Note: Transcripts may contain errors. If you wish to re-use all, or part of, a transcript, please contact CBC for permission. Please check the corresponding audio before quoting in print. Copyright © CBC 2019

The Current Transcript for September 6, 2019

Host: Laura Lynch

STORIES FROM THIS EPISODE

Prologue

[Music: Theme]

SOUNDCLIP

Sounds from protests of BC timber workers.

LAURA LYNCH: In case you can't quite make that out, those are forest mill workers shouting our logs, our jobs. Thousands in BC working in the timber industry have lost their jobs of late and not unlike the auto industry, they face an uncertain future. In a moment we look into why and what the future holds. In an hour, we're going to talk tennis and the wonder that is Bianca Andreescu. But before that we will revisit a time and a show that played the simplest situations for laughs.

SOUNDCLIP

VOICE 1: What's wrong buddy.

VOICE 2: Someone at work ate my sandwich.

VOICE 3: Well what did the police say?

LL: Friends is 25 years old and it's catching a new nostalgic wave. I'm Laura Lynch and this is The Current.

Hard times for softwood lumber

Guests: Madeleine deVooght, Gary Bull

SOUNDCLIP

VOICE: My grandpa started here in 1946. My dad started here in the 60s and my grandpa worked here about 38 years. My dad worked here 45. And I've been here for 32. And my son who is a fourth generation, he's been here almost a year.

LL: So that's four generations of Darren Morrey's family who have worked at the Hammond Cedar Sawmill in Maple Ridge, BC. It makes this week's announcement especially tough. The mill is closing permanently, putting about 150 people out of work. It's just another sign of an industry that's struggling. This summer nearly two dozen B.C. sawmills saw closures or short term shutdowns, affecting about 4000 jobs. It has always been an industry of ups and downs, but the federal government is calling the situation an especially deep cyclical decline. There are plenty of reasons for this: forest fires, a U.S. housing slowdown, the pine beetle infestation and the global decline in demand for newsprint and printing paper. For Madeleine deVooght the news this summer that the Canfor Mill in Vavenby, BC was closing permanently in July has hit hard. She has worked there for 30 years, her whole working life so far. We've reached her at the mothballed mill where she has a contract to work as a security guard until it's fully dismantled. Hello.

MADELEINE DEVOOGHT: Good morning.

LL: Can you tell me about your family's history in the forest industry?

MADELEINE DEVOOGHT: My dad moved up the valley, up to the valley here from Vancouver in the late 50s and began working at the mill in the 60s. And my husband's family was actually the family that started Clearwater timber products. He was partners with a fellow from Edmonton and they started this mill in early 40s.

VOICE: And how did you decide you wanted to work at the mill?

MADELEINE DEVOOGHT: It was marred by accident then that it's by design. I had moved away and came back and I just fell back in love with the valley I grew up in and decided the best way to stay here was to get a job at the mill. And what was your job up to the end. Here it was as a plane or tech maintenance.

LL: What was that job? Can you describe it?

MADELEINE DEVOOGHT: It's maintaining the machines in the plane or mill and fixing them as as they break, if they break. It's like maintaining a car right.

LL: Did you work steadily at that job at the mill throughout these past 30 years?

MADELEINE DEVOOGHT: Yes it was very reliable.

LL: What did you like about your job? I imagine the reliability is one thing but what else?

MADELEINE DEVOOGHT: The people here were great at the lifestyle here is great. And you know the mill you know if it was like family here know people came and went but you know you had the core here that was it was family. They'd been here they'd lived in the valley they grew up in the family in the valley their families worked at the mill. My parents both worked at the mill.

LL: So what warning signs were there that the mail might permanently close?

MADELEINE DEVOOGHT: Pardon me?

LL: What warning signs were there that the mill might permanently close?

MADELEINE DEVOOGHT: There was not. I mean maybe we lived in a bit of a dream world, but you know it always seemed to be somebody else. You know you always think Oh my God there goes another mill. There goes another mill and then all of a sudden it's you. It was a shock.

LL: You didn't see it coming?

MADELEINE DEVOOGHT: Not permanent. We'd had temporary shutdowns before. We'd been shut down for two years and started back up again. And you know we've been in slumps before, we've been in slowdowns before, but this is quite the blow.

LL: Yeah I'm wondering well what what feels different this time? Is it just knowing it's never going come back?

MADELEINE DEVOOGHT: Absolutely. It's devastating for our town is small. It's a devastating blow for this town.

LL: Yeah I was going ask you, how many people live in the town?

MADELEINE DEVOOGHT: I think it's around 3000 in Clearwater itself. There's about 600 in Vavenby.

LL: So what impact is this going to have with the loss of almost 200 jobs?

MADELEINE DEVOOGHT: Well the impact is great because it's not just the 200 jobs at the mill. It's the restaurants it's the support industry there's the hardware stores. There's the industrial stores. There's the contractors. There's the, we have a beautiful park here Wells Great Park, which is tourism, but you know that's very seasonal and not reliable.

LL: What are you thinking you will have to move away?

MADELEINE DEVOOGHT: I certainly hope not. But there isn't a lot left of good paying jobs. Not at my age. You know I can go back and get re educated which many of the people here are going to be able to do, but you know you get reeducated, it may not guarantee you a job back here.

LL: Now we said that you're working as a security guard right now while the mill is dismantled and we reached you pretty much in the middle of the night there. I'm wondering what it's like to be there. It must be sort of like walking through a graveyard.

MADELEINE DEVOOGHT: It's horrible. It's like picking a scab every day I come here.

LL: Why?

MADELEINE DEVOOGHT: I have to correct something. I'm not contracting here. There was six of us left and we are still employed by Canfor to look after the mill.

LL: You say it's horrible. Tell me more about why.

MADELEINE DEVOOGHT: It's just it's been here forever it's like it was part of the community. Part of our life. It's part of our lifestyle. And it just it's empty. There's nothing here it's like. It's like the life has just gone out of it.

LL: And you just don't know what you're going to do when this job is actually finished.

MADELEINE DEVOOGHT: No not exactly. You know like I say I'll have to definitely re-educate, upgrade do whatever I can to you know to get a job in another mill is definitely a move, but at the other mills they're shutting down too. I mean at the being a program they just announced Hammond Mill yesterday and that's the Cedar Mill. That was shocking. Like Cedars being affected too? We have a little Cedar Mill down the road here and I've worked there before and they're awesome people, but again you know they can't absorb all of us.

LL: And when we talk about generations working in this industry, I'm wondering you have children yourself?

MADELEINE DEVOOGHT: Yes I do.

LL: And what are they doing? What are their plans?

MADELEINE DEVOOGHT: My children are grown. One is an accountant and one works in the hospital in Kamloops.

LL: So and the accountant, is the accountant living in Clearwater or left town?

MADELEINE DEVOOGHT: Grand Prairie.

