Meet people from different cultures, trade ideas and dreams and nonsense with them, and come to respect them enough never to fight them, nor to let your leaders fight them in your name, be those people from Israel, Romania, Iran, Wales, Ireland, or Syria. I spoke to people from each of these countries today. They, and people representing dozens of other cultures, set up pavilion tents and stages in Edmonton's Hawrelek Park for the Heritage Festival, the biggest annual event in this city of a million people. More than 300 000 attend.
At the entrance to the Israel tent, behind a stage where Israelis danced for the public, beside a tent selling Israeli food, I met an 18-year-old man from Israel. In Edmonton for a few months to help with this festival, he told me he is from Nazareth. I diplomatically did not mention that Nazareth is in Palestine, not Israel. Indeed, all of Israel is in Palestine. When I asked him if he would do his mandatory military service soon, he said he would, said he was not worried, and said he wanted to be in combat situations, in his country or elsewhere in the world. "This Canada of yours is so big; it has so much room and so few people," he observed. He was a nice young man and I wished him well, then walked away thinking that he has a different view of land than I have, or does he? He lives in a settler colonial state, as I do, on land taken from others. In each state, the settlers want more control over the stolen land.
This was my second encounter with this young man, my first having been interrupted by a fellow visitor who pointed to a mistake on a map displayed inside the Israeli tent. I'd meant to read more of the text with the maps, especially post-1917; but instead I went to the Romanian tent. This second time, I did read the Lord Balfour, British Mandate Palestine map and blurb, after telling the young Israeli my reason to return. I quipped, "Maps are important in your country." I think of the David Rovics song "Israel Geography:"
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ujfaaD-UpqY
Romania?
Ah, you were thinking, as I was when he accosted me, that this map man was a Palestinian, Arab, or someone else from one of many places opposed to Israeli acts near and far. But he was a Romanian, showing me a mistake on a map of the Ottoman Empire, which for centuries controlled vaster land than Israel now controls.
Not all of Romania, though.
"The Ottomans never conquered all of Romania, but this map says they did," he explained. "They only conquered the south," he continued, narrating a province-by-province tale of Ottomans here, Austrians there, and Russians elsewhere, but never Romania's entire land subjugated at one time. We chatted about the Roman Empire, Romania's military support of it, the 1453 Muslim conquest of Constantinople and therefore the Roman Empire's end in the east, a millenium after the western empire fell. "Go see the maps in the Romania pavilion," he advised me.
I traipsed the kilometre to the other end of the festival site, and read my way through the Romanian history display. Sure enough, at no time in its history was all of Romania under foreign control at one time.
Iran, another country with a long, proud history, had a tent full of beautiful carpets, poetry, art objects, and clothing, including a stunning dress on a stunning woman. She let me take her photograph, after a man from Istafan, an old city in Iran, showed me a glossy book of photos of amazingly-detailed artwork on mosques and other buildings.
Next door, however, the Welsh were waiting for the Iranian stage music and dance to subside so they could re-enact, on the grass in front of their tent, jousts connected to some Welsh war, probably with the English, who had no tent this year. Neither had the Scots. Did the Welsh and Irish drive off the English, or did they vote themselves out of the Heritage Festival as they had voted themselves out of the European Union?
As the armored men milled around, medieval weapons in hand, I moseyed up to an organizer and said, "Perhaps your men should invade the Iranian pavilion and quiet the dancers and music so you can get on with your war. You're better armed." But he and his battlers patiently waited for the end of the Iranian performance. One warrior should have waited through the war because another poked him in the face with a sword, blunted but still with a pointy metal end. Can there be too much cultural authenticity? I've little proof one way or the other, for my Android battery died just after I started photographing this battle: collateral damage?
The twinkly-eyed Welsh-speaking man, 65 or so, manning a display table within the tent, was born in Swansea and seemed an encyclopedia of all things Welsh, including my Welsh last name. "Wynne means white, and it can be Gwynne or Wynne." He gave me a sheet of last names, mine the last on it, and told me that an internet search would show the density of population with that name in various times and places.
Across the park, a twinkly-eyed Irish man, 65 or so, born in Dublin but not back in 40 years, rejoiced when I told him of the peaceful country I found when I was there in 2015. As we yammered away, his table mate, a woman descended from Irish people born north of Dublin, interrupted us to get him to help detach a large lacework from the tent wall behind. Someone wanted to buy it. "You're here to sell, not talk," I ended our natterings as he leapt into service.
Natterings by people suspicious of those from far away might fade to welcome silence if xenophobes heard the Syrians drum and dance in the Centre for Newcomers, a pavilion tent that held them, and people from Togo and Barbados. This was my second visit to this tent; on my first, a Syrian sitting at a table in the tent gave me a bookmark on which he wrote my first name in Arabic.
This second visit, I sat in the shade of trees on a hillside behind the tent, eating two pakoras and a samosa from the nearby Bangladeshi tent. The back of the tent was open, covering a 3m wide circle of 8 or so chairs, on which sat Syrians, including the mother of the bookmark giver. Notice those Arabic numerals in the last sentence.
As I chewed in the shade, and Somalis gathered around me for some rendezvous they planned, and I moved out of its way, drum music and singing and dancing broke out in that small circle of Syrians.
What a joyful noise they made. These seem like people happy to be in Canada.
I thought, "How lucky Canada is, to have these lively, cultured people move to it."
We are one species in one world.
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