Archives for 2010

The guy in the store is Vancouver born and bred. He’s never been to Toronto and he speaks about it with vague antipathy.
I laugh. “Do you hate Toronto on principle?” I ask.
“Yes,” he says, and then pauses, before mumbling, “And I was going to say it was because I hated all the people I met from Toronto.”
And when I laugh, he says, quickly now, “They keep complaining about being here. The air is sweeter, the girls are prettier, the clubs are better in Toronto. So if they love it so much there, why don’t they go back?!”
So I resolve, on this day after the city’s first snow, when it reminds me of home, to remember that I’m here and here is different from Toronto, and it’s time I just accept that.

He asks me my name as I leave, and I tell him. But with that infernal question mark hanging off the end of the last syllable, that jarring question that taints the sound of my name whenever I say it here, already cringing for the moment when they repeat my name and butcher it because they’ve never heard it before. But then he says my name perfectly right.

Spend enough time with the right kind of people, and eventually someone’s going to tell you that activism is the praxis of love. Which is strange (and arrogant). Social justice may be about establishing structures that manifest the inherent dignity of human lives, and it may be that this work is an expression of love for all the ways humanity knows to exist, but that formulation, besides being esoteric, suggests that doing this work teaches a person how to be kind to the people who move most closely against their heart. Which isn’t the case. These are separate languages for different spaces. After all the modernism is done being post, still there is a distance between the public and the private, where the latter is finally that space inside your chest or your belly, that space wherever, where you feel emotions palpably. A sudden shortness of breath or a tightening in your gut, this power we have to change how the tiny wet parts of other bodies fit together.

So this ‘praxis of love.’ The kindest people I know are not always the people I do the most work with. They’re simply the kindest, the people to whom I turn for models of dignity and respect. And I’m thinking of this tonight because I messed up. Nothing I’ve learned about diversities of tactics or systemic change has taught me how to handle old hurts when they resurface, how to be at once considerate and firm in this new moment, when the old language was inscrutable and angry and sticks around like every bad habit you never quite quit. It’s a delicate balance, and grace has never been my strong suit. Paltry excuse, and maybe you only learn by practice, but this sucks. I need also to stop listening to melodramatic music.

Am reading Our Fire Survives the Storm: A Cherokee Literary History by Daniel Heath Justice and wanted quickly to note the clarity and vigour with which DHJ writes about “intellectual sovereignty” and grounded hermeneutics. He writes:

To ground one’s work wihtin Indingenous ways of knowing is not a necessarily exclusivist act that seeks an idealized cultural purity. Rather, it is, at its core, a deeply realistic and life-affirming act. [...] Intellectual sovereignty doesn’t presume an insistence on tribal-centred scholarship as the exclusive model of sensitive or insightful analysis. It does, however, privilege an understanding of community as being important to a nuanced reading of the text.

Wanted to note this here, quickly, before I head off in half an hour to host a reading by DHJ, before I forget why his argument matters. It rings with some urgency for me now since I have been thinking quite a bit these days about my position with respect to any given Muslim community (as versus with respect to individuals). My concern is specifically how the delineation of such a group is necessarily exclusivist, and therefore essentialist. My focus is trained on the margins of this definition, on the people who aren’t quite in and aren’t quite out and feel disempowered to choose their position for themselves. In that context, I struggle often with depictions from Muslims of Muslim cultures — are there Muslim “ways of knowing”? but there is nothing generalisable across these innumerable borders — that feel to me, invariably (to the point of feeling knee-jerk), essentialist. The practical implication of this is that when negotiating against the historic and continuing disenfranchisement of Muslim (and similarly minoritised) communities in the West, I feel uncomfortable. How does one, for instance, create a network of Muslim students that can take up a diversity of socialisations — cf. people whose concerns around Islamophobia emerge out of their experiences being visibly Muslim on campus and those who must confront Islamophobia in work as queer rights activists (this pairing being neither mutually exclusive nor exhaustive). How does one create safe and non-essentialising and culturally-grounded spaces to contend with a diversity of oppressions?

There are workshops on this, I know. And it isn’t work to be done, superhero-like, by one person — collective, consensus models ftw. And I’ve taken quite the detour here from DHJ’s text, but who knows, maybe we’ll talk about it more over dinner. Am starving.

I used to buy my mother flowers. We used to live in an apartment building crowded with flats, in a neighbourhood crowded with apartment buildings. Within a decade we’d moved 5 times, 6 if you count that first move across the Atlantic. We’d moved so often, between so many differently shaped and sized spaces, that we lost things along the way. Books went awol, and trunks of children’s clothes disappeared into some kind of ether while we decided which pieces of memory were worth the trucking fees. Still we found ourselves finally in an inner-city neighbourhood, the kind that journalists only ever write about in culinary terms, as though its very concrete were spice, as though every balcony of the stories upon stories of these grey highrises were strung with saris, as though our skins too did not turn grey through the course of the city’s bitter winters. I used to buy my mother flowers here, the only gift I knew to give this woman who would not accept anything easily. There was little space for plants elsewise, still less time for their care. Our balcony functioned as a suspended garage, parking space for the car reserved 16 floors below us, and every other thing whose absence wasn’t immediately noticed crammed into that railed-off strip of whitewashed concrete in the sky. The air in our apartment seemed stifled with the congestion of things and people and our breathing was always interrupted by history. So I’d buy my mother these flowers, these technicolor plants I never learned the names of, and she’d love them and how their shrillness disrupted the overfull bookcases, put them in a vase, and they’d die, spilling petals over the table my father bought 15 years ago, a dangerously heavy wooden thing whose grooves are as familiar and forgettable to me as my own scars.

