From the slaves comes the freest of all music, jazz, which flies without asking permission. Eduardo Galeano, Century of the Wind The sussuration of beat “As beats ensnare you in the parallel complexity of the amplified jungle, your skin starts […]

Serai editor Jody Freeman digs in to the Indigenous roots of blues and jazz.

Heading H2 Cinematic and photographic, spatial and visceral, the creations resonate with the quality of the punctum, as ascribed to the photographic image by Barthes. The lyrical intonation and retrospective candour entwine, juxtaposing an aesthetic imagery with a situational ethos void […]

A conversation with sound artist, choreographer and performer Jassem Hindi.

Poet-guitarist Paul Serralheiro pays respect to Montréal’s historic jazz artists.

Montréal writer and musician Paul Serralheiro interviews renowned deejay and jazz educator Andy Williams about the potent role of jazz in education.

Burnt Records of a Forgotten Past In the eyes of the manHe doesn’t understandI’m not a simple plan band I’m a brother first Already lived the worse, they lied about the curseI’m always striving damn man don’t you see it […]

Naomi Klein conceived the idea for this book when the public started confusing her with a feminist author turned right-wing conspiracy theorist.

Unveiling Israel's structures of segregation, confinement, surveillance, and restrictions on freedom in the occupied West Bank

A delicate interplay between the fragility of life and the nuanced dance of relationships

This edition honours Maria Worton, a cherished Montreal poet and activist from Eau Secours and Échec à la guerre.

Maria Worton was fearless, compassionate and committed to social justice. She was funny, brilliant and sometimes enraged.

In the shadow of history, Iranian women's bodies bear the scars of intergenerational grief

Dark Sky Preserves are protected areas around the world dedicated to protecting the night

It’s 1991, barely a year after the Oka Crisis, and I’m with other Commonwealth Fellows visiting South Pacific island nations.

Something alive under the snow makes it shiver like it’s asking not to be shovelled, scraped, or salted.

Even though both of my parents are alive, much of my childhood was spent in a special orphanage

For more on Kathryn Jordan’s writing, photography and events, or to buy her book, please visit her website.

It seems now more than ever that we are faced with crises upon crises

Each body remembers the necessary distance between lovers  the space & touch, here & recalled

Caroline Vu's third novel follows a war orphan in Saigon and his Vietnamese mother and African-American G.I. father

forest berries grow  by the cool rushing creek  scent of irises

I had to dive fully in and swim around the poems as in a vast coral sea

Passing the gatekeepers four times with the rite answers we left you there in the garden

Susan Neiman is director of the Einstein Forum and a member of both the American Philosophical Society and the Berlin-Brandenburg Akademie der Wissenschaften

Against a global backdrop of discrimination against transgender, non-binary, and queer individuals, the late Rana Bose proposed our latest editorial theme.

If from Every Tongue It Drips (2021) explores distance and proximity, identity and otherness, through the daily interactions between two queer women.

A vibrant processions resonates down Ste. Catherine Street. Tiziano Cruz, from Jujuy, Argentina, reveals a nation all too eager to erase its Indigenous history for a whitewashed image.

In an Urdu poem, Iftekhar Ahmed expresses love and acceptance for his trans child, bridging cultural heritage with the language of understanding.

Kalpesh Oza's journey from India to Canada unfolded in three pivotal returns.

Montréal poet Katharine Beeman shares two poems about quantum entanglement and binaries.

Patrick Visentin's practice explores the interstice and interplay of fact and fiction through the fusion of analogue and digital mediums and methods of creation.

in which I am no longer the centre of the universe

The Myth of Normal expands the narrative beyond individual and family issues, delving into societal pathology and systemic analysis.

Remembering the life of Montréal Serai co-founder, Rana Bose.

This repudiation does not go as far as rescinding the “Doctrine of Discovery,” which is what many Indigenous leaders have been demanding.

Making artwork is my way of making peace with the inner battles that haunt me. I don’t belong anywhere, but I belong everywhere because of it.

In the 70s, Perú was blooming with all sort of audacious ideas, from feminism to social rebellion and sexual liberation. It was feast time for poetry.

the same soil that buries our lives

A tartaruga escapa da faca afilada

because she can only avoid so long

When Jordan, another member of the team, was given a model of a brontosaurus, he drew a seven-legged creature. Why?

There is a particularly treasured moment towards the end of the film where one of the men speaks in Purépecha, Michoacán’s beautiful native language.

Leandro Urbina est un des plus grands écrivains chiliens de notre époque. Et voilà que Julie Turcotte, une jeune traductrice montréalaise, pour sa première traduction de l’espagnol (Chili) vers le français, a choisi le premier livre de l’auteur, Mauvaises fréquentations (Las malas juntas).

The affair quickly blew up into a media-and social media- driven frenzy, triggering resignations, condemnation, a petition and calls for boycott.

This compilation of poems and short prose pieces by marginalized Honduran writers reflects the diversity of intent and life experience of the authors themselves.

Struggles over recognition of personhood are rooted in the history of colonialism and private property. Indigenous worldviews of “Our Relations” –­ the land, and mountains and waters; the sky, sun, moon and stars; the trees, plants and rocks; the birds, […]

A Conversation with Chief Jean-Charles Piétacho Innu Council of Ekuanitshit, Québec Introduction Chief Jean-Charles Piétacho, who has fought for his Innu community and its ancestral territory of Nitassinan for over 30 years, spoke to Serai editor Jody Freeman on December […]

My name is Alix Van Der Donckt-Ferrand. I was born in 1995 and I live in Montréal. I make drawings, objects and music under the name La Cucurucha. Many of the images I draw have a synchretic component, a mixing […]

Thread The thread was a rope, stretching to the moon, to my dark daughter on that distant shore. Cats, rents, and jobs, insurance, eyelashes, cars. Was I any closer to helping, for all that? Was I any safer from loneliness, […]

What I was missing here All night it snowed love turned white I trampled love underfoot The forest mews tiny scraps of light sway in the trees Love covers the wound the wanting, the marks on the soul We sing […]

Ready For what can’t be known mind and body write poetry, freedom of movement, favourite food, sacrifice. Lead me through lingering rain claps, sun showers. Lead me: by hand, with your voice, by signs if pained through what remains – […]

Blár Cerulean, stamen-like brushstrokes wet on wet blending the colours create three shades of blue not to paint anything ugly or dark uggely, uglike, from Old Norse uggligr‎ a love song within the frame using a palette knife to anchor […]

Knocking the Next We rise to shining life, then turn—— lungs to earth, liver to river, kidneys to constellations; heart of the recent being knocking the next. I am for the dark wood, for the slick, invincible mountain. I am […]

Another word for obstruct The word Yemen is a lemon, in government mouths while the poor covet a vaccine for covid-19. Hospitals strafed silent prisons broken into. I blurt out, war is always public murder, but they won’t let you […]

Saeed Teebi’s masterful collection of nine short stories delves right into the many nuances of the Palestinian community in Canada.

In Farzana Doctor’s first poetry collection, each part contains a different exercise followed by a haiku response.

Collections of Yahia Lababidi’s Verses and Aphorisms: Desert Songs and Learning to Pray Yahia Lababidi describes Desert Songs as “a slender love letter to the deserts of Egypt.” The poems in Arabic with English translations by Osama Esber and photographs […]

When the Editorial Board framed the theme statement for this issue of Serai on Nationhood, we asked in the opening paragraph, “What does nationhood mean today for the First Nations and other Indigenous peoples, who strive to navigate forward in […]

Introduction Dans les semaines précédant cette entrevue avec Yves Sioui Durand, en août 2022, des intervenant·e·s autochtones de tout le pays ont multiplié des actions interpellant le pape François à réfuter la Doctrine de la Découverte. Ce concept colonialiste européen […]

Haïti gained independence through a revolution led by those who experienced slavery firsthand.

They say books are on their way out – and who reads anyway, especially poetry? They say humans will either be done in by wars or melted down by climate change, or be replaced by cyborgs. They say a lot […]

“Lock and load!” I started noticing The Gateway Pundit clickbait site in late 2020, when the comments sections beneath the articles in that prominent far-right news-and-conspiracy webzine were full of posts urging people to head to Washington well-armed to take […]

To start out, I have taken great pains to not consult academic or internet classifications of the subject that I have chosen to write on, and have allowed my mind to wander and evolve. As a result, there may be […]

“The most potent weapon of the oppressor is the mind of the oppressed.” — Steve Bantu Biko I remember. I probably shouldn’t, but I do. It’s a distant memory. Still, like my parents and their parents before them and so […]

Introduction Panj, a solo performance seamlessly combining storytelling, spoken word, song, images, video and original live psychedelic-rock-fusion music, premiered in Montréal at the Festival Accès Asie (Asian Heritage Month) in May 2022. The show is based on creator Himmat Singh […]

Mount Everest: She was a mother hen and the other mountains were chicks under her wings. – Tenzing Norgay Shimla was where I wanted to be, like nowhere else in the northwest Himalayas – where the houses stood on precipices, […]

Montréal Serai m’a invité à commenter ce livre, non pas en tant que spécialiste de l’Inde, du maoïsme ou des Adivasis (peuples autochtones de l’Inde), mais plutôt en tant que membre intéressé du public. À la fin des années 1960, […]

When I think of India, I think of many things: of broad fields dotted with the innumerable small villages; of towns and cities … of the magic of the rainy season which pours life into the dry parched-up land and […]

Montréal Serai invited me to comment on this book, not as someone with any particular expertise on India, Maoism, or the Adivasi (Indigenous peoples in India), but as an interested member of the public. In the late 1960s, when I […]

Admittedly, vigilantism may not be the first thing that comes to mind for most when thinking of pop culture, but that doesn’t make the two any less intertwined. From movies to comic books and beyond, the theme of justice is […]

Sometime in the late fifties, as a 10-year-old child in what was then known as Calcutta (now Kolkata),  I wandered around in the neighbourhood I grew up in and would stop at a books and comics store, which was nothing […]

Walls You tell me you are not like me. Nor am I like you, but obliterating my thoughts, my feelings, my senses was not yours to do. It was my place as well as yours and if I chose not […]

Artist statement Working quietly for decades on a singular pursuit is what draws me, letting the pieces speak for themselves. This body of work is a study in power and refinement. For more on Eric James Jensen’s artwork, please visit […]

