Archives for February, 2008

The woman with whom I share my husband
Walks as if her shadow
Has been captured,
You can never hear
Her footsteps

- from Song of Lawino by Okot p’Bitket

Updated Feb 20

You could make several criticisms of Afrocentric schooling. You could argue that creating an alternative school system merely re-entrenches the Eurocentricism of the dominant one. You could point out that creating these schools only addresses the symptoms and not the root causes of the systemic issues of race and class that make these schools appear necessary in the first place. You could bring up the tricky logistical problems, like: would admitting a white student be tantamount to denying a black student a spot?

You could make those criticisms and sound intelligent. Reducing the issue to one of ‘segregation,’ however, and dismissing it as such is not intelligent.¹ It’s this latter kind of superficial politics though, with its lazy and disingenuous over-simplifications, that rules supreme in mainstream discussions of the issue. Critical debate is not what corporate media appears to be interested in having.

The Globe and Mail, for instance, in its editorial cartoon (drawn by Tony Jenkins) on February 18, made a mockery of pedagogy, black masculinities, and popular culture all in one fell swoop.

I honestly cannot believe someone thought that cartoon constituted useful contribution to the debate. ²

The Toronto Star has also indulged in more than its fair share of cheap shots. I don’t have dates for the following cartoons, but you’ll find them if you scroll through the Star’s online cartoon archives.

The Globe and Mail one definitely takes the cake though.

What I find most useful about these discussions around Afrocentric schools is the way they bring to the forefront all the latent anxieties Canadian society as a whole continues to have about constructions of blackness and the way whiteness and perceptions of ourselves as a ‘tolerant’ nation-state are dependent on marginalised communities refraining from making a ruckus and drawing attention to their status as peoples who are marginalised (as opposed to merely people ‘of colour’ ³) in ways that make everyone ‘else’ uncomfortable.
Ultimately, this co-opting of figures like Martin Luther King and discourses of multiculturalism has less to do with a genuine interest in helping the students of Toronto, black or otherwise, than it does with ensuring that everyone feels like they’re getting their tax’s worth of self-righteousness.
 

Because, listen, I like my neighbours. I’m so colour blind, I didn’t even notice they were black. I certainly don’t treat them like they’re different. I am a good person and I am not a racist. I think it’s just horrible that kids are killing themselves to death in places like Jane&Finch and I wish the fathers in those neighbourhoods would stand up and be men. I insist, therefore, that my neighbour’s kids go to school with my mine. No, really, as a sign of my goodwill, I absolutely must insist.

 
 
Update:
Tony Jenkins, the cartoonist responsible for ‘Afrocentric Algebra’, has a history of passing off blatantly racist cartoons as art. A full fourteen years ago he published a cartoon, again in the Globe and Mail, entitled “Wisdom of the Elders”:

This is his justification for that cartoon:

Natives are into smoking, drinking and now gambling, Jenkins said. At one time, Elders would pass on information about hunting and trapping. Now the knowledge that will be passed down will be about gambling, the cartoonist said. »

Wow. A decade and a half later and the Globe and Mail continues to publish this shit. Unbelievable.

 
 
Footnotes

1. I dare you to talk about Afrocentric schools and not once use the word ‘segregation’ or some variation thereof. [⇑]
2. I’m practising restraint here. My first response on seeing that cartoon was, “You’re fucking kidding me.” [⇑]
3. As labels go, ‘of colour’ isn’t so bad. But it has this fetishistic aura to it that I don’t like. It gives off this vibe of sexiness that detracts from the thorniness of the actual process of racialisation. It conjures to mind, for me anyway, images of slender brown women in silk saris that don’t quite outshine their long and impeccably straight hair. This is the practice of ‘of colour.’ It has no space for Walmart sneakers and depilatory creams. [⇑]

Today I turned twenty-three. My birthday isn’t for several months yet, but now when I think of how old I am, the number twenty-three is the number I know. For weeks now, whenever I thought of how old I was, I had to do mental arithmetic every time. That was tiring. I was trying to reconcile two contradictory facts. This is better. I’ve discarded one as untrue.

As of today, I am twenty-three. Should anyone ask, that is what I will say: twenty-three. Not twenty-two, which is a strange and invisible age to be, transparent and thin.

I was twenty-two from the months January to December inclusive, and it was a good year. Anger clarified, grew still.
I began it with a cautious disclaimer I know what I want, the things that make me. This will probably change, tomorrow, next week. But for now, just now, I know.
Twelve months later, I still knew. Somehow. Lack of experience, yes granted and admitted, notwithstanding, I had enough anger to sustain the work I was doing internally, not entirely consciously. The writing wasn’t lying – the effort of writing, anyway. The words themselves were meaningless, irrelevant. But the effort I was making wasn’t lying or over-compensating. It was groundwork, bare architecture, a solitary nakedness.

Foundation in place, I turn twenty-three in one step. Now I do not have the luxury of twenty-two’s half-consciousness. This is the year for moving horizons, forcibly shifted. For this, I need to be fully awake, to be cautious and afraid too, but undaunted despite myself.

