In English-speaking countries like USA, Canada and Australia, where there is a long tradition of immigration from non-English-speaking countries, the existence of large numbers of immigrants from many countries has led to the setting up of extensive and expensive interpreting and translating services to assist them in their new country. Anecdotal evidence that the systems are subject to great pressure and do not always work well, as well as of the potentially serious consequences of not using interpreters in medical situations involving non-English-speaking citizens, is contained in excerpts from the following reports.

“Unfortunately, cases in which language barriers cause compromised quality of care and preventable medical errors may become increasingly common in the United States. Almost 50 million Americans speak a primary language other than English at home, and 22.3 million have limited English proficiency (LEP), defined as a self-rated English-speaking ability of less than “very well.” The last decade witnessed a 47% increase in the number of Americans speaking a non-English language at home and a 53% increase in the number of LEP Americans.”
…
“High-profile cases are accumulating of medical errors due to language barriers. Lack of an interpreter for a 3-year-old girl presenting to the emergency department with abdominal pain resulted in several hours’ delay in diagnosing appendicitis, which later perforated, resulting in peritonitis, a 30-day hospitalization, and two wound site infections. A resident’s misinterpretation of two Spanish words (se pegó misinterpreted as “a girl was hit by someone else” instead of “the girl hit herself” when she fell off her tricycle) resulted in a 2-year-old girl with a clavicular fracture and her sibling mistakenly being placed in child protective custody for suspected abuse for 48 hours.
Misinterpretation of a single Spanish word (intoxicado misinterpreted in this case to mean “intoxicated” instead of its intended meaning of “feeling sick to the stomach”) led to a $71 million dollar malpractice settlement associated with a potentially preventable case of quadriplegia.(15)”
(From http://www.medscape.com/viewarticle/534045_2. Note: It is necessary to register with Medscape.com as a health practitioner or as “Consumer/Other” before accessing their professional articles.)

The brief mention of that latter case offers an example of the dangers of not using a qualified interpreter in medical situations. It also gives an insight into the idiosyncrasies of the American system of litigation. Further details are available here.

“Providing adequate translation is also a safety issue and a potential liability issue, Flores said, noting a successful $71 million Florida lawsuit in the case of a teenager who was left a quadriplegic.
“He was an 18-year-old who went to a sporting event at his high school, wasn’t feeling well and walked over to his girlfriend’s house. Just before he collapsed he said, ‘Me siento intoxicado.’ The paramedics came along, and the girlfriend didn’t speak a lot of English, and the mother of the girlfriend didn’t, either. They mentioned that word, and the paramedics said, “Oh, yeah, intoxicado, that means intoxicated. So they took him to the emergency room.
“He ended up going to the intensive-care unit because he had gone into a coma, and for 48 hours they were working him up for drug abuse. Then they finally did a CT scan, and it turned out he had actually had a brain aneurysm and that it burst, and he got a huge intracranial bleed,” Flores said.
Intoxicado, in fact, can mean nausea.
“That is one example of why, if you spent $30 for an interpreter, you wouldn’t have had to spend $71 million to settle a lawsuit,” he said.”

A further case of an interpreter reaping his or her 15 minutes of fame occurred in September 2009 when a flamboyant enfant terrible of international diplomacy, Libya’s President Muammar Gaddafi, rejected the use of the official U.N. interpreting services and insisted on using an interpreter from his own entourage. The resulting marathon speech to the U.N. General Assembly in New York (recorded by media cameras and microphones) and the effect on the interpreter, however predictable, can only be decribed as bizarre. Although the anonymous Libyan interpreter emerges with honour from the unfair ordeal, the didactic value of the incident may ensure use of this priceless footage as future interpreting course material. This is how The (British) Times Online reported the extraordinary incident on 25 September.

“Muammar Gaddafi’s personal translator broke down towards the end of the Libyan leader’s meandering 94-minute UN speech and had to be rescued by a U.N. Arabic speaker.

The Libyan translator matched the “Brother Leader of the Revolution” word-for-word for 90 minutes before collapsing from exhaustion, just after Mr Gaddafi denounced the popular Ottawa Treaty outlawing landmines. […] The translator broke down as the man once denounced by Ronald Reagan as the “mad man” of the desert embarked on a tirade about the Israeli-Palestinian conflict and an explanation of his call for a single-state solution called “Isratine”.

