Another new entry today in the Verbatim series, the transcripts we provide of our Listen to This podcast. (Just a reminder that you can catch new, original interviews every other Monday—you can subscribe with any podcast listening program by grabbing the podcast rss feed, or easily subscribing through iTunes.)

In today’s interview, associate editor Natalie Samson talked with Eternia, a Canadian rapper whose music and volunteer work challenge gender-based stereotypes and injustices, including sexism in the music industry, violence against women, and rape. Eternia was in Toronto two weeks ago for the People’s Summit, the alternative gathering to the G20 leaders’ conference, where she performed for a rapturous crowd. Eternia’s newest album, At Last, a collaboration with Canadian producer MoSS, came out on June 29, 2010.

Q&A

Natalie Samson: You were involved in the People’s Summit in Toronto last weekend. Can you let me know how you got involved with that?

Eternia: To be honest with you, it was as simple as them reaching out and asking to book me. When they initially reached out I was under the assumption that it was more of a gender equity conference and then they changed the name of it. So my assumption is that they thought to reach out to me just because they were discussing gender equity issues and I’d done a little bit of work in that area, touring schools, and then also the fact that I am a woman and I do what I do—it’s kind of a nice slant on the gender equity narrative, and that alone is kind of cool for people.

Natalie Samson: I was wondering, too, what you think your role is when you get involved in these sorts of events like the People’s Summit. It’s obviously political and an activist event.

Eternia: My show is super-high-energy and it also—if you listen to my lyrics—there is a certain slant to my music as well. But it’s super, super-high-energy, super-empowering, super-integrational, super-positive. People were listening to speakers for, I don’t know, a couple hours before I went on stage. The room was clearing out when I went on stage because people had been there for so long listening to speakers. So I think a main thing of what I do—other then being the physical manifestation of a walking anti-stereotype, which is what I like to call the music that I do—it really just gives people a chance to get up, to stand up, (they had literally been sitting the whole time) put their hands up, and literally be like “Yeah!” for something that they believe in. If you look at musicians that perform at rallies and musicians that generally do that circuit, that’s what they do; they get people riled up, they get people riled up for their cause.

To me, the definition of good music is music that makes you feel. And that relates to all different areas, including music that makes you feel angry about the current state of affairs in your country ,and music that makes you feel inspired to change things that you don’t like about your political system, or globally. I don’t view myself as a political activist in any way, shape, or form, or overly involved in a lot of these issues. I kind of feel ignorant to a lot of these things that are going on—I shouldn’t say that but its true. At the same time, the music that I make is music that inspires a whole bunch of people that are not ignorant to what’s going on, that do need change, that need a soundtrack for that. I feel like at the end, when I do perform at these kind of events, its like a soundtrack for the dialogue. That’s what it is. And it gets you feeling and it gets your blood pumping, and it gets your emotions rising, and it gets you ready to do something about it.

Natalie Samson: You kind of touched upon it a little bit earlier about your involvement with Oxfam. I was wondering if you could talk a little about the work you’ve done with Plan Canada.

Eternia: This is the first time that I can recall that I’ve been directly booked and involved with Oxfam, although of course their reputation precedes them and I was really honoured. I believe that was based off the work I did with the 4 in 1 Initiative for change with Plan Canada. We toured high schools for many months, thousands of kids—over 10,000 kids—speaking about girls’ rights. We also did AIDS awareness, but specifically with Plan Canada it was about girls’ rights. That was just literally about bringing awareness about the situation of women and girls around the world and bringing it home to girls that are in grade 5 all the way to grade 12. We wrote content specifically for the tour that was educational but still entertaining at the same time for these girls so they could rock out with us and put their hands up, but that they’re also hearing things that make them think. So I think based off that and some of my other material that I have, for example my Amnesty International violence against women song that I dedicated to that cause, “Love,” stuff like that is probably what made Oxfam consider me for the gender equity summit.

Natalie Samson: Going back to the 4 in 1 initiativeve with Plan Canada, why did you get invovled with those initatives in the first place?

Eternia: I jumped at the chance to speak to people. It’s a situation I could relate to, number one. I’ve been through—I guess we all face—gender discrimination we just don’t know that we do, but I’ve been through specific things. Whether it be because I’m a woman in hip-hop, which is male dominated, or whether it be because I’m a woman growing up in this society in general,  I think other people can relate. I think other people have experienced that as well, especially young girls that I’m speaking to in these schools, and I think they need to hear from someone they might look up to as a role model or a mentor or a star, whatever they view us as, and hear what’s going on, and how to deal with it, and what to do, and how you can get involved.

