Tag: Blackness

  • Trophies

    Trophies

    Eight-thirty and I’ve been awake since six. The body has been doing this since I sent the dissertation in: waking itself before I decide to wake, some obscure bodily alarm I didn’t set going off in the dark. I ended up at a coffee shop I’d never tried before–less by choice and moreso because all my usual spots are all still closed–an oat milk moka slowly going cold in my hand. I don’t fully know why I came to sit here, under this ash tree at the edge of the Lachine Canal, except that the body has been leading and the mind has been following.

    The bike path is busy even now, this early. Commuters, runners, a construction worker setting out cones thirty meters from where I’m sitting. Birds are picking crumbs off the stone edge of the canal, and I can see an RTL bus from Longueuil crossing the Mill Street bridge above my right shoulder, moving through without stopping.

    The story broke a few days ago: officers from Station 39 in Montréal-Nord had been stopping Black men and men of Arab origin at rates that required formal explanation, issuing tickets on the basis of ethnicity, making racist remarks inside a unit culture that circulated them as ordinary. The investigation had started in March, already underway before anyone outside the unit knew to ask. Then, in the coverage, a detail: some of them had been ripping off locs during police interventions and keeping the pieces as trophies.

    Trophies.

    What I notice is which part of this incident dominated the headlines. The stops, the tickets, and the remarks are the texture of daily life for people in that neighbourhood: the unremarkable climate of being under a specific kind of management. It took the “trophies” to produce the press conference, the mayor calling it disturbing, the police chief holding the room with his own face as evidence that the institution has changed. Frank B. Wilderson writes that anti-Black violence circulates as atmosphere, the condition against which civil society confirms its own moral coherence. Scandals like this, almost predictable in their recurrence, are necessary precisely because the atmosphere is not. The trophy takes the heat so the remarks and the tickets and stops don’t have to. Then the reform response arrives on cue: body cameras, reassignments, oversight, the machinery that allows the atmosphere to be named without being changed.

    This logic doesn’t stop at the institution. A progressive journalist in this city who has covered SPVM violence for years and has built a sizeable following opened their Station 39 video with: “The SPVM is scalping people.” The image is vivid, which is the point, which is also the problem. Anti-Black violence is passing through a progressive media network as affective content, producing moral feeling in audiences who will likely never be stopped in Montréal-Nord on a humid Tuesday evening. The feeling confirms alignment: it circulates, metabolizes into outrage, and then the next story accumulates. I want to be clear about this: none of this requires bad faith. Civil society built the execution scaffold, and we mount it before we decide to. This is what Wilderson means by background affect: the Black body in pain as the ground condition that civil society, including its critics, requires in order to feel itself.

    Vincent Woodard writes about the consumption of Black bodies as inherited logic: the taking and keeping of the souvenir. Locs accumulate over months and years, the hair carrying its own time, and cutting them during an intervention is taking that time alongside the dignity and the agency and the flesh. What the officer does with the trophy and what the viewer does with the progressive journalist’s video share a structure. In both cases, the Black body is made available to someone who is not subject to it, received and held briefly, used to produce something — possession, feeling, the confirmation of one’s moral position — and then the Black body remains where it was: in Montréal-Nord, subject to the next ticket, the next racist remark, the next unjustified stop. The trophy is the version that made the condition legible. The underlying assumption was already there before the scissors, before the camera, in every interaction that didn’t make anyone’s feed.

    Saidiya Hartman says gratuitous violence doesn’t require justification. It enacts a prior condition. The analysis is not a shield against it. I have been studying this for four years. The dissertation on my committee’s desks right now is over a hundred pages about how communities care for themselves when institutions won’t, and I am sitting here under this ash tree at eight-thirty in the morning with a chest that weighs more than it did yesterday. The knowing doesn’t stop the landing.

    A duck comes down the canal with a few others trailing. The water here is built, cut through Kanien’kehá:ka territory in the 1820s to make commerce legible, to route water according to a particular purpose, to bend it to the capitalist’s will. There is still life in it. Their attempts at control failed, as they always do. Water finds a way.

    Christina Sharpe writes about residence time, the measure of how long an element stays in water. Sodium for 260 million years. The water doesn’t release what entered it. This canal connects to the St. Lawrence connects to the Atlantic, and the Atlantic received—and the Atlantic holds. Holds the bodies, holds the names that were never written down, holds the ones whose lives were rendered unremarkable long before the Station 39 officers kept their trophies. The surface in front of me has always been holding something it won’t disclose, and I have been sitting beside it long enough that I stopped checking.

