Archives for 2004

she’s not asleep. i can tell because her dry, painful cough echoes through the night silence.

he’s made himself a bed on the yellow futon with yellow cushions from the living room to match.
i stand with my head against the cupboard, watching him sleep. there’s a lamp standing on the stool next to him and a book on the floor.

i can feel the guilt; it is a living thing writhing in my stomach, crawling up my throat, stifling me. i want to scratch at something, claw at something, pull apart these bars.

in my search for a purpose, i have failed no one as much as i have failed myself.

you can only ever say goodbye once. after that once it becomes a farce, an embarrassment to be blundered through.

i spent all of last year saying goodbye and having said it and having looked to a future (mine?), i found that the past is not something you can close, like a book, or end, like a story. or send away, like letters.
it lives in you and breathes in you. it betrays itself in your words. it flaunts its presence in your happiness, in your hesitant steps, in the grey days.

it took the drawing of a line for me to recognise the beauty in the people i had known. this lesson i needed to learn only once, because i can see the beauty in the people i know now.
and this line, having drawn it, i can smudge, step over.

sometimes i am a middle aged mother of three.

i pull off the band and unravel the tight bun. my hair, still wet, falls around me and i am reminded of many after(school)noons begun seated on my bed, enveloped in the scent of many mornings.

I’ve set my deadline for Monday. In the meantime, I sleep and wake to this one conviction and in typical F. fashion I see the black humour of it all.
Which makes it very hard for me to believe in 100%s, in convictions that one feels in hearts.

On Friday I was expecting an epiphany of some sort. I was hoping to hear God speak to me and to make this absolutely clear for me, so I could protect myself from future regrets.
No such luck.

Dead people aren’t dead people. Many of us had been afraid of seeing of their faces. But their faces weren’t faces. These weren’t people. They were life-sized dolls made just for us, kids out to get money. This isn’t skin and who knows why this face is drawn frowning.
Then someone drew the last strip of cloth away, revealing two feet, veins and muscle still clothed in skin. The skin was drawn tight and wrinkled, puckered and there was a hint of life in them.
One male, one female.

I have no revelations about humanity, about mortality, about life or death. I do not suddenly fall on my knees and repent for a life of sin. I can’t account for their eyeless faces, the droop in their lips. These aren’t people, with souls I can see.
Only a blankness is present.
Not even Death seems to care about these human-like shapes.

I wander around the museum and pause in front of a pair of skulls on display. Both are of children. And I stand there and I wonder who died, how and why. There are no names anywhere. Nothing to attach bones and muscle to words and songs.
But it is a lazy wondering.
Like everyone else, I don’t care.

So in Science, we point out the facts. We build facts upon facts. We construct a city of diamonds to glitter in our justified suns. When one assumption falls apart and one building comes crumbling down like so much angel dust, we set to work like diligent ants to create a mansion on rubble. We have hope and we believe we will find a core truth to explain the world with. We seek a better creation.
In English, we tear apart words. We prove again and again that no word is dead once said. We recreate a person, we act as God for three hours a week. We dissect one sentence, we analyse from every angle, and we strike at some core truth about humanity. And then, let loose into the blinding light, we stammer and stumble when confronted with loves and hearts whose words are indicative of nothing but a moving tongue. But still we look for the gods in ourselves.

So. We make choices. Of assumptions, of creations.

A word is dead

A word is dead
When it is said,
Some say.

I say it just
Begins to live
That day.

- Emily Dickinson

we stood in front of the school entrance and she traced the boundaries of the restraining order.
and then she pointed across the street, to the front yard of the midde school that my brother went to.
“he could stand right there,” she said, “and he could shoot me from there.”

it was bright that sun, white, and it made spots dance in my eyes.

Today in Canadian Lit, we did the following poem (as well as three other unremarkable ones):

The Onondaga Madonna

She stands full-throated and with careless pose,
This woman of a weird and waning race,
The tragic savage lurking in her face,
Where all her pagan passion burns and glows;
Her blood is mingled with her ancient foes,
And thrills with war and wildness in her veins;
Her rebel lips are dabbled with the stains
Of feuds and forays and her father’s woes.

And closer in the shawl about her breast,
The latest promise of her nation’s doom,
Paler than she her baby clings and lies,
The primal warrior gleaming from his eyes;
He sulks, and burdened with his infant gloom,
He draws his heavy brows and will not rest.

- Duncan Campbell Scott (1862-1947)

Scott worked in the Department of Indian Affairs for a number of years, which makes this, for me, a very interesting poem. (I have found that context always heightens my appreciation for poetry, more so than with prose.)
Anyway, even though we weren’t asked to, just because I wanted to, I sat down and attempted to write coherently and cohesively what I felt was important about the poem. And because I was aiming for formality, my thoughts were forced and so I wrote a page and then gave up and made notes instead.

