Last week, the human rights organization SOS Esclaves interviewed a female slave in Mauritania (who fled servitude in February 2010), then sent me the interview. I have translated this direct testimony of a slave here for English-speaking readers.

“My name is Oumoulkheir Mint Yarba. My father’s name is Yarba. My mother is Selek’ha Mint Yarg. I was born around 1965 in Guelb Heboul which is in the Adrar region. My father is still alive. He spent many years under the masters Ehel Ahmed El Houda, a family of the Oulad Ammoni residing in Tiberguent near Akjoujt. Then he was transferred to the family of Ehel Kerkoub, of the Oulad Ghaylane tribe, for whom he is still working.

“My father married a slave of Ehel Kerkoub named Teslem; a daughter was born of this union who is apparently the mother of a child. The last time I saw my father, I was still very young.

“My mother is long dead, I never knew her. I don’t remember her.

“I have two brothers, one named M’Bareck Ould Mahmoud and the other Ben’Ich Ould Selek’ha. I am the mother of five children, three girls and two boys. The girls are called, respectively, Selek’ha Mint Oumoulkheîr, aged around fifteen, Mbarka Mint Oumoulkheîr, twelve years of age or so, and Fatma known as Kounadi Mint Oumoulkheîr, who is ten years old. As for the boys, they are: Yarba Ould Oumoulkheîr, aged five years and Ben’Ich, about a year and a half old.”

She was asked “where were you, Oumoulkheîr, when you began to understand what was happening?” She answered:

“I was with the Ehel Boulemsak of Smamna, part of the Oulad Ghaylane tribe. I was a slave for the family of Abdallahi Ould Boulemsak, and worked for his youngest son, Mohamed Ould Abdallahi. Our elder brother, Mahmoud Ould Mbareck one day showed me how my younger brother Ben’Ich and I became or rather were born slaves of the Ehel Boulemsak; he taught me that long before my birth, our mother Selek’ha Mint Yarg was the slave of Rajel Ould Aoueïneni who sold her to Abdallahi Ould Boulemsak, the father of Mohamed Ould Abdallahi. Our condition of slaves for the family can thus be traced back to a deed of sale.

“I have been the slave of this family since my birth; they educated me as well. From a young age I did the laundry, did errands, that is to say, r’soul, at the request of my masters, collected brushwood, prepared tea, watched over the growth of the animals, tied them and let them loose, pounded millet in the mortar and did all the cooking.

“When I grew up, I was responsible for keeping goats, sheep and camels. My job was to lead the animals to water for watering. In order to do that, I had to dig wells myself, and this was hard work. In return, I was forced, despite fatigue, to take care of all the drudgery of housework. When I finished, I began to milk the goats and camels. Each morning at dawn, I start the same activities and this does on until very late at night. My children and I ate leftovers rather than meals. Otherwise, we ate nothing. This is my life and the life of those dearest to me.

“The hardest thing I had to endure under the yoke of Mohamed Ould Abdallahi Ould Boulemsak and his family was to watch over the animals while I was pregnant. This task continued right up to the day I gave birth. I had to carry the little baby and guard the livestock as usual. I will never forget the day they took my little girl Oumoul Barka away from me, and forced me to abandon her in order to guard the herd. My child was one year old; she could barely scrawl along on all fours.

“For my masters, the priority that day was the herd, since some females were likely to give birth. I had to have my hands and back free in order to bring the newly born animals back. That evening, I found my daughter dead body in the sand, her eyes open, her body covered with ants. I asked for help in burying her, but met only with total silence and contempt. The family of my masters did not even deign to respond to the pleas of their mother, Fatma Mint Bouderbala, to help me with the grave. She finally came to me and ordered me to put the little body in a cloth and accompanied me to the cemetery. Once we got there, I dug the hole myself and buried my child. The only consolation I had, working for my masters, was my own tears. I cried a lot about my daughter and my own condition. The people around me did not seek to understand my state of confusion, but instead ordered me to keep quiet, otherwise they would make me suffer in ways I could never bear.”

When asked about the pay she received for her work, Oumoukheïr said that the slave receives no pay from his masters.

“I have no home, none at all. All I have in the way of shelter is a bunch of rags gathered together (‘Devya’). I had to make do with an old blanket and an old sheet, throughout the entire year.

“My masters never offered clothes, either to me or to my children. They only gave us their worn-out clothes. However, my children and I managed to receive some charity, particularly from neighbours. My masters sometimes bought us shoes, but never for my children. The poor darlings walked barefoot. My kids and I were beaten by Mohamed Ould Abdallahi, who never hesitated to kick me in front of them. He hit me with thorny branches. The scars can still be seen on my back.”

She was asked whether she or her children went to public or Coranic school. Oumoulkheïr shrugs her shoulders and says: “I do not recite ‘Al Fatiha’. Neither I nor my children have known any moments of leisure, we have never gone out to have fun. We know nothing other than work, that’s all.

“I’ve never married. When I received a first marriage proposal, I went to Boulemsak’s mother, and told her about it, but she suggested that my master would not allow me to get married and both the man proposing marriage and I would be beaten if they learned about it. I have never received any assistance from the State. Neither my children nor I have any official identification: I have never voted. This is my life with the Ehel Boulemsak.

“One day with the Ehel Boulemsak, a police car came to carry me off to Mboirick d’Ideghchemma in Yaghref, actually the little island known as Guediwar that belongs to Ain Ehel Taya, Moughataa of Atar, in the Adrar region.

“On this occasion, the Ehel Boulemsak gave me six goats which they had never done before: this came as a big surprise to me. Since my birth, I have never had anything of my own. The animals were only left with me on the arrival of police, along with a loincloth, a pot, two plates and a cushion. I realized later that this was all in order to conceal my true condition of slave. When I arrived, I met Vouyah Ould Mayouf, who told me that the ‘Akhouk El Hartani’ organization (your brother Hartani) had filed a complaint with the authorities, in my favor.

“My case was reported in 2007 at a time when there was a public awareness campaign in the Adrar about the law criminalizing slavery; at the meeting in Atar, a representative of SOS-Esclaves explained the situation of Oumoulkheïr; he was contradicted by local authorities and the police immediately dispatched officers on site to separate Oumoulkheir from her masters, the Ehel Boulemsak.

“One day, after spending about a month and ten days in Mboîrick d’Ideghchemma, my brother Ben’Ich, who was still exploited by the unrepentant Vouyah Ould Maayouf, visited me. He was accompanied by his master, a celebrated army officer. This latter man took me home. With the complicity of my brother, he turned me and my children into slaves again. I have endured more suffering under him than I ever had before. His exploitation did not involve just me. He also exploited my children who were reduced to slaves. I then started to keep and water the goats, camels and sheep for him, pounding the millet and preparing the meal. I did everything by hand. He hit me hard, much more than the Ehel Boulemsak family had done. Each time I did not perform a task, Vouyah molested me; sometimes, to terrorize me, he fired bullets over my head. One day, he even wanted to kill me as well. I owe my salvation to his sister, who saved me. She stood in between him and me, begging him in the name of God and His Prophet not to kill me. If I am still alive today it is thanks to this woman.

