Archives for July, 2009

The car stalled at an intersection today. Save one polite beep, no one honked. The car sat there like that, still and indifferent at the head of the line, unmoving from one red light to the next, like a kid who’d surrendered the race the moment he heard the whistle, contrary and stubborn, placid. I looked up, thinking this was supposed to have been fixed two weeks ago, the streetlights blurred colours, and the engine grumbled back to life.

Fifteen minutes earlier I’d narrowly escaped a collision at another intersection. The thing about accidents that almost happened is that they didn’t happen: they’re the opposite of memory, the absence of an event. You drive on, calm because that’s just how unremarkable survival is. Afterwards it occurs to you that instead of driving straight on as you did, you might have made some attempt in those three seconds to avert the collision, turned right or turned left, instead of sitting there, saying noncommittally to the no one who’s sitting with you, “I’m going to hit that car,” like you were stating the solution to a mathematical problem, that one and one makes two. Your hands and your feet stay in the usual places they’re in when you’re driving, as all the film re-enactments you’ve seen of vehicle collisions project themselves onto your inner eye, and you can already begin to see the passenger side of the car in front of you begin to crumple, the metal wrinkling outwards like a fist unfurling its fingers. You are aware not only of the rapidly shrinking space between the two cars, but of all the other vehicles gathered around the two of you, the patient arena they’ve created around the spectacle you’re about to present. Your fingers remain loose at 10 and 2 on the steering wheel; no part of you attempts to acknowledge what’s happening, what is about to happen.

Aloofness or apathy, delayed reaction times, whatever it was, that saved you. Turning or slowing would have had disastrous results. You just kept moving, and three seconds later you’re coasting over the swell of the bridge, thinking about nothing.

There’s a lot of overlap between this blog and my Facebook page. Some of the posts here are notes on my Facebook profile, and some of the links on the side are shared items there, too.

When I was in Sri Lanka and thinking about how I was going to share the pictures and the stories I was collecting, I knew that how I presented the information would hinge on where I presented it. It was all very neat in my head: barring the occasional image that had minimal backstory, I would put nothing on Flickr, runltw would be where I put up the more personal/literary, less overtly political pieces; Facebook albums would be where I put up the “casual” collections of pictures; and I was going to create a minisite for a more formal showcase. Lethargy and time’s passing have made each of those projects a little more difficult to carry out separately from each other, but for the most part I intend to stick to that plan.

Some of the articles I’ve written recently have garnered responses so different in their respective spaces that it’s underscored the value of thinking about how different specific spaces on the Internet are from each other. The first example of this is the article Noaman and I wrote, “The War in Sri Lanka and the Left in Toronto.” I can’t speak for Noaman, but I wasn’t prepared for how overwhelming the response to that article would be — both from Tamil youth and non-Tamil activists. If we’d restricted ourselves to just our blogs, it wouldn’t have reached many people all. And if we’d restricted ourselves to getting it published in The Bullet, it wouldn’t have reached people outside academia. What was key was that we posted it on Facebook. Suddenly we were getting responses from young people, primarily young Tamil people, who were frustrated by the reductiveness of both the pro-Tiger groups and the uncritical mainstream leftists who had conflated resistance against Sri Lankan state violence government with support for the LTTE. Though I’d had many conversations with people prior to publishing that article that had made clear to me that my anxieties about the conflict weren’t unique or radical, it was still important to me that I had those politics confirmed by others invested in the conflict, especially those I didn’t know. I needed the validation, however self-absorbed it might be of me to admit that weakness.

Given the value of Facebook, then, from a strategic perspective, posting on the blog seems almost redundant. But what’s interesting is that the post I wrote about my parents, “Muslim Career Women (And Their Husbands),” attracted even more readers than the article on the war in Sri Lanka did. Continue reading this entry »

I’ll explain it this way. During our lives, we struggle to forget. And it’s foolish to assume that forgetting is altogether a bad thing. Memory is a bruise still tender. History is a rusted pile of blades and manacles. And forgetting can sometimes be the most creative and life-sustaining thing that we can ever hope to accomplish. The problem happens when we become too good at forgetting. When somehow we forget to forget, and when we blunder into circumstances that we consciously should have avoided. This is how we awaken to the stories buried deep within our sleeping selves or trafficked quietly through the touch of others. This is how we’re shaken by vague scents or tastes. How we’re stolen by an obscure word, an undertow dragging us back and down and away.