Basically what I mean to say is that I’m a woman, and so on a personal level issues relating to women really impact me and affect me and I care. In the end it was one of those things where it was like. this is what I want to be doing—this is what I want to be doing more then regular rap concerts. I don’t want to fake the funk, I don’t want to speak about things that I don’t personally feel passionate about or relate to, and that is why the girls’ rights and the gender equity issues are so near and dear to my heart. And especially speaking about violence against women, instances of sexual assault or physical abuse in a woman’s life—you know the stat about one in three women will experience abuse in their lifetime, it’s that serious–stuff like that hits home for me and I can relate to it just for my own personal life story. I don’t know if that answers your question other than I relate to it, I feel it and I want other girls to know they’re not alone when they’re going through things.

Natalie Samson: I did want to touch on something that you mentioned, that you do face a lot of gender discrimination in your profession and in general in your life. I was wondering if you could speak to that a little bit more and maybe give us some examples of the barriers you’ve had to face and overcome doing the work you do.

Eternia: It’s so subtle, and that’s whats interesting: it is so prevalent and so subtle, so it’s hard to pinpoint one example. There is a lot of ego in hip-hop, I think people are hesitant to co-sign for a woman for whatever reason—generally because the statement “girls can’t rap” or “I don’t like female rappers” is not even viewed as problematic. Whereas if you were to fill in those two words with something else, like exchange rapper for guitar player and exchange female for a certain race, that would be extremely offensive. I was speaking about this last night with another interview, there is something about sexism specifically that doesn’t seem to get people up in arms or offend most people, especially in hip-hop. So its like the little things that happen all the time, little statements, little experiences, I find that often times when it comes to technical stuff, like mixing and mastering a record, my opinion’s not really taken seriously, but if I get my male manager, my male business partner, my male representative to be my mouthpiece—to open his mouth and say what I want him to say— they will listen to him. But the people that are being my mouthpiece are people that have way less experience then me. So the male who has way less experience then me is listened to over the women that’s been in the industry for 15 years.

Natalie Samson: Is that where your campaign, My Favourite Rapper Wears a Skirt, comes into play?

Eternia: By the way, that’s just one example of thousands. I don’t want you to think that’ the big example. “My Favourite Rapper Wears a Skirt”—somebody said that to me one day and something went off in my head the minute I heard that come out of his mouth. So it was really a kind of organic thing, I didn’t really sit there thinking about it. But what is awesome about the shirt is it really creates dialogue and gets people talking. So when people wear that shirt the assumptions that come out of it, like if a dude wears it it’s just funny. If a man wears my shirt other men will come up to him like, ‘what, your favourite rapper is gay, your favourite rapper is a cross-dresser.’ They still assume he’s talking about a dude, meaning they don’t even consider that he could possibly be referring to loving a female on stage.

Natalie Samson: People come up to me, even, and ask that question when I’m wearing that shirt.

Eternia: Really? That’s awesome! So not even men. I assumed that when girls wear it people would assume girl-girl but that’s just my assumption. So, yeah, exactly, even when you say my favourite rapper wears a skirt people still assume it has to be a man. You know what my next slogan may be? When I was doing the girls rights tour we were in middle schools, we were spitting all these stats at the kids, lots of stats and information while we’re performing and at the end we asked “what did you learn from the presentation?” and this one little boy puts up his hand, and he’s got to be like grade 6, and he’s like, “I learned that sometimes girls rap better than boys.” That was the highlight for me because it’s not what we taught him, but it’s so awesome that he would get that from the presentation. And not just on an ego level—its not just about me—but that is kind of what were talking about when we talk about gender equality and inequality. Most people don’t ever consider that. So that was pretty cool, that might be my next shirt: “Some Girls Rap Better Than Boys.”

Natalie Samson: It’s an interesting approach to the issue of gender equity and gender justice.

Eternia: It really felt fitting the first time we did the girls rights tour, George Nozuka was performing and so was I and so was Masia One. But the cool part was George Nozuka, he’s, you know, a man, he was doing very sensitive, soft, you know, if you saw me in heaven playing the guitar-type strumming which, you know—gender roles generally say the sensitiveve stuff, the mushy emotional stuff…you know where I’m going with this. Then the women were rocking out in the show were all high energy very—for lack of a better word—hyper-masculine in a way, you know: ego, bravado, strong. My voice alone is very strong. And so I just felt that it was so fitting, without us even stating it, it never had to be mentioned that we were doing a tour on issues of gender equity and issues on women and girls worldwide, and literally these are the roles, and it was a role reversal. I thought that was really cool, that men can be emotional and soft and women can be aggressive and hard. To be honest with you, I think girls seeing a women on stage rapping, without it having to be said, is like, okay this chick wants to be a skateboarder, or this girl wants to be, you know, maybe she wants to be a biophysicist, or whatever. We talk about the fact that guidance counsellors and people in schools will often gender-stereotype you and put you into this instead of that. Girls will put up their hands and share their stories, and so it’s really awesome that even if they don’t want to rap, they see a woman doing something normally defined as a male task or a male occupation, and I think it speaks to their lives directly.

