Minister Faust's Blog, page 17

If it says "African tribe," don't repost it!

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COMEDIAN DARRYL LENOX on MF GALAXY PODCAST - Parts 1 + 2

Darryl Lenox is one of my favourite comedians, and while his routines are hilarious, I respect the intellectual weight he brings to his work that arises from his education, his socio-political perspective, and his international experience.

For twelve years we got to claim him as an African-Canadian, but he’s originally from the US and to the US he has returned. He’s spent 15 years touring and headlining comedy clubs, researching human behaviour and calibrating his comedic lasers.

But no matter where Darryl Lenox goes, he’s hilarious. He’s had his own hour-long special on Starz Network called Blind Ambition, a reference to his own serious eye problems that led him to work with the Third World Eye Care Society that provides eye exams and donated eye glasses to people in developing countries.

In addition to appearing on the Conan O’Brien Show, A&E's Evening at the Improv, BET's Comic View, The Best of Just For Laughs Comedy Festival New Year's Eve Special, and Comedy Central Jamie Foxx's Laffa Polooza, Lenox has performed at the HBO Comedy Arts Festival and the comedy festivals of Boston, Chicago, and Vancouver, and won the Seattle Comedy Competition and Best New Play at Vancouver Fringe Festival.

MF GALAXY Episodes 1 + 2: EDEN ROBINSON

Almost twenty years ago in my then-rôle as a high school English teacher, and while teaching some stories and poems by South African writers, I reflected upon the fact that for decades in apartheid South Africa, students had studied literature written only by English and Boer writers, never by actual South Africans. It struck me as perverse that a colonial minority could overwrite an existing and vibrant culture with its own narrow world-view.

And then I came to a shattering realisation: as a non-Native Canadian, I was no different than an English or Boer school teacher in South Africa. I had gone through twelve years of public school and two university degrees without having once been required to read the words of a Canadian writer—and by Canadian, I mean one whose ancestry in Canada pre-dates European conquest and Indigenous destruction.

At that moment I decided that I needed to delve into Canada’s Aboriginal literary canon. That wasn’t easy, since the people whose advice I sought—from librarians to bookstore managers—had no answers. One told me point-blank that First Nations people had no actual body of literature, since “they have an oral culture.” Eventually someone suggested I speak with a professor in the Native Studies Department at the University of Alberta. That instructor recommended an anthology edited by acclaimed author Thomas King, and a 1996 collection of short stories called Traplines by someone named Eden Robison.

Traplines stunned me. The four short stories told the harrowing experiences of urban and rural teenagers in contemporary British Columbia.

In the title story, young Will Tate is torn apart emotionally by an offer from his English teacher. Having lost her own son, she offers to adopt him, giving him an escape his abusive brother and alcoholic parents. But how can Will face betraying his own blood, despite their monstrous betrayal of him?

In the mystical, darkly-comedic “Dogs in Winter,” a teen girl protagonist struggles to escape the legacy of her mother, a serial killer who preys on men. In “Contact Sports,” a boy is knocked around like a pinball by his older cousin, who could be either his saviour, or a slick sociopath, or both.

But of all the stories, none affected me more than “Queen of the North,” an inspiring and tragic story of a sensitive, intelligent young woman who is transformed by her uncle’s decade-long sexual abuse into a violent, drug-abusing catastrophe. I loved the eloquence, intelligence and emotional intensity of the collection, and so did my students. Some, inspired by reading the stories, crafted their own excellent creative writing or made positive improvements in their lives.

Eden Robinson is a thirty-something West Coast writer of the Heisla and Heilstuk nations from Kitimat, BC. Traplines was as a New York Times Editor’s Choice and Notable Book of the Year; it also won the Winifred Holtby Prize for the best first work of fiction in the Commonwealth. Robinson’s first novel, Monkey Beach, was nominated for the Giller Prize and the Governor General’s Award of 2000.

This episode’s conversation is from deeps in the archives of the Grand Lodge of Imhotep. I spoke with Robinson way back on December 16, 2005 for a celebration of indigenous writing at the Edmonton Public Library and co-presented by the University of Alberta bookstore. 

Please nominate THE ALCHEMISTS OF KUSH for CANADA READS 2015! Deadline is Nov. 30!

Okay, folks. Please nominate THE ALCHEMISTS OF KUSH as a book to break barriers.
If TAOK even gets on the 15-longlist, that will be a major boost for me. But if it gets on the 5-shortlist, that's a career changer.