– Chariandy, David. Soucouyant. Vancouver: Arsenal Pulp Press, 2007. 32.

We are deeply conscious of the lacunae in this volume caused by the absence of [...] a paper on Arabic-Tamil, a dialect which was mainly Tamil with a profusion of Arabic conceptual terms, which were indispensable to convey Islamic thoughts and feelings. And it was written in Arabic script. It was a dialectical synthesis of Semitic Arabic and Dravidian Tamil – an ingenuity of the Moors, which remained the tool of Moorish intellectual writing and discourse from the end of the thirteenth century right up to the end of the nineteenth century. And Arabic-Tamil had its parallel in the Swahili group of languages along the East African coast. A deeper research of Arabic-Tamil and the immense corpus of literature that came out of it is bound to reveal much about the origin and history of the Moors of this country, at least, such was the contentions of one of our foremost eudcationists and scholars – the late Mr. A. M. A. Azeez.
[...]
Some of the source material, I should say, a greater part of them – namely, the immense body of literature of the early Arab settlers in Arabic and the much later productions in Arabic-Tamil are irretrievably lost. The Moorish leaders in the past had expressed a desire that the younger generations of this community should delve into their past and continue the initial effort made by I. L. M. Abdul Azeez. It should be borne in mind that Mr Azeez’s contribution to this field is of a polemical nature as it arose in the course of a controversy to refute Sir Ponnambalam Ramanathan’s thesis* on the origin of Moors.

The term ‘Muslim’ denotes a religious denomination and not an ethnic, and not necessarily an ethno-cultural one, but an ethico-religious one. This should be clearly grasped by the readers to avoid confusion. Conceptual clarity is vital to understand the problem we are dealing with, namely, Muslim Minorities. For instance, while all Moors are Muslim, all Muslims in this country are not Moors. Cultural varia[tion] within even a local or regional community such as the Sri Lankan Muslims is a fact, but it is glossed over even by serious-minded scholars. “Moor” is not a synonym for “Muslim,” at least as far as Sri Lanka is concerned. There is a sizeable number of Malays, Bhoras, and Memons; and in the recent past there were substantial numbers of Coast Moors, Khojas, Afghans, etc.

* Ethnology of the Moors of Ceylon. Vide Article on the Moors of Ceylon by Sir ir Ponnambalam Ramanathan. Proceedings f the R. A. S. (C. B.) Vol X No 36 of 1888.

– Skukri, M. A. M. “Preface.” Muslims of Sri Lanka. Avenues to Antiquity. Jamiah Naleemia Institute: 1986, Sri Lanka. iii-v.

Notes.

• What are “Islamic feelings”? I think he meant Islamic concepts or terms (masjid, mosque, palli; sawm, fasting, nombu). However, the rest of his writing indicates that he is in fact invested in the construction of a unifying Muslim spirituality, which is what finds expression here as “Islamic thoughts and feelings.”

• My mother’s maternal grandmother – who I think was from Gampola, and therefore not a coastal Muslim, i.e. without direct contact with Arab traders, who anyway stopped coming to the island some centuries ago, so can we please stop with the ridiculous “Sri Lankan Muslims have Arab connections” myths, unless you want to talk to me about how the Sri Lankan government benefits from its labour ties with Arab nations, in which case go ahead, because it’s not Al Qaeda I give a fuck about, it’s modern-day slave conditions in Middle-Eastern households, and this applies as much to Sri Lankan Tamil and Sinhalese housemaids and labourers as it does Muslim ones – could speak and read Arabic-Tamil (aka Arwi, aka Arabu-Thamizh). I don’t know if any of her offspring could. I should find out. In any case, my mother, who knows both Arabic and Tamil (and can read the first, but not the second), doesn’t know Arabic-Tamil.

Continue reading this entry »

i set up spaces that start to suck in so much meaning that i can’t return to them after a while: old emails; and people i used to know; and some books; and, since i’ve come back from sri lanka, certain folders on my computer.
but i looked today, and apparently i’ve written nothing about sri lanka since June 5. that’s a month today — but it’s not like the stories haven’t writhed every day in the back of my mind. it’s not like i don’t go to sleep every night guilty with the thought of all the work i’d intended to do, all the work i’d said do. it’s not like i’ve stopped wanting to do those things.
but somewhere, the hurt is profound enough that i cannot bring myself to touch it just yet. i’m not sure why. i lost next to nothing there, just took on more than maybe even i had prepared myself for.
but it’s counterproductive to wallow in self-pity like this. when it’s death you’re dealing with, even when the deaths are decades old, time is of the essence. so i’m trying to write about sri lanka, and i’m trying to learn to do something productive with grief.

for weeks now, i have been talking about writing, and i have been doing little of it. i know i’ve promised a few people articles i haven’t delivered. i’m hoping that putting up drafts will help trigger some sort of process to get this shit started. it’s not like everything’s not already too late, but it’s also not like everything is not vitally important right now. this is some sort of experiment, making public things that i’m afraid i’d never complete otherwise.