LAURA LYNCH: OK. I'm sure this is a very tough time for you Madeleine. I really appreciate you coming on to talk to us about it.

MADELEINE DEVOOGHT: Yeah no worries. It was my pleasure. I just I'd hoped for our little town that that things, our mayor and our council and the staff at the district here, the municipaldistrict, are doing an amazing job of mitigating this and reaching out and trying to keep this in the forefront of people's minds. It's a real problem. It's huge and it's not just us, it's right across BC.

LL: Thank you Madeleine.

MADELEINE DEVOOGHT: Thank you. Thank you for having me on your show.

LL: Madeleine deVooght worked for 30 years at the Canfor Sawmill in Vavenby, British Columbia and that is where we reached her. The job losses in BC saw mills over the past few months are part of a long term trend. Between 1991 and 2017 the number of people employed in BC's forest industry fell by close to 50 percent. And it's a trend my next guest says he's been warning about for decades. Gary Bull is a professor in the Faculty of Forestry at the University of British Columbia. He's in our Vancouver studio. Hello.

GARY BULL: Good morning Laura.

LL: What does this recent spate of sawmill closures in BC say about the state of the industry?

GARY BULL: The industry has been changing for some time and driven by a combination of factors whether it's natural disasters as you mentioned my fiery insect disease or changes in the marketplace or changes in how we manage land and and changes in technology. So there's a number of things that well data driven us to where we are today.

LL: But why are so many mills then closing all of a sudden if this has been part of a long term trend?

GARY BULL: So I think this is not a surprise to those of us who've been in the forest sector for decades now. We've seen a gradual movement of investment to other places like the U.S. South by some of the companies we've seen the lack of. The ability of government and others to deal with the impending problems of fibres supply. We've seen that the whole question of First Nations rights and title will have a big impact on how we govern and manage the land and we see of course that there's a number of other users now that have come onto the scene that also want to recreate or play in the same lame sandbox and even other industries resource industries like oil and gas on the same land base. And so all of these very complex factors come together and and now of with the current turmoil in the markets and in in the things that we see in the news every day it's led to decisions by the managers to either permanently shut down or temporarily shut down.

LL: I wanted to ask you about the ongoing trade dispute with the U.S. over softwood lumber. That has often had an impact on the B.C. industry. What about this time?

GARY BULL: We've been having softwood lumber disputes with the U.S. since the 1870. So I guess that will always continue. The the issues are around how we governed and manage the land and how we set prices as a result of that. And so I don't think that that's the driving force at this point. It's it's a factor but it's not the one that is led to this series of curtailments. It might accelerate it, but it's not the driver.

LL: It's so many other things that are that are just coming together in sort of a critical mass.

GARY BULL: Exactly.

LL: So is this a problem industry wide or is it specific to British Columbia?

GARY BULL: It's happening in different parts of the world. You do in industry like the forest sector have to embrace a lot of dynamics and change. And so I would say we are slower on the uptake as compared to our Scandinavian colleagues for example. And I would say that the U.S. s as embrace change more readily than we have you do here. Of course you heard in the previous interview that you know we have we build communities. We try and create stability, but any resource industry is subject to these whims of nature and of the marketplace.

LL: But is this just cyclical then?

GARY BULL: No I think this cycle will be different. We will see decades of of downturn and it might even be permanent and may never get depends on the kind of decisions we make as we move forward into the future.

LL: You mentioned the southern U.S. and Scandinavia and you talked about change. What do you mean when you say change? What needs to happen?

GARY BULL: Well the current discussion and I'll focus on Scandinavia is on what we call the bio economy. This is transitioning our decarbonising our economy and that means actually more use of forests for and forest products which could create many different new industries that surround traditional commodity industries. And so for example you can take a pulp mill and it becomes a bio refinery. And what I mean by that is you can start producing an array of new products materials chemicals energy all from the same things that we used to not use and waste and the idea is to basically replace fossil fuels.

LL: I just want to interrupt you there because I want you to listen to something. We spoke to Kamal Sanghera, the CEO of Sand Group, which is actually building a new multi-million dollar sawmill and manufacturing plant in Port Alberni.

SOUNDCLIP

VOICE: We treat tree as similar to when you butcher an animal. You use every part of the animal. We utilize every part of the tree and make something out of it. We add value when. We harvest we take everything out of the forest. Then we process every specie in house. Whatever we can sell to the overseas market, we sell it. If we cannot sell something then we go further manufacturing and make finished products. And then if we cannot sell to those guys we open up our own retail place. So we are looking for new things than traditional ways things are done. And this is what is keep us one step ahead of everybody.

LL: Is that the future?

GARY BULL: Yes. The future is going to be at many scale. So you may have the same group in Port Albany and I congratulate him for his efforts and the innovation in his thinking. But you know I don't want to dismiss the fact that we've had some of our older companies also do lots of innovation. And then of course what I'm excited by because I teach and work at the university is roles for many what we call me small to medium enterprises who can create start-ups and be part of this new economy. And we have we run a bio products research institute. And ironically our student numbers now in forestry are higher than they've ever been. We've we do see students still wanting to work with the land and with forests and animals and water and so on. And I think there's tremendous opportunity in the future for them to participate in this new economy.

LL: I know that over the years that there have been a lot of complaints about the way timberlands are managed in British Columbia and I don't want to get into the technicalities of it. But I'm wondering is there a role for government to encourage more innovation and stable employment in the sector?

GARY BULL: There's a critical role for government. We do have what I would call outdated systems for governance in terms of how we manage land and resources. I think that needs a thorough overview and we could come up with a much more efficient and relevant way for for for a new economy to emerge. And so I think the other thing I would say for the governor's side is that where we've seen success like in Nanaimo at a pulp mill where the workers now participate in the running of the pulp mill. Those are the kinds of things that we need to see.

LL: We're going to have to leave it there. Thank you so much.

GARY BULL: Thank you.

LL: Gary Bull is a professor in the Faculty of Forestry at the University of British Columbia and he was in our Vancouver studio. Well it is Friday and we have nearly made it through the first week of back to school for a lot of us. So for some deepish thoughts on this let's hear from a uniquely placed person, a comedian and an educator in Vancouver.

