But I’d been unfair to Scarborough. I’d let myself forget that this city operates with its own surly logic, distinct from the hustle of downtown Toronto or the exhibitionism of Montreal. Not that it doesn’t have either of those things — not, by any means, that Scarborough doesn’t hustle, doesn’t preen.

Scarborough is its own city, unconcerned with what other cities are doing and liable to tell you off very loudly if you suggest it should care. Where I live, the bus routes are uncooperative. The malls are big boxes, and the streets quickly succumb into highways, lined with open fields where massive insect-like electric poles stand in for trees. The music in the cars is a lot louder, the drivers a little more aggressive. The people arrange themselves into groups, loyalties worn deliberately on their sleeves, separating like oil and water, brown from black from white, class from class, we are who are legal and those who aren’t.

I took a different turn today, walked down some blocks I generally only drive through. Suddenly, there are patches of green sprouting unrepentantly between the model minority backyards. The thick road streaks over an unremarkable concrete bridge that hangs flat over a ravine that descends into a thin, clear brook. There is a small graveyard on the way to the grocery store, a corner lot that bumps against the six-lane road, large enough to contain maybe 60 people, tombstones tottering into the lawn without a house. And there is a tract of land on the way to the bank that someone forgot to turn into a townhouse, a neat rectangle of untended grass with a lone twisted goalpost. The clouds collect here, in this small space, the way they do not elsewhere, and fall over themselves into the grass.

What is … what is the name for those striations in lips, those fine wrinkles that ridge up and then plummet away under the exacting touch of fingertips, that tighten into fragile cobwebs of dryness in frigid winters. And those expanses behind ears, those wide and soft landscapes that valley into the sweep of your neck, what do you call them. Ears themselves — each elaborate whorl of pliant bone under velvet skin must have a title, something I could use to explain why their sight makes my breath catch in my throat.

Suprasternal notch. I learned this name the other day, for that hollow where neck bleeds into chest, where one shoulder meets the other.

“Look up,” I said, almost whispering, with no one else to hear me.
So, obediently, you look up.
“Up.” A finger at the tip of your chin, and your head tilts in the direction of its pressure, obedient, silent.

The picture I take is wholly unremarkable, angled altogether incorrectly. I had been meaning to catch the twin protusions that cradle the dip, that rise knoll-like on either side. But in the photograph, they are too faint, the shadows did not hold, there is an inconvenient blur. The camera caught other things, like the tips of your eyelases and how the ends of your mouth tuck neatly into themselves. And then it didn’t know what to do with those things, so it let them fall, weakly.

And now I miss the days I spent in labs, surrounded by the leathered remains of people’s legs and arms on tables, with hearts and lungs in clear jars arranged on shelves, and silent cadavers resting on tables in the cold room behind. I could have been a better student, then. I could have stifled the nausea and committed more carefully those names to memory (of the people? of their parts).

So these are the inner ends of your clavicles. I could have known the names of these and other bones, of all the muscles and tendons that pull things together, that ripple sleek under my cautious palm.

But it isn’t the same to want to name things as to want to know them. It isn’t the same to want to see a thing as it is to want to photograph it.

Suprasternal notch. I learned this name the other day, and have been unable to look at necks the same since.

There’s a ticket with my name on it. My name and two stopovers and 24+ hours of flight. And the date Thursday, Aug 11 8AM.

It is Wednesday night. 8AM on Thursday will find me asleep in my parent’s unfinished basement, my bags still packed from 2 months in Montreal, everything else still packed from 8 months in Vancouver. I survey the small wreckage of half-open luggage at the foot of the bed and feel a flash of perverse, useless pride. My life fits neatly now within every imaginable airline baggage limit.

It’s the first night of Ramadan. These past years, I have come to associate the month not with the moon, or with the athaan, or with hunger or prayers, or any of the things that used to mark this part of the year for me. These years, Ramadan is at its most Ramadan-like when I’m driving, family packed into a fast-delapidating car, nights caught between increasingly scattered iftars and no less scattered taraweeh, too many backseat drivers and streetlights that are never quite bright enough for me to feel like I’m doing anything but bluffing my way through this cement.

The first night of Ramadan. I do more U-turns in that half hour than I have the entirety of my driving history. I love driving at night through Scarborough. The streets are empty enough that I can drive the way I can never speak, 40 over the limit and smooth, one hand easy on the wheel. And this city boasts some terrific potholes, real necksnappers.

“I’m going,” I say. A light turns red behind me.

