Archives for the 'Long' Category

There’s a ticket with my name on it. My name and two stopovers and 24+ hours of flight. And the date Thursday, Aug 11 8AM.

It is Wednesday night. 8AM on Thursday will find me asleep in my parent’s unfinished basement, my bags still packed from 2 months in Montreal, everything else still packed from 8 months in Vancouver. I survey the small wreckage of half-open luggage at the foot of the bed and feel a flash of perverse, useless pride. My life fits neatly now within every imaginable airline baggage limit.

It’s the first night of Ramadan. These past years, I have come to associate the month not with the moon, or with the athaan, or with hunger or prayers, or any of the things that used to mark this part of the year for me. These years, Ramadan is at its most Ramadan-like when I’m driving, family packed into a fast-delapidating car, nights caught between increasingly scattered iftars and no less scattered taraweeh, too many backseat drivers and streetlights that are never quite bright enough for me to feel like I’m doing anything but bluffing my way through this cement.

The first night of Ramadan. I do more U-turns in that half hour than I have the entirety of my driving history. I love driving at night through Scarborough. The streets are empty enough that I can drive the way I can never speak, 40 over the limit and smooth, one hand easy on the wheel. And this city boasts some terrific potholes, real necksnappers.

“I’m going,” I say. A light turns red behind me.

Ten minutes later, I nearly do a left turn on yellow, but stop in time, fifteen feet from the mosque entrance. I curl over the wheel, rest my cheek on its rough plastic. “I’m not going.” A bus rumbles past, then a truck, large mechanical animals that make the streets shudder underneath us.

I’m not going. After everything’s said and done, the irony of it is that despite everything, I always forget how beholden I am to borders. After weeks of reducing my life in this country to immaculate itineraries of changes-of-address and disgustingly lit passport photographs, I finally grow up and concede defeat. High Commission, you win this round.

But all these things, these larger machinations of exit and reentry, are not why I take a break at a stoplight to not pretend I’m not disappointed. The thing is, I told you, what I like best is leaving. Reorienting myself, when the goodbyes were on the tip of my tongue, is dizzying. I put my head down.

Camus, Albert. The Outsider. Trans. Joseph Laredo. England: Penguin Classics, 1982.
(Spoiler alert.)
—-

This is a story about a very emotionless young man. Consequently, despite the fact that this is also a story about sex and murder, it isn’t a particularly stimulating story. The drama, tragic as it is, is merely the backdrop to the protagonist’s existential crisis, which Camus goes to some length to explicate.

Pretentious enough, right?

But I loved the book. It’s compelling and believable. The writing isn’t forced. It moves with a light touch through topics (eg. dying mothers and capital punishment) that would otherwise invite a lot of straining at genius. The quietness of the writing is in keeping with Meursault’s self-possession. Meursault is the kind of person who can’t muster up much in the way of grief at his mother’s funeral and who doesn’t particularly regret accidentally killing a man. More importantly, he can’t be bothered to try to feel or to fake these emotions. He’s not regretful, he’s annoyed. He’s not sad, he’s tired. And he’s not going to pretend otherwise, however much this lack of emotion horrifies the people around him, even when his life depends on the performance.

In his afterword, Camus writes that Meursault’s indifference is a threat to society. His refusal to “play the game,” as Camus puts it, makes life difficult for others, inviting first their confusion and eventually their anger, until they finally decide he must “be decapitated in a public square in the name of the French people” (103). Camus argues that Meursault’s “passion for an absolute and for truth” (119) makes him Christ-like. I think the analogy is exasperatingly pretentious (not to mention cliche), but I’m willing to overlook it, partly because Camus scales back the excessiveness a little by excusing the description as an expression of “the somewhat ironic affection” (119) he feels for Meursault as his creator.

The other thing I enjoyed about this novel is that it provides a really biting depiction of the criminal justice system. Camus describes, among other things, how the accused becomes incidental to his own case.

So that’s an overview of the general philosophical gist of the novel. However, it’s also worth paying attention to how Camus’ treatment of the secondary characters in this novel inform his analysis of truth-telling. My thoughts here are still a little unformed, so bear with me.

