Archives for January, 2010

Can we talk about poverty in a way that doesn’t exoticise it. Is this possible anymore. When we talk about elitism and about golf courses and convertibles, can we admit that conversations about privilege are also about government housing, about skipped school fieldtrips, and the way roaches will scatter in swarms across tile floors when you flip the kitchen switch at midnight.

“So what are you saying,” he says, “would eating meat be elitist, just because some people can’t afford it?”

And suddenly I have a flashback to Ramadans in Jeddah, and the hours of preparing food that would go into making that one iftar near the end of the month for upwards of a hundred Tamil Muslim men whom my father would use his vast networking skills to invite — labourers and streetsweepers, distant relatives some of them, boys from villages not far from places I would later come to call home. Shy, gawky men. I think of my father, those years in Saudi Arabia, and the guilt he’d always feel when we went grocery shopping — this is one labourer’s one month’s pay. Some of these sinewed boys were my cousins.

“My father couldn’t afford to eat meat growing up,” I say. Why do I sound so angry.

Is there a way we can talk about poverty that doesn’t make the leanness of labourers a mere thing of beauty. Can we talk about these things in a way that underscores the ugliness of living the way we do, this way that reduces other people’s struggles to spectacle. He tells me that where he comes from in Pakistan, this argument about the accessibility of gyms is moot because people there don’t need gyms. The streetworkers, he tells me, “were the most ripped guys you’ve ever seen,” and he tells me he knows this as fact because he’d seen them bathing in the canals by his house.

I wonder, I wonder, I wonder did he mean gutters.

There’s a certain evil here, in the photographs we Like of dusty children arranging bricks. You know the kind of picture I mean – the nameless, homeless man asleep in a streetside doorframe, a mess of hair barely poking out of a grimy sleeping bag. You know exactly the kind of photograph I mean. And the kinds of the stories we tell, about those cheery kids in the third world who sell gum at your car windows. So cherubic these kids are, with the dirt packed deep under their malnourished nails. And those sharp-angled beggars in the streets — the way the light falls on the clean lines of the hollows where missing limbs should be is spellbinding, but they smile so widely for you, don’t they.

I think of my father, how his eyes would sometimes cloud over in the middle of a conversation about his childhood, the way he’d pause. I think of how I now revisit the stories he’d told me when I was a child, and how they say things to me now that I coudn’t hear at eight, at ten, at fifteen. How I talk differently to my father now, how he cries more easily these days, this man I used to know as rock, as unyielding and as ageless.

I think of my father often these days. I think of how he raised us, this man with his particular combination of guilt and commitment, how money was skittish in his hands, how I grew up thinking we were poorer than we were, because my mother the doctor couldn’t seem to afford to buy us clothes except when they were on sale and we only ever seemed to live in cramped apartments across the world’s richest cities.

Later I would learn where that money went. And yes, charity is just that: charity. But there is a love here, that acknowledges the brutality of poverty, the way people can and do starve themselves into madness and into death.
Love isn’t enough.

I know the kids who go home to asbestos-infected flats in those unappealing parts of Toronto, who wake up at 3AM so they can fold the newspapers they deliver to houses where everyone’s still asleep. I know the kids whose fathers cut meat for a living, until their hands are raw and the smell of blood seems sewn into their clothes; and who drive trucks that they bought with their own pay and will sleep in; and who have pains they think must be normal because they’re everyday. I know what happens when your parents fall sick, when suddenly one day they can’t move, what things children will sacrifice for blood, and what kinds of futures get written off, how young people can grow into thinness, how the need to pay rent trumps everything else.

I’m not saying — listen — that happiness is foreclosed to everyone who can’t afford to eat meat; pay rent; buy gym memberships; attend university; be us. What I’m saying is that in this crusade for Beauty at all costs, we blanket violence with violence. It’s cannibalistic, how we consume the images of their bodies because it satisfies some horrific longing in us to believe that we can live with honour despite their pain.

They were ripped, I suppose, yes. And sure, the housemaids were svelte, weren’t they. So slender under the thinness of their clothes and the curves of the bones in their wrists so very delicate. And illiterate, except when they wrote my father letters, blue-inked tamil on near-transparent paper.

– instruments courtesy of Delhi 2 Dublin (note, these photographs were not colorised).

“TV shows like you get cancelled. You always did have an aura of prematureness to you.”
– Adnan Ali, Jan 22.

Yesterday someone from the RCMP read this blog. Huh.

I can’t go two weeks without describing someone as “the most beautiful person I’ve ever seen.”

And I mean it every time I say it.

I genuinely like Wonder Bread (wholewheat). Another thing I genuinely like is house music.

“I would use of international law the words which Galileo used of the earth: ‘But it does move.’”
– Denning in Trendtex Trading Corp v Central Bank of Nigeria (1977)

We went on a fieldtrip to court today and the coordinator, when introducing one of the lawyers, said, “He comes from a fine lineage — his grandfather was a Supreme Court judge.”

I didn’t even try to not look embarrassed for her and, by extension, for this whole profession, where this kind of fawning elitism is so unabashed.

Update. The next morning the prof does a catch-up and the first thing she talks about is this guy’s lineage.
Oh well, at least I wasn’t the only student who wanted to scream.

I.
I emailed my kid sister pictures I’d taken of my parents in November. Which is kind of crazy meta, if you think about it. My parents don’t even like people taking pictures of them, so the last time I was home, I basically never took my camera out of my bag. Until the very last night, when I frantically started taking pictures of everything, of my mother eating leftovers for dinner and my father striding late through Pearson to see me off.

II.

- Tell Ummah to let me buy a camera, says my sister on the phone.
- Why do you need a camera?
- Because I want to pictures of everything and nobody’s got a camera here. And Ummah said you already have one, but you’re in Vancouver. You can get them for 4$ at Walmart. Tell her.
- Those are disposable cameras. Don’t get those. How about you say it’s a camera for the family, instead of for you.
- So my sister yells into the living room on the other side of the continent, Ummah, can we buy a camera for everyone?
- Okay, says my mother.

III.
I have few, very few pictures of my parents, or even my siblings. My brothers are even more adamant about taking not taking pictures than my parents. So I take pictures of them asleep.

We grew up traditional that way, strict in that cleancut way that prohibited graven images. I still get uncomfortable in front of a lens, still feel every muscle in my face freeze on the other side of a camera. But I don’t know if those things are connected, or if it’s just that I’m still and always will be the girl who couldn’t stand mirrors.

But on the other hand, I have a picture from the terrible summer of two years ago that I took of my father, in his spotless white thobe and mosque cap, swinging on the swing in my aunt’s Scarborough backyard. These things are also true.

IV.
I don’t remember faces. The more a person means to me, the less likely I am to remember the way their lips would meet or the colour of their eyes. It’s as though I can only remember without my glasses on or contacts in.

I mean, when I think of you, I think now, with less and less clarity, of how the lightest touch of your hand on my skin always hurt like nothing else I’ve ever felt. But I can’t remember your face.

Except there are moments, for which I am never prepared, when suddenly, in the middle of some other thing I’m doing, an image of your smile, sharper than all the photographs I never took of you, interrupts me.

V.

VI.
Then the image fades, of your mouth and the bridge of your nose, and what I’m left with is not you, but the memory of remembering you.

Things I am apparently incapable of boiling:

• Eggs;
• Rice sticks.