I am massively excited to photograph Scarborough, though I haven’t figured out what of yet exactly. Maybe the people. This place somehow makes me a little light-headed with joy.

In the meantime, here is a photograph from Vancouver. It was taken outside a coffeeshop so hip its washroom mirrors were broken panes.

This is what comes of moving and bare cupboards.
With under a week to go, the kitchen is devolving into a patchwork of missing foods. The ketchup’s all done, as are nearly all manner of vegetables — except broccoli. On the other hand, there is a whole block of butter and a huge ziploc bag of frozen dumplings. And we went through the last teabag last night. So today I finally made a pot of tea with the looseleaf tea I bought in Gampola a year ago this week.

I could tell you that the tea stings with the taste of home and history and truth and belonging and all those other things. But it tastes like none of those things. I added too much ginger, the magic is skewed.

A very dark-skinned Indian man walks in and orders a chicken plate for after salat. For a moment we stare at each other, and then I look away.
“For after salat?” says the proprietor. I’m not used to hearing it as salat, instead of salah. “Friend, I’ll make it for you after salat. It’s not so good otherwise.”
And the customer walks to the back of the store, to where the washrooom is.

The halal shawarma place down the street, besides the best falafels I’ve ever had, also sells kafiyyehs and Puck and Vimto and tiny glass bottles of Arabic shatta. All of them terribly overpriced, but regardless.

And tonight, with two weeks to go in this strange city, I learned they also have a musallah.

Last week, I watched videos of people I know on a neo-Nazi website.

 
The thing about Toronto — about being a person of color in Toronto — is that it’s easy to forget how different the rest of the country is, how much more blatant the racism is everywhere else. I remember realising this soon after I moved to Kingston. Then I moved back to Toronto and though I tried to keep the lesson in mind, I forgot it again.

So in Toronto, Nazis aren’t real to me in the way that systemic racism and ethnically-targeted state brutality are. I don’t generally have reason to think of Hitler and the KKK — those are throwbacks to some other history that I’ve never experienced as directly as, say, the fear in my mother’s voice when she calls to make sure, after the shootings in Texas, that I’m okay in Vancouver.

But now I’m here, and here is Vancouver, where someone emailed notification to a group I volunteer with of an upcoming white supremacist celebration gathering. The neo-Nazis had set up a Facebook event page, and there were details being arranged on a Stormfront forum. There were going to be two: one in the city and a larger one on Vancouver Island. A couple of papers got wind of the story and covered it. By and large, all the comments on those articles bashed the antiracist groups that were organising a counterprotest for supposedly faking a story that couldn’t possibly true. “It’s a publicity stunt by antiracists,” was one comment.

In the days leading up to the rally, the Facebook event page for the Nazi rally was, unsurprisingly, deleted. Reports came, however, that the rally on the Island was only growing larger. And more and more people promised to show up at the counterprotest for the rally in the City.

All the while, I remained skeptical that any of the Nazis would show up to the rally at Baird Station. Nazis struck me as a caricature of racism — the absurd extremities that distract attention from the polite systems by which hierarchies of race and class are maintained. But I went to the rally anyway. Some cold grey morning, when I’d rather be in bed, nursing my aching head and bones. As expected, there was no concerted Nazi presence. There were a handful of passersby who yelled at the protesters and spat on the banners, including one guy in a jacket with an Iron Cross on it. There were also two reporters from Global TV who, even as they were collecting material, were snide with the protestors about the irrelevance of their protest. But there were also 350 protestors, and a bus driver driving into the station honked his support. And after all, why not — it’s one of the easiest things to decry here and now, in this age of security certificates and racial profiling. Even Jason Kenney‘s probably willing to go on record saying neo-Nazis suck, even if he won’t actually ban the groups. (Insert obvious Ann Coulter reference here.)

Anyway, the protest was largely uneventful. I went home and slept away the afternoon.

A couple of days later I received an email that someone had put a video up of the protest on a white supremacist website. I clicked the link and watched the video. A pang of cold fear set in at the thought that people I knew and respected had their faces up on a Nazi website singled out for attention. The newspaper articles continue to say the Nazi rally never happened — even while it was happening elsewhere. Even while people are having their IDs posted on these websites.

So I thought back to all those kids at the protest who’d had the sense to cover their faces, and how the Global TV journalists had mocked them for it, and how frighteningly ironic it was that that particular moment was captured on this Nazi’s camera, and how, dear god, I wished we’d all had the sense to cover our faces.

