Archives for April, 2008

My wallet, with my SIN card in it, was stolen some months back and last week I decided to be proactive about getting together the documentation I’d need for a replacement. So late one morning, when everyone else was out and I decided I deserved a break from the essay that was writing itself in the laptop on the table in my bedroom, I rifled through my father’s briefcases of legal paraphernalia. Old drivers licences that should have been cut up and discarded long ago. Photocopies of Saudi visas. First grade report cards. A collection of cheque books dating back to the years we’d lived in England, addresses still clear on them as though we still live there. A copy of the first university magazine that published me.

Passports, too. Glossy maroon covers with gold embossed text.

One holds a black and white photograph of me at age three. I remember this, though less clearly than I used to. My mother couldn’t join us because she had work, so my father took me to the studio. He was probably at least as nervous as I was at the thought of being alone with each other. He sat me down on the seat, studied my face, and then, perplexed about what he was supposed to do, told me to comb my hair. I must have tried, and it could not have been very good, because my father took the comb and attempted it himself. In the picture, my eyes are too large for my face and my lips just pulling apart from each other form a tiny o. My hair, as thin as it has become again these last few years, falls from its split on the left diagonally across my forehead, until it obscures in the strangest, most jagged fashion one eyebrow and the corner of one eye.

There is another passport holding an even older picture of my mother. In this picture, she’s twenty-seven, several years older than I am now, and it’ll be a few more years before I’m born. Continue reading this entry »

Some part of this text we are about to make is already written … that I am a Black woman speaking to a largely white audience is a major construction of the text. blackness [sic] and ‘whiteness’ structure and mediate our interchanges – verbal, physical, sensual, political – they mediate them so that there are some things that I will say to you and something that I won’t. And quite possibly the most important things will be the ones that I withhold. The racialised power relations that we live determine what I will say and how I will approach my saying it. Our relative positionings within the society are at the core of these determinations. Notions of voice, representation, theme, style, imagination are charged with these historical locations and require vigorous examination rather than liberal assumptions of universal subjectivity or the downright denial of such locations. Even if my audience were half Black, or three-quarters Black, even if it were fully Black or people of colour, blackness and ‘whiteness’ – racial identities – would still mediate our conversation, though in such circumstances I might become a little more revealing. In such circumstances so much time wouldn’t be wasted in convincing white people their ‘ruling’ culture firstly, exists, secondly, was and is violently invasive and hegemonic and rationalises all others it meets into subordinated categories. That is, we might and in full cognizance of those circumstances proceed beyond white ignorance, white denial, white fear, white apathy, white lies, white power disguised as concern for censorship. Whites, that is, might proceed into the dangerous territory of knowing, instead of engaging in the sleight of hand that Michelle Wallace calls “the production of knowledge (that) is constantly employed in reinforcing intellectual racism.
[ellipses hers]

- Brand, Dionne. “Whose Gaze and Who Speaks for Whom.” Bread out of Stone. Coach House Press: Toronto: 1994. 152-3.

I want to read everything Dionne Brand has written ever. Every single word, every last painstaking, unforgiving conclusion. I want to read everything she’s ever written.

some words can make you weep,
when they’re uttered, the light rap of their
destinations, the thud as if on peace, as if on cloth,
on air, they break all places intended and known

I have a paper on her Inventory due in four days. I haven’t written a single word. Continue reading this entry »

The first day I don’t recognise my reflection. It takes me a moment to realise that I am looking straight at my own face looking back at me from within the dark subway window. After that I start to consciously seek out my reflections, to look for myself in storefront glass, in passing mirrors, sheets of metal. Bus shelters, revolving doors, elevator dashboards. Failing that, at intersections I study the shadows I throw, the single strands that show up dark against the grey concrete.
I need to identify my self to myself against these new backgrounds. I need to relocate my presence in these public places, to reconsider my position with respect to all these other people milling under this sky.
 

The hat fits perfectly: black corduroy, with a sloping bill.
“Do you want me to take the tag off or put it in a bag?”
“I’m sorry?”
“Are you going to wear it now or do you want it for later?”
“Oh – now, thanks.”
I watch her snip through the plastic thread with a scissor. “This is my first hat,” I say. “I’ve never had one before.”
“Congratulations!” And she smiles a wide smile across the counter. “You go to university?”
“Yes. UofT. I’m almost done.”
“Ah.” She punches numbers into the keypad. “All the students come here now. The other day a boy came – and he bought a wig – a big one!” She waves her arms to show just how big. Apparently huge. “I asked him why. He said he was finished school and he said he was going to have a party.” She extends the vowels of the last word, mimicking him maybe, or performing for herself. Her exclamation points linger in the summer light. Dust motes hang in the bright air between us.
I grin and hand back the debit machine. “It’s summer.”
“It was a boy!” she protests, her eyes open wide against the upward thrust of her cheeks. “It was a big wig! He said it was for a party.”
I pull on the hat, laughing. It’s a snug fit, the band wraps firmly across my forehead and the brim settles low over my eyes. “Yeah, you never know what happens at these parties.”
As I step out through the doors and onto the pavement, Feist begins to sing and I sing with her that there is so much present inside my present.
Continue reading this entry »

Whatever else it may be, autobiography is the least reliable of genres—one person in relation to one world of that person’s manufacture, which is that person in macrocosm, explained and made beautiful by that same person in the distance, playing god to the unholy trinity. Nevertheless, the three are lonely; they do not trust themselves any more than they trust each other and with reason, as each is persistently reminded of his capacity to cheat and distort by the enterprise in which all are engaged. There is in the subject, the loneliness of the oppressed; in the object, the loneliness of the oppressor; in the artist, the loneliness f the overseer, of infinite manipulation. None feels genuine kinship with anything outside its own limitation.