Caveat: There is a reason I’ve largely avoided the Italian crime thriller/poliziotteschi genre all my life. That’s what Tele-Italia aired on Montréal’s defunct ethnic TV channel, along with La Piovra mafia series and commedia sexy all’italiana (Edwige Fenech, Banfi or […]

If you were coming home at night and saw a group of people burning down your house and attacking your neighbours, your first inclination would likely be to call 911 and contact the police. But what if you realized that […]

Pororoca Do you hear the lament of the deep riverwhere you played as a childlaughed when youngand in which you drown today? Playful shorestickling water lettucesexcited crabshiding in the warm sandwhere you dipped your feetfreelyyour cleaned handsoverflowingwith the fullnessof the […]

plink, drip, drip, drip, drip, drip, drip plink, drip, drip drip drip drip I hate the sound of raindrops on the roof. So insistent, loud, abusive. Noise is invasive— overpowering the senses. Angry noise dominated my family. As a child, […]

“Poetry’s appeal is rooted in emotion. It tends to chase people away whenever it becomes too cerebral.” Michael Fraser Author Mayank Bhatt interviews award-winning poet Michael Fraser, whose third collection of poems, The Day-Breakers, was published by Biblioasis in April […]

    Over a year ago when our editorial team gamed out our upcoming issues, we decided that the theme for this April 2022 issue would be “Out of the Ashes.” The concept was based loosely on the idea that […]

    [Serai editor Jody Freeman interviewed Vice-Chief Sipi Flamand from the Atikamekw Council of Manawan in early January 2022. The Council of Manawan and the Atikamekw Nation Council spearheaded consultations in the Atikamekw community and the larger Québec community, […]

    Chernobyl II Revelation 8:10-11 “… the waters became wormwood; and many men died of the waters, because they were made bitter.” We are the Chernobyl babushkas wearing black kerchiefs. We are the ones with radiation sickness. We are […]

    [Editorial note: Serai editor Rana Bose was intrigued by the autobiographical story submitted by Miriam Edelson, from Toronto. “Intrigued” would perhaps be the wrong word. It was more of a sense of resonance with a time in the […]

    AT THE END OF THE YARD Because after much meandering I’ve determined the world is that new bicycle, its chrome menace: Tour de France, Giro d’Italia, that hill. And because we laid out the table in the garden, […]

    [Serai editor Kerry McElroy had the pleasure of interviewing Guy Sprung about his father, Mervyn Sprung, whose philosophical writings strike an evocative chord in our current era of extremes and hegemonized mindsets.]   Kerry: You are the son […]

    Recently, I read a collection of reminiscences on the hunger strike of 1981 carried out by republican prisoners in the north of Ireland. The hunger strike began March 1 and ended October 3. During those seven months, 23 […]

    On the evening of January 29, 2017, a white Franco-Québécois gunman entered the Islamic Cultural Centre of Québec City (ICCQ) after Isha prayers, and murdered six Black and brown Muslim men. Survivor Hakim Chambaz was there when his […]

  There Was a Wind There was a wind blowing outside, a dog barking, flashing headlights. When your stomach turned black in your RV, you finally got scared. You decided the time had come to softly drift. All you needed […]

    I will say it outright: Fear the Mirror, Cora Siré’s newly minted collection of linked short stories, is the most emotionally satisfying book that I have read in a long time. The author takes readers through the aftermath […]

      Concertina   Think of all the times you haven’t been thwarted by your teeth and tongue, your clavicle and ulnas, femurs and gut. Body says, This one’s on me. Brain says, What’s remembered lives; It’s alright not […]

    Ann Eriksson’s Urgent Message from a Hot Planet is a heartfelt plea for all of us to do our bit, however little, to save the planet from global warming. In fact, author Eriksson contends that the term “climate […]

    “Just Food,” the theme of our current issue, slyly downplays the power of food by dishing it up as utterly ordinary. The very idea of “just food” may, in fact, be an oxymoron. The humbleness implied by “just” […]

    Agriculture is what gave rise to civilization and it is also what is going to end it! Assured availability of food began with the Neolithic Revolution about 10 000 years ago. At the end of the Pleistocene epoch and […]

      POEM OF THE UNFINISHED SANDWICH   Tomato slice, white baladi cheese, rye, a bite taken from one end, crumbs. An ant trudges her burden across the blue countertop. Ah, if only you’d listened! Ah, yes, if only […]

    Sunlight filters through the treetops and spills onto our cobblestone road as I roll down my window and let the cypress-scented breeze flow in. Everything rattles inside, including my Cat Stevens cassette tape dancing in the car-door pocket. […]

  Hands remember the skills and patterns of a lifetime.                 Text and photographs © Joseph Kary    

    An interview with Ossie Michelin Introduction Telling Our Twisted Histories is a popular podcast series focusing on all things First Nations, Inuit and Métis, co-produced by Terre Innue and the Canadian Broadcasting Corporation (CBC) in 2021. Created and […]

  Green String Beans Long thin beans on slender stems, fresh, smooth velvet carefully picked, weighed, lifted. Carried them as she did the signs of fading youth. Softened each one gently from ends, Prepared, diced into tiny circles, pearls in […]

    For the foods we chow down on every day, labels and nutrient values do not tell us enough about the history of their evolution or the processes used in their production. When we eat, we don’t always know […]

  I read Wendell Berry’s The Farm on a rainy afternoon in late July. It took me fifteen minutes, and I enjoyed it. Then I began to think back to the first time I heard about and read other work […]

    Nobel laureate Pablo Neruda wrote a passionate ode to the humble onion, acknowledging its importance as a staple food both for poor and rich. Marie Antoinette showed up her (wilful?) ignorance when she urged her subjects to eat […]

a thread of history, a thread of legacy, a thread of continuity in cycles, rhythms, tradition and culture

You see, the story people don’t realize is, we didn’t know we were making history.

Someone would light the incense, and sounds began: the tanpura, sitar, sarod, tabla, with a different person practicing in every room.

It is a particular history that we in Africa, and Indigenous peoples, have endured.

And you’d ask: Why do you write about fetuses and swallows, “Ciuri, Ciuri”? Flowers, Flowers.

The reunion of Sarah and Cohen as pupil and teacher at the age of 59 and 80, respectively, forms the heart of the memoir.

I wanted to make a soundscape with the rhythmic patterns of my father’s voice and cadence, as well as his poetic presentation.

She was one of a handful of women of colour working in an industry full of white middle-class men. So she felt that it was up to her to carve out her own identity.

I would close my eyes and watch the shadows play behind my lids while the vibrations molded and shaped my dreams.

These images are music between two notes

I adjust my non-existent headphones and I add castanets, maracas, timbales, and I try to change the beat

dans la sculpture comme dans la musique on retrouve la forme, le mouvement, le tempo

    A group of oil-on-canvas camel herders in Rajasthan, a number of plants sent from different parts of the Middle East and Africa to Montréal by mail, a black-and-white photograph of the longed-for “velvet hush of a foggy evening,” […]

    Tell Mother, I’m Home is a series of images and text that I have been working on since May 2018. The photographs, previously manual – both film photographs and instant film/Polaroid – have been digitized for the series […]

    I’ve been making a series of hand-embroidered interventions on printed fabric. The images of various places and people come back to the common theme of subjects unable (or unwilling) to be claimed. This unfinished business is embodied by […]

  Introduction Displaced Garden is the latest work of Montréal-based Iranian artist Anahita Norouzi, exploring the legacies of botanical exploration, plant-collecting and documentation inherited from colonial scientific expeditions. Taking the form of a photographic book containing 18 cyanotype impressions of […]

    An interview with Roxann Karonhiarokwas Whitebean [Editorial note:  Montréal Serai editor Jody Freeman interviewed Roxann Karonhiarokwas Whitebean in mid-May 2021, before the heart-rending discoveries of the unmarked graves of 1,148 children on the sites of former Indian residential schools.] Jody: […]

    Works of art reveal themselves to me, rather than my creating or composing preconceived notions. (I’d call them vague notions that I feel for some time without defining them, sometimes for a long time.) I believe each work […]

    I come from a thousand light-years beyond the dark twilight of Earth, a planet today corroded by ambition and destroyed by so many shambles and fights over territorial and ethnic powers and other foolishness of the human species. […]

  Artist’s Statement All through my training in sketching and painting, I was inspired by Bargue and Gérôme’s Cours de dessin to reproduce what I saw in real life and the natural world. Included below is one of my sketches […]

  After we learned to live with the plague, we learned to survive without the city’s darkness, thanks to the curfew.  It is clear what we have lost in this pandemic: lives, loved ones, health, jobs, businesses, fearlessness, spontaneity, the […]

    Introductory note: The term “conflict” play is occasionally used as a form of shorthand to describe the nature of the plays depicting the Israeli occupation of Palestine. The Palestinian community at large rejects the description of their reality […]

  Easily Fooled, by H. Nigel Thomas Guernica Editions, 2021, 293 pages   It does not matter how sharp and on top of things we are, we have been duped and hoodwinked too easily at some point in our lives […]

    Los Nombres de Las Flores (2019) Director: Bahman Tavoosi (79 minutes) Genre: Fiction Language: Spanish Greenground Productions   Amid the majestic terrain of Bolivia, a poetically sublime film unfolds. The Names of the Flowers / Los Nombres de […]

One Madder Woman, a novel by Dede Crane Freehand Books, 2020, 360 pages   The year is 1858, the place, a Parisian suburb. A family of five is having breakfast. There is Papa, M. Morisot, the patriarch, a chief advisor […]

In this significant departure from the beaten path by our editorial board, we chose to dispense with the “theme statement”

Social feeds serve bodies, bludgeoned and lynched.

A girl could fall 40 years through time

to chase transgression, tussle demons in a private show

to escape—one last time—that worn-out chest

These days, I stand to gather the bones

blows between earth and sky

A stilled world, living in frames?

clenched muscles relax without warning

Dubois’ visual work has interesting parallels to her writing

She grabbed my arm and led me through the gathering of people from the slums.

indeed, her keen sense of mortality heightens an anxiety-edged but ecstatic awareness that this is it

It is a celebration of the oral and spiritual traditions of the first poets of what today is known as the United States of America

on the lake shuts tight

Bring me flowers and bees.

    There is a vital energy pulsing through this winter issue of Montréal Serai. It radiates off the landing page, with the vibrant art of Leah Kanerahtaroroks Diome, who is from the unceded Kanien’kéha:ka Territory of Kahnawake. In her […]

The effects of intergenerational trauma on both my family and community are felt every day.

The way I see it, I’ve made choices in a context that was imposed on me.