“One day Vouyah came to tell me that he was going to marry my daughter in order to be closer to me, to be able to shake my hand, thanks to this union. Some time later he came to tell me that my daughter Selek’ha had become his wife. Who performed the marriage, when and where? I did not receive her dowry, much less any paper certifying the union. He ordered me to make her beautiful, and to bring her to him in his tent “Gueïtoun.” The clothes my daughter wore that evening came from the charity of other neighbours. My daughter spent the night with him until morning and came to see me. That lasted until she got pregnant. It was then that his “legitimate” wife learned the news through Fatma known as Kounadi, the sister of Selek’ha. When questioned by the wife of Vouyah Ould Maayouf, Kounadi retorted that Selek’ha had spent the night with Vouyah. When he found out about this, he came to me and said that he was repudiating my daughter. This never actually happened, since he continued abusing her. When he learned that Selek’ha was pregnant, he wanted to marry her off to a shepherd called Youba, who was a slave of the Lech’yakh; so Vouyah wanted to get out of his role as father of the future child. However, Youba refused because he realized that Selek’ha was carrying an illegitimate child. Afterwards Vouyah began to scold us and insult us just because we were working badly …

“One day he called Selek’ha and me, and put us in a car driving at breakneck speed on a side road; we were subject to unimaginable shocks; this gave much discomfort to Selek’ha, as well as excruciating pain, made her sick, and resulted in a spontaneous abortion in the Atar hospital.

“Vouyah used me whenever he needed me and brought me back to the village to abandon me there when I was no longer useful. This is how he behaved with me. This time, on February 7th at night, when he came to me while I was in the field, I refused to go with him. Then he boarded my children in his car. The next day my brother Mahmoud Ould Mbareck called on people connected with SOS-Esclaves who came to see me and took me to the town hall of Ain Ehl Taya on February 9th. The mayor informed the Hakem of Moughataa Atar.

“The latter ordered the town to send me to the police station of Ras Tarf. Once  got there, the chief of police, Ahmed Ould Hamdinou, came to see me and sent away the people connected with SOS-Esclaves who had accompanied me. He asked me what I wanted and I told him I wanted my children and my goats. He objected: Vouyah is our superior and we can do nothing. He asked me what I wanted; I told him that I wanted my children and he asked me to go and plea with Vouyah, since I was from the Oulad Ghaylane tribe who are his uncles. If he answers in the affirmative, well and good, and if he doesn’t, come back to see us … We will take action. I said I do not dare visit him since I am afraid he will shoot me dead. The policeman offered me a car to take me back to the village. I refused to return for fear that Vouyah would not see me, and I preferred to go to Ain Ehl Taya instead. Finally, I was taken to Atar where the chief of police accompanied by Vouyah brought my children to me. The chief asked me what I wanted exactly. I replied that I want to take my children and my animals.

“The children were in the car but Vouyah prevented them from greeting my brother and me. The chief of police was going to bring them to me when we get in the car, but not my daughter Selek’ha whom Vouyah took in his vehicle. The police took us to Ain Taya Ehl where I remained until the arrival of my brother Mahmoud Ould Mbareck with whom I then departed for Nouakchott.

Nouakchott

“I came to Nouakchott on February 15th to demand my rights. I was informed me that my daughter Selek’ha had married without my knowledge. This marriage for me is null and void for several reasons: first, because it was performed without a legal guardian; second, because the girl is underage; and finally, because I have a right to know her husband is, and I have a right to agree or not to the marriage. This union took place, as I noted earlier, to conceal the actions of Vouyah Ould Maayouf. It is a forced marriage, contracted in accordance with the actions and interests of Vouyah Ould Maayouf and a form of intimidation.

“Today, I am filing a complaint against Mohamed Ould Abdallahi Ould Boulemsak, and claim compensation for the many years spent as a slave for his family, since my childhood.

“I am also filing a complaint against Vouyah Ould Maayouf and seek compensation for my children and myself, throughout two years and a half operating under duress without any remuneration. I am also seeking my animals and my daughter who are still in his possession. I ask all Mauritanians and good people on this earth to support me. I just want my share of justice and to live with my children, in freedom, and by the sweat of my brow.”

This interview and the statement were recorded by the president of SOS-Esclaves

Nouakchott, March 4th 2010

(Translated by George Tombs)

Simon Deng & George Tombs

On a visit to New York City last weekend, I met Simon Deng, originally from the Shilluk tribe in Southern Sudan, then a child slave, a competitive athlete, and now an American citizen and human rights advocate. Simon strikes me as a modern-day Martin Luther King: this smiling, soft-spoken, humble man in tennis shoes, full of compassion and rage, is resolutely fighting for the right to life, freedom, dignity and self-government of his people.

I would like to quote part of a speech Simon just gave to the Geneva Summit on Human Rights, Tolerance and Democracy.

“My name is Simon Aban Deng. I am from Southern Sudan. I am a Shilluk by tribe. I am a Christian by religion. For decades, the people of Southern Sudan have been persecuted by various radical, jihadist regimes in Khartoum. Twice we have been the victims of prolonged genocidal campaigns by these Islamist regimes, seeking to destroy our people and our cultures through murder, rape, enslavement, and forced conversion to the Islamic faith AND the Arabic culture. First from 1955 to 1973, then again from 1983 to 2005, what are often referred to as ‘civil wars’ brought death and destruction to my people. Yet these wars were far from civil: they fit a well-defined pattern of Arab imperialism, which seeks to destroy the indigenous African peoples of Sudan in whatever ways possible. During these years, over three million Southerners were killed. Millions more became refugees. The same pattern is seen still in Darfur, but also in less-frequently-discussed parts of Sudan, including the Nuba Mountains, Beja in the east, Nubia in the north, and still throughout the South as well. Indeed, the majority of the population of Sudan consists of marginalized peoples. They are ruled by a small, powerful minority in Khartoum.

Massacres in Sudan

“I am living proof of the many crimes and de-humanizations that occur in Sudan. When I was a child, my village was raided by Arab troops contracted to kill by the Khartoum regime. As we ran into the bush to escape, I watched as my best friends were shot dead and the old and weak who were unable to run were burned alive in their huts. The survivors rebuilt our village and buried our dead, only to have the whole process repeated, over and over again. The same calculated atrocity has happened across Southern Sudan, and for many many years.

“When continuing to live in my village became impossible, my parents moved us to the capital of the Upper Nile region of Southern Sudan, the city of Malakal.

Malakal

“There, at the age of nine, a neighbour asked if I would help him with his luggage. He told me to carry his bags onto a steamship on the Nile, and to wait there until he returned. I waited, but he did not return, and soon the ship left the dock, and I, terrified, began screaming and crying. He neighbour then appeared out of nowhere, and calmed me down by saying that since we had left the station already, we would have to wait until the end of the journey when he would put me back on a ship to head back home. He promised it would be OK. Of course this was a lie.