According to the New York Post, the Libyan translator shouted: “I just can’t take it any more.”

Rules specify that UN translators provide live interpretation only for 40 minutes at a time, and they are accustomed to seamless handovers. But Libya insisted on using its own translators for both English and French rather than one of the 25 world-class Arabic translators at the UN.

Libyan diplomats said that Mr Gaddafi would be speaking a dialect only his own staff could understand. In the event, he spoke standard Arabic.

Mr Gaddafi spoke six times longer than the 15-minute limit set by the UN General Assembly. But he did not come close to Fidel Castro’s record of four-and-a-half hours, set in 1960.”

The dramatic dénouement is a credit to the high level of professionalism of U.N. interpreters:

“The Libyan translator was bailed out by the UN’s Arabic section chief, Rasha Ajalyqeen, who stepped in without missing a beat. Ms Ajalyqeen provided English translation for the remainder of the speech, but sometimes appeared to be chuckling to herself at Mr Gaddafi’s extravagant and rambling language.”

(See the full Report here)

My earlier blogs Mistranslation 3 (13 June 2008), 4 (23 June 2008) and 5 (17 July 2008) were on the topic of the Interpreter (or Translator) as scapegoat or centre of media attention in national and international political affairs. A recent case may be added to this growing list.

The screening of the documentary Stolen at the Sydney Film Festival in June 2009 created a snowballing controversy which lasted two months and may still be reverberating as the documentary is shown in other countries. By the time the film was re-screened at the Melbourne Film Festival on 31 July 2009, the controversy had become so heated that the Australian ABC recorded a 20 minute Q and A session after the screening. (References will follow later in a group for further study.)

In the background of the discussion is a long-festering African post-colonial dispute which began in the mid-1970s when the Spanish Government ceded its Protectorate of Western Sahara (Sahara Occidental) to Morocco and Mauritania. (The case has some parallels with the East Timor saga (Timor Leste), which began at the same time but reached a settlement a decade ago. In fact, at one point, the President of East Timor, José Ramos Horta became involved. See reference below.)

The complex controversy arises from the conflicting points of view of the Moroccan Government and its supporters and the views of the (rebel) Frente Polisario Freedom Movement and their partisans. Also active in the debate were a number of Western Saharans (Saharawis) who have migrated to and settled in Australia and belong to the association, Australian Western Sahara Association, AWSA). Others also joined in the debate.

However, the major point of interest for those of us interested in translation and interpretation matters is the accusation that some of the recorded dialogue was incorrectly translated or transcribed from the local Hassaniya language into English, and also in part, the question of interpreter competence. This charge led to the accusation that some of the statements of one of the interviewees from a refugee camp were misrepresented by the film makers. The evidence offered is not easy to analyse but may be worth the attention of independent experts.

The basic details of this case may be studied by following these references:

1. Australian ABC TV, 7.30 Report, 15 June 2009
http://www.abc.net.au/7.30/content/2009/s2598994.htm

“Bitter dispute over Stolen documentary
Australian Broadcasting Corporation Broadcast: 15/06/2009 Reporter: Matt Peacock

A bitter dispute has erupted over the accuracy of a taxpayer-funded feature documentary screened at the Sydney Film Festival. The film, called ‘Stolen’, features the story of Fetim Sellami and her family, who live in a refugee camp in the Algerian Sahara Desert. Fetim Sellami has been flown to Sydney by the independence movement that runs the camp, to enable her to denounce her depiction in the documentary as a slave, and the allegation that such slavery is widespread in the camps.”

1 (a). The Question and Answer Session (after the July screening)
ABC Radio Movie Time, 31 July 2009
http://mpegmedia.abc.net.au/rn/podcast/archive/audioonly/mme_31072009_e1.mp3

2. The detailed response by the Australian Western Sahara Association (AWSA), consisting of 42 pages, mainly of transcripts and compared translations.
http://awsa.org.au/wp-content/uploads/2009/08/critique-of-stolen-ii.pdf

3. Relevant blogs on the Nuseiba blogsite
(a) Western Sahara and Faitim’s Story (30 June, 2009) (Followed by many comments.)
http://nuseiba.wordpress.com/2009/06/30/western-sahara-and-faitims-story/

“Control of the territory is being fought between the Kingdom of Morocco and the Polisario Liberation Front (PLF). Since 1991 most of the territory is controlled by Morocco, with the remainder controlled by the PLF (backed by neighbour Algeria.).”

