Guess Who’s Coming to Dinner?

Hush, my baby, baby, don’t you cry.
Mommas gonna make all of your nightmares come true.
Mommas gonna put all of her fears into you.
Mommas gonna keep you right here under her wing.
-Pink Floyd, Mother

The Cannibal of Rotenberg was a quiet and sensitive fellow who urges those who fantasize about eating their schoolmates to get help before it’s too late.

The “amiable” military man, Armin Meiwes, born in 1961, lived with his beloved mother, who regularly beat him in public as a child. She accompanied him on his dates and even attended troops outings with the grown lad. Later, he worked as a computer programmer, and stayed with Mom in a big house near Kassel, Germany.

He kept a shrine to his mother after she passed away at 77, laying a mannequin in her bed to simulate her sleeping presence. He liked to wear her clothing and mimic her higher-pitched voice, so as to not feel too lonely. He was devastated by her death, and kept the house arranged exactly as she had.

Still, it was only after her death that he was finally free to look for the kind of love that dares not speak its name: “Gay male seeks hunks 18-30 to slaughter.”

With a special butchery equipped with everything needed for a romantic lover’s tryst- an oven, meat hooks, and trough drains- dude was ready for dinner.

the holding pen

Not your average cannibal, the killing itself was a necessary evil. Unlike most flesh eaters, for whom the hunting is the main thrill and the supper symbolic of their conquest, Armin, ever polite, needed a willing victim. Without it, his fantasy fell…er, flaccid.

While blood and guts were no deterrent, the mild-manner Kraut insisted on consensual cannibalism. His partner had to desire the death deeply, giving himself freely, the ultimate act of surrender. Armin had had this fantasy since he was around eight years old, he said, desiring a handsome brother who understood him and teamed up with him emotionally against the suffocations of Ma Meiwes. Then, he would consume his brother, so that they would always be a part of one another, one flesh.

Amazingly, this sick savage, ever Mr. Congeniality in the courtroom, initially avoided being charged for the murder of Bernd Juergen Brandes, one of over 200 who answered the ad. Though poor Bernd’s body parts- those that were not eaten- were found buried throughout the Meiwes’ yard, there was more than enough evidence to prove he had willingly sacrificed himself to the erotic surrender of death. It might be convenient for the killer to use this elaborate explanation, but Bernd had dropped some stuff off at his lawyer’s on the way to his hot date, documents that later turned out to be his consenting will.

The unlikely couple shared a romantic evening, then the dinner began: simply sever Bernd’s penis, flambé with garlic, and serve. They enjoyed the German sausage meal together, and then Armin prepared for the main course, of which he alone could partake- Bernd’s life.

the happy couple

The date was captured on video, showing Bernd’s arousal and consent, and making a lovely souvenir for Armin to rewind over and over again.

The process was slow, and because the killing itself was the hardest hurdle, Armin didn’t really want to take a life but have it given- so Bernd bled to death over ten hours, while Armin waited patiently, reading some Star Trek pulp novels. Ultimately, he had to stab his dinner date in the throat, because the torture was going on for too long.

Armin then filleted his friend and popped him in the freezer with some frozen pizzas. He didn’t want to waste anything, so he even tried to make bone meal flour. But those pesky parts were numerous, and teeth and bones eventually had to be buried in the yard.
Sadly, the food supplies began to run low after some time and Armin reposted his personal ad, looking for another special someone, seeing as his dream date was dead. There were only fifteen pounds of meat lover’s pizza left in the freezer, so what’s a hungry man to do?

the house of horror

What happened then prevented another round of carnage- at least until around 2010, when Armin looked forward to being released after serving his eight year manslaughter sentence. (Cannibalism is not technically illegal in Germany.) An Austrian chap answered the ad- thinking it was some kind of a joke. Upon finding out that he had a real date with the Grim Reaper, he notified the authorities, and the excavation of Meiwes’ yard and home began.

While this man with the morbid sense of humour was able to steer clear of the severe queer, he was not in any real danger: turns out Armin had a wide range of dinner dates in his slaughterhouse. Several backed out of the fantasy at the last moment, and the gentle giant respected this totally.

There was Andreas, who “wanted me to pick him up in a cattle truck and slaughter him like a pig,” Armin told the court. Sadly, the chemistry just wasn’t there for him.

Another, the biggest loser, was turned down despite being desperate for a beheading. “He was too fat,” Armin stated.

Still another, Dirk, wanted to play court, complete with death sentence. But when push came to shove, he changed his mind, and the pair headed out to amicably watch Ocean’s Eleven and then call it a night.

Still another was just too wild for Armin. “He wanted me to hammer his body down with nails and pins while he was whipped to death. I found that a bit weird.”

German authorities estimate that there are close to ten thousand living Germans with the desire to eat others or be eaten themselves.

Thankfully for those future dinner dates, the conviction was overturned and Meiwes’ was later sentenced to life in jail. He is a model prisoner, supporting the Green Party passionately, and helping police solve cannibal murder cases when he can be of any assistance at all.

