Today’s piece pays homage– and it must– to the brave women of Chile and around the world who are standing up for their right to be free from sexual and gender-based violence. Currently, Mexico leads the world in murder of women and other forms of sexual violence. The United Nations, whose research wing may be…
Author: Red Balloon
I am a chronically ill queer artist and writer. I have a number of degrees in higher education and have spent most of my life interested and active in social movements against racism, militarism, misogyny and homophobia. Over the course of my life, I have worked in the world of alternate news, translation, law, teaching, and with progressive cultures, music, poetry, performers, and artists. I speak and understand a few languages and plan to share media in them on this blog. I am a poetry, art, music, and nature lover with an especial fondness for cats!
Return to My Native Land (with apologies to Aime Cesaire)
I have been travelling and experiencing the world through the eyes of my childhood and the “now”. The city I return to is not the city of my childhood and teens, nor the city of my twenties and thirties, where the excitement of women’s liberation, the furious exchange of ideas, politics, and philosophies at the…
Chile: Forbidden to Forget…
I was first introduced to the world of Chileans in exile, in the late 1970s, as adults and children fleeing political repression, torture, kidnapping, political rape and murder, arrived in Canada. In fact, Chile had not been know for mass migration until the political banishment of left and progressive sectors under the Generals. Chile’s self-image, shaped…
A fall gallery
A series of drawings celebrating autumn in all her glory!
Pachacutec
This is a seven part poem I have been working on since my work, studies, and travels have taken me to South America and Cuba. I have long been fascinated and moved by the strength of peoples who manage to hold on to their cosmologies in the face of terrible odds such as kidnapping, enslavement,…
We Lived Happily during the War
One tries to hang on to hope, in spite of the onslaught. Poetry, art, music, dance, theatre, and even sometimes film, can offer us someting in that direction, give us a glimpse of that blue star. This year has been filled with changes in our political landscapes, fear and trauma among many who have been…
Journey
nothing but the need for friendship reduced, quest now stripped of myth how difficult not to remember the colour of eyes how we ran to and from such passions there was a time i thought i must not know you but outside the rain howled your name could not forget, would not, how could i?…
