Flag-waving
Post#10: Ellen Fairclough, K’naan, Julian Bonder, Donald Tarlton, George Elliott Clarke.
Ellen Fairclough. Federal Minister. (22 August 2004, National Archives, Ottawa.) I’ve had zero time for archival research since starting with the National Capital Commission in January. Skimming Cabinet minutes to trace the evolution from Dominion Day to Canada Day. It was Ellen Fairclough, Secretary of State, and Canada’s first female Cabinet Minister, who initiated the annual July 1st program on Parliament Hill in 1958. For a few days during that victorious winter the Chief was away and she became the first woman Acting Prime Minister.
It would surprise many that it was Conservative Mrs. Fairclough, a chartered accountant, who convinced fellow ministers that “the time had come for the government to rectify a neglect and make it a practice to observe annually the anniversary of Confederation on Parliament Hill.” The royal 21-gun salute fired from Nepean Point was to be accompanied by Parliament’s carillon, a band concert, and fireworks “if they were not too costly.”
... (23 August 2004, Ottawa.) A planning exercise with capital events staff today: I remind them of Minister Fairclough and also conjure up French Orientalist Ernest Renan’s What is a Nation? to explain why the NCC is a cultural agency.
Highly-capable and practical, my theory-averse employees’ eyes narrow as they weigh his 19th century notion that the “soul” of a nation depends on a “daily plebiscite.” Government depends on consent, he believed, but also on forgetfulness, even a tacit acceptance of “historical error.” Citizens must “remember-to-forget” what is unreconcilable to a nation’s narrative.
Canada Day’s potentially uncontrollable masses—half-a-million strong, roaming freely in Ottawa’s core area—are a litmus test of the state’s ‘legitimation’. Brows furrow again. I remark that the State’s legitimacy is unstable: that’s why we’re here, friends, that’s why we have capital events. For Renan, such events lodge in the nation’s contested myth-symbol complex to defer collective violence rather than incite it.
Renan witnessed revolutions but did not live to see the global diasporic population movement that would complicate his ethnic-based nation state. Today’s multicultural states are, perforce, security states. Cultural policies counterbalance that ineluctable reality.
I wrap up the history lesson. If there is an insight worth retaining about ‘capital events’ it is this: the world-system of nation states, imperfect as that may be, is infinitely preferable to domination by an empire.
K’naan. Poet, musician. (2 April 2009, Providence.) Five and half hours riding the train to Providence from Washington; business coach, quiet as a library. A brush with Martin Sheen, healthy and glowing at 68, ambling up the aisle to converse with a man in the seat ahead. Chatting with us, too; perhaps coveting our picnic of Irish cheddar and scones. We ask about certain film roles; he exchanges amiably, in no hurry to move on. I notice a penny lying where he was standing. Providence. Tonight, scouting K’naan at the Lupo Heartbreak Hotel. (2 April 2009, Amtrak.)
...Here for the National Council on Public History. In the evening Léa and I seek out the Lupo to hear Ethiopian-Canadian hip-hop artist K’naan. I wear a toque. The old variety theatre has its seats cleared out, there’s a loud bar at the back. Not even half the crowd is listening. K’naan stops the music.
Dragging a wooden chair centre stage, he sits on it backwards, legs wrapped around its spindled back. He gazes impassively from under a wide-brimmed fedora at the boisterous Rhode Islanders. Gradually, the young partiers settle down, an awkwardness ensues. Now we hear just the clinking of empty glasses behind the long foot-railed bar. The rapper states softly that either we’re going to be quiet or else he’s leaving.
Likely the Mogadishu-born poet doesn’t know how his assertion of artistic authority tonight intersects with Providence’s painful reconsideration of its vexed past. Tomorrow the public history conference will focus on how this New England port formed the north-west corner in the Atlantic slave-trade triangle. Everyone’s gathered now near the stage. He’s counting in his new single, “Wavin’ Flag.”
When I get older, I will be stronger
They’ll call me freedom, just like a wavin’ flag
And then it goes back...
As I’d expected, K’naan’s danceable multi-purpose anthem is a perfect fit for Canada Day on Parliament Hill. It lifts up hope in people, but conserves a certain ambivalence, too, withholding any automatic consent to being governed.