The videos are here:

1. http://podblanc.com/anti-racist-action-vancouver-jewssundry-orc-goyim-cows-kvetch-for-heebrew-jeebooist-easter-egg-nazi-
2. http://podblanc.com/no-one-is-illegal-vancouver-jew-kwammunists-kwanada-hatefully-rail-agin-whiteybraid-sta-2%E2%80%9Cneo-nazis%E2%80%9C

Copy-paste the links, as I’d rather not have the hits be traced back to this site. (Hey, if any of you could somehow through the powers of magic and the internet videos down, don’t let me stop you.)

The name of the guy who filmed us is Craig Cobb. I remember seeing him at the rally — an thin, elderly white man with frizzy hair and filming everyone with his Mac, which is why you’ll see several shots in those videos of people peering into his camera. We were confused by his laptop, but no one really questioned him about it, because recording is an inevitable part of protests and rallies. Here’s some more about him:

According to a 2007 report by the U.S.-based Southern Poverty Law Center, which tracks hate groups, Cobb has been active in the World Church of the Creator, White Revolution, and other neo-Nazi groups. He has distributed copies of a racist tabloid called the Aryan Alternative and was “the first person to prominently post the home address of a federal judge whose husband and mother were later murdered there”. The SPLC stated that the killer was not connected to racist groups.

[...]

“He promotes violence on Podblanc, which he founded in April 2007,” the SPLC stated. “Keith Luke, a mentally disturbed young man in Brockton, Mass., who in January allegedly murdered two black immigrants and attempted to murder a third, told police he was inspired by white supremacist web sites such as Podblanc.”

So Nazis, they’re still around. I got that memo, yeah.

Sunday morning neo-Nazi counterprotest in New Westminster;
Saturday night quasi-Khalistani concert in Surrey;
impromptu dinner and dessert with family friends of friends in Richmond, “you sound so nice when you say aunty and uncle;”

telling highschool students about lawschool;
listening to lawyers tell lawstudents that the legal aid cuts make them want to stop being lawyers;

jail support twice in one month;
running through unfamiliar alleys, looking for one specific copcar;
learning the difference between undercover and plain clothes police, and wishing they’d teach me this in school, so I wouldn’t look a fool at protests;
signing off as emergency contact after the fingerprinting;

emailing an instructor to tell him his pedagogy in the last class had been problematic;
next class he was great about addressing it;

mooting while my partner absented himself to vomit in the washroom two minutes before his turn;

meeting my friends’ parents when they were drunk;
missing the funeral of someone I’d never met;
essentially becoming a secondhand smoker;

forgetting I’d left a bowl of yellow split peas to soak for a week on the kitchen window sill and wondering what that awful stench was;
washing and washing and washing said lentils to make dahl, but gagging;
a return to grilled cheese sandwiches with red pepper flakes and too much ketchup;
brunch in some hipster diner, unwashed and hair uncombed, this morning mouthwash stood in for toothpaste;
jugs and jugs of ginger tea, cookies;
more free sushi than I can remember, daily cravings for wasabi;

allegedly forthcoming salsa;

“one of these days someone is going to buy you chocolate;”
red lipstick;
white tees;

buttondown shirts and hightops;
vs. skinnyjeans and construction shoes;

these mountains and this sky;
the kinds of hugs you feel tight around your shoulders for days after, that memory imprinted into your bones;

one poetry reading of the names of killed Arabs, and then their ages;
I didn’t know that was what she’d be reading, or who she was, and was unprepared, so I froze;

astonishment at the quality and quantity of things that can be shared via text message;

one doctor advising me to drop out of lawschool and recommending a counsellor;
another doctor’s hand soft on the scar on my shoulder, indistinguishable from a caress on that deep hollow, my body tensing under the irrelevance of his touch there;
being the only girl in a group of straight brown boys after the show, these musicians and performers hopped up on adolescent adulation, hearing how our every word becomes reduced to trope, watching how bodies move differently backstage behind the curtains, and again shrinking from the touch of strangers, someone’s hand on my arm, the tips of someone else’s fingers on the small of my back, fleetingly marked territory;

late nights in coffeeshops, later nights in libraries;
waiting and waiting and waiting for hypersaturated summer days, waiting until I can almost feel the sun on my naked skin, until the longing is palpable and painful.

The answer is always the same to the question howareyou: busywithschool. There are so many things I could be doing if I weren’t in school.

