Movie Review - The Color Purple - Directed by Blitz Bazawule

There is so much to unpack in this powerful movie. Set in a small black community in Georgia in 1909, Celie is pregnant and living with her sister, Nettie and their father. She has had one other child. When she delivers, she is allowed to keep the baby for two days, but her father takes the newborn from her as he had her first child ‘giving them to God’. Celie never told what that meant and mourned for her babies. Nettie has an admirer who asks for her hand in marriage. Her father declines that request, but soon after he tells Celie to pack her bags. She was to marry this man. He has three children that ‘need a mother’. Celie is beaten from the first day she is there if she doesn’t jump when asked, or if this man that they call Mister, is in a foul mood or drunk. 

Nettie had remained with her father, but turns to Celie when her father touches her indecently. She is allowed to stay as long as she pulls her weight and does as she is told. One evening, while she slept, Mister tries to climb in her bed. When she fights back he picks her up and throws her out in the rain. Holding a shotgun at her, he tells her to get off his land and not return. It will be the last Celie sees of her sister for several years. 

Celie learns of a woman who is her husband’s girlfriend. Shug is a blues singer who has Mister wrapped around her little finger. Shug, soft hearted and kind, comes to their home for a visit. She is the one to tell Celie her husband’s actual name: Albert Johnson. The children grow up, the eldest son, Harpo, builds a house for a new wife. The house is connected to his childhood home by a bridge across the swamp. Harpo and Sofia's marriage is tumultous.

In the intervening years, abuse of women continues. Harpo’s wife, Sofia, is one woman who will speak up for herself. Not a gentle woman, but kind hearted, she refused to bow down to the mayor’s wife. This scene is extremely troubling. She is beaten by white men, jailed and then made to work for the mayor’s wife ‘until she was recovered' from the beating.

It is clear that the women were controlled by the men. Sofia is the first person Celie saw who fought against the control. Celie had never been able to stand up for herself, didn’t know that she could and continues to tolerate the abuse. Shug is the second to see the abuse and finally take Celie away from it. On that day, her husband yelled her “You’re poor, you’re ugly, you’re black and you’re a woman.” That from the porch of their house as she was driven to safety by Shug’s new husband, Shug and another woman. 

Because of the cruelties they faced, women supported each other when they could. This movie told their story with wonderful choreography and song. Brilliant casting, wardrobe and lighting made this a joy to watch. I’ll not give away more of this story except to say that the ending was joyful and very satisfactory.

“Everything want to be loved.”

~ Alice Walker, The Color Purple

Directed by: Blitz Bazawule

Second movie adaptation of : The Color Purple by Alice Walker

Screenplay: Marcus Gardley

Abbreviated Cast: 

Fantasia Barrino - Celie

Taraji P. Henson - Shug Avery

Halle Bailey - young Nettie Harris

Phylicia Pearl Mpasi - young Celie

Danielle Brooks - Sofia

Colman Domingo - Albert “Mister” Johnson

Ciara - adult Nettie Harris

Cory Hawkins - Harpo Johnson

Deon Cole - Alfonso

H.E.R. - Squeak

Louis Gossett, Jr. - Mister Johnson, Sr,

Jon Batiste - Grady

Movie Review: Women Talking directed by Sarah Polley

As the title suggests, this movie is a group of women talking. Not the chatter of idle gossip or the most recent fashions, but the serious debate about whether ‘to do nothing, to stay and fight or to leave’. Based on true events of horrendous serial and ongoing rape and domestic abuse in a Mennonite colony, the women of the colony knew they had to do something, or stay quiet. Throughout the movie, there were flashback scenes of the effects of the rapes and abuse. Sensitive to the audience, the actual violent acts were not part of the filming. Drugged, they never knew who or when they would be assaulted. They were given many reasons why they woke up with bruises, became infected or pregnant. Reasons of dreaming, making things up, ghosts or Satan were given for the behaviour of the men of the colony. After one such attack, one of the girls saw the face of her abuser, reported it to the colony elders. The abuser named the others and they were taken to jail - for their own protection. At least one woman was angry enough to attack one of them.

