Author: Vincent Mousseau

  • The Body as First Register

    The Body as First Register

    My body has been the first place where things gather. A pressure sits in my back—a low bracing that has begun to feel structural, the kind of tightness that doesn’t shift with stretching or rest. It moves without ever fully leaving. Some days it settles between my shoulder blades; other days it spreads into my neck or rests heavily in my hips. The sensation is diffuse, hard to locate, yet immediately recognizable once it arrives. Everything feels slightly drawn inward, as if the body has deliberately narrowed its range.

    The ache doesn’t spike. It remains steady, more background than signal. Muscles stay engaged even at rest, as if something still needs holding and hasn’t yet been set down. There’s a readiness in it, though nothing immediate is forming. I notice it most when I slow down. Sitting brings it into focus. Pausing sharpens it. When movement stops, the pressure moves forward and the body organizes itself around it. The sensation doesn’t ask for attention; it simply refuses to disappear.

    Living this way has altered how I understand what’s been happening. The body feels occupied, involved in something ongoing—not injured, not malfunctioning, but engaged in sustained effort without a visible task. This is the place I’m writing from: a body compressed and alert at once, held together without a complete story yet for what that holding is preparing for.

    A Quiet Overwhelm

    Over time, it became clear this wasn’t random. The body was registering something before I had language for it. The tension built gradually, without a single moment to point to, accumulating over weeks and months and settling quietly rather than arriving all at once. What surprised me was the form this overwhelm took. There was little panic—no rush, no spike, no outward agitation. Instead, things slowed. Initiation became difficult. Small tasks grew dense. The body responded by becoming still, narrowing its range, holding position.

    I would sit in front of my laptop with the lid open, the screen dimming itself while I stayed there, hands resting on the keyboard without moving.

    This kind of stillness is easy to misread. From the outside, it can look like avoidance or delay. From the inside, it feels like containment. Energy pulls inward. Movement pauses. Output reduces. The system stays intact by limiting how much it releases at once. I began to recognize the pattern as it repeated. Each time something shifted—each time another layer of uncertainty entered—the body tightened slightly, not as protest but as stabilization, a way of staying upright, of keeping things from spilling.

    There’s information in that response. An early warning that doesn’t speak in sentences. The body adjusts first, marking change through sensation and letting the holding register before the story catches up. Over time, this read less like pathology and more like pattern recognition: the body noticing accumulation and responding in the only way it knows how—by slowing down and staying in place until the next shape becomes clearer.

    Loosening Frames

    At the same time, several forms of scaffolding have been loosening—not abruptly, but through gradual unfastening, felt before it was fully understood. The PhD is coming to an end, along with a structure that has carried weight for a long time. Its timelines and rhythms organized my days and sense of direction. As that frame thins, the body seems to notice first. The absence registers as space, and space carries its own pressure.

    The lease is ending too. The rooms I move through each day no longer feel fixed. Space has become provisional. The body responds by staying alert, keeping itself gathered. Even familiar corners take on a different texture when they’re no longer guaranteed. Beyond that, the next steps remain unformed. There isn’t a clear container waiting to take shape. This doesn’t arrive as a dramatic void. It appears as a background hum that keeps the body from fully settling.

    All of this unfolds within a broader atmosphere that never quite recedes: political instability, escalating violence, systems coming undone. These conditions don’t remain outside personal life. They enter the body like weather, a constant barometric shift that makes everything heavier and harder to place. None of these shifts stands alone. They layer, overlap, and accumulate. The body holds the sum of them, adjusting quietly as the ground shifts underneath.

    Where Things Stall

    As these layers built, freeze began to appear in ordinary places, in small procedural moments. Initiating simple tasks took longer. Messages lingered unopened or half-drafted. Anything requiring sequencing or follow-through felt dense. Often the body reacted before thought finished forming. A screen would open and something in my back would tighten. An inbox would load and the body would brace. Lists and calendars brought on a full-body pause—immediate and physical—as if the system had already shifted gears.

    Mail collected on the edge of the table, unopened, the same envelopes moved from one corner to another over several days.

    Stillness became common. Movement narrowed. Energy pulled inward. Attention shortened. The effort to move from one small step to the next increased. The body organized itself around slowing down, especially where accumulation was highest—administrative tasks, ongoing correspondence, anything requiring continuity across time. Engagement reduced. Output thinned.

    Seen closely, this freeze carried information. It mapped density. It marked where too many threads were being held at once. The system paused to stay intact until pressure eased enough to allow movement again. Over time, the stillness took on shape. It wasn’t empty. It occupied space. Muscles gathered around it. The pause held.

    What Can Be Held

    When several structures loosened at once, the body narrowed its field. When demands accumulated without clear edges, movement reduced. Fewer motions. Fewer decisions. The body stayed closer to itself. Engagement continued in some places and not others. Tasks requiring sustained attention stretched the system thin. The body responded by slowing initiation and working in short intervals.

    The pause had boundaries. It wasn’t total or random. It clustered around sequences that extended forward without a clear end. The body adjusted its pace to what it could hold without spilling.

    The narrowing had a threshold
    Enough.

    The Form No Longer Fits

    The decision to end my private practice arrived through the body. It showed up as contraction, as effort that no longer redistributed. The work remained meaningful. The form no longer fit. Capacity and structure stopped aligning in a way the body could negotiate. I noticed it in the preparation it took, the recovery afterward, the back tightening before language did. The work demanded continuity across time.

    And something in me would not go there again—not cleanly, not fully, not without paying a cost I could already feel.

    The body responded by pulling inward, signaling a limit that didn’t soften with reassurance.

    The decision wasn’t dramatic. It settled slowly through repetition. Each return to the question carried the same physical answer. There is grief here, low and steady—a grief for a form that once held something real, for relationships shaped through care, for a version of myself that lived inside that structure.

    Responsibility remains. It appears in careful timing, in communication, in how endings are handled. The body still holds that weight even as the boundary is set. Ending the practice feels less like rupture than closure—a form laid down because it no longer matches what the body can sustain. Care remains. The limit remains. Both are held.

    Work Beneath Stillness

    What began to make sense was the compression itself—the narrowing, the inward pull, the body staying gathered. There’s logic in that compression. When a form is no longer viable, work turns inward. Systems reorganize without consulting the calendar. Energy reroutes. What once moved outward turns back toward center.

