Tag: Abolition

  • 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.

  • 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.

  • 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.