    I was starting to gather myself to go when I realized it was raining. Had been raining for a little while, actually. There was no forecast for it, so I hadn’t brought an umbrella. The ash tree had been holding it off without asking—the canopy dense enough to keep me dry—while the canal surface in front of me was already pocked with it, thousands of small entries. I hadn’t noticed because I was protected. I don’t know how long I’d been sitting inside this weather I couldn’t feel.

    Fediverse Reactions
  • Période de questions

    Période de questions

    June 10th. Twenty to six, and I’ve just arrived at Centre Saint-Pierre for RÉZO’s annual general meeting. The long tables usually here have been folded and pushed against the right-hand wall. Plastic and metal chairs in rows facing a screen. Fluorescent light. I find a seat and the shaking starts, low and steady. There is one woman in the room. No Black people.

    By ten to six I can read who is staff and who is board. I take out my notebook. The body does what it does in rooms like this — holds itself a certain way, stays within a shape the space expects, files everything it notices without letting that noticing show. Fourteen days before, I had published a piece about this organization and sent it directly to its executive director and board. Two days after that, the executive director confirmed receipt and told me it had been received by everyone I had intended, that there would be more reflections soon. I had also published the piece publicly on LinkedIn, where the organization was named and tagged, visible to the funders and sector partners and researchers who follow it. Tonight is the annual general meeting. I have yet to receive a written response. I came because the meeting is public and the community this organization built a program for, and then let go of, deserves someone in the room when its year is accounted for.

    Before the meeting opens, the executive director tests the sound. He opens a laptop, opens YouTube, types musique into the search bar. The algorithm returns Aya Nakamura first. There is a pause before he clicks. Copines loads. No sound.

    He works through the settings. A young Black tech enters the room — the only other Black person who has come through the door, and he has come to work. He locates the problem, works on it. While they’re at it, the video ends and Tyla’s Water starts automatically, one Black woman’s voice following the other’s into the same silence, neither one selected, neither one heard. A few minutes later, the tech fixes the system. He leaves.

    Rodrigo, the board’s president, opens by announcing he won’t be running for re-election. The territorial acknowledgement that follows is Concordia University’s, read verbatim. A text written for another institution’s rooms, carried into this one without the labour of being re-situated.

    At twenty past six, Kevin arrives. He is the only Black member of the board, and the only Black person who entered this room as a member tonight. The meeting has been running for fifteen minutes. The opening, the acknowledgement, the beginning of the financial report — already done.

    The financial audit is presented by a Black woman, external to the organization, hired for this function. The working sound system carries her voice across the room — this is what it was fixed for, this is the first voice it produces — as she presents a surplus of about twenty-four thousand dollars for the year and accounts for the organization’s finances with the precision of someone engaged for a single purpose. She finishes. She leaves.

    The tech came to work. The accountant came to work. The two voices surfaced by the algorithm came to test whether the room could carry sound. I came as a community member and was not spoken to once — not by staff, not by board — for the hour and forty minutes I was there. There were looks, several of them, across the whole evening. The particular flicker of recognition from people who know exactly who you are and what you sent them fourteen days ago, who saw it posted publicly on LinkedIn with the organization named. Their recognition went nowhere. It registered me and moved on, and kept registering me and moving on, each time it happened, across the whole meeting, the room processing my presence the way it processed the two voices the algorithm returned: surfaced, used, set aside.

    The budget for the coming year: a dedicated line of eighty-two thousand dollars for the chemsex project, in partnership with the Direction régionale de santé publique. A grant received six months ago that would have funded more chemsex workers had conditions not changed. Seven positions cut at the end of March. A new funding source for a program that cannot yet be named. The precarity of project financing acknowledged as the sector’s structural reality — and it is, I want to be precise about that, the instability is real and organizations across this city are living inside it. No dedicated funding line for Kominote.

    Then the annual report, not yet published, available in two weeks. In the rundown of services, I hear the word Kominote spoken aloud in an institutional setting for the first time in two years.

    Six meetings this past year. Eight people per meeting.