Sáasil didn’t know how to write at the time, so she told the story to María, her mother, in a combination of Mayan and Spanish, and then both of her parents helped her transcribe it.

What are the ethical concerns with bringing Indigenous languages into cyberspace?

They were right in front of us and I was shaking so much I almost shot my dad’s Ski-doo windshield.

Independence from British rule did not really improve matters for either the Dalits or the tribespeople as a whole.

Durant la nuit, j'ai peur. Durant la nuit, je vois des ombres. Durant la nuit, les démons sortent.

Today is a rainy, slushy, windy, still-winter grey day, and my mood matches the weather.

sagging above the deep

I felt more keenly aware of being a visitor and a guest here on this land — something I had always known instinctively.

“We were all family: witches, tricksters, what the ancients call cycles, balances and harmony.”

Globalization, as a phase of capitalist mutation, received a punch in the face from COVID-19.

Along these lines of racism, the pandemic brought to light some of our more troubling social reflexes.

The pandemic also confronted society with the nature of work.

Lax’s stories further the journey of questioning pre-pandemic “normalcy.”

Do you think that this is a turning point or a turning away from the notion of de-regulation, globalization and so-called free trade?

Strapped to a machine alone the suck thump thump suck thump thump

Hiding behind a mask will not attract any censure now.

thin figures twisting, pleasuring, labouring....

“Quebec is a society full of inconsistencies."

a moving collage of essays, conversations, aphorisms, poems, interviews and reflections

There is the disease, and it’s scary enough, but even scarier are the underlying policies, and those that are improvised as we go.

Four hours later, they were intubating Karina for the ventilator.

What does it say about us that we resist the grief expressed in this play, displacing it into wishful thinking about a better king?

“Through removal and erasure of the paint from the surface of the canvas initially covered in blue, the final imagery appears as the result of an uncovering.”

Yes, I just used scare quotes. I can’t help myself

Tell me how I can do this and still live.

I wake up one morning with Macbeth’s line trotting through my head like a horse round a manège

experimental poetry communicates changing times while remaining timeless

A plague forces us to isolate, sequester into our spaces without the shared moments that make us social creatures.

No oxys, no benzos, no sleeping pills, not even a bottle of Percocet.

Saw a police car this morning on my way back from the laundromat, driving around looking for signs of trouble.

    In the past couple of years, we have all discussed and dissected, with intensity, the man-made climatological changes that have hit our earth. It has become frustratingly clear that it is not enough to debate the science, the […]

    Photos by José Luis Aranda with commentary by Claudia Itzkowich   The southern part of the Chihuahua desert is home to Wirikuta, the sacred land of the Wixáritari, who carry out ritual pilgrimages from the remote mesetas where […]

    Stardust and Moonlight: A Love Poem Beaches built of melted Sun. Iridescent air Lavender thoughts sprinkle Yearning on sun-whipped skin Oceans shout to the shore, “I will sing to you of love.” Waves recede with a kiss.   […]

    We too are wild In the past year we have seen hundreds of kangaroos flee bush fires in Australia, half a billion birds and reptiles perish, and many people lose their homes or in some cases, their lives. […]

    I Bob Carty’s Arctic report and how it froze my heart Scientists do not write in the first person, since their findings seek to reflect processes that unfold beyond the vagaries of human will. When they say that […]

    He walked among the trees. They smelled good. He had rarely taken the time to notice. The smell was a counterpoint to that tendency to see only the claustrophobic solitude of boreal forests. In the winter the forests […]

  Dhrupad of Destruction I see Nataraja dancing on a lofty hill, to the sound of crushing ice, Melting glaciers and rising seas. Primordial forces unleashed. From the dark corners of the earth, I hear the eternal rumble of Chaos […]

  Eocene Time of rising temperatures the dawn horse gallops on primitive hooves greeting the day’s heat with hunger and teeth grinding small-brained toward longer-limbed progeny expanding onto the first grassy plains no mountains to snow on but coming on […]

  TAKEWING a.m., written and Illustrated by Brenda J. Wilson. FriesenPress, 348 pages   TAKEWING a.m. is Brenda J. Wilson’s first novel, although she has a long track record as a media producer, librarian, photographer and educator. She also wears […]

Dusk On Loukes Lake (for Kathleen) thin spirits of mist rise immobile on a lake flooded to ice by the calm water bugs skate in circles to a waltz of their own signature my canoe glides on the echoes of […]

Editorial note: Charles William Johnson shares some of his intriguing and controversial research into ancient art forms, with special reference to the legend of Pan Gu as it appears in both Chinese and Maya cultures. He describes how transparencies of […]

    Along the south bank of the River Thames strode a sunken-faced man carrying a small book. The man, only thirty-nine years old, was meditating on life and death as he walked down the waterfront promenade. His eyes, bruised […]

    Perhaps scientific understanding and artistic imagining are different aspects of the same impulse. And humanity’s great understanders and imaginers are inspired from similar sources. Jack Klein That science informs art is patently obvious: painters and sculptors studying anatomy […]

    Montréal Serai editor Claudia Itzkowich visited Amanda Woolrich in her studio to prepare this piece. An etching press presides over Amanda Woolrich’s apartment/art studio in Mexico City. Next to it hangs Amanda’s camera, looking down from a rustic […]

    Call of the Loon Come back. It’s cold here without you. When I bend my neck to drink there is no reflection in the water. Come back to the wild. When I call your name it ricochets off […]

    My father’s death defeated me; I felt robbed by it.  It didn’t come as a surprise because he had cancer, lung metastases to be exact, and we were told at some point that he had a month left […]

    Mitochondrial Eve A plague of poppies: salmon, tomato, apricot. Some years I save the seeds, audible in upright cups, and carry them, carefully, to make two lemon cakes, eat all those flowers. Flowers that are as famous as […]

  When we say first principles, we claim we are going down to the basics. To a fundamental truth. Being totally iterative, methodical and without prejudice. We are arriving at a fundamental principle. Scientists are not supposed to assume anything […]

  Turbulence it’s not the breath, in or out not quite breath’s only the boundary sneaks past smooth ebbs on laminar silent it’s where streamlines retch mouth shot off with plosives, or trills eddying deep into passionate night where breath […]

  One reason to go to medical school can be a letter from a university congratulating you on a successful application, with the suggestion that you bring your thinking cap and your running shoes. So long, Dostoyevsky; hello… Galen, Harvey, […]

  I I find her hunched in her chair a wizened crow wrapped in a food-smeared bib porridge drying on her mouth and chin. Her hands are bony and translucent and her nails curl back on themselves like talons. She […]

    The zeitgeist of our times is characterized by creativity and innovation, particularly in the fields of art and science. A question often pondered is where these two fields intersect. Do they touch each other at a tangent? Do […]

  Cardinal Flower Red flash— a few sprigs puncture the monotony of brown-green bog, never-ending evergreens and skeletons of cedar. I know you, skulking in the wetlands between bridge and dam, around the island, beneath the boulder’s shoulder, under jack […]

  ODE TO HIPPOCRATES Who’s Hippocrates, I know, in Crete or someplace else – calling out to the Sirens, the Sea’s own and asking you for healing ways, the mind or spirit’s, not the body’s own. Oh, the body, and […]

  “In its encounter with Nature, science invariably elicits a sense of reverence and awe. The very act of understanding is a celebration of joining, merging, even if on a very modest scale, with the magnificence of the Cosmos. And […]

  Snow Is Falling Snow is falling. The earth turns white. Its new skin is as smooth as silk. The sun hides behind a veil. I stay confined inside my shelter while the cedars run between the houses and collect […]

    Summernote V Call her goddess of heath and yellow gorse. Tell her you have left the moon unlit. Snuggled into its folds. Swamp-fed forest creeks. Grafted to fen carr, sedge grasses. Dwarf blackberries. See if she believes you. […]

    The South Asian Film Festival of Montréal (SAFFM) was launched in 2011. Since then it has established a reputation for showcasing quality documentary and feature films from India, Pakistan, Nepal and Bangladesh, as well as films about the […]

    Cheeky Mathematics He and she fuse their cells with the sticky glue of their warm juices Two cells become one which then divides and multiplies until one plus one adds up to ten perfect little toes Baby trades […]

Is there a contradiction between performance as entertainment, performance that is essentially an esthétique of form, beauty and years of extraordinary cultivation of skills, and performance that is by itself an act of change, designed to disturb? For a moment, […]

Writer, performer and griot Koulsy Lamko directed the Centre Universitaire des Arts in Rwanda from 1999 to 2002, in the aftermath of the genocide of the Tutsis. After handing the project over to students, he continued to support and visit […]

Teesri Duniya Theatre was established in 1981 by Rana Bose and me as co-founders. Others involved were the cast and crew of the company’s launch production, Badal Sircar’s Julus. At the time, there was no other South Asian theatre company […]

    Stanley Février’s art gets under your skin. It calls you and keeps calling. It engages more of you than you know. Heart and mind and spirit remember. Flesh remembers. You feel the expanse, the height, the depth. The […]

    1. Circumstance and sorrow had aged me by the time I found my way into the fire-blighted wood scorched by flames rising up from an earth ravaged by explorations for oil, its water table plundered relentlessly by impulses […]

  The 29th edition of the Montréal First Peoples Festival (Présence autochtone) unfolded from August 6 to August 14. On this occasion, it celebrated diversity and creativity through a combination of visual arts, film, music, song, poetry and gastronomy. It […]

    Montréal actor Howard Rosenstein in conversation with Serai’s Rana Bose   Serai:  Good afternoon, Howard!  The theme of this issue is Performance as Change. I will begin, though, with a slight diversion. I’ve come across your opinion on […]

What We Remember: Poetry that Reframes History   Lisa Bird-Wilson combines two forms of remembering in The Red Files. Her poems mix archival sources with oral history to reconstruct the stories we tell about the residential school system and its […]

    I am nobody else’s version of who I am You cannot set your mind based on my looks alone There is no language that defines me Do not box me in Because I am my own I choose not to be enslaved […]

    Run J Run, Sokol’s latest novel, was published in May this year by Renaissance Press, a publishing company whose roster features writing that doesn’t fit into a standard genre, niche or demographic and which hopes to uplift marginalized […]

Sometimes it takes just a moment to realize that one is in the presence of greatness. Meeting Habib Tanvir was one such moment. In 1992, I went to India to visit my parents.  My husband Rahul Varma, who runs Teesri […]