(b) Mistranslations and Finger-Pointing – Revisiting Stolen (August 2, 2009). Also with many comments.
http://nuseiba.wordpress.com/2009/08/02/mistranslations-and-finger-pointing-%E2%80%93-revisiting-stolen/

“A couple of weeks ago my post on the documentary Stolen generated a whole discussion about whether or not slavery exists in the Tindouf refugee camps in Western Sahara. Is there, isn’t there, it went on and on (even though I distinctly remember saying the post wasn’t discussing whether or there was slavery, but rather about the abuse of Fetim’s story for the uses of others.) But never mind. I decided to reserve my opinion on the existence of slavery in the region until after I watched the film. On Friday I had that opportunity (it was screened as part of the Melbourne International Film Festival) but unfortunately for Fallshaw and Ayala I’m still undecided about the whole issue …”

4. A President Intervenes: Timor’s link to a Saharan struggle by Jose Ramos-Horta (22 July, 2009)
http://www.theage.com.au/opinion/timors-link-to-a-saharan-struggle-20090721-dryz.html?page=1

This begins:
“As I visit Australia again, to attend this week’s opening of the Melbourne International Film Festival, I have been confronted by the outcry over the film Stolen, which will screen at the festival and which represents, in microcosm, the importance of truth in the struggle for justice. The film, which makes claims of widespread slavery in the Western Saharan refugee camps, represents many of the ugly realities of this central dynamic. It is a scenario I know only too well.
I have followed closely the question of Western Sahara for decades. In our years of struggle for independence, strong friendship and solidarity grew between the Timorese and the Saharawis. I have met many Saharawis and visited the Saharawi refugee camps and liberated areas twice. I did not see any form of slavery in those camps. Rather, what I know of the Saharawis is that they are enlightened and committed to their cause of freedom.
The situation of Western Sahara is perhaps not well known to Australians. For East Timorese, there are ties which make a mutual understanding easier to find. Both East Timor and Western Sahara were colonised by Iberian powers – Portugal and Spain, respectively; both have been identified by the United Nations as being ready for decolonisation; both were invaded, post-European withdrawal, by regional powers in 1975; both peoples have been subjected to widespread human rights abuses; and both have been caught up in global political trends not of their making.”

Disclaimer:
In spite of what is shown in the following quotations from one book, educated Mexicans tend to speak very good English. They have to because their careers often depend on this facility. Unfortunately, the same cannot yet be said for educated speakers of American English in relation to fluency in Spanish.

In 1997, the Mexican author Eduardo R. Huchim published an interesting futuristic political novel, set in 2000, with ample doses of sexual interludes. It was titled Las conjuras. Una historia en el México del año 2000 (Mexico, Grijalbo, 1997).

The author includes some imaginary telephone conversations on serious matters between the American and Mexican Presidents. Presumably to add realism, Huchim writes these conversations mainly in English. But the seriousness of the topics under discussion is completely undermined by the unconvincing language used. The resulting bathos is due to Señor Huchim’s failure to take the precaution of getting his comically literal English checked, at minimal cost, by a competent translator.

Here are some of the results (they include sloppy spelling and punctuation):
-Mr. president, you can not anounce what your message says.
-Of course I can, Mr. president. I shall do it in 20 minutes.
-Do you want to kick the world?
-Do you want to do that?
-Of course not.
-Then, agree to the moratorium.
-Will you forget the drug legalization and the reduction of your exports …?
-Yes, Mr. president. I promise I will forget both things for some months-. I need proof of the efectiveness of your program against drug consumption and I need to see the oil prices. (p.119)
-Well, Mr. president. I need some hours to try to persuade my team and the IMF about the moratorium.
-How many hours, Mr. president?
-This day.
-OK, Mr president. I will postpone my message until tomorrow. I shall wait for your notifications.
-It is a black mail.
-From your part, Mr. president. You are who tries to persuade me not to give my message to my people.
Una carcajada de William Clinton y un “you are terrible” puso fin a la breve charla. (p. 120) [A belly laugh from President Clinton and a “you are terrible” ended the brief conversation.]
…

-Mr. president. There is an only way against the drugs. It is the legalization. Any other thing will fail. It is necessary to walk on that road. But while it is possible, I’ll have good news for you very soon. Be atent about news. Good morning, Mr. president. (p. 125)