SOUNDCLIP

VOICE: Hi I'm John Cullen and I'm a teacher. And this week is bad for us, but let's get it straight, the days just after Labour Day are bad for everybody. There's more traffic. Your favourite lunch spot is now that much busier and wild packs of teenagers are roaming the streets. Unless you're a parent who can afford to send your children to day camps for eight weeks in a row, the days after Labour Day suck. I mean you could be a substitute teacher like me and then you get roughly one more week off to swallow your existential dread, wonder how you're going to do another 10 months of this and then begrudgingly accept that on its best days, teaching is still the greatest job in the world. The problem is there's a lot of bad days and everyone is named Aiden. One of the great joys of Back to School Week is finding out just what things parents are naming their children these days. Hearing a truly awful name for the first time is what I would imagine the feeling would be like upon discovering Atlantis and coincidentally, I've taught two children named Atlantis. Only one named discover. I do think it's great that parents have the liberty to name their children whatever they want. I've taught three children named Liberty and perhaps it is their name that foretells their destiny, six Destinys. But why is every boy now named Aiden? When did we decide that that name was the name that every single male must have? Here's a history lesson. Aiden is a Gaelic name inspired by their son God and literally translated it means fiery one. Picture this, you're sitting around a bonfire and you're trying to stoke the fire by throwing a small piece of kindling, back atop the flame, but then you find out that the kindling is hot and it burns your hand. And it doesn't hurt that much, but it's annoying. That's Aiden. That's your fiery one. He's annoying and when I say every boy is named Aiden, I'm obviously being facetious. They're either named Aiden or their name ends in Aiden. Here's a list of children I have taught Braydon, Draydon, Graydon, Caden, Kaden with a K. Hayden, Jaden, Ladin, Peyton, and my three favourites Taton, which is not a name, Raiden that's a character for Mortal Kombat and Satan, that's the devil. They say as a parent you can learn the most from your children. Well today here's an opportunity I'm giving you to learn something from a person who helps your child learn. Stop naming your children Aiden. It's the least you could do.

LL: Tom Cullen is a comedian and an opinionated teacher, not named Aiden, in Vancouver. Well the CBC News is coming up next. Then the last we heard of our hero Ross from the TV show Friends, someone at work had eaten his sandwich. Good thing he has a friend like Chandler.

SOUNDCLIP

VOICE 1: Ross it's just a sandwich.

VOICE 2: Just a sandwich? Look I am 30 years old, okay? I'm going to be divorced twice and I just got evicted. That sandwich was the only good thing going on in my life. Someone ate the only good thing going on in my life.

LL: Ah simpler time when a stolen sandwich is the making of a crisis in comedy. Coming up after the news, on the 25th anniversary of the TV show Friends, we will explore why nostalgia is so appealing. I'm Laura Lynch and you're listening to The Current.

[Music: Theme]

Friends TV series may not have aged well but it's still popular due to a 'nostalgia boom'

Guests: Bob Thompson, Katharina Niemeyer

LL: Hello. I'm Laura Lynch and you're listening to The Current.

[Music: Theme]

LL: Still to come, if Bianca Andreescu was questioning reality when she won her Women's Singles quarterfinals match at the U.S. Open, imagine how she's feeling today. She is the first Canadian woman to make it to the final of the U.S. Open. A huge accomplishment in her young career. We'll find out from another tennis great what it's like to play in this tournament in half an hour. But first, let's check back in with a very distressed Ross Geller. He's one of the characters on the wildly popular 90s sitcom, Friends. Last we heard from him he was all in a snit about the fact someone at work had eaten his sandwich. When you're on a show called Friends, there's always people to help you out.

SOUNDCLIP

VOICE 1: Hey look I have enough for one more sandwich. I mean I was going to eat it myself, but.

VOICE 2: That would be incredible. Thank you so much. I still can't believe someone ate it.

LL: Amazingly the hand-wringing over a sandwich continued for most of the episode, but you don't need to hear at all to get the gist of what made this show tick. It was pure pop escape. Six twenty somethings living their best lives in New York City. The show captivated audiences for a decade and it still regularly makes top 10 lists of the best comedy TV shows ever made. So it's no surprise that the 25th anniversary of Friends once again has people talking about Ross, Rachel, Chandler, Joey, Monica and Phoebe. And with Netflix picking up the show it's seen a resurgence in audience. Diehard fans, occasional viewers and a whole new generation of viewers. Sam Sanders is the host of NPR's It's Been A Minute. He decided to mark the milestone by tuning in for the very first time.

[sc].

[Scene from Friends]

VOICE 1: How's my ding-a-ling?

VOICE 2: I don't know. You tell me. Anything you want to tell me because if you, you should, if you, you would tell me.

VOICE 1: Why are your eyes..

[scene fades]

SAM SANDERS: It was the one where Janice, Chandler's annoying, annoying, annoying girlfriend, kind of got back with him, but then she was sleeping with the mattress guy again. He had to you know dump her and he was sad and I'm starting to feel like Chandler become more of a fully formed and fully realized human being with feelings. At first I was like this man is a sociopath. Just one long sarcastic joke and I'm scared of him.

[new scene]

VOICE 3: Yo, can I have your attention please? Best man making a toast here.

VOICE 4: Thank you.

VOICE 3: I remember when Barry got home from his first date with Rachel.

[scene fades]

SAM SANDERS: When Rachel, the guy that she leaves at the altar, he ends up marrying Rachel's best friend and the best friend asked Rachel to be the maid of honour. And she goes and she just has this embarassing experience where all the men are just mean to her. And it just underscored like how chauvinist the show is.

[new scene]

VOICE 4: There's not a lot of women who would have had the guts to come back here tonight and even fewer who do it with their asses hanging out.

LL: Sam Sanders was of the age to watch Friends at the height of its popularity, but as a gay black man who just didn't see himself in it, he chose not to. Now he's three seasons into the show and he vows to keep at it, even though he compares it to being lactose intolerant and still choosing to eat ice cream.

SOUNDCLIP

SAM SANDERS: It is really strange for me to see this show become a thing that Gen Z likes because they're literally the wokest among us. And so to see them embrace a show that is actually transphobic, fat phobic, homophobic and a little bit racist, I'm like wow.

LL: So what does it mean that even the wokest among us are embracing Friends once again? Two guests are here to help answer that. Bob Thompson is the director of the Bleier Center for Television and Popular Culture at Syracuse University. He is in Syracuse. New York. And Katharina Niemeyer is a professor of media theory at the University of Quebec in Montreal and the author of "Media and Nostalgia: Yearning for the Past, Present and Future." She's in our Montreal studio. Hello to you both.

KATHARINA NIEMEYER: Good morning.

BOB THOMPSON: Hello.

LL: Bob, let's start with you. Why all this love for Friends now?

BOB THOMPSON: Well I think for one thing the show went on for 10 years. So it's 25 years old from the beginning, but it ended not all that long ago. So a lot of people remember it. And the next thing is it was one of these classic American sitcoms, which is one of the great sort of storytelling inventions. I agree with everything that was being said. This show really plays in some uncomfortable ways to our raised consciousness. But it's one of those programs you can watch the UN episode for the third fourth fifth time and it doesn't matter it requires no attention. You can be comatose when you watch it which is a lot different from all of the fancy good television we've got now no yeah. An episode of Friends is almost like a like a song that you like. You would never you know listen to the turn on the radio and hear a Beatles song and say oh I don't want to listen to that. I've heard it before. The whole point of songs is you enjoy them over and over and over again. The American sitcom in this bizarre way I think has that same sort of appeal.