First, I’m curious as to why every time Raymond’s lover or her brother come up in the novel, Camus/Meursault takes care to note they are Arab or “Moorish” (the former for the men, and the latter for the woman; I don’t know why Camus makes this distinction). Note that this novel takes place in Camus’ native Algeria. There is therefore a history of racism in the country that locates this novel and its author. The reason I highlight this is because these characters, in a book where pretty much everyone is expendable to the protagonist, are the most disposable. Quite literally, these are the people who are killed or beaten off. These are the ones who have the least agency, whose appearances are most fleeting, and who exist only to move the plot. They do not speak and they do not have names. And yet, were it not for their presence, this story could never have happened. In light of their purely functional use, then, the constant re-identification of them as Other has the effect of underscoring their disposability. This subtle fixation on their ethnicity serves absolutely no practical purpose in the book, so the only reason I can think that Camus would choose to insert it in this brief and carefully-worded novel is because that obsession emerges out of a culture that routinely dehumanises minority communities.
And, I shouldn’t need to add, this culture remains mainstream 40 years later.

Second, I’m concerned with the treatment of sexual violence in this novel. It gets largely glossed over, but of all the things Meursault does, the only thing I actually found morally offensive was his involvement in Reynold’s abuse of his (Moorish) lover. What is curious and troubling is that that incident is never picked up as a potential reason for societal disapproval. It’s as though it’s trifling. My argument, then, is that her dehumanisation (unlike the other women in this book, she is never given a name) is not just a function of Meursault’s extreme disaffection, but a structural component of the novel itself. In other words, it’s a mistake made not necessarily by the character, so much as the author.

In conclusion, at a macroscopic level, the story is a cogent treatise on the limits of honesty. Zoom in a bit, however, and some of its ethics start to unravel, revealing the complicated hierarchies of power that limit its generalisability (which isn’t a word, oh gosh).

—-
Reposted on my Goodreads account.

In the summer, bodies take on new geographies. Light maps itself onto skin in new formations of shade and shadows fill out more carefully the curves that stretch slow from neck to shoulder. Bodies now mark their borders more clearly: forearms melt into elbows and darker calves meet paler thighs at toughening knees. The soft, small hairs that round shoulders start to fade into diffuse blurs that glow and forget to glint. On people I’ve known for barely a month, I can trace how the sun has fallen on their bodies, can chart the deepening of their skins over the course of my knowledge of them. Can trace, therefore, how clothes sat on their bodies, where the edges of cloth fell across their arms, their legs, their chests. Like the movements of tides, I can watch after the fact how the sun moved across your arms, leaving shorelines darker against lighter, the imprints of sporadic afternoons of heat and rain.

These are the bodies geometry was invented for, bodies whose lines meet at angles so sharp I could take compasses to them and analogise out of the thrust of muscle along arm and through chest formulas that trap into small symbols and beautiful numbers the clean long lines of their bodies. At the base of your neck, your bones slide into each other, forming hollows that you can’t see, and those are wells so deep I could drink out of them. Your belly caves into a shallow indentation just above your hips, reorienting how I will from here on in think of the word ‘button.’ The tendons that wind up your calves fall into the backs of your knees, catch on the lock of bones there, and open up wells deep enough to drink out of.

But thankfully, there are things about you that my eyes cannot speak to, which I cannot reduce to painstakingly focused stillshots. Like the unexpected softness of the tip of your nose, which, if touched just so, is no less soft than the lobes of your ears. And somehow I lose track when I set to tallying your ribs. They are as difficult to count as the beats of your heart, as difficult to trace out from under your skin, or my fingers aren’t as gentle as I need them to be, or I must not be listening closely enough. But somehow your ribs do go on forever. Sinews weave determined and gentle along the length of your arms, like roads hugging mountains, and the tips of my fingers are careful, careful, careful to cling close to those careening routes, conscious of the heights from which they might otherwise fall. There is a dark and raised birthmark along your back, mapping out like rocks newly raised from land its upper right quarter a rough terrain that cuts harsh under my palm.

