

            The narrator of Season of Migration to the North has a mental disease. Spreading the disease of patriarchal colonialism. Mustafa as patient zero? Patient 2 is Jean Morris. Mustafa’s women are complicit in colonization. At the intersection of gender and race, Mustafa wins. Patient 3 is the narrator. His fascination with Mustafa borders on the homoerotic. Patient 4 is Mustafa’s wife Hosna.

            Apala says racialized women are more dangerous. Save the white man from indigenous women. She said that it is less acceptable for a white man to be with an indigenous woman than vice versa. 

            In my experience of hearing many bigoted reactions to interracial relationships, it’s always the other way around. White people who express racist views don’t mind seeing a white man with a woman of colour, but they can’t stand seeing a man of colour with a white woman. This bias seems to be reversed in racialized communities, especially in First Nations communities in which an Indigenous woman mating with a “Shaganash” is frowned upon. 

            My research shows that interracial marriage was officially against the law in the United States until 1967. There were never any miscegenation laws in Canada but there was still a stigma. Five percent more Canadians approve of mixed marriages than in the US and there is a higher rate of mixed marriages in Canada than in most countries. Three-quarters of Japanese Canadians are in mixed partnerships, much higher than any other group. One theory for this is that the cultural infrastructure of Japanese Canadians was destroyed by Canada during WWII. The Japanese word for someone who is half Japanese is “Hafu.” 

            Isabelle had said that the narrator dies at the end. I pointed out that he didn’t, but she said she knew that. I don’t get why she said it then. 

            Fiona gave her presentation on Harsha Ram's “The Scale of Global Modernisms” in which he critiques singular modernity. Multiplicitous modernism. Global modernism requires more than one scale of spatialization. She quotes from “The Contemporaneity of Modernism: Literature, Media, Culture” by D’Arcy and Nilges who say contemporary culture must return to modernism. A work of art can be modernist and postmodernist at the same time.

            In the end, she listed several contemporary novels that expand modernism: Convenience Store Woman by Sayaka Murata; Amnesty by Aravind Adiga; Boy Parts by Eliza Clark; Jonny Appleseed by Joshua Whitehead (Queer, Indigenous, expanding spatial and vertical modernisms); The Handmaid’s Tale by Margaret Atwood (uses stream of consciousness); My Year of Rest and Relaxation by Ottessa Moshfegh; Tokyo Ueno Station by Yu Miri (could be postcolonial, modernist, and postmodernist).

            Apala says she is not clear about the difference between modernism and postmodernism. 

            To ask the why of religion is modernist. 

            

             I may be the only student who feels this way, but while I enjoyed the three novels we read, I found every one of the articles on literary theory to be the most boring texts that I’ve ever had to read in an English course. The closest of the articles to being literature was the one by Spivak because she’s a bit nuts in an almost interesting and artistic way. That being said, Apala was mostly quite engaging and took the edge off some of the tedium of these concepts. There were also interesting discussions and presentations scattered throughout the course, but maybe I’m just too right-brained for this stuff. I prefer reading creative writers like Oscar Wilde and Nietzsche writing about literature than all of this lifeless analysis. 

            On the way home I stopped at Freshco where the red seedless grapes were the incredibly cheap price of $1.00 for half a kilo. I bought five bags and would probably need to throw half of them away but even then, it would be cheap. I also got two half-pints of raspberries, ten avocados, soymilk, a jug of orange juice, and a bag of frozen lima beans. 

            My cashier was the head cashier Amelia, who is my favourite because she’s always so friendly. She said it was nice to see my smile and then explained why most of them are masked. She said that while they can take their masks off if they want, because of the sixth wave the company has encouraged them to keep wearing them. It sounds like the company made them an offer they couldn’t refuse. I learned that yesterday was Amelia’s birthday and I wished her a happy birthday.

            I weighed 84.9 kilos before lunch. I had the last of my lettuce with avocado, the last of my grape tomatoes, a scallion, and the last of my olives, with sundried tomato and oregano dressing. 

            I weighed 85.6 kilos at 17:30. 

            I got caught up on my journal at 19:00. 

            I chopped a piece of ginger root, three cloves of garlic, three scallions, a zucchini, and a crown of broccoli. I sauteed them and had them for dinner with piri-piri sauce while watching an episode of Astro Boy. 

            In this story, Professor Notsu has developed an elixir of life and has agreed to donate it to the first interstellar rocket ship crew because it takes longer than a human lifespan to reach the nearest star. But some businessmen want the elixir for profit while the Cult of Baal, led by their high priest Nova Cane wants it so the devotees will gain eternal life. Dr. Elefun tells Astro Boy to guard Notsu but by the time he gets there the Baalites have already ransacked Notsu’s home. But since they find nothing, they try abducting him as he walks to his lab. They try to offer him a friendly ride in their limo, but he trusts no one and refuses. They try sleeping gas, but he wears a gas mask. They knock Notsu out with a girder dropped from a skyscraper, but Astro Boy saves him and takes him to the hospital. The professor wakes up angry, refuses any help, and jumps out the window, using his umbrella as a parachute. But while Notsu is falling the Baalite rocket ship grapples him and takes him to their temple, with Astro Boy following. Notsu refuses to give Nova Cane the formula and so he is hypnotized and ordered to make it. Astro Boy sneaks into the temple disguised in the robe and cowl mask of one of the devotees. He finds Notsu just after he has finished the elixir and wakes him up from his hypnotized state. Astro Boy puts Notsu on his shoulders and has him slip on the robe and hood so they can sneak out undetected, but they are discovered when Notsu sneezes. The Baalites shoot their ray guns at Astro Boy and Notsu, but Astro Boy flies the professor to safety. Notsu is upset that he gave Nova Cane the formula, but Astro Boy reassures him that he switched the formula with castor oil. Astro Boy attacks the Baalites until they are on the run, but Nova Cane doesn’t let his followers escape with him because he wants the formula all to himself. Nova Cane takes off in an idol that looks like a giant eagle but is really a rocket. Nova drinks what he thinks is the elixir and then Astro Boy captures him. Notsu decides to travel on the interstellar ship with the crew and to make the eternal life formula for them on the way. 

            The first known mention of an elixir of eternal life is in the Epic of Gilgamesh. It was also part of the mythology of ancient China with the hare of the Moon mixing the elixir up there.