    This phase doesn’t look spacious or restorative. It’s dense, pressurized, full of friction. Beneath the surface, the body works continuously—redistributing weight, testing configurations not yet named. From the outside, little changes. Movement slows. Output thins. Inside, everything remains active.

    There’s no timeline attached to this work. The body stays in it as long as needed, reorganizing around what can be sustained next. This isn’t rest. It’s internal labor.

    Care Finds Its Scale

    As this reorganization continues, my relationship to care and obligation shifts. The body responds differently to what asks for attention. Some requests land cleanly. Others stall before reaching language. Care feels more precise now. It gathers around what can be met without strain. Long arcs of responsibility register as heavier as they extend forward.

    Obligation has slowed. Urgency has thickened rather than intensified. Timing and pacing matter more. Commitment hasn’t disappeared; it has cooled. Energy collects before release. Attention stays closer to center, conserving what hasn’t finished forming.

    This doesn’t feel like withdrawal. It feels like recalibration. Care finding a shape that matches capacity. Responsibility adjusting its scale. The body setting a tempo it can maintain. What I’m allowing arrives quietly: accompaniment without translation, delay without panic, unfinishedness without collapse. Messages wait. Tasks unfold over days. Threads remain open.

    I’m allowing the body to set the pace, letting sensation determine when to move and when to stay still. I watch where effort gathers and where it drains. These allowances aren’t generous; they’re necessary. They create just enough room for the system to keep reorganizing without tearing.

    Orientation

    Where I am now feels specific. The compression remains. The pressure hasn’t lifted. The body stays alert, organized around holding. At the same time, there’s less confusion inside it. The sensations are familiar enough to be read. I move more slowly—not hesitantly, but attentively.

    I walk the same short route most mornings, past the same trees and parked cars, noticing how often I stop without realizing it.

    There’s steadiness here—not ease, but orientation. The body recognizes itself in this compression. It knows how to stay upright. I’m not waiting for resolution or trying to see past this moment. The present has texture: dense, close, manageable in small spans. The body stays with what’s here.

    This feels like a place rather than a passage.

    Arrival, for now, looks like remaining intact—staying in relationship with the body as it does this work, letting sensation lead without rushing it into meaning. Integrity lives here: in listening and pacing, in allowing form to change without demanding a finished outline. What comes next will arrive when it’s ready. For now, the work is contained in this holding. The body stays steady and attentive until the shape ahead becomes clearer.

  • Time, Held

    Time, Held

    Time arrives before anything happens. It shows up early, settles in, rearranges the day around itself. You learn it through how the body prepares. Through the way the chest stays slightly lifted, like it’s waiting for a tap on the shoulder. Through how often the jaw tightens when the phone lights up. Through the reflex to count days without meaning to.

    Empire works through this kind of time. It lets it sink in slowly. It gives people enough room to adapt, enough repetition to make endurance look like a personal trait. Lives stretch around renewal dates and review periods. Everything keeps moving, but nothing quite lands. You learn how to hold your life lightly, how to keep your belongings minimal, how to stay ready to shift without being told to move.

    People live for years inside extensions. Inside temporary permissions. Inside measures that circulate without ever settling into something solid. Life fills the space anyway. Dinners get made. School lunches get packed. Work schedules get memorized. Love keeps happening. All of it unfolds on ground that never fully firms up. You learn to distribute your weight. You learn where not to lean too hard.

    Joy still arrives, but it comes with an internal clock already running. You feel it tick while you’re laughing. While you’re planning. While you’re letting yourself believe something might hold. Celebration becomes careful. Plans stay provisional. Even rest carries a low hum of alertness, as if the body doesn’t quite trust that it can go all the way down.

    This kind of time wears people without leaving marks you can point to. It teaches the body to stay available. Sleep thins out. Attention fragments. You start measuring life in cycles you didn’t choose. Renewal cycles. Processing cycles. Waiting cycles. Each one asks for patience. Each one takes a little more capacity with it.

    Policy relies on this. Fatigue funnels what feels possible. When energy gets spent managing uncertainty, very little remains for anything else. The week becomes the unit of survival. The future starts to feel abstract. You make decisions based on what requires the least explanation, the least exposure, the least risk of being noticed.

    Urgency moves unevenly through this system. Some situations stop everything. Others stretch on quietly, absorbing days, months, years. Loss waits its turn. Harm gets filed, deferred, assigned a new expected timeline. You feel the delay in how long it takes to breathe normally again, in how quickly hope retracts when it gets too loud.

    The language surrounding all of this stays calm. Dates appear. Updates get promised. Progress gets implied. These words move smoothly through official channels. They sound steady. They invite trust. They ask for composure. They ask people to keep showing that they can handle it.

    And still, time gets made elsewhere. In kitchens where stories don’t arrive in order. On dance floors where the body follows sensation instead of sequence. In care networks that move when someone needs something, not when a form clears. Memory bends time. Touch compresses it. Grief stretches it. None of this asks to be scheduled.

    These practices don’t wait for recognition. They happen because life keeps insisting. Because care has its own tempo. Because people stay with each other even when everything else feels provisional. These rhythms don’t resolve the waiting, but they interrupt its authority.

    Empire manages time by distributing it unevenly. By deciding who gets to arrive and who must remain in motion. Who is allowed to settle and who must stay ready. Who is worn down slowly enough that it looks procedural. Paying attention to time means noticing how power moves quietly, through calendars, deadlines, queues, and the long spaces in between.

    There isn’t a clean ending to this. Time under empire leaves residue. It stays in the muscles. It shows up in how cautiously people plan, in how often joy gets delayed, in how carefully hope is rationed. Naming that doesn’t make it disappear. But it does bring the clock into the room. It lets the weight be felt together.

    And sometimes, that shared awareness is where movement begins.

  • Structures of Warmth and Violence

    Structures of Warmth and Violence

    The sun is warm on my face at the port, and I don’t trust it.
    Midwinter light has no business feeling this gentle.
    The river is frozen hard enough to refuse reflection, to hold its surface without depth.
    Ice tightens everything into place.
    And still, the sun presses against my skin, insistent, intimate, as if it has selected me for a comfort it has not offered the water.

    The warmth settles along my cheekbone, my forehead, the bridge of my nose.
    It feels careful.
    Conditional.
    The kind of warmth that arrives without consequence.