The I-beams show and the empty window frames. The caved doorways and the floorless ground. Their nakedness gleams in the light, still in their calm anger. But now is not the time to dwell on their stark lines or wonder at the wide spaces that spill through. This happens, this wonder, can happen only in retrospect. I cannot afford to become nostalgic for the future now, must not allow myself to preempt my own endings, cannot write off my twenty-third.

I beg for haven: Prisons, let open your gates—
A refugee from Belief seeks a cell tonight.

Executioners near the woman at the window.
Damn you, Elijah, I’ll bless Jezebel tonight.

Lord, cried out the idols, Don’t let us be broken,
Only we can convert the infidel tonight.

Has God’s vintage loneliness turned to vinegar?
He’s poured rust into the Sacred Well tonight.

In the heart’s veined temple all statues have been smashed.
No priest in saffron’s left to toll its knell tonight.

He’s freed some fire from ice, in pity for Heaven;
he’s left open—for God—the doors of Hell tonight.

And I, Shahid, only am escaped to tell thee—
God sobs in my arms. Call me Ishmael tonight.

- Agha Shahid Ali, “Ghazal,” The Country Without a Post Office

By close-ups of the things around us, by focusing on hidden details of familiar objects, by exploring common place milieus under the ingenious guidance of the camera, the film, on the one hand, extends our comprehension of the necessities which rule our lives; on the other hand, it manages to assure us of an immense and unexpected field of action. Our taverns and our metropolitan streets, our offices and furnished rooms, our railroad stations and our factories appeared to have us locked up hopelessly. Then came the film and burst this prison-world asunder by the dynamite of the tenth of a second, so that now, in the midst of its far-flung ruins and debris, we calmly and adventurously go traveling. With the close-up, space expands; with slow motion, movement is extended. The enlargement of a snapshot does not simply render more precise what in any case was visible, though unclear: it reveals entirely new structural formations of the subject. So, too, slow motion not only presents familiar qualities of movement but reveals in them entirely unknown ones ‘which, far from looking like retarded rapid movements, give the effect of singularly gliding, floating, supernatural motions.’ Evidently a different nature opens itself to the camera than opens to the naked eye — if only because an unconsciously penetrated space is substituted for a space consciously explored by man. Even if one has a general knowledge of the way people walk, one knows nothing of a person’s posture during the fractional second of a stride. The act of reaching for a lighter or a spoon is familiar routine, yet we hardly know what really goes on between hand and metal, not to mention how this fluctuates with our moods.

- Walter Benjamin, “The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction“

And in my shyness and anxiety to please, those schoolgirl phrases would escape from me again, those words I never used except in moments like these, “Oh, ripping”; and “Oh, topping”; and “absolutely”; and “priceless” even, I think, to one dowager who had carried a lorgnette, “cheerio.”

- Daphne Du Maurier, Rebecca.

To The Boy Reading Maxim On The Subway:

Your attempts to be discrete are appreciated, but futile. You’re going to have to actually make a crease in that cover, if you really intend to bend it back far enough to cover more than the first letter of the title. Or significant portions of the cover model.

Nor does it help your case, if you had to make one, or your efforts at invisibility, assuming that’s what you want, that you keep glancing around at the rest of us, surreptitiously checking to see if anyone can tell what you’re reading.
Because, yes. Yes, we can tell. It is a crowded train. There are several people standing very close to you. Of whom I am not one, but their pain is mine.

I’m willing to give you the benefit of the doubt, though. I’m sure you bought it only for reading material.
But surely the lighting’s better at home.

Regards,
-f.

The first time was easy. I wanted to go. It was colder that afternoon than it had been the entire winter. I would feel that cold deep in my fingers hours later. But it was also a day when I had no problems being cold. And that day I had my camera to hide behind, so that I could maintain the distance I wanted when in the middle of the crowd: an interloper clutching an alibi and the right intentions.

That day, over a week ago now, I went easily. It was only after I left, going home on the subway that night, though, that the rush of it really hit me. Stars between Broadview and Castle Frank, ribbons of red and white streaking the highway. A sudden flare in that quiet train.
Delayed responses always.

Saturday I didn’t really want to go. I felt ill and looking in the mirror was more than a little traumatic. I was supposed to be seeing a doctor about my ankle, except I hadn’t made an appointment. I was supposed to be simultaneously attending a conference, except I’d overslept. All these things, these not-excuses congealed in my head that late morning, but I managed to get dressed anyway, my clothes linty and my eyes red.

Music on the subway. I fall asleep and the stops go by. Sickening, this morning. The city is not this ugly, nor are my memories. I know they’re not, but my head is heavy. I watch a few more stops roll by. I travel farther west than I should, watch the station names pass. And then, to my own dull surprise, I get off and turn around, heading back to where I should have been.