    I sit with that for a moment. Two years of institutional silence, two annual reports in which the program and the person who built it didn’t exist on any page, and now the name said aloud, in this room, while I am in this room, unaddressed. He can say the name — that isn’t what the pause is about. The pause is about what comes after it, which is: nothing else. Convive, the Spanish-language group, gets its registrations and activities and long descriptions. The chemsex project gets its staff trainings, in active development. Kominote gets one breath and the meeting moves on. HoT, the group for trans men and trans masculine people, is mentioned as also continuing this year. I didn’t catch the details. I was still inside the hearing of the name.

    The board section is thorough. The person presenting lists membership requirements carefully: there must be at least one person living with HIV. That requirement exists. There is no requirement about racialized members. There is no requirement about Black members. The 2020 report I wrote for this organization — the one it called un point tournant dans l’histoire de notre organisme — required a board composition of minimum 33% racialized members, including at least one Black person, as a governance requirement. Because the presentation tonight was detailed and specific, the absence is not ambiguity. Six years. It was never made a rule.

    The institution counted the sessions it did not sustain. It listed the requirements that were never written.

    After the services section, the moderator asks if there are questions or comments.

    The room tightens as people look around at each other, avoiding my gaze. A collectively held quality, bodies readied, the expectation of confrontation. Everyone in that room knows the piece exists. The executive director confirmed its receipt and forwarded it to every person with authority here. The tension has a specific shape: the room is waiting for me to make myself a scene.

    I say nothing.

    This is not retreat. The argument is already on the record, made carefully and in full, using the organization’s own documents as evidence, delivered to the people who could act on it. What a raised hand would produce is a different kind of record: the one where I become the disruption to be managed, the affect to be addressed while the substance waits. I have watched this organization manage that particular sequence before. At SMASH, their annual conference, in 2025, I pressed a white presenter on why a session built on photographs of Black people contained no analysis of what being Black meant for the people in those photographs, for the statistics being shown, for the rates of criminalization and healthcare exclusion the data was already documenting. What the institution managed afterward was my affect. Not the presentation. The following year’s SMASH program contained no Black-specific health content. The word does not appear in the document.

    So I stay quiet, and the room’s readiness for a fight moves through the agenda and dissipates. Two silences in one room tonight. The voices that were loaded and never played. The voice that declined to perform. Both of them the post’s.

    The meeting ends at quarter to eight. I close my notebook and go.

    Here is what I knew sitting in that room that the room did not say.

    RÉZO is not an organization that lost its federal funding and had to make impossible choices. The original Advance program — five years of federal money coordinated nationally by the Community-Based Research Centre, with RÉZO as the Montréal partner — funded Kominote, and it ended. That ending was real. But a second cycle followed. Advance 2.0 runs from 2022 to 2027 with the same partners, RÉZO still the Montréal coordinator. Federal money is flowing now. I was sitting in a room where the organization’s 2026-27 budget was being presented, and that budget exists inside an active federal funding relationship. The sector-wide precarity is real and I am not dismissing it. What it does not explain is where the cuts specifically landed — because that determination is institutional, made inside the precarity, and the record shows what it produced.

    SMASH is what RÉZO built with those resources. The conference was created in 2019 as the francophone pillar of the Advance alliance and confirmed at the AGM tonight as continuing alliance programming. Which means the specific federal funding stream that once sustained a support group built by and for Black GBTQ men now sustains the conference where I was managed for naming anti-Blackness in one of its rooms — the conference that answered that naming by removing Blackness from its program the following year. RÉZO runs an independent budget and workplan, and the choices about what to build within the mandate belong to them. The redirection is RÉZO’s redirection. The same mandate. The same federal relationship. Different choices about what gets architecture.

    HoT makes the choice legible. I was sitting in a room where HoT was mentioned as continuing in 2025-26 — the group for trans men and trans masculine people that, like Kominote, was an Advance-era program that lost its footing when the first grant ended. The most recent annual report shows HoT on its fourth cohort, named and described, with documented plans to expand. Kominote appears nowhere in that report, or the one before it. Both programs apparently ran this past year. The report in two weeks will show what each looked like. But the 2024-2025 record already answers the question the funding cliff raises: when two programs fall off the same cliff and the organization rebuilds one with institutional architecture and leaves the other to run on whatever labour held it together outside any documented support structure, the cliff stops being the explanation. What remains is the choice.