Natalie Samson: Music: it’s obvious how candid it is and how rooted it is in your own personal experience. You bring up issues like abortion and violence against women and domestic abuse. How have you been able to do that–to go up on stage do after day and address these issues?

Eternia: It’s very freeing. There’s a song on the album—it’s the most personal I’ve ever done in my life—and it’s called “To the Future,” it deals with a lot of things I haven’t mentioned in previous songs, even though I’ve mentioned a lot of stuff. So, like, specifically relating to sexual assault and abortion as well, and my father being violent to my mom. So to answer your question, once it’s written and once it’s recorded, I don’t want to say I’ve kind of grown numb, but by the time I’m performing it on stage I’ve heard it a million times. So it’s one of those things where it’s like I put myself in the moment and I feel it but it’s not like the first time I wrote it.

What will often happen is I will write something personal and kind of devastating and I’ll cry when I write it and when I get in the studio I’ll be frustrated. The song I’m referring to now, I did in one take and it really knocked the wind out of me—like it really knocked the wind out of me. After I was done I was on the floor of the booth like “Yeah, not doing that one again.” But once I get on stage it’s freeing. It’s the most amazing feeling ever, and so it’s kind of like what a therapist would tell you to do. You need to work through your shit and you need to write it down and that’s what I do. So by the time I’m performing it I can see the impact that it has on other people, which is amazing and I don’t take that for granted, but for me it’s like I am a woman working at becoming, I guess you could say, healthy, adjusted, and whole. And a part of the process of becoming whole is writing this music. I’ve always been an open book so it’s one of those things where it’s like, “Yeah, this happened, yeah this happened, yeah this happened.” No shame. And guess what: you shouldn’t have shame either.

Natalie Samson: Have you ever faced any difficulty with any of your collaborators, or anybody in the business, for getting this message out because of the content? Because you’re talking about violence against women and these kinds of issues?

Eternia: The only thing I would say is my first album got criticized for being too personal. One of the most running critiques of It’s Called Life was, “Great album, great album, too personal.” So it’s almost like people don’t want you to go that deep, almost like it made them uncomfortable. But I can say for the most part people really relate and appreciate having someone else speak their story. What I often hear is, “You took my life and put it in your song.” Sometimes it gets really overwhelming when you’re making people aware of an issue and there are so many elements to it—it’s complicated and it’s not simple. The music that I do is very personal to me, so when I start doing it in relation to a lot of issues I kind of just feel like I’m one narrative. The only difference between me and the people I’m rapping to—for example at the Oxfam event—is that they gave me a microphone. But everyone could technically have a very moving compelling personal story that would call you to action. And that’s what it’s about: it’s change. Let’s not be satisfied with the status quo.

Ryan Walker of Torontoist captured the same event from ground level:

In a separate incident on Sunday, outside the detention centre, Global TV recorded this scene, in which an officer fires what appears to be a tear-gas pellet into a loud but peaceful demonstration, striking a young woman:

Late on Sunday, Toronto Police Services Superintendent Jeff McGuire held a press conference outside police headquarters to talk about police activities on Sunday, including an incident in which hundreds of individuals—some protesters but also many journalists, bystanders, and tourists—were boxed in by a police cordon at the corner of Queen and Spadina for hours in torrential rain. McGuire defends police actions, but is unconvincing and evasive, invokes vague “threats” that he cannot enumerate, and repeats the same talking points ad nauseam. While it’s not in the linked video, during the Q&A McGuire was asked whether the statement constituted an apology to those people; he responded with: “I cannot apologize to them and I won’t.”

Then, of course, there was the video of choice for large media outlets, the burning police car. These are the images that many outside Canada will see in relation to this weekend’s events—if they see any news coverage of it at all:

If Maclean’s was looking for someone to explain Canada’s teenage girls to their parents, Sax was a strange choice. He does have a PhD in psychology from 1980, but he primarily interprets and popularizes research rather than doing peer-reviewed work himself. Unfortunately, his interpretations are pretty controversial.

