Archives for July, 2007

Away back last fall, I resolved to know this city. I thought it could be done and on foot.
I still think so.
The way I set about knowing then was I printed out a map off the internet and marked it with key locations, used bookstores all.

I lost that map sometime ago.

After a while, I began to know the the streets downtown. I couldn’t tell you if I was walking east or south, but I could, with much meandering, get from one point to the next. Mapless, the the windows of bookstores began to feel familiar to me. Simultaneously, paradoxically, I began to whittle down the streets I wandered through and stores I went bookshopping in. The list became reduced to the biggest stores, the ones with the clearest air and the best lighting, the ones closest to the subway stops.

I had also resolved that this would be the summer that I would arm myself with theory, other people’s words. I had decided, while labouring through end-of-undergrad papers in April, that I would not walk into grad school without knowing – really knowing – every name that academics like to drop. At the very least, I would know enough to be able to identify and dismiss the people who used dead names to bolster their own anaemic superficialities.
Also, more importantly, I wanted to know these theorists/ies well enough that their ideas became my own and I could no more cite their terminology and their histories than I can trace my own thought processes or punctuate my private monologues.

This was the plan.

I managed to get onto the waiting list for and then into a class named Ideologies. I was excited. World domination, I was sure, began here, with this total immersion in theory (intentionally, self-consciously lower-case t theory).

Meanwhile, with the winter cool grudgingly receding, I made lists of books and of names so I could prep, but the lists grew too long and lost context, degenerating into pencil marks on grubby paper, so I stopped adding to them. In any case, I wasn’t buying very many books at all, because I had also decided, with a twang of remorse, to redirect my attentions towards to reading all the books that sat at home, unread and forlorn.
And on that front, I’ve been doing pretty well, blazing through literary theory and critical history. I even managed to finish, and happily, a play and a book on grammar.

So armed now with James Baldwin and Cyrano de Bergerac, Maya Angelou and Anita Desai, I reconsidered this course named Ideologies. The provided outline, little more than a list of Names, now struck me as strangely hollow. Where were Franz Fanon and Homi Bhaba, Edward Said and Guyatri Spivak in this blatant list of People To Know (Of)?
I have since renamed this couse The Great Whites and if this sounds crass, well show me a name in that list who isn’t white and maybe I’ll reconsider.
(But oh look, there is one woman.)

Anyway, I decided I’d have to take my education into my own hands and I went bookshopping a few days ago, armed with a new map, marked with new old book stores.

And I bought:

• A Suitable Boy by Vikram Seth: I picked up this book in a Kingston library, just before I began reading Clarissa. Richardson would feel threatened by the sheer weight of this book if he were alive. I put it away then for the same reason I put Mahfouz away. But all I needed, really, was time to gear up the mental forces.
• Distant View of a Minaret by Alifa Rifaat: I vaguely remember reading this book a long time ago. Possibly I found it in my high school library. The one detail from this book that has stayed with me throughout the years is when, in one story, she compares prayers to meals punctuating a day. I thought it genius when I read it then. I also felt somewhat wistful.
• I Know Why the Caged Bird Sings by Maya Angelou: we’ve talked about this already.
• All About Love: New Visions by bell hooks: The clerk¹ at She Said Boom said, as he handed it to me, “This is a good book.” And then, for some reason, looked bemused when I said, “I’ve been looking for bell hooks for a long time now. But I don’t tend to buy books new, so it was getting difficult.”
  As an aside, She Said Boom is the only used bookstore I know of that has a decent cultural studies/philosophy/politics section. Pages is good too, but that’s not a ubs. This was also the most expensive book I bought, at $10.

The thing about lists is that they only matter to the people who make them, especially when they grow unwieldy. So you are warned: these are long lists. Long.

Continue reading this entry »

among the first things I noticed were missing – this was years and years ago, long before my last trip when I sat in that house and waited for the things to come back that had left while I was gone, without my knowing.

Spectacularly tall, in their thinness they seemed to almost brush the side of the building so that more than once I was tempted to stretch over the balustrade circumventing the roof, to try to touch those thin, blinding leaves. But my arm would dangle in the air between and the distance would suddenly drop through, weighted with the heaviness of the light, and I would remain stranded on my side of the roof, the trees on their side as deceptively slender as ever. Untouched and untouchable, they didn’t poke the sky so much as seem to approach it, their tips just tickling the bottoms of the flimsy clouds, bending gracefully with the breezes that brought citynoise with them, shaking themselves back into position, never quite vertical, but willowy, curved liked peeled branches and not the full-fledged trees that they really were.

