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In the Realm of Hungry Ghosts, Hubert Evans Pirize
I'm honoured to have been awarded this prize for literary non-fiction. It's a validation of a deep part of me. Since childhood books have played essential part in my development. Books show us what life is, what it truly is beneath the surface dross of the mundane and the day-to-day superficialities of our culture. Beyond that, they show us what life could be like if we honoured who we really are, and what existence is at its human and divine core.
As a writer, I work on two levels. First, the level of facts and ideas, and in this realm I don't have too many self-doubts. I'm arrogant enough to believe that by the time my thoughts find their expression in print, they are grounded in science and logic and intuition, no matter how they are received and who agrees or disagrees with me. But on the level of literary expression I'm vulnerable. This is where I have insecurities and for that very reason this prize is such a welcome validation, an affirmation that I belong to the great community of writers.
Having said that, there is a living fact I cannot neglect to mention. Ten blocks to the east of us is the epicenter of the world I depict in my book, Vancouver's Downtown Eastside. Here are fellow human beings who are ill and impoverished and hunted and ostracized because they were abused early in their lives and, as a result, came to the conclusion that only through certain substances will they find relief from their pain, only through drugs a source of pleasure, only through addiction any escape from torments most of us would find unbearable.
In the Downtown Eastside thirty per cent of my patients are of First Nations origin, whereas our aboriginal people make up only a small percentage of the Canadian population. There is a prevailing myth that they are genetically prone to addictions to drugs and alcohol. Nothing is further from the truth. There were potentially addictive substances in North America before the European invasions: peyote, tobacco and even alcohol. As elsewhere in the world, aboriginal peoples used psychoactive substances as spiritual teachers and never in an addictive way.
That the DES is so heavily populated by people of First Nations background has nothing to do with genetics, and everything to do with they way our society has displaced and oppressed them, drove them from the lands and natural habitat, destroyed their ways of life, invalidated their spiritual universe and, finally, abused their children for several generations in the residential school system. That dislocation and that abuse is the template for addictions.
So amidst this celebration of our culture, of our writers and poets and publishers and books, we must not forget the reality of those who, no fault of their own, lead lives of suffering and not-so-quiet desperation only a short distance away, whose entire lives are a struggle against despair.
As a writer, I work on two levels. First, the level of facts and ideas, and in this realm I don't have too many self-doubts. I'm arrogant enough to believe that by the time my thoughts find their expression in print, they are grounded in science and logic and intuition, no matter how they are received and who agrees or disagrees with me. But on the level of literary expression I'm vulnerable. This is where I have insecurities and for that very reason this prize is such a welcome validation, an affirmation that I belong to the great community of writers.
Having said that, there is a living fact I cannot neglect to mention. Ten blocks to the east of us is the epicenter of the world I depict in my book, Vancouver's Downtown Eastside. Here are fellow human beings who are ill and impoverished and hunted and ostracized because they were abused early in their lives and, as a result, came to the conclusion that only through certain substances will they find relief from their pain, only through drugs a source of pleasure, only through addiction any escape from torments most of us would find unbearable.
In the Downtown Eastside thirty per cent of my patients are of First Nations origin, whereas our aboriginal people make up only a small percentage of the Canadian population. There is a prevailing myth that they are genetically prone to addictions to drugs and alcohol. Nothing is further from the truth. There were potentially addictive substances in North America before the European invasions: peyote, tobacco and even alcohol. As elsewhere in the world, aboriginal peoples used psychoactive substances as spiritual teachers and never in an addictive way.
That the DES is so heavily populated by people of First Nations background has nothing to do with genetics, and everything to do with they way our society has displaced and oppressed them, drove them from the lands and natural habitat, destroyed their ways of life, invalidated their spiritual universe and, finally, abused their children for several generations in the residential school system. That dislocation and that abuse is the template for addictions.
So amidst this celebration of our culture, of our writers and poets and publishers and books, we must not forget the reality of those who, no fault of their own, lead lives of suffering and not-so-quiet desperation only a short distance away, whose entire lives are a struggle against despair.
Submitted on April 30, 2009 in By David.