    Below me, the St. Lawrence stays sealed.
    Nothing loosens.
    Nothing yields.

    The body receives what the structure does not.

    I stand longer than I need to. The warmth encourages this. It invites cooperation. I find myself adjusting my posture to keep it where it is, then stopping mid-movement. The river does not respond. Frozen water thickens time, holds things mid-instruction.

    The river has lived many lives. Long before it was drawn into colonial routes, it moved according to rhythms that did not answer to ledger or law. Those rhythms were narrowed, redirected, pressed into service.

    The river was not born into circulation, but it was made to sustain it. Even frozen, that demand remains legible. I feel it in the way the streets pull away from the water, organized and expectant.

    Montréal learned early how to organize violence without spectacle.
    Enslavement here did not require plantations.
    It required houses.
    Parishes.
    Courtrooms.
    Contracts folded small enough to disappear into pockets.

    The river anchored this order without needing to carry every body directly. It stabilized the circulation that made enslavement repeatable inland. Wealth accumulated. Authority settled. Black life moved through kitchens, sacristies, wills, and back rooms—measured, assigned, transferred at the scale of the household.

    I leave the port and begin walking. The sun follows in fragments now, slipping between buildings, touching my face, then withdrawing. My hands stay numb inside my gloves. My feet register the cold through stone and pavement.

    As the river slips out of sight, it does not recede. Its work continues elsewhere—through inheritance records, baptismal registers, domestic routines. Violence did not need the port to remain present. It lived closer than that.

    Warmth keeps insisting. My thoughts turn to fire.

    In 1734, fire tore through Montréal and forced exposure. It moved through homes and businesses, through the interiors where enslaved Black and Indigenous people laboured without legal standing. The fire did not invent violence. It illuminated what the city already contained.

    Marie-Joseph Angélique was accused of setting that fire.
    The archive does not offer certainty.
    It offers procedure.

    She was enslaved.
    She was imprisoned.
    She was interrogated.
    She was tortured.
    She was sentenced.
    She was hanged.

    Fire moved quickly.
    Judgement did, too.

    Walking now, the sun returns as the street opens. It warms my face without softening anything else. I let it stay. Heat has always been read carefully here—allowed when it behaves, named dangerous when it does not.

    The records remain.
    The scaffold remains in description.
    The crowd remains as fact.

    In New France, the work of execution was frequently assigned to enslaved Black men. Settlers refused the role. The state solved the problem by purchasing someone into it. One of them, Mathieu Léveillé, was held in bondage and forced to perform executions for years. The archive places him as the one who likely carried out Angélique’s hanging. It tells us something else, too: that the colony routinely conscripted Black life to enact its most visible violence.

    This fact does not resolve anything.
    It deepens the fracture.

    The executioner’s body was also owned, unfree, positioned to absorb the consequence of an order that required intimacy rather than distance. The rope passed through Black hands—rough hemp against skin just as unfree—because the colony needed it to.

    Angélique’s execution did not interrupt slavery in Montréal.
    It clarified the terms.
    It demonstrated consequence.
    It absorbed the fire into governance.

    Ice forms differently than fire spreads.
    Slowly.
    Quietly.
    Layer by layer.

    By the time I drift back up to Vieux-Montréal, the river is elsewhere, but its cold has stayed with me. I turn towards Place d’Armes without ceremony. The square does not announce itself as a site of death. It behaves like stone and space. People pass through. Traffic moves nearby.

    This is likely where Angélique was hanged.

    This knowledge reaches the body first. The chest tightens. The jaw sets. There is no shift in the square to mark this recognition. The sun touches my face once more, briefly, as if insisting on its neutrality. Nearby, a busker’s rendition of “My Heart Will Go On” bounces off the buildings, unembarrassed, continuous. The warmth does not belong to the place. It belongs to the moment, and the moment does not care where it happens.

    Execution is cold work.
    So is administration.
    So is forgetting.

    I keep walking.

    The warmth thins. Cold resumes its full instruction. 

    By the time I reach home, the sun feels distant, almost unreal. But it stays the way certain facts stay—undeniable, insufficient, instructive. The river remains sealed. The square remains where it is. The archive remains incomplete and operative.

    Nothing has been redeemed.
    Nothing has been resolved.

    What has happened is simpler and harder:
    fire, ice, sun, and walking have entered the same field of attention, and my body has been asked to hold them together without explanation.

    That is part of the afterlife too.

  • Unmoored

    Unmoored

    The morning after the election, the city looks the same. Dry streets, brittle air, leaves pressed flat against the pavement. A jogger passes, breath clouding the cold, and somewhere, a car alarm starts and stops. Montréal continues its routine with the precision of muscle memory, a city that knows how to disguise grief.

    Inside, the kettle cools on the counter. I stand at the window, watching the light shift across the buildings. The light is hard, metallic, the kind that makes everything appear sharper than it is. The silence in the room feels heavy, almost physical, like something you could lift with both hands.

    Last night, Soraya Martinez Ferrada and Ensemble Montréal won the municipal election. The radio speaks of renewal, pride, stability. I picture the rented ballroom where speeches rang out: the clink of glasses, the smell of fabric softener and stage lights, laughter spilling into the dry streets, volunteers walking home beneath banners that promised progress.

    Progress, they say. But I can’t feel it. The air still carries the weight of something unspoken. Every party with a chance built its platform on the same foundations: language purity, economic austerity, the management of difference. Whether they spoke of pride, efficiency, or neutrality, the promise stayed constant: belonging for some, permission for others, surveillance for the rest. Strategic voting wasn’t the failure. The ballot was the trap.

    Some will say the vote split the left. They’ll insist that if we’d all lined up behind the same banner, things might have turned out differently, as if the problem were arithmetic and not ideology. As if the left they’re mourning hadn’t already increased police budgets, backed racial profiling, and dressed austerity in green. As if we were meant to keep voting for the same forces that have made so many of us less safe in our own neighbourhoods. There’s grief in watching people mistake management for care.

    Anger doesn’t erase love. It sharpens it. Even as the slogans collapse, I keep seeing the city’s face in the small things that once felt like home. I’ve loved this place through every version of myself. Montréal shaped my language, my work, my survival. It taught me the pace of winter light, the generosity of strangers, the way care grows inside contradiction. It held me through uncertainty and exhaustion. It’s where I built kinship, where I learned that love can live inside ruins.