-Mr. president, I also want to tell you of an important matter. I think our differences had gone far enough. I want to propose you an agreement for the normalization at once of all our commerce, including oil and petrochemistry. We accept your decisions on the matter and we are ready, tomorrow if you want, to sign an agreement for buying and paying for all the oil that we did not buy in the last four months. You will give us the oil in a period of three months.
…
-Oh, Mr. president, be understanding. Congress is very angry. Do not make it difficult.
…
-Nuestra decisión es definitiva. Yo tendría mañana al pueblo en rebelión si, después de tantos sacrificios, me rindiera -insistió López Obrador. (p. 208)
-No, Mr. president, your people would be calming down after so many sacrifices. But this is not a conversation between merchants. So I accept your prices, but this will be signed immediatly. OK?
…
-Yes, Mrs. secretary -se despidió [el Presidente] Williams dirigiéndose a Jimena-, someday all of you will know how much you have won tonight, much, very much more than an oil bussiness. Good nigth. (p. 209)
*

And Good night to readers!

“cough into the crook of your elbow rather than your palms”
It sounds convincing to me. And simple.
“However the pandemic plays out, the chief mantra for everyone — wash your hands, cough into the crook of your elbow rather than your palms, stay home if you’re sick — will be repeated endlessly over the coming months in ad campaigns, public-service announcements and the global media.”
See ‘Inside the Fight Against a Flu Pandemic’ by Michael Scherer and Eben Harrell (Aug 12, 2009).
Good luck to you up there in the Northern Hemisphere, from Down Under.
P.S. This is the equivalent of TWO Tweets.

The latest angle (12 August 2009):
Climate Change, the American Psychological Association, and Psychopathology
“The Soviet Union perfected the art of pathologizing its dissidents. Since the USSR was a “Worker’s Paradise” it was rather obvious that anyone who objected to the arrangement must be psychologically impaired. Dissidents were routinely sent to Psychiatric hospitals and injected with all manner of powerful Psychiatric medications in an effort to correct their Psychiatric disorders. Once the basic premise was accepted, the misuse of Psychiatry was inevitable. It appears that the American Psychological Association is following in the glorious footsteps of Soviet Psychiatry.”
Read the full article.

Closely on the heels of Professor Ian Plimer’s hefty contribution to the Global Warming debate (Heaven and Earth. Global Warming: The Missing Science, ConnorCourt Publishing, 2009, now in its umpteenth pritning) comes another stimulating work by a fellow Australian scientist, Garth Paltridge (The Climate Caper).
See the review by John Izzard in Quadrant Online.
It begins:
“There is a wonderful image from the painting by Pieter Bruegel the Elder, The Blind Leading the Blind on the cover of a new book on the crass new celebrity-science Global Warming a.k.a. Climate Change.
These two quasi-scientific expressions deserve capital letters as they have now moved from the notion of a theory to a rapidly developing religion.
In his new book, The Climate Caper, Garth Paltridge joins the growing band of eminent scientists and rational thinkers who are challenging the runaway theory of human induced Global Warming. Like the Wendy’s hamburger TV commercial from the USA — they are exclaiming of the science, “where’s the beef”.
Unfortunately, Global Warming scientists who want to find simple explanations for complicated questions about The Meaning of Life, are behaving more like Monty Python performers than men and women of science.”
Read the rest at
http://www.quadrant.org.au/blogs/qed/2009/07/the-climate-caper-2

Today’s blog is simply the privileged and delighted sharing of vital health information which has only just come to my notice. It is for those others who have not yet become aware of a book which may improve – or prolong- your (and my) life. If it does, the benefactor is David Gillespie and his invaluable contribution is the book Sweet Poison. Why Sugar Makes us Fat, published by Penguin in late 2008.
*

I am entitled to share with you the back cover ‘blurb’ of this opportune ‘whistle-blowing’ book, because it is available to anyone who sees the book in a bookshop. And because, in my opinion, it is very much in the public interest.
*

“David Gillespie was 40kg overweight, lethargic, sleep-deprived and the father of four, with twins on the way. He knew he needed to lose weight fast, but he had run out of diets — all had failed.
After doing some reading on evolution (why weren’t our forebears fat?), David cut sugar – specifically fructose – from his diet. He immediately started to lose weight, and kept it off. Slim, trim and fired up, David set out to look at the connection between sugar, our soaring obesity rates and some of the more worrying diseases of the twenty- first century, and discovered some startling facts in the process.