But it’s got me thinking.
Today was only the second class we’ve had in Canadian Lit and it dealt (if only slightly) with Aboriginal affairs. In the very first class, on Monday, I had asked the Prof, a man I happen to like, why the outline didn’t contain more works from Native writers. He replied that we will be studying Canadian literature up to and including the late 1960s and at that time was little published by Native writers.
As someone else said later, that was a token gesture, and I’m worried that we will do very little else with Aboriginal literature – in this course, anyway.

—

I find it disturbing that immigrants to this country – Fathima, watch the generalisations – I find it disturbing that none of the first-generation Canadians or landed immigrants I know, both young and old, could care less about Native rights and conditions. It seems to me that that is hypocrisy at its finest.

Consider: the only reason most immigrants move to the North America is to escape the conditions they had previously lived in. Canada and the US (I’m not going to talk about Africa, or New Zealand, or Australia, or any other places) possess qualities that make them desirable, things like financial stabillity, (relative) peace, quality of education, etc etc.

And yet – we (I say we, because I live here and am Canadian in terms of my responsibility to this country and my gratitude to this country) only have these things because the founders abused and stole from the people who lived here before us. And it doesn’t matter if it happened centuries or minutes ago – an injustice is an injustice. To pretend that simply because we did not physically or literally harm a Native American (or even know one for that matter) ourselves, we are free of guilt is wrong. We share in the collective guilt because we benefit collectively from the injustices that were committed in the name of this country.

We are responsible.

And it strikes me as strange, as eery even, that even in Toronto I never met someone of Native descent.

So today was the beginning of the long and painful ordeal that is my half-hearted attempt at Med School.
Half-hearted?
The more I think about it, the more said heart sinks.

In first year, one is not considered a Life Sciences student. You apply for entrance at the end of first year. As it is, first year was, in my opinion, a waste of time. All we did was review high school material, except in Calculus. Now Calculus I liked. And Physics, too. And of course English.

Second year Life Sci is the make-or-break year. Second year was designed to weed out those poor fools like myself who really don’t have the kill-for-marks mentality that is required in people who like to cut up dead people. Second year is where you find out whether or not you have it in you to continue this crazy thing called Pre-Med. Second year is where professors rub their hands together and chortle with glee as they devise new and puke-inducing ways of testing the humane limits of impressionable young adults.

And in spite of all this, I am afraid – it’s funny. almost. not. – that I’m going to continue being a Life Sciences student for a number of years.

Today’s first class was Anatomy 215. It began at the pure, untouched, clean and ridiculous time of 8:30AM. The professor seems a nice enough man. Under his turned-up nose is a neat white moustache and under his mouth hangs a neat and severely rectangular white beard that is the exact breadth of his lips and about a hand’s length long. Otherwise, he is clean-shaven and balding.
The first class was an introduction, as all first classes are. He talked about studying for Anatomy and how things will begin to make sense after we “get [our] hands wet in the lab.” Then he informed us that this Friday we would be doing just that – specifically, that we would be “getting [our] hands wet in the belly of a cadaver.”

There must have been over 250 people in that auditorium. I think I was the only one who didn’t cheer.

it’s like a joke we keep repeating in the hope that one day it’ll get a laugh.

“hope is the denial of reality.”
- anonymous

it’s like every word can be weapon. sometimes a hammer, dull, bludgeoning away at the strength necessary for life. sometimes a knife to twist in a wound not yet full healed.

if here was black and here was white, i could ignore the reds, the blues, and above all the greys. but i have to also deal with the yellows, the greens, the shades of trust and responsibility.
but everytime i hold the paintbrush in my own hands, my fingers start to shake. so where i imagined a work of beauty stunning in its honesty, i am left with a nervous scattered collection of broken watery lines.
all this to prove to others my own strength of conviction.
until finally i begin to take my creations as reliable portraits of myself.

and then i lose.

it’s been a long time since this house has seemed so bright, so washed in sun. but then again, it’s been a long time since i’ve been home at this time.
footsteps and the incessant creaking of doors. voices, cutlery, old movies, a symphony of family at home.

yesterday, when i was home alone and diligently working away, it had been quiet behind my music. and in broad daylight, in the mellow afternoon glow, a cricket was sounding its song.
it was slightly disconcerting listening to it, standing in the {grey} kitchen. the emptiness in me refused to echo, a superficial appreciation, an impression like skids on ice.