I think TAOK satisfies the meaning of a "one book to break barriers." Please support by sharing, tweeting, and of course, by nominating!
According to CBC, you need to "submit it via Twitter, Facebook, Instagram or email. Be sure to use the hashtag ‪#‎CanadaReads‬ so we can track your suggestions. Check out all the submissions here. The deadline for the public call-out is Nov. 30 at 11:59 p.m. ET."
NOTHING SAYS AMERICANS CAN'T NOMINATE CANADIAN BOOKS!
ONLY TEN DAYS LEFT TO NOMINATE!http://www.cbc.ca/…/canada-reads-2015-one-book-to-break-bar…

MF GALAXY podcast+vlog coming DECEMBER 1!

ATTENTION! In December I'll be launching my podcast/vlog MF GALAXY!



Fresh out the gate I'll have the first 8 half-hour podcasts. My guests will include (among others):
The Walking Dead director Ernest R. DickersonComedian Darryl Lenox Authors A Lee Martinez and Robert J. Sawyer Mass Effect voice actor and improv genius Mark Meer Bob the Angry Flower creator Stephen Notley Stage and MadTV madman Ronald Pederson, and Screenwriter and Concrete Park creator Tony Puryear!
The podcasts will be free, but I'm hoping folks will subscribe for $1 or $2 a month, or better yet $1 a podcast (details to follow).

Please share on FB, Twitter, etc. If you want to be alerted when the page is up, leave a note in the comments with your email address.

Activist science fiction?

Strangely enough, it hadn't occurred to me until just yesterday that all of my books (if one takes my War & Mir trilogy as a single work) are in part or in large measure about community activists.In The Coyote Kings,Hamza and Yehat run an intermittent “Coyote Camp” during summers where local (largely newcomer or second-generation Canadians) can play street hockey, launch model rockets, build trebuchets, put on plays, and do other amazing boffo stuff.
In my Kindred-winning and PKD-runner up political satire Shrinking the Heroes (originally published as From the Notebooks of Doctor Brain), the L*A*B (League of Angry Blackmen) not only supply security for their neighbourhood of Langston-Douglass, they run programmes such as “Free Breakfast for Shorties,” “Africa Medallions for Homies,” and “Free Fades, Flat-Tops, and Afro-Picks for Soul Brothers.”

In The Alchemists ofKush, Brother Moon and company run a youth organisation called the Alchemists (AKA the Street Falcons) aimed at teaching African histories, entrepreneurship, the arts, martial arts, and community organising itself to young from a wide variety of backgrounds (Somalis, Sudanese, South Sudanese, Ugandans, Rwandans, pioneer African-Canadians, and more).
In War & Mir, on the alien world of Qorodis in the country of Shr Koioon, after a bitter experience in a massive agri-gulag, Harq attempts to build an inclusive union that will stop excluding Humans.


I can’t say I’d intended to write “activist fiction” in most of those cases (although I’m delighted to find out I did) any more than I’d intended to write what academic Lisa Yaszek informed me was “domestic science fiction”—that is, novels that include a focus on life in the home. To me, writing about the home (including cooking) seems totally obvious and natural. Why do any writers exclude such basic and central aspects of life from their work?But in the case of War & Mir, a revisionist space opera and non-comedic political satire, I consciously set out to explore the work of activists, which to the best of my knowledge is almost completely absent in the canons of science fiction and fantasy.Those genres, so concerned with titanic struggles of good and evil, seem to operate on the political delusion that smashing the villains will create a better society, rather than merely creating a vacuum for more villains to fill (and leave previously-existing social ills including racial and gender supremacy in service of economic exploitation to continue reaping profits and destroying individuals, communities, and nations).I attempted to address that delusion (though briefly) in the Alchemists’ oath, which included a devotion to “replace/elevate” (a phrase I got from a Grand Puba line in Brand Nubian’s anthem “Wake Up”). One cannot make a better world by destroying evil alone. One must create good that is better adapted to the environment (or change the environment) so that evil cannot thrive and good can reproduce itself.

While there are non -SF/F classic novels dramatising activism (John Steinbeck’s The Grapes of Wrath, Ralph Ellison’s Invisible Man, Richard Wright’s Native Son, Mongane Serote’s To Every Birth Its Blood, Andre Brink’s A Dry White Season, among others), I’m curious to know other which—if any—SF/F novels address activism (Ursula LeGuin’s The Dispossessed dramatised an already existed anarchist society, rather than activists trying to change their society or create a new one)—and how they do so.So please educate me!

Minister Faust named Writer in Residence at Canada's second largest university

Canada's second largest university, the University of Alberta, has nominated me as the 2014-15 Writer in Residence.

Valued at $50,000, the cash equivalent to the Scotiabank Giller Prize, the residency entitles me to write my own work (which includes finishing my War & Mir trilogy and creating several screenplays) and to help writers (from novices to professionals) of the greater Edmonton community to advance their writing.

To the best of my knowledge, I am the first Kenyan-Canadian to be made Writer in Residence at any university or college in the world, and one of the very few African-Canadians to become a Writer in Residence at any Canadian university.