He is also ardently spiritual, actively attending the prison church. Perhaps it is the Last Supper that appeals most to him: he says he is deeply comforted today by the spirit of Bernd, living through him. Still, he regrets the death, and wishes Bernd had committed suicide instead of begging to be killed.

And in addition to his regular church attendance, he is an impassioned earth advocate who decries the environmental havoc and the suffering conditions of factory farmed animals. He is now a vegetarian.

Visit writer Lorette C. Luzajic at www.thegirlcanwrite.net.

The Life and Death of Benjamin Chee Chee 1944-1977

The serene, spare elegance of Ojibway painter Benjamin Chee Chee was probably my first consciousness of art.

I babysat the neighbour kids, amazingly named the Friends, and loved going to their house, which was free of the clutter that defined our home. The clarity and breathing room there was a safe haven from the manic pace I came from. Mom was a compulsive hoarder, and the closest thing we had to art were Old Testament felt storyboards and macaroni fridge magnets. While there were countless wonderful things about my own home, there was also much chaos. The Friend family had selective, neatly laid out objects. I felt safe there. And it was the minimalist lines of Chee Chee’s bird paintings that mesmerized me most. I stared at their artful flight for hours after the kids went to bed. Of course, I knew then very little of art or of Indians or even Benjamin Chee Chee’s name, but those stunning paintings stayed in my mind’s eye. I forever associated peaceful serenity with the Temagami artist’s monochromatic and linear style.

But the handsome young native’s life and imagination was anything but serene. Rather, Benjamin was an orphan, a drifter, an alcoholic with a raging temper, in and out of trouble, and in and out of jail. He abused drugs as well, until he saw an acquaintance overdose and die. He burned himself with cigarettes. He was 32 at the end of his short story.

He was also at the height of his fame, and galleries were selling out every showing. He sometimes received rush commissions for ten or more works in order to stock public demand. And he had recently fulfilled his 20-year desire to find his mother, reunited with her at last. This search had consumed much of his life, but the reunion was perhaps disappointing. Both were glad, but veritable strangers. Josephine was a recovering alcoholic, happy to see her son, but she had little to offer him. A few months afterward, Benny was arrested for public drunkenness for the last time. He fashioned a noose from his clothing and slumped against the bars of his cell, dying in hospital three days later.

Chee Chee was born in northern Ontario’s Temagami in 1944, in the cabin of “Angele,” a woman who was the first wife of the naturalist and native poseur, Grey Owl. His name was Kenneth Thomas Chee Chee, and it was Angele who added “Benjamin.” His early years were spent on the Bear Island Indian Reserve. He never knew his father, who died while gathering firewood when his truck crashed through the ice to his freezing grave.

Mom Josephine struggled to survive her grief and support her family. She had no education and her only work experience was as a cleaning lady. She earned about 30 bucks a month as a widow, not nearly enough to support her child. Benjamin was often left with friends while Mom went out to work. By early adolescence, he did not even know where his mother was. And while the tall and good-looking kid had a witty and outgoing persona, he maintained few real friendships. He joked around to get over his shyness. He was sent to juvenile detention, where like countless other native children, he was abused. The boy took to booze early on, preferring the buzz to fleeting human relationships. It was impossible to trust anyone. He later had one serious relationship with a woman, Yvette, toward whom he was very kind, but he was violent toward her when he was drinking and so the affair didn’t last.

Although Chee Chee was drinking from his early teens, he had another deeper interest: drawing. No one was around to recognize or encourage the drifter’s considerable talent, but the boy took some comfort in sketching and occasionally expressed his desire to be an artist.

His immense gift was evident much later to a lawyer named Frederick Brown, whom Chee Chee met at a party in Montreal. Brown introduced him to other artists and helped him find a job in a warehouse. But the lawyer saw that in addition to general disruptive behaviour under the influence of alcohol, Chee Chee exhibited a great deal of hatred toward whites. While it is absolutely true that the authorities were harsher with Chee Chee and other Aboriginal Canadians in detention, and that poverty and racism were grim realities from the start, it was white people who recognized and boosted Chee Chee’s art career.

In the last four years of his life, he was valued as an artist and was on the verge of becoming very famous. Chee Chee had no formal training in art. Other native Canadian Woodland-school artists were painting in the Norval Morisseau tradition- symbolic native legends in a very beautiful and popular style. But Chee Chee preferred to be known on his own, and his sparse, elongated wildlife merged contemporary minimalism with his own ideas of Ojibway art, creating a style unique to him. Benny sold a considerable number of works during his brief career: they sold for $200 or so per print- or even per original- and now fetch upwards of ten grand each. It could be surmised that his suicide has made certain collectors and art world figures quite wealthy.