    Which brings me to the six sessions. Eight people each time. Running in 2025-26 after two years of documentary absence, with no funding line, no named partnership, no dedicated position. Steve Bastien built Kominote and ran it through its first years. His name disappears from the 2024-2025 annual report alongside the program — gone in the same transition, without acknowledgment, the way the internal anti-racism committee also went: there in 2022-2023 as a named organizational priority, absent from the next two reports without explanation or account of dissolution, as though it had simply stopped being something worth noting. Whether Steve was the one who held those six sessions in 2025-26, or whether the community found another way to sustain what the institution had dropped, is not on any record I have access to. What is on the record is that the institution will count those sessions as its own in the report published in two weeks. The labour that made them possible will not appear in it.

    I want to add something I didn’t say in the last piece. The 2020 report specified a campaign against racism in LGBTQ+ spaces, with its form to be determined by a consultative committee made up exclusively of racialized people. The campaign that launched in 2022 was real. It said what needed saying. I wrote that before and I meant it. What I didn’t write: it was produced through a professional advertising relationship with Upperkut, with community members as consultants to production rather than governing committee. Participants from Kominote — people who had described, in sessions built on trust, what it felt like to be reduced to the surface of their bodies in spaces that were supposed to hold them — had those descriptions worked into campaign content and distributed on the apps where those reductions happen. The apparatus that named the consumption reproduced it in the act of naming. Both things are true and I have stopped needing them to resolve.

    And the extraction has operated twice, not once. The 2020 report produced institutional currency — the turning point language, the sector legitimacy, the funder credibility of an organization that had commissioned rigorous community research and named what it found. That currency was spent. Then the BLM statement, published six days after George Floyd’s murder, naming Kominote specifically, naming the structural obligations the moment required — that statement is still live on the organization’s website. Still in circulation, still producing legitimacy, still available as evidence that the organization understands structural racism and is committed to addressing it. The structural transformation it named is not documented as implemented in any annual report. The commitment is retained. The obligation is not met. Tonight: Kominote’s name spoken once after two years of silence, six sessions counted, next ones unfunded, the page still live with Dates à venir! The naming costs nothing. Each naming produces another small increment of the same currency the turning point produced in 2020, and the obligation that would have required actual redistribution remains, as it has remained, unnamed.

    I have been in relation to this organization since 2017. That summer I was a young outreach worker doing harm reduction in communities the state had largely abandoned, learning two things simultaneously: what care looks like when it actually reaches people, and what an institution looks like when it houses harm without naming it. I had no full language for what I was reading then. The body read it anyway, developed its grammar for it — the low shaking that started tonight before the meeting opened, settled across the ninety minutes into something steadier, the room’s recognition of me without address becoming just another thing the body metabolized and kept.

    What nine years of that grammar has produced is this understanding, which I want to state plainly.

    The anti-Blackness I have been describing does not work by exclusion. Not the door closed, not the service refused, not the hostility you can locate and confront. That form is real and it is not this form. This form welcomes you in. It hires you. It commissions your knowledge and calls what you produce a turning point. It launches the program your community asked for. It funds the program while the funding architecture compels it to. It builds a campaign from your community’s testimony and receives the coverage. It keeps the commitment on its website. It confirms receipt of the analysis that names all of this and says there will be reflections soon.

    And through all of it, it does not change its structure. The governance requirement is never written. The training is never documented. The program is not rebuilt when the resources return — or it runs on absorbed and unrecorded labour, and the institution counts the sessions it didn’t fund. The money moves toward the conference. The accountability infrastructure disappears from the record. The meeting that was going to happen, happens.

    What makes this form distinctive is that it cannot operate without us. It needs the needs assessment, the community’s attendance, the testimony, the turning point, the Black voice the algorithm surfaced into the search bar, the Black tech at the sound board, the Black accountant at the podium, the Black member in the plastic chair not speaking during the période de questions. We are not incidental to what this institution presents itself as. We are the input. The welcome is not the opposite of the extraction. The welcome is how the extraction works. We are brought in so that what we carry can be used, and the structure that would make our presence binding rather than useful is the one thing that is never built.

    The body knew this in 2017. The language has caught up.

    The piece went out on May 27th. Receipt confirmed May 29th. More reflections soon. The AGM was June 10th. No written response has arrived in the fourteen days between. The budget presented that night was the budget. The board requirements listed in detail were the requirements. Nothing in the fourteen days of looking into it produced an amendment to either. The deferral was named, and the AGM is what came after it.