February 14 2010 marked the 19th annual Women’s Memorial March, organised by the residents of Vancover’s Downtown Eastside to commemorate the lives of murdered or missing women from the neighborhood. Approximately 2,000 people attended the march this year.

Much love and respect to the elders and the bereaved, and to everyone who has suffered not only the loss of loved ones, but the wilful erasure by state institutions of that violence from mainstream consciousness.

More pictures on Flickr.

About midway through the march, the procession paused in front of the Vancouver Police Department, where elders spoke about police complicity in violence against Aboriginal women in Canada.

There are over 500 cases of missing or murdered aboriginal women in Canada. Except for a mere handful, those cases remain open, triggering a demand for a public inquiry into the policing of crimes against Aboriginal women. The violence and policy apathy is especially pronounced in British Columbia — 15 women were murdered by Robert Pickton after the police officially began investigating him.

Even the UN has demanded Stephen Harper investigate why the deaths and disappearances of aboriginal women remain unsolved (Nov 2008). To date, the Canadian government has not responded.

The other night I went to the world’s worst hip hop show. I need to believe it was the worst, though it likely wasn’t, because if this city can do worse than this, I’m giving up on all hope right here and right now.

I’m not going to get into how fucked it is for a hip hop show to consist of white boys in dreadlocks rapping to an almost exclusively white audience (including one guy in a do-rag), because others have written about that phenomenon more intelligently and less crassly than I could. But there were some details specific to the show that I’d like to believe were unique.

One of the rappers wore a fur tail (fake, I’m hoping) pinned to his bottom; he never explained why. He and his partner performed a song about how they got his sister off pads and onto menstrual cups; he used the word “temple” at one point, but I can’t remember the exact reference because I’m mostly suppressing the memory.

During the intermission the MC said, “I don’t know why anarchists haven’t taken over hip hop,” which made me swallow my drink the wrong way, setting my trachea on fire. I nearly hacked to death.

Perhaps less surprising (given the show was billed to an activist community), but no less gagworthy, was when the rappers called on their soundcheck person to do an impromptu performance — only because she was female. That kind of unselfconscious tokenism around gender dovetails beautifully with how resistance in hip hop music and cultures gets co-opted by white anarchists who think screeching “Fuck the system!” ten times makes for an acceptable hook.

There’s a lot of discussion around the larger phenomenon of young white men co-opting rap and adopting its assumed culture (no matter that that stereotype gets constantly teased by current mainstream black musicians), but there’s something more specific to how white activists co-opt these things. My sense is that their self-identification as “activists” is precisely the mechanism by which they allow themselves to be this ludicrously oblivious to the racial politics that they’re fooling around with. In other words, the problems of entitlement and self-awareness not only do not become less pressing within activist and/or anarchist communities, but in fact are re-entrenched through this notion that by being activist we’re all necessarily beyond this kind of petty squabbling over the ever-fraught intersections of art and history.

So it’s nice to come home to songs and videos like The Remnant’s “Know This“. The lyrics are cheesy as hell (will boys ever, ever get off the woman-as-muse hack), but the boys are pretty and have style, and the filming is so cute (I wish I’d filmed it). And, for the P&P aficionados among you, there’s a Jane Austen reference in there (or so he says, someone else run a check).

I want to get old, grow a gut that I suck in when I’m next to you. Sixty odd years old and still trying to impress you.

It’s just past midnight on Saturday outside Commercial Station. Two white police officers are ticketing a young black man — one of five in Vancouver — for skateboarding on the wrong side of the pavement.
“But I already got ticketed twice!” he protests.
And so they give him a third.
They turn around after he leaves and watch my friends and me watching them. One of them locks eyes with me and I look away.

This morning I woke to the sound of helicopters overheard, a roar that’s been a mainstay for the week over the city’s less yuppie sections. But now this air security spreads westward, encroaching onto the carefully hedged peaces of Vancouver’s richest neighbourhoods, bringing with it hoards of drunken middle-aged men who clump these streets at night. I start to become cautious about where I go when I go out.

There’s still a week to go to the games. Welcome to Vancouver 2010.

But it’s also good to return to the loner lifestyle.

Everything’s forgettable. Strange how that is. I had the loveliest, most exhilarating three weeks in Toronto, which ended only last night, but it’s a struggle now to remember the specific incidents that made it so wonderful. This bothers me.

And this makes being here, being in Vancouver that much more difficult.

Oh well, it’s still early days. I’ll get over this, and start remembering again.