Indeed, Al Evans, a retired professor from the University of Waterloo, blames Chee Chee’s tragedy on whites like himself, and his book, Chee Chee: a Study of Aboriginal Suicide contains most of the very limited information we know of Benny’s life. He speculates in his fascinating text on the redemptive power of art, and generally champions Chee Chee, interpreting all of his flaws and violent outrages as the unavoidable side effects of a bad childhood. It is undeniable that Chee Chee is a victim, and undeniable that most native Canadians have suffered countless abuses and racisms that have devalued their heritage and contribution. It is true that a man with no roots and nothing in way of stability had little to cling to even when he achieved recognition, success, and reunion. His lawyer friend Frederick Brown said that in the artist’s last days, he was filled with incredible self-loathing and tormented by isolation, rejections, and darkness. Not even art could assuage the hopelessness and meaninglessness he experienced.

Evans quotes Chee Chee telling an interviewer about his artistic hope. “I wanted to be my own man. I wanted to develop a style that was so much my own that anyone looking at a painting by me would say at once, even if the work was unsigned, ‘Now that was done by Benjamin Chee Chee.’”

Indeed, as a young lady first addressing my own madness and my own inclinations toward creativity as both a writer and an artist, I spent long hours looking at those prints, and in my head. I made up legends about the native group who painted them. Naïve to art or folklore, I assumed the various prints were a ‘style’ and that Chee Chee was one member, kind of like the Group of Seven of which I would later learn, or the Woodland painters. I found some books of Indian legends at the library and read about the Great Spirit and Quebecois mythology and east coast native mythology like Glooskap. I made up stories to go with the paintings, stories of deep serenity and elegance and clean, harmonious living with wildlife. I was inventing my own ‘noble savage’ ideology to take me away from the cluttered chaos and upheaval of my own personal narrative. I meditated on the clarity and serenity of Chee Chee’s loons, breathing in the perceived calm. It was the first conscious healing I received from art. That my impressions and research were crude and naïve is forgivable- I was only eleven years old.

Though Chee Chee’s work was known for its linear grace, he himself was known as a man who fluctuated wildly between gregarious joking and drunken brutality. I’m not the only one who read into his work- critics, patrons, and other various art people also tended to over-interpret his work. Curator Elizabeth McLuhan saw ‘visual longing for a family he never had.’ Friends also saw representations in the wildlife of that romanticized family. But Chee Chee himself said in a calendar, “My drawings of birds and animals have no symbolic meaning from the past. To me they are creatures of the present and I draw them because I like their clean lines and beautiful shapes.”

That may be, but the grace that Chee Chee never knew somehow materialized in those beautiful, mysterious wildlife abstractions. Little Lorette never tired of studying the prints after my charges had fallen asleep and the dishes were done. It was the Friend house, too, that brought me solace- every troubled little girl needs a place to go, and my early responsibilities, along with the serenity of an alternate life, gave meaning and direction to any adolescent upheaval I was experiencing.

But things change, and the Friend family moved away, and I never went back into that very special house next door. The spirit of the walls, emptied of the artist’s grace, held an alternate legacy for the new tenants. In an absolutely haunting irony, one I wouldn’t connect until much later when as an adult I heard of Chee Chee’s demise, the new neighbour’s child hung himself in the basement of that house, eternally suspended in seventeen.

Visit writer Lorette C. Luzajic at www.thegirlcanwrite.net.

Please order her amazing poetry collection, The Astronaut’s Wife.

Available at:

http://www.chapters.indigo.ca/books/Astronauts-Wife-Poems-Eros-Thanatos-Lorette-C-Luzajic/9781847287335-item.html

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Saved Alone: the trials of Horatio Spafford, 1828-1888

Few souls are blessed with tranquil dignity and grace through tribulation. Fewer still can reach out to others to bless and comfort complete strangers through their unique message, even though they themselves went off their rocker.

Horatio Spafford’s name may not ring a bell, but you don’t have to be the churchgoing type to be familiar with the hymn he wrote more than 130 years ago. The strains of “It is Well With my Soul” are nearly as beloved as “Amazing Grace.”

When peace like a river attendeth my way,
When sorrows like sea billows roll;
Whatever my lot Thou hast taught me to say,
“It is well, it is well with my soul!”

The stories of the great hymns have much in common with the stories of the great blues- perhaps a little less drinking and smoking, but the themes of overcoming heartache and defeat are extraordinary. Those who were not raised in the church, and those who may just not have been paying attention because too much church was so damn dull and irrelevant, missed a few heartbreaking and heroic stories. Horatio Spafford’s tale is one of them…though most churches only told the half up until the hymn was written…

Often I reflect with heavy sorrow on the tidings of my unique story, but for all that I’ve grieved, my sob story is kind of like Happy Days compared to poor Horatio’s. It started out all right- Horatio was a successful lawyer and real estate investor, son of a prominent government man of the same name. He fell in love with Anna Larssen, but she was only 15 years old, so he financed the remainder of her education and waited until she was ‘old enough’ to marry at 18. They were a very spiritual Christian family, blessed with a large brood, and many properties.