I will be hosting four literary salons called AUTHORPALOOZAS, featuring at least sixteen Alberta writers from various disciplines (novels, poetry, song lyrics, comics, video games, plays, journalism, blogs, and more), who will come on stage to read from their work and/or be interviewed by me.

I will also be vlogging, posting original interviews with acclaimed novelists such as Robert J. Sawyer and comic legend/TV literary host Rick Green, on their approaches to writing.

I'm honoured to be the Writer in Residence at my alma mater, where I earned my BA English and ADBEd English, and look forward to helping build E-Town's literary community. We already have hundreds of outstanding writers in many disciplines--I'm hoping this year we'll channel our energies so that we all benefit.

#AfricaIsNotYourSynonym

1. Africa is not a country.

2. Africa is 55 countries and 1 billion people. But if Africa *were* one country, the GDP per capita would be higher than that for India or China. See Vijay Mahajan's Africa Rising.

3. This poster grossly misrepresents the experiences of 1 billion people in 55 countries. See the world's leading multi-disciplinary, statistical survey of Safety & Rule of Law, Participation & Human Rights, Sustainable Economic Opportunity, and Human Development of Africa's 55 countries as prepared annually by the Mo Ibrahim Foundation.

4. This poster continues the standard White liberal positioning of a mythic, monolithic "Africa" as the ultimate contrast for the White techno-civilisation: as a sprawl of unrelenting misery and deprivation, and therefore a place to focus White liberal pity (which is to say, a racist illusion of superiority masquerading as compassion), rather than addressing realities of, say, water desalination, business and technology, leadership, secondary education, post-secondary education, fashion, animation, video games, the construction of the “Silicon Savannah,” Kenya’s Konza City, or any number of other stories that would be standard reporting about modern Western countries or Japan.

5. Canada and United States contain plenty of misery and deprivation specifically related to water scarcity—some of it caused by colonial racism, capitalism and racism, or climate change and capitalism. There is no need to create and distribute a racially, economically, and politically misleading image to discuss the ALS challenge or water scarcity.

Stop reposting content embodying the standard White liberal vision (i.e., racist misunderstanding) of the realities of 55 African countries and 1 billion people, and replace such material with accurate, broadly representative stories, demonstrating actual problems, yes, but also, actual everyday life which includes excellence in every sphere of human activity.

Jian Ghomeshi, tomorrow, please don't say "African music"

Today the CBC promo-dude described Beninese star Angelique Kidjo as “the undisputed queen” (I think he said “queen”) “of African music.”Wrong, wrong, wrong. And that has nothing to do with Kidjo.Kidjo is an outstanding singer with a hugely successful career many albums and tours long. She’s loved by audiences and critics across the globe.But how can someone be “queen” of something that doesn’t exist?For two decades as an Africentric radio DJ at CJSR FM88, I reminded audiences that there is no such thing as “African music” (singular), any more than there is “European music” (singular) or “Asian music” (singular). Who would ever put Johnny Rotten and Rachmaninov in the same sentence, just because they’re from the same “race”? Their musics have nothing to do with each other. Who puts the music of Japan and Lebanon together, even though they’re both Asian? No one. The musics of Senegal have nothing to with, and sound nothing like, the musics of Somalia. The musics of Tunisia and Togo, South Africa and Sudan, Mali and Malawi—they’re not only distinct from each other by country, but inside each country. So claiming any one artist could be “queen” of them (categories that can’t be compared) is absurd.
Grouping the cultural production of one billion people of 55 highly diverse countries together is profoundly misleading, although it’s typical of how most Westerners discuss anything or anyone from any of those 55 countries. It’s how they talk about our 3000+ languages (“Do you speak African?”), our cuisines (“African food”), our clothing, our religions, and our civilisations (assuming they know we have them stretching back 6000 years, including, of course, Ancient Egypt).Jian Ghomeshi, when you talk with Kidjo on Wednesday, please drop the phrase “African music,” and don’t call Kidjo its “undisputed queen.” No matter how excellent she is, she can’t be queen of something that doesn’t exist, and the claim is an insult to the thousands of other recording artists that the copy writer has never heard of from 55 countries on the world’s second-largest continent.Please be part of de-stereotyping the lives and realities and cultures of an entire “race” of nations.

Join me for the launch of my new novel, War & Mir, Vo...

Join me for the launch of my new novel, War & Mir, Volume I: Ascension, a revisionist space opera like The Phantom Menace on meth.
Corporations dominate the third world, second world, and first world.How long will it be until they control the entire solar system?
WHERE: Happy Harbour Comics, 107th Street + 104th Avenue across from MacEwan U  downtown.
WHEN: July 18 (Wednesday), 7:30 - 8:30 PM
OCCUPY THE SOLAR SYSTEM!