An Anecdote from Melissa - The day I became Naomi Klein

In the summer of 2004 I was at a social justice retreat at Camp Arowhon in Algonquin Park. We were playing an ice-breaker game on the first day where people were all given labels on their backs of the names of people, normally people use celebrities, but in this case it was social justice advocates, environmentalist, lefties, grassroots leaders, revolutionaries etc.

So there I was in a large group of about 100+ people mingling while asking yes or no questions to gain some clues about the person’s name that was affixed to my back. And people were asking me questions about who they were supposed to be. There was David Suzuki, Ghandi, Maude Barlow, Augusto Boal, Martin Luther King Jr. and so forth. I seemed to know everyone in the room. After asking multitudes of obvious questions about my person, such as, “is this person a man?” or “am I dead?” or “is this person on tv?”, I was still drawing a complete blank.

About 45 minutes later everyone but me had guessed who they were supposed to be. Being kind social justice people, many people wanted to help me solve the mystery. I had a cluster around me trying to give me hints. One whispered “She’s a writer”. I heard from someone else, “She wrote No Logo” . And someone else said, “Her husband is Avi Lewis”. Nothing. Nada. I had no idea.

Desperately, I was shrugging my shoulders and feeling a little sweaty. My eyes were darting around anxiously looking for an exit, a bathroom perhaps. I felt that I was not making a great impression on these people and I was hoping to network with many of them over the course of the retreat . At the time, I couldn’t remember ever feeling so stupid. The answer seemed so obvious to everyone else. I finally admitted to everyone I didn’t know who I was representing. A group in unison groaned the answer, “Naomi Klein”. They sounded just as frustrated with me as I am of them. I could of sworn that I thought I saw someone roll their eyes (I think that’s when I learned that do-gooders can be such snobs sometimes).

So, yea… the game doesn’t exactly work if you didn’t know who the person was, but from that moment on I thought that Klein was definitely someone I should know, especially since I was in my “social justice advocate” phase or what my friends call my green period. I’m glad we were able to read No Logo in the course as I never did get to read her. As soon as I got home from that social justice retreat I went to the library to check No Logo out. Sadly, it was taken and there was an 8 month waiting list! I kind of got busy with life and forgot to read the book. After that small and humbling experience that summer, I will NEVER forget who Naomi Klein is, that she wrote No Logo, and that she is an important contemporary writer who has many fans amoung the social justice circles.