Poet-Warrior All Ways

Bruce Cockburn keeps his eyes on the horizon

Consider for a moment the iconic English-Canadian singer-songwriters and which one best qualifies as our national poet-laureate of song. While it would seem absolutely natural and right to pick Gordon Lightfoot, Leonard Cohen, Neil Young or Joni Mitchell, for my money, it’s Bruce Cockburn.

If not our poet-laureate, Cockburn has certainly been our poet-warrior, committing himself to the quintessential Canadian cause of universal social justice through word and deed for much of his four-decades long career. But his songbook, which goes far deeper than the top-40 hits he’s enjoyed, makes the case as well as anything. Twenty-nine albums after the release of his self-titled 1970 debut, he’s still going strong, documenting the personal and public journeys that are so much part of the exterior and interior landscape of this country.

On the phone from his home in Kingston, Bruce Cockburn is everything I’d expect him to be: thoughtful, intelligent, articulate, and—it must be said—humble. “I don’t feel like I do very much,” he says, when I comment that he’s done so much great humanitarian work. “Once in awhile I get lucky and I’m able to be useful to some of the people who are really putting their lives on the line or at least devoting their lives to helping other people—it just seems like the appropriate thing for someone in my position to do.” Humility aside, Cockburn began quietly walking the road with organizations like Oxfam and USC Canada long before it was the hip thing to do.

When I ask him how he got involved in the Child Soldiers No More benefit at UVic, he says simply, “They asked,” but then adds that Romeo Dallaire’s approach to the problem intrigues him because he’s trying to make it unacceptable for third-world warlords to want to use child soldiers in the first place. “It’s the kind of approach that I find fresh and interesting and hopefully it will complement the other efforts that people are making around the issue.” Cockburn explains that those other efforts, for the most part, involve attempts to rehabilitate former child soldiers.

Such a discussion can’t help but bring up our own involvement in a war. Like most of us, Cockburn is conflicted about Canada’s role in Afghanistan. “I don’t have answers for this one . . . I’m as perplexed as the rest of us on that,” he says. “I admire our gang . . . I admire that somebody’s trying to take a stand to fix things . . . I doubt very much it’s going to be successful and, in the end if it’s not, then it means that a lot of our folks have died for nothing.” Cockburn also wonders if Canada has been a little naïve in joining “Bush’s war” when “nowhere in the world does the Bush agenda seem to involve altruism.”

On the question of political activism and international aid work, however, he is more certain about the value of commitment—but also realistic about what can be accomplished. “The hope lies somewhere over the horizon,” he says. “There are exceptions—the landmine treaty is a major exception to that, the exception that makes the norm worthwhile. If you need proof that this kind of work can have tangible results, there it is, but most of the time you don’t get to see that. . . you have to keep doing the work because you love it, because you need to, because it’s what you do.”

What Bruce Cockburn does, besides lend his voice to important causes, is write and perform meaningful songs that help us reflect on our lives and our place in the world. We should be thankful that our national dialogue, our artistic landscape, includes such voices as his.

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Child Soldiers No More
(featuring Bruce Cockburn and Roméo Dallaire)
7:30pm Saturday, October 4
University Centre Auditorium, UVic
Tickets $81.50 • 250-721-8480