LL: Are you a fan of Friends? I'm not sure after listening to that.

BOB THOMPSON: You know that's a really tough question to ask some. Do I watch it when I turn on the TV after a long day's work and don't have the mental energy to watch an episode of Insecure or a rerun of The Wire or something like that? Yes. It's a great show to answer your e-mails and pay bills and go in and out of the room with at the same time there are episodes of friends that will pop on that will make me roll my eyes to the extent that I'm ashamed that I'm watching.

LL: Okay. Katharina, what does Friends popularity say to you?

KATHARINA NIEMEYER: While I'm not a fan neither. I mean I saw the show when I was younger, but I haven't seen it for a while now. But I think Bob, I agree with you on what you were saying. I think it does the sort of a fantasy it's like a place and a home where you don't have to worry about anything. So it's also a coming back to something so set. I think it's a yeah it's a show where you just watch it and it's like amusing or sometimes not amusing and I think when you see it like 20 years after it can also of course be shocked because there has been a conscience thing going on after after Watson which is what he got. So it's not also a regressive nostalgia.

LL: And you're referring to Bill Cosby of course. I want to go back to NPR's Sam Sanders who is discovering Friends for the first time and has been reading a lot of hype around the show's anniversary.

SOUNDCLIP

SAM SANDERS: People online have been saying read this thing about it. Read this thing. Have you thought about this? Have you thought about that? And like one of the new little nugget and titbits that I'm glomming onto right now is that it turned out that one of the creators of the show, one of the head writers of the show is gay. And he wrote the characters of the men to kind of poke fun at the way a lot of straight men in New York City in the 90s were totally weirded out by the ascendance of gay men in a place like the village. That this is actually a critique on the awfulness of straight men to which I say maybe, but they should have made that point more clear. If me is a gay man, I don't get that then they didn't accomplish their mission.

LL: Of course Sam's watching it in 2019. Bob Thompson what stands out for you about Friends now that maybe didn't in the 1990s?

BOB THOMPSON: Well one of the things that I think the two things one hits really total lack of diversity, but I suppose that would realistic. The types of people like Ross and Rachel and Monica and all the rest would probably have not been, would probably not have had a very diverse set of friends. The other thing though is that certainly are issues of race and gender and all that, but the body shaming. Especially whenever we get the flashbacks of Monica when she was in high school and when she was younger, the idea of a larger body type being something that it is the American dream to overcome, I find really really uncomfortable.

LL: Right because in those flashbacks she would wear a fat suit. Katharina I'm wondering how you think we should treat this kind of content that really hasn't aged very well?

KATHARINA NIEMEYER: While I think it is because some people say that Friends now like rerunning friends all the time is a sort of white privilege nostalgia. I think it depends on who watches. Of course not everybody is nostalgic of these times. I think what we can get out of like the reruns especially is like having being aware actually of what was going on in the 90s and early 2000s to see that we have a really reflective nostalgia. I think it's good to have this conversation today about it and also yes see the differences that came up in the last year. So this is something I think that can get out. It's not that can be this white privilege nostalgia at some point and said You make people feel it and don't even know that they are feeling it, but I think that's also about something which we can call reflective nostalgia and like see that things have changed.

LL: So that's that's the serious side of things Katharina, but what is going on here? Why does the show that ended this long ago still have the audience that it does?

KATHARINA NIEMEYER: Well I guess that it's something very universal going on it's the idea of friendship being together and holding together, despite everything of the diversity problems they were just talking about. And I think it's also a series that stopped in 2004, so just before the arrival of the worldwide web. So it's also something about the analog era. Another media area. It's a bit like the Netflix Stranger Things. So I guess there's also nostalgia about what was a friendship before the world wide web arrived. So there's something about slowing down. So maybe people or the younger viewers today watch it also to know what was it like. What was my parents being friends at this time. So sI think there is something about like the media change results or reflect it and in the show and in the reruns. So it's a universal friendship thing and also like a media question I guess.

LL: And Bob I think you want to get in on this.

BOB THOMPSON: No I was just saying amen to all of that. There is something so quaint and charming to watching friends who are friends by actually physically being in the same space with one another as opposed to friends by having friended them. There are telephones in friends but there are no no cell phones. And there is something. So I think delightfully charming about that. And the last thing I think we keep watching it is in spite of all these other issues that we've talked about which are certainly issues it is a meticulously written funny show with some really hilarious performances. I think we keep watching it because it's good. And we have to both turn away and at the same time be cognizant of all of the fact that this is a reflection of a time that we hope we have evolved beyond what we would teens be attracted to in this is the simple quaintness of it as you said well there's six attractive characters going through all kinds of situations that are at least analogous to ones that they go along with it never gets too sappy. But at the same time it never gets challenging. I couldn't easily see the same reason that I was attracted to I Love Lucy I Love Lucy had been off the air long before I was born. But I still found it's universal appeals of funny and interesting. And back then I didn't have a whole lot of choice. There were only three channels.

LL: Katharina there's something else to this. There's a commercial aspec.t in addition to the huge push for just coverage of the 25th anniversary, you've got companies like Lego coming out with its own line of Friends memorabilia. How does the commodification exploit our nostalgia?

KATHARINA NIEMEYER: Well I guess sometimes I ask myself if it's not the industry or television channels or producers and the whole cultural industry that is nostalgic of the older products. So to begin with that's always a question of respect of the nostalgia business. But of course it works because the commodification goes also with yeah with products like like T-shirts etc. are surrounding products. But the television series. So nostalgia always made money. So it is something that's going on in advertising for. Long time at the also in fashion and it got really strong in the last year like in the television industry especially with television series. So it's also about this media change on the one hand but of course I would say that the nostalgia business years I guess on idealization of the past at some point. So we were just talking about this white privilege nostalgia etc. but I would say that there's something deeper rooted in the nostalgia boom today which goes much far way like in the in the lost historical meaning off of nostalgia was just best to get homesickness. So it was a term coined in the 70s century by a pale Swiss doctor and it means actually that we want to go back to a place and a time we laughed but not only in a regressive ways not an idealization of the past but also something yeah we can do better a process for the future. And I think that the commodification at some point can be a danger to this so that we don't reflect the television series itself, but it's also a way of coping with the crisis and the progress going on to slow it down.

LL: Okay. And that may explain why there seems to be so much nostalgia on the screen right now. There are reboots of The X Files, The Brady Bunch, 80s them shows, Stranger Things, Dark Crystal on Netflix and of course on the big screen, Quentin Tarantino's Once Upon a Time in Hollywood. Bob what do you think is the draw of nostalgia now?