It was a double whammy in the early 1870s for the Spafford family, when they lost their four-year-old Horatio to scarlet fever, and the Great Fire in Chicago took most of their investments. (Some sources put the loss of their son at a later date.) But the Spaffords took it in stride. There were thousands of people left homeless, and so they wanted to share God’s love with those less fortunate. They worked tirelessly to help assist those who were more devastated by the fire, left impoverished and hungry and alone. Several years of this grueling work left Anna exhausted, and the family decided that a trip to Europe would do them well. Of course, they planned to do a bit of evangelism and help some poor people while they were abroad.

At the last minute, Horatio had to postpone his plans due to some business concerns, but he didn’t want to delay the much-needed rest for his family, so he sent them on ahead, planning to catch up with his wife and four daughters shortly.

Though Satan should buffet, though trials should come,
Let this blest assurance control,
That Christ hath regarded my helpless estate,
And hath shed His own blood for my soul.

The Ville du Havre didn’t make it to England. Just off the coast of Newfoundland, there was a collision with the Loch Earn, and the in twelve minutes, the ship sank. Anna survived, thanks to a floating plank that held her unconscious head out of the water until rescue, but all four of their daughters drowned in the wreckage. Anna’s telegram is now famous for its concise and haunting message: “Saved alone.”

Horatio boarded ship immediately to Wales, where the 47 survivors had been landed. As his boat traveled the ocean grave of his daughters, staring out at the rolling sea billows, he wrote the poem that would become, with the music of Philip Bliss, one of our greatest hymns. “On Thursday last we passed over the spot where she went down, in mid-ocean, the waters three miles deep,” he wrote to a relative. “But I do not think of our dear ones there. They are safe, folded, the dear lambs.”

It would be sweet if this tragic but inspiring story of faith and devotion ended here, where most Christian devotional blurbs leave it. But it doesn’t. Upon returning home with nothing but one another and the Lord above, the expected comfort of the Spaffords’ church was absent. Faith has always been a mixed bag of charitable compassion and grotesque hatred and hypocrisy, and the Spaffords’ faith family was no exception. It was clear they must have grave and secret sins to warrant so much of God’s wrath, and the other ‘believers’ wanted nothing to do with the cursed couple. They were actually asked to resign from their church! So much for ‘all are welcome.’ So much for letting saints walk among us. So much for the teachings of Christ.

Undeterred, the Spaffords took their faith with them overseas to Jerusalem, where they had two more children- and lost one of them. (This may or may not be a girl, or the earlier mentioned son- sources conflict). They also formed the America Colony, a rather unusual Christian utopian society. Horatio had long been interested in the pyramids and other signs and symbols, and he felt Jerusalem would be the heart of Old Testament prophecies. Indeed, many have criticized the eccentric and cultish practices of the ‘colony’, but the unusual group worked with the Red Cross to serve the poor, the orphanages, and the soup kitchens, regardless of the religion of the needy.

There were followers who gave away all of their possessions to go to the Holy Land utopia, but the colony in no way profited from these decisions. These followers also felt called to help the poor. While they gave food and medical attention to Christians, Muslims, and Jews without prejudice, they did develop some strange practices, like total abstinence from sex. Husbands and wives lived in separate quarters! Colony members believed you had to be eunuchs to get into heaven. New marriages were forbidden. Children were separated from their mothers. Many authorities in Jerusalem and in America declared the America Colony a dangerous cult. Indeed, Horatio was suffering from delusions that he was the second coming of the Messiah.

It doesn’t take a genius of psychoanalysis to understand that after so much grief, a couple may conclude that celibacy is the key to happiness, a sort of loss prevention. The messianic madness that bubbled out of Horatio only demonstrated that despite his admirable attempts at peace, all was not well with his soul. For near the end of his life, Horatio began to lose the unwavering strength and vision he was known for, and started suffering from mental problems, including delusions and hallucinations. Anna also began having ‘revelations’ and with these visions, she took over the colony as “Mother” after Horatio’s death from malaria in 1888. He was buried in Jerusalem, and of his brood, left only one daughter, Bertha.

Regardless of the pain and madness this family endured, the legacy of When Peace Like a River has assuaged countless grief-stricken souls over the past century, and so their story is kept alive in the wings of the melody, sung by congregations and funerary mourners the world over, to this day and forward.

The American Colony in Jerusalem

Lorette C. Luzajic’s work has been widely published in Geez, Adbusters, Book Slut, Gremolata, Dog Fancy, Quarry, Modern Poetry, Rattle, Caffeine, and a whole lot more. She is the former editor of Idea Museum Magazine, and the author of The Astronaut’s Wife: Poems of Eros and Thanatos. Visit her at www.thegirlcanwrite.net.

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Keep on Gokking in the Free World

Everyone’s favourite rice queen Gok Wan might be the world’s only diva who’s just too dang nice. The sweetest stylist on the planet, she looms larger than life but can’t be accused of being too big for her britches. Indeed, when Gok Wan was born in a trailer park in Leicester, UK, in 1974, he was too small for his nappies.