    I don’t know where this lands. The annual report arrives in two weeks and I will read it the way I read all of them — alongside everything else this organization has published about itself, because its own documents have always been the evidence. Something is in motion. I am not in a hurry. The work doesn’t depend on the institution answering. It depends on staying in relation to the people the institution was supposed to be answering to, which is what required being in that room, and what will require being in the rooms that come after it.

    One Black woman’s voice returned by algorithm as the answer to a search for music, clicked into the silence, not heard. Another arriving automatically behind her, also not heard. Neither one reached for, both of them used, the apparatus moving on when they didn’t produce sound, the shaking in my body settling across the evening into something steadier, the body done warning and simply present.

    I closed my notebook. I got up from the plastic chair. I went.

    Fediverse Reactions
  • Les inscriptions sont fermées pour le moment

    Les inscriptions sont fermées pour le moment

    The conversation is over. My friend and I are sitting in the particular stillness that follows something hard, the kind where the next thing hasn’t become possible yet. I know how to be here. I’ve learned, over years of this kind of work, how to stay inside difficulty without flinching toward resolution, and that knowing didn’t go anywhere when I closed my practice. That was partly the point. The practice closed so that this could happen differently, in the register of friendship rather than the session note, the billing code, the annual registration, the showing up that doesn’t require an intake form.

    Which means I also know what comes next. I know how to locate a resource, how to identify which organizations are genuinely adapted and which ones will make someone feel worse for having tried. For this friend, this need, I reach for RÉZO, Montréal’s primary sexual health organization for GBQ men, before I’ve finished the thought. The body already moving toward the answer while the mind is still formulating the question. Something that becomes reflex when you’ve been inside a community long enough, when you’ve given enough of yourself to a particular ecosystem of care to know where things live inside it.

    I open the site. The navigation has changed. The page has moved, nested now under a sub-sub-section I have to locate before I can locate what I came for. I find it.

    Les inscriptions sont fermées pour le moment.

    My body receives this before I do. Something settles low in the chest: not sharp, the specific weight of something already known arriving as confirmation. The body has a grammar for this particular texture of disappointment, has developed it over years and in relation to this specific institution. I stay on the page longer than I need to. Dates à venir. I close the tab.

    My friend is still there in the way people stay with you after a difficult conversation. Still needing something. I sit with the quality of not having it to give, which is different from not knowing it existed, different from not having tried.

    I’ve known RÉZO since 2017. That summer, I was an outreach worker for their sex worker program, young, newly arrived in this kind of work, learning what it meant to move through communities the state had abandoned and then appointed institutions to monitor. The work itself was real. I was doing harm reduction with people who had built their own forms of survival inside that precarity, and something in me recognized that, was drawn toward it, was learning from it. That part I kept.

    There was a supervisor. His relationship to Black men’s bodies was legible to me that summer before I had full structural language for it. The institution had chosen not to have language for it either, which is its own kind of position. What surrounds that kind of behaviour inside a professional context is often more instructive than the behaviour itself. The silences. The way certain things circulate without being named, without anyone being required to account for them. The particular atmosphere of an organization that’s decided its progressive commitments are self-evident and therefore require no examination. I was a young Black worker inside that atmosphere, doing real work, learning two things simultaneously: what genuine care looked like when it reached people the state had abandoned, and what an institution looked like when it housed harm without naming it. You learn things from what an organization doesn’t say. I filed that knowledge somewhere and kept working.

    Training, supervised hours, three provincial registrations, insurance, continuing education requirements, documentation, all of it building toward a practice and toward a growing clarity about what the credential required in exchange for the legitimacy it conferred. It asked me to convert genuine care into something auditable, to route what happened between me and the people who trusted me through frameworks designed to make it legible to institutions rather than useful to people. I stayed inside that structure long enough to do real work and also long enough to understand what it was costing. I closed the practice deliberately in order to hold this differently. In the register of community, of friendship, of care that doesn’t require the state’s recognition to be real. I believed the infrastructure for that kind of work existed. That belief is what I was carrying when I opened the tab.

    In 2020 RÉZO hired me to lead a community needs assessment. The question was precise: why were Black queer and trans people structurally absent from the organization’s users, and what would it actually take to change that. I consulted 38 people, 21 in individual interviews and 17 through an online survey, with trans and non-binary participants deliberately over-recruited because the existing research on Black MSM health had excluded them as a matter of course. The consultation ran mid-COVID, which meant planned group discussions were cancelled, interviews moved to screens, and anonymity was compromised for participants who weren’t out because payment required a name attached to a cheque. These constraints are named openly in the report because that kind of transparency is part of what makes a document trustworthy rather than authoritative.