Then I moved, and so did my mother, she 45 minutes east into the city’s suburbs and I as far west as I could, flying unthinkingly over the entire breadth of prairie sky, until the Pacific stopped me. The house my mother moved into has a garden. This changes everything. The house has a front lawn and a back yard. It’s still semi-furnished, its bedrooms still in flux between siblings who haven’t yet decided where they want to live within those three floors. The living room could still do with couches, the walls are still bare. I’ve stopped buying my mother flowers. She grows her own here. They spilled in careful riots over the balustrades at the house’s front entrance and sprout up in demure sqaures on the other side of the den’s french windows. There is a tree there, which supposedly grows pears. It’s not particularly massive, but it commands a certain corner of the garden and occasionally I watch it. I met a woman soon after I came to visit my mother’s new house this summer and I wrote her a letter about it, an email I can’t remember now. I can’t remember her response either now, except that it was beautiful and made me smile. So I can’t look at that tree again, without remembering how she wrote and the curve of her lips when she smiled. Those days my mother’s tables were always littered with glasses holding the flowers she came home every day to tend, and I never saw them die. It would have been a different creature altogether I would have bought home then, the tendering of money for cheap bouquets a different language altogether.

So I’ve run out of things to buy my mother. At airports, my mother says goodbye with “You are a such a good daughter. May Allah bless you,” and I wonder about the gifts I could possibly give that could make sense of this.

Afterwards, it’s morning, and I’m standing on the pavement, on its edge, its concrete sharp and snug in the arch of my foot. We’re watching for the bus to come, to round the corner and the uphill curve of the street, calculating the precise fraction of time it would take for us to sprint to the bus stop half a block down. Streetlights interrupt my view, and storefronts and the sky. I’m standing there dressed in two sweaters, one black, the inner white, and a bag swung across my right shoulder, the strap tight in the hollow by my neck, a clumsy and dangerously-shaped mass against my left hip. Inside I have my camera and two lenses. I stand there, perfectly still and silent, watching the air between me and the other side of the street. Thinking that I’d take a picture now, if the picture I could take were of the cold.

Cousins
Ham, the conquistador of outer space, was captured in Africa.
He became the first chimpanzee to travel far beyond the world the first chimpanout. They put him in the space capsule Mercury, hooked him up with more wires than a telephone switchboard, and blasted him off.
He came back safe and sound, and the record of his bodily functions demonstrated that humans too could survive a voyage into space.
Ham was on the cover of Life. And he spent the rest of his own caged in a zoo.

– Eduardo Galeano: Mirrors: Stories of Almost Everyone

They had talked for hours moving gradually off the edge of the social world. As Bellocq lived at the edge in any case he was at ease there and as Buddy did not he moved on past him like a naïve explorer looking for footholds. Bellocq did not expect that. Or he could have easily explained the ironies. The mystic privacy one can be so proud of has no alphabet of noise or meaning to the people outside. Bellocq knew this but never bothered applying it to himself, he did not consider himself professional. [...] Bellocq thought of this. Aware it was him who had tempted Buddy on. Buddy who had once been enviably public. And then this small almost unnecessary friendship with Bellocq.

– Michael Ondaatje: Coming Through Slaughter.

Twice tonight I was asked if I was someone else, in both cases, someone from a stranger’s past. The girl on the bus was profusely apologetic, even before she’d begun her question. “I’m sorry to interrupt,” she said, and she’d been interrupting me as I sat alone on the bus, without book or music, “I didn’t mean to interrupt, but are you friends with MZ? From Black Lake?”
She’s reading an oversized hardcover sci-fi novel, a pale teenager, with an anxious, urgent lilt to her voice and her brows furrowed.
The drunk man next to me repeats, bemused, “Black Lake?”

But by then I was a pro at deflecting. Unlike earlier, with the boy at the show, who asked if I was Aysa, I’m not the one who’s apologetic. As I leave, I see him and ask if he ever found Aysa. “No,” he’d just finishing performing. “She was a childhood friend – you looked … I thought …”
I tell him his performance was great.

Who are these doppelgängers of mine, and why do they keep losing their friends.

I come home later and later these days, and the sun sets earlier and earlier. Tonight the rain smelled like fire. Cold feet in red shoes, the sound of my earrings against my ears with every step, left right left, all the shadowed walk home.

Before leaving, I pause to tell the elderly man eating a single cookie at the table behind me that his seeing-eye dog is beautiful. Thank you, he says, head cocked in the direction of my crouching self. Have a good night, and I leave the coffeeshop and don’t look back, because I never do.

It’s nearly 10PM on Commercial Drive, and I am walking to a farewell party with two young men, a noisy coloured trio who spill over the pavement and onto the road, empty under the suspended Skytrain tracks. What lingers, through the night and into the chill morning, is that I got it wrong. What I meant to say, what I’d opened my mouth to say was You and your dog are beautiful together. But when I opened my mouth, it was as though the wrong muscle tensed. I felt something shrink inside me, as though I were recoiling from committing some crazy excess, and when I meant to say, You are beautiful together, and trust that my voice would convey everything else about wherein the beauty lay, I told a blind man, Your dog is very, very beautiful.