“He was smaller than his first teddy bear. We had to wrap face cloths round his bottom because he was too tiny for the smallest nappies,” his sister, Oilen Wan told the Times Online.

“The women customers at our parents’ restaurant absolutely loved him. They made far more fuss of him than me or my other brother. He was really cute. And always incredibly tactile. He just doesn’t seem to have any boundaries. Almost the first thing he does when he meets women for the first time is hug them, which makes them feel safe.”

Gok Wan was once a homely, fat, mixed-heritage fag with big self-esteem issues. Now he epitomizes every reason why some women are fag hags. Every girl’s best friend, he decided to be a fashion stylist, lose the traditional bitchery required for the job, and show the gangly and the chubby and the morose and the spotty gals How to Look Good Naked. Forget about stabbing already fragile esteem- Gok Wan, pointy ears and all- puts his tender hands all over a gal’s body, shows her how to dress, and loves her tender until her inner-diva ignites.

It’s all in the attitude- but Gok’s special twist is his absolute certainty that all you need is love.

It all began very far away: Wan’s dad hailed straight from a fishing village in Hong Kong and his mother was a Brit. They worked hard, late hours at their little restaurant, and eating masses of food was the best way they whole family could come together and express love when time was limited. It was a robust and noisy family of brothers and sisters and the rambunctious clan might wake up in the middle of the night to eat steak and fried rice together. They didn’t really fit into the rough trailer park they lived in, and poor Gok was noticeably campy and effeminate already as an adolescent. He thought his older sister turned him gay because she told him, during her ‘80s phase, that she thought it would be cool if he were.

The roughnecks and school kids growing up constantly taunted the freaky fat kid with the funny ears, (and his assortment of chubby half-Asian siblings, too.) Instead of turning into a bitter old queen, Gok Wan decided to become a brand new brand. He lost weight, and created the updated and streamlined ‘80s look that is now his trademark, copied all over the world. With an edgy, flaming haircut, thick glasses, and superbly tailored clothing lines, Gok Wan flaunts his feminine wiles while celebrating his physical peculiarities.

It was all about clothes from the get-go. He used to lie in his sister’s room, pretending to be her. “I can remember with complete clarity the outfit she wore on her 14th birthday, including the jewelry. She wore a black-and-white 1980s-style animal-print dress and red pointy shoes with a small kitten heel. Her hair was in a bob and she wore red-and-black dangly earrings and I loved her so much, she may as well have been the Venus de Milo.”

Gok studied drama and performing arts for a while at a lowbrow institution of ‘further education’ and then began helping out with hair and makeup whenever he could. It was his tremendous eye for detail and his sweetness that turned him from a frumpy, bumpy teen into a self-made man, one of the most sought-after fashion stylists of all time. By using his splendid style sense along with a rarer gift- helping someone feel good about herself- he showed a distinctive and personal flare for bringing out someone’s most flattering look, keeping it true to her personality.

He has worked in the pages of huge media like Cosmopolitan, Tatler, Glamour, and Marie Claire- indeed, very few big-name mags have ignored the Gok phenomenon. He has worked with celebrities including Bryan Ferry, Erasure, and Vanessa Mae. He’s been all over the telly- and best known for How to Look Good Naked, where he strips the ladies down to their birthday suits after raising their self-esteem via love and shopping therapy. Now he has a new series called Gok’s Fashion Fix.

Beauty is important, but it’s only skin deep, so Gok Wan is also the celebrity ambassador for Kidscape, an anti-bullying group. And because he knows that guys do make passes at guys who wear glasses, he’s on board for National Glasses Day with Specsavers and has a line of Gok Recommends.

It’s inevitable that the flamboyant, campy, outrageous sweetheart would turn the western world into a nation of fruit flies. Gok Wan is a true ladies’ man, in the enviable position of having hundreds of women getting naked for him and thousands sending fan mail, willing to go starkers for Gok. The lucky duck is Queen of the Bangers, known for his endless number of pet breast names. But Gok confesses that his hope for 2008, just like very good little girl, is to find a husband.

Visit writer Lorette C. Luzajic at www.thegirlcanwrite.net.

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Raising Kenya- Meet Tree Hugger Wangari Maathai

Wangari Maathai is known around the world as “the tree lady.” The Kenyan superwoman was considered a dissident back when she founded the Green Belt Movement in 1977, and jailed for the heinous crimes of tree planting and providing jobs that could help stave off soil erosion in Kenya. Born in 1940, and married in 1969, her husband divorced her because she was too outspoken and he could not control her. The judge agreed, and Maathai was thrown in prison again for sassing him. It was a place she would visit frequently, for speaking out against dictatorship, political corruption, and tribal politics. Now she works from within the government, and is a Nobel Peace Prize winner.

