Archives for 2006

A bunch of people down at the University of Alberta are hosting the Broad Album Daylight Tour, featuring Amir Sulaiman and BeLikeMuhammad (aka Anas Canon).

So if you’re in the vicinity you should check it out.
Also, I made the site. (:

About a week ago I read Ali Eteraz’s article, “Muslim Experience At Ann Coulter Chat Forum.” It was a powerful read, if only because it has forced me to realise that I am guilty of consistently stereotyping the right wing. Other parts of his post also made an impression on me, but I’d like to focus on the following passage (emphasis mine):

What hurt most was the way in which I was blatantly excluded from the conversation as if I were completely invisible. There were postings and conversations in which the commentators spoke to each other about “he,” “the guy,” “the Muslim apologist,” “this experiment.” It was as if I was not there. I was not Ali Eteraz. I didn’t have a name. They described and discussed me without acknowledging me. I was no more to them than a vague idea. Not a person, but a pronoun. It was the most blatant case of linguistic exclusion I have ever experienced because even when a man has called me sand-nigger, it has been to my face and I have felt his spittle hit me and felt the actual tangibility of the moment. This time I felt brushed off like I was a husk. Non-existent.

Besides the fact that I could relate, I had just recently read Cornel West’s essay “The New Cultural Politics of Difference”¹ and was strongly reminded of his statement that “[t]he Black diaspora condition of New World servitude … can be characterised as … natal alienation. This state of perpetual and inheritable domination that diaspora Africans had at birth produced the modern Black diaspora problematic of invisibility and namelessness” (261- emphasis his). Eteraz’s experience of “linguistic exclusion” (a beautiful phrase) perfectly mirrors West’s concern with Black “invisibility and namelessness.” Continue reading this entry »

This was supposed to be the year I gorged myself on literary theory, grew fat on subjectivity, exploded under the intensity of my thought and the splattered everyone around me with ideas that would change their worlds.
Yes. This was the year I would put finishing touches on The Plan. The one that would Change The World. A major part of this plan was my application to grad studies. I had vague ideas of what I wanted to study; they involved ethereal words like diaspora, identity, and youth. Their very vagueness ensured their ethereality. I was able to spin intricate webs with those thin connections, was able to see potential in everything. Continue reading this entry »

I was going to write a long post about Friday, the way it opened light-heartedly, before ripening to slightly giddy gregariousness and finally ending with an unexpected and surprisingly sober, yet passionate discussion on self and community.
But. I didn’t.
Continue reading this entry »

You reach a point in novels when you think, “Things wil be so different after this, how will this book go on? How can it possibly continue and still be the same book?”
But they do go on.

I am at the point in my life right now. I cannot conceive of a life after tomorrow. My imagination, limited at best, screeches to a halt now as it considers not just the future, but also the past. Because I can’t remember his face, even though it was just days ago that I saw him. What I would remember is what I would see without my glasses: a blur of colour, a vague impression.

And the present is a blankness. Not a deadness, because that denotes a weight, a heaviness, an existence. This, the now, is a lack of. Of reconciliation between the everyday and the mundanely unexpected, between the private and the screechingly public, between loyalty and loyalty.

I’ve been meaning to post some code, mostly for my own reference and mostly relating to WordPress, but wanted first to edit my css to make my code look pretty. In particular, I’ve noticed that an increasing number of people are able to give their code line numbers without additional markup. You can see an example at Miha Hribar‘s site. Continue reading this entry »

There was a period a few years ago when I, a fervent teenager, was adamant in my desire to become a journalist. That fervency has gone. With it the ability to put words to horror has also been lost to me. Continue reading this entry »

Last winter, while my mother and I stayed on at Queen’s, completing our respective degrees, my three siblings and father moved back to Toronto, back to the very same neighbourhood we had left three years ago. Abdullah enrolled in the middle school he would have joined had we never left Toronto. He eased back into his old circle of friends, now taller than before, now more hockey-fixated. But he had difficulty coping with the amount of work he was given. The school he had been attending in Kingston is ranked Ontario’s best, but the workload had been light there. Homework was an anomaly. Now, back in Toronto, he would call my mother every night for help with his homework, sometimes close to tears. Continue reading this entry »

This is the first summer in three years that I have spent in Toronto. Previously, I lived in Kingston. Not only is that city cooler and less congested than Toronto, while there I had a basement bedroom. During the summer, it was always the coolest part of the house. In the winter, I would sleep without a quilt, because the heating system was about as old as the house, which was very old, which meant that the basement received most of the heat. Those summers I was, if not in the basement, in the backyard where my mom made lunch.

And sure, it was warm, but summers are warm. Reports of heat waves in Toronto washed over me.
Continue reading this entry »

That last post was pretty pathetic. The latent ablism makes me cringe now. Also the fact that I could have just gotten out of the bus and helped the man myself and that would have made maybe 10 minutes late getting home.
I’ve been meaning to say that for some time now.
As you were.