Archives for the 'Pictures' Category

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.

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

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.

I got the TransCanadian Sketchbook in the mail today. It came in an anonymous package addressed to Fathima Cadre.
The handwriting (all three lines in my address) is frustratingly familiar, but I haven’t figured out whose. Yet.

The day drags. I manage to do some of the things I had to do today, but doing them gives me no sense of satisfaction, leaving me with no desire to do the more pressing things I haven’t yet done. Like writing, or processing pictures. Or reading the things that it scares me to read.

I spend the morning and then the afternoon flitting between my novel and my laptop, computer screen and blotted typefaces alternating until my head hurts and a thick-clotted frustration begins to settle itself, heavy-haunched and maudlin, behind my eyes.

I’ve been in the country, been in Toronto for three weeks now. Sri Lanka is at once at the forefront of everything I talk and think about, and also somewhere so far back in the recesses of my memory that I cannot believe that I was there less than a month ago, that I was there for longer than I’ve been back in Toronto. It is at once the central point of interest around which I am constructing lifeplans and also some place, some history that I am not quite sure exists. There is so much to say — so much to say, in fact, that I’m overwhelmed. I cannot put words to paper, cannot write about Sri Lanka. There is too much preamble, too much of Toronto to wade through first.

So anyway, I’ve been in Toronto for three weeks and have yet to walk through this city, really walk through this city: on my own, with no destination, where the point is the streets you find that you’ll never find again and the people you meet who you’ll never speak to again. When I was in Sri Lanka and thinking of Toronto, sick with longing for and dread of this place, it was of those solitary walks I’d think with relief, the way you can spend days entirely anonymous in public places, how people talk to you when you know you’ll never see each other again.

Continue reading this entry »

My friend knew someone who was cutting herself. She was telling me about it, and there was a fair amount of anger mixed in with the worry and the fear. Exercising an unusual amount of self-restraint, I said nothing. I don’t cut, but admitting an appreciation during that specific conversation for the particular logic of self-mutilation wouldn’t have been productive, so I didn’t say anything.

Coping mechanisms, she asked, how is this a coping mechanism? I remember being taken aback a little by her frustration. Its logic might be twisted and it might not be something that appeals to me, but cutting makes sense to me. It’s a way of both recording and forcing presence. I said I didn’t understand how that was coping. The doctors said I wouldn’t but I had to.

I was talking about substance abuse with a friend recently and he asked me what my relationship with my body was. I managed to avoid answering the question, because some things I can’t say out loud. At some level, it exists disconnected from me, just a physical entity that takes up space in the real world. It’s a body, a space I occupy. Cutting seems to emerge from a similar disconnect. On the one hand, it engages skin as canvas, as something to be worked on or with, like paper or walls. A body is something that can be marked, a thing whose connection to one’s intrinsic self is almost incidental. On the other hand, cutting also realises that self-skin connection. The blood and the hurt provide visceral proof of the fact that our bodies are our own. They aren’t merely trifling extensions of our being; they are what we are. Our bodies are our homes, in ways no other spaces can ever be. And like all homes, the space is often claustrophobic and alienating.

I don’t know that it’s helpful to be able to relate the way I do to self-abuse. At least, I don’t know yet how to talk to people whose behaviour makes sense to me in a way that is both compassionate and constructive. I know a lot of unhappy people; it’s part of who I am, that I have these conversations with people. I know it’s unhealthy (a realisation that took some time in the coming) and sadomasochistic, but the thing that I find most humanising in other people is pain. The problem is that I don’t know how to talk to other people about pain in a way that doesn’t normalise self-destructive behaviour to the point of condoning it.
Because often, there is a part of me that is condoning it, if only because it’s behaviour that I know I’m always close to, if not already, indulging.

I like subway lines. I like pacing their length, I like hearing how the songs I love become unfamiliar over their noise, and I like watching the people. I like taking the train together, feeling the steadiness of your shoulder against mine; I like comparing people’s faces to their reflections in the windows, how the latter are always more expressive; and I like listening to you talk, unable to hear your words over the roar of metal, an excuse to watch your mouth move. I smile when it seems appropriate and under the cover of public transit remind myself to remember the way your cheekbones flare below your eyes.

Someone asked me over the summer, her voice heavy and slow with fear, if I heard voices. If I hadn’t been so blindly furious, I’d have laughed. But I was angry, my fingers knotted into fists, and I choked out a No.
No, my voice catching, I don’t hear voices. I’m not crazy.

I’m fond of subways, but I’m always surprised at how in the time it takes for the train to arrive, other people manage to navigate that waiting in that space so easily, as though none of them have the questions floating in their heads that I have in mine.

It’s never as explicit as the movies or newspaper columns make it seem. It’s a little bored, a little ironic, profoundly mundane: this question of what’s on the other side, this question of what would happen. It’s always a story, just a story that I’m curious about. There’s a line, in subway stations, a line that isn’t metaphoric: it’s literal and yellow and you’re not supposed to cross it. It’s a little bored, it’s a little amused: what’s on the other side. I pace subway stations. It’s something to do in the interim.

Grand Analog – Touch Your Toes Part 2
The video makes me want to bring out my air guitar.

I.
I was being serious, and then I wasn’t being serious.
“But,” I paused and waved my hands grandly, “I am a writer.”
“Yeah.” He nodded. “That was perfect. With all that sugar all over your face, like coke.”
It was my first raspberry jelly donut in months, and it was good. Continue reading this entry »

Fever Ray – Keep The Streets Empty For Me (mp3)

For going on nearly a year now, I have been writing and have been trying to write about home. I was trying to write about the spaces we construct between walls and behind doors, what we name them, and how we allow specific people into those spaces and call them blood. I was trying to write about the cities that we occupy, the ways we live in them, the way the shape of a particular street can inform a worldview. I needed to write these things because it was, after a certain point, a matter of sanity.

I wrote the post below in July. I’m still thinking about home, but more quietly now, with less of my heart in my throat.

—-

The first sentence of the last paper I wrote for school was this:
If we could reduce truth to its most literal elements and if we could be sure of the black and white markings of it, we could rightly argue that it is not so far from “here” to “there” – the distance just a solitary letter, nothing more than a trifling lowercase “t.”

Six weeks after I wrote that sentence, I punched in my final period and emailed the essay off, ending my academic career with a characteristically sprawling and inconsistent piece of melodrama. It was half-decent, just good enough to pass, just insane enough to mark it mine.

When I wrote that first sentence in June, those words meant something important to me. And naively I hoped that I could maybe put that important something down into coherent words, if not in this paper, then maybe elsewhere. In the intervening month and a half that it took me to write that paper, weeks punctuated with long days of sleep and nights of writing every other conceivable thing I could sit down long enough to focus on, that particular obsession faded away. The importance of figuring out how it is that we negotiate change in the cityscape and how and why we continue to love places and people when everything is caught in a perpetual flux waned with the summer heat. I grew nostalgic for the cold and for snowed-in beaches and for the stifling clasp of ill-fitting cheap wool coats, the way those things demand and encourage solitude.

I can’t remember now what it was that I was hoping to resolve when I finally typed up that first sentence after having had it float in my head for days. Naively, I started off every academic paper I wrote this last year with the hope that when I finished it, it would say something to me that I could hear, something important that had nothing to do with the text in question, something comprehensible to me.
Not a single paper ever did end that way.
Continue reading this entry »