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Arts/Review

WOMEN OF SMOKE. By Marjorie
Agosin. Translated by Janice Molloy.
Williams-Wallace Publishers, 1989.
$12.95, paper. At the People’s Co-op
Bookstore.

In general, dictatorships instill in a
woman a feeling of belonging; they wel-
come her as a reproducer of the great
human specie. Nevertheless, the woman
who creates words and not just children
does so in defiance of such governments.

— Marjorie Agosin

Two years ago I had the chance to
interview Rigoberta Menchu, a Mayan
Indian who has committed herself to the
liberation of Guatemala from oppres-
sion. She has seen her father, her broth-
ers and her mother killed, and in some
cases tortured, by those she opposes.

That someone can go through such
hell and remain, at least on the surface, a
warm and sensitive person imbued with
humour, struck me as much as the hor-
rors she had witnessed. It was a testim-
ony to her strength of character,
springing from some deep spiritual
source.

I have never fully comprehended how
the courage and defiance that Rigoberta
had could be nourished in the face of
such darkness. The book Women of
Smoke perhaps provides the answer.

A collection of essays by Marjorie
Agosin, originally from Chile and a pro-
fessor of Spanish literature in Boston,
Women of Smoke explores the experien-
ces of Latin American women who have
refused to be silenced and have taken up
a pen as one would take up a
rapier — stabbing at the heart of fas-
cism.

Rigoberta is one of the women whose
experiences are chronicled by Agosin.
Another is Alicia Portney, who was
thrown into the dungeons of the Argen-
tinean junta’s prisons along with thou-
sands of others who “disappeared.”

Alicia survived and her book of her
time in prison, The Little School, is a
testament to those who did not survive.
It is a cry against forgetting, as Agosin in
her essay notes: “. .. The final appendix is
more chilling than any_literary mani-
festo, because here Portney talks of peo-
ple who existed, babies born in prison
that were taken away by the same jailers
who helped them to be born .... We
almost hear the steps of Brujo taking the

Book honours Latin
women of courage

RIGOBERTA | MENCHU

prisoners to the baths. We learn to hear ~

the screams of torture at night, when
Alicia says they will not convert her into
an animal.”

Agosin’s essays are more poetic than
they are studious. This is not a book
restricted to, or addressed at, the stifled
corridors of literary academia. It is book
of emotions, one that tries to penetrate
the soul and the source of strength of
Latin American women who have
refused to be mute before the patriarchal
pillars of censorship — whether it comes
from the overt oppression of the right-
wing or the covert oppression of male
“progressives” who feel that political
change is led by men.

Another essay tells of Frida Kahlo, the
great Hispanic artist who, despite her
talents, is known more for having lived
with Diego Rivera and Leon Trotsky
than for anything she ever painted.

It is a moving essay about a woman
who in her illness faced death every day
yet persevered and through her art
demanded the right to create and to be
seen: “Kahlo’s pictorial contribution not
only resides in her majestic technique
and balance of colours and forms, but
also in the narratives of her life that
reflect the history of women. Finally, she
dared to speak with an unequalled clarity
about miscarriages, fetuses and uncon-
sumed lives. Frida Kahlo gives us life,
because she was born dying and created
dying. She created a mode of painting
that, by focusing on the artist herself,
teaches us to examine ourselves.”

Women of Smoke is more than a trib-
ute to Latin American women who have
refused to be censored — it a reminder
that in the face of injustice, silence is a
weapon of oppression.

— Paul Ogresko

Whitman enlivens, but
Beautiful Dreamers
suffers blandness

BEAUTIFUL DREAMERS. Starring Colm
Feore, Wendel Meldrum, Rip Torn. Written
and directed by John Kent-Harrison. Tele-
film Canada with the Ontario Film Devel-
opment Corp. and the National Film Board.
At Famous Players theatres.

Pretty boring lot, those Canadians. All
that sitting around in starched collars dis-
cussing safe subjects and playing cricket on
the green. A repressed, transplanted British
culture afflicted by “‘a secret, silent loathing
and despair,” as Walt Whitman might put
It.

People like that could use a little foreign
influence to get the old juices of SPOQUEY
flowing.

Maybe that’s the theme of Beautiful
Dreamers, a dramatization of the experien-
ces of Dr. R.M. Bucke when he became
superintendent of the London Asylum for
the Insane in London, Ont. in 1880. Or is
this film about challenging a medieval style
of treatment for the mentally impaired?

It could be abouf both, but somehow this
film concerning the meeting and subsequent
friendship between Bucke and Walt Whit-
man, America’s celebrated poet of natural-
ness and non-conformity, never quite finds
its focus.

Beautiful Dreamers starts out well. After
the opening credits roll the scene crystallizes
into wooden slats through which we see a
man, his face contorted in private agony.
The camera pans back to show a wooden
cage wheeled through dimly lighted corri-
dors. The man within is lifted out and
placed on a restraining bed, his hands
encased in leather gloves affixed to cables
attached to the ceiling.

Welcome to mental health care as prac-
ticed in the 1880s. Newly appointed superin-
tendent Bucke (Colm Feore) views the
scene with apprehension, but can only tell
the patient, weakly, “I guess it’s for your
own good.”

But Bucke has his own ideas. He believes
the path to alleviating mental distress is
through appealing to the patients’ feelings.
Attending a conference in Philadelphia,
Bucke is shocked to find the same hideous
methods — electroshock therapy, the ex-
traction of women’s ovaries — are revered
in the U.S. Angrily, he tells the assembled
doctors his paper on the human nervous
system would be wasted on them, and
stomps out of the conference hall.

