Category: Personal

  • 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.

  • 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.

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  • The Weight of Absence: On Boundaries, Accountability, and the Politics of Disappearance

    The Weight of Absence: On Boundaries, Accountability, and the Politics of Disappearance

    There are moments when absence carries more weight than presence. When the space someone leaves behind doesn’t just signal distance, but a rupture. A confirmation of something you hadn’t yet said aloud. Not all harm is loud. Some betrayals unfold in silence. Sometimes, the deepest wounds are not from what was done, but from what was not.

    I have always believed that friendship is a site of responsibility. To love someone is to be present. To recognize that relationships require more than shared joy. They require care, reciprocity, and repair. That belief has sustained me, but I have seen how quickly care turns conditional. How easily people disappear when accountability enters the room. Some people are only available for ease, not for the work that love demands.

    This was not just one moment. It was not just one conversation. It was a pattern, a structure, a political reality that plays out in the intimate corners of our lives. I have seen how non-Black people, particularly those whose identities grant them proximity to whiteness, expect the safety of Black friendship without the responsibility of real care. They want the warmth. The way we hold space effortlessly. The way we know how to make people feel at home. But the moment we ask them to hold something heavy, they vanish.

    I used to think these disappearances were about me. That if I had softened my words, made my pain easier to hold, things would have turned out differently. But I know better now. This is what proximity to whiteness teaches—to evade, to deflect, to disappear rather than engage. It is a refusal to be seen as someone who can harm. A retreat into silence, into absence, into the ease of never having to reckon with what it means to be in real relationship with Black people.

    I named what had hurt me. I set a boundary. I said: this is where I end. Instead of sitting with discomfort, they called me rigid. Unforgiving. I have seen this before, and I refuse to let it shape what I build next. Black people are told we are too accommodating, too forgiving, too available. Yet, the moment we assert our limits, we become too harsh, too difficult, too unwilling to let things go. This contradiction is not accidental. It is structural. It is what happens when you are seen as something to be held for comfort, but never engaged with as an equal.

    And so they disappeared. Not with an apology. Not with an attempt to repair. They vanished in the way that people do when their presence was never meant to be sustained. A blocking, a shutting down, a refusal to sit with what had been broken. A settler-colonial logic of disposability, played out in friendship.

    I have seen it before. I have learned. People who cannot meet me in presence do not deserve my time. Moving forward, I am choosing relationships where care is not an afterthought, where presence is not conditional, and where accountability is not treated as a burden.

    Care without accountability is not care at all. It is convenience. And I refuse to make myself convenient.

  • Joy, Survival, and the Refusal to Be Broken

    Joy, Survival, and the Refusal to Be Broken

    Notes from a Night of Performance and Resistance

    As Saidiya Hartman reminds us, Black life moves through the tension of mourning and survival, a condition intensified for Black queer and trans people whose very existence challenges the terms of the social order. In a world structured by anti-Blackness, where exhaustion is manufactured and joy is framed as indulgence, Black pleasure is a radical act of refusal. It is a practice of world-building amid dispossession.

    This refusal, this reclamation, is what I found myself reflecting on last night at the Wiggle Room in Tiohtià:ke, where I attended a burlesque show wrapped in the language of tarot and transformation. The performances that unfolded were not simply acts of entertainment, but rituals—embodied acts of storytelling that spoke to the precarity and possibility of life under structures that seek to contain us.

    Each performance was shaped by the energy of a different tarot card, an invocation of mysticism woven into movement and presence. The night had been playful, filled with laughter and cheers, until Phoenix Inana took the stage. Unlike the other performances, theirs was not burlesque—it was performance art, and it demanded silence. A rupture in the rhythm of the night.

    Phoenix embodied The Devil, but through deliberate intervention, they transfigured the archetype—not as a warning of corruption, but as an opening toward self-possessed liberation. They wove The Devil into the figure of Lilith—a symbol of defiance, a body ungoverned, a refusal to be subdued. In dominant narratives, The Devil is a sign of excess, indulgence, a descent into desire. But in Phoenix’s hands, The Devil became something else entirely: an opening, a confrontation with the self, a refusal to abide by the moral logics that have long been used to discipline those cast as deviant. Their movement, measured and defiant, enacted what Mackey calls affective choreography—a performance that is not for spectacle but for insurgency, refusing the logics of discipline.