- Rosenblatt, Roger. “Black Autobiography: Life as the Death Weapon.” Autobiography: Essays Theoretical and Critical. Ed James Olney. Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1980. 169-180.

I did it all today. I wore flipflops and dangling earrings. I left my winter coat on its hook behind my bedroom door and I made sure my camera’s batteries were charged. I visited the waterfront and I bought flowers. I ate ice-cream and sucked on the popsicle stick. I plugged in my headphones and sang out loud. I vowed to buy rollerblades and renewed my pledge to learn to unicycle. I read the opening pages of what promises to be a very funny book and bought tickets to a show.

My flipflops are five-dollar faux-rattan things I bought last summer. My feet cramped up in comfortingly familiar ways within the hour, as I felt the thin, practically non-existent soles, fraying at the heels and unravelling at the toes, slap against the concrete.

I attempted to buy a spring coat and remembered again that as much as I like shopping in theory, I actually severely dislike it in fact.

I took pictures of the water. One boater, dressed all in white, turned to watch me, as I, seated cross-legged on the edge of the pier, took picture after picture after fiftieth picture of the red bollard. I watched a water taxi driver flirt with two women in business suits holding ice-cream cones.

I sang everything on my (brother’s) mp3 player, everyone from Patrick Park to Modest Mouse. The only song that gave me pause was Rufus Wainwright’s “Hallelujah,” but eventually even that lost its winter feel. Mostly.

Getting on the train coming home, I thought I saw someone I used to know very well from a very long time ago. After the initial moment of surprise, I realised that I did not want to talk to him at all and began to panic. And then began to meta-panic at the thought that I was panicking for no good reason. But it wasn’t him and the ride home was uneventful. I caught the sunset suspended between Broadview and Castle Frank.

Today I did it all. Every single cliche, I did. A good day.

It’s strange, how much I love this city. It’s not like I even know it very well, or have called enough others ‘home’ to justify how much I love this particular city, but the snow is all gone outside, this weekend the temperature is flirting with double digits, and the thought of spending my summer here wandering these sticky streets gives me butterflies. I will disavow socks for the next six months, and come home with the city grime lacing my feet. The heat will give me pounding headaches and my windows will be perpetually open. Yesterday, they were doing construction across the mall and the air was thick with dust.

“Toronto is,” said a friend, “where I am when I’m nowhere else.”*
Which sounds dismissive, the way you’d talk about the people you know will always wait for you, and therefore you leave.
Except I don’t think he’d meant it that way.

I wouldn’t have described my love that way. And though something about them makes his words stay with me so many months later, I sill can’t describe it to myself in those terms.
For me it’s this simple, in this many words: Toronto is home to me.

It’s strange, how much I love this city. How the thought of it gives me butterflies in my stomach. Is it possible to have a crush on a place? I love: the lake in winter; the stalking geese; the sheep in the Village; the squat, dark lowrises; the brooding ravines; lowslung cars with tacky paintjobs.

It’s strange, that I go so far as to even call this city ‘home.’ I must love this place very much, more even than I know, to have reached this level of comfort, to forswear all the other cities I have been and have not been and one day will be. This city occupies pride of place in my heart. And why? I don’t understand. Not even the lists I construct – public transit; concrete bridges; graffitied cement; vast and empty grey skies – capture fully, justify enough how deeply in love I am with this city.

I haven’t left yet, am still here, which is another reason this love is strange, because it is also deeply nostalgic. What does it mean to miss the place you live in, the place you call home even as you live in it. It’s as though my definition of ‘home’ requires a temporal disconnect, as though I practise diaspora in ways that permeate even my stasis, and therefore, the only way I can both be here and be home, is if a part of me has left already, is always looking back, is always aching for a return to something straight-forwardly beautiful.
Continue reading this entry »

To make trouble was, within the reigning discourse of my childhood, something one should never do precisely because that would get one in trouble. The rebellion and its reprimand seemed to be caught up in the same terms, a phenomenon that gave rise to my first critical insight into the subtle ruse of power: The prevailing law threatened one with trouble, even put one in trouble, all to keep one out of trouble. Hence, I concluded that trouble is inevitable and the task, how best to make it, what best way to be in it.

- Butler, Judith. “Preface.” Gender Trouble.

But the word is more than just an instrument which makes dialogue possible; accordingly, we must seek its constitutive elements. Within the word we find two dimensions, reflection and action, in such radical interaction that if one is sacrificed — even in part — the other immediately suffers. There is no true word that is not at the same time a praxis. Thus, to speak a true word is to transform the world.

- Freire, Paulo. Pedagogy of the Oppressed.