    Lately, that love feels unreturned, and I know I’m not alone in feeling the distance widen. This loss feels like mourning in slow motion. What’s changing isn’t only the skyline or the slogans but the city’s sense of itself, the fragile coexistence that once made it possible to breathe here. Policies that promise safety and pride have become instruments of surveillance. Community centres lose funding while police budgets grow. Streets that once felt like gathering places now echo with a quieter kind of fear.

    I watch it happen and recognize the pattern. The same language of order and belonging spreads far beyond Montréal, across the provinces, across the border. It’s a choreography of control disguised as care, a politics that tightens around what it names as protection. Each new measure asks again and again: who gets to belong, and who must disappear? I grieve not only the policies but the narrowing of imagination they bring, the loss of what this city once taught me, that people can make worlds together even when institutions refuse to.

    The city that once felt expansive has begun to fold in on itself. The word values fills the news, followed by neutrality and order. The province denies systemic racism even as its laws rewrite language, dress, belonging. Policy takes the form of open arms that never quite reach. Every speech about inclusion carries the faint scent of repetition. This isn’t a sudden change. It’s the slow drift of habit, hardening like ice across the Saint Lawrence. The denial of injustice has become an everyday reflex. What I feel now isn’t surprise, but recognition. The city mirrors everything beyond it until reflection itself becomes suffocation.

    That reflection doesn’t stay on the glass; it settles beneath the skin. The air thickens around conversation. What begins as policy ends as posture. The city lives in the body: in the jaw that tightens before speaking, in the breath that hesitates before it leaves. Doing Black queer and abolitionist work here means learning to breathe within narrow margins, shaping language that can move through corridors built for silence, carrying whole conversations in the space between what’s said and what’s permitted. I’ve written reports no one read, proposals that came back without comment. Each silence taught me another dialect. I’ve learned the rhythm of translation, not of language but of self, a fluency in shrinking. That quiet labour settles deeper still. The lungs forget how to widen. The skin learns to anticipate tension. The body absorbs every moment of being misunderstood.

    And yet, grace persists.

    A friend leaves soup at my door. A neighbour cracks a joke, and we both laugh longer than expected. A kiki ball fills the night with sound, and laughter becomes a kind of heartbeat. These gestures don’t repair anything. They make living possible within a structure that resists it. The tenderness of this city lives in the people who refuse to stop loving it. They keep planting, cooking, teaching, dancing, writing. They hold each other through exhaustion. They create small interruptions in the machinery of forgetting.

    Love keeps me here. It isn’t safety. It is endurance, and endurance has a cost. I’m tired of pretending that staying is a choice. They say patience. They say progress. They say it takes time. But time is what they’ve stolen.

    I’m nearing the end of my PhD, standing in the quiet between endings and beginnings. I’ve started reading job postings from other cities, looking for roles that might let me live and work at a distance. I read slowly, careful not to look too far ahead. I tell myself that leaving could continue what began here, that movement could be a form of care. Still, there’s guilt in mobility. Even leaving is a privilege, though it doesn’t feel like one. I’ll cross borders others can’t, carrying a passport built from contradictions. But staying has its own kind of disappearance.

    Lately, I’ve been imagining what life might feel like elsewhere. The thought arrives gently, without certainty: rooms with different light, mornings that move without hurry, work that grows without needing to explain its own worth, air that feels generous. Beyond this city, there’s no clear refuge. Borders reopen old wounds. Fires, floods, droughts, storms, fear. Billionaires call their escape routes progress while governments trade care for resilience.

    I keep hearing the same logic in every headline. The slogans change, but the project’s the same: control the language, control the border, control the breath. What’s happening here isn’t local; it’s the rehearsal of a world learning to survive its own cruelty. Everywhere, the same sentence repeats: you’re on your own.

    And yet, even in that sentence, I hear an echo — the sound of people refusing to let the world end quietly.

    I think about the scale of this unravelling, and about the people who still find ways to love. I think about how living with honesty feels like defiance. I want to spend what time remains building something that holds life, like a room with open windows. I want to work with intention, to write with purpose, to live without apology. I want to move through a world that gives instead of withholds.

    Montréal stays inside me: the bagels on Saint-Viateur at two in the morning, the smell of snow, the hum of the métro at night, church bells layered with ambulance sirens, the sound of languages mingling in a café, the sight of people helping each other carry groceries through the rain, laughter and smoke drifting from balconies into the dark. These memories form a pulse. They remind me that a city isn’t only its institutions; it’s the gestures that persist. I hold those gestures close. They’re what keep the city alive when the headlines fail it.

    When I walk to the river, I listen. The water moves without hesitation. It carries the weight of the sky and keeps going. I think of other seasons: the river in thaw, in flood, in stillness under ice. The city has always tried to contain it, yet the current keeps finding its own line. I stand at the edge and feel the cold reach my fingers. Behind me, the city hums. Ahead of me, the current folds into itself, steady and endless.

    Movement feels like a kind of truth. I don’t know if I’ll leave, or when, or where I’ll go. I only know I’ve started to listen for motion. Montréal lives in me: the rhythm of its languages, the tension of its contradictions, the lessons in its beauty and its harm. I’m still here. I’m already elsewhere.

    I want a life that breathes. I want to find places where care isn’t a performance, where living doesn’t require permission. I don’t know if those places exist, yet I move toward them, in thought, in hope, in practice.

    The river keeps its rhythm. The wind carries the scent of cold. I whisper gratitude for what this city has given, and for what I’ve learned in its arms. Then I turn toward home, where the kettle waits on the counter, and the light settles once more across the window.

  • There Is No Word for This Grief: On Gaza, Famine, and the World That Watches

    There Is No Word for This Grief: On Gaza, Famine, and the World That Watches

    I wasn’t supposed to be writing this.

    I’m supposed to be writing a comprehensive exam about temporality and health. About how Black queer people live and care for one another in timeframes not designed for our survival. I’m supposed to be providing therapy tomorrow—offering calm, presence, holding—for clients navigating their own overwhelm, grief, burnout. I’m supposed to be finishing a manuscript, drafting another talk, prepping for the next ball.

    But there is a genocide happening in Gaza.

    And I am broken.

    And that’s not what this is about. But it’s also what everything is about.

    Because I don’t know how to move through this world anymore.