It’s Not Our Fault We’re Fat

* Sugar was once such a rare resource that nature decided we didn’t need an off-switch – in other words, we can keep eating sugar without feeling full.
* In the space of 150 years, we have gone from eating no added sugar to more than a kilogram a week.
* You would need to run 7km every day of your life just to not put on weight as a result of eating that much sugar.
* Two decades ago 1 in 14 adult Australians were obese; that figure is now 1 in 5.
* The ‘natural’ sugar in one glass of unsweetened fruit juice per day for a year is enough to add just over 2.5 kilos to your waistline.
* The more sugar we eat, the more we want. Food manufacturers exploit our sugar addiction by lacing it through ‘non-sweet’ products, such as bread, sauces, soups and cereals.

Sweet Poison exposes one of the great health scourges of our time and offers a wealth of practical and accessible information on how to avoid fructose, increase your enjoyment of food and lose weight.”

Your next step, if like me you have been unaware of this book for the past 9 months, is to do yourself and your loved ones a huge favour and go and buy the book.
However, for the ultra-cautious or sceptical, I would add the following further brief inducements.

The book consists of two parts:
Part 1 (130 pages) deals with ‘Why is sugar making you fat?’
Part 2 (60 pages) contains priceless advice on ‘What can you do?’
That is all I can fairly share with you, except to commend the author’s engaging writing style. How about this for an original Acknowledgement?
“Any mistake that escaped the Penguin editorial process well and truly deserves its freedom.” (p. 208).

References.
It is interesting how news travels on the Internet and the media at different speeds, and by which conduits.

My first news of this October 2008 book was this morning (12 July 2009, at 8.45 a.m.) when the author’s spellbinding 15 minute story about his discovery was broadcast by Australian ABC Radio on a short but always edifying weekly programme introduced by Robyn Williams, ‘Ockham’s Razor’
(and there is audio too).

In the intervening 8 hours I have bought the book, skimmed it and checked its history via the Yahoo Search Engine. When I finish this urgent article, I intend to read the whole book and begin to follow its (already) convincing advice.

Although I was quickly convinced by today’s brief interview and, a few hours later, by a skim of my prized new book, I now know that this late 2008 publication was accorded the distinction of a TV presentation on Australian Channel 9’s ‘A Current Affair’ on 8 October 2009 (9 months ago).

I also now know that Mr Gillespie has his own website, to which you must now hasten.

Here you will find more information and a series of very active and simpatico forums, as well as references to Facebook.

That’s all from me, the mere messenger. Please go and buy yourself, or weight-challenged relatives, Gillespie’s book! He may one day get a Nobel Prize for Dieting. And if you act in time, you may still be there to read about it.

P.S. I am not a member of David Gillespie’s family. Just another sugar-addict, hopefully soon to be an ex-addict.

In 1999, Dr Averil Earnshaw published a book with the above title based on thirty years of research into what she terms “Inner Space” and “the dangerous collections of undigested experiences from our lives, which never disappear”. She explores and comments on parallel events (especially major life events) in the lives of fathers and sons, mothers and daughters. She suggests, in particular, that some physical illnesses may be of psychosomatic origin, perhaps unconsciously ‘inherited’ from our parents.

In short, her theory is that our lives may be seriously affected by what she calls “age-linked life events” of other family members, in particular of our parents. She suggests that “we are particularly vulnerable in our lives at the very same ages at which our parents experienced major events in their lives.” She further suggests that if we are aware of these potential “time bombs”, we may be able to exert a personal influence on the outcomes.

As well as offering pertinent observations from her career in psychotherapy and speculative cause and effect arguments for her ideas, Earnshaw devotes many of the pages of this book to short practical analyses of the biographies of many famous individuals: writers, poets, writers, actors and artists, musicians and politicians. Among her special subjects are:
Darwin, Einstein, Freud, Picasso, Keats, Fleming (Alexander), Robert Oppenheimer, Jane Austen, Marie Curie and Bertrand Russell.
There is obviously further scope for self-analysis and biographical analyses by those who find Earnshaw’s hypotheses convincing.