BOB THOMPSON: Well I think the draw of nostalgia at least as we know is we now define that word has been around forever. I am sure there were people in caves thinking back of the glorious days before we invented fire. So I think this nostalgic thing has been going on forever it's a natural human condition. The reason we're seeing such an explosion now is a much simpler one. There's so many more places for it to explode not that long ago there were three networks with 22 hours of programming per week per network that was pretty much it. Now we've got three times or twice as many broadcast networks all of these cable channels doing original programming and Netflix which seems to be released releasing a new show every five minutes. So the reason we're getting more of this than we ever did before is there is so much more real estate for it to move in on. And it's a pre sold branded name in every single case. These are things that have already been around. I'm not surprised we've got as much reboots as we've got. I'm surprised we don't have more.

LL: Well OK. Here's another example then, the 1960s set, Mad Men.

SOUNDCLIP

[Scene from Mad Men].

LL: Okay so even less woke than Friends. Bob Thompson you talked a little bit about the difference in how we attach emotionally to a show that plays on nostalgia or a time long past like Mad Men versus a show that was so utterly of its time like Friends.

BOB THOMPSON: Well what's fascinating about Mad Men is Mad Men was able to show the 1960s in a way that the actual 1960s television never could. In 1960s television we had Leave It to Beaver Father Knows Best. These kind of perfect. Any suburb USA type kinds of families that didn't reflect in any way what was really going on in the 60s. It took us decades to get to a point in television history where a TV show like Mad Men could actually reflect the decade of the 1960s in a way that the actual decade of the 1960s was completely incapable of doing.

LL: OK. Katharina are there different kinds of nostalgia?

KATHARINA NIEMEYER: Yeah of course I mean nostalgia it should be like seen as a plural because there is of course the original meaning I was just talking about. That it means homesickness and a yearning for a place that never was. Maybe it's an idealization also of the past of course. Maybe we can in relation to what we're talking about today. Talk about two different kinds of nostalgia. There's some media nostalgia at some point which means that we are can be nostalgic for media content. So as for the reruns of shows because Mad Men as Bob just said is like a reconstruction of the past and not a very good one actually. So this is like the sort of more media nostalgia related to the past media. We were we were watching and there's also a sort of mediated nostalgia which is exactly in the nostalgia that could be expressed. And I would like to make a difference actually between the nostalgia business and the nostalgia industry which tries to make us nostalgic maybe we are not nostalgic friends itself but because we were watching with friends at this time, so it's also about the ritual on the social relationships we had.

LL: You're talking about when people used to gather around?

KATHARINA NIEMEYER: Exactly. So if you look at the retro gaming for instance it's not, so of course it is about the games itself, but it's also about having been together with people and the rituals that are related to it. And of course that media are triggers to be nostalgic, but also like on YouTube the past is accessible. People can digitize their past, with pictures photographs. It's also something on the personal memory going on and media has a trigger for this and this is quite interestingly an interesting point historically because already when that when the soldiers who felt sick and were homesick in the 18th and 19th century what made them feel better to cope with a crisis a personal crisis was getting in touch with the mother tongue or listening to music. So basically media also a cure of getting a feeling better at some point when you in a personal crisis.

LL: Let's hear from Sam Sanders one more time on with his take on why this generation is drawn to nostalgia.

SOUNDCLIP

SAM SANDERS: People 35 and under are spending more time alone these days than their parents did and that's weird and that's not good for us. And so yeah maybe watching Friends and seeing those six people find time to build community in person, in real life with real people, maybe that is a thing that we long for, but we've forgotten how to do or don't even know how to do anymore.

LL: Katharina what does that sense of loneliness that Sam touches on play into our nostalgia? You were just discussing that a bit on our nostalgia for shows like Friends.

KATHARINA NIEMEYER: Yeah yeah. For instance the students we could interview in our research they say we are at some part nostalgic of the period our parents could experience really. Like this pre era of the web and that they feel sometimes lonely with Facebook and Twitter and Snapchat And even if it creates some relations say they they are in a need for something which seems to be a real and material skill and physical. This is also the comeback of the venal and maturely objects actually so there is something about. Also if you are bringing people reconnecting actually at some point and this can also function with the parents because that's what we name and in our studies like the trans generational nostalgia at some point and the industry has always of course playing with that too like with Star Wars and the reruns so bringing people at some point together is maybe not a bad thing about that and listening maybe to yearnings that are much deeper than this sometimes superficial nostalgia media can produce.

LL: Bob I'm wondering will we see anything like this again, a nostalgia 25 years from now for a show that's on air today?

BOB THOMPSON: Well it's going to be different. There are a few shows on the air today or recently on the air that get the kind of audiences as Friends did, but actually not quite. We're talking about a show that was getting 20 million, way more than 20 million viewers. So there isn't. The 90s was kind of the last pure decade of stuff that we all watched at the same time and everybody knew about it and that's why I think 90s nostalgia has a certain value to it. I had this extraordinary experience. I was waiting for my car to be fixed and there was a woman in the waiting room as well and she was probably, I don't know about 23 years old and this is to the answer to the previous comments. And she was watching an episode of Friends on her cell phone and this idea that here is a person perhaps has just theorized longing for a day before cell phones, all by herself, with a cone of silence around her watching an episode that was made before the era of cell phones. That's a dynamic that I think speaks volumes about the show.

LL: Alright. Thank you to the both of you. I guess we'll all trot off and gather around our old TV sets in the next little while to watch Friends. Thanks very much.

BOB THOMPSON: Thank you.

KATHARINA NIEMEYER: Thank you.

LL: Bob Thompson is the director of the Bleier Center for Television and Popular Culture at Syracuse University. He was in Syracuse, New York. And Katarina Niemeyer is a professor of Media Theory at the University de Quebec Montreal and the author of Media and Nostalgia: Yearning for the Past, Present and Future. Well don't miss our show on Monday. Make sure you tune in because I'm going to be speaking to Margaret Atwood. There is so much buzz about her new book, The Testaments. It's already nominated for prestigious literary awards. It has been under the strictest of embargoes, except I've already read it, until it was accidentally shipped to some U.S. Amazon customers this week. It's all fuelling the anticipation of the novel's official release next week. The Testaments is a sequel to her dystopian novel, The Handmaid's Tale, which was published in 1985.

SOUNDCLIP

MARGARET ATWOOD: So when I published The Handmaid's Tale there were several different kinds of reactions to it. In England they said Jolly good yarn because they couldn't see this in their future anytime soon. Think again. You won't be with the outfits or the religion in England but they're well on their way to some kind of weird nationalism. In Canada it was nervously. Could it happen here which is more often what Canadians say. Less likely. Why. Because we don't have two political parties we've got five or six. And it's it's quite hard to get a consensus. You may have noticed this in federal politics and what you really need to get a regime like that going is a pretty concentrated 30 percent or so in a homogeneous population. And that's not Canada. And in the United States in 1995 they said on the one hand this will never happen here. Exactly the kind of thing I was objecting to because anything can happen anywhere. Given the. And on the other hand they said How long have we got. And that was in 1995. So I did a radio show like this one in which they opened it up to callers. On the West Coast and the guy was poking people and he was saying well Margaret you can't be serious about that you don't honestly think that something like this can ever ever happen in the United States. The switchboard lit up like a Christmas tree with people yelling at him. It's already happening.

