Critical Remembrance: two songs for November 11

One interesting thing about Remembrance Day is that the solemn ceremonies seem like the exact opposite of protest and radical critique. But as November 11 approaches, two songs from the Cape Breton Protest Songs project strike me as very relevant to remembering what it was like for veterans and their families in the time period immediately after the war, when this “history” was still very fresh in everyone’s heads.

source - http://protestsongs.ca/volume-1/good-times/

“The Applicant” is one such song. The poem itself is by Dawn Fraser, and local musician Vic Tomiczek gives it a beautiful, heartfelt treatment with his arrangment. You can stream the song from the site here, where you can also read the lyrics and a bit more about the experiences of World War I veterans in the 1920s.

This was a time when being a veteran was something of a stigma, and society was likely at a loss for how to deal with so many young men who came home as broken shadows of what they used to be:

It’s very kind of you, Mum, to call to see my Dan.
Since he came back he seems to be a very wreck of man;
I think it must be German gas, still inside his head,
He talks of places back in France and lads that now are dead.

The second song is more about the experiences of young women in the same time period. The Old Song Resung tells of lack of access to birth control and family planning, children growing up in poverty, and the lack of opportunity for those children when they grow up. This one is arranged and performed by Breagh MacKinnon and contains some of the most haunting lines on the album:

Johnny’s a drummer and drums for the king,
(A bullet left Johnny a sodden crushed thing!
But Johnny knew glory and mother knew pain
Besides she’s expecting a baby again.)

On the CB Protest Songs project itself:

There are simply too many good things to say about this project, and it warrants its own blog post later. But by way of brief introduction, a local assortment of mostly young musicians were given song lyrics and poems that dealt with the lives and labour struggles of Cape Breton workers in the 1920s. The result is a truly remarkable album, which you can read more about here.

Will Nova Scotia require Transgendered people to give fingerprints when applying for a name change?

So the Nova Scotia provincial government wants to get a criminal background check for folks wanting to get their name legally changed. This would involve prospective name-changers submitting a set of fingerprints.

Justice Minister Ross Landry claims that the pending legislation around this would not apply to children, or to people who want to change their name through marriage. He also assured that the fingerprints would be destroyed after the background check cleared.

I have yet to find any mention or consideration of transgendered folk in all of this.

Nova Scotia is not a friendly place for people in transition. It’s one of the provinces that doesn’t cover the costs of sex reassignment surgery, putting a significant part of the transitioning process out of reach for a lot of people. Even aside from costs, many medical professionals have along way to go in terms of dealing respectfully with Trans patients.

Canada also doesn’t explicitly protect Transgendered people from discrimination, disturbing in the context of transphobic discrimination and violence.

Maybe I’m being presumptious, but I can’t imagine that anyone would be thrilled at having to add yet another layer of hassle and humiliation to the transitioning process.

Any thoughts, Trans advocates? Any good online resources on Trans issues?

Composer of “Cape Breton Lullaby”: yet another Atlantic Canadian socialist

Oh boy it is just SO FUN when you learn of little tidbits like this one:

Mom’s choral group Coro Cantabile is working on “Cape Breton Lullaby”, a local much-loved celtic standard.

After one of her recent practice sessions, mom drew my attention to the fact that the composer Kenneth Leslie was a character with strong identity as a Christian Socialist whose C.V. includes things like producing a broad-circulation anti-fascist comic.

One quick google search later, et voilà, a biographical essay on “God’s Red Poet”:

Leslie held strong left-wing convictions to which he gave vigorous expression not only in his poetry and his personal letters but in a remarkable public career as a crusading editor and political activist. Although one critic has suggested that he tried to “juggle” too many interests and occupations “to remember to be a first-rate poet,”² his religious and political values seemed to demand multifarious expression, and his careers as editor, activist and poet were for many years almost completely integrated: “Good poetry’s good propaganda,” he wrote, and professed a low regard for “poets whose lives weigh lighter than their words,” considering them “word-men only, not fit to be named / With the great healers of men’s selfmade wounds.” He defined the poet’s function as essentially a political one: “to disenthrall / The world from all these hitlers great and small,” and identified poetry with the “hammer blows that build men’s homes.”

If you have a couple minutes, it’s worth the read for the odd little anecdotes about Leslie’s life. One of his marriages was to the daughter of Halifax Candy Manager James Moir, who in turn tried make Leslie into something resembling a respectable businessman. The results of Moir’s efforts seemed to be middling at best, though Leslie apparently enjoyed playing the stock market and wasn’t bothered by how this contradicted his professed ideology.

On Leslie’s famous song: most (if not all) contemporary arrangements of Cape Breton Lullaby use Leslie’s lyrics set to a different melody.

The best-known version is probably Catherine MacKinnon’s, though my favourite rendition is by Teresa Doyle – the mournful small pipes and haunting vocals take me back to summertime nights camping along the cabot trail. This video is probably similar to how mom’s choral group will perform this number:

Street Kids feel welcome at Occupy Nova Scotia

By now, I feel like any journalist who says that the occupy movement is “aimless” or “has no message” is a huge idiot.

That statement is more about an unwillingness to look closer at what is actually happening on the ground. Halifax journalist Miles Howe has pointed out that, despite the absence of a media-friendly list of demands, it’s clear that there is a lot going on.

One such angle is the presence of the homeless, particularly street kids. Howe just did an interview with two street kids who had camped out with the Occupy NS protests in Halifax – you can listen to the whole thing at the Halifax Media Co-op site.

The audio is about 5 minutes, and you get the kids’ full uncensored take on their lives and their experience with the local Occupy encampment. There are many kids & adults like these two who have found some degree of inclusion and community at Occupy protests across North America.

This interview is particularly timely, after the death of a young woman at the site of Occupy Vancouver. As a friend from Vancouver’s Downtown Eastside pointed out, the city has an average of one person die every three days from a drug overdose. The city is now using this death as the reason for forcing the shutdown of Occupy Vancouver.

So next time you or someone else disparages these protests, ask yourself why there are so many people out there who have nowhere else to go. Maybe you can even ask yourself what is it that’s so impossible about making sure *everyone* in our communities is looked after. Perhaps you should also wonder how, with limited resources, a small-ish temporary community of people still manages to share what they have, without judgement, because they believe that everybody matters.

Then give yourself a good, hard look in the mirror, and see if you can tell these kids–one of whom was kicked out of his house at the age of 9–that they’re just lazy, entitled slobs who need to stop being freeloaders and get jobs?

Photo by Miles Howe, originally posted at Halifax Media Co-op.