Maathai is known as much for her spectacular presence as for her awards, her trees, and her controversies. Corpulent and broad-faced, incredibly vivacious, with a megawatt smile, she is surely an incarnation of the earth goddesses, and indeed, she is called Tree Mother of Africa. She wears traditional Kenyan outfits, or dresses inspired by tradition, including head wraps, in bold colours. Her beauty and tribute to her native styles are but a tiny sliver of this brainiac goddess’s power. Fearless and astoundingly intelligent, she left Africa as a young girl in the early ‘60s to study biology at an American Catholic school for which she had won a scholarship. She picked up a Masters degree before returning to Nairobi, Kenya to become East Africa’s first lady PhD. By 1971, she was a professor of veterinary medicine at the University of Nairobi, and the dean of her faculty.

Wangari Maathai lets nothing stand in her way. Clearly, she is not affected by the laws of nature, gender, or customs, and certainly not by the fact that a day has only 24 hours. Her daytimer may be a lengthier database than the New York phone book. Even a brief run-down of a very few selected projects that Wangari has been involved in would rattle Wonder Woman. She founded the Green Belt grassroots movement in 1977, planting over 40 million trees. Later, the Pan African Green Belt was formed, with countries like Tanzania, Uganda, Malawi, Lesotho, Ethiopia, and Zimbabwe beginning similar planting initiatives. Wangari sat as chairperson on the National Council of Women of Kenya. She was co-chair of Jubilee 2000 Africa Campaign, seeking cancellation solutions for unpayable debts for Africa’s poorest countries. She saved Uhuru Park, some say single-handedly, from bulldozing by the President Moi regime.

The list goes on and on and on.

She serves on endless boards, including but not limited to the commission for Global Governance and Commission on the Future, UN Secretary General’s Advisory Board on Disarmament, The Jane Goodall Institute, Women and Environment Development Organization (WEDO), World Learning for International Development, Green Cross International, Environment Liaison Center International, and the Worldwide Network of Women in Environmental Work.

She was a vocal supporter of International Year of Deserts and Desertification, a flag-bearer at the 2006 Olympics, and she spearheaded the United Nations Billion Tree Campaign. She worked with the Congo Forest Basin Fund, an international effort to preserve Africa’s largest tropical rain forest, securing a massive donation (100 million) from Britain.

She hosted the Global Young Greens in Nairobi in 2007, a conference for international youth about environmental and social justice. And she helped launch the Nobel Women’s Initiative in 2006. And she established Peace Tent, an initiative to foster goodwill among warring African tribes. And she has stripped naked in the streets of Nairobi with other women to protest torture and corruption.

She has honorary degrees from half a dozen universities. Her awards include he Hunger Project’s Africa Prize for Leadership, Woman of the World 1989, the Petra Kelly Prize for Environment, The Conservation Scientist Award, and of course, she was the first African woman to win the Nobel Peace Prize (2004).

Oh, yeah, and she also ran for President in 1997. For unclear reasons, her party withdrew her candidacy. In 2002, she was elected to parliament with 98 per cent of the vote! The president then appointed her Assistant Minister for Environment, Natural Resources and Wildlife in Kenya’s ninth parliament.

While her work for peace and for ecology has generally been above reproach, her ideas on AIDS in Africa have generated considerable controversy. She is allegedly a proponent of the idea that AIDS was created in a laboratory as a biological weapon of mass destruction. This viewpoint caused the United States some alarm, as the lab she was pointing at would seemingly be the United States, with racist motivations. There is also the concern that common diseases resulting from malnutrition, poverty, pollution, and infectious water supplies are overwhelmingly classed as AIDS, often treated with toxic antiretroviral drugs. No doubt these drugs save some lives, but there is also no doubt that clean water and fresh meat and vegetables would go way further in supporting health measures.

While Wangari’s viewpoints on an issue as explosive as AIDS may be met with reactionary emotions, it would be reasonable to consider what a woman of her extraordinary education in biology and her experience in African history and culture has to say. American groups like HEAL which question the HIV-AIDS hypothesis and give considerable evidence toward alternate theories of treatment are muzzled by the government and by gay communities and the medical establishment. Yet in truth no one knows anything about AIDS, and in fact HIV tests are completely unreliable in both results, medications work erratically, and many AIDS patients die without any sign of the HIV virus! Not knowing the answers myself, I am willing to consider the possibilities, and if the white world has nothing to hide, it has nothing to hide.

Despite the hysteria over Maathai’s expression of the possible origin of the AIDS mystery, she has been integral in educating her people away from some destructive primitive mythologies. Some tribes were certain that sleeping with a virgin could cure the virus, in turn spreading the disease through rape to younger and younger victims. She has publicly called for an end to taboos discussing the disease and sexuality.