LL: So join me on Monday to hear more of Margaret Atwood on the eve of the official release of her new novel, The Testaments. Coming up in our next half hour, a reign of fear. That's how residents are describing conditions in the al-Hol refugee camp in northern Syria. More than 70000 women and children live there. We will speak to a reporter who has just been in one of those camps about the brutalization and radicalization that she says is happening there now. I'm Laura Lynch and you're listening to The Current.

[Music: Theme]

One Win Away: Canadian Tennis Sensation Bianca Andreescu Goes for History at the US Open

Guests: Patricia Hy-Boulais

LL: I'm Laura Lynch and this is The Current.

SOUNDCLIP

[Commentary from US Open semi-finals]

VOICE: It's just surreal. Like it's a dream come true playing against Serena in the finals of the U.S. Open. Like I don't know what to say. It's crazy. It's crazy.

LL: Bianca Andreescu, this is real life. You are going to the final. The 19-year-old Canadian tennis being beat Switzerland's Belinda Bencic in her semi-final match last night. She now faces Serena Williams on Saturday for the U.S. Open title. It's a historic moment. She's the first Canadian to ever get to the women's singles final in the grand slam event. Patricia Hy-Boulais knows what it's like to be a Canadian in the U.S. Open spotlight. In 1992 she made it all the way to the quarterfinals. She watched last night's match and she joins me now from Oakville. Hello.

PATRICIA HY-BOULAIS: Good morning Laura. How are you?

LL: Good. What did you think of last night's match.

PATRICIA HY-BOULAIS: Chills. You know right from the second round early on at the U.S. Open. I've been following Bianca all these years because we've gotten to know her. The relationship with my daughter and Bianca played together in the junior years. So I got to know how you know when you know somebody in the juniors right. You sort of like follow the career and then you know they're good. But it's always amazing to see where they have arrived from so far from ago and the progress she has made was just incredible. And you know obviously she's setting the world on fire with her charisma and the core personality and her game.

LL: I want you to be a tennis analyst for me for a moment. What was key for Bianca Andreescu winning last night?

PATRICIA HY-BOULAIS: She was in every play there's always a weakness and a strength. And you know sometimes it's bigger than you know sometimes smaller with Bianca. There is very little gap of weaknesses and strengths so it's very difficult to play against somebody who has no weaknesses. Her biggest strength is her mental. I've seen it time and time again where you know last night especially she she just got after the first set she got low paid and she got annoyed and got negative on herself. But then somewhere in there down to five and a second she decided you know what I'm going to play the way I want to play that I'm capable of playing and she just buckled down and bulldozed over.

LL: And now I gather that did not surprise you?

PATRICIA HY-BOULAIS: No.

LL: Because you know you watched her her whole career. What what impresses you the most about her? Is it that mental toughness?

PATRICIA HY-BOULAIS: Her maturity. And I've always told everyone that you know is willing to listen to me, playing good tennis it's about especially we're talking the elite level you know and it's about understanding you know how the game works the momentum in the match and how if it's a mental a little of a play game and mentally with the opponent when to step up when to just go on neutral and then you watch and just be like you know waiting for the moment and then pounce on them. And that is Bianca's biggest gift.

LL: You were in that pressure cooker yourself. How old were you when you played in the quarterfinals?

PATRICIA HY-BOULAIS: In my 27 years old.

LL: Oh so my team relatively late in your life. I mean she's 19. What does a young tennis player need to keep composed on such a big stage?

PATRICIA HY-BOULAIS: Mainly you know that's what my husband was talking about, you know the composure of a teenager and then let's face it until the last few matches young guys did not have the experience like the top players are playing on Centre Court, never mind night matches and to be able to come out and there's a great big event in the world you know just to find that she had to be very sure of herself. She knows exactly why she's there she's doing the things that she loves the most in her entire life. And that is to play. And somewhere in her dream obvious everyone's dream is to get to it to get to the U.S. Open. And you go you know you arrive each match, each round and you arrive to where she is tomorrow.

LL: When you watch her play, especially in the U.S. Open, is it easy for you to tap back into your own experience?

PATRICIA HY-BOULAIS: Oh absolutely. It is a feeling that you cannot express in words to others it is reserved only for yourself. The pressure that you have to go through whether it's internally or from your coaches parents externally what not. You know it's somewhere somewhere inside of you that it touches every part of your nerves and being and you just have to find your way out. And it is very difficult to explain.

LL: Yeah I'm sure you experienced this on a pretty visceral level. Canada's produced some pretty good female tennis players. I'm wondering where you think Bianca Andreescu rates?

PATRICIA HY-BOULAIS: You know for me has always been comes with status is the responsibility of influencing the community and especially in the young female players. Bianca I think is a superb role model for the up and coming female players. You know she she is what you see is what you get on the court. She's feisty. You know she's on the court doing her see and she doesn't really she was able to keep the outside world away from her and just do what she needs to do. And she works hard at it and as a young female as you know now FEMA has a tendency to compare ourselves with others. And Bianca just does her thing and that's a great message to the young females coming up.

LL: Does that mean then in your mind that she's the best Canada's ever produced in women's tennis?

PATRICIA HY-BOULAIS: Absolutely. You know mentally, emotionally, physically she is in line and I really believe that she has yet to be the best. Right now she is the best. Pretty hard to top. But then again you know what we've all right. So everything you know you need a role model you have a record. And then the new people come in to break the record and so forth. But right now she is the best.

LL: So then you talked about her as a role model. Do you see her attracting other people into the sport in Canada on the male and female side?

PATRICIA HY-BOULAIS: Oh she has already done that because on part of my work now is mental coaching. And I will ultimately you know in the past year and I'll be speaking to my athletes. Oh who's your role model? It would be like Federer, Sharapova, Serena and so forth. But now the last since she won, it's been Bianca Andreescu.

LL: So tomorrow she is facing Serena Williams who looked great last nigh in her semi-final match. What does Bianca Andreescu have to do to win?

PATRICIA HY-BOULAIS: Enjoy the moment being feisty. She's creative. She knows how to dig deep. She knows how to get to the finish line. I would expect that Serena is gonna be very aware she's gonna be quick off the block and Bianca. You know keep keep do and keep fighting and there is nothing to lose. Enjoy the moment.

LL: What are you predicting?

PATRICIA HY-BOULAIS: I am predicting.

LL: I'm putting you on the spot. Yeah, I know.

PATRICIA HY-BOULAIS: I'm biased right because of course I'm going to be rooting for Bianca and I believe she can do it. The only, I would go before I would be for them every match because like oh yeah totally one sided to Bianca or even the three said that she she played with tomorrow's match. I am gonna be 51 49 on Bianca. It's not so clear cut. I'm still going to be leaning on her just because when you go in and you are full of momentum you know you you. And then you have nothing to lose you. You lose as a loose act. And she she is a she is a very strong athlete. She has a mean boss Serena. On the other hand has the experience of obviously winning Grand Slams and so forth. But Serena we've seen her when she gets nervous. You know it's dicey.