A blog called Language Log has criticized Sax for over-interpreting and distorting research on gender differences. This stands out to me because I know Language Log to be home to particularly smart take-downs of bad statistics. The New York Times also published a fairly critical profile of Sax a couple years ago.

So I shouldn’t be surprised to find Sax up to his usual tricks in this Q&A. Take his claims about self injury:

…if you look at the literature, you see that more than one in five girls is cutting herself and/or burning herself with matches. […] In a very well-executed study published in the Canadian Medical Association Journal two years ago, a demographically representative sample of young people 14 to 21 years of age was surveyed in Victoria, and there was an overall prevalence of roughly 16 percent. Although in the abstract there’s no mention of sex differences, if you pull up the tables you see that only eight percent of boys but 24 percent of girls were cutting or burning themselves.

In fact, that’s not exactly what the paper found. (You can read it here.) Sixteen percent of young people and 24 percent of girls had, at some time, injured themselves. But the way this statistic is repeated presents two problems. First, Sax implies that all self injury in these papers is cutting or burning, when in fact the authors also measured some kinds of drug and alcohol use, and other behaviours. This is an understandable memory lapse. But second, and more importantly, Sax’s statistics are for youth who had ever hurt themselves. When we look at how many youth had injured themselves more than three times, prevalence falls to six percent. (The paper doesn’t provide a gender breakdown for that smaller group.)

The difficulty here is Sax’s verb tense. The fact that he says “one in five girls is” and then later “24 percent of girls were” suggests an ongoing, long-term problem. As unpleasant as it is to imagine, I think we can accept that a large number of teenagers try out self harm, and that this is quite different from someone who injures repeatedly, over a long period of time. It is the latter scenario that Sax goes on to describe in titillating detail:

The girls themselves tell you, “I cut myself because it’s real, it’s not fake.” It’s not a cry for help: most girls don’t want adults knowing they’re cutting, which is why they cut in places we won’t see, like high up on the inner thigh. And they don’t want to kill themselves. There’s research which is quite astonishing to many people: when girls cut themselves, they are getting a release of endogenous opiates—they’re actually getting high.

This is a small misinterpretation, but it is important. A surprising result has unusual power in this sort of piece—it stops readers short, overturns their assumptions, and encourages them to reassess the rest of the article’s claims. And it’s especially disappointing coming from a magazine that just last year published a comprehensive package on how well teenagers are doing:

In light of these facts, [Reginald] Bibby [sociology at the University of Lethbridge] expects strong resistance to his findings from the very teen crisis apparatus he partially credits with all the good news. “The experts act almost annoyed when you suggest kids are actually looking a little better,” he says. Some of that blowback stems from genuine difference of opinion. But a lot grows out of popular wisdom coming out of the United States.

Unfortunately, with this piece Maclean’s has uncritically repeated that misleading popular wisdom. And from a cover this sensationalist, I think we have a right to expect more.

“I know what I wanted to tell you,” she said both times, “so-and-so died.”

The first unfortunate object of forgotten conversation was a dear old great aunt in Vancouver I hadn’t seen in a decade. The second was my childhood family doctor, whose last prescription for me was filled at least 20 years ago. My mother is the meticulous and dedicated reporter of demise in our family. She spreads the detailed news of death and disease, and these are usually the lead stories in any call from her. In this, she shares a curious simpatico with a writer of whom both she and I are fond, Michael Ondaatje.

Is there another writer anywhere who makes sickening violence and death into beauty with such regularity and skill? I hear someone shouting—perhaps wailing—Atwood!, and indeed, Peggy and Mike can be justly seen as the twin pillars of Canadian moroseness. Why bring a character’s life to a satisfying conclusion amid doting pets and darling grandchildren when you can murder, beat, maim, dismember, explode or burn them beyond recognition? But while Atwood hurts her characters as object lessons in the indifference of the universe, Ondaatje’s cruelty has the air of fetish about it. It is violence for art’s sake. His is a stunningly beautiful landscape of suffering.

In Divisadero, the reigning Governor General’s Award champion, Ondaatje cripples one character with childhood polio, has a horse kick the stuffing out of the same girl and her sister, induces a father to attack and nearly murder his daughter’s lover, and has that same daughter stab and almost dispatch the attacking father.

Later in the book, the almost-murdered lover is beaten into amnesia by some gambling colleagues and must undergo a second round of recovery and recall. As well, a literary flashback takes us through the life of a French poet who is blinded in one eye when glass shards pierce his cornea, and who later witnesses his one true love die of diphtheria. In an Ondaatje novel, not even a poet is allowed a life of quiet. Then again, this is the same writer who flung a nun from the Bloor Street viaduct, blew up a nurse with a roadside bomb and forced a lovestruck archeologist through the agonies of body-wide third-degree burns.