 The women discussed how they had never asked for any kind of help at all from the men.  This prompted one of the few scenes of levity in the movie when they realized that the first thing that they would ever ask of the men would be for the men to leave the colony. There were many scenes of happy children playing in the cornfields surrounding the colony.

The setting was the loft of the barn on the colony’s land. One man only was included in their deliberations: the school teacher who was there only to take the minutes of their meeting. Given the content of the movie, the gray/green/brown filter used in the cinematography was very effective in telling this disturbing and hopeful story. We do not know the outcome for the abusers, but the final scene is of a long line of carriages with children, women and belongings leaving the colony.

“Time will heal. Our freedom and safety are the ultimate goals, 

and it is men who prevent us from achieving those goals.” 

~ Women Talking

Directed by: Sarah Polley

Based on the novel: Women Talking by Miriam Toews

Writing Credits: Sarah Polley (screenplay by) and

                           Miriam Toews (screenplay by)

Abbreviated Cast:

Rooney Mara - Ona

Judith Ivey  - Agata

Emily Mitchell - Miep 

Kate Hallet - Autje 

Liv McNeil - Neitje

Claire Foy - Salom

Sheila McCarthy - Greta

Jessie Buckley - Mariche

Michelle McLeod - Mejal

Kira Guloien - Anna

Shayla Brown - Helena

Frances McDormand - Scarface Janz

Vivien Endicott Douglas - Clara

Ben Whishaw - August

August Winter - Melvin

Safe - Or Not

 

Never-ending imbalance: the feeling of the day for too many of us. When will we get back to normal? As if normal was ever a balanced state. Today, for example, it is 31 years since the tragic murder of six women at Montreal’s École Polytechnique. How normal are the lives of those families, and still for many women, since that dreadful time? 

Is normal being free to walk up to someone and greet them with a handshake or a hug? Is normal being able to just drop in on someone without wearing a mask? Is normal leaving your home, with or without your children, just to escape daily abuse? 

So many questions with one simple answer - stay where your feet are, given the situation that surrounds the world, has the world in its grip. But if your world involves abuse, take your feet to a shelter, a safe home……oh, I forgot - restrictions have compromised the availability and accessibility of these places of safety. 

I paraphrase an Edmonton physician, who related this morning, on CBC's Rosemary Barton Live: It is not the legislators that are curtailing our rights. It is the virus. This pandemic, and the resultant restrictions to protect us all, sent us all into the safety of our homes, our bubbles - except for those in abusive relationships.

It is the Covid19 virus that has us in our homes: either creatively managing our homes with jigsaw puzzles, baking bread or cookies, painting or writing, doing a lot of walking on our own or with one another, juggling kids and work at home, taking a nap whenever and wherever, or, more dangerously, being trapped, scared and lonely.  

Normalize your day if you possibly can, don’t wait for ‘it’ to become normal again. An old normal may not be a good thing. 

“She’d worn anxiety like a thick robe for 

so long that it was hard for her to take it off.”

~ Pernell Plath Meier, In Our Bones

**Authors note: Go to The Sunday Magazine for the December 06, 2020 episode on CBC Radio, to hear Piya Chattopadhyaya’s excellent interview with Pamela Cross, a feminist lawyer and legal director of Oshawa, Ontario family law support centre Luke’s Place regarding this issue.

Book Review: Starlight by Richard Wagamese

Challenging opportunities arose with either terrorized fierceness or deep, peaceful calm throughout this beautiful novel. Set in British Columbia, the novel opens on Frank Starlight polishing and closing up the home where he was raised by ‘the old man’ - his only words for a man that was like a father. Far away in an unnamed town, Emmy, and her six year old daughter, Winnie barely escape with their lives from Cadotte, a man, violent and angry at the world. While he and his friend Anderson were passed out from a night of alcohol and fighting, Emmy saw her opportunity and grabbed it with both hands. Saving her daughter from any abuse from these men fuelled her rage. Winnie, fought as desperately to protect her mother. The story that follows is the long road they travelled to get as far away as possible, with the knowledge that Cadotte would come after them. Emmy had no money to provide for her daughter or herself. Along the way they steal food and clothes, siphon gas and count on Cadotte’s old truck to carry them away. 