    As Hortense Spillers reminds us, the body under colonial and patriarchal orders is always already marked for discipline. To reclaim the figure of The Devil—through Lilith, through the rejected feminine—is to refuse the very foundations of that discipline. The room held its breath as Phoenix moved—deliberate, magnetic, speaking in a language beyond words. They did not perform for an audience; they conjured something larger, something uncontainable. A reckoning with desire, with shame, with the ways we have been taught to fear our own hunger for pleasure, for freedom, for more. In that moment, The Devil was not a force of corruption but of possibility—the permission to exist outside of the constraints imposed upon us.

    Before the performance began, I noticed a tarot card had been left on my seat—the Eight of Cups. I didn’t think much of it at first, but later that night, after stepping into the cool air outside the venue, I pulled out my phone and looked up its meaning. Departure. Choosing oneself. The aching, necessary act of walking away. The card’s imagery—cups abandoned, a figure moving forward—settled into my chest.

    It was a lesson I have met before. One that keeps finding me. To leave is not to retreat but to carve out the possibility of elsewhere—to refuse the exhaustion of extractive institutions and instead move toward Black queer possibility. In the afterlife of slavery, where Black life is both hyper-visible and disposable, departure is not just a metaphor—it is a method of survival. We leave institutions, relationships, even versions of ourselves, because survival demands movement.

    I carried that message with me as I lingered after the show, laughing, exhaling, held in the kind of embrace that only chosen family provides. The space between us—our breath, our joy, our indulgence in the moment—was a refusal. Not an escape, not a reprieve, but an insurgency. These nights are not outside of struggle; they exist in direct opposition to the anti-Black, capitalist systems that demand our exhaustion, our suffering, our depletion.

    These spaces of performance, of radical belonging, exist within a lineage of Black queer world-making. One of the most enduring examples of this is ballroom—a subcultural movement rooted in the survival of Black and Latinx queer and trans communities. Ballroom was born out of necessity, a direct response to anti-Black and anti-queer exclusion from white-dominated LGBTQ+ spaces in the mid-20th century. It became not just a venue for performance but a site of kinship, a world where categories of gender, beauty, and realness were reimagined on Black and brown terms.

    Ballroom operates as a Black queer counterpublic—an insurgent archive of survival, where kinship is built outside the logics of capitalist extraction, and where the aesthetics of gender, performance, and belonging are constantly being rewritten in real-time. While ballroom remains deeply rooted in Black and Latinx history, it has also grown into a space where others who have known displacement, resistance, and the urgency of chosen family can find belonging. As Godmother Phoenix Inana Sankofa LaBeija, she has taken up the role of mentor and guide, carrying forward the commitment to craft, care, and those who come after. Her position within ballroom is not just a title; it is an obligation—to those who seek space in a world that denies them room to breathe.

    The world grinds us down. It tells us that we must earn rest. It frames joy as frivolous. And yet, we choose otherwise. We gather. We celebrate. We insist upon ourselves.

    To persist is to resist, but to insist on joy is to demand livability—not as a concession, but as an act of abolitionist defiance, a refusal to let extraction be our only inheritance.

    The Eight of Cups is a departure, yes, but it is also a return—to self, to possibility, to the world we are making together. As I walked out of the Wiggle Room, my fingers still tracing the Eight of Cups in my pocket, I felt something shift within me. Sometimes, the universe delivers its messages in grand gestures. And sometimes, they arrive in a performance piece that demands silence. A tarot card left on a seat. A night spent in the presence of those who see you fully.

    And sometimes, those messages are simple but profound:

    Keep going.
    Keep choosing yourself.
    Keep finding joy.

    Because that, too, is resistance. That, too, is survival. And even when the world gives us nothing, we will make ourselves—together.