When we were younger, my writer friends and I made a game of Ondaatje sightings around town. Someone had spotted him in a liquor store, buying a wine that screamed of excellent taste. Another had a long, uncomfortable conversation with him at a book launch. Yet another is proud to report he used the urinal beside Ondaatje’s not once but twice in his travels. In each instance, the tellers of the tale escaped literary harm despite their proximity to this genius of personal disaster. So far, Ondaatje has not clubbed a character with a wine bottle, talked one to death or had him painfully assaulted during urination.

I note a brand-new Coach House title, Girls Fall Down by Maggie Helwig, brings potential bio-terrorism to the Toronto subway. Helwig’s characters drop to the tiled platforms in delightfully Ondaatjean style. Of course, Ondaatje began his career as a Coach House author. Is Canada’s hippest small press the source of all this pain and morbidity?

In my student days I edited and handmade a literary magazine called ink, and we printed the covers and trimmed the final books at Coach House. I did the trimming myself on their diabolical-looking industrial book cutter, an awesome machine that can straighten the edges of 20 magazines or more with one precise machine-driven cut. I never passed my fingers beneath the blade without visualizing the horrible damage it could visit upon me.

Once, deep in concentrated trimming, I was interrupted by someone standing beside me. A voice asked me to trim a pile of Brick magazine covers. As I handed back the trimmed pile, Michael Ondaatje gave me, and the deadly cutting edge, a grateful smile. I realize now I’m lucky to have escaped with my life.

November 13, 1971, The Pas, Manitoba. Four young white men drive past Helen Betty Osborne, a 19-year-old Cree girl. They call for her to get in the car and party with them. “I think I heard a yes,” one man taunts. When she refuses, the men pull her into the car and drive off.

Flip the page, to illustrated panels showing the RCMP knocking on her mother’s door, about to deliver the news of Osborne’s rape and murder. Winnipeg author David Alexander Robertson uses the advantages of a graphic novel to detail the horrific event in his book, The Life of Helen Betty Osborne.

“Her story is really close to my heart. All of us involved in it really got to know her,” Robertson says. His father comes from Norway House, the same small northern community where Osborne spent her early years.

Robertson had self-published two novels when the Helen Betty Osborne Memorial Foundation asked him to write a book about Osborne’s murder to use in schools. He came up with the idea for a graphic novel telling the story of the girl’s last days, showing her hanging out at high school with her friends and dreaming of becoming a teacher—depicting her as a person, not a victim. What’s left for discussion is the racism, sexism and indifference behind the fact that only one of the four men implicated was ever convicted, and only sixteen years after the fact. It’s a tale of sloppy police work, townfolk who wouldn’t speak up about what they knew, and official indifference to a pattern of white men sexually harassing aboriginal women and girls.

The racial tension that divided whites and aboriginals in The Pas in the 1970s has lessened, but Robertson argues his book is relevant all these years later because the problems that played a part in Osborne’s death are still very much at play. He sees a connection between Osborne and hundreds of other disappeared aboriginal women. “There are 520 murdered and missing aboriginal women in Canada, half of them in this decade. By telling Helen Betty Osborne’s story to a wider audience, it’s bringing a new awareness to the issue. We’re seeing the awareness build, but it’s a long slow build.”

Robertson’s book is just the latest in a string of non-fiction Canadian graphic novels to surface. Many landmark works are personal projects, like Skim by Mariko and Jillian Tamaki—which, like Robertson’s book, sketches the life of a teenage girl. Others, like Chester Brown’s footnoted history Louis Riel: A Comic-Strip Biography or Guy Delisle’s Burma Chronicles take a more documentary approach. These home-grown examples follow in the footsteps of global successes like Joe Sacco’s pointillist reportage on the Bosnian War with The Fixer, Marjane Satrapi’s memoir of an Iranian childhood in Persepolis, and Art Spiegelman’s Pulitzer Prize-winning holocaust memoir, Maus.

Unlike these creators, Robertson writes the script but leaves the art to others. For Osborne, illustrator Madison Blackstone applied a range of graphic techniques, including full-colour paintings and black and white drawings. Some panels mesh drawings and photographs, underlining that this project is based on a real woman; the photos show the flowers and cigarette lighters that continue to be placed on Osborne’s grave and memorial, the hold she has on people’s memory in a town that cannot forget her death.

