Archives for 2009

“death flowed from the wound.”
– Lord Parker in R v Smith (1959)

I got the TransCanadian Sketchbook in the mail today. It came in an anonymous package addressed to Fathima Cadre.
The handwriting (all three lines in my address) is frustratingly familiar, but I haven’t figured out whose. Yet.

A friend’s Gmail status: I PEE ON COMPANY TIME.

Everyone’s got a theory, we’d never get out of bed if we didn’t. Everyone’s got a theory, it doesn’t matter if you believe or not.

During a heated (but polite) discussion my friends and I were having with an audience member at a stand-up comedy show that was both stupid and racist (we called them out on both counts; it may be said we heckled them), the white woman we were arguing with, apropos of nothing, turned to me and said, “I love your accent.”

And my first reaction was to think she was being sarcastic, as a way of re-performing and possibly deconstructing the racism of the performer (whose first shtick had been faking (and badly) a Spanish accent because sometimes she gets mistaken for her daughter’s nanny, and who then followed with something about suicide bombers, but by then we were yelling so loudly that we were missing the punchlines, which were so flat I’m pretty sure the audience only laughed because they were family, which they were). I thought she was referring to the fobness of my accent, and how it complimented the fobness of my skin and nosering.

But no, she was so genuinely in love with my British accent (which I thought I’d lost nine years ago) that she felt compelled to suddenly remark on it. She was so unconscious of all the ironies operating simultaneously at that moment that my brain shut off, and I went into autopilot. I was polite where I should have been biting, and so, like the good brown colonised subject that my mother raised me to be, I said, in the Queen’s English, “Thank you.”

Surreal.

In some ways, my family operates like the Mafia. They’re moving into their own house for the first time in, I think, my entire life. My mother called me today and told me they’re finalising the paperwork week after next. She asked me to come home for the transfer, “You know, because you’re going to be a lawyer, and you’re the eldest.”

I have joined that ever-growing cadre in North American of young brown women with shorn hair and noserings.

There are worse things that could happen to a person than love.

Kitsilano is one of Vancouver’s most expensive neighbourhoods. It’s where I live here.

And I have felt safer in innercity Toronto in the dark hours before sunrise than I do walking here after the sun has set. I’ve loitered on my own in empty playgrounds in Flemo at midnight and had lone men watch me swing on the swings and felt no fear, while here I sometimes steel myself before walking through these leafy streets, past these quiet and polite houses.

It’s 11PM and I go out for a walk. I stay close to the main street, try to force myself to avoid the alleyways, to stick where the lights are, try to force myself to trust this city, the way it goes dead still with the night. And here, where there are five pet salons in the space of two blocks, the insides of the entrances to the clothing boutiques are people’s homes. You always see the shopping carts first. Then you see the rugs encasing legs, except at first sight, the form is unformed, so you could mistake them for dogs curled up under blankets, and you still often do. And tonight I see the shopping cart and I see the blanket and I’m hoping, as I draw nearer, that he’s asleep, but he’s not. He’s awake, eyes open and mouth closed, sitting up with his back against the door, toque pulled low over his forehead and scarf up tight below his chin. And his hands — why must this one detail, above all the others, hurt most — are folded over his chest, like at the end of prayer, after you’re done asking for impossible things, in resignation or patience, surrender or hope. It’s grown colder in Vancouver than in Toronto, and it’s a deep physical hurt.

So I keep walking, trying to pretend like he doesn’t matter, like the fact of my seeing doesn’t matter, and I shoulder my way through a crowd of drunk boys, and there isn’t a single car on this street, but the stoplights blink green yellow red anyway, diligent and irrelevant. And I think against my will of yesterday, of being in court, under-dressed and over-invested. I think in colours, of the white walls and the brown benches and the orange jumpsuit.

In the daytime, the men — in this neighbourhood, the homeless are always male — mostly disappear, or else they stick to the back streets, like the one I walk through to get home. So we stay close to the thinnest capillaries of this place, away from the surface, where we conflict with the decor.

This neighbourhood is eerie. I do not trust it. I can never put my guard down here. It is too clean, too calm. It is artificial; no one can smile this steadily and this constantly without being a liar. Continue reading this entry »