  Québec has just passed Bill 21, which bans many Québecers from holding positions of authority in the public service ostensibly to extend the appearance of ‘neutrality’ of the state. There has been a loud cry of praise for protecting […]

  We are still here Aimé, us the niggers of the north An otherness-nothingness imprisoned in our minds by our colour   I have heard of white writers who claim to be bush niggers they live outside the high prison […]

    Being Chinese in Canada: The Struggle for Identity, Redress and Belonging by William Ging Wee Dere Douglas & McIntyre, 2019 (400 pages)   A life of struggle for redress from Canada’s systemic racism From 1885 to 1947, some […]

  My Undiscovered Country by Cyril Dabydeen, Mosaic Press (2018), 129 pages   Cyril Dabydeen is a Canadian writer born in 1945 in Canje, Guyana, where he worked as a teacher. He came to Canada in 1970 to study at Lakehead […]

  Ma voix se dévoile Je me souviens lorsque j’étudiais le chant classique au Collège Ste-Croix. Thérèse, ma professeure, me répétait sans cesse de relâcher ma mâchoire pendant que je chantais. Elle était si rigide et si tendue qu’elle rendait […]

In Which, Being Book One of the Chronicles of Deasil Widdy by Louise Carson, Broken Rules Press (Ste-Anne-de-Bellevue, Québec), 2018, 152 pages   “Their long horns drooped and they seemed half asleep, unable to feel his presence. Perhaps I am […]

    The history of music is all about borrowing and building on the work of predecessors, whether it be Griots keeping old stories alive and telling the stories of their time, or Johann Sebastian Bach traveling to hear Buxtehude’s […]

Me Artsy, compiled and edited by Drew Hayden Taylor Douglas & McIntyre, 2015 (256 pages)   The best way to enter into the spirit of this luminous collection of essays is to quote what Drew Hayden Taylor, its compiler and […]

  Conception, photos, commentary: Tilak Seth, Keya Dasgupta and Subhendu Dasgupta English text: Nilanjan Dutta                

    My grandmother died in 1969 at the age (I think) of 89. My brother and I weren’t expected to go to the funeral and neither of us now can remember exactly when it was. My grandmother had become […]

  Vibration before sound, that’s how it starts. You could be at school, at home, anytime, anywhere. You hear mumbling and feel your lips twitch as you mouth words. Keep on your noise-cancelling earphones, never go anywhere without them. Listen […]

    Seven Mountains For my maternal grandmother   That moment when you see spring on your windowsill you have lost your sister, ceramic pot yellow daffodils, nodding buds. Wilted petals. Ruffled trumpet. Shriveled and fading that moment when news […]

    Veteran war correspondent, Robert Fisk, speaking to a packed house at St. James United Church in Montréal in 2015, reflected on ISIS and the colonial history that has fomented justifiable resentment across much of the Middle East and […]

  The Lingering Past  Identity is not a simple phenomenon. The farther back in time we go in studying the question, the more limited the number of groups there are to study and the more simply those groups are organized […]

  Depuis le tournant du siècle, nous assistons à une montée alarmante de l’extrême-droite et d’un racisme décomplexé, pas seulement au Québec mais ailleurs aussi, notamment en Allemagne, en France, en Italie et aux États-Unis. Il est vrai que les […]

  Démarche artistique Le travail intérieur qu’exige la création ne cesse de me fasciner. Il me garde vivante. Mon travail se module autour de deux pôles : la céramique-sculpture et le monotype. J’ai commencé à faire du monotype en 2009, […]

  Beliefs and affiliations There are many people who relate the concept of “class” to level of income. This is understandable given that a majority of people see “class” as an extension of an archaic English approach towards social “classification” […]

Je voudrais dire wliwni (merci!) de vivre à Montréal, qui est en TERRITOIRE MOHAWK NON CÉDÉ! I would like to say wliwni (thanks) for being able to live in Montréal, which is in UNCEDED MOHAWK TERRITORY!     Kwaï! Bonjour! […]

  Je nage. Autour de moi les vaguelettes taillées comme dans l’ardoise remuent au vent. Le visage immergé j’expire à fond, faisant bourdonner l’eau pendant que se vident mes poumons. Par moments, j’entends mon gargouillis se répandre dans un écho […]

  Kingdom of Olives and Ash, edited by Michael Chabon and Ayelet Waldman, 2017, HarperCollins Publishers, 448 pages   The “land of milk and honey” generally refers to the promised land of Jewish tradition. As a notion, it denotes a […]

Hussey, Charlotte. Glossing the Spoils. Awen Publications: Stroud, England, 2017 (2nd edition), 72 pages.   Montréal poet and scholar Charlotte Hussey’s most recent book of poetry, published by an Irish imprint, was sparked by a quest for reconnection to the […]

    Jonny Appleseed by Joshua Whitehead, 2018, Arsenal Pulp Press (Vancouver), 223 pages   Joshua Whitehead is an Oji-Cree/nehiyaw, Two-Spirit /Indigiqueer member of Peguis First Nation (Treaty). He is also the author of full metal-indigiqueer and winner of the […]

Maru and the Maple Leaf by Uma Parameswaran, Larkuma Publishing, 2016 (367 pages)   Uma Parameswaran, a retired professor of English (University of Winnipeg) and well known author with a special interest in women’s literature and South Asian culture, has […]

Territorial integrity is not the only marker of independence

Margaret will be remembered for her probing and incisive mind

Now, I have neither unease to express, nor artistic views to state, nor a CV to display.

Mes quatre médiums se rejoignent tous soit en prenant des chemins différents ou en se mariant les uns aux autres.

sometimes I dream that speaking Hausa would make me feel better

In the rich dread of my predecessors.

No women here. No women at all.

“The walk is a journey of the spirit carried by the body like a good friend, and sitting is an important part of the walking.”

This suffering had demonstrated to me the harsh limitation in my heritage, both Indian and Western.

The sound tech is weaponizing Classic Rock against me – “Start Me Up” by the Stones, “Light My Fire,” by The Doors.

...it would have been easy for me to fantasize that this landscape is the unspoilt one of ancient times, but I am focused instead on a radio program about a rural shooting that happened a few days ago.

Nungak delivers an often humorous, in-your-face account of the history of Nunavik

Tata worked as a waitress at her family's restaurant by the beach.

In her personal life, her friendship with a Zimbabwean fellow doctor earns her a brutal “correction” from her fellow countrymen.

And the ducks give up their dabbling at the lily patch

loops of razor wire fences

Collier was born a boy, but when I knew him in high school, he called himself two-spirit, fluid.

Pay heed to the final words of a profound thinker.

Days of Moonlight by Loren Edizel, Inanna Publications Inc., Toronto, Ontario, 205 pages   The compelling, contradictory nature of cover blurbs! They excite and prod the reader on. Depending on the era – from Jane Austen to Grace Metalious, from […]

    This was my third time at the Toronto International Film Festival (TIFF). It was also Piers Handling’s final year as the TIFF director, with Joana Vicente now as its new director – a sign of the times reflected […]

  This issue of Serai, “Beyond the Pale” (Vol.31, Issue 3), is one that resonates with me deeply. Hence, I am very happy and honoured to write this editorial. The issue looks to the many changes in cinema across both […]

  Commentary on La Negrada, Sueño en Otro Idioma and El Violín [Note: References to film portrayals of Indigenous dramas from the golden age of Mexican cinema have not been included because they depict a folkloric and at times disrespectful […]

    As Cinema Politica turns 15 in Montréal, Dipti Gupta and Raphael Cohen-Demers interview co-founders Svetla Turnin and Ezra Winton to walk us through their accomplishments, challenges and vision.   “If it’s still just a few profit-driven corporations that control all the platforms, venues […]

  1. Tradition NANA PEAZANT (narrating) “In this quiet place, simple folk knelt down and caught a glimpse of the eternal.” (from the screenplay) Traditions can be looked at as auras of history. Specific traditions associated with individual families are […]

Interview with Catherine Bainbridge and Ernest Webb     Introduction: The evening of the interview, I showed up at Catherine and Ernie’s door. Ernie had just come back from a rehearsal with the Montréal Symphony Orchestra for Tomson Highway’s opera, […]

    In 1991, Indian feminist filmmaker Reena Mohan produced a little-known documentary called Kamlabai. The film chronicled the remarkable life of one of the first Indian film actresses, Kamlabai Gokhale – one that began with the dizzyingly modern new […]

    In response to a three-page critique[1] of the film by Boots Riley, the first point I want to make is that labelling, categorizing, denouncing, and tearing apart a filmmaker’s entire IMDb may be cool posturing, but it is […]

    Padmaavat (2018), Sanjay Leela Bhansali’s latest magnum opus, became mostly notorious for what was claimed as its attack on Rajput pride and its portrayal of the legendary queen Padmavati (the story of the film was based on a […]

    [Note: The film was featured in the diaspora panel at the South Asian Film Festival of Montreal (October 2017) and generated a dynamic discussion, with the director in attendance.]    “Egalitarianism isn’t always a by-product of education and […]

  Magnificent. Maddening. John Cassavetes’ Minnie and Moskowitz (1971) is a small story about big love. Seymour Moskowitz, played by Seymour Cassel, is a hapless parking attendant living in Los Angeles. He goes on dates, spends time with strangers at […]

      Démarche artistique Ma pratique photographique est inspirée de l’environnement qui m’entoure. Un premier projet abordait le thème de l’eau. Celle-ci selon ses différentes phases, son parcours, ses empreintes et la manière dont l’homme vit avec elle. Le […]

CD Review Cultures around the world provide a rich heritage to draw from for practicing contemporary artists, but it’s always a thorny issue when a non-native draws on stylistic features of the practices of another culture, as care needs to […]

  At the beginning of the year, I was invited to act as guest editor for the current issue of Montréal Serai on “Populism and the Erasure of History.” I had to ask the editorial team to clarify what that […]

    Preface by Montréal Serai A high-profile yet anonymous artist in his hometown Québec City and beyond, Wartin Pantois is a breath of fresh air, a quiet voice of dissidence, a street artist, an agent of change, and a catalysing […]

    My name is Dina Gardashkin. I’m a Jewish Israeli, and the first time I learned what the word Palestinian really meant was at the age of 23. Since I grew up in Haifa, a city known for its […]

  Things were simpler in the past. Authority figures told us what “our” gods wanted us to believe and how to demonstrate our beliefs. They established rules and the dire consequences of disobeying. They could even prompt those consequences to […]