It is raining, bordering on snow. Today is not a day when I do not have problems with the cold. Today my skin is too tight on my body and there is a sting around my eyes. But I’m here – more out of obstinacy than anything else. Nothing so honourable as clean anger, not like last time. Today I am being stubborn, setting out precisely because of aching foot and leaden head. Nothing poetic here, nothing pure. No honour, but I am here.

My grandmother is cold today.       Very cold.     I know she is.
I’m going to be cold today.

And he takes off his jacket.
That is how he starts.

We’d been going almost every year, so the last time I left, I took it for granted.

Stories.
And he is roaring at the end of it, but I am quiet in the middle of the crowd that yells back, my hands in my pockets, watching. This is something else. Something else – how do stories cross like this. I watch him, silent.

He pronounces it Gaa-za. Others Ghazz-eh.

Later I am equipped with a loudspeaker that doesn’t actually work.
And by the end of the afternoon, I am surprised my voice hasn’t given out.

A motley crew, marching down Yonge Street, cheering at the cars that honk their approval. Makeshift drums made out of empty plastic tubs strung with twine around our shoulders. A makeshift sound system – portable in that he carries it strapped to his back, and the wires sneak around to a microphone and the women who lead the chants. A middle-aged Somali woman – I am tempted to call her aunty – smiles at me as I pass. A woman with a stroller argues with the police, who don’t realise she is part of the demonstration. Children. A man in a wheelchair.

My mother has dialysis three times a day – I can’t imagine -
She stops. And we pick up in the silence after her broken voice.
How do stories collide like this.

What is the connection here. A motley crew: she is a young black woman, curls tied back under a red and white kafiyyeh, and one of the reasons this rally is even happening. But her mother is not in Gaza. What is the connection here? It cuts deeper than the politics we appear to wear (kafiyyehs, banners, flags, armbands, placards) to a common sense of out/rage at the glaring injustice of this. A shared and noisy anger, wending its way past Holt Renfrew and Club Zanzibar.
A truck cruises by, emblazoned with Boxing Day Sale signs.

After it’s over, putting away the signs, we fall to talking. There will be peace, one day. I look away when he continues if god wills, considering the translations just enacted for me. And later we do introductions, exchange names. You’re Muslim, he says. Your name.
Yes.
And then Where are you from? And before I can answer, – Morocco?
I laugh. Sri Lanka. And It has a war going on, too. Then I lie, I know how it feels.
He is from Haifa. He pauses. It is called Israel now, but it will always be Haifa to me.

Kaifek, I ask.
He laughs, and I catch my error.

On the subway, suspended over the Don River, tears suddenly spring, but strangely euphoric, I blink them back. I am sick. I should be at home.

–

These are not the choices doctors should be making – heart surgery or babies on incubators. Those are the questions we ask in games that teach us sadism. Those should not be the lives and deaths that we practise, the killings we perform in hospital wards.
These are should not be the pieces of the present that we wait to become history, so that we can look back in pride at the moment the walls came down. There is only now, and a monstrosity of concrete accumulating stories in ways it should not, a testament to the sticking power of fear. We can’t wait for the self-indulgence of years later. There is only the dying now.

I should not have to hear a man my age describe how naively he made his last goodbyes, how he let his guard down one year, seven years ago, a leave-taking stretching over unattended deaths. I know that number, I know that foolishness.
Or have to see a woman my age stare at the rain drenched paper in her hand, struggling for words. I know that haze, I know that illness.
These are not the stories people should feel compelled to share behind microphones, in the rain, to strangers.
This should not be happening.

Update: Noaman has a video up of the rally and some of the lectures that preceded it.

Obviously, when you enter language
you enter a kind of choice which contains in it
the political history of the language,
the imperial width of the language,
the fact that you’re either subjugated by the language
or you have had to dominate it.
So language is not a place of retreat,
it’s not a place of escape,
it’s not even a place of resolution.
It’s a place of struggle.

- Derek Walcott; qtd in “Two Healing Narratives: Suffering, Reintegration, and the Struggle of Language” by Maria Cristina Fumagalli and Peter L Patrick; originally from a (prose) interview by David Montenegro, Points of Departure: International Writers on Writing and Politics.

Sometime this morning, I twisted my left ankle. I may have been overcompensating for how muddled the day had started off, so at some point just before noon I forced the bones in my foot into positions they resented.
I had a moment of sanity and I went home, changed my socks and my boots and resumed the day’s activities.

And then, to compensate for that moment of rationality, I walked. Where I could have taken the bus, I walked, though this meant I spent a good half hour on my feet. Where I could have taken the ever-obliging elevator, I took the stairs. And where I could have followed the straightforwardly helpful pavement, I tackled icy slopes.

My better judgement exists only in relation to my idiocy, and my idiocy exists only in reaction to that little part of me that notes my insanity as it manifests itself. It’s like walking outside in negative twenty weather without a jacket on, or sauntering through the snow in flipflops. It’s not that you don’t know what will happen. It’s that you do these things in full knowledge of what the results will be. You do it because, not despite, the reasonable voice.
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