Ten minutes later, I nearly do a left turn on yellow, but stop in time, fifteen feet from the mosque entrance. I curl over the wheel, rest my cheek on its rough plastic. “I’m not going.” A bus rumbles past, then a truck, large mechanical animals that make the streets shudder underneath us.

I’m not going. After everything’s said and done, the irony of it is that despite everything, I always forget how beholden I am to borders. After weeks of reducing my life in this country to immaculate itineraries of changes-of-address and disgustingly lit passport photographs, I finally grow up and concede defeat. High Commission, you win this round.

But all these things, these larger machinations of exit and reentry, are not why I take a break at a stoplight to not pretend I’m not disappointed. The thing is, I told you, what I like best is leaving. Reorienting myself, when the goodbyes were on the tip of my tongue, is dizzying. I put my head down.

Camus, Albert. The Outsider. Trans. Joseph Laredo. England: Penguin Classics, 1982.
(Spoiler alert.)
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This is a story about a very emotionless young man. Consequently, despite the fact that this is also a story about sex and murder, it isn’t a particularly stimulating story. The drama, tragic as it is, is merely the backdrop to the protagonist’s existential crisis, which Camus goes to some length to explicate.

Pretentious enough, right?

But I loved the book. It’s compelling and believable. The writing isn’t forced. It moves with a light touch through topics (eg. dying mothers and capital punishment) that would otherwise invite a lot of straining at genius. The quietness of the writing is in keeping with Meursault’s self-possession. Meursault is the kind of person who can’t muster up much in the way of grief at his mother’s funeral and who doesn’t particularly regret accidentally killing a man. More importantly, he can’t be bothered to try to feel or to fake these emotions. He’s not regretful, he’s annoyed. He’s not sad, he’s tired. And he’s not going to pretend otherwise, however much this lack of emotion horrifies the people around him, even when his life depends on the performance.

In his afterword, Camus writes that Meursault’s indifference is a threat to society. His refusal to “play the game,” as Camus puts it, makes life difficult for others, inviting first their confusion and eventually their anger, until they finally decide he must “be decapitated in a public square in the name of the French people” (103). Camus argues that Meursault’s “passion for an absolute and for truth” (119) makes him Christ-like. I think the analogy is exasperatingly pretentious (not to mention cliche), but I’m willing to overlook it, partly because Camus scales back the excessiveness a little by excusing the description as an expression of “the somewhat ironic affection” (119) he feels for Meursault as his creator.

The other thing I enjoyed about this novel is that it provides a really biting depiction of the criminal justice system. Camus describes, among other things, how the accused becomes incidental to his own case.

So that’s an overview of the general philosophical gist of the novel. However, it’s also worth paying attention to how Camus’ treatment of the secondary characters in this novel inform his analysis of truth-telling. My thoughts here are still a little unformed, so bear with me.

First, I’m curious as to why every time Raymond’s lover or her brother come up in the novel, Camus/Meursault takes care to note they are Arab or “Moorish” (the former for the men, and the latter for the woman; I don’t know why Camus makes this distinction). Note that this novel takes place in Camus’ native Algeria. There is therefore a history of racism in the country that locates this novel and its author. The reason I highlight this is because these characters, in a book where pretty much everyone is expendable to the protagonist, are the most disposable. Quite literally, these are the people who are killed or beaten off. These are the ones who have the least agency, whose appearances are most fleeting, and who exist only to move the plot. They do not speak and they do not have names. And yet, were it not for their presence, this story could never have happened. In light of their purely functional use, then, the constant re-identification of them as Other has the effect of underscoring their disposability. This subtle fixation on their ethnicity serves absolutely no practical purpose in the book, so the only reason I can think that Camus would choose to insert it in this brief and carefully-worded novel is because that obsession emerges out of a culture that routinely dehumanises minority communities.
And, I shouldn’t need to add, this culture remains mainstream 40 years later.

Second, I’m concerned with the treatment of sexual violence in this novel. It gets largely glossed over, but of all the things Meursault does, the only thing I actually found morally offensive was his involvement in Reynold’s abuse of his (Moorish) lover. What is curious and troubling is that that incident is never picked up as a potential reason for societal disapproval. It’s as though it’s trifling. My argument, then, is that her dehumanisation (unlike the other women in this book, she is never given a name) is not just a function of Meursault’s extreme disaffection, but a structural component of the novel itself. In other words, it’s a mistake made not necessarily by the character, so much as the author.

In conclusion, at a macroscopic level, the story is a cogent treatise on the limits of honesty. Zoom in a bit, however, and some of its ethics start to unravel, revealing the complicated hierarchies of power that limit its generalisability (which isn’t a word, oh gosh).

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Reposted on my Goodreads account.