Journaliste de longue date, lauréate du prix Hyman-Solomon pour l’excellence journalistique dans le domaine des politiques publiques, et professeure adjointe au département de journalisme de l’Université Concordia, Francine Pelletier nous livre le fond de sa pensée sur le populisme qui […]

      À travers mon travail avec l’argile, j’explore les notions d’identité et de territoire. La mémoire, le legs, la tradition, tout comme l’espace que j’habite, m’amènent à me confronter au temps qui se dérobe. J’aborde le thème du […]

  As a political ideology, populism can be divided into an array of currents, beyond the obvious distinction between right- and left-wing. It can have negative connotations and be written off as demagogy by some individuals of the fortunate classes […]

A quick search of the term populism in cyberspace reveals its increasing popularity (no pun intended) in the last decade, in both traditional and social media. The term democracy, on the other hand, became de rigueur a long time ago […]

Radius Islamicus by Julian Samuel, Guernica Editions, 2018   “The radius islamicus is the farthest distance a camel part is thrown from the blast centre.” The narrator of Julian Samuel’s second novel is a “stateless” leader who supposedly spent more […]

Man on a Rocking Chair in San Juan   In San Juan I found a man rocking on his balcony, the floors creaking, the glaze in the gaze, a daffodil stem hanging from his lips. I asked him was he […]

Writing and rewriting history are primeval pursuits of human beings. Not all human beings, maybe, but at least those who care for power. The ones in power believe that the past can provide them with some displayable justification for their […]

Sometime in 1976, Jean Baudrillard, the French philosopher, suggested that saturating the media with carefully selected flash news disables the concept of historicity, depth, intelligence and transparency in following daily events, and creates a hyper-reality that challenges or drowns out […]

  Alicia Loría, langagière, accro du numérique, mère d’une femme merveilleuse, grand-mère de trois fleurs printanières cherchant leurs vocations professionnelles, et être sensible à nos réalités diverses et à nos contradictions parfois inextricables, se demande si la transition énergétique et […]

As we observe that the multitudes of heritages operate in competition with each other (“mine is bigger than yours…”), we find that ramifications of this scramble for influence pervade a multitude of cultural, political and economic spheres. In what follows, […]

      You will be the midwife To whatever little I have, You will be the midwife To what little miseries I cherish You will be the mast To my lost catamaran You will be the frozen froth of […]

Pleasure disappoints, possibility never. Soren Kierkegaard     I The Europeans left with a vengeance, what I said to Lia. Now a new political atmosphere marred our lives with land masses falling apart and going into the ocean, it seemed […]

  Acts of dispossession, ethnic cleansing, genocide, discrimination, erasure of cultures and languages go back to time immemorial. But the backdrop of events of the past two decades, looming catastrophic climate crisis, Trumpism and the rise of the “alt-right” across […]

What we ask for is true justice: justice for ourselves, justice for our daughters, justice for our grand-daughters…

Sound of water intensifies, from flowing to rushing, to almost a waterfall. Transforms into the sound of motor.

I shot myself But I can’t seem to recall how it felt

By my country, they mean India. Complete strangers will ask me how to get Indian rice to be saffron-coloured.

Le coté rationnel de la matière aide à une certaine lecture.

First of all, the Nekawa people were socially, culturally and politically matriarchal.

“Nowhere in these treaties or court decisions does it say we grant you permission to take over management and control of our territory and our lives.”

Good never breaks back, and never puts much effort into the fight.

Franklin drove into the inner city from a middle-class white neighborhood outside the city limits, where his stern Christian father once sold insurance, where home was his mother’s orderly domain.

Oleg Dergachov is an internationally recognized Canadian cartoonist who has won over 130 international prizes and awards in 25 countries.

And now, I’m declaring it, I’m shouting it out: I no longer want to belong to the “dominant culture.”

A certain element of uncertainty and adventure motivates me.

The snowplow driver was motionless in his seat, seemingly in shock.

The other neighbourhood happening here, on these shared streets. So why do I now feel naked on them?

Promises for compensation are made and broken as a matter of course.

“A poisonous, crucial element of this imposed expectation is that brown people and their books should look back, into a past and a place that may never have existed.”

Muslim and Hindu villagers alike worship Jholmolia as their mother and believe her waters bring light into their lives.

Harsh, but stay with me.

    This issue is dedicated to the memory of Dr. Abby Lippman (1939-2017). “As we were preparing to go on-line with this issue, we were hit with an emotional sledgehammer.  Abby Lippman – a frequent contributor to Serai, a dear […]

    Well, this is our annual ritual, so to speak. The literature issue. And the theme is spirit. Geist. And we shall be blunt about it. For several years, we have enforced a self-discipline so that we must, at […]

  After Mark Rothko’s Untitled (Red on Red), 1969 Montreal Museum of Fine Arts, Peace Pavilion  

  Since human beings are eminently perishable, they seem to have an obsession for permanence. It is normal for people to yearn for what they do not possess or do not have a chance to possess in their lifetimes. But […]

    Artist Statement: “I want to be thoroughly used up when I die… for the harder I work, the more I live.” This is my mantra, which encapsulates the intensely and sometimes uncomfortable feelings I explore when I’m creating in […]

  Qi or Ch’i is often defined as a spiritual force that emanates from, or animates, living beings. In Chinese, Qi literally means breath. So do the words psyche in Greek and atman in Sanskrit. It is perhaps no coincidence […]

[This tribute to Art Solomon is an adaptation of a radio documentary written for Radio Canada International in 1995, a year and a half before he died. Now, twenty years after his death, his words and actions and powerful spirit […]

    Réflexions de l’artiste La photographie est entrée dans ma vie à l’adolescence et s’y est taillée une place unique. Suivant les traces de mon père, passionné de photo, je capturais tout ce que mon oeil curieux trouvait beau. […]

[NOTE: A different and shorter version of this essay, with another title, has appeared elsewhere.]   Kabari ani? How are you? Hoori. Good. I introduce Morga, an invented language, with the above phrase, in my forthcoming novel, Land for Fatimah. […]

  Musée Rodin, 1972 I saw this body I am sure of it. Flesh and bronze. In one long stare, In fixated, circular study, In love with this thoracic cage, Vertical breakline, rack Of ribs, sinews strong, Tying life and […]

  Lorsqu’on nous regarde d’en bas, ça donne l’impression que notre vie est facile. On imagine les grands espaces, la liberté. Eh bien, je dirais que la liberté n’est possible qu’à l’abri des problèmes et la seule période sans problème […]

Cayo Santa Maria (Written in Cayo Santa Maria, Cuba in February 2017, right after meditation on the beach)   Crashing wave reaching high up on to the beach, then disappearing  like a dream, like some understanding, into silent sand (a […]

Selection of aphorisms from Yahia Lababidi’s forthcoming book, Where Epics Fail: Aphorisms on Art, Morality and Spirit – Unbound UK / Penguin Random House, 2018 The danger of cynicism is getting what you believe in: nothing. In the same way that […]

  Talula   Talula, my seven-year-old visitor, meets the ghost of my husband in my kitchen. Her father lifts her onto the bar stool at the counter where I’ve spread out a festive buffet of beads. Lately, Talula has been […]

  Film Review of Mathieu Roy’s The Dispossessed (Les dépossédés)   The camera shows a woman in a field. The ground around her is rough, with a bit of greenery in the distance. She goes down into a ditch, comes […]

  Chronic Fatigue System Too tired to exercise (who gets mono in their 50s?), endorphins droop and symptoms of menopause return, drench night’s sheets. And the bones, breaking down, what that other poet said, ‘the leaking’ or ‘letting in of […]

There is nothing benevolent or beautiful about the forces of Nature mercilessly unleashed on Texas, indiscriminately flooding its precious oil refineries and destroying its population’s homes and livelihoods.

It was the shyness and shame in his voice that struck me full in the chest and had me weeping before I could even sit down.

Peuple dilué investigates the psychology of bodies untethered to borders and regions. Originally inspired by the Roma population of Sutka, Macedonia, this on-going series explores the idea of a people versus a nation and transient identities.

We are the rational and sensible ones with access to almost every piece of information over the Internet. We are intelligent, sentient beings.

So now, the poor be damned! There was now one single model, based on individual indebtedness, promoted around the world as UN policy and supported by the World Bank, the IMF and multiple governments.

Such systems are attempting to learn to recognize and identify voices, images, vocal tones and facial expressions, and develop a response that will go beyond a databank-based response system.

The South Asian Film Festival of Montréal (SAFFM), launched by the Kabir Cultural Centre in 2011, has grown year by year in scope and reach. This year it runs over two weekends: October 27-29 and November 3-5. http://www.saffm.centrekabir.com/en/   Veena […]

November: Poems by Jaspreet Singh, Bayeux Arts, July 2017 Jaspreet Singh’s new anthology of poems, November, is about memories of pain, grief, migration and mourning, following the 1984 mass murder of Sikhs across India, and the loss – thirty years […]

Fifteen years ago, I would have never even thought of this as an option. Yet here I stand, looking out of my window from my closet of an apartment, and I watch the stars.

Undoctored is an honest, well-researched, clearly written indictment of an unholy alliance that affects each and every one of us.

Having played Hitler,Nixon and a range of serial killers and social screw-ups, and Picasso, for that matter, the aura surrounding his presence in a frame shot is devilishly complete.

In this well-researched and incisive book written at breakneck speed (to match the speed of Donald Trump’s sharp turns in the White House), Klein makes it very clear that Trump’s rise to power is not an aberration, but rather the inevitable culmination of neoliberal politics in recent decades.

Who is (are?) the actual culprit(s?) in both books and in the film? Please do not consider my initial question as a provocation, but as something to be taken literally, although ironically so.

  Early Work History:   Sold sugary fruit-flavored shaved ice piraguas on busy South Bronx streets for chump change. Opened laundromat mornings to sweep mop roll down lock steely cocoon face at night. Loaded outdoor lumberyard truck with plywood sheet-rock […]

We at Montréal Serai are overwhelmed by the response to our call – a response by writers, artists, poets and performers, sharing their experiences, at times highly personal, within this new state of the world.

The 70 per cent of Canadians living in poverty are part of the “working poor:” people who are working, but don’t make enough to get by.

The current land and seascape paintings combine near-abstraction with realistic references. The portraits, initially inspired by increasing signs of intolerance towards minorities in Québec, are also set within abstraction.  I continue similar works in Toronto. Julian Samuel           […]

The precariat is growing because “there was a crude social compact in the globalisation era.”