Furthermore, it’s possible that the statements attributed to her are rumours, not fact. Wangari feels that her very limited comments have been taken out of context, and that she is waiting for truth and guidance like everyone else. She made public a statement about AIDS on her website, which said, “It is a new, silent, powerful, misunderstood and overwhelming threat to peace and security on the continent. Walking around the villages burying the dead beside the graves of their relatives, the reality of losing tens of thousands to AIDS-related illnesses leaves me and fellow Africans with tremendous pain and fear for the future.”

I have a dream…that at some United Nations rock out, Madonna and Wangari get together. Madonna feels the whole of her world domination has had a purpose that she didn’t even know about in the selfish, sex-crazy days of her beginnings- Raising Malawi. She had never heard of Malawi, she admits, when someone called asking her for help for the orphans. Now she has used her massive fame to kick the sleeping into action, whether it be voting, adopting, safe sex, or contributing to peace and social justice. Her movie Raising Malawi indicates the future direction of her work, which she believes is just beginning.

If Mother Africa and Mother Madge get together, on Oprah, everything will be solved in a few days. It’s more than time to let the ladies take over- the men in power have had their turn and showed us nothing but war and greed. Let’s see if an alliance of women would need more than four minutes to change the world.

http://wangarimaathai.com/

Visit writer Lorette C. Luzajic at www.thegirlcanwrite.net.

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Flowers for Vincent (1853-1890)

A few things come to mind when one hears the name Van Gogh- the outrageous multimillion-dollar auction sales for sunflowers and irises; the fact that he sold only one painting while he was alive; and something about insanity, severing his own ear, and sending it to a prostitute.

It is true that Van Gogh’s work, 100 years after they were created, are among the highest fetchers in all of art history. Multiple works have sold for more than $50 million a pop. The infamous Dutch artist, who lived in abject poverty on little more than coffee and turpentine and the odd prostitute, sold only one painting, named The Red Vineyard, near the end of his short life. Starry Night, arguably his most famous painting, was what he saw from the window of the lunatic asylum where he was confined. And yes, after a fight with his friend, the painter Paul Gauguin, with whom he frequented the whorehouses and absinthe parlours of France, he severed his own year with a razor, presented it to 16-year old Rachel, and went home to bed.

It all seems very sordid, and it was, but in context, it’s important to know that many artists were mad. They were free thinkers, in an era giving way to Impressionism and Modernism, moving away from the confines of realism and religiosity. And Vincent was not alone in his penchant for prostitutes- the cat houses in Paris and Montmartre in the late 1800s were meeting places where the café society gathered to discuss painting techniques and philosophy, drink absinthe, and meet women. Everybody was doing it. In this manner, Van Gogh did not stand out at all in his time.

But he was definitely not quite right, and the speculation continues to this day over ‘what was wrong with him.’ Van Gogh, born in 1853, said himself that when he had episodes- such as the severing of the ear- he did not recall a thing that was said or done during that time. He attempted suicide several times, following various rejections throughout his life, and though his alcoholism, absinthe addiction, and ingestion or inhalation of paints and cleaners- and possibly syphilis- all contributed most assuredly to his problems, Vincent’s head wasn’t screwed on straight from the beginning.

Or maybe it was, and society was all wrong. For Van Gogh was a deeply sensitive child, whose early days were spent staring at a grave marker that read Vincent Van Gogh. He was a replacement for the real Vince, whose death left his mother heartbroken and inattentive. Van Gogh was definitely one of the HSPs (‘highly sensitive persons’) and his original desires were not art, but social work and the ministry. He was a devout Christian, like his Calvinist pastor father. He wanted to reach out to the poor and downtrodden, like his good shepherd Jesus. The family was middle class, but Vince spent his emotions feeling sorry for the lower working classes. He was prone to mood swings, temper tantrums, and crying jags, often over nothing in particular but the state of the world.

By chance his very first job was as an art dealer, for an uncle was in the business and did a family favour. But Vincent fell in love, as he would do often and passionately, with the landlady’s daughter. She was engaged to another and the rejection brought about the first noticeable changes in the young man’s health. He grew thin and lived in silence, and became more religious.

Though Vincent stubbornly refused to study ‘dead languages’ he found irrelevant to missions work, an evangelical school took a chance on the young man’s considerable conviction. He was assigned to a remote post in a coal-mining community of Belgium. He didn’t fare well in this position because he was depressed by witnessing firsthand the deplorable conditions. Miners stood for hours in freezing water labouring at the coal, and their lungs filled with toxins. When explosions buried miners or injured them, Vincent worked into exhaustion tending to the wounded or comforting the grieving.

He gave his own lodgings to the homeless and lived in a hut without heat, and refused to tend to his hygiene, a luxury that was not afforded to the mineworkers. He became so embroiled in his compassion that he fed the insects and mice in his quarters while he himself went hungry. But in this depth of despair, he began documenting the scenes of labour, and these sketches began his ‘career’ as an artist.