“When we arrived at our destination, in the northern city of Kosti, it turned out that the neighbour had brought three other children with him on the same ship, and we were all unloaded with him. The other children soon disappeared, probably handed off to someone else. I don’t know. I was brought to the man’s village in a suburb of Kosti. There I was given to a family, his relatives, without any knowledge of the arrangement between them, and immediately put to work. After three miserable days, I asked them where my neighbour had gone, for he had promised he would return me to my loved ones back home. It was then I was told that I would not be going home, because according to them I was given to them as a gift. A “gift”, ladies and gentlemen. When you look at me, do you see a gift? Do I look like an object or a commodity? I am a human being, a person created in the image of God. The simple truth is denied by the jihadists and slave-traders who continue to kidnap and enslave children in Sudan to this day.”

Simon has been very active speaking out in the United States, Canada and Europe on behalf of his compatriots in Southern Sudan. “The whole Arab world was behind the war in Sudan,” he says. “If you look at the goals of the war, forced conversion of Christians was a big objective.” He and other Sudanese in exile, such as Catholic Bishop Macram Max Gassiss, lobbied the American government, drawing attention to the violation of basic rights of Sudanese, such as the right to life. While a peace agreement brokered by the United States has calmed things down to some extent, Simon notes that “injustice is being done, atrocities are being committed, crimes are being committed and we should not feel fear and run away just because religion is serving as an umbrella for these crimes… The Sudanese regime in Khartoum takes any accusation of slavery in Southern Sudan as a conspiracy against an Islamic state. In Sudan, we are not just talking about human rights, but about gross atrocities against human life itself…”

Simon says the next ten months will be critical: “it is easy to walk away, to turn one’s back on the situation. The Southern Sudanese should not be denied their right to go to heaven or to go to hell, to determine themselves.”

It is difficult to assess the number of slaves in Sudan at the present time. But there are many of them.

There are at least 29 million slaves around the world – right now, at the beginning of the year 2010! I have devoted previous blogs on this site to contemporary slavery, especially slavery by descent, a common phenomenon in the southern Sahara and the Sahel. I encountered this kind of slavery while doing documentaries for CBC Radio in Mauritania and northern Mali (Timbuktu etc.). In this blog, the Mauritanian human rights advocate Mohamed Yahya Ould Ciré explains the role of female slaves in Mauritanian society. Apart from Mauritania, the Moors (West African Arabs) live in Western Sahara, northern Mali, northern Niger, Burkina Faso…

Mohamed Yahya Ould Ciré is a former Mauritanian diplomat, who now lives in exile in Europe.

Mohamed Yahya Ould Ciré

1. Housework
In rural areas, the female slave performs the following work:
- She finds wood for the kitchen, prepares meals, makes tea and roasts the méchoui.
- She draws water from wells, lakes, marshland…
- She takes care of watering and herding flocks of animals.
- She milks sheep, goats and camels.
The settlement of Moors in cities means that slavery has been transposed from the rural to the urban setting. Moors in rural areas are much the same as Moors in the city: they are lazy and  self-satisfied, and they hate all manual labour.
In the city, the slave becomes a driver, mechanic, bricklayer, salesman in shops, carter, water seller etc., working for the benefit of the master. Living in the city does not change the condition of the slave. Urban life changes some slave tasks but does not make them any easier to bear.

2. The production of new slaves
The procreative role of the female slave means she plays an extremely important role in the production of new slaves.
She need not be married. The genitor can be anyone: the masters of slaves, the parents of the slave master …
When she reaches a certain age, and if she has not yet fallen pregnant, some Moorish tribes tie the slave woman, with her legs apart, beside the road. Passersby and foreigners can help themselves. Reproduction is an important means of increasing the number of slaves. While Mauritania claims to be an Islamic society, it nonetheless subjects human beings to practices explicitly forbidden by Islam. In fact, the prostitution of female slaves is forbidden in the Koran.

3. Breastfeeding
The female slave nurses the children she has had, as they grow up. At four years of age, the child slave may be set to work in agriculture (sowing seeds …), in watching over flocks of livestock (lambs, goats, camel calves).
The child’s age determines which tasks it must perform.

4. Breastfeeding children of the Berber or Arab master
Noblewomen do not breastfeed. Once they give birth to a child, that child is entrusted to a slave woman who feeds, clothes and washes it… According to the Moors, breastfeeding creates “kinship.”
Relationships derived from breastfeeding are structured by the Moors in order to be closer to their slaves. The slaves are proud of the relationship (because of their own inferiority complex). These relationships prevent neither the exploitation, sale or exchange of slaves, nor the abuse experienced by slaves.

5. The satisfaction of sexual needs
In general, all Moors are free to have sexual intercourse with a female slave. The slave master has his official wives. Then next to these wives are all his female slaves, with whom he has extra-marital relationships.
Young Moors have their first sexual experience with slave women and slave girls.
In the Moorish camp, young Moors line up in single file, outside the poor huts where slaves live. Each Moor gets his turn.
During the daytime, female slaves work for their masters. At night, instead of resting, they work to satisfy the sexual needs of Moors.
Moorish wives sometimes find out that their husbands are keeping company with female slaves, and the consequences can be tragic for these slave women: their genitals are sometimes burned with a branding iron, their eyes torn out of their sockets. Sometimes slave women are killed, even when they have been raped or coerced into unwanted sex. Sex with slaves is never consensual.

6. The dowry of a female slave
The master of the male slave negotiates the dowry with the master of the female slave. When the dowry is fixed, it is then handed over to the master of the female slave. The slave woman does not benefit from it in any way. The only beneficiary is actually the master of the female slave. Thus, at all stages of her life, the slave woman is exploited.

7. The flight of slave women
Slave-owning practices necessarily involve physical and moral abuse. Such abuse may encourage slaves to flee to protect themselves and escape further abuse.
Women slaves flee less often than men slaves do because, among other things, they are involved in raising the master’s children, and are thus kept under close supervision.
When a woman flees her slave master, he can always claim she is his wife. Mauritanian law enforcement and government authorities side with the master, and as a result he loses neither the slave woman nor the slave children.
A system based on slavery is neither fair nor democratic. As Victor Schoelcher noted: “The freedom of one man is a piece of universal freedom, you cannot touch one without compromising the other.”

8. The sale of female slaves
Slave owners rarely sell slave women because of the important roles they play in the slave system. Only poor families will sell slave women.
The persistence of slavery in Mauritania is a sign of the social degradation of Moors.
The slaves are compared to “millet packed away in baggage (Izragh Idbëch).” The Moorish expression is: “Izragh Idbëch maoukoul or melmoum,” or “millet packed away in baggage, is eaten and well hidden.”
Like millet, slaves are fully exploited, and well hidden from the eyes of the world, so that their plight remains unknown.

Mohamed Yahya Ould Ciré
Doctor of Political Science
President A.H.M.E.

(Translated by George Tombs)

Constitutional bear trap

I would like to return to a point I made in the previous blog, where I said that the amending formula of 1982 makes any significant change to the Canadian Constitution practically impossible, as if a bear trap had been placed within the supreme law of the land. It may seem odd to use this metaphor in describing the amending formula of the Constitution of a country. Nonetheless, you only have to look at the unsatisfactory record of constitutional reform in Canada since 1982 to see what I mean.