Frank Starlight, a well respected man in the B.C. community of Endako, was the most comfortable out on the land where words are not necessary. The land is where he goes to sink into the quietness of the land and the rhythms of the natural world. It is on his sojourns alone that he photographs wildlife in their habitat. Frank Starlight has a good friend in Eugene Roth who lives on the small farm, but has little understanding for Frank’s deep love of the land or his reticence for using back-hoes and any labour saving devices. Their relationship is an easy going one, filled with humorous repartee. Roth does most of the talking - expounding on his exploits, trials and tribulations while Starlight listens quietly. They’ve lived as two bachelors for three years and their home reflects it. A story of redemption and hope, there are changes are in the offing for all of them. Emmy and Winnie learn what it feels like to be safe and loved. Starlight and Roth learn a bit more about order in their lives. To me, this story is also about labels. The labels we give to people that stick and do not even envisage or encourage change. 

Some reviews I have read this morning, suggest that the story was ‘too slow’. I counter that such deep changes require a gradual coming together. Others suggested Starlight should not have be published. I disagree with both of these opinions. Unfinished, due to Richard Wagamese death on March 10, 2017, readers have the opportunity to imagine their own endings to this story. I found Starlight to be a lovely story, brutal, but soft and tender with the characters finding their way away from and towards the worst and the best in each other. Following the untimely ending of this story, there is ‘A Note on the Ending’ at the back of the book with the possibilities the author had in mind for the remainder of the book.

“I come to know right there that when you figure ya got nothin’, 

goin’ back and movin’ on can feel like it’s all the same direction.”

 ~ Richard Wagamese, Starlight

Title: Starlight

Copyright: 2018 Estate of Richard Allen Wagamese Gilkinson

Author: Richard Wagamese

Publisher: McClellan & Stewart

Format: Unfinished Novel

ISBN: 978-0-7710-7084-6

ebook ISBN: 978-0-7710-7085-3

Book Review - The Break by Katherena Vermette

An important book. A hard read. Family love. Strong, educated women. Generational abuse. These are some of the comments made at book group yesterday afternoon in our discussion about The Break by Métis author Katherena Vermette. The Break is all of those things and so much more. Most of it is beyond my ability to write in this review.

Katherena Vermette did not soft pedal any unpleasantness. The reader was not spared the brutality of the abuses. The incredible sadness of Lorraine (Rain) freezing to death behind a dumpster in a prairie winter after a beating is only one. When I think now of those incidents, because this is not the only one, family love and compassion for each other swaddled the broken souls to help them heal. 

The Break, an open stretch of land under tall robot like power standards, is isolated and, in winter, impassable. Stella, Rain’s daughter, lives on one side of The Break just a couple of bus rides from her family on the other side of The Break. Stella witnesses a brutal assault, but can do nothing about it except call 911. Two police officers arrive four hours later. Tommy Scott, Métis a young police officer and Christie, a senior and very jaded officer begin an investigation into the assault. Christie is not particularly enthused, but Tommy is determined to pursue the investigation. Although, these two characters are seen throughout the novel, it is not their investigation that is at the centre of this book. 

On the other side of The Break, family members are introduced - Cheryl, Louise (Lou), Paulina (Paul), and Emily (13 years old). Kookum and her daughters, grand-daughters and her great-granddaughters have close family ties with each other. They support each other throughout their lives, with the support of a close friend Rita, and her daughter, Zegwan (Ziggy - also 13 years old). Sons are raised and cherished. Love relationships are strained but love is deep despite the many difficulties. Family bonds provide the peace to gentle the violent events that rock their lives.

In counterpoint to this gentle and strong family connection and love, is the lack of family connection for one of the characters outside of the family. I’ll not give away this part of the story, only to say that compassion came with difficulty, at least for this reader. 

“The dead don’t hang on, the living do. The dead don’t have anything to hang on to. Our bodies become nothing, and we just float around the people who love us. We go back to nothing. That is all we ever were or should ever be.”