    Not in a poetic way. Not in a metaphor. I mean literally. My body doesn’t know what to do with itself. I sit still and I shake. I eat and feel nauseous. I sleep and wake up in a sweat. I walk outside into wildfire smoke so thick that Tiohtià:ke now has the worst air quality in the world—and even still, I know I’m breathing freer than a child in Rafah.

    And what do you even do with that kind of knowing?

    There is a level 5 famine in Gaza.The highest designation possible.
    Thousands of children are already dead from starvation.
    More will die in the coming days.

    And the food is already there.
    Just metres away.
    Across the border.
    In trucks.
    In planes.
    In warehouses.

    Blocked.
    By policy.
    By intention.
    By design.

    This is not a crisis. This is not a natural disaster. This is not an unfortunate byproduct of war. This is a settler colonial genocide. A calculated campaign of extermination. Ethnic cleansing disguised as self-defence. Starvation weaponized. Infrastructure targeted. Grief made endless.

    This is the logic of Zionism.
    This is the logic of empire.
    This is what it means to disappear a people in real time.

    And the world watches.
    Scrolls.
    Shrugs.
    Argues.
    Donates, maybe.
    Then forgets again.

    Because forgetting is the luxury of the unaffected.

    And if you know what it is to be Black, to be queer, to be Indigenous, to be trans, to be displaced, to be criminalized, to be border-crossed or borderless, then you already know this truth: the world is not neutral.

    Not when it comes to genocide.
    Not when it comes to who gets to live.
    Not when it comes to who the world calls human.

    What’s happening in Gaza isn’t unimaginable.
    It’s entirely imaginable.
    That’s what makes it unbearable.

    This is what genocide looks like in the age of livestreams.
    This is what settler colonialism looks like when the camera’s always on.
    This is what fascism looks like when it doesn’t need to hide anymore.
    This is what it means to beg for mercy and be called a terrorist.
    This is what it means to scream for food and be met with silence.
    This is what it means when a child’s life is worth less than the narrative.

    And here we are. Watching.
    In real time.
    As Gaza bleeds.

    I’m not here to offer hope.
    Not the kind you can package.
    Not the kind you can sell.

    Because if you’re watching this and still talking about “both sides,”
    If you’re more outraged by broken windows than by bombed hospitals,
    If your solidarity is contingent on respectability, strategy, or PR optics,
    If your grief only activates when white bodies are harmed,
    Then your humanity is not mine.

    And I am not interested in convincing anyone that Palestinians deserve to live.

    Because life is not earned.
    Freedom is not a prize.
    Liberation is not a matter of debate.

    Palestinians do not need your approval to resist.
    They do not need your permission to mourn.
    They do not need to be perfect victims in order to be spared.

    They are not being starved because of Hamas.
    They are not being bombed because they resist.
    They are being exterminated because they exist.
    Because they are Indigenous.
    Because they are still there.
    Because they refuse to disappear.

    And I am wrecked by this.

    Not just as a witness, but as someone who knows what it means to be told that your life is too complicated to matter.
    Who knows what it means to scream into silence.
    To live in a body that the state treats as collateral.
    To walk through a world that sees your death as routine.

    But this isn’t about me.

    It’s about a father holding the body of his child and saying I’m sorry I couldn’t protect you.
    It’s about people breaking apart stale bread to share with twenty others.
    It’s about the doctor who keeps treating the wounded in the rubble of a bombed out hospital.

    It’s about the poets still writing.
    The dancers still dancing.
    The children still drawing keys to homes that no longer exist.
    The elders still planting seeds in soil they know they may not survive to harvest.

    This isn’t resilience.
    This is refusal.

    This isn’t optimism.
    This is survival strategy.

    This isn’t a tragedy.
    It’s a crime.
    An atrocity.
    A catastrophe authored by cowards in suits and suits in tanks and tanks in children’s bedrooms.

    And still, somehow, there is singing.
    Still, somehow, there is prayer.
    Still, somehow, there is resistance.

    Still, somehow, they live.

    And I want you to understand what it means to keep living in the middle of a genocide.
    To not just breathe—but to love.
    To not just exist—but to refuse.
    To not just survive—but to fight.

    So no, I don’t have the words.
    I have this grief lodged in my throat like shrapnel.
    I have these tears that feel like they betray the scale of the loss.
    I have this ache in my chest from trying to hold space for others while knowing the world is falling apart.
    I have the unbearable knowing that every second I spend writing this, someone else is dying.

    And still—I write.
    Because silence is complicity.
    Because bearing witness is not enough, but it is necessary.

    Because abolition means all cages.
    Because solidarity means now, not after.

    Because Palestine is not a symbol—it’s a place, a people, a love, a struggle that stretches across oceans and generations.
    Because to be Black and queer and abolitionist and breathing in this world is to take a side.

    And I will say it again and again and again, even if my voice shakes:

    From the river to the sea, Palestine will be free.

    And may we live long enough to see that day.

    And may we never forget what we did—and didn’t—do until then.

  • How to Exit Without Offering Your Body as Proof

    How to Exit Without Offering Your Body as Proof

    for the ones who leave before they’re broken

    There are days when showing up costs more than it gives.
    You feel it before you can name it.
    In the jaw that tightens.
    In the breath that skips.
    In the way your screen feels brighter than usual,
    and your voice feels like it’s echoing back to no one.

    We are taught to explain. To translate.
    To make our exits reasonable, legible, polite.
    But this is not that.

    This is a quiet manual for leaving without spectacle.
    For protecting your softness.
    For holding onto what the world keeps asking you to give away.

    1. Listen to the tremor.

    Not the full collapse.
    Not the spiral.
    Not the point of exhaustion or shutdown.

    Listen sooner. Listen earlier.

    That flicker in your gut when someone says “can I ask you something?”
    The flat tone your voice takes in the meeting.
    The numbness that settles in your hands when you open the email.

    That’s the moment.
    That’s the window.
    You don’t need to wait for crisis.

    You are allowed to go
    before you unravel.

    2. Leave before you’re asked to perform it.

    The longer you stay, the more they’ll want to see it.
    The pain.
    The breakdown.
    The proof that you’re not just tired—but wounded.

    Because when you disappear quietly, they get nervous.
    They want a reason. A diagnosis. A narrative they can process.

    Refuse the translation.
    Refuse the trauma theatre.
    Refuse the expectation that your no must be explained, softened, or made teachable.

    You can exit in silence.
    And that silence can be a full sentence.