LL: It's too bad you're not going to be there in the stands because let's face it, this crowd is gonna be overwhelmingly for Serena Williams. You talk about Bianca Andreescu's mental game. How's she going to stand up to that?

PATRICIA HY-BOULAIS: She has a little taste of that when she played Townsend, when the entire stadium was against her and she you know. Mind you this crowd would be even louder. Ten times louder for Serena for sure right now. But it's it's you know where they talk about there is this little message on the side of the court at the centre of Billie Jean Case. Pressure is a privilege and she Bianca actually mentioned that the other day in her interview. So she understands that pressure is a privilege. So I think she will embrace it.

LL: And as we've been saying she's still only 19. We've got less than a minute left. What are your predictions for her in the sport?

PATRICIA HY-BOULAIS: About three weeks ago I predicted she would be top five. So I think I'm going to be pretty close to that. My prediction going forward is that she will be top three, if not number one, but she's climbing there.

LL: As long as she steers clear of injury.

PATRICIA HY-BOULAIS: Exactly.

LL: Alright Patricia Hy-Boulais, thank you.

PATRICIA HY-BOULAIS: You're welcome. Thank you very much for having me.

LL: Patricia Hy-Boulais is a former Canadian national tennis champion and an Olympian and we reached her in Oakville.

[Music]

ISIS women are responsible for brutal killings at al-Hol camp in Syria

Guests: Louisa Loveluck

LL: I'm Laura Lynch and this is The Current on CBC Radio One.

SOUNDCLIP

VOICE: I don't know I thought I was doing things correctly for the sake of God. And when I came here and I saw everything with my own eyes I realized that I made a big mistake and I know I ruined my future and my son's future and I deeply deeply regret it. I've been planning, literally planning to get out for months. I got caught twice by ISIS and I was so scared I broke my phone. From what I heard if they were to read my messages, I would have been killed.

LL: Hoda Muthana left her home in the United States to join ISIS in the Middle East. She knows now that was a mistake and she desperately wants to go home, but she's trapped in the al-Hol her refugee camp in northern Syria. That's where she spoke to a reporter from The Guardian. More than 70,000 people live there, most from Syria and Iraq. There are also thousands like Hoda Muthana, women and children from outside the region, from countries like the United States and Canada. And conditions in that camp are deteriorating rapidly. There's open sewage, polluted water and increasing violence amongst the women. Louisa Loveluck returned from the al-Hol refugee camp just a few weeks ago. She's the Baghdad bureau chief for The Washington Post and she joins me now from Washington D.C.. Hello.

LOUISA LOVELUCK: Hi.

LL: Can you start by describing the camp for us, what it's like, who's there?

LOUISA LOVELUCK: So the camp's on the edge of a small town in northeastern Syria called al-Hol. It used to be controlled by ISIS is now controlled by the US backed Kurdish forces and it's a place that's completely transformed in the space of just about five months. Back in February when I went there was there a roughly I think fifteen or twenty thousand people there. Up from nine thousand. The Islamic State's caliphate was in its dying days and people were coming into that camp by the thousands. Spin forward to now and we've got close to 70000. It is completely vast. It's split into sections where the Syrians are in one place. The Iraqis are in another place and then in what's now become known as the annexe. You have some 9000 foreigners who are locked up behind chain link fences and in a very bad condition indeed.

LL: And what are the living conditions like?

LOUISA LOVELUCK: As you say there is open sewage running into some of the tents. Human Rights Watch researchers he made several visits to the camp earlier this year say that they found women drinking water from from from water tanks that had had worms in them. It's incredibly hot. It's incredibly Dusty. When you were outside of your tent which doesn't have many possessions in it anyway there isn't much to do. You know children are sort of running around with you know with nothing to do and it's it's very barren.

LL: How were you able to gain access to the camp and speak to the women in al-Hol?

LOUISA LOVELUCK: The camp is run by US backed Kurdish forces and you have to get permission from there. Their intelligence service you make your request you often say you know if you want to see a certain type of person and they will often facilitate two days access you are with armed guards at all time particularly when you go around. Anything related to the foreigners as that is one of the more dangerous sections and it's a very heavily controlled visit but a visit nonetheless.

LL: So of the thousands of captured women do we know how many are actually die hard ISIS adherents?

LOUISA LOVELUCK: It's incredibly hard to tell. Most of the women in the camp are fully covered with an abaya and a niqab covering their face. It is certainly the case that there are a lot of hardliners in there a lot of these women are people who are willing to stay inside the caliphate inside the final strip of territory until its dying days. They were willing to survive on weeds and little else to you know to stay. Very few people will openly say that they themselves are radical particularly as a lot of them just want to go home. But from the people we met a lot of them said they were very scared. They said that they were they were radicals going around the camp reinforcing the group's strictures making sure that people who had wanted to take off some of those coverings weren't allowed to. And that makes it very very difficult to really tell anyone apart.

LL: Why why aren't there guards trying to make sure that doesn't happen?

LOUISA LOVELUCK: There are guards Put simply there. First of all there aren't enough but particularly around the foreigners annexe where some of the more radical women are staying. They are scared to enter. They when they have been inside they have been lured in into ambushes into traps. Several have been stopped. We saw we saw photographs of one of the one of the men who had been stabbed and he'd been stabbed with the blade right up to them to the hilt. These are this is a place that the Kurdish authorities are very very scared to enter. And it's also a place of course it's run by Kurdish authorities who themselves have carted off these women's husbands have cast off these women sons to prison. They are very very angry at them. And it's a place of I think a lot of mutual suspicion and fear.

LL: Now it seems the violence hasn't only turned toward the guards. You were told about a 14 year old girl who had been killed. Tell us about her.

LOUISA LOVELUCK: We were these these murders that at least two of them are very much at the sharp end of some of the violence. But these cases were seemingly unprecedented even for what we we know of inside the caliphate. There is a 14 year old girl who whose family initially claimed that she had died off. She'd slipped and fallen the her grandmother took her to the medical centre in a shroud. And when the doctors pulled back the shroud and we've seen this in the photographs and for the medical report it looked instead like she had been strangled. There was you know her blood had haemorrhaged around her neck. She appeared to be terribly beaten around the torso and people who knew her in the camp claim that she had been asking whether she could take off her niqab her face covering. And while the exact perpetrators remain unclear it seems that she was targeted specifically because of that.

LL: How do you know then, I guess other women who as you were saying trying to enforce ISIS beliefs. How do you know it was these women who committed this crime or do you know?