“I love the way that graphic novels offer different ways to engage people, from elementary school to people in their sixties,” Robertson says. For his next project, he’s working on a comic book series called 7 Generations, a historical work of fiction focused on the Plains Cree area. “It’s all about the impact of history, how can we address that and move on.”

Graphic novels are long past being comic relief. Robertson’s new book joins a growing tradition that expands our idea of what to expect from the un-funny pages.

Jane Creba.

On Tuesday, the sixth and final remaining manslaughter charge in the Boxing Day shootings that killed 15-year-old Jane Creba and wounded several others in 2005 ended in acquittal. Two others, who actually fired weapons, had previously been convicted of second degree murder. G.C., whose full name is withheld because he was a minor at the time of the shootings, was, like the five manslaughter defendants acquitted before him, being charged with having a “common unlawful purpose” with the shooters, despite not carrying any firearms. With good reason, the Crown is now 0 for 6 in these manslaughter prosecutions.

Though, like many observers, I lamented the outsized attention these shootings received, I can understand why they caused such a stir. This was, after all, a shooting with indiscriminate victims, in a major urban center, during a national holiday, and the details of Creba’s death are both heartbreaking and infuriating. Nevertheless, the Boxing Day shootings didn’t warrant anything like the hysteria that ensued. Despite being part of a larger wave of gun violence in Toronto, incidents like this were hardly commonplace, and other shootings that killed bystanders received a small fraction of the attention because their victims failed to elicit the same degree of nationwide sympathy. It may not immediately seem like it, but Tuesday’s acquittal amounts to a small measure of justice, and a necessary pushback against the culture of panic.

G.C. was a gang member who freely chose to associate with Creba’s killers; that he is, or at least was, an unsavoury character seems quite clear. Also clear is that the Crown overreached, almost certainly in response to the public outcry. “A person cannot be guilty of manslaughter merely because he was present when his companions committed murder,” explained Justice Anne Molloy. “He must have some actual connection to the wrongdoing.” How depressing that this need even be said.

Though our media and politicians have yet to fully succumb to — or perhaps just failed to master — the lurid exploitation of tragedy that’s so common in the United States, we aren’t immune to its effects. The overwrought response to Creba’s murder — from public hysteria, to media fulminations, to governmental overreach — isn’t all that different from responses to terrorism, in which extremely rare violent acts warp our perspectives to the point where we lose sight of anything beyond our primal reactions. It’s hard to tell if G.C.’s flippant post-acquittal behaviour showed a lack of remorse, or merely understandable relief. In either case, he never should have been tried, and his release is a welcome rebuke to a troublesome trend.

Nav Purewal is a Toronto-based freelance writer. Follow him on Twitter here.

No Refuge: The Crisis of Refugee Militarization in Africa, edited by Robert Muggah.

Among Africa’s considerable problems is the pressing issue of refugees and internally displaced persons (IDPs). Armed conflicts and violence on the continent has effectively made it the foremost home of forced migrants, with the United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees (UNHCR) estimating that 3.5 million of the world’s 9.2 million refugees, and 13 of the 25 million IDPs, are in Africa. These numbers are disheartening in themselves but, put alongside the constant militarization of these displaced people, it’s a monumental problem of great urgency.

A book edited by Robert Muggah, No Refuge: The Crisis of Refugee Militarization in Africa, presents articles by a number of writers and researchers on the arming and recruitment into militias of refugees and IDPs. The authors address the ways in which displaced persons waiting longingly in their unprotected refugee camps are at considerable risk of militia recruitment, prolonging whatever conflict may be ravaging the country and region in question. The risks are high and the strategies combating them are, unfortunately, often inadequate. There are, however, as the book notes in various places, new ideas. New alliances and collaborations with a host of NGOs has established the political will to fight harder to protect these people from an ugly fate. And yet this may not be enough.

One current development the book fails to address is the phenomenon of climate refugees. Climate change and the environmental degradation it’s produced — the droughts, deforestation, crop failure, among others — has forced many Africans to seek new homes. In practical terms these people are refugees but, sadly, and inaccurately, the UNHCR does not recognize them as such — not just yet, at least. This may explain the omission in the book. It may also point to an even grimmer future than initially expected. In addition to those displaced by armed conflicts, we will now see many displaced by climate change, thereby increasing the stock of people susceptible to militarization. And, because climate change and the dwindling resources it produces will inevitably lead to conflicts, we might expect an even greater number of refugees — and militarization.

Hopefully the editor of this book and its writers will take the importance of climate change to the issue of refugees, IDPs, and militarization more seriously in the near future.It would help fill out what is an important contribution to a pressing human rights issue.