- July 5, 2009.

—
Draft 1.
Written May 30, 2009. I spent the latter half of April in Pottuvil, which is the closest I came to the actual war, which is closer than nearly everyone I met in Kandy and Colombo.

I think this was the morning we were driving out of Pottuvil, or the last afternoon I drove through its main street. This is where you found the highest density of soldiers from the Special Task Forces. They’d be strolling through the street, or standing in clusters under the shade of trees and store canopies, or grouped around the checkpoints. The van, or maybe the three-wheeler, that I was in that day was making its way down the street, either we were leaving for Gampola or I was going to the post office, and we drove by two soldiers walking past us. I remember they were both young, teenagers, their faces still clear. Thin boys in full army regalia: camouflage trousers and jacket, guns and clips slung over their right shoulders, one hand on their straps. I remember the one on the right in particular, the way the sight of him made something in me twist. He looked unlike anything I’d have expected anyone, let alone anyone in the Task Forces, to look. There was nothing untoward about his uniform or his demeanour: two young boys, two young soldiers, walking through a coastal village in eastern Sri Lanka, laughing, the sun hot on all our skins. It was something about his face and the transparency of his smile. He looked like a girl, and he didn’t. Hair cropped close to his scalp, unblemished skin, and soft cheekbones flaring up below his eyes. Nothing effeminate, only something so untouched and so youthful that I stiffened as though stung. Simultaneously, I drew closer, trying to force the sight of him into imperishable memory. The image I have of him now is the sight of him passing my window, the sun’s light so bright in his eyes that they shone blinding and black.

They were boys, the recruits they got into the army. Teenagers, recruited from the impoverished South. The country’s private schools boasted innumerable cadet troupes, but few of those students would ever join the army, however much military discipline and nationalist rhetoric they’d absorb during their training camp sessions. Ultimately, the army was manned by young men who had nowhere else to go, boys who wore their youth so unselfconsciously on their skin that nothing, not even five pounds of accumulated artillery, could counter it. But these were boys, after all, at work in the more peaceful parts of the East. It was the ones in the North, towards Trincomalee and further north still towards Mullaitivu whom I wanted to see, the boys who were killing that I wanted to see.

On July 4, the Vancouver branch of No One is Illegal, Canada’s foremost immigrant and refugee rights group, will be holding a Movie Marathon Madness event. Films to be screened at the event include Home Feeling: Struggle for a Community, about Toronto’s Jane and Finch neighbourhood; You are on Indian Land, about the 1969 protest by Mohawk Indians against violations of the Jay Treaty by Immigration and Customs officers; and Brown Women Blonde Babies, about the thousands of Filipina women who work in Canada as domestic workers.

In its entirety, the event schedule showcases the gamut of oppressive realities that mark Canada’s history and contemporary existence. They cover topics as varied as the ongoing systemic racism targeted at working-class African-Canadians, the WWII internment of Japanese-Canadians in British Columbia, and current intersections of sexuality and immigration policies. On Canada Day, when we are asked to congratulate ourselves on how well we treat our ethnics, screenings like these expose the lived realities of marginalised peoples across Canada. These are realities that resist reduction into easy parades of colourful clothing and exotic foods. This is not a diversity of commodifiable cultures, but a diversity of class positions, gender performances, linguistic practices, and race identifications. This is a diversity of privileges and discriminations. In discussing them in public spaces, we highlight the many injustices that are enacted on a daily and systemic basis in Canada by the Canadian nation-state.

What I’m saying here is simple: for many of us, it is difficult to celebrate the creation of a state that was founded on the theft of territory from its indigenous inhabitants, a state that has continued to refuse to address in any meaningful way that inaugural violence. For many of us, constructions of Canada as a nation of polite peacemakers ring hollow, because we know too well the myriad and systemic ways by which Canada oppresses its indigenous peoples, its migrant labourers, and its racialised poor, among others.