    What the community described was specific. They talked about walking into RÉZO and feeling immediately that the space had been built around someone else, that the staff’s frame of reference didn’t include the particular ways anti-Blackness and homophobia operated together in their lives, that being Black and queer in Montréal’s LGBTQ+ spaces meant being hyperlegible in some registers and invisible in others. They described the sexual fetishization of Black men as a documented harm operating not at the margins of those spaces but at their centre. They described needing something built from the ground up around their actual experience, not retrofitted from programming that had been designed around a different community’s needs entirely.

    The report that came from that process wasn’t a set of suggestions. It required a Board composition of minimum 33% racialized members including at least one Black person and at least one Indigenous person. It required anonymous CVs as standard hiring practice. It required mandatory anti-racism training built into onboarding for all staff and volunteers, with documentation, on a schedule the organization would be held to rather than one it could determine for itself. It required a dedicated support group animated by and for Black community members. A public awareness campaign against the sexual fetishization of Black men inside LGBTQ+ spaces, because the community had named that fetishization specifically and the report took them seriously. The specificity was deliberate. The consultation had been thorough. The report matched it.

    The document landed. RÉZO received it, the document they’d hired me to produce, and called it “un point-tournant dans l’histoire de notre organisme.” The report is still linked on the Kominote page. Still available to download. The organization’s own words about what this moment represented are still on the record, attached to the page of a program that’s no longer running, below a banner that reads: Les inscriptions sont fermées pour le moment.

    Kominote launched in 2021. Discussion groups, individual consultations, thematic workshops covering sexual health, discrimination, mental health, the specific experience of navigating LGBTQ+ spaces that hadn’t been built with Black queer people in mind. An awareness campaign against the sexual fetishization of Black men. RÉZO had asked what the community needed and they’d said, and then they’d come when something genuinely responsive was offered. The community showed up. Twelve people across twenty-five sessions in the program’s second year. Individual consultations running in parallel. People moving from one-on-one support into the group because the group was what they’d been looking for. They didn’t need to be convinced.

    Then political appetite shifted. Funding dried up. RÉZO’s own 2024-2025 annual report opens by acknowledging a reduction of sexual health funding. This is real. RÉZO has undergone significant restructuring in recent years, losing substantial staffing capacity across multiple intervention teams. People lost their jobs. Programs lost capacity. Communities lost services that had been built over years. The organization has been navigating a genuine crisis, not a managed inconvenience, and that context belongs in any honest account of what happened next. It does not, however, determine where the cuts landed. That determination is institutional. The funding landscape is genuinely difficult, and it does not explain what happened next. The Chemsex/PnP project expanded during this same period. It received more than 267 hours of individual accompaniment in 2024-2025, two support groups, multiple staff, detailed coverage across several pages of the annual report. Convive, the Spanish-language group for Hispanic GBQ men, is described in the same document as essential and thriving, 182 members, 12 meetings. Funding pressure is distributed unevenly and the distribution is legible if you read the annual reports alongside the Kominote page. Neither the 2023-2024 nor the 2024-2025 report mentions Kominote. Two consecutive years of institutional silence. In that same 2022-2023 report, the last one to mention Kominote, Chemsex/PnP appears for the first time: a new program still in development, four meetings held.

    The page stays up. The report stays linked. Les inscriptions sont fermées pour le moment. Dates à venir. The organization keeps the political currency produced by the consultation, the report, the community’s attendance, and sheds the obligation that currency was supposed to carry. This isn’t neglect and it isn’t bureaucratic failure. Neglect would be passive. What this is, is the active maintenance of a progressive reputation built on work the institution is no longer doing, for a community that came to everything Kominote offered and was not sustained. The box is ticked. The community member looking for a group session finds a banner. RÉZO gets to keep the turning point. The community gets dates à venir.

    The summer of 2017 is where this grammar comes from. Not a case being built but a way of reading being learned, through the body, before the language caught up. Black presence instrumentalized to produce legitimacy, to signal progressiveness, to access funding, and then the institution withdrawing once the currency has been extracted, leaving the community that produced it without the infrastructure their presence was used to justify. The needs assessment the institution commissioned and praised and didn’t implement. The program the community filled and the institution didn’t sustain. This isn’t a pattern of failure. This is a pattern of extraction, and it’s been operating at RÉZO for as long as I’ve known the organization.

