A book about story telling and the storyteller, art and the artist
Writer: Sultan Somjee
Excerpt:
One day I saw two elderly brown women climb into Bus No 144 at the Sperling Sky Train Station in Burnaby, British Columbia. They disembarked at the first stop on Sprott Street. Opposite this stage behind some green trees and bushes is the Ismaili jamat khana or the prayer house. In their bare hands, the Bais (we call women Bais in the community) held white plastic bags slumping with weight. One woman was wearing a long dress under a brown artificial fur collared blue jacket and boots that seemed awkward to walk in. It was a murky grey winter evening and sleet rain.
The plastic bags made me nostalgic. In them they carried a lot of history hidden from the view of fellow passengers in the bus. I wrote a paragraph about the Bais that night. A story came together and an epic emerged:
http://thebeadbai.blogspot.com/
Read in order from No 1, 2, 3 and so on in the Archive for the flow.
Sultan Somjee did his PhD at McGill University and was the Head of Ethnography at the National Museums of Kenya. Ma Aging Gracefully – the coming of Satpanth Khojah to Africa and the Asian African Heritage are two of the many exhibitions he has curated. He is the founding member of the Community Peace Museums of Kenya and the Asian African Heritage Trust. Together with his wife Zera he founded the Community Counselling Services under the Aga Khan Social Welfare Board of Kenya. In 2001 Sultan was one of the twelve people worldwide to be named the Unsung Hero of Dialogue among Civilizations by the United Nations. He lives in Vancouver with his wife and three children.
Ismailimail 