~Katherena Vermette, The Break

Title: The Break

Author: Katherena Vermette

Copyright: 2016

Format:  Soft & electronic

Paperback - ISBN-978-1-4870-0111-7

html -  ISBN-978-1-4870-0112-4

Salt Spring Island She Shed Tour 2018

So what is a She Shed? Well, most everyone knows a Man Cave is a dedicated place for the guys of this world away from the domestics of home, a place where the ‘real work’ can be done. So, She Shed’s are sheds devoted to the work that women do outside of the domestic part of life. Multimedia artworks from iron work to pottery to working with nature’s abundance in settings bucolic and lush on this lovely island in the Strait of Georgia between mainland British Columbia and Vancouver Island.

For the past 22 years, a group of women on Saltspring Island - Saltspring Women Opposed to Violence and Abuse or SWOVA - was developed in response to ‘a horrific incidence of violence against a woman and her daughter’ in the Saltspring community over 20 years ago. Since then they have been providing education, raising awareness and developing solutions to prevent violence and abuse on Saltspring Island. This She Shed Tour was this year’s fundraiser for this very important program.

A quick ferry trip in brilliant sunshine to Saltspring Island, we met with our host. For the rest of the day we were driven by said host from one She Shed to another - some of them obvious places of hard work to the more gentile and decorative. We did not get to discover each of the 14 She Sheds because of the interesting conversations we shared with the proprietors.  I’ll not be able to do this tour justice in tonight’s post, so will continue tomorrow. 

“The secret to change is to focus all of your energy 

not on fighting the old, but on building the new.”

~ Socrates

What Defines You?

What defines you?

Not your life - you.

I’m not sure there is one answer to this question introduced so clearly by Lizzie Velasquez,

a 25 year old young woman with an obvious health condition.  A victim of bullying and to some, an object,not a person, of fear as a child. She took these difficulties and in her words, created ‘a ladder’ on which to climb.

Definition suggests shape. We are all born open to the world that, fortunately for most, is not a hostile world. Unfortunately for too many, the world is a very hostile place. That opening time begins our shaping ~ learning what value we hold to the rest of the world. Then come influences of family, community, education, and employment. Achievements and losses, joys and sadnesses continue to shape us as we grow through life. More shaping is done when employment is ended, whether due to age or other circumstance. Awareness of ourselves and our world can provide us openings not dependent on a grade, or a job, or our life's emotional content.

So, as Lizzie Velasquez asked in her TED talk - What defines you?

“There’s no one defining moment that kills you or makes you.”

~ Sinbad (David Adkins, comedian)

Re-connecting Humanity

A heart torn by thoughts swaddled

in past present future

and what if 

and must do 

and no one else will help.

Finding the spot of care and logic

in a careworn and illogical life

to bring focus and calm awareness

no matter if a bit cloudy.

Communication is challenged.

Sanity, order and respectful kindness

delve into swirling unreliable thoughts

without disturbing too much of the muck.

Thoughts that should not be disturbed 

threaten to eddy into a vortex filled

with muddied voices and hum

pulling even stability inside.

A nugget of humanity glows faintly, faintly

in hearts dulled by years of abuse whether 

    alcohol or drugs, 

    physical or mental

    emotional or spiritual.....or maybe all.

“You must not lose faith in humanity. Humanity is an ocean; 

if a few drops of the ocean are dirty, the ocean does not become dirty.”

~ Mahatma Gandhi

Possibility in Small Steps

Abusing alcohol or drugs ~

the only injured parties at the party?

Extended abuse

takes the fun out of the party

at least deep inside, 

where no one else sees or feels

Abuse sneaks over the line

into addiction when

no one is looking

the world is too loud

wounds raw and tender scrape open

Body, mind and spirit split quietly apart

with liquid courage or magic powders

fortified by images of good times.

When abuse or active addiction stops

bruising and bleeding not so quietly heal.

If the world is still too loud

staying stopped almost impossible.

When abuse or active addiction stops

staying stopped becomes possible with tiny pieces of

intention, commitment and faith in the moment

learning, action and belief in each uncertain step

“There is a thin line between the impossible 

and the possible ~ that is determination.”

~ Ogwo David Emenike