Archives for the 'Pictures' Category

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.

I haven’t posted a photograph in a while. Here is one.
I also haven’t taken a photograph in a while. But soon I will have time.

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.

February, and the sun is out, so all the blinds are up, and the windows and the front door open. The kitchen is chaos. I wash dishes under its angled roof, hemmed by bright yellow walls, hot water breathing up steam and clouding up the tiny window. I have a cold, and I’ve taken out my nosering to making sneezing less of a production. There’s a wad of tissue in each of the pockets of my jeans, the thin denim grimy from the previous night spent under a tarp in the rain in the tent village. Tomorrow is for laundry, for fresh underwear and crushed sweaters. There’s a pot of lentils and potatoes simmering on the splattered stove. It smells incredible; I have come to believe in the transformative power of coconut milk. There’s a carton of overpriced orange juice in the fridge, and there’s ginger to brew into sweet tea. There are cheap strawberry wafers on the counter and figs in the cupboard, and I’m feeling just a little lightheaded.

Sade’s singing about a Long Hard Road, and I sing along, scratchy-voiced and sniffling. Outside the landlord’s kids are playing, one four-year-old and one two.

And these are good days, this combination of dirt and sharp light.

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.