    HoT and Kominote were built under the same federal project funding, the first phase of the Avancer alliance, which ran from 2018 to 2022. HoT followed a needs assessment, produced a guide for trans men and transmasculine people having relationships with men, and became a program. The community it was built for came to it. Kominote did the same. Federal project funding is always time-limited. When that first phase ended, both programs hit the same cliff and RÉZO had to decide what to sustain.

    The 2024-2025 annual report describes HoT as being in its fourth cohort, nine people enrolled, with plans to rebuild the group for 2025-2026. Its registrations are also currently fermées pour le moment. The difference is that HoT exists in the report: named, accounted for, assigned a future. Kominote doesn’t appear in either the 2023-2024 or the 2024-2025 annual report. Not to note a pause. Not to signal a rebuild. Not once. Two programs, the same funding origin, the same cliff, the same direction of travel while Chemsex/PnP expanded, while Convive grew, while the annual report filled pages with statistics about what the organization chose to sustain. A community’s needs don’t contract because a program’s enrollment does. The pattern isn’t about one program or one community. It’s about which communities RÉZO decided, in practice rather than in stated values, to keep building toward when the federal money ran out.

    Architectural decisions are decisions. Convive has its own dedicated portal in RÉZO’s primary navigation, built into the site at the same architectural level as the main sections. The site exists in three languages, structured partly around this portal. Where something lives in a navigation structure communicates institutional priority as clearly as anything in an annual report. Kominote sits under a sub-sub-page of the services section, below a banner that by now you know.

    This isn’t a critique of Convive or the community it serves. The contrast isn’t between those communities. It’s between what the institution decided to sustain and what it decided not to, and what that pattern communicates about where Black queer people actually sit in RÉZO’s hierarchy of commitments, as opposed to its stated one.

    In 2022 I presented Kominote’s findings at SMASH. Black queer and trans community members had said what they needed, I had documented it, and I brought it to the conference of the organization that had commissioned the work and called it a turning point. That’s the before.

    SMASH 2025. A presenter had used photographs of Black people throughout their slides on sex work and health access without once analyzing what being Black meant for the people in those images, for the statistics being presented, for the disproportionate rates of criminalization and healthcare exclusion the data was already showing. I asked, in the room, why racialization had been absent from a presentation that had used Black bodies as its visual evidence. The answer was that there hadn’t been time to get into everything. I said that was a choice, and that the choice didn’t align with the use of those images. The presenter, a white woman, became upset. A white man well known in the space went to her and said, “en tout cas y’était ben énervé,” offering her comfort by reducing what I had said to a matter of my affect. Not the presentation. Not the question. My affect. A Black trans friend who had been at the conference with me heard it and told me. I addressed him directly and in public. What followed was the organizers moving to calm me down — not to address the comment, not to address what any of it meant in a space organized, ostensibly, around the health and dignity of the communities whose images had just been used as backdrop. The angry Black body was the disruption. Everything that had produced the anger was not.

    RÉZO didn’t address what happened in any way the community would recognize as meaningful. Nothing reached the people who had been in that room. Nothing suggested the institution understood what the afternoon had revealed about the space it had built.

    SMASH 2026. No sessions on Black people. Multiple sessions on chemsex and PnP, across different framings and angles. The conference that couldn’t hold a question about anti-Blackness in 2025 found no place for Black-specific health content in the following year’s program. The 2026 program is the institution’s answer to the 2025 question, more complete than anything said in the aftermath of that afternoon, more honest about institutional priority than any statement of values on the website.

    I’ve been carrying what I know about this institution since a summer in 2017. The specific and accumulated kind of knowledge that builds when a body is right about something before the mind has language for it, that builds through years of acquiring the language only to watch it change nothing. I know what it means when an institution commissions a report, calls it a turning point, and files the turning point. I know what it means when a community fills a program and the program isn’t sustained. The body kept the record across all of it. So did I. The difference between those two things has gotten smaller over the years.

