Boreal
Bernard Payeur
A Short Autobiography
I was was born in 1951, the fifth of
eight children, in Hearst, Ontario, a mostly French-speaking town about 150 miles south of James Bay on a northern leg
of the Trans-Canada Highway.
One of my first memories is of a man crying. I had been playing with his son in a sandbox that afternoon. It was not a real sandbox, just a pile of sand dumped in the middle of a muddy driveway. The boy's father, who was in the gravel hauling business, came home at the end of the day—unaware that his son was still playing on the pile of sand—and drove over him.
My older sister took me to my friend's house to see him one last time. I was standing in front of the open coffin admiring how good he looked in his tidy little suit and tie, his black hair combed back all slick and shiny, when the tiny coffin started rocking back and forth and a voice started to shout.
I looked up and noticed a man with his hands resting on the open end of the coffin, jerking it back and forth and yelling, “Wake up! You're not dead; wake up!” (Réveilles toé! T’es pas mort; réveilles toé!) over and over again. The man was crying, with big tears running down his face. It was the first time I had seen a grown man cry. I promised myself I would never do that when I got older. It's not that I don't get all emotional, an unexpected kindness can bring on the outset of tears, but that's just me.
Six or seven years later I would suffer a similar mishap as my childhood friend but survived thanks to the quick action of a priest.
In 1967, my parent’s lifelong business selling logging and farm equipment was forced into bankruptcy. The year before the family home and much of the family’s belongings had been destroyed in a middle-of-the-night fire.
Having to start over again with next to nothing my parents decided to try their luck out West. On a cold Sunday afternoon in late November, in a scene reminiscent of The Grapes of Wrath, with a snowstorm threatening, my mother at the wheel we set out on a journey of more than 2,000 miles to begin again.
My parents found a business they could afford in Ashcroft, a small town about 50 miles South-West of Kamloops, 3 miles or so off the highway to Vancouver. How welcoming would a town which catered to miners, ranchers and cowboys be to people who spoke English with an accent and were responsible for that foreign language on cereal boxes? But welcoming they were.
After my mother suffered, what I think was her fourth or fifth heart attack, her first since we moved to Ashcroft, it became imperative that we move to a larger urban center and find a business that was less taxing. The good people of Ashcroft made Kamloops possible.
After completing grade 13 at Kamloops High, I attended university for a few years. A professor at Simon Fraser who introduced me to Jane Austen and Jonathan Swift said that, if I applied myself, I could became a decent writer.
After abandoning my studies, I went to work for a finance company in Kelowna. Industrial Acceptance Corporation (IAC) provided private sector experience that would prove invaluable when I later joined the federal government. I may have been born in Ontario, but I had never been to Ottawa. In 1972, on the spur of the moment, I decided to visit the National Capital and perhaps find work there for a year or two before returning to B.C.
A few months after arriving in Ottawa, I took the public service exam and was invited to join the federal government.
Twelve years later, I was terminated for alleged insubordination. After discovering a multi-million dollar fraud at the Canadian Department of Foreign Affairs I was later accused of failing to report the theft of additional millions. When confronted with overwhelming evidence of widespread malfeasance by Canadian diplomats and high ranking officials, all the government lawyers could do was dare the adjudicator to find a former Prime Minister at fault.
During the two years it took for the appeal of my dismissal to be heard by the Federal Court of Appeal then later the Supreme Court of Canada I started development of a ground-breaking software application using the ZIM fourth generation language which I would christened The Boreal Shell.
It wasn't quite ready and we were in dire financial straits when the the Right Honourable Chief Justice Brian Dickson dismissed my last appeal with a curt "not a question of national interest!" My Lucette took it upon herself to contact a former student who got me an interview with a consultant from Montréal whose company had just won a substantial contract to provide computer support to the Canadian International Development Agency (CIDA) with the connivance, which I did not know at the time, of two public servants he bribed.
I would later find out that André hired me knowing my history, confident that I would not repeat the same mistake. I am sad to say, he was right. I now knew better than to stand in corruption’s way; but I could not operate that way as my work with the Ottawa Heart Institute will attest.
The Boreal Shell was, for a number of years, our salvation. It opened the door to consulting contracts in both the public, e.g., Indian Affairs and private sector, e.g. Bell Canada Enterprises.
In the 1990s, the Canadian government, looking to standardize how information was stored in government databases, turned to the past, to the relational model. The ZIM database component was based on the hierarchical model, the model that has become the standard for how the Web handles information. The ZIM implementation of the superior hierarchical model had no impact on its interoperability with other databases; nonetheless, the government declared the last remaining piece of advanced Canadian information management technology non-compliant, therefore outside the normal procurement process. This meant no new government clients.
With a disappearing client base for the amazing Canadian technology that powered the Boreal Shell, I could no longer operate as a one-man consulting firm using it to open doors. Finding work the old-fashioned way, with a despicable appraisal on file—not to mention my firing, to which I would have to admit—was not realistic.