What I’m saying is simple: it’s July here in Toronto as I write this, summer has finally broken, and I’m enjoying the day off from work, but I have no flags to wave.

Meanwhile, media darling Tarek Fatah has a post on his blog entitled "An Arab Canadian’s way of celebrating Canada Day." The approximately 300-word long post can be split into three basic sections. Only a few sentences have anything to do at all with the titular Arab-Canadian, Omar Shaban, who Fatak singled out for attention for having a Facebook status on the morning of July 1 that read "Happy Genocide Day Canada." The rest of the post – approximately two-thirds of it – is about comments that Fatak claims Ali Mallah, VP Ontario of the Canadian Arab Federation, made on "a Muslim cable TV show" in which Mallah said the election of Iranian President Mahmoud Ahmedinejad was valid. Fatah fails to give the name of this show or the date of this episode. Nor does he specify if Mallah was speaking in an official capacity. Needless to say, Fatah also fails to note that the election results and discussions about Western involvement are arguments currently raging across the world, including in Canada by Canadians (who aren’t Arab). Fatah adds some visual oomph to his post with screenshots of Shaban’s Facebook page, including a pixelated photograph of Shaban in a ghutrah. It’s worth noting that this photograph is not Shaban’s profile picture, which means Fatah must have clicked around to find it. The post closes with a screencap from the CAF website showing the names of its Executive Committee, of whom Shaban is VP West. In short, there is very little of any substance in Fatah’s post, primarily because he provides almost no commentary at all, but it is valuable as an instructive example of sloppy and xenophobic citizen "journalism."

To begin with, there’s the issue of post’s title and subtitle, which are "An Arab Canadian’s way of celebrating Canada Day" and "As Canadians celebrate their country’s birthday, Canadian Arab Federation VP says, ‘F**k Canada Day,’" respectively. Were Fatah so offended on behalf of the upstanding citizens of Canada (of whom, according to Fatah, Shaban is apparently not one) that he felt compelled to devote an entire blog post to criticizing Shaban, one imagines he’d have actually done so. That is, one imagines he’d have actually written a blog post on how misguided Shaban’s politics are. But this Fatah does not do. Instead, he barrels right along without so much as a by-your-leave into a criticism of Mallah. Apparently, one Arab-Canadian can stand in for the next, the implication being that, after all, they’re all the same: not really Canadian.

I don’t know about the rest of Canada, but I’m insulted on behalf of my intelligence.

But in presenting Shaban and Mallah as interchangeable, Fatah isn’t only making a comment about Arab(-Canadian)s or CAF. He is also collapsing all critique of Canadian oppression with support for Iranian oppression. I’m not sure how one makes that leap in logic, but Fatah manages to do it without the slightest assistance or provocation.

Nor does Fatah have anything to say about the CAF as an organisation. He leaves all that to the imaginations of his readers who, with few exceptions, are only too happy to chorus "go back home." Happy Canada Day to you, too.

But who exactly are the Canadians who, according to Fatah, are en-masse celebrating Canada Day? Certainly they aren’t the survivors of Canada’s residential schools, who have spent years trying to hold the Canadian government responsible for the mass murder and rape of indigenous children. On June 11, 2009, a group of indigenous elders released the following statement: "A year ago, ‘Prime Minister’ Steven Harper exonerated his government and these churches with a hollow ‘apology’ that released them from any responsibility for their murder of our children. Today, we declare that these institutions are not absolved from their guilt, or their liability, for their murder of our people."
Perhaps these insufficiently grateful denizens should also be sent back home? … Oh, wait.

So, to extrapolate from Fatah’s article, to be Canadian is to refuse to acknowledge that Canada is deeply invested in oppressive policies at home and abroad. Yet there are many of us who, for a variety of reasons, claim ownership of Canada, and who, as a result, feel it is ethically incumbent on us that we recognise and resist the oppressions that Fatah totally elides in his post. In other words, it is because we are residents and/or citizens of Canadian that we are opposed to mindless displays of nationalism. Home is not for us the hollow utopia that Fatah has constructed, but a deeply contested space. Thus, at the same time that we resist oppressions that marginalise us, we resist oppressions carried out against others in our names by the Canadian government. This too is a practice of citizenship, but perhaps one more self-aware than what Fatah prefers.

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cross-posted at Muslim Lookout