    My friend is still there. Still in the particular aftermath of a hard conversation, still needing something that should exist, that did exist, that was built specifically for them and for people like them by a process that asked the community what it needed and received an answer and turned that answer into a program and called the whole thing a turning point in the organization’s history. The report that produced Kominote is still on RÉZO’s website. Still linked from the page with the closed registrations. Still available to download. It describes, in the organization’s own commissioned language, exactly what RÉZO was asked to become and exactly what it hasn’t become. The turning point is still there. The program it turned toward is not.I don’t know what my friend will find when they look for support next. I know what I found when I looked for them. The report and the page are both still there, sitting on the same server, attached to the same organization, available to anyone who knows where to look. The evidence isn’t mine. It belongs to RÉZO. They hired me to write it, they praised it, they linked it, and they left it there, attached to the absence it was supposed to prevent. That is the record. It doesn’t require my anger to be legible. It is legible on its own.

  • Place d’Youville

    Place d’Youville

    May 20th, 10 AM. Twenty-three degrees and the wind is moving through the field in a way that keeps changing its mind. I’m sitting near the old Customs House, just off rue McGill, in what is now a wide green space ringed with historical plaques. This is where the first Parliament of the Province of Canada convened in 1844. The building burned in 1849. A mob set it on fire the night Governor General Elgin signed the Rebellion Losses Bill. The plaques are careful about this.

    I came here without a book, which almost never happens. I’d nearly finished the nonfiction I’d been reading and realized it on the walk over, so I stopped at a nearby bookstore, bilingual, Francophone in its orientation. I wanted fiction for once. Something more porous, less argumentative. I asked if they had anything by Black Québécois authors in French.

    The question on the face.

    What followed was Dany Laferrière, of course, and then a migration story. When I said migration wasn’t the direction I was looking for, the category shifted without either of us naming the shift: non-Black Palestinian and Colombian authors. I clarified. Black francophone fiction, I said, broadening it, not requiring Québec specifically. That didn’t help either. The broader frame returned the same result.

    Each time I offered more information about what I was actually asking for, something tightened in the person’s jaw. At some point I watched her notice the same gap I’d been watching from the beginning. That must have done something to her. Being seen not to know by the person you couldn’t locate.

    The reflex is what I keep returning to. If I had walked in and asked for Québec literature with no further specification, I suspect the shelf would have looked different. The reflex showed it. If every Black Québec story is for you a story about arriving, you cannot imagine Black people as having always already been here. And if your frame for not-white is general enough that Palestinian and Colombian and Black are interchangeable categories, then Blackness isn’t what you’re reaching for. It’s a placeholder. It’s difference, undifferentiated, available to be filled with whatever the shelf has to offer.

    The presence precedes the Haitian immigration narrative by centuries. Black people were enslaved in Nouvelle-France. In this city. In the predecessors of these buildings. The Parliament whose ground I’m sitting on held its first session while that history was still recent and living in specific bodies. Charlène Lusikila and I traced some of this a few years ago, in a paper about why the intercultural frame in social work keeps failing Black Montrealers: treating Blackness as something that arrived, rather than something the city was organized against from the beginning.

    There are no plaques for that. The city decided what to mark. The decision is ongoing.

    Near the end of the conversation, the person pulled out a book by Rebecca Makonnen. Transracial adoptee, they said, with a slight shift in register, as though this were a different route to the same destination, more legible somehow. And I’ve been sitting with that grammar ever since. Laferrière gets to be called Québécois now. He’s Haitian, too, and I’m not taking anything away from what that means. But notice what had to happen first. The migrant who earns recognition through what the community decides is exemplary. The adoptee. Each route requires prior authorization from the same structure that just spent ten minutes finding me migration stories when I asked for Québec literature.

    I could claim Québécois. The claim would be legitimate. I’ve been here long enough, loved this place through several versions of itself and several versions of myself. What resists in me when I reach for that word is not uncertainty about who I am. It is the specific difficulty of loving a society that keeps showing you the conditions attached to its love. Loving it anyway. Both of those things are true and they don’t resolve each other and I’ve stopped asking them to.

    All I wanted was literature.

    The field is quiet. A few tourists reading the plaques with the careful attention of people who arrived this morning and will leave by evening. The St. Lawrence is so close to here, obscured by the Customs House to my left, the one that has been deciding what moves through it since 1838. The new book is in my bag, barely opened, bought because it was the least fraught option available.

    The city put a park here. The grass is doing its patient work over the ground where the Parliament burned and the river keeps moving past all of it, indifferent and uninterrupted. The wind is still changing its mind.

    I might return the book.

  