LOUISA LOVELUCK: I don't think anyone. For sure that is certainly what. What. All of the women we spoke to and all of the guards and all of the medical professionals said by process of elimination it seems more likely than not. You know this is this. This is the killing that happened in the middle of the night. There is no one else in there apart from these these women in the middle of the night and there were suggestions that the. Her mother in fact had had confessed. But as I say this is a place of such suspicion such fear has an incredibly active rumour mill and I think it would be very difficult to pin it on any one person.

LL: Did you hear of other incidents of this kind of violent extremism?

LOUISA LOVELUCK: We did. There was a woman who we was told was was Indonesian. She was she was killed several days before we arrived. Again we saw the medical report and pictures and pictures of her body and the difference with her was she was heavily pregnant. She had spoken to journalists several days before and at least the intelligence in the camp who have their own sources particularly by sending people in as informants into this area. They said that she had been targeted after speaking to the Western media and she was incredibly brutally beaten again in the middle of the night in her tent. It's not easy to tell from the photographs exactly what happened. But one of the main suggestions that she was whipped along her entire body and in close quarters.

LL: There are a lot of children in the camp as well. Do they have any access to school?

LOUISA LOVELUCK: They do have access to school or at least they have access to what I call some of some of these things that are called child friendly spaces. There are makeshift schools as far as I'm aware. Aid groups are certainly doing their best but it's a real uphill struggle. This is the camp of roughly 70000 people. Some 50000 of them are minors. And the majority of those miners are you know are under the age of 10 an awful lot of them are under the age of five which meant they were they were born inside the caliphate. They've never really known anything else. Psychosocial support exists in theory but it's very limited. And I was speaking to save the children who have a lot of aid workers in the camp and they were describing very high levels of trauma among the children. It's a very bad place for them.

LL: Well if that's the situation where they are trapped, there the education is spotty. They're dealing with trauma. How vulnerable are those children to radicalization?

LOUISA LOVELUCK: I mean nothing's a done deal. Every every family and every child would deal with this differently. But it seems like a major concern right now especially within within the the foreigner section speaking to several people about you know their own interviews and their own experiences in the camp. I think the consensus is that the you know a lot of the women that potentially less vulnerable to radicalization because certainly the Syrians and the Iraqis they are to some extent being ruled once again by foreigners in much the same way they were inside the caliphate. They might change their behaviour but it doesn't mean that they would become true believers. But these children the longer they stay there the longer they are essentially in a pressure cooker of at times some pretty intense radicalism. And there are many other outlets many other places for them to be where that behaviour is not policed where the trauma is not filtering through into aggressive behaviour. And it's a very concerning situation I think.

LL: Remind me again, how many people are there living in what you call the foreigners section of hte camp?

LOUISA LOVELUCK: Roughly 9000.

LL: OK. And a lot of different nationalities in the camp. Did did you meet any Canadians?

l: I didn't meet any Canadians this time. The last time I was in the camp I did. I did meet one woman very briefly. This was at a time when Baghdad is the final area of ISIS controlled territory was was being emptied and people were flooding into the camp every day. And she was just someone I bumped into you know I asked her name. She wasn't willing to give that but I ask where she was from and she said Canada and we had a very short conversation. She was incredibly scared. She was I think incredibly traumatized from what she herself had witnessed inside inside the caliphate. And people coming out of that area had not had cell phones. They suddenly if they'd had them haven't had access to coverage. And so she was asking me what was going to happen to her.

LL: Did sge express her desire to come back to Canada?

LOUISA LOVELUCK: Yes she did. Most of the foreigners we've spoken to do.

LL: So of course that poses a great challenge for her for countries like Canada who are struggling with the idea of repatriating people who once seemed to pledge allegiance to ISIS then their families perhaps they could still mean a risk of violence if they do return. What do you think could be a solution?

LOUISA LOVELUCK: I mean I think when you speak to intelligence officials to diplomats to aid workers or the people sort of working on this issue there is a general consensus that this will have to be done on a case by case basis when it comes to assessing one's one's future risk. Radicalism. What I can say is someone who's visited the camp several times is that this place is a huge problem and it's hard to see that leaving people who are not from that area in that camp effectively to rot is not a good solution. Every day these people stay there. The situation gets worse. And on top of that you can't forget that they are controlled by a US backed Kurdish force which is a non-state actor. Once the US fully withdraws from Syria it's highly unclear what is going to happen to this territory. And it could well be that both the prisons and the camps that they control are going to be handed over to the Syrian government now. No one knows what that transition would look like it would seem that it's going to be probably quite insecure. It would run the risk of a lot of people potentially escaping and even on a purely logistical level. Again that is something that makes their continued stay in al-Hol unsustainable.

LL: I'm curious to know with a number of women you met, foreign women, do you see them as victims or perpetrators?

LOUISA LOVELUCK: I think it's a real mix of both. One thing that is very striking when you speak to people is the level of indignation as to what's happened to them. This is particularly when it comes to the foreigners. They are outraged that conditions. They are often very they say they're very unclear as to why their home governments are not letting them back. And they very much see themselves as being on the side of the right the conditions they are in are absolutely appalling by any standard. And they have been through an awful lot so from that side of course they are victims to some extent. But it's also important that we don't forget what these women were responsible for inside the caliphate. And as I say every individual will be different. But the the act of going to the caliphate the act the movement of foreign women to Syria and Iraq was used in ISIS propaganda very heavily as a way of showing that this was an islamic paradise where men and women could go and be together. Not only that but in some cases you know the foreigners foreigners with more money often had sex slaves from the Iraqi is EDI minority the treatment of those women has been described by the United Nations as as part of the genocide and the women were often even apparently at times even more brutal than the men in terms of how they abused the women in their homes. And so there is a lot that we don't know about with some of these people have done before and it's certainly not anything that they themselves are going to admit.

LL: Complex difficult subject. Thank you for talking to us about it.

LOUISA LOVELUCK: Thank you.

LL: Louisa Loveluck is Baghdad bureau chief for The Washington Post. She recently returned from al-Hol camp. She is in Washington D.C.

[Music]

LL: That's our program for today. Stay tuned to Radio One for Q. Today Jeff Barnaby's second film, Blood Quantum is a zombie movie with a twist. It's set on a fictional First Nations reserve and the only ones immune to the virus are those with Indigenous blood. Tom Barnaby speaks to Tom Power about mining Canadian history for terror and subverting the expectations placed on Indigenous cinema. Well if you were a fan of the TV show Friends you're probably familiar with Phoebe's rather dubious musical talent. Her most popular song according to Phoebe was titled, "Smelly Cat" and then a memorable episode she attempted to teach it to her friend Stephanie, a character played by an actual singer songwriter Chrissie Hynde. Have a listen. I'm Laura Lynch. Thank you for listening to The Current.

SOUNDCLIP

[Scene from Friends of Phoebe singing and teaching "Smelly Cat."]

[Music: Theme]

Sept. 6, 2019 episode transcript

Social Sharing

More from this episode