Terry Glavin stirs up debate at annual Harvey Stevenson Southam Lecture

Martlet, Nov 03, 2011, Volume 64 Issue 13

Brandon Rosario

During the Oct. 19 Harvey Southam Lecture, author, journalist and sessional writing instructor Terry Glavin stirred up some controversy.

During the question period, Glavin was asked why he had chosen to begin his address with a moment of silence for Canadian soldiers in Afghanistan rather than for the Afghan people themselves.

“It was one of these dirty insinuations,” says Glavin about the incident, “framed in the most passive-aggressive way in the form of a virtuous question.”

The award-winning writer’s recent book, Come From the Shadows: The long and lonely struggle for peace in Afghanistan, has been slammed by critics on campus and nationwide for its overt pessimism toward what Glavin says is the Canadian left’s embarrassingly short-sighted and extremely vocal “troops out” mentality — which is, in his view, a dangerous political phenomenon.

“This dodging, this subject-changing, this self-flattering proclamation of virtue,” says Glavin, “this is dementia, this is what happens before brain death, this is what happens before flat-lining . . . Spare me your pleadings, there’s nothing left wing about what you’re saying; there’s nothing progressive or anti-unilateral and pro-multilateral about telling the UN to go fuck off.”

Glavin says the subject matter he engages with in his book, and during the lecture, is not going to feel pleasant.

“This book is going to hurt, it’s going to sting,” he says. “A lot of people in this country, who set the parameters of the public debates . . . pundits, columnists, opinion makers and trend setters, who whine about reporters [that are] embedded with the military in Afghanistan, are themselves embedded up their own ass.”

Come From the Shadows is an unabashedly personal account of Glavin’s journeys outside the wire of a country that he says has been falsely portrayed by the mainstream media as a type of “Absurdistan” — an imaginary nation that has been collectively built up by Western audiences as an apocalypse of bombs, bodies and constant fear.

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