Oleg Dergachov is an internationally recognized Canadian cartoonist who has won over 130 international prizes and awards in 25 countries.

As the woman is walking back and forth between the two poles, I try not to think about where I want to be in five years. I also try not to think about where I was five years ago.

He could hear them in the night as they shuffled and whispered, their murmurs a prelude to the shrieking that he knew would finally erupt and the wave of pain it heralded that would swallow him.

One day, I had to face the fact that there were no more options, and even borrowing on the future was no longer viable.

It is as if she had come to me in her old age, dressed in black, to tell me the dangers she faces and how she is coping with them, and as if I were meant to be her messenger.

Like worms in the soil, we love to slide and wriggle down this wonderful rectilinear cement-way of uniformity.

When we were young, some of us were very fond of the phrase, “Live dangerously until the end” (courtesy of Godard, not Nietzsche).

In Latin, precarius is something given to you as a favour by somebody else, or in other words it describes a bond of dependency.

On the face of it, Icaros: A Vision brings together two pathologies, a shaman’s developing blindness and a rich Westerner’s spreading cancer. Both the blindness and the cancer will be victorious, in spite of a healing forest.

Chew-Bose invites us to meander with her through her thoughts and live with her reflections on a wide variety of subjects touching on relationships, art, movies, music.

“War on drugs is hell,” announced Candide to his friend. “Someone’s always trying to rip off your grow-op. They better learn to cultivate their own garden if they know what’s good for them.”

Throughout Mapping Grief, Granter refers to a considerable number of artistic works that seem to have their place in her narrative as witnesses to the enduring powers of life, youth, love, urgency, innocence, and artistic timelessness.

It feels like a story at the right moment

The Stone told The Sculptor what it wanted to be.

What sustains our hearts, our minds, our bodies, our spirits, our families, our communities, our environment?

After Fukushima, it became clear to me that there was a problem with memory in Japan....

Seule et honteuse dans mon lit

In Che’s imagination, two things were inextricably linked with sustenance – freedom and sacrifice.

Well then, assuming you’ve got air you can breathe, water to drink, food to nourish you – what more do you want?

I believe that poets have a moral responsibility to speak up for those whose own voices have been suppressed or altogether silenced.

The title of The Invention of Wings is inspired by ancient black folklore which maintains that Africans were able to fly before they lost their wings when trapped into slavery.

I opened Dean Steadman’s collection hoping for something rich and flavourful, and I was not disappointed.

Set in the near future and structured into two books, the novel tells the story of a family and their fraught journey from New York City to Montréal, or, in some respects, from the dangers of dystopia to the refuge of utopia.

Perhaps the notion that indigenous people living on reservations should have the same constitutional right to clean drinking water as non-indigenous people has not really dawned on the city people!

The speakers, however, made little reference to people from different cultures, ethnic origins or language groups, with the exception of Charles Bender, a First Nation’s speaker.

Can I look down and see my ageing, knuckled hands...

Because going to Montreal seemed like going to another country.

...we need to honour these silenced and silent women and all others who are still exiled and violated and unseened.

Though he is a chronicler of injustice, misery and the need to oppose the status quo, you don’t feel weighed down while reading Nawrocki.

"The human impact on biodiversity, to put the matter as briefly as possible, is an attack on ourselves."

...they were born in a country where female foeticide – and even infanticide – is endemic.

Where there is no poverty and oppression – Where there is no prisoner of political dissent – There will be peace   Editorial note: This article was first submitted in late 2016 when peace talks were still underway in the […]

The Filipino people are like a long-lost family that I did not know I had.

"Canada has seldom been a benevolent international actor. "

A Second Coming, Canadian Migration FictionEdited by Donald F. Mulcahy, Guernica, 348 pages One of the best stories included in the twenty-four chosen by Thomas Mulcahy, editor of this intriguing anthology, has the chilling title, “Mephisto in the Land of […]

Getting into her white coat, she glanced at the list of people to whom she had given an appointment over the telephone during the weekend.

After the storm, turned my back on my lover till he sighed and left.

Thirty years ago, in November 1986, we launched our very first issue of Montréal Serai. While commemorating this important milestone, we are proud to announce that Serai’s contribution to the promotion of literary arts has been recognized through the Quebec Writers’ […]

Two stories, one set in Canada, the other in India

Article 4 is an article of the Constitution of the post-WW II Italian Republic that deals with the right of every citizen (regardless of race, sex, gender or any other bias) to obtain a reasonably paid, decent job.

Mexican filmmakers Luis Ernesto Nava and Keisdo Shimabukuro have devoted the last ten years to understanding and documenting human migrations through Mexico.

Settler Education, is a historically informed book of poetry that roams through Canada’s past, focusing on the destabilizing impact of colonialism, particularly on the indigenous population of North America, but also on European settlers.

And on the second day, God said: “When sadness falls upon thee, eat gluten and eat a lot of it.” That day she ate many pancakes.

Rafiq is a young, second-generation, Indo-Canadian Muslim being implicated in a plot to bomb public places in Toronto.

Leonard Cohen was unaffectedly honest about his warts and failings and, far from wreaking havoc, his candour revealed a rare, gentle grace and elegance that defeated ego or pretence.

In these difficult, divisive, often overwhelming times, all of us crave a clear, quiet space

The Hindu goddess Durga represents strength, motherhood and the victory of good over evil.

On the Side of the Road premiered on November 28, 2013 during an International Film Festival on “Nakba and Return.” It was the opening film at the fest, held in Tel Aviv — a radical break from the past.

A man awakens from his coma, his caregivers, family and colleagues realize that he suffers from “neglect syndrome”.

An aging movie theatre owner in a small town near Kolkata, India, is forced to send his dreams up in smoke as new technology and morality takes over (Cinemawala, Bengali feature film, 2016), while a group of talented musicians in […]

Truth be told, I’ve been neglecting my boudoir. J’ai négligé mon boudoir.

Grant Munro, affectionately known as “Grantie” to his friends, is as beguiling and entertaining as ever, edging toward his mid-nineties.

I don’t know about you, but when I think of American photographer Robert Mapplethorpe, I think of the height of his notoriety in the 1980s, when he photographed the rich and famous the way Rodin sculpted busts for his aristocratic patrons.

The images of flowers framed in dark secrets

Cinema South Asia: the human condition in all its complexity

“There is no place for the state in the bedrooms of the nation”

Ephemera is a metaphor for humans connecting with both inner and external nature.

Read Chomsky. Things are dangerous and bad things happen. But you can't let fear control you, you'll never get anything done.

India in the 1960s. We were growing up very quickly, and could not imagine the luxury of a boudoir, or even a room of one’s own, closed to others.

Boudoir (/ˈbuːd.wɑːr/; French: [bu.dwaʁ]) is a woman's private sitting room or salon in a furnished accommodation usually between the dining room and the bedroom, but can also refer to a woman's private bedroom.

“It’s hard to decipher where the fictional madness and social seclusion begin and end for both the work and life of Edgar Allan Poe, one of history’s most compelling horror writers who, it’s believed, was wracked with his own demons.“ […]

The notion of a place where women can talk among themselves, even sulk – or maybe rant, rage, and agitate – is likely foreign to those who are today engaged in doing this via the various social media that occupy so much daily time.

The story of a marriage in decline and the reasons that will inexorably lead it to its fatal conclusion

Montreal is an island in the St. Lawrence River so wherever you turn, you can see water, provided you poise yourself on rooftops, stand on top of Mount Royal or cycle your way close enough to the shore. But that […]

Canadians adopting girl children from China, and “the dark world of transplant tourism” and organ trade in that country and its links to Canada

                  Below is a poem by Nilambri Ghai that was inspired by the mural Above and below the fault line by Montréal Artist OMEN.   Nilambri lives and writes in Ottawa, but […]

How long are we going to be in denial about certain fundamental belief systems that have been put in place and are being continuously doctored and prettied up to look good?

Chomsky himself has stated on numerous occasions over the years, it is his duty as a citizen of the United States to speak out against the atrocities committed by his country on foreign shores

Why do we avoid probing the root causes behind a calamity, be it a flood, a massacre, a genocide, or severe environmental catastrophes?

...and so as not to waste time on the demagogic hysteria of fascist wall-builders and KKKers blending in with Trumpers, let us list a few things that still seem so unsettled in the discussion about what happened in Orlando.

11 Steps is a comment on the fogginess in the minds of our government as to what human chaos would really unfold if a nuclear disaster occurred....

Copyright protection beyond sixty years for any work, beyond the span of a human life, rewards greed.

Today, Peshawar is again in the hands of those who like to play with fire.

Art is a conversation with my inner self.

For the next six days, we stayed at home, obeying the curfew that gripped the city as the Israeli army stood at its doorstep.

It is an extraordinary fact that for more than three decades, France never officially acknowledged the Algerian War.

Lost in the Idomeni refugee camp, a young Syrian girl stands in the mud holding a bag of bread for her family

He tells me that the government came to decontaminate his house simply by washing the walls and the roof.

        Born in Guatemala in Central America in 1950, Roberto Godoy has been living in Montréal since 1984. An architect and anthropologist by profession, he has explored painting and printmaking since he was in his teens. Roberto […]

Dheepan is a Tamil-language film directed by French director Jacques Audiard, featuring Jesuthasan Anthonythasan as Dheepan, Kalieaswari Srinivasan as his wife Yalini, and Claudine Vinasithamby as their daughter Illayaal. However, things are not what they seem. Dheepan is in fact […]

Following the rhythm of the seasons suggests an ebb and flow: a life in harmony.

Generous Inuit throat singer, Nina Segalowitz, offers Montrealers an unforgettable experience: the joy of playing – using only their breath, voice and heart – and turning a roomful of strangers into a strange living creature that sounds like a… saw! […]

    Farida by Naïm Kattan, translated by Norman Cornett and Antonio D’Alfonso, Guernica Editions, 252 pp. Canadian novelist, essayist and critic, Naïm Kattan, has penned more than 50 works including 30 published books, and is one of the best-known francophone writers […]

For six days, Imraan and his fellow passengers talked about games and films, keeping themselves distracted from thoughts of their families and the war they had left behind.

  The desires for freedom, safety and self-determination move people across the globe, away from familiar landscapes and across geographic borders. Lack of these basic necessities has led many to Cyprus. The second largest island in the eastern Mediterranean, Cyprus […]

    Spoiler alert: If you are a devoted believer that putting Canadian “boots on the ground” in Syria will actually solve anything, you might want to skip this contribution. Let’s see if we can dissect the situation: ISIS commits […]

  The eyes of the taxi driver regard me in the mirror. “Why are you going out in this storm?” I mention a poetry reading and his thick eyebrows rise. He turns off the radio, inhales deeply and begins to […]

But the Empire is wracked with growing contradictions.