It was shortly after 9/11 when, spurred on by the events of that day and what a young African immigrant in Montréal had told me about her religion (my time with she who was the inspiration for the character Uzza of Remembering Uzza: If Islam Was Explained to Me in a Pub is recalled in Love, Sex and Islam), I bought an approved translation of the Koran and quickly read it from cover to cover. It more than lived up to Edward Gibbon’s assessment of “as toilsome a reading as I ever undertook; a wearisome confused jumble.” Is it any wonder so few non-Muslims have read the book?
I was both a programmer and a systems analyst; the latter skill often involves bringing order to chaos. Could I do the same for the Koran and make it more accessible to the layperson, perhaps making a living as a writer? The result was Pain, Pleasure and Prejudice: The Koran by topic, explained in a way we can all understand.
I worked on Pain, Pleasure and Prejudice in conjunction with a play/script I wrote about the breakup of Canada, incorporating some of what I had learned about Islamic scriptures. Calgary Herald columnist Les Brost warned his readers not to read The Fractured Nation Interviews unless they were “prepared to think -- really think -- about tomorrow's Canada”. The Interviews were nominated for The Sunburst Award for Canadian Literature of the Fantastic.
The Interviews brought me face-to-face with the brave new world of post 9/11. A well-established television producer expressed an interest in a mini-series but without the conversation with the Ayatollah (a sample). “I don’t want to open my front door one morning and be confronted by a guy with a bomb” is how I remember him expressing his reluctance.
Muhammad bragged that he had been made victorious with terror (Bukhari 52.220). This would prove more than just an idle boast as the fear induced self-censorship described here gave way to governments censoring and even criminalizing criticism of scriptures which advocate violence as a means to an end; a tacit acknowledgement of the effectiveness of terrorism.
In 2006, I registered the Boreal Books trademark and obtained from Library and Archives Canada the right to issue ISBNs under that name.
Then followed in 2005 the first edition of Pain, Pleasure and Prejudice. Seven years later my wife and I accomplished, to my knowledge, a world first: a layperson's guide to the Koran which contains the entire book.
In 2012, I published Alice Visits a Mosque to Learn about Judgment Day, a one act thought-provoking, often brutal (it could not be otherwise) sometimes funny play/script about an important concept in Islam on which the Koran expounds at length.
In October of 2013, thinking that time was not on my side, I stopped working on Going Swimming Fully Clothed, an introduction to Islamic law, to concentrate on a less ambitious manuscript about what Muhammad said and did that informs the decision of Sharia tribunals to this day. In approximately four weeks, I assiduously read 6,275 of the hadiths collected by the celebrated Bukhari, and a few thousand others by lesser luminaries about what the companions of the Prophet, and his child-bride, Aisha, remembered he said and did.
I thought Pain, Pleasure and Prejudice was the most important book you could read about Islam. After completing 1,001 Sayings and Deeds of the Prophet Muhammad, I am not so sure.
Within the house of Islam, the penalty for learning too much about the world—so as to call the tenets of the faith into question—is death.
While the Koran merely describes the punishment that awaits the apostate in the next world, the hadith is emphatic about the justice that must be meted out in this one: “Whoever changes his religion, kill him.”
Given the fact that [hadiths are] often used as the lens through which to interpret the Koran, many Muslim jurists consider [them] to be even a greater authority on the practice of Islam.
Sam Harris, The End of Faith - Religion, Terror and the Future of Reason, 2004, W. W. Norton & Company.
My next book on the Koran explored a surreptitious concept, that of abrogation. The Verse of the Sword which nullifies any pretense to compassion for those who refuse to submit to the Will of Allah is its most momentous and violent manifestation.
Of all the incongruities that devotees of a religion steeped in incongruities have to accept, the concept of abrogation has to be the most outlandish. For the rational mind it is inconceivable that a god, in a book in which He lays claim to infallibility, has to retract, annul, abolish, modify… what He said earlier. Welcome to Let Me Rephrase That!
Children and the Koran, a comprehensive argument against exposing children to the hate, violence and brazen sadism of Islam's core religious text, is not my first book devoted to children and scriptures, but it promises to be the most controversial and epoch-making should it reach a large enough audience. I hope it will be received in the spirit it was intended, which is to make our world a more peaceful place and avoid ISIS-like atrocities on a scale not seen since World War II.
A friend had challenged me to make getting acquainted with the Koran less of a chore. The result was Remembering Uzza, the last book for which my Lucette was my sounding board. When the first draft was completed, she called the number to say she was ready, and three days later she was gone.
One of Lucette's last requests was that I make one more attempt at getting people to read my Whistleblower's Tale. I should not have been surprised that my dismissal from the Canadian Public Service still bothered her considering the surroundings in which she died. Instead of making A Whistleblower's Tale into an audiobook—her suggestion for getting people interested (I may still do that)—I decided to simply published an extended edition.
