Monthly Archives: August 2018

Arts, Canada, History, Scotland

Fallen idol: Canadians tear down statue of Scots founder

SIR JOHN A MACDONALD

HE was the revered founding father of the Canadian nation.

Coming from humble beginnings in Scotland, he would go on to bring together the British Colonies under one rule.

But now a statue of politician Sir John A Macdonald has been torn down by protesters over his treatment of indigenous tribes.

Macdonald was Canada’s first and one of the country’s most highly regarded Prime Ministers, his family having emigrated in 1820 to what is today Ontario.

As well as being Prime Minister for 19 years, the Glasgow-born politician was a dominant figure in the confederation, which brought together the various British colonies such as Nova Scotia to establish the collective new nation of Canada.

But his treatment of indigenous tribes, specifically the children of the Esquimalt and Songhees tribes, has caused a Canadian city to pull down his statue.

The Mayor of Victoria, the capital of British Columbia, has divided the Canadian nation over the move.

Mayor Lisa helps said: “We do not propose to erase history but rather to take the time through the process of truth-telling and reconciliation as part of the Witness Reconciliation Program to tell this complex and painful chapter of Canadian history in a thoughtful way.”

The statue which was removed for storage within the last few days has seen protesters both for and against its removal airing their views.

Those in favour of keeping the statue claim that Mayor Helps is trying to rewrite history with the removal of the monument.

One protester remarked: “Mayor Lisa Helps, in a final act of cowardice on this issue, is removing the statue under cover of darkness.”

Another said: “If you want to see what a traitor looks like here it is. Lisa Helps, Mayor of Victoria, is taking down [the] statue of Sir John A Macdonald to protect the feelings of Indians.”

The statue is to be replaced with a plaque which reads: “In 2017, the City of Victoria began a journey of Truth and Reconciliation with the Lekwungen peoples, the Songhees nd Esquimalt Nations, on whose territories the city stands.”

Macdonald was the architect of the Indian residential school system. The schools were part of a system that is “best described as a cultural genocide” according to a report by the board which is overseeing the reconciliation work with the indigenous inhabitants.

The schools would separate children from their families in an attempt to suppress their culture.

Mayor Helps said: “John A Macdonald was a key architect of the Indian Residential School system.

“In 1879 he said, ‘When the school is on the reserve, the child lives with its parents, who are savages, and though he may learn to read and write, his habits and training mode of thought are Indian. He is simply a savage who can read and write.

“It has been impressed upon myself that Indian children should be withdrawn as much as possible from the parental influence’.”

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Arts, Films

Film Review: The Guardians

TRAGEDY ON THE FRENCH HOME FRONT

Sowing tension: ‘Land girls’ Francine (Iris Bry) and Hortense (Nathalie Baye) work the fields of the Massif Central.

THE story of France’s land girls during the First World War is told with patience and painterly finesse in this softly virtuosic period drama from Xavier Beauvois (Of Gods and Men), based on a 1924 novel by Ernest Perochon. The place is the pastoral folds and plains of the Limousin in the Massif Central, the year 1915, the mood tense but perseverant.

The region’s menfolk are gone, swallowed up by the front some 400 miles to the north-east. So it falls to the women to till the soil and gather the crops – women like 20-year-old orphan Francine (screen newcomer Iris Bry), who arrives at the door of stoic, pewter-haired farmer’s widow Hortense (Nathalie Baye) on a 12-month contract, ready to do her bit.

The war itself is rarely glimpsed, but always invisibly present, through both the landscape’s eerie half-emptiness and the water-torture drip of death notices announced in church, as Beauvois’s camera watches the faces of the mourners.

When Hortense’s son Georges (Cyril Descours) comes home on leave, a seam of sexual tension is struck through the daily routine: Georges is at least informally betrothed to young Marguerite (Mathilde Viseux), but he and Francine strike up a close relationship, and the two correspond by letter when he returns to active duties.

Hortense’s daughter Solange (played by Baye’s real daughter, Laura Smet) is already married, but her husband Clovis (Olivier Rabourdin) has been embittered by the conflict – a far cry from the handsome American GIs now roving around the landscape.

Beauvois’s vision of the period is totally convincing, and his depiction of hardscrabble farm life rings with a quiet vibrancy – a slow-burn story of tragedy and betrayal takes shape, but some of the best moments here are when the film just watches Hortense, Francine and Solange go about their work, and scenes in which charcoal is made in a mossy forest kiln and pats of golden butter are slapped into shape in the pantry look like magical rites.

Period detail feels truthful thanks to its particular way of looking: cinematographer Caroline Champetier’s compositions look like canvassers by Daubigny, Corot and Millet, capturing the essence of a moment so vividly you can almost smell the morning mist.

This is a rich, fulfilling film that rolls along with the bittersweet turn of the seasons, and makes century-old rhythms of living engrossing and fresh.

 

The Guardians (15 cert)

Verdict: Endearingly rich and moving

★★★★

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Asia, Books, Britain, China, History

Book Review: Imperial Twilight

DARK TRUTH OF THE OPIUM WARS

THE Opium War began in 1839 in which the British and Chinese faced one another. It was a one-sided affair: The Royal Navy was the most powerful military force in the world, while the Chinese possessed weaponry that was centuries out of date.

The Chinese were reduced to desperate measures. One commander hatched a plan to strap fireworks or pyrotechnics to the backs of monkeys and catapult the poor primates onto the British ships in the hope that they would blow up their powder magazines. In the event, nobody could get close enough to launch the monkey bombs at the enemy.

The war was the end result of a decades-long, often fractious relationship between China and Britain, characterised by misunderstandings and ignorance on both sides.

Eighty years earlier, in 1759, there was only one British national, James Flint, who knew how to speak and write in Chinese. His attempt to present a petition to the Chinese emperor on behalf of the East India Company ended with Flint imprisoned for three years and the man who had taught him Chinese decapitated.

In 1793, Lord Macartney arrived in Beijing, bearing gifts from King George III including telescopes, a planetarium and a hot air balloon. The Emperor announced that they were “good enough to amuse children”. Macartney left Beijing having achieved little.

It was trade that finally brought the two nations together, but there were, unfortunately, two kinds.

One consisted of legal commodities such as cotton, silks and tea. The other was in opium, which the East India Company smuggled from India into China, where demand was high.

The two countries had very different attitudes to opium. In Britain, the drug was legal and sold by apothecaries and tobacconists. There was even a tonic for teething babies called Mother Bailey’s Quieting Syrup.

But China’s growing addiction problem was devastating its cities. Opium was illegal and punishments for using it grew even harsher.

The war was precipitated by the Imperial commissioner Lin Zexu, who confiscated vast amounts of the drug and threw it in the sea. (He wrote a prayer to the god of the sea apologising for his defilement of the waters.)

Charles Elliot, the chief superintendent of the British in Canton, sent a furious dispatch to the British Foreign Secretary, Lord Palmerston, demanding military action. Some months later Elliot got what he wanted.

The Opium War was not the British Empire’s finest hour. The Times newspaper described it as “nothing less than an attempt, by open violence, to force upon a foreign country the purchase of a deadly poison”.

But the twilight of Stephen Platt’s title was not that of Britain’s empire. It was China that was in decline – and worse was to come. Now that China is once again one of the world’s great powers, knowing the history of its relationship with the West becomes ever more important. Platt’s book makes a scholarly, but enjoyable, contribution to that knowledge.

– Imperial Twilight by Stephen Platt is published by Atlantic for £25

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