Most proposed amendments to the Constitution need to be approved by the federal Parliament and two-thirds of the provinces with at last 50% of the population. Proposed amendments relating to a specific province need only be approved by that province alone. The unanimous consent of all 15 federal, provincial and territorial legislatures is required for many fundamental matters, however, such as changing the make-up of the Supreme Court of Canada, changing the process for amending the Constitution itself and making any change to the offices of the Head of State (the Monarch, currently Queen Elizabeth II) and the Governor General.

So even when it comes to amending the process of amending the Constitution, we are caught in the bear trap. The most fundamental changes which any country ought to be able to make to its Constitution are unthinkable in this country. Every legislature has a veto, with the result that everyone is caught in the bear trap. If the two Houses of the British Parliament wanted to abolish the monarchy, they could do so with relative ease (although they may not want to, at present). But with the current amending formula, Canada could only abolish the monarchy by waiting for the British Parliament to act first, or by watching the royal family wither away. This is absurd.

Grizzlies in nature are beautiful – yet we are all caught in a bear trap

I can think of 10 successful amendments since 1982: one amendment strengthened aboriginal rights in the Constitution, seven involved particular provinces alone, one changed the formula for representation in the House of Commons, and one established the territory of Nunavut. None of these amendments is  insignificant, but all are certainly modest.

Of the failed attempts to amend the Constitution, however, the Meech Lake accord of 1987-1990 and the Charlottetown accord of 1990-1992 were traumatic and even existential disasters, whose defeat  signaled the definitive end of significant constitutional reform in this country. In both of these cases, it took just a single voice to block adoption in a legislature, whereas the unanimous consent of all legislatures was required.

A single Polish noble could rise in the assembly, and call out Liberum veto (I freely forbid), in order to disrupt the proceedings

Another analogy comes to mind. In the Polish-Lithuanian Commonwealth of the 17th century, a peculiar institution came into being. Sessions of the Sejm, or assembly of nobles, could be broken up by a single noble rising to call out liberum veto, that is I freely forbid. In a way this individual veto could be seen as a way of standing up against the tyranny of the majority – something which Tocqueville would denounce two centuries later. But giving an individual nobleman a veto also had profoundly negative consequences. It paralysed proceedings of the Sejm, made it practically impossible to reform the Constitution of the Commonwealth, and left the country at the mercy of individual noblemen who represented special interests not to mention foreign influence. No wonder Poland was partitioned by its stronger neighbours.

I am not predicting any foreign invasion of Canada! But I find it appalling that parliamentarians would deliberately lock the country into a bear trap, constitutionally speaking, that is.

Although constitutions naturally need to be amended from time to time, no politician in Canada dares bring up the topic, since attempts at overarching amendments are doomed to backfire

As master of ceremonies at Cité Libre evenings in the 1990s, I remember introducing Pierre Trudeau’s historic defence of classical liberalism, and of his own constitutional legacy

I have long enjoyed studying classical liberalism – the whole body of political theories that promote democratic institutions and the rule of law, while advocating limits on government, and promoting the sovereign rights of the individual (for example, freedom of speech, of religion, of the press, of association, etc.). Classical liberalism is sometimes called “constitutionalism.”

Many people consider that since 1981-82, when the Canadian Constitution was repatriated from Westminster by Prime Minister Pierre Trudeau, and was redrafted to include the Canadian Charter of Rights and Freedoms, Canadians have enjoyed “more” human rights than they did before. I remember serving as master of ceremonies at a gathering of the magazine Cité Libre, on an October evening, in 1992, when Mr. Trudeau attacked a series of constitutional proposals known as the Charlottetown accord, and defended his own legacy. So I have occasionally had the chance to discuss these questions with key actors in the field.

Much as I enjoy studying classical liberalism, however, I am dismayed when I look at it in practice. In Canada, for example, human rights and justice are not universal but are actually quite selective. You may be wondering what I mean exactly. From the perspective of the rule of law, I have known people in Canada directly committing or organizing murder, sexual crimes, cartels, commercial frauds, copyright frauds, money laundering, the bribery of politicians, drug trafficking, stock manipulation and tax evasion (secret accounts abroad, shell companies). I have seen a former minister of justice brazenly organize illegal political financing, and I have seen convicted gangsters (once they got out of prison) do just the same. I remember having lunch with one bank president who boasted that a single depositor at his bank, a minister of the Lebanese government, had a $100 million deposit. It would have been extremely unlikely at the time (during the Lebanese civil war) if this deposit were anything other than the proceeds of crime, or terror. Each Lebanese minister was head of a clan or faction, and deployed his own private militia.

Actually, the strong, the rich, the aggressive, the crafty, and those able to afford high-priced lawyers, exercise their rights far more easily and effectively than ordinary members of society. As individuals wielding tremendous power, they are more “sovereign” than ordinary citizens. And some of the strong, rich, aggressive people I have known have knowingly been involved in illegal and/or criminal activities, as if their philosophy of life could be summed up in the phrase  “catch me if you can.”

At another evening organized by Cité Libre, I introduced the Manitoba Cree chief and aboriginal politician, Ovide Mercredi, who said classical liberalism’s defence of the individual ended up defending only strong and wealthy individuals in society.

Then there is the problem, in classical liberalism, of the tension between individual rights and collective rights. I remember serving as master of ceremonies at another evening organized by Cité Libre, when the guest speaker was the aboriginal politician Ovide Mercredi, a Cree from Manitoba. He passionately defended the need of aboriginals to have their collective rights protected. He said that the protection of individual rights alone, would end up strengthening those in society who were already strong, and weakening those in society who were already weak. Mr. Trudeau stood up to rebut everything Mr. Mercredi had just said, claiming that any defence of collective rights was tantamount to fascism, and would lead to incredible abuses in society. As I stood next to Mr. Mercredi during the exchange, I felt thrilled to be participating (in my modest role of master of ceremonies, leading the question and answer period) in such a memorable exchange. I couldn’t help feeling that Mr. Trudeau was exaggerating. Besides, the last word I would apply to a strategy of using the laws to better the condition of aboriginal people in Canada was “fascist.”

Most ordinary people in Canada do not actually need the Charter of Rights (apart, perhaps, from its provisions against discrimination), since they abide by the laws of this country, are very rarely victimized by criminals, and never have to go to Court to defend themselves. Before the Charter became law, there were other laws in this country that already protected human rights. As countries go, I would say that Canada’s culture of relative civility also helps protect human rights, up to a certain point. I say this because I believe laws reflect people, however imperfectly, and the respect of human dignity starts with the people, and is not imposed from above by abstract laws. I also say this because I have  met only two men  who actually used the Canadian Charter of Rights and Freedoms before the Courts: (1) a leading gangster and international drug trafficker, and (2) an alleged serial pedophile. Both men invoked  their rights under the Charter, since in law they should have enjoyed the same rights as any other Canadian, and both were thus able to “get off” on a technicality.

I wonder whether the constitutionalization of human rights in Canada has actually improved respect in this country for human rights. While this constitutionalization claimed to uphold the sovereignty of the individual citizen as he or she faced the arbitrary will of the State, in many respects the Charter has increased the arbitrary power of the State over the individual. Some sovereignty!