From this point on, Vincent relied on a stipend from his brother Theo, and spent the rest of his life painting, in and out of psychiatric treatment. His brother was a successful art dealer in Paris, and was certain that brother Vince was a genius. Though Vincent did treat himself to occasional carousing, by and large, he lived as a pauper, never misusing the generosity of his family. He drank endless amounts of coffee, seldom bathed, and had ten teeth extracted. He was not exactly lavish- every penny possible went toward paint and canvas, and he produced ceaselessly, sometimes working so manically that he made a painting in an hour. Other times, he stared endlessly until he would grab the brushes and began angrily striking colour onto the canvas. His work, though tame by today’s standards, was considered outrageous. Though he painted perfectly respectable landscapes, flowers, or perspective scenes, and portraits, he did not use colour or brush strokes in a conventional way. He left some parts of the canvas bare, he mixed strange hues to brighten or darken a palette, and he let his emotions dictate the paint strokes he laid down. But it didn’t matter whether or not Vincent was free to wander with his painter acquaintances, or locked up in a room with little view- he painted endlessly from whatever was there in front of him.

Vincent’s depressive episodes were blamed on his overly sensitive heart.  He never got over an early rejection, his older cousin Kee, who responded to his marriage proposal rather clearly: “no, never, never.” Evidently she didn’t want him to have false hope, but poor Vincent insisted that he would go on loving her ‘until in the end she loves me.’

He never quite gave up this unrealistic passion, but went on to have an involved relationship with a prostitute, Sien, and her children, living altogether. Vincent by then had thrown out the hypocrisies of his childhood faith, developing a real hatred for the church and its insult on his intelligence, loathing its lack of kindness. He thought the clergy was vile but kept his love for the groovy JC in tact. He was convinced by his own interpretations of the Bible that Christ would take pity at women for whom there was no option but to sell themselves, rather than blaming these impoverished, widowed women for the downfall of society. To avenge himself of the sins of the church, Vincent took a rather unusual approach- he would himself help the whores, both by caring for them as friends, and by purchasing their services. “I am no friend of the present Christianity, though Jesus was sublime,” he wrote to his brother. “I have taken revenge…by worshipping the love which they…call sin, by respecting a whore…”

Like his empathy for the miners, he became so sensitive to the plight of women that he could probably be considered an early feminist. He condemned the clergy and religious rhetoric that spoke down to women. Indeed, he all but lost his early faith, feeling religious rejection as fiercely as any other rejection. “That God of the clergymen is as dead as a doornail,” he wrote. His family was outraged by the scandal of Vince and his hooker girlfriend- Sien was rather unattractive and in poor health, on top of it all, though Vince found her beautiful. To defend himself from his family’s disdain, he wrote, “No matter how good and noble she may be by nature, if she has no means…in present day society runs a great and immediate danger of…prostitution. Our life is so dependent on our relations with women…that it seems to me one must never think lightly of them.”

The scandals continued up until the end of Vincent’s short life. He became ill with gonorrhea, a common affliction in France at this time. Later, the only woman to ever fall in love with him attempted suicide after his rejection. There was a pregnancy out of wedlock blamed on him, as if he should be so lucky. He also hallucinated frequently that people were trying to harm him. This could point to paranoid schizophrenia, bipolar mania, or the effects of the absinthe. He attempted suicide by swallowing his paints during a particularly low point confined in the loony bin.  And after a fight with his beloved friend Gauguin, he chased the other painter with a razor, turning it on himself in the end, and sending his severed ear to a prostitute they both loved.  (It is highly unlikely that the two artists, both on the ugly side, were lovers, as some insinuate. There were plenty of homosexual liaisons and scandals in art history, but there is very little evidence or titillation to suggest that these unwashed, toothless madmen had anything but a brotherly love for one another.)

In the very end, he had a great deal of support and love from his brother Theo’s wife, who named their baby Vincent in his honour. Little Vince became ill, and Van Gogh felt that because he was a mooch and a leech, the baby did not have the proper care that more funds could have afforded him. It was around this time that he took psychiatric care with a doctor that many felt ‘played with his mind’ before putting a bullet into his stomach in the wheat fields near his brother’s house. He was 37 years old.

Brother Theo died from grief – or possibly from syphilis- six months later, ironically in a loony bin, having taken to violent fits against his loved ones and himself, similar to the outbursts and episodes that his brother suffered. He was buried alongside Vincent.

Theo left his widow Jo with all of Vincent’s paintings, and the rest is art history.

In 1888, a couple of years before both of their deaths, Theo wrote about Vincent in a letter to his wife: “That head of his has been occupied with contemporary society’s insoluble problems for so long, and he is still battling on with his goodheartedness…His efforts have not been in vain, but he will probably not live to see them come to fruition, for by the time people understand what he is saying in his paintings it will be too late. He is one of the most advanced painters…his ideas cover so much ground, examining what is human and how one should look at the world…I am sure he will be understood later on. It is just hard to say when.”

Visit writer and artist Lorette C. Luzajic at www.thegirlcanwrite.net.

(Letters quoted are thanks to Derek Fell’s amazing book Van Gogh’s Women.)