Rampant globalization, senseless war, anthropogenic climate change, unbridled technological innovation and even (why not?) old-fashioned greed are the ingredients that lead to massive destabilization of human populations.

I rarely follow a preconceived plan of action

What we are seeing is a return of chaos whenever there is a unilateral decision to close borders

a woman clutching the arm of a cloud

Together, perhaps we can recover our common spaces and our interdependent communities

Here I was, a seventy-year old Canadian artist, and yet I found the garment workers in Bangladesh eager to participate and to be part of something.

The Rohingyas become a stateless population in 1982

Hu has a lithe and beautiful body which he struts throughout the film in a fluid graceful calligraphy

  Editorial note: This is a slightly modified and edited version of an essay that appeared in the author’s personal blog.    Directed by Todd Haynes in a Cincinnati, Ohio made over to look like New York and its suburbs […]

In her recently published memoir Good as Gone, about her marriage with internationally renowned Canadian poet, the late Irving Layton, Anna Pottier boldly asserts that “modern Canadian poetry was born in Irving’s living-room” in his “tiny house” on Kildare Road […]

En route to Europe and Asia, I find graffiti everywhere on streets and train stations in Copenhagen. Many words on the graffiti look for peace in an unstable world. Others look for a world without borders or simply a place […]

    Like so many artist-creators who felt somewhat suffocated under our country’s last political regime, for me it was like a breath of fresh air when our new government was formed. Cuts to the CBC and the arts gave […]

    Le projet des cornets s’est amorcé en 2013 alors que l’artiste avait fixé sur sa bicyclette un petit atelier de sérigraphie. En déambulant dans les rues, cette installation avait pour but de sortir l’atelier des murs et de […]

      He drove me in a TATA cab through the streets of Old and New Delhi. The air un-breathable. I heard his bone voice   breaking down telling why he didn’t vote for “the man who wears a […]

Portrait of Nina Simone, heart blazing, on Jeanne Mance St., by Montréal street artist (and jazz singer) MissMe, who describes herself as “an artful vandal.” For more on MissMe, go to her website at http://www.miss-me-art.com/. (Photo by Jody Freeman) —–   Anonymous mural […]

  Municipal Court Mondays were always a low roar or outright chaos. Or maybe it was the other way around as the herd of weekend detainees was packed into the courtroom. The crimes for the most part were of a […]

  Ellipse I am the chaos of my father’s order I am the conscience of his delight I am the fantasy of his prison I am the mirror of my father’s light I am the axis of his revolution I […]

  I came looking for you on the streets of Montparnasse boulevard Arago, rue Saint-Jacques, rue Mouffetard, boulevard Raspail place de l’Odéon I came looking for a woman solitary not afraid living on coffee and fine on the money men […]

Approximately one hundred and fifty years ago, a remarkable play featuring a Muslim character who hates himself and who embodies what those in power at the time considered to be the villainous opposite of what was considered civilized, true and […]

  Nelly Arcand, Breakneck, Anvil Press, 2015, 223 pages. Translation by Jacob Homel   Nelly Arcand was a shooting star in Québec’s literary scene. Between her first novel Putain in 2001 (Whore, 2004) and her fourth and last novel Paradis, […]

  Canadian poetry The birds are quiet here. They do not shout or bang about the window openings. They are discreet and twitter from a distance screened by shrub and fence, minding their business.     Perfume All my life, […]

In the context of the present aggressive globalization, this affirmation – the heart has its reasons – is fundamental. It is not new. Already in the seventeenth century, the mathematician, philosopher, theologian and physician, Blaise Pascal, had written “The heart […]

[Melissa Bull, rue, poems, Anvil Press, 2015, 104 pages]   I was handed a copy of Melissa Bull’s debut book of poetry, rue, less than a week after a meaningful exchange with a writer friend. Under late September lamplight, we […]

    Woman in the dream of the pink house   I listen to you tell, Éloïse. Years before this dream. Perhaps it is taboo because it is ugly. We are stripping corn and talking. I stare at your bruised […]

  “She is a liar and a cheat. She is an elephant. She is my wife.” And it was the end of an almost perfect day. She thought of her beautiful daughters and her grandchildren. She counted on her fingers […]

    This is an adaptation of the presentation I gave at the launch of the English-language edition of Gabriel Nadeau-Dubois’ book, In Defiance. It was translated from the 2014 Governor General’s Literary Award winner for nonfiction, Tenir tête (Lux […]

Resilience and Triumph: Immigrant Women Tell their Stories (Second Story Press) is a collection of writings by over 45 women from diverse cultural, linguistic, religious and national backgrounds. Edited and compiled collectively by a group of seven women, it is […]

  Yves Engler’s latest book, Canada in Africa: 300 Years of Aid and Exploitation, continues this author’s relentless work not only of speaking truth to power, but also of telling Canadians the truth about themselves. Near the end of his […]

      Cope, Karin.  What We’re Doing to Stay Afloat. Pottersfield Press, 2015. 96 pages   Persephone in Canada Karin Cope, a poet, blogger, photographer, videographer, activist, and sailor works in Halifax, where she teaches, and lives several miles […]

      Imagine nomads in quilted alkhallas (long loose robes), strumming ektaras (single stringed drone guitars) in the Sufi-Baul[1] tradition on the streets of Chicoutimi, Québec! “Goley malé goley malé Pirit koro na!” Don’t mess around with love, because it […]

On October 29, hundreds of men and women packed the public square at Place des Arts in Montréal for a vigil saluting the courage of the Native women of Val d’Or who have spoken out against police abuse, and honouring […]

  “It was on a Sunday afternoon that the portraitist came to me, not in search of any ransom, but out of pure admiration. I peered through the parlour window and squinted my eyes to clear my vision of the […]

José! The Migra, José, the Migra! Hurry up, just as you are, don’t even dry yourself off! What? The Migra! Come on, butthead, hurry, there’s no time for you to dry off! They’re on their way up to Doña Cira’s […]

‘In a way of living where fear and loathing is aided and abetted, the subtleties of wonder and contemplation are in the general weight of things, lost. Within a society that is just that, a conglomeration of a big group […]

Bombardier and refried beans The Québec government managed to pull $1 billion U.S. out of the ethers to bail out Bombardier, but for the 400,000 workers who “woman” our public education system, health and social services and the public service, […]

Love by Gaspar Noé “Can you show me how tender you can be?” Electra in Love Reading philosopher George Bataille’s Eroticism can practically be an erotic experience as he outlines the discontinuity humans have come to experience and our search […]

The 11th Edition of the Montreal International Black Film Festival [Sept. 29-Oct. 4, 2015] has chosen Martin Luther King III as recipient of the 2015 Humanitarian Award. This is a fitting tribute to the son of the man who led […]

As always, when editing an issue of Montréal Serai, there is a certain FEAR bordering on near paranoia that the theme that was chosen several months ago may not produce potent and relevant pieces. And as always, when we are […]

Tech and media workers for justice, and vice versa Director and filmmaker Laura Poitras has made another film worthy of award nomination by an elite ceremony honouring cinematic achievements. This past February, said latest documentary of Poitras’, Citizenfour, won an Oscar […]

They say everything happens for a reason. That’s what they say, but what they really mean is that you only know the reason why something happened when it’s too late. Take accidents, for example. If you turn your car to […]

There is a remarkable scene in Laura Poitras’ film Citizenfour, her prize-winning documentary on whistle-blower Edward Snowden. In the film, Poitras, the investigative journalist Glenn Greenwald, and the defense and intelligence correspondent of the British newspaper The Guardian, Ewen MacAskill, […]

If there is any truth to Bruce Cockburn’s line that “the trouble with normal is it only gets worse,” the great enabler of our deteriorating normality is the country’s sterile media consensus. Media then serve as a loudspeaker for a […]

The Amadou Diallo Diptych is a memorial divided between a section of darkness and violence, chaos, and a section devoted to Diallo’s suffering. A bleeding hole drips with his blood from the unwarranted barrage of police bullets that killed him in front […]

DISCONTENT AND ITS CIVILIZATIONS. Dispatches from Lahore, New York and London. Mohsin Hamid, Penguin, 2015. Discontent and Its Civilization, the title of this collection of essays by Mohsin Hamid, is a take-off on Freud’s Civilization and its Discontents, published in […]

Her name was Jane Houde. She was half French-Canadian and half-Irish. She was born in Quebec City and raised in a convent there. My parents found her through a newspaper ad. She came to live with us and to take […]

Parallels can be drawn between the ways in which medical screening (with mammography, for instance) can lead to over-reaction and over-treatment, and the ways in which socio-political screening for criminals or alleged “terrorists” (with social profiling and predictive policing) does […]

– “I haven’t come to the store since this started. I don’t feel safe here anymore.” – “I look around me and I don’t know who I can trust. I don’t know which side they’re on.” – “All this talk […]

Siddharth, 2013, Richie Mehta’s second feature film, opened the 5th South Asian Film Festival of Montreal on September 11, 2015. This festival is an annual feature of the Kabir Centre for Arts & Culture, a Montreal-based charitable organization whose mission […]

“At your age, you should consider screening,” the obstetrician said. She gave me an earnest look from behind her desk. Six months later you were placed on my chest: raven black hair, covered in blood and softly screaming. My reward […]

For five years between 2007 and 2012, Susan Dubrofsky and I ran Poetry Plus. These events were held six times a year at the Arts Café at the corner of Esplanade and Fairmount in trendy Mile End. Each event featured […]

  The celebrated author, academic, and essayist, H. Nigel Thomas, says:“I write because reality mystifies me, and my temperament pushes me to explore it via my imagination. I know that my senses apprehend little more than the masks of reality. My […]

Medicine, Healthcare and the Raj. The Unacknowledged Legacy. By Daya Ram Varma. Three Essays Collective, 2015, Gurgaon, India.   Dr. Daya Ram Varma (1929-2015) graduated with honours from the prestigious King George Medical University in Lucknow, India. He obtained his […]

  When I wrote a poem inspired by the 1876 painting by Edgar Degas Dans le Café also known as L’Absinthe, I wasn’t aware that I was practicing a genre that originated in ancient Greece. Ekphrasis, from the Greek “ek” […]

