Open a ‘human book’ and read a life story
Atwater Library event aims to help us get beyond surface impressions and understand each other
“I read you like a book.”
How many people know you well enough to say that? Probably just your spouse, your best friend or your mom.
But an upcoming event at the Atwater Library will let you read into the lives of total strangers.
The Human Library is an opportunity to “borrow” a person the way you would take out a book. Just be sure to check your prejudices at the door.
Thirteen Montrealers have agreed to be “books” by opening up to members of the public in one-onone conversations on Saturday.
They include a gay rabbi, a dwarf, a member of the Roma community, a former bully, a trans advocate and a vegan ex-Canadiens player.
“It’s a chance to look at the world in a different way, to view life through someone else’s eyes,” said Emily Schon, 20, a theatre development student at Concordia University who helped create a website on the project (humanlibrary.atwaterlibrary.ca).
The one-day event will help participants see past stereotypes, she added. “The old adage comes to life: Don’t judge a book by its cover,” Schon said.
People tend to pigeonhole one another according to faith, ethnic origin, occupation, physical appearance or sexual orientation, but when you get to know someone, you realize that person has many other facets, said Eric Craven, co-ordinator of digital literacy at the library.
“The way we see people isn’t necessarily the way they see themselves,” he said, pointing to Rev. John Walsh as an example. The Catholic priest is familiar to many Montrealers as a pastor and broadcaster, but he is also an avid fan of new media who promotes interfaith dialogue on his blog, Faithblender.com, with Orthodox Rabbi Chaim Steinmetz and imam Ziyad Delic, Craven noted.
“Everybody’s very threedimensional,” he said.
The Human Library movement has been gaining momentum since a youth group in Denmark held the first one in 2000.
Five young Danes founded Stop the Violence in 1993, after one of their friends was stabbed in Copenhagen. They began organizing concerts to combat inner-city violence and racism.
In 2000, the group set up the first Human Library at the Roskilde festival, the largest music fest in northern Europe, to break down barriers and promote acceptance of diversity.
Since then, the concept has spread from Europe to North America, Australia, New Zealand and Japan.
In 2007, the Bibliothèque Gabrielle Roy in Quebec City held Canada’s first Human Library as part of a series of activities to combat prejudice during the Action Week Against Racism. Human books on offer included a Haitian art historian, a Paraguayan culture-centre director and the leader of a Muslim women’s association.
In 2011, Concordia University held a Human Library where students could meet people whose life experiences differed from their own. They included a police officer, a lesbian minister, an anarchist, a teenage mother, a former convict, a person living with mental illness and a young Conservative.
Jason Edward Lewis, an associate professor of design and computation arts at Concordia, will be among the “books” on hand at Saturday’s event.
If he had a title, it would be Kinetic Verses, said Lewis, 45, a newmedia pioneer who, with his wife, Skawennati Fragnito, co-founded the Skins Aboriginal Video Game Development Workshop, which empowers young people from Kahnawake to create video games based on traditional Mohawk legends.
Born in California of Cherokee and Hawaiian descent, Lewis’s life story is a fusion of art and technology, of age-old traditions and cutting-edge expertise.
Educated at Stanford University, he worked in Silicon Valley before enrolling at the Royal College of Art in London, where a dynamic peer group of young, emerging artists inspired him to follow his creative impulses.
“It was an incredibly rich environment,” he said.
While there, Lewis created a conceptual artwork that attracted the attention of musician and record producer Brian Eno. It consisted of a darkened room with a virtual flickering candle that evoked a ritualistic space and created a sense of the unexpected.
Lewis moved to Montreal with Fragnito after the couple met at the Banff Centre, where she was a curatorial resident.
“There aren’t enough Indians doing new-media work,” said Lewis, who noted that traditional media like photography and film were long used to depict First Nations people as objects of curiosity or derision. New media offers a chance to turn the tables, he said. “This is an opportunity for us to be behind the lens.”
The Atwater Library is hosting the Human Library in partnership with CBC, whose local TV anchor, Andrew Chang, is among the human books.
The Atwater Library’s Digital Literacy Project has created a web- site to mark the event. The project enables youth from local community groups like the Head & Hands Young Parents Program and Côtedes-Neiges Black Community Association to learn about digital media and create websites, blogs, videos, photography and podcasts.
Youth from disadvantaged backgrounds have fewer chances to explore new media because they lack access to computers and know-how, Craven said. The digital literacy program fills that gap, he added. “It’s evening out the online playing field.”
The Human Library and Digital Literacy Project are just two of the ways in which the downtown library is reaching out to non-traditional audiences, Craven noted. “As a librarian, I’m very passionate about making the library a place that is relevant,” he said.