Ten years on, people are finally beginning to pay more attention to this original thesis. To give an idea of the wide appeal of her research and speculations, I reproduce below two extracts, one on a poet, the other on an actress.

( C Copyright Averil Earnshaw)
Reproduced, with permission, from Time Bombs in Families and How to Survive Them, Part 3: Time Will Tell, pp 93-4.
ISBN 0958714517

JOHN KEATS (1795 – 1820)

“However it may be, O for a life of Sensations, rather than of Thoughts!”
(Keats, 1817, in his “Negative Capability” letter to his brothers)

John Keats was the first of his parents’ five children. He was born in1795, when his father was aged twenty-two; the next child, George, was born when father was twenty-three-and-a-half. John Keats’ miraculous poetic creativity began to dry up in 1819 when he was twenty-three-and-a-half. He was ill at twenty-four (his father’s age when Tom, the baby after George, was born), and he died aged twenty-five.

His biographer, Gittings, wrote of Keats as a young man:
The stress of his love, disease, money worry over George, all took their part in his sudden and tragic finale. Yet more than these are needed to account for the complete blotting out of poetry from his system”. (My italics)

[Dr Earnshaw’s 2 circular diagrams representing parallel life time charts of father and son are not reproduced here.]

His time of creativity was over. John Keats’ last poem was a long, comic poem which he called The Jealousies. It was never finished; it is quite alien to all his other works.

With reference to the age-linking, i.e. John’s illness and death at the ages his father was when George and then Tom were born, one can conjecture that both father and son felt sick and lost when Frances Keats was busy with her new babies.

When the eighteen-month-old John Keats reached his father’s age at George’s birth, twenty-three-and-a-half, the whole scenario was replayed. Death and the mid-life crisis? Yes, but it can also be seen as a replay of the occasions of births in the family – births which felt to little John like death blows to his existence. Keats’ ‘Negative Capability’ letter to his brothers takes on a new meaning in this context. Keats was not capable of surviving his inner agony, and of acknowledging his unspeakable terror.

Gittings (1968) wrote in his biography of Keats:
“… in any really essential matters of poetry, thought or human conduct, he behaved, until illness began to distort his judgment, with the ripeness of a man twice his age” (p 240).
Did he live his life in identification with his father? Or, did his father live again, in him, or both?

Gittings understood Keats’ limitation:
“His description of Apollo’s godhead is the final contradiction of his theory of Negative Capability.”
“It is Hyperion who remains in the seat of half-ignorance and half- knowledge which Keats had once seen as the creative state.”
“Apollo only becomes the god of poetry by complete and painful knowledge.”
“He could not yet face the pain of absolute knowledge, necessary for his continuance as a poet” (p 297).
(Reference: R Gittings, John Keats, London, Heinemann, 1968.)
*

(Averil Earnshaw, pages 102-103)

Vanessa REDGRAVE (1937 – ) Like Mother, like Daughter

In her frank and wonderfully detailed autobiography, Vanessa Redgrave records that her grandfather, actor Roy Redgrave, “died penniless, with only just enough to pay for a plain tombstone.” Her father Michael died with no savings in the bank, and “my mother at the age of eighty-one has to work as often as she can to pay the bills” (p 190). Like father, like son, she seems to imply.

Vanessa Redgrave was born in London on January 30, 1937, the first of her parents’ three children. All three children chose stage careers, and they are successful, as their parents were before them.

Rachel and Michael married in 1936, when Rachel was twenty-five and Michael was twenty-eight. Vanessa married Tony Richardson in 1962, when she was twenty-five and Tony was twenty-eight.

Rachel was aged twenty-six, twenty-eight and thirty-two when her three children Vanessa, Corin and Lyn were born. Vanessa was aged twenty-six, twenty-eight and thirty-two when her three children, Natasha, Joely and Carlo were born. In 1940 when Vanessa was three, London was being bombed. Her mother, aged twenty-nine, took her and baby Corin and their nanny to Herefordshire. They saw the fierce glow of the burning city of Coventry on the horizon. Michael was away on active service as an ordinary seaman on Atlantic convoys. Subsequently, Vanessa had nightmares for years, of fires engulfing their home.

In 1966, when she was twenty-nine and apart from her husband, Vanessa was playing the lead part in The Prime of Miss Jean Brodie. Quite suddenly, she entered a phase of terror that she would not remember her lines. “In fact,” she writes, “I never did forget my lines, though for the rest of that run I felt that I was never more than one syllable away from a screaming, yawning abyss” (p 132).