    3. Take the small exits. They count.

    You don’t need to leave the institution.
    You can leave the call.
    You can leave the conversation.
    You can leave the WhatsApp group.

    You can leave for five minutes.
    You can leave for five months.

    Not all survival is dramatic.
    Some of it is just:
    “I’m not going to this event.”
    or
    “I’m not replying right now.”

    We are allowed to step back without falling apart.

    And sometimes stepping back is what keeps us from falling apart.

    4. Stop narrating your no.

    You do not owe an origin story.
    You do not owe a justification.
    You do not owe context, citations, or clarity.

    We live in a culture that mistakes access for entitlement.
    That confuses transparency with care.
    That expects Black queer survival to be narrated in the key of pedagogy.

    Let them sit with the silence.
    Let them wonder.
    Let them misread you.

    That’s not your responsibility.

    Your no does not need subtitles.

    5. Let someone you trust hold the knowing.

    Refusal does not mean isolation.
    Refusal does not mean self-erasure.

    You can still reach out.
    Not to explain—but to be witnessed.

    Tell one person:
    “I had to leave.”
    “I’m choosing quiet.”
    “I need care, not questions.”

    Let your no be mirrored by someone who won’t try to fix it.

    Let it be honoured like a prayer.

    6. If you want to be found, leave breadcrumbs.

    You don’t have to go ghost.

    You can leave a note.
    A post.
    A playlist.
    A timestamp.
    A song only one person will understand.

    Not everything sacred needs to be hidden.

    But you get to decide:
    who sees it,
    who finds it,
    who earns the right to follow.

    The Exit Is Its Own Kind of Arrival.

    They’ll say you’re avoiding.
    They’ll say you’re unreliable.
    They’ll say you’re disappearing.

    Let them.

    What they see as abandonment
    might actually be a return.

    A return to your breath.
    To your boundaries.
    To your own pacing.

    You are not ghosting them.
    You are re-entering your own orbit.
    You are refusing to be consumed.

    You do not owe your exhaustion as evidence.
    You do not owe your breakdown as a learning moment.

    You are allowed to leave. Without offering your body as proof.

  • The Wrong Kind of Grief

    The Wrong Kind of Grief

    Who’s Allowed to Mourn in Public—and Who’s Not

    It was quiet at first. Just a few of us lying on the cold concrete outside of McGill University. Keffiyehs folded. Bodies arranged—not for spectacle, but for mourning.
    The die-in wasn’t meant to go viral. It was meant to say what the system refuses to name:
    Gaza is being erased.
    And health workers know what genocide looks like.

    I remember the weight of my own breath as I lay there.
    Not heavy. Not performative. Just present.

    Someone walked by and snapped a photo without asking. Another didn’t stop at all.
    When we stood up, nothing had changed. Not on the street. Not in the news.
    But something had settled in my chest. Something that hasn’t left.

    Because we weren’t only laying our bodies down for Gaza.
    We were laying down with the knowledge that our grief is never allowed to be grief.

    Not when it’s Black.
    Not when it’s queer.
    Not when it’s tied to Palestine, or trans lives, or state violence.

    That kind of grief doesn’t get candles.
    It gets cops.
    It doesn’t get statements.
    It gets silence.
    And sometimes, if we’re not careful, it gets turned inward—
    Treated like something to suppress. Something to explain away.
    Too emotional. Too disruptive.
    The wrong kind of grief.

    Black Grief as Threat

    Black grief has never been read as grief.
    It’s read as aggression.
    As instability.
    As a problem to manage.

    A vigil for a Black life becomes a police incident.
    A protest gets framed as a riot.
    A mother weeps on camera, and the story pivots to property damage.

    This isn’t new.
    But that doesn’t make it any less violent.

    Even in so-called progressive spaces—health orgs, queer collectives, activist networks—there are unwritten rules:
    Don’t cry too hard.
    Don’t speak too plainly.
    Don’t say something that makes people uncomfortable.

    I’ve been in those rooms.
    Told I was “too emotional” for naming what hurt.
    Asked to “come back when calmer” as if grief needed to be reasonable to be real.

    But Black grief doesn’t belong to institutions.
    It doesn’t need to be tidy.
    It doesn’t need to be polite.
    It shows up where it’s needed:
    In kitchens. In bathrooms. In the street. In the quiet moment after the meeting ends.

    And maybe that’s what makes it dangerous.
    That we still feel.
    That we still care.
    That we refuse to forget.

    Because in a world trying to erase us, grieving is a form of resistance.

    Palestinian Grief and the Politics of Denial

    If Black grief is read as a threat, Palestinian grief is denied altogether.
    Or worse—criminalized.

    In recent months, we’ve watched mourning itself become a battleground.
    Vigils banned.
    Flags confiscated.
    Photos of murdered children labeled “too political.”
    The dead rendered offensive.
    The living forbidden to name them.

    The message is clear:
    You can grieve, but not like that.
    Not too visibly.
    Not too loudly.
    Not in a way that disrupts the narrative.

    The same governments funding the bombs demand silence about the bodies.

    But Palestinian grief refuses to stay quiet.
    It pours into streets, onto murals, through chants.
    It insists on being seen—even when the world tries to look away.

    And that insistence resonates.
    Because for many of us—Black, queer, displaced—it feels familiar.
    We know what it means to mourn in public and be told it’s too much.
    We know what it means to be asked to tone it down, make it palatable, put it away.

    Still, we mourn.
    Together.
    In public.
    Without apology.

    Queer Mourning and Rituals of Refusal

    Queer people have always built our own ways to mourn.
    No one gave us space.
    So we carved it out ourselves.

    In clubs. In alleyways. In bedrooms and chat threads.
    We’ve lit candles in parking lots.
    Laid flowers on steps where no police ever came.
    Held vigils that no news crew covered.
    Carried names no one else bothered to say.

    This is part of our lineage:
    ACT UP die-ins.
    Ashes delivered to government steps.
    Protests that doubled as funerals.
    Grief that refused to be silent.

    That legacy is still with us.
    Every time a trans name is whispered online because no outlet printed it.
    Every time someone cries in a bathroom after reading a headline and someone else holds them.

    Queer mourning doesn’t always look like mourning.
    Sometimes it’s awkward.
    Sometimes it’s loud.
    Sometimes it’s just showing up.