The perverse device in the Constitution allowing this to be done is the notwithstanding clause, which can be invoked by the federal Parliament and the provincial Legislatures to override provisions of the Charter, whenever they see fit. Since I live in Quebec, I have seen on many occasions how Quebec governments have invoked the notwithstanding clause precisely in order to suppress human rights. It may sound strange to say this, but if the Charter had never been there in the first place, these governments would never have needed to override it, and citizens would have found some other way to contest bad policy. Which is not to forget that the amending formula of 1982 makes any significant amendment of the Constitution practically impossible, as if a bear trap had been placed within the supreme law of the land.

Now that I have integrated different life experiences, when I read the masterworks of classical liberalism nowadays, I am much more sensitive to the relationship between laws, citizens and communities. But I end up asking myself more questions than I used to.

For example, Montesquieu wrote that “Liberty is the right to do what the law permits.” I wonder: what if the law itself is excessive? When is the citizen justified in defying an unjust law?

Although Alexis de Tocqueville was a leading nineteenth century democratic theorist, he believed in selective rights and justice

Tocqueville wrote that “Democracy and socialism have nothing in common but one word, equality. But notice the difference: while democracy seeks equality in liberty, socialism seeks equality in restraint and servitude.” I suppose Tocqueville was here referring to equality before the law – a good idea in theory, but something that is far from being fulfilled in practice. Tocqueville also wrote that “The best laws cannot make a constitution work in spite of morals; morals can turn the worst laws to advantage. That is a commonplace truth, but one to which my studies are always bringing me back. It is the central point in my conception. I see it at the end of all my reflections.” I cannot help remembering that in Tocqueville’s analysis of democracy in America, he was highly selective in who should enjoy equality and liberty. One reason he admired America was simply its inexorable imperial push westwards, crushing aboriginals, colonizing and founding farms in the forests that had once been part of New France (the pays d’en haut, or the Michigan of today). He wished France could be like America in this respect. He had no problem with French colonial officials raiding parts of Algeria, kidnapping indigenous people (Algerians) and killing them if circumstances required it.

Then there is Lord Acton, who wrote that “Power tends to corrupt and absolute power corrupts absolutely. Great men are almost always bad men.” So far, so good. Although Acton was one of the great theorists of classical liberalism, he also supported the Confederate side during the American Civil War, which means that he was willing to tolerate the institution of slavery. Talk about “selective rights!”

I live in a country known as one of the world’s leading democracies. Yet in Canada, human rights are selectively protected, and justice is selectively applied. The rule of law should apply to everyone. Perhaps the problem is the relative ineffectiveness of the justice system. In any case, it seems to me there is a big gap between the theory and practice of classical liberalism. How can rights be strengthened, without further weakening the position of the underprivileged, the outcast, those without a voice in society? How can the rights of individuals and of communities be reconciled? How can the strong, the rich, the aggressive, the crafty and those able to afford high-priced lawyers be prevented from exercising their sovereignty at the expense of ordinary citizens (for example, by committing illegal actions with complete impunity)? I will return to this subject.

Damien Iquallaq showing me some of his extraordinary stone carvings

On a visit to Cambridge Bay, Nunavut, I had the chance to talk to Damien Iquallaq, one of the great young Inuit stone carvers. He showed me some of his carvings, and answered a few questions about what motivates him to be an artist.

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George: Can you tell me about your family, Damien?

Damien: My great-great-grandfather was Roald Amundsen, the Norwegian explorer. He pretty much founded the town of Gjoa Haven. He discovered the spot where Gjoa Haven is today. He was on a journey to map out the Northwest Passage. He had to find some place to harbour for the winter, and he came across this beautiful little harbour which is known as Gjoa Haven. The words Gjoa Haven come from his ship which was called the Gjoa, and he came to a stop, it seemed like a haven to him, a very safe haven, and that’s where he stopped. My grandfather was Nelson Takkiruq. He was from Gjoa Haven. There were four brothers – they were all carvers… My grandfather Nelson Takkiruq is the one I look up to the most. His brothers were all pretty much world-famous carvers who traveled around the world and stuff like that. But I don’t know – I wanted to be like my Tata, my grandfather.… Concerning the spirits, there is Nuliyayuk, the spirit of the sea. She controls the hunting of sea animals, pretty much. She controls pretty much how well the hunting is, whether it’s bad or not. She’s a very powerful spirit in Netsilik culture because in Gjoa Haven they rely a lot on the seals. So it’s pretty much up to Nuliyayuk whether the hunting season will be good or not…. There is also the fish maker, Kiviuk. He would chop blocks of wood, and they would turn into fish as they fell into the river.

A map of Nunavut - Cambridge Bay is in the centre left, Gjoa Haven in the centre

George: You do carvings of many spirits.

Damien: Yes, this is a drum dancer, a winged drum dancer – he’s a shaman. The wings represent his ability to fly or overcome any obstacles he may face. The drum is just to give him some expression and emotions. Drum dancing is a very important part of our culture, like it’s pretty serious art, I would say. The expressions on his face just show the hardships that people can go through in their lifetime. It’s a piece I am very proud of.

George: It’s very beautiful.

Damien: And here is a shaman, who is swimming underwater and traveling down to the bottom of the ocean to visit Nuliyayuk, to pretty much battle her because she has been withholding the animals from the hunters. So the people have sent one of their most powerful shamans down to the bottom of the ocean to battle Nuliyayuk so she could release the animals for them to hunt again. This carving took me about four days to get to this point.

Damien is working here with whale bone

George: What do you carve?

Damien: I carve mostly stone. I like to make shamans and spiritual beings. Pretty much like Netsilik folklore, or however I could say it.

George: What stone do you use?

Damien: This stone is called “Brucite” – it is a fairly hard stone. It is the first time I have come across it, and I actually like it. The harpoon is make of whalebone and his teeth and eyebrows are also made of whalebone.

George: What do you like so much about the spirit world?

Damien: I just totally believe in them, and like the elders in my family and stuff, they told me that these people really did exist, and it just – I don’t know, as soon as I started seeing the shamans and stuff, probably it just took hold of me, and that’s what interests me the most.

When I visited Cambridge Bay, some of the elders (like Margaret and Matthew Nakashook) told me wonderful stories about the great shaman-hero Kiviuk - they spoke to me in Inuinnaqtun (thanks to Emily Angulalik for interpreting). In fact their stories were about the same spirits as in Damien’s carvings.

George: Can you tell me about the spirit of lightning?

Damien: Yes, it is Qudluk. He is the spirit of lightning. He lives up in the sky, and he has two flint stones, which he bangs together to create flashes of lightning.

George: And you have made carvings of all these spirits. They are beautiful.

Damien: Thank you.

I met up with a muskox herd just outside Cambridge Bay

Sir John Sulston

One of the most interesting interviews I ever conducted, and one of the most astonishing, was with Sir John Sulston, head of the British part of the Human Genome Project. Astonishing, because early on the morning of the interview I called him by telephone, asking what would happen to our appointment  if he learned later that day that he had been awarded the Nobel Prize for Medicine. This was all for a three-hour radio documentary series I was doing for CBC Radio, entitled When the Machine Awakes. (The French-language version of the same documentary series, three hours’ worth on Radio-Canada, was called Quand la machine s’éveillera.) Here are five questions and responses from the interview.

