This is Your BA » Human Rights

Grand slam poetry

ccms_editor — Mon, 11 Apr 2011 13:27:30 +0000

Chris Tse has a winning way with words. Literally. He’s Canada’s slam poetry champion and next month, when he competes in an international competition in Paris, he could capture the world crown.

: Chris Tse, performing at last year’s Capital Slam competition

Not bad for a guy whose mom had to encourage him to enter poetry competitions in high school in Coquitlam, B.C. “She’d enter, I’d win,” he jokes.

“I could always flat-out write, and that’s how I could B.S. my way through everything,” he adds. “I wasn’t a strong student, but writing was how I got the grades to get into Carleton.” He’s wrapping up his fourth year in the Bachelor of Journalism program.

Soon after he arrived in Ottawa, he caught a performance by Shane Koyczan, a slam poet he’d learned about through MySpace. “I liked his work, but didn’t know what it was,” Chris recalls. “I didn’t know how to define it, but I thought it was cool.” Opening were members of the local group, Capital Slam, and Chris was hooked. He wrote a couple of poems, performed at the next Capital Slam competition, and took second place.

Last year was a banner year, when he became Ottawa champion and captained Capital Slam to the national championship.

Since then he has taught slam poetry at high schools in Ottawa and B.C. and talked to kids at TEDx events, and will perform next month at Toronto’s St. Lawrence Arts Centre.

But his fame has spread internationally – and he almost didn’t know why. At a Vancouver slam in December 2009, he performed a controversial work called “I’m Sorry I’m a Christian.” It went online a couple of weeks later, but nobody told him.

“All of a sudden I got random requests to be a Facebook friend or Twitter follower, and I finally asked somebody why. He said, ‘Dude, you don’t know? You’re all over YouTube.’” With more than 80,000 views to date, the poem has caused a stir among atheists and Christians alike, is blogged about by right- and left-wing religious leaders, received air time on two Australian radio shows, and led to speaking invitations from both church and hip-hop events throughout the U.S.

“I don’t even think it’s my best piece,” he says.

But it does reflect another side of Chris Tse: his faith. He serves on the leadership team of the campus chapter of Navigators, an international group that explores Christian beliefs from a social justice perspective. “When you make a decision to believe, you’re not set for life. It’s a constant struggle.”

He helps promote club events, volunteers at the Ottawa Mission and Sandy Hill Community Health Centre, and interned one summer as a youth director at a church.

He also spent four years with Journalists for Human Rights (JHR), a group that mobilizes the media to make people aware of their human rights, and this year was president of the local chapter – though he says, “That’s really just a title since the executive works together.” He’s off to Ghana this summer to work at a radio station on a government-funded JHR project.

But he’ll take a break from that for the world slam poetry championship in Paris. He says he’s pretty competitive – after all, he was a provincial-level athlete in track and field. But win or lose, he says, every performance is “an opportunity to get on stage and be fully uncensored for 3 minutes and 10 seconds. You can say the most radical things, and people give you respect.”

From so much to so little

ccms_editor — Fri, 01 Feb 2008 21:59:02 +0000

By Nicole Findlay

Only half way through her undergraduate program, Ashley Armstrong is already a veteran of international humanitarian work.

A second year student majoring in linguistics and human rights, Armstrong will return for the third summer in a row to Honduras.

This year, she will spend May and June in the capital city, Tegucigalpa. She will be volunteering for Sociedad Amigos de los Ninos, a not-for-profit organization that delivers educational programs, counselling and support to orphaned and abandoned children.

For the first time, Armstrong will be teaching English. She had spent her previous trips building houses for the orphanage.

“My first trip to Honduras was through my high school in Grade 12, and it literally changed my life,” said Armstrong. “I love the country, the kids, the work that we were doing, and the feeling that there is something outside of the material society we live in.”

While most of her peers will spend their summers working to fund their return to university in the September, Armstrong has used her own savings to finance her trip. She has also received corporate sponsorship to off-set her living expenses.

Sociedad Amigos de los Ninos operates the Reyes Irene Training Centre which provides an education to domestic servants between the ages of 12 and 30.

“In the future, working with an NGO is one thing I would love to do, so hopefully this experience will give me some insight into the workings of one.”

FASS Student Takes on Human Rights Case

ccms_editor — Tue, 14 Feb 2006 18:30:23 +0000

By Nicole Findlay

Tina Langdon is putting theory into practice in her fight to end the use of security certificates in Canada. Langdon has been working on behalf of one of the men affected by the certificates to raise awareness of his situation.

Langdon, a fourth-year major in the Institute of Interdisciplinary Studies’ Human Rights program became aware of Canada’s use of security certificates when she saw a documentary about Mohammed Harket’s case in November 2005.

Harket is one of five men currently incarcerated under a security certificate issued under Canada’s Immigration and Refugee Protection Act. Security certificates are used to indefinitely detain non-Canadian residents and foreign nationals in the interest of national security

Harket immigrated to Canada from Malaysia in 1995 and was granted refugee status in 1997. While in Canada he met and married Sophie Lamarche. Detained since December 2002, the Algerian-born man is accused of suspected terrorist links. Other than a summary of the evidence against him, neither he nor his lawyers have been given access to the key witnesses or full evidence upon which the case for his defense hinges. If the security certificate is upheld, Harket will be deported to Algeria, where it is feared he will be tortured.

In July 2005, Langdon met Sophie Harket at a fundraising event for her husband. This encounter had a profound impact on Langdon and she began to take a more active role in the case. Since then, she has been to the Ottawa-Carleton Detention Centre to meet Harket himself and has become a member of the Mohammed Harket Committee, a group that advocates on his behalf. Through the committee and Amnesty International Carleton, Langdon has helped organize events, vigils and a post card campaign. She is now setting her sights on lobbying the Federal Government.

“We would like to see the end of the security certificate process,” said Langdon. “We would also like to see the men in detention either charged and presumed innocent until proven guilty of a specific crime under the Criminal Code and within the normal bounds of the law or be set free to live their lives.”

Security Certificates were legislated under Canada’s Immigration and Refugee Protection Act (IRPA) in 1978. Of the 27 certificates issued since 1991, five of these were employed after September 11, 2001. In 2004, the Federal Court of Appeal ruled the use of the certificates were constitutional as “non-citizens and permanent residents can be subjected to a different standard of legal treatment than citizens.”