    But it’s always a refusal.
    A refusal to grieve quietly.
    A refusal to perform respectability.
    A refusal to act like this world hasn’t taken too much from us.

    This grief is a kind of care.
    Not the kind taught in workshops.
    The kind that says:
    “I see you. I’ll carry this with you. Even if no one else will.”

    Grief That Doesn’t Fit

    I’ve been in spaces where I knew I wasn’t allowed to grieve.
    Not really.
    I could speak, maybe. But not feel too much.
    Not shake the frame.
    Not say something that might get labeled “too intense.”

    Sometimes, the silencing is subtle.
    Someone avoids eye contact.
    A conversation gets politely redirected.
    A room falls quiet—not in respect, but discomfort.

    I remember being told I was ben énervé for naming the violence of Black bodies on slides, with no disaggregated data, no context, no care.
    Just images.
    Just performance.

    I wasn’t angry.
    I was grieving.
    Grieving the way our lives get reduced to symbols.
    Grieving the absence of real recognition.
    Even that was too much.

    Most of us learn to shrink our grief until it fits.
    Until it sounds strategic.
    Until it’s digestible.

    And when it doesn’t shrink, we’re called unstable.
    Disruptive.
    Unprofessional.

    But grief isn’t supposed to make people comfortable.
    It isn’t a moment.
    It’s a condition.

    It lingers in the breath, in the body, in the way your shoulders won’t release even when the meeting ends.

    Some days, I carry it like fog.
    Some days, like glass.
    Some days, it doesn’t arrive until I’ve taken off the mask and closed the door behind me.

    But I no longer apologize for it.
    Because I’ve learned something simple:
    Grief is proof that something hasn’t been taken from me.
    Not yet.

    Toward Abolitionist Mourning

    We need to stop pretending grief only matters when it’s quiet, clean, or backed by institutions.

    We need to stop asking the systems that harm us to validate the losses they cause.

    Abolitionist mourning doesn’t wait for permission.
    It doesn’t ask for policy.
    It doesn’t make pain legible to power.

    It mourns on its own terms—messy, collective, unsanctioned.
    It stays with what hurts.
    It lets the wound speak.

    We’ve always known how to do this.

    Black and Indigenous people have mourned in ways the state can’t hold.
    Palestinians have carried memory through exile and massacre.
    Trans people create rituals that no church would sanctify.

    We don’t need more professionalization of pain.
    We need more space for its truth.
    More honesty.
    More refusal.

    Because grief is not what breaks us.
    What breaks us is having nowhere to put it.
    And what repairs us—if anything does—
    is knowing we don’t have to carry it alone.

    We’re Still Mourning

    We don’t need the state’s recognition to make our grief real.
    We don’t need institutions to validate what our bodies already know.
    Our mourning isn’t excessive.
    It isn’t disruptive.
    It isn’t unprofessional.

    It’s memory.
    It’s survival.
    It’s care.

    And it’s not going anywhere.

    If the world refuses to hold our grief,
    then we will keep finding other ways to carry it.
    We will light candles where they say we can’t.
    We will chant the names they refuse to speak.
    We will gather in the cracks and hold each other there.

    Our grief isn’t the problem.
    The problem is a world that only makes space for it once we’re gone.

    We’re still here.
    We’re still mourning.
    And we’re not asking for permission.

    Fediverse Reactions
  • What Whiteness Mourns When a Plantation Burns

    What Whiteness Mourns When a Plantation Burns

    When the Nottoway Plantation burned down, it wasn’t just a building that went up in flames—it was a monument to white fantasy. And in the ashes, what surfaced was telling: white grief, not for the enslaved, but for the venue. For the photo ops. For the imagined innocence of a land that was never innocent.

    Comment sections filled quickly. We had our wedding there. Our anniversary photos were so beautiful. I can’t believe this piece of history is gone.

    But which history? And whose grief?

    What I witnessed wasn’t mourning. It was a performance. A familiar one. A white grief that isn’t about loss—it’s about possession.

    The Plantation as Fantasy

    There is nothing neutral about getting married on a plantation. When you choose that backdrop for your love story, you are choosing to centre aesthetics over atrocity. You are choosing nostalgia over memory. You are choosing the soft light of the golden hour over the screams that once filled those fields.

    A plantation wedding doesn’t just ignore history—it repurposes it. It turns a deathscape into décor. And when that fantasy is taken away, even by something as natural as fire, the outrage that follows is not about heritage. It’s about the loss of comfort. The loss of an illusion.

    White Grief and Anti-Black Sociality

    This grief isn’t misplaced. It’s foundational. As an Afropessimist, I understand it as part of a social structure that requires Black death to affirm white life. The plantation is not grieved because of what it represents—it is grieved despite what it represents. Or rather, because its representation has always excluded the dead.

    In this structure, Black suffering is not just ignored—it is rendered background noise. It is the scenery. The atmosphere. The soft echo behind the vows.

    And when the scenery burns, grief floods in—not for the lives lost on that land, but for the loss of a setting in which white fantasies felt uninterrupted.

    What I’ve Learned from Grief

    As a social worker, I spend much of my life witnessing grief. I know its forms—raw, raging, quiet, complex. And I’ve learned to listen not just to what grief says, but to what it silences. To who it centres. To who it allows to be remembered.

    The grief I saw after the Nottoway fire was not about mourning. It was about control. Control over the narrative. Over space. Over who gets to feel what, and when.

    It was, in many ways, a refusal to grieve what should have been mourned centuries ago.

    The Fire Was Not the Tragedy

    The real tragedy is not that Nottoway burned.

    The tragedy is that it stood for so long. That it was never turned into a memorial, a site of mourning, a place to honour the enslaved. That it became a hotel, a wedding venue, a tourist destination. That it welcomed guests in linen suits and lace dresses but never acknowledged the lives it extinguished.

    And the real tragedy is that so many people still believe it’s the fire that ruined it.

    Refusal as Mourning

    I didn’t mourn the plantation. I won’t.

    What I mourn is every Black child buried without a name. Every resistance that went unrecorded. Every descendant asked to forget. Every ghost made to smile for a photo.

    I mourn what whiteness refuses to see. What it refuses to carry. What it refuses to let go.

    But a plantation is not a loss.

    Its burning is a reckoning.

  • Independence Fantasies, Colonial Truths

    Independence Fantasies, Colonial Truths

    Alberta wants to leave. Again. And this time, it’s louder than usual.