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George: So, congratulations! I feel like something of a prophet here, because I called you just this morning, and said  – “if you win the Nobel Prize, won’t that bounce our meeting or something!”

John: That’s right! And I said, “what Nobel Prize?!” Because I didn’t know anything about it – I really didn’t! In fact, you’re not the first person. There was somebody else that I was talking to just the end of last week, who emailed me, and said, you’re very good at keeping a secret! I have to email him back and say, I had no idea!

George: What do you feel is the significance of this Nobel Prize?

Sir John Sulston receiving the Nobel prize from the King of Sweden

John: I think it’s as so often with the Nobel committee, it’s very firmly about fundamental work. It’s saying that something was built up by Sidney Brenner and the group he drew around him, that has really contributed very heavily to our understanding of the mechanism of our own bodies. And it’s interesting to look at the water that flowed under the bridge since then. I think what we’ve learned was only guessed at then. But what we’ve very clearly is what a unity of life there is, how the mechanisms that we had begun to uncover in those days in the worm are found in our bodies. And the reason for the citation, is that genes that control cell death pathways in the nematode are also found in humans, and are therefore very important medically of course, because if they go wrong, then they cause trouble, either by cancer or degeneration or whatever. And so I think they are showing they have taken a very long view of the work.

A nematode up close

George: What do you think your work will lead to?

John: It will lead, in a sense, to everything, but only through a lot of work by other people. I mean, take one good mid-term example, because there are things that are happening immediately now, like diagnosis, there are things that won’t happen for a long time like most forms of gene therapy. A good mid-term one is the work on cancer. The work that is being done on cancer by the cancer screening group here under Mike Stratton* is using the information from the human genome to look systematically through tumours and find out what’s wrong with them, in the genetic sense. The important thing about a tumour is that its DNA is altered. It’s not that there is something else wrong with it. We know that the DNA is altered. The cells carry on behaving in a different way. They are not responding to the signals that say “stop growing” from the body. Now if we can find out for any particular tumour which particular genes have gone awry, which particular genes it needs to keep growing and destroying the patient, then we can hopefully, very likely, in due course, make drugs to stop it or maybe anti-bodies or maybe some other means for getting at those positions. The point is what you are doing this way is finding targets. You are searching now in a systematic way, with a full knowledge of the human genome. But now, it’s not that it comes out automatically from the human genome. The data is there for people to use. Mike Stratton’s group finds the targets. It then requires years, maybe decades, of dedicated work by large groups of people in pharmaceuticals, to find the actual cures. So you see, what you have to say over and over again: this is a beginning. It is the beginning of everything, and yet itself is nothing until it is transferred into real useful practice by these other people.

George: If the cells consist of machinery, if the genome works as a kind of mechanism, a very complex mechanism or programming, is the human being, at least from the physiological point of view, a machine of sorts?

John: Oh yes, it’s a very beautiful machine, a very complex machine, but it is a machine. That’s what we mean by understanding. And it’s very proper to call it that. It just is sometimes misunderstood as being too simple, like a couple of gear wheels or something, and of course it’s much more than that. I think it’s useful to think about the word “programme” as well. The point about complex programmes, is that they have iterative loops, and that those will trigger new bits of the programme. It’s not a simple A to B process. It’s a pathway, going through a whole series of processes. Complex computer programmes are like that anyway. That’s why computers crash, because it’s not the computer that’s crashed, it’s because the programme that it is running has got itself into a position that was not anticipated by the designer. Because the designer couldn’t anticipate all the possibilities. So, what we’re looking at is a complex unfolding of the information of the genome, through a computational process that is expressed in the physical properties of the molecules which it generates. That’s the problem we have to solve.

Human epithelial cells, used to study cancer

George:  But in your book, The Common Thread, you also defended towards the end the uniqueness of each human being, that the programme per se cannot be applied universally in all its aspects.

John: Yes, you’re quite right, and thank you, that’s a very important point. Because of course in the course of this unfolding, the programme is also interacting with the environment, and – the case very importantly with human beings – is thinking. It’s actually producing a thinking machine. And that thinking machine is thinking about itself. And it’s learning, and combining what it learns into new patterns, the thoughts, the ideas, the observations that combine into new patterns. So what happens is that we end up with a probably fully unpredictable situation, because exactly what we think or do, at any particular moment, is at the very least down to chance, and nevertheless I think the question is whether it is down to free will, and there you have to say “do I believe that there is something else, apart from the machine, or is this sense of being a self-conscious person, with free will, that says “I am”, is it just what it feels like to be a very complex machine? I find the second quite a satisfying explanation, but clearly if one really really understand how one works, it might be hard for us, but it won’t be so hard for our children’s children, because in their generation, I think, people will have got to that position of understanding, and they’re going to say, “fine, that’s what it feels like,” so I’m going to go on and be a really fine human being anyway.”

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*For more information on Mike Stratton’s research work, please consult the following site:

http://www.sanger.ac.uk/research/projects/cancergenome/

St. Mary’s Church, Kraków

I have written a few times here about liberty and slavery. Actually, the time I first became aware of liberty was while visiting Kraków, Poland with my friend Wilczek Siemienski in the late 1970s.

Poland was a virtual colony of the Soviet empire, and subjected to the faceless tyranny of communism. I met people who had survived Nazi concentration camps or served as slaves in the Soviet gulag system. I met others who were subjected to the more refined bureaucratic torments of perpetual servitude. I got to know people who opened up a space of personal liberty for themselves. Wilczek took me to visit his aunt Pelagia Potocka, an elderly lady who operated a dissident printing press in her home. Countless friends were in and out of jail for forty-eight hours, simply for expressing their opposition to the régime. I learned that “real life” was experienced in private, and largely in secret, where the lives of individual Poles were intense and colourful. Some Poles, in their private lives, struck me as somehow freer than the Canadians I knew back home in Montreal, where liberty was simply a given and was taken for granted.

The clarion call of liberty

I remember walking across the vast market square of Kraków, before the twin Gothic towers of St. Mary’s Church, and hearing the hejnał Mariacki ring out every hour. I found this clarion call to freedom unbelievably moving, and I still do. The hejnał has been a regular feature of Polish life ever since the 13th century, when a bugler alerted his compatriots to a Tatar invasion but was then suddenly, in mid-melody, fatally pierced in the neck by an arrow.

I began studying the nature of liberty, and came across The Captive Mind, a peculiar book by the Polish-Lithuanian Nobel laurate Czesław Miłosz. In this book, Miłosz explained what happened to authors when they were subject to totalitarian pressures to conform.

Czesław Miłosz

Communism by turns smothered and spied on the individual, disrupted and re-ordered his life, co-opted the weak and harassed the strong, turning everything public into shades of grey.