The almost-bare shelves of Toronto's Pages Bookstore in its final days. Daniel Tencer writes about the plight of independent booksellers in the November-December issue of This Magazine.

The November-December 2009 issue of This Magazine is now snaking its way through the postal system, and subscribers should find it in their mailboxes any day now. We expect it to be available on newsstands next week, probably. (Remember, subscribers always get the magazine early, and you can too.) We’ll start posting articles from the issue online next week. We suggest subscribing to our RSS feed to ensure you never miss a new article going online, following us on Twitter or becoming a fan on Facebook for updates, new articles and other sweet, sweet This action.

This issue is our annual mega-hyper-awesome edition (64 pages instead of 48!), as we bring you a special supplement with the winners of the 2009 Great Canadian Literary Hunt.The winners this year were:

On the cover this month is a special package of articles we call Legalize Everything! — five writers tackle five things that should be legalized, and the activists who are fighting to make that a reality. Katie Addleman witnesses the madness of the drug trade, and the misbegotten “war on drugs” that criminalizes the mentally ill, funnels billions of black-market dollars into the pockets of narcoterrorists, and never actually reduces drug use. Tim Falconer asks our politicians to legalize physician-assisted suicide and allow Canadians to die on their own terms. Jordan Heath Rawlings meets the artists who believe that online music sharing may actually be the future of their industry, not its end. Laura Kusisto says criminalizing hate speech erodes Canadian democracy and offers no meaningful protection for minorities. And Rosemary Counter hunts down the outlaw milk farmer who wants all Canadians to have the right to enjoy unpasteurized milk, even if he has to go all the way to the supreme court to do it.

Elsewhere in the magazine, Meena Nallainathan surveys the state of Canada’s Tamil community following the defeat of the Liberation Tigers of Tamil Eelam last spring, and meets four Tamil activists who may hold some answers for rebuilding a Sri Lankan nation tormented by decades of civil war.

All that, plus James Loney on the Canadian government’s attitudes towards its citizens trapped abroad; Bruce M. Hicks on what Canada’s new Mexican and Czech visa restrictions are really about; Paul McLaughlin interviews B.C.’s Prince of Pot, Marc Emery, on the eve of his American incarceration; Dorothy Woodend on a new crop of documentaries that dissect the workings of our capitalist world; Darryl Whetter gives his picks for the must-reads of the first decade of the 21st century; Navneet Alang warns that when it comes to online charity, sometimes clicking isn’t enough; Lisa Charleyboy profiles Nadya Kwandibens and her photographic exploration of the urban Aboriginal experience, “Concrete Indians”; Aaron Cain sends a postcard from San Salvador, after a chilling meeting with some right-wing politicians on the verge of a losing election; and Jen Gerson ranks Canada’s political leaders on their Facebook and Twitter savvy.

PLUS: Daniel Tencer on the plight of independent bookstores; Sukaina Hirji on Vancouver’s Insite safe injection clinic; Lindsay Kneteman on Alberta’s Democratic Renewal Project; Melissa Wilson on getting the flu shot; Graham F. Scott on Canada’s losing war in Afghanistan; Jorge Antonio Vallejos on a remembrance campaign for Canada’s missing Aboriginal women; Jennifer Moore on an Ecuadorian village that’s suing the Toronto Stock Exchange; Cameron Tulk on Night, a new play about Canada’s far north; Andrea Grassi reviews Dr. Bonnie Henry’s Soap and Water & Common Sense; and Ellen Russell on Canadian workers’ shrinking wages.

The current issue of This features Andrew Webster’s profile of Canada’s independent videogame scene, which came to mind recently when I stumbled across Lose/Lose, a video-game/conceptual-art-project that adds some real risk to the normally consequence-free world of blowing up aliens. When you play Lose/Lose, the alien attackers are stand-ins for actual files on your computer. When you blow them up, those files are deleted. If the aliens blow you up, the game deletes itself and you have to download it again. I didn’t play it, because, well, that’s not really the point. It’s a thought experiment.

The game’s creator, Zach Gage, explains the concept:

Although touching aliens will cause the player to lose the game, and killing aliens awards points, the aliens will never actually fire at the player. This calls into question the player’s mission, which is never explicitly stated, only hinted at through classic game mechanics. Is the player supposed to be an aggressor? Or merely an observer, traversing through a dangerous land?

Why do we assume that because we are given a weapon and awarded for using it, that doing so is right?

That’s a pretty explicit question, and a politically charged one—the kind that videogames have traditionally avoided.