Why then? A recurring nightmare? A repeat performance of the situation of 1940? Now Vanessa is the twenty-nine year old mother of a three-year-old child, Natasha, and her baby, Joely. Like mother. Like daughter?
(Reference: Vanessa Redgrave, An Autobiography, London, Arrow Books, 1991.)

(Anyone wishing to contact Dr Earnshaw may send an email to me for forwarding: ompukalani@hotmail.com.)

In Spain, after 1939, when their Basque ethnic identity was viciously repressed by dictator Francisco Franco, following the disastrous Spanish Civil War, Basque patriots had the presence of mind to offer passive resistance by cultivating geraniums on the balconies of their houses and flats. The red and green of the plants (plus an imaginary white) were an easily identifiable silent symbol of the Basque ‘national’ colours. Decades later, after the death of the dictator in 1975, their ethnic ambitions were rewarded with a comforting semi-autonomy. (The lengthy and murderous rebellion of the ETA terrorist organisation was the result of activism by a tiny unsupported minority.) Spanish Catalans (in the broad Barcelona region) were similarly rewarded for their passive resistance to similar ethnic humiliations and repression – by keeping their proscribed Catalan language alive in the home. For more than three decades, Catalans have thrived in a semi-autonomous and very productive region of Spain.

Many decades later, the free world now welcomes an equivalent, though more risky, expression of defiance to dictatorship and tyranny: the spontaneous response of the people of Iran to the recent disputed elections. The following report from TheTimes of London describes the current precarious – and volatile – situation: http://www.timesonline.co.uk/tol/news/world/middle_east/article6572101.ece

June 25, 2009
‘Wailing of wolves’ in Iran as cries of Allahu akbar ring from roofs
Martin Fletcher
At about 9pm each day Nushin, a young housewife, performs the same curious ritual. She climbs up the stairs to the roof of her Tehran home and begins shouting into the night. Allahu akbar,” she cries, and sometimes “Death to the dictator”.
She is not alone. Across the darkened city, from rooftops and through open windows, thousands of others do the same to form one great chorus of protest — a collective wail of anger against a reviled regime that no amount of riot police and Basiji militia can stop. “It sounds like the wailing of wolves,” said one Tehrani.
And each night, as the street demonstrations are crushed with overwhelming force and the regime cracks down on all other forms of dissent, it grows steadily louder and more insistent, not just in Tehran but in other densely populated cities of the Islamic Republic.
“It’s the way we reassure ourselves that we are still here and we are still together,” says Nushin, a woman who has never dared to rebel before.
“This is what people did before the revolution and I hope it warns the regime about what could happen if it doesn’t change its way.
“And because I’m a religious person the sound resonating in the neighbourhood makes me feel better. Even my little daughter joins me, and I can see how she feels that she is part of something bigger. It is our unique way of civil disobedience and what’s interesting is that it increases every time they do something that makes people angrier.”
Ever resourceful, the opposition has developed other ways of showing dissent short of wearing green or taking to the streets. They honk their horns, and they drive their cars and motorbikes with their headlights on. But the hour of chanting is anonymous, safe and almost impossible for the security forces to stop. Who could arrest someone for shouting their praise of God? Hossein, a young engineer, is another nightly participant. “The first time I did it, it was in protest to the theft of my vote, the insult that the President had made towards us,” he told The Times. But after Ayatollah Ali Khamenei, the Supreme Leader, ruled out any compromise in his sermon last Friday, “it has become much more than that. It is the people’s way of saying that they are still together and will stay that way until they reach their goal. It has become a way of getting out our anger when we can’t protest and to keep it going . . . It makes me happy to hear others, it reminds me that I’m not alone.”
In many ways this has been a high-tech rebellion, with the opposition using video clips shot with mobile phones, Twitter, YouTube, Facebook and the internet to generate outrage around the world. But the rooftop protests are the precise opposite and a deliberate and resonant throwback to an earlier age.
It is what Iranians did before the revolution of 1979. From their roofs, they would shout Allahu akbar” to support Ayatollah Ruhollah Khomenei in his battle against the tyranny of the former Shah. That a later generation should now be using the very same weapon against the regime that Khomeini helped to establish is an irony lost on no one.