But authors want above all to be published, to be read. So, some sold themselves out, and became official authors in the service of the State; others practiced Ketman, which according to Miłosz is originally a Muslim strategy for survival, and consists in shielding one’s private doubts about the ideology in place with an outward display of acrobatics. His definition of Professional Ketman appealed to me above all: “since I find myself in circumstances over which I have no control, and since I have but one life and that is fleeting, I should strive to do my best. I am like a crustacean attached to a crag on the bottom of the sea. Over me storms rage and huge ships sail; but my entire effort is concentrated upon clinging to the rock, for otherwise I will be carried off by the waters and perish, leaving no trace behind. If I am a scientist I attend congresses at which I deliver reports strictly adhering to the Party line. But in the laboratory I pursue my research according to scientific methods, and in that alone lies the aim of life.”

The idea of dissidence appealed to me, since it combined individualism and altruism. I saw Miłosz as a dissident, although he tasted the bitter cup of exile. As he wrote in The Captive Mind, “Now I am homeless – a just punishment. But perhaps I was born so that the ‘Eternal Slaves’ might speak through my lips.”

The literary formation of Czesław Miłosz included clandestine journalism during the Warsaw Uprising

Part of his literary formation was being a clandestine journalist during the Warsaw Uprising of 1944, during which the Nazis fire-bombed the city, while the Soviets watched and waited on the other side of the Vistula. Many members of Wilczek’s family also took part in this Uprising; some of them told me about it.

When visiting Poland, I wondered why Europeans make it seem as if the re-enslavement by the Nazis and Soviets of tens of millions of Europeans was some kind of passing historical aberration, as if the rest of the world (apart from a few islands of exported liberty, such as North America and Australia) were doomed to slavery, but Europeans were naturally destined for liberty. Of course some Western powers, Canada among them, declared war on Nazi Germany in September 1939, because of the invasion of Poland. But by the time of Yalta, in 1945, Poland was tossed as war booty to the Soviets. Given the existence of the Iron Curtain at the time of my stays in Kraków, it was as if whoever did not enjoy liberty, could not even be considered European. Whereas history shows that servitude and slavery have been part of the landscape in Europe for millennia.

I also wondered then, and I wonder now, why there are so few dissidents in Western democracies. Could it be that we also are co-opted, that we get into bed with the State or large corporations simply because it is convenient, or necessary for our survival? Do we not also practice Ketman of our own, a kind of craven opportunism, allowing us to profit publicly from the system while nurturing private anxieties, doubts and hopes? When there is such a gap between what a person does and what he says, one can hardly speak of having any conviction.

If there is one constant in human nature, it seems to me that even in the midst of relative liberty, some malevolent individuals, groups, criminal organizations, large corporations not to mention agents of the State are constantly devising new ways to reduce others to servitude, in other words, to enslave them. At the same time, others promote liberty assiduously.

The hejnał and Miłosz serve as reminders that liberty is not to be taken for granted.

Sadly, Wilczek Siemienski was killed during the devastating earthquake in Haiti just recently. When I wrote this blog, last December, I was thinking of him. He was working for the United Nations in the area of human rights.

Liberty should not be taken for granted

Emily Doolittle

I met Emily Doolittle, a composer with a doctorate in music from Princeton University, while doing a documentary series for CBC Radio, called The Secret Voice of Nature.

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GT: When did you first get interested in the music of birds?

Emily Doolittle: I wrote “Night Blackbird Song” in 1999 when I was living in Amsterdam. When I first moved there, I woke up in the middle of the night, to hear a European blackbird – Turdulus merula – singing outside my window. And because I was in a new place and keenly aware of what was around me, I threw open the window and listened for a long time, and I was really fascinated by comparing what the bird was singing to what I am used to in human music…. I found that a lot of the small motives that it sang were very much like what humans use in music – small scalar passages and arpeggios and things like that. The way the blackbird strung the motives together was very unlike what I am used to humans doing in music. So I thought about this for a long time, and I ended up exploring it through a composition of my own – Night Blackbird Song…. I made up a whole collection of motives. I listened to the blackbird by my house, and there was a blackbird by a friend’s house and I listened to that, so I collected some actual blackbird motives, and I made up some motives that sounded like they could be blackbird motives. Then, in the piece, I start out by arranging the motives as I imagine a blackbird would – lots of repetition, jumping from one motive to the other without any connecting melodic or harmonic material … sounds followed by silence in a pattern that doesn’t necessarily make sense to humans. Gradually through the course of the piece I transformed the motives into something that is more the way I am used to humans arranging music. It is more patterned, there is more transition between motives, things are more connected….

This lovely blackbird song was recorded in Germany by reinsamba. The recording is covered by a Creative Common license, and can be downloaded from www.freesound.org

European blackbird (Turdus merula)

GT: Do you think your own training as a musician helped you put together what that blackbird was singing back in Amsterdam?

Emily Doolittle: Yes, I guess in a way, although classical music would not generally be open to it, or a lot of classical musicians would not be open to the idea that animals are making some sort of music. I remember, about fifteen years ago, talking to a conductor about animal songs – bird songs – and whether they might be music or not. He was saying “It sounds like music, but really it is just a mating call, so it can’t be music – it’s just a territorial call, or something like that. It can’t be music at all.” I always wondered about that. Now if you get a standard conservatory training, that training will not lead you to believe that birdsong is something musical.

GT: Aren’t human love ballads a form of mating call?

Emily Doolittle: In this culture, we have a tendency to think of animal songs as something purely functional and biological, and of human music as something purely aesthetic and creative and beautiful. I think that if we actually look at what is going on in animal songs and human songs, we find that animal songs are not all explained by functionality, and that lots of human songs do have some functional purpose. For example, think of love songs, and sexy rock stars, and national anthems, team songs – all things that could, just as much as animal songs, be about mating or territoriality.

GT: Are there some species that seem more creative to you than others?

Thai Elephant Orchestra

This audio clip of the Thai Elephant Orchestra is from a YouTube clip: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=23ASZtKfEAc&feature=related

Emily Doolittle: Definitely there are some species that are more musical than others. For me, part of something being musical would mean there is some sort of learned element, and some sort of choice. There are birds which don’t learn their songs. They have instinctive songs. Or birds which never vary their songs. I would to think of those as not very musical, or at least not as musical as a species in which birds learn their songs as young birds and constantly reshape them and gather new material and bringing it together in different ways…. Of the animals that make sounds that I would consider music or possibly music, by far the majority of them are birds. However, there are also some mammals that have songs that seem to me very musical. Among the animals that definitely make musical sounds would be whales and dolphins, possibly bats – bats sing ultra-high-frequency songs which are learned and quite variable. Then there are  some animals that are not really known to make music in the wild, but do things very much like music in captivity, and one of these is elephants. In Thailand, for instance, there’s one ensemble of elephants called the Thai Elephant Orchestra, and it arose because elephants used to be used for logging in Thailand, and when the logging industry dried up, there were all these unemployed elephants with no means of earning money for them to be kept. As a result, some people who were interested in helping the elephants came up with other ideas for ways to earn money for the elephants. In the past, people have done various things with elephant paintings and selling the paintings…. These people – David Soldier, the composer, is one of them – had the idea of building large musical instruments for the elephants to play, and see whether the elephants would be interested in doing that. They found the elephants were very interested in playing the instruments. They actually approached the instruments in the same way humans would have approached the instruments. The instruments were very large xylophone type instruments, and the elephants would try out one note for a long time, then add another note, and explore both notes, they would add things one at a time, rather than trying everything all at once, and they found that elephants ended up developing favourite instruments and favourite passages that they would play. Apparently some of the xylophones were built in the Thai musical scale, but there was one extra note. And the elephants would not worry about playing the extra note – they would play the notes in the Thai scale. So that suggests they recognized a correspondence between the instrument they were playing and the music they had heard. There have been other experiments with elephants which show they have really good recognition of melodies, not just immediate, but they remember them over years. Indeed, they are sensitive to pitches, whether they are transposed or not…. In the last ten or twenty years, elephants have been discovered to communicate with infrasonic sounds – these are too low for people to hear – so although elephants haven’t been known to make music in the wild, it’s also possible that they are doing things that we just don’t know about. Elephants are known to imitate other elephants, and sounds in the environment, and that’s often something that goes along with music-making.