Lithe, they stand even now in my memories as though they were merely overgrown saplings, little girls with long, long legs and clear, gap-toothed smiles. So I was surprised, the trip before last, or the trip before that, to find they had been cut down. The sky seemed uninteresing in the space that had been opened up with their absence. Without those pointed heads forever nodding there, there was nothing for the clouds to weave through, nothing to bring out the blue. Nothing of comment there, now.

And the trip after that, remembering that I’d asked the year before, when I asked again about the trees, they told me again that they’d been cut down. I nodded and said nothing in reply to their silent bemusement, my elbows on the low cement wall, my head turned to the left, a corner of the red kitchen balcony just poking through my field of vision.

That roof. I used to love that roof. There was space there. Slipping past the grownups and their protests that I was too old for this – Continue reading this entry »

He looks as perpetually surprised as I remember him looking. An expression that on other people might be endearing, on him makes me suspicious. Wide open eyes, a slack mouth, an underlying blankness; these things I hold against him. Always have.
Still makes me suspicious, even a year after our last fleeting, unacknowledged encounter in a a gymaniusm crowded with dressed up people and their parents.

But seeing him now, I can feel the shadow of a smile curl one side of my mouth as we, supremely impassive both, see each other. A silent, utterly unacknowledged process of identification, resistance, and bemusement happens now, as we cross paths under the lowering gloom of disdainful skyscrapers and impending rain. A slight grin grows at the corner of my mouth, as I note the unwavering blankness behind his eyes: always there, always this vacuity staring out through his startled eyes.

No flicker of recognition crosses either of our faces. We were merely passing acquaintances who happened once – two years ago, three? – to work on a project together, when we made our confused dislike for each other absolutely, hilariously clear.
Names forgotten, only vague memories of misplaced retorts linger now. They hover in the clear, streetfilled space between us, fixing us into positions of mutual wariness.

And so we walk by each other now, in this city big enough that I can trust in sheer probability that I will see walking here people I have not seen in years, without making the slightest gesture towards a greeting.

The girl beside him, neck crooked at just the angle that makes her right at home in Yorkville, made untouchable and oblivious by her oversized sunglasses, formal shorts, and scarf thrown carefully across her shoulders, does not note her friend’s momentary distraction.

Possibly no one does, except that, continuing on my way further into the shadows of overhanging construction, I laugh out loud at him and at myself, and the woman walking ahead of me turns around.

It’s books like these that make history a living thing, a real and pulsing thing that doesn’t so much seep into my consciousness as invade my every breathing moment. It’s books like these that make reading such a physical experience for me. I have to stop every few pages, sometimes every few sentences, to come up for air. And I mean this literally. My head will snap up between revelations, but the people sitting at the tables elsewhere do not notice my momentary disorientation.

And I will curse myself that I need to rely on these things, these pencils and highlighters, to mark the moments of ache in these books, that I can’t trust myself to remember the slash of it.

But then I’m on to the next and the next one after that. Continue reading this entry »

The Toronto Star published a strange, strange article a few days ago on inter-racial marriage. It’s not the topic or the paper’s interest in it that I find strange, but the shallowness of the writers’ analyses and the conspicuous lack of certain critical statistics that I find so troubling.
Obligatory disclaimer: I consider myself a “fan” of intermarriages ⁰, but I have two qualifications on the subject.

It used to be that I would have said that I was unequivocally in favour of inter-cultural relationships – to the exclusion of any other kind of relationship. I used to believe, whole-heartedly and simplistically, that these mixed-up unions were the cure for world hurt. I was convinced they would usher in a new era of harmony.

And the earth would be full of beautiful people, honey-skined and doe-eyed.

Ok, maybe not that. I knew enough about the physical differences between people to know that it would take, even if we all made a concerted effort, at least a few generations to reach that level of deracialised homogeneity.

But yes, at some level, I believed vehemently that there was something intrinsically better about marrying outside your culture than remaining within it. I believed this with all the ardour of an angsty brown kid, wanting revolutions in everything, from the clothes I wore to the people with whom I found happiness.

A worldwide united colours, no less, this was the goal.
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