    Calls for Western separatism—what some are now trying to brand as a serious referendum campaign—are gaining traction. Politicians are testing the waters. The Premier hasn’t ruled it out. And, predictably, they’re invoking Quebec’s sovereignty movements as a model.

    But let me be clear from the outset: I’m not defending Canada. I’m not clinging to the federation. I don’t believe states are worth saving—not this one, not any of them. I’m not interested in sovereignty narratives that just redraw the same borders with different colours. I’m an abolitionist. And as a Black queer person raised in Quebec, I know firsthand how nation-building is so often just empire with better PR.

    That’s exactly why Alberta’s separatist posturing doesn’t read as radical to me. It reads as settler revanchism—masked in the language of resistance.

    Yes, Quebec’s independence movements have been violent, colonial, anti-Black, and shot through with contradictions. But they emerged from something real: a distinct cultural, linguistic, and historical formation shaped by centuries of attempted assimilation. That doesn’t absolve them. But it contextualizes them.

    Alberta has no such context.

    There’s no endangered language. No collective memory of being colonized by the Canadian state. No suppressed literature or forbidden faith. What there is, is capital. Oil. Guns. White grievance. And an economy built on extraction and entitlement.

    What Alberta wants to separate from isn’t oppression—it’s accountability.

    This isn’t a fight for freedom. It’s a tantrum from a province that’s never been told no. A province that has long enjoyed disproportionate political power, federal subsidies, and a privileged place in the settler imagination. And now, as the climate crisis accelerates and global scrutiny mounts, Alberta doesn’t want to change. It wants to opt out.

    It’s not seeking liberation. It’s demanding exemption.

    And when Alberta reaches for Quebec as its excuse—as its supposed precedent—it exposes something deeper. It shows how shallow this separatism really is. Because for all of Quebec’s failings, there is a cultural infrastructure here: a language, a kinship system, a literature of struggle (even if that struggle has too often excluded Black and Indigenous people). Alberta has none of that. Just the myth of rugged individualism and the fantasy of permanent control.

    This is not decolonization. This is a colony refusing to share.

    Alberta separatism borrows the postures of liberation movements to double down on domination. It mimics the rhetoric of resistance while clinging to the very systems that are killing us. And that’s what makes it so dangerous: it masquerades as anti-state politics while defending everything the state was built to protect—white wealth, settler power, and the right to extract without consequence.

    As someone who has lived through Quebec’s nationalism and survived the Canadian state’s violences, I don’t mistake any of this for freedom. I’ve seen what nationhood does to those of us who don’t fit its image. I’ve watched how state-building chews up the very people it claims to uplift. I’ve learned that not all exits lead somewhere better.

    Abolition isn’t about preserving Canada. But it’s not about celebrating every departure from it, either. Especially not the ones led by those who already have everything and just want more.

    So no—I won’t romanticize Alberta’s separatist dreams. I won’t let them smuggle white supremacy into the conversation under the banner of autonomy. I won’t let them use Quebec as cover while erasing the very people Quebec has tried to silence.

    Alberta isn’t trying to escape oppression. It’s trying to protect it.

    And some of us are done pretending not to notice.

  • After the Election: No Victory, No Salvation, Only the Work Ahead

    After the Election: No Victory, No Salvation, Only the Work Ahead

    Yesterday’s election unfolded the way it always does in a decaying settler state: desperate, fragmented, unmoored from any real possibility of change.
    Mark Carney won a minority government.
    Not because he inspired anyone.
    Not because he offered a vision of something better.
    But because fear of collapse keeps people clinging to the wreckage.
    Carney’s victory is a victory for capital, for managed decline. He will govern not with transformation, but with technocratic violence, offering competence while administering crisis. He represents an empire trying to manage its own decay without ever questioning the structures that brought it to this point.

    The NDP, meanwhile, collapsed into near-irrelevance.
    Not by accident.
    They spent years softening their demands, trimming the edges off movements that once demanded real justice, chasing approval from the very systems that were built to contain and destroy them.
    By the time they realized who they had abandoned, it was too late.
    The base that built the NDP—racialized, working-class, Indigenous, disabled, queer communities—has already moved on.
    Many of us have stopped looking to electoral politics for salvation.
    We learned long ago that there is no ballot box for liberation.

    And then there’s Poilievre.
    His personal defeat is not a victory.
    He lost his seat but grew the Conservative base.
    He played with the fire of white rage, conspiracy, and open fascism, and those flames are not going out.
    They will find new leaders, more dangerous ones.
    The centre did not hold. It barely even tried.
    What we are seeing is not a reversal of right-wing momentum. It is its acceleration, even in the absence of the man who helped bring it to this point.

    Taken together, tonight’s results confirm what many of us already knew.
    Canada, as a project, is dying.
    Not with a rupture that could birth something new, but through a long, grinding erosion that tightens its violence while pretending to offer stability.
    There is no vision here. No future being built.
    Only a managed decline, administered by people too invested in the structures of extraction, policing, and dispossession to imagine anything different.

    For Black, Indigenous, racialized, queer, and trans communities, this election does not change the terrain.
    The state was never our protector.
    It was never ours to reclaim.
    There was never a version of this country where we were meant to survive with dignity.
    That’s not pessimism. It’s clarity.

    The task ahead is the same as it has always been.
    To build outside of the crumbling systems.
    To invest in abolitionist infrastructures: mutual aid, communal care, survival networks that are not dependent on the permission of the state.
    To protect each other when the safety nets fail, because they were never designed to catch us in the first place.
    To refuse despair, not because we are hopeful about the system, but because we are committed to each other beyond it.

    Carney’s victory is hollow.
    Poilievre’s downfall is dangerous in disguise.
    The NDP’s disappearance is a cautionary tale about what happens when you sell your soul for electoral respectability.

    But our survival has never depended on who wins elections.
    It has always depended on how fiercely we remember who we are to each other.
    How fiercely we build in the cracks they cannot seal.
    How boldly we refuse to accept the limits they place on what we can imagine.

    No ballot was going to save us last night.
    No parliament will save us today.
    Our future will not be built in the halls of power.
    It will be built in kitchens, basements, parks, community centres.
    It will be built in memory, in movement, in revolt, in care.

    No victory.
    No salvation.
    Only us.
    Only everything we still have to build, together.