Shooting the Messenger – Till Death Do Us Part begins with my original eyewitness account of a sustained multi-million dollar fraud perpetrated on the taxpayers and how, without the benefit of a lawyer, which we could not afford, I appealed my dismissal all the way to the Supreme Court of Canada. Till Death Do Us Part reveals the next leg of this personal journey, starting with finding a job and ending with the assisted death of my beloved on the afternoon of July 5, 2019.
"Freedom of the press belongs to those who own one” A. J. Liebling
Purchasing advertising where it would have had the greatest impact proved impossible.
The Ottawa Citizen: Then and Now
The Globe and Mail: It's a Legal Thing
In a posting on my website, a few months after my wife's passing, I wrote that I owed Lucette’s friends an explanation as to why, when I told her that a young African working girl was crashing at my apartment in Montréal, all she said was she would like to meet her. My explanation took on a life of its own and that is how I found myself writing, during the coronavirus (Covid-19) pandemic, a book about love, sex and Islam.
I have been asked, on more than a few occasions, why I write about the Koran, and the alleged illiterate tasked with acquainting mankind with its content knowing the consequence of a one wrong word, a typo or a misspelling... let alone a book-length challenge to orthodoxy.
The danger is there, but it is nothing compared to the risk we ask our young people to take when we send them to fight religious extremists like the Islamic State, the Taliban, Al-Qaeda... And, unlike yours truly, they jeopardize lives not yet lived in what many have to know is a forlorn battle because of what is happening at home.
With the new race and religious hate laws coming through [after the London bombings] it could be considered illegal if Pain, Pleasure and Prejudice is deemed an attack on a person’s religious belief.
A publisher expressing his regrets.
Words, the most effective weapon against an advancing darkness are being rationed in a futile attempt to appease an intractable foe who lives, murders and dies as per the instructions contained in an inviolate book whose provenance and error free status is vouched for by the Book. "Epistemological black holes of this sort", writes Sam Harris "are fast draining the light from our world."
The darkness cannot smother the light on its own. It requires our complicity, our collective willful ignorance of what is behind "the draining of the light". I will not be an accomplice, the reason for my books and my postings.
When writing about Islam you are always concerned that you will not get to finish what you started because someone will take exception to what you wrote earlier. Therefore, you tend to rush the next thing you are working on, and that is unfortunate.
If you find any errors – and by errors I mean typos and malapropism, the bane of writers expressing themselves in a language other than their own – after my passing, you can correct them and publish, post them or do with them what you will for I have in my last will and testament instructed my executor to transfer all my published and unpublished material, including cover art, into the public domain. Just give credit where credit is due.
In 2017, I was diagnosed with a rising aortic aneurism. Every eight months or so I went in for an echocardiogram to check if it had expanded to a size where surgery to cut off the damaged portion to be replaced by some type of polyethylene tubing was called for, in an estimated three years I was told. After Lucette passed away on July 5, 2019 I cancelled any further measurements and decided to let nature take its course.
Six years since the last measurement, to better understand why I am still here and to get a current estimate as to when I can expect my aneurism to rupture I got another measurement that has revealed that the odds of my aneurism going ballistic have significantly increased. Best news I have had in a long time. As I wrote in the Preface to Fade to Black, my last book:
Whether it’s my heart or some angry believer upset about something I wrote who sends me to meet our alleged fickle friend in the sky, or that other place, it will put an end to a life that has grown tiresome without her and erstwhile friends and acquaintance who no longer care for my company with only me and my obsession.
In the meantime, I have posting about love, death and Islam in Chronicles Of a Man Dying From a Broken Heart.
Post-Mortem
On a sunny October day in 2013, sitting on the front porch of our wonderful, if somewhat dilapidated nearly century-old home, I gave my first lengthy on-camera interview about that old whistleblower's tale of mine.
In the interview, I mention that one of my most treasured accomplishments was getting a hearing before the Supreme Court of Canada. Having said that, should this interview be shown after my passing, please remember that I would much rather be remembered as the man, of the man and wife partnership who wrote Pain, Pleasure and Prejudice.
To that end, and leaving nothing to chance...
Obituary
My name is Bernard Payeur. Shortly after 9/11, I decided to get to know the Koran and write about it. It turned out to be a ten year odyssey culminating, with my beloved Lucette's indispensable support and assistance, in Pain, Pleasure and Prejudice – The Koran arranged by topic and explained in a way we can all understand. Those who have read it, say it was time well spent; those who have not, have been less kind.
Since then, I have continued writing about Islamic scriptures, the Prophet Muhammad and Islam in general.
Eighteen books later, It's over.
If there is a supreme being who wrote a book to mess with our lives, and if Paradise is my final destination and not that other place, I will attempt to come back with the proof. Not the actual Koran, but a reasonable facsimile. I have to assume that the Almighty will not want to part with the original Arabic edition that He keeps close at hand.
43:3-4 We have made it an Arabic Qur’an that perchance you may understand. And, indeed, it is in the Mother of the Book, with Us, lofty and wise.
Cheers!
Bernard