GT: Are you also interested in the song of humpback whales?

Emily Doolittle: Yes, humpback whales are the best known whale singers. The way they put together their songs is remarkable – very much like human composers might put together their songs. There’s gradual, constant change in humpback whales songs and processes they actually go through to be transformed.

A humpback whale

Emily Doolittle: Humpback whales are very interesting. In each ocean basin, all the humpback whales will be singing the same song. But that song will actually be gradually changing. The song is made up of five to nine different themes, and each of these themes must always be sung in the same order. So if the themes are A, B, C, D and E, the whale A, BBBBBBB, C, EEE, but it could never sing A, C, B, D, E. Then within these songs, the themes are actually transforming in set patterns. In a typical theme, the whale would sing in a glissando, going upwards, and some of the pitches in between would be taken out, so it’s like a scalar passage going up. In due course, maybe some more notes would be taken out, and it will sound more like an arpeggio going upwards, and then eventually it might just be the note at the beginning and at the end, and then the whale would go on to change it by repeating the beginning note and the end note. Eventually the sequence would transform into a whole new theme. So if you heard this song a few years later, you might not recognize what had become of the theme, but if you listened to all the songs in between, you could see how it transformed.

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For more information about Emily Doolittle and blackbirds, check out:
www.emilydoolittle.com
http://silvertone.princeton.edu/~emily/musicfiles/nightbird.mp3

For further reading:
“Progressive changes in the songs of humpback whales (Megaptera
novaeangliae): a detailed analysis of two seasons in Hawaii” by
K.B.Payne, P. Tyack and R.S. Payne in Communication and Behavior of
Whales. Westview Press (1983)

Humpback mother and calf off Hawaii

I am half-way through a mid-career MSc in health sciences at Oxford University

I would like to see the “care” put back in “health care”. Of course, as everyone knows, the real question is how. There have been many formulations of values along these lines, such as “patient-centred care”. My personal favourite, among such formulations, is narrative medicine, perhaps because I am a writer steeped in narratives.

It would be great if patients were treated as real persons, in a human dialogue, rather than just as abstractions, or as illustrations, on the micro level, of some medical phenomenon, on the macro level.

Doctor and patient (Photo by DaVita)

For example, I want to believe that science provides a more rational way of offering health-care, and yet I wonder whether this is not some sort of rational fantasy. I ran an international organization for six years, devoted to evidence-based medicine, to the value that patient care should involve the “conscientious, explicit and judicious use of the current best evidence.”

Moreover, I am half-way through a mid-career MSc at Oxford University, in evidence-based healthcare, and I am interested most of all in the meeting ground, if there is one, of narrative medicine and evidence-based medicine.

And yet there are days when I feel the evidence-based movement, far from being the remedy to so many woes in the practice of medicine, has become a religion of sorts, with its prophets, high priests, sacred texts, rituals and fervent devotees, who are really only talking among themselves.

In my experience, nurses are better listeners than physicians (Photo by Roger Aziz, for Dawson College, Montreal)

Can evidence-based medicine be adapted to the individual, in the way narrative medicine is?

I like the idea that medical decisions should be backed up by the best evidence available, and yet the definition of evidence often seems overly narrow. Does it include patient narratives? It should.

What if there is no real body of evidence, compelling or not, to justify a medical decision?

What if apparently solid evidence is derived from clinical trials undertaken by pharmaceutical companies, which may have deliberately skewed research outcomes, in order to promote their product, rather than give a fair view of how effective the product was in actual practice?

What if the physician’s understanding of evidence is very limited – for example, in the case where a physician continues to take decisions based on tradition, professional authority, prejudice, or some other factor?

What if professionals actually take decisions that are not shaped by Enlightenment values such as rationality, the rigorous analysis of the best evidence and the hierarchical ordering of levels of evidence?

What if the patient has a better idea what is “wrong”, but the physician simply won’t listen to the patient? In a blog on narrative medicine, elsewhere on this site, I remember quoting Dr. Rita Charon to the effect that in the average medical examination in the United States, the physician interrupted the patient after just 18 seconds.

What if the physician has an unscientific view of medical examinations? When I think of some of the physicians who have examined me, I am left wondering whether they did any medical studies at all. Seeing I was suffering from a herniated disc, one physician recommended that I drink lots of wine, go regularly to a Carpathian brothel and make love on all fours – he claimed this repeated movement would help reabsorb the hernia. Another physician examined me for all of two minutes, then prescribed a series of epidurals, as if I were about to give birth to a baby (quite the exploit for a man). A third physician, in reading the file his secretary had handed him, burst out laughing at my last name, and wailed in a Latin American accent, with tears dribbling down his face, that he simply couldn’t believe I had such a strange-looking last name. “My English name ‘Tombs’ actually means ‘son of Tom’,” I replied, “not ‘six feet under’.” He then launched into a long discourse on surrealistic literature. And by the way, I asked, what is your name? His reply: “Dr. Appletower.” I found his name very funny, but was too polite to say so.

The question of the limits of evidence-based medicine sometimes attracts attention. In a fascinating article in 1998, Ian Kerridge et al. raised issues on the ethics of evidence-based medicine. The article appeared in the British Medical Journal. According to them, “evidence-based medicine is unable to resolve competing claims of different interest groups; collecting sufficient satisfactory evidence raises problems – randomised controlled trials are only possible where there is genuine ‘therapeutic equipoise’; crude applications of results of clinical trials to individual care may disadvantage some patients; and allocating resources on the basis of evidence involves implicit value judgments and could imply that lack of evidence means lack of value.”

Behind many of these objections is one reality – diagnostic uncertainty

I suppose a fundamental idea in these objections is that the physician may be faced with diagnostic uncertainty – he or she simply may not know what is the matter with the patient. In cases of diagnostic uncertainty, applying an across-the-board rule, based on meta-analysis, randomised controlled trials and reams of statistics, may not help.

It is important to focus on the patient, and listen to the narrative – both the verbal narrative, and the narrative of the body. According to my experience, nurses are better listeners than physicians.

I hope to find answers as I continue my researches at Oxford University