  Ideas are cheap. It is the physical actualization of a thought or a feeling that can be torturous, laborious and demanding but when ultimately achieved, and achieved successfully, that result, can be wondrous and mystical. As Mark Twain so […]

  We regularly see, read or hear works of art only when they are completed or when they are considered finished by their creator. The following statements are from various visual artists who have previously been showcased on Montreal Serai […]

    Elena Stoodley is a Montreal-based, multidisciplinary artist most known for her sultry, jazz and rhythm and blues infused vocals and sound art performances.  I met Elena when she was hired as the sound technician for the Create Dangerously: […]

What will you be making when you make it?  I was just in Mexico City. On my “must see” list were Diego Rivera’s murals – as many as I could see in three days’ time. In hindsight, I know that […]

“I view art as a system of action, intended to change the world rather than encode symbolic propositions about it.” Alfred Gell, Art and Agency In a 2014 lecture titled “Contemporary art: considered philosophically and poetologically”  the eminent French philosopher […]

  The musical group Mosaïque was attracted and inspired by the diversity of folk music of Bengal and that led them to undertake a trip for 4 weeks in Bengal in January 2015 in order to acquaint themselves with a […]

They came from the Cordillera region in northern Philippines. Their families were grabbed of their ancestral lands. Without their own houses to live at and farmlands to till, they moved to another country to work in order to help their […]

  A note from Rana Bose, Co-Editor Montreal Serai ​I ​first met Tanya Bindra, an alumna of McGill University, during a cultural festival in the Philippines in 2011. She was there with her ​backpack full of lenses and camera gear photographing rappers […]

The Concert Pianist   Through her half-open window, she lets out a series of sweet notes, the melodious raindrops, repeats and repeats till a lively mountain stream comes to life in the opening of the concerto she has chosen to […]

‘Jahaz’ is the Punjabi word for a ship. On the 23rd of May, 1914, Nanak’s Ship, also known as Komagata Maru made it all the way to Canada.       In Japanese (a friend told me) Koma Gata stands […]

  Adele Shtern embraces her calling as a multi-disciplinary artist using traditional and digital media. She takes pleasure in discovering visually interesting sights in diverse loci. Her creative process involves opening herself to the revelation of seeing the familiar in new ways. […]

This summer 2015, from June 23-June 26, the Simon Fraser University English Department’s France Field School will be in full swing with special guest speaker Professor Norman Cornett, from Montreal, introducing the students to Paris’ international jazz culture. Professor Cornett […]

  “REMAPPING HISTORIES & EXPANDING TERRITORIES” March 7 2015- THE ARMORY ART SHOW CONFERENCE ON THE MIDDLE EAST, NORTH AFRICA, AND THE MEDITERRANEAN (MENAM)- NY  March7-8, 2015, NY   Is there only one story of  modern art? Is it not […]

  I keep trying to write a story about a woman I saw once in the metro. It was crowded, probably sometime around rush hour. All I can remember about that day was that it was raining and cold; I […]

    For seven years from 2005 to 2012, I was enrolled in ceramic sculpture courses at the Visual Arts Centre, Westmount, and at the Town of Mount Royal culture centre. I was uniquely interested in hand building pieces, not […]

  Editor’s Note: This issue of Montreal Serai — “Old Age and Youth in a Changing World” — has featured two pieces of writing by young people, Savannah Stewart’s story “Alzheimer’s” and Meghri Doumanian’s essay “War is a Wrong Kind […]

We (the editorial board) struggled with the theme for some time – Old Age and Youth in a Changing World. We tried to find the balance between keeping the theme open and general enough to allow for interpretation and limited […]

  SéKAI SéKAI is a Canadian artist for 30 years based in Montreal. His creative development began in Nova Scotia and PEI. A mixed racial background inspired him to explore the world through painting, dancing, theatre and literature. For over […]

Given the number of years that have elapsed since my birth, I could be considered an “expert” on aging, at least an experiential expert. Therefore,  it should have been  simple enough to come up with a few hundred words on […]

  I was twenty-three and living in London for the first time.  I should’ve been fulfilling my father’s dreams for me, which had me doing a qualifying teacher training year in some grimy Midlands town.  Instead I was working for […]

Author note: Written in 1993  for a wellness conference sponsored  by The Gazette, Montreal.  It was one of ten winning submissions.   Many people aspire to a ripe old age, but when they reach it, they spend most of their […]

It’s Algebra Tibe! If someone only likes you 6 out of 10 you can tutor them to like you more. Sinbad Richardson is a Montreal animator and filmmaker. He has filmed numerous shorts and also directed/created music videos for many […]

  “Wrinkles should merely indicate where the smiles have been.” ― Mark Twain   “No, that is the great fallacy: the wisdom of old men. They do not grow wise. They grow careful.” ― Ernest Hemingway, A Farewell to Arms […]

    [Montreal April 6, 2015] Greece – Ελλάς or Hellas – is a place that for many people has existed only as a sunny spot visited from some monstrous cruise ship, or perhaps a mental image of a make-believe […]

  The temperature had finally settled down to a mild -15 degrees in Ottawa when Louise Crandall and I sat down to discuss the new Supreme Court Ruling over Physician Assisted Suicide. Louise has worked for three health organizations including […]

“Audrey, you have visitors,” the nurse says to me, looking me in the eye while pointing to the door. A man stands in the doorway; he is tall, standing with his shoulders tense. A younger woman stands slightly behind him. […]

    “Don’t tell my husband I touched a white man” — our interpreter, Rajat, speedily translated the language of a woman farmer in a field in rural Rajasthan, India. She had quickly recoiled after her initial interest.  It was […]

        First there is nothing, then a sign there might be something comes like a sudden flinch a flash in the night   an economic crash the death of a friend the bolt of a deer before […]

  For as long as I can remember I have considered middle age to be fifteen years older than I am. When I was five, twenty was definitely middle-aged. At twenty, middle age clearly began at thirty-five and by the […]

American journalist and author Chris Hedges’s War is a Force that Gives us Meaning places war under three categories:  war, he says, is culture, myth, and crusade all at once. He explains that war is often a tool for the […]

  Rethinking AGING. Growing Old and Living Well in an Overtreated Society. Nortin M. Hadler, M.D., The University of North Carolina Press, 2011.    “The days of our years among them are seventy years and if, with special attributes of […]

  That Which Drowned with Narcissus Where there was once a lake Is barren land now From there can be heard the footsteps of Narcissus Even today She has gone there Looking for flowers bees and butterflies For many other […]

    En ouvrant les yeux, je vois la neige légère accumulée sur le bord de la fenêtre. Je crois qu’elle se dissiperait si je soufflais dessus, mais je n’ai pas la force de le faire. Tourner simplement la tête […]

    I am tired now. I sit at a table and write cursive. Tables are something taken for granted. They live such a long life, and as a rule, aren’t discarded for disease or wear, but for fashions sake. […]

  Song of the Sybil: fifth lesson   The Sybil foretold the end will come. The house deserted. Broken grey barn wood fence. The family beyond Curé-Clermont Street. Mount Royal foothills. Split into layers. Perennial river grass. Parched earth. Not […]

  Aging Fine lines grace your face, Your eyes, beautiful Remain so, As you age. Self-conscious, You gently turn your head. A blush, Lightens your years. I remain smitten. The nectar in your eyes Flows through, My insides. Over the […]

  REFLECTION   the tree that stands near the edge of the pond sees the deep blue abyss into which it would one day tip and fall without end       THE SKY IS FULL OF SHINING STARS   […]

    [Montreal Serai received this comment from architect Michael Fish on Roger Jochym’s LOST URBANITY and Serai editors think Fish’s remarks are sufficiently pertinent to appear as an article. We hope the debate about this project will be ongoing. […]

[The Beautiful West and the Beloved of God, Michael Springate, Guernica Editions, 2014]   Michael’s Springate’s first novel, The Beautiful West and the Beloved of God, is a powerful book set in Montreal and Cairo in the year 2008. Mahfouz […]

My mother hated her wedding dishes. These dishes, of fine china with a lavender floral pattern numbered E2904 from Henry Birks and Sons department store, had been given to her by her family when, at twenty years old, she had […]

[Holy Fools + 2 Stories,  Marianne Ackerman, Guernica Editions, 2014]     Holy Fools + 2 Stories is Marianne Ackerman’s first book of short fiction. Ackerman, who is the founder and publisher of The Rover an online magazine of art and culture […]

  For several thousand years, the dominant view of the arts and literature has been  that they imitate reality. Even in the 21st century, well after the normative idea of mimesis has been challenged, toppled, and made fun of – […]

[Mara Grey explains the origin of her interview, carried in this issue of Serai,  with Jorge Luis Borges (1899-1986) the world-famous Argentinian writer of fiction, poetry, essays and translations. In Grey’s words: “I returned to Buenos Aires in 1980, after […]

    Gods and Monsters is a series of paintings based on manipulated images of symmetrical trees. These trees appear somewhat hallucinatory –simultaneously commonplace and supernatural – both “tree” and “not tree”. I want the work to provoke viewers to […]

  I share a room in the geriatric ward With another who can speak A language everyone understands.   I feel my body shrink My mind grow in anticipation of a visit I try to hold Try to keep Try […]

  To Gertrude MacFarlane, in memory   Edith peers down the long shadowed nave of the church. There is only a sparse sprinkling of people seated close to the altar. She has heard that her former neighbor, Andrew McIntyre, spent […]

  LIT 101 The dawn, drawing itself up the brick wall, begins conjuring graffiti out of the dark that bore it.   A blocky weave of leaning letters, bursting with blood orange arrows, shock red spikes,  and vampire violet   […]

  The Situation   The McGill University Health Centre at the Glen (the MUHC) is a mega- complex on the western edge of downtown Montreal.  It is the agglomeration of a number of hospitals into one immense entity:  the Montreal […]

    (*unmâd is a term in the Bengali Language, which is used to designate a totally insane but intellectually possessed person)   I knew she was scanning me. Everywhere people are watching.  From tall bank towers, security cameras and […]

  LA LECTURE             (Quatuor de quatrains n̊ 72)   Je lisais dans mon lit des romans d’aventure, Une torche à la main, dessous la couverture. C’était une façon de sauter la clôture Dans l’univers où je fuyais par la […]

  ATWATER STATION   The man in the metro yelled hoarsely to his rush hour captives: “Ma tante Denise has a nice cottage on a lake. Do you know my aunt Denise? She has a beautiful cottage.” This man asked […]