Look how they treat us, make us believers
We fight their battles, then they deceive us
Afterwards I ask if he’d like to play the Hill. He says he’ll do it if he’s allowed to speak a few words.
“Sure,” I nod. “What do you want to say?”
“July 1st is Canada Day and Somalia Day, too. I’d just tell everyone that.”
Julian Bonder. Architect. (3 April 2009, Providence.) Today, on a conference panel on commemorations, I’m discussing Washington’s National Mall and Ottawa’s Parliament Hill as spaces of commemoration and dissent. Architect Julian Bonder speaks with great acuity about the intellectual challenges of commemorating slavery’s abolition. He and Krzysztof Wodiczko are creating a memorial in Nantes, proposing to use the tidal movement of the lower Loire to create an exhibit space that is fully accessible only at low water.
In their scheme slave-ship timbers and bulkheads are suggested on its river-facing side, while the sloped land embankment bears texts and imagery telling the harrowing story of this corner of the Atlantic slavery triangle.
Fraught with practical challenges, their design entails complex planning permissions to achieve its concept so rich in symbolism. I find brilliant their notion of experiencing the memorial as if inside a ship’s hold, a spatially-exact lieu de mémoire, with the tidal wash cyclically renewing and opening it to a fresh potential.
Donald Tarlton. Concert Promoter. (April 2009, Montreal.) At Donald K. Donald’s HQ on the Plateau, producer Donald Tarlton grudgingly accedes to “Wavin’ Flag” but maintains that K’naan should open the show instead of closing it out into the fireworks. There are music-biz undercurrents here, but Donald has a point that Sarah McLachlan should take the headliner slot.
Man on elevator. (30 June 2009, Ottawa.) I don’t know the featureless suited man in an open-necked shirt in the NCC’s elevator. He congratulates me on the Canada Day program, mentioning his visit to Parliament Hill with some out-of-towners to watch the technical run-through.
“We waited for K’naan, but he was stoned out of his mind,” he blurts out for all to hear. “Couldn’t even get his song started.”
It wasn’t true. I had been on stage with K’naan at the top of that rehearsal.
As always, he’d been a little cool, lucid, detached, not unfriendly. We’d waited for his DJ to resolve an eight-bar anomaly between the underlying track and the house band’s sequencer. That glitch kept throwing off K’naan’s vocal entry on a couple of tries. Standing on the steep arc of steps fronting the stage we’d conversed about his most recent recordings for a new album.
“You’re mistaken, sir,” I reply, before the elevator opens. “He wasn’t stoned.”
George Elliott Clarke. Poet. (January 2020, Ottawa.) Archiving the leather-bound guestbooks I had circulated backstage each year at Canada Day and other capital events I’m leafing through entries starting in 2004, my first of seven years as executive producer. Hundreds of signatures, joyous messages of gratitude, funny doodles, high spirits, blended solitudes, love of country.
George Elliott Clarke’s Martin-Luther-King-like delivery of a bespoke Canada Day poem to tens of thousands of people on the Hill. You could have heard a pin drop. Queen Victoria enters on a camel, George’s imagination gathers everyone with infectious humour and a great heart.
Feist took a few minutes on June 30, 2007, to consider Canadian patriotism, writing, “We wave flags when it’s fun, appropriate and not all year round. I ♡ and am appropriately proud of Canada. ♡ Feist
In 2008, Blue Rodeo has a hundred thousand people arm-in-arm swaying, singing “and if we’re lost/then we are lost together.” Busting with emotion, notwithstanding Greg Keelor’s verse of caution: “So much controlled by so few/Stumbling from one disaster to another.” Jim Cuddy writes in the book: “Great day, happy birth!”
In 2009, K’naan pens: “Happy Canada Day AND Somalia Day!” Later in the book, he provides an unofficial poet laureate’s afterthought for policy-makers:
I think that the capital city of a country should change every once in a while, and whichever city that has given up the governmental city title, would be given the arts capital of the country.
So then Ottawa would wash over its atmosphere from politics and disbelieve, with poetry and dreams. K’naan, the dusty foot philosopher
"For Renan, such events lodge in the nation's contested myth-symbol complex to defer collective violence rather than incite it." Intentionally or not, that formulation resonates with the ideas of Eric Gans, for whom all cultural representation functions as the deferral of violence. --