Correction: We erred the other week
when we indicated the events of Central
America Week were sponsored solely by
the Canada-Honduras Information and
Support Association (CHISA). In fact,
CHISA was only one of several co-
sponsors which also included the Gua-
temala Human Rights Commission, the
Vancouver Salvador Refugee Association
and several other organizations. Our

apologies.
SR Tae

Concerts: Canada’s premier cowpoke
balladeer — and long-time folkie for that
matter — Ian Tyson plays the Vancouver
East Cultural Centre for four nights next
month. The concerts aren’t until May 27-
30, but since May 27 is already sold out, we
felt it best to get the word out fast. Perfor-
mances begin at 8 p.m. Phone 254-9578 to
reserve. Co-sponsored by the Cultch and
the Vancouver Folk Music Festival.

Also in concert at the centre is Rory
McLeod, British topical songwriter, on
Monday, April 9, 8 p.m. Tickets are $12,

Radio birthday bash

phone 254-9578.

Meanwhile the Rogue Folk Club pres-
ents Canada’s “neo-celtic greats,” Tama-
rack at the W.I.S.E. Hall, Saturday, April
7, 8:30 p.m. Tickets $9, $6 members.

Vancouver’s Co-op Radio has been
marking its 15th anniversary with the Big
Bash birthday celebration this month.
Topping that off is a fundraising concert at
The Commodore on Friday, April 27,9 p.m.
Feaxtured are Canadian artists, including
Bim, Ferron, Stephen Fearing Band, Shari
Ulrich, Bruce Miller and several others.
Tickets are $18 advance (Black Swan
records, Highlife records), or $20 at the
door.

* * *

Cheap vinyl and tape are offered by the
Vancouver Folk Music Festival’s Festival
Records. Recordings include several Latin

performers, notably Nicaragua’s Luis
Enrique Mejia Godoy and Mancotal,
Grupo Igni Tawanka, and Cuba’s Silvio
Rodriguez. LPs, not available in all for-
mats (check carefully) run $6 or $7, or
three for $16. Phone 879-2931.

* * *

Movies: The Vancouver East Cinema
presents Greek director Theo Angelopou-
los’ latest film, Landscape in the Mist on
the week of Friday April 6-Thursday, April
12, 7:30 and 9:30 p.m.

* * *

Tube: A dramatization of the life of
Soviet writer Boris Pasternak, shot on
location in the USSR, is featured on Seat-
tles KCTS public TV. Pasternak airs
Monday, April 9, 9 p.m. and Thursday,
April 12, 3 a.m.

Knowledge Network presents, on Equi-

ox, “Spy Tech,” an examination of the
satellites, computers and other hardware,
comprising the world’s high-tech espion-
age systems, on Wednesday, April 4, 9 p.m.

10 « Pacific Tribune, April 2, 1990

ae

One spectator views this scene with
obvious approval. Following the doctot
outside, the poet Walt Whitman (Rip Torn,
hidden behind whitmanesque long white
hair and beard) introduces himself and con
vinces Bucke to accompany him to examine
the poet’s mentally impaired brother at the
family home in Camden, N.J.

The trip is more an education for Bucke,_ :

however. He sees how Whitman effectively
treats his unfortunate brother with love,
and learns, under the persuasion of the
warm and caring poet, to overcome self
deprecation at his own handicap: one foot is
toeless, the result of a childhood attack of
frostbite, which forces Bucke to walk witha —
leg brace.

Bucke’s transformation is noting short
of miraculous. When his wife and daughte
greet him at the train station, they meet
unshaven, grinning man who has shed hi
confining suit and tie, who kisses his wife
full on the mouth and introduces the family _
to their new house guest. Whitman h
come to Canada to help Bucke institute
new program at the asylum.

American actor Torn plays the famed
author of Leaves of Grass effectively, cap-
turing the straightforward, almost}decep-
tively simple honesty of: the’ man who
opposed early manifestations of U.S. impe-
rialism like the Spanish-American War.
Beautiful Dreamers works best in the
Whitman scenes, because he is such a neces-
sary antidote to the affliction of tight-
assedness. Reciting his poetry to a Sunday
gathering or bathing naked in a southern
Ontario quarry pond, Whitman is an Amer-
ican import that means us no harm and can
even do us some good.

This movie scores some points too on the
theme of sexism. A farm wife, raving and
attired in the tattered remains of her wed-
ding dress, is brought to the asylum. Her
“cure” consists of slaps in the face with wet
towels administered by a zealous psychia
trist of the old order.

But it doesn’t take much for the audience

to diagnose the cause of the malaise. The |
woman has been worked from dawn to |

dusk by an insensitive husband who views
his wife as part of the chattels.

On the same tack the film makes cursory
explorations into the life of quiet despera
tion suffered by Bucke’s wife Jesse (Wendel,
Meldrum). She is confined, as surely as by |
her corset, by a straight-laced moral code |
that demands decorum and submissiveness.
Slipping into alcoholism, Jesse is told thai
her problems stem from her woman’s anat
omy.

These scenes don’t work, however, partl
because Meldrum sleepwalks through thi
role of Jesse and because the film get
trapped in its own depictions of the stiflint
social world of 19th-century middle-clas
Ontario. Repressed its characters may bé

but if there is to be any hope they cai
transcend what Whitman calls the “secret }
silent loathing and despair,” there must beé .
spark of passion behind the manneret
facade to work with.

In Beautiful Dreamers’ costumed draws}
ing room scenes, we never see it. It’s as
Whitman’s challenge to conventionality, hi
impassioned plea to people to let their inhi
bitions go and live life to the fullest, fails t
move the filmmakers themselves, whose tot
frequently timid examinations of societ!
and madness make the alleged nation

blandness seem an historical heritage.
— Dan Keetot