As an art form, games seem to remain ideologically inert in comparison to other media. Partly that’s a function of the cost of developing them. When you spend millions building a blockbuster game, you can’t afford to turn it into a searing commentary on morality in pop culture; stuff just has to blow up real good. That’s true of film and music too, other high-capital undertakings that can’t afford to alienate the audience. But in those fields, independent, aggressively avant-garde projects still flourish on the margins. With video games, even the tiny indie producers seldom seem to venture into serious commentary on social, political, or economic issues. It’s all “dance dance” and no “revolution.” There’s the “serious games” genre, but those seem more like educational games, and less focused on commentary.

Does anyone have suggestions for video games (any platform) that have real political content? Who is the Brecht of X-Box? The Godard of GameBoy? The Breillat of Wii? Suggest them in the comments section below or email them to editor at this magazine dot ca.

Should we be telling bigots to just shut up? Creative Commons photo by Flickr user Bronclune.

A provision governing hate speech in Canada is under the microscope this week, after a tribunal of the Canadian Human Rights Commission concluded that it violates the right to freedom of expression guaranteed in the Charter of Rights and Freedoms. This body doesn’t have the power to strike down Section 13(1) of the Human Rights Act, but the tribunal’s reluctance to apply the section against freedomsite.org webmaster Marc Lemire has set an interesting precedent and kicked up renewed debate over the right to free speech.

Queer people being one of the groups that anti-hate speech laws are supposed to protect, the outcome of this debate could have consequences for LGBT advocacy organizations. Queer activists are divided on the subject of hate speech. Some believe that the kind of homophobic and racist rhetoric that appears on websites like Marc Lemire’s contributes to an unsafe environment for the groups it targets, and should be proscribed. Others, wary of censorship, are willing to let the haters say whatever they like and hope that in the process they expose themselves as irrational and crazy.

This has tended to be the approach of LGBT equality campaigners Egale Canada. In 2005, they refused to endorse a complaint before the Alberta Human Rights Commission against conservative pastor Stephen Boissoin, the author of a letter to the Red Deer Advocate newspaper denouncing the “homosexual agenda.” Egale’s Executive Director said at the time that the organization wanted Boissoin’s assertions “aired, debated and subjected to public scrutiny.”

On the face of it, the director’s statement sits a little uneasily with Egale’s ongoing campaign against “Murder Music,” Jamaican dancehall music that features violently homophobic lyrics. A letter Egale sent to HMV and iTunes asking them to cease sales of music by particular dancehall artists last year made specific reference to the Section 13 provision against hate speech.

Clearly, there are cases where silencing homophobic commentators only serves to elevate them. But there are other cases where homophobic speech can contribute to violence against queer people, and where it seems to have genuinely vicious consequences.

Section 13(1) doesn’t require that hate speech include a call for violence, only that it be “likely to expose a person or persons [of a certain protected group] to hatred or contempt,” which is a pretty fuzzy line. Increasingly there are people, both liberal and conservative, who do not believe the Human Rights Commissions are best qualified to decide what sort of speech crosses that line. Partly, this is because the HRCs seem to think everything does: not one person accused of violating this fuzzy provision has yet been acquitted at the first round of hearings.

Section 13(1) is not the only provision that protects queer people and other minority groups from hate speech. Sections 318 and 319 of the Criminal Code (to which Egale’s Stop Murder Music campaign has also made reference) prohibit public incitements to hatred or violence against protected groups. The only thing distinguishing Section 13(1) is a lower standard of proof, and the fact that lodging a Human Rights complaint is free.

It’s not clear that the mounting convictions under Section 13(1) and the associated penalties are actually doing us any good. While there’s something satisfying about fining someone for spreading bile on the internet, doing so does not actually alter people’s hateful convictions — it just pushes them underground. Or worse, it makes loud indignant martyrs out of the people who hold those convictions.

Are Maclean’s sorry for publishing an article declaring that Muslims were going to breed Western civilization out of existence, for which they were issued an ultimately unsuccessful Human Rights complaint? Not one bit: they’re mad as hell and they won’t shut up about it. Ditto Ezra Levant, whose magazine The Western Standard was the subject of a Human Rights complaint for publishing the infamous Danish cartoons, and who is now one of the country’s most vocal opponents of the Human Rights Commissions.

Breaking down homophobia, racism and religious intolerance takes time and education — the last of which might be a more efficient use of government money than the current human rights apparatus. But ultimately, the Human Rights Commission’s biggest cost might be that it silences our enemies — whom we would be far better off knowing.