In the summer, skin turns into its own language. I learn it again, and again, how every other science I know can exist to speak about just this one thing.

Lots of law students like to have “Confidentiality Notices” in their email signatures. This is the online version of fine print, except actually, as opposed to merely deceptively, useless. Whereas bona fide legal documents like to sneak in their threats where they know your eyes are too tired to care (“This product is guaranteed for life, until you break it.” or “And now we own you.”), law students, having little of value to say except that they’re one bell curve from having suits tailored in-office, can only tell you they’ve sent you an email that may or may not have been intended for you.

As a result, as part of email threads about everything under the sun, including the weather, I get this kind of inanity nigh daily from people who have nearly as little power as grad students:

CONFIDENTIALITY NOTICE: This email communication may contain private, confidential, or legally privileged information intended for the sole use of the designated and/or duly authorized recipient(s). If you are not the intended recipient or have received this email in error, please notify the sender immediately by email and permanently delete all copies of this email including all attachments without reading them. If you are the intended recipient, secure the contents in a manner that conforms to all applicable provincial and/or federal requirements related to privacy and confidentiality of such information.

There is the rare law student who must have missed the session during Orientation when the Dean, some random judge, and every single exec member of the student council (including the Social Justice reps whose election campaigns consisted of colour posters of themselves kneeling next to Poor Black Child From Africa And/Or Haiti) told the incoming class You Are Special*. This is the kind of law student who has this kind of thing in their signature:

“POSSIBLY” CONFIDENTIALITY NOTICE: This email communication may or may not contain private, confidential, or legally privileged information, depending on what the author is saying and how he feels like that day. Usually, it will be intended for the sole use of the designated recipient(s); however, at times, you will be expected to guess who he actually wants this email going to. If you are not the intended recipient, please undertake an existential inquiry into the spirit of mankind and human relation, and let this inform your decision about whether the email is intended for you. Do not act hastily and delete it. You may want to inform the author of any fruits of your existential search into the human condition.

Thank you, NC.

 
 
—-
*Orientiation was the strangest experience of my life. I have never before felt like I was actually in kindergarten — largely because when I was in kindergarten, I was 4 (I was an early-achiever. How things have changed.), so pleas to “Please, please be nice to each other” (I swear, we were told this five million times in the space of six days) fell on age-appropriately deaf ears.
That was the Mantra 2, Mantra 1 being “WELCOME TO THE CLUB.”

Playing Lions and Tigers by Rohini
Published by Earthworm Books, India in March 2004

—

Pretty much the only time I had to read Playing Lions and Tigers was when I was on public transit. This was a problem, since on several occasions the book moved me dangerously close to tears. That kind of reaction is to be expected with a novel about a war as horrific as Sri Lanka’s (aren’t they all), and with a plotline that, consequently, boasts so much death it’s essentially Shakespearean.

What made it unexpected, however, is that, unlike every other contemporary novel that’s capitalised off conflict in South Asia, the prose in this book is anything but poetic. It is also not a novel about diaspora. While England does make a brief appearance near the end, the story is centred firmly in Sri Lanka, with none of the diasporic angst that has come to define popular Western literature about South Asia.

Also, the cover has no paisleys. FYI.

But first, this issue of prose. It was offputting at first, how prosaic the writing was. Where were the passages spanning pages describing the claustrophobic verdure with so so delicate metaphors and carefully careless use of native languages? Where was the brilliant and severely self-conscious young protoganist, caught in conflicts of families and cultures and civilisations? Where were the metanarratives and the obscure intertexts and the pop culture references? No footnotes, no structurally existential guilt, no vulnerable flippancy.

No wonder Random House hadn’t picked this up.

This is its first paragraph:

Bala took a deep breath, as though drawing the intoxicating mixture of peace and excitement into the hidden recesses of his lungs. He had looked out on the breaktaking beauty of the hill-country almost every day of his life for as long as he coould remember, yet it never ceased to stir him. Other people might smoke tobacco, drink alcohol or take drugs, but for him nothing could beat this.

The straight-forwardness of the writing — straightforward to the point of apparent amateurishness — persists through to the novel’s end. And I think it speaks to how cannibalistic my consumption of art about war is that it wasn’t until about a third of the way into the the novel, when the murders and the disappearances began in earnest, that it occurred to me that this mode of writing, made unfashionable by [insert the names of any 5 top-selling diasporic brown writers here], is perhaps the most the ethical in this context.

I have been thinking for a long time about writing about Sri Lanka and have been thinking about the ethics of creating beautiful things — poetry, for instance, or films — about violences that are irremediably horrific, especially when those things become consumer products, off which whole industries of pleasure and fame are created. Broadly, there is the recogntion that publishing industries, given how they commodify and package grief, are hardly innocent spaces. But much more personally, given how invested I am in imagining peace in this particular country, it would be disingenous to exploit traumas I know at most as macabre family gossip in order to indulge my own desire to realise myself as a writer. Anything can be turned into poetry; that doesn’t justify the poem.

This sounds like a backhanded compliment. Which it isn’t meant to be.

So one afternoon, I was on the subway, moving west out of Scarborough, and I was reading a particularly difficult passage and I had to stop for a moment because the backs of my eyes stung, and I realised it’d hurt less — or it’d hurt in that way we’ve learned to enjoy — if this death had been written about differently, more lyrically. Then I could have distracted myself with rhythm and simile. Then I could have said the pain was bittersweet, and waxed philosophically indifferent about how violence is constitutive of history. And then we’d all have a book club meeting about it and, while sipping tea, talk about how terrible it all is, and maybe Oprah would give us a sticker.

Instead we have this:

The prominent mode was disappearance. The victims vanished without trace, as though they had never existed. She heard of instances where all the young men in a village were carted off in the night, there was a valley of shots, and the next day their relatives had to search through the pile of corpses for the remains of their loved ones. It got to a stage where those who found a body were considered lucky. Because very often they were taken and dumped somewhere else — perhaps in a river or the sea, where the bodies would decay beyond recognition — or burned, or buried in a mass grave. Generally, there was virtually no hope that they would ever be seen alive again. But not always. So you had to keep trying, battling the feeling of hopelessness, just in case someone might have survived [pp 240-1].

Yeah. People die, and they die like this. Or they survive, and there are camps for the survivors. Or we butcher the English language to make up a new verb tense for an old word — people are disappeared. What underscores the heartbreak of reading about all this in a novel is that this violence is true, is right now, and is home. And so I think, if art about war must make people cry, I would rather have them cry because war is that fearful, not because the art is that beautiful. The first pain might be productive, the latter could only ever be self-gratifying.

But in a literary era where postmodernism holds sway and where I will always be skeptical of any claim that facts can be unassailable, it is difficult to accept that what I appreciate most about this narrative is that its narrator is invisible and omniscient.

No doubt one reason I am willing to accept such a narrator here is because I agree with its politics. The simple writing belies the carefully chosen characters, who are attractive not because their personalities are especially real, but because they espouse very real and subtle perspectives on the war. The novel spans almost the entirety of the twentieth century and its roster includes assorted Sinhalese union workers, male and female; an anti-government Burgher human rights lawyer; an anti-LTTE Tamil journalist who moves from Jaffna to Colombo; a Muslim private school teacher; a Tamil nurse in Jaffna who opposes the LTTE and escapes during the expulsion by the Tigers of Muslims from Jaffna; her son, a Tamil university student who joins the LTTE; two hill-country Tamil doctors, one of whom moves to Jaffna and supports the LTTE; a working poor Sinhalese university student who joins the JVP; her professor, an undercover Sinhalese radical who opposes both the government and the JVP; several Sinhalese factory workers; and assorted multiracial children. Pretty much the only group missing was the always absent Veddas.

The people themselves are all somewhat too perfect, all of them rather angelic, but their interactions and conversations are nuanced and fascinating. They provide rare insights into the intersections of class, gender, and resistance. When was the last time you heard about women in the war, except in a sensationalist piece on female LTTE cadres? And who these days, except diehard, oldschool, and ageing academics, talks about how class has informed this war? But this is a novel peopled with women whose positions on marriage and reproductive rights are real and therefore complex — birth control, in fact, was a recurring issue. The novel has a strong socialist vein, at least to the extent that most of the characters are acutely aware of the ways in which the frustrations of working poor Sinhalese and Tamil youth in the South and the North respectively were exacerbated and exploited by the war, but this awareness of class is tempered also by critiques of how gender hierarachies are maintained within movements whose purposes are avowedly anti-oppressive. It’s not surprising then that in addition to the stories of female nurses, lawyers, and JVP and LTTE members, special attention is paid to the importance of unpaid domestic labour, particularly with respect to the rearing of children, both biological and adoptive.

On the issue of non-violence, Rohini’s position is clear. This is an excerpt from her dedication:

It [this book] is also a tribute to the activists of University Teachers for Human Rights (Jaffna), past and present, and all the other courageous people who kept alive the values of truth, compassion, and solidarity in the midst of a culture of cruelty.

This is a statement from UTHR(J)’s website:

Our reports deal with several aspects pertaining to violations and are very unorthodox as human rights documents. In order to clarify our position, we once more reiterate the purposes for which these reports are written:

1. To document human rights violations by all forces in order to bring about general awareness and to make violators accountable.
2. To bring out the human background to these violations through a portrayal of individual characters together with an analysis of social pressures and external circumstances governing their behaviour. We try to show that the characters involved, even in the worst violations, are often human, whose actions are governed by mislaid human potential, past choices and oppressive circumstances.Its an endevour to capture a narrative space for the people who were trapped in the conflict and in their name only many atrocities were justified by the protagonists.
3. To leave behind a historical record of this crucial part of our history. Since there is no space in our community to discuss and choose between different options,and the young especially are giving their life even without knowing our recent history, we feel it is necessary to leave a record. Moreover, in this country, we seem to suffer from historical amnesia combined with a moral vacuum, forcing us to re-live an unpleasant history again and again. We trust these records will also help benign minds who in the future would like to make a re-evaluation.
4. As responsible members of an academic institution and citizens of our community, we would like to express our opinions and make room for free expression and an edifying debate. We also seek to highlight the untapped human potential in all communities in our country, for both internal regeneration and to make a success of living in one plural nation.

I don’t know that Rohini is or was a member of UTHR(J), but her book definitely addresses its mandate. It records not only specific instances of violence perpetrated by disparate groups, but in so doing, presents an overview of how those violences stem from systemic abuse. The book’s conclusion is that the best way to fight this is through non-violent resistance. That position is dissected almost incessantly during the latter half of the novel — at one point, one of the characters most opposed to violent resistance actually ends up killing someone, and that death is justified by its circumstances. Yet the policy of nonviolent resistance remains the take home message. This is a particular political stance to take in this conflict. It is by no means neutral. And this is what makes the invisibility of the narrator’s omniscience so troubling, at least theoretically. My only response is that it is a position for which I have a lot of sympathy, the more so in this case because it isn’t forced on readers dogmatically.

And as to the irrelevance of the diaspora: Finally.

—

Edits:

1. A friend pointed out that there is a Burgher in the novel.
2. I should’ve added this from Rohini’s introduction:
   

   This novel is about the ways in which ordinary people (all too often ignored by professional peace-makers) have resisted the barbarism resulting from the imposition of one-dimensional identities — the ‘lions’ and ‘tigers’ of the title — and have in very different ways worked for a world in which working people will not allow themselves to be bamboozled by their leaders into killing and dying in order to establish fictitious identities and spurious claims over territory”[ii].

3. Rohini identifies as “a Sinhala-speaking half-Burgher Tamil from the south” (via).

Mid-April last year, I got back from just under six weeks in Sri Lanka. Besides being born on the island, I’d visited it many times over the years, but that last trip was pivotal in the way no prior trip ever had been. Every day following that return until well into the winter, until long after I’d moved to a new province and commenced a new career path, literally not a day went by when I didn’t talk to someone about that trip. For months, I was convinced I was going to move to Sri Lanka as soon as I could, that that would be the homebase from which I would live the rest of my life. I had not one, but two research projects in mind. I had thousands of pictures and hours and hours of audio recordings. I had notebooks of material, and tightly plotted stories that kept looping through my every conscious moment.

Something happened along the way to now. I stopped talking about Sri Lanka, and the drafts I had saved on my desktop grew stale. The heartache grew a little less palpable. That thing that I knew, when I was in Sri Lanka, that would happen when I got back to Toronto began to happen — it was no longer possible to talk about home, about love, about family, about history without feeling that the conversations had already been determined for me. It was someone else’s novel, someone else’s award-winning screenplay about some maladjusted third culture kid undergoing a delayed and severely pronounced bout of false nostalgia. The force of this industry we’ve churned out about “lost” “identities” towered up and then came crashing down, and I let it go.

I think sometimes that all it takes to make some people come is the word diaspora.

The heartache grew less palpable, became a little less live. It receded from a constant pulse at the base of my throat to a pressure under my diaphragm, a soft throb that I could count beats to when conversations turned to the subject of love and blood, family and memory. I stopped talking about it, but it remains here still, a love I know as more real than most of the things I spend my time reading these days.

But I learned this thing from parents about the nature of love, a lesson that took some years in learning, a lesson I used to hold against them, but which in their stubbornness and wisdom, they never gave up drilling into me — that love is a verb. It is a thing you do, it is a responsibility you shoulder. It is not a pretty thing to put on display, not merely a thing of easy beauty, but a demanding combination of things out of your control. A measure of guilt, and anger, and courage. Blood is something to which you as self are irrelevant; it is the thing you do. What I’m saying is, it doesn’t matter that I claim to love my father’s hometown with a love that changed my life, and yes I know how trite it is to say that. You know, lives can change back.

Etha onagada kudumam, said my cousin one night, as she opened the gate to my aunt’s house. And then she paused, hand on lock, and said in English, Do you understand? Blood.
Literally: this is your blood.
And I smiled a dazed smile at the word, at how deep the knowledge of it runs.

So for a few months this past year, I had a goal in mind. I had tangible projects I was working towards, and I made an effort to speak Tamil to my parents, who sometimes forgot they weren’t speaking English to me. But the deadlines have since become less acute. The mundane drone of the life I’m living here has taken over, and taken with it the energy that kept me focused all through that bright summer and fall.

When I talk — and I’ve stopped talking about it — about how much it hurts that I have no one here to speak my stuttering Tamil to, what I mean is that the forgetting is an active process. And in the absence of any one person here with whom I can share this language, the distance between here and there becomes infinitely greater. The love becomes abstract, a mockery of action.

I spent the happiest weeks of my life with my father’s family, living in his sister’s house.

Last week I called home, and my mother told me my aunt had recently been diagnosed with a degenarative neural condition. Her doctor has given her 18 months. My father came home a few minutes later and when he took the phone, he said, So your mother told you about Maami. And unlike my mother, he had less to say about the details of the illness. The conversation was short, and ended as it always does when I talk to my father with a reminder to eat well.

I have listened several times to my father cry for the deaths of people he loved, and I cannot bear the thought of hearing it again. If people loved me in that village, it was solely because I was my father’s child. I have never known a person to be so loved as my father’s memory was in that place.

Why did you come, said my aunt, one day in her kitchen, if you’re going to leave again.
She had a particular knack for rhetoric. I stood silent and twisted my hands together. I did not know how to say, in English or in Tamil, that I had come because I am my father’s daughter and this was what love to him entailed, but that I was leaving with a connection more direct to the village. I was leaving as someone who — nervous chatter in the diaspora be damned — would claim this place, her house and her love as home.

Call them, says my mother. And then she reads out one of those hilariously long long-distance numbers that come appended with every regional prefix in the world.

I still haven’t called. It seems every conversation I have with family begins with an apology — I am sorry. Sorry for not being t/here, for not being more present, for not knowing how to say the things that need to be said. Sorry I’ve forgotten more Tamil than I thought I knew, sorry I didn’t call before. Sorry, sorry, sorry.

My parents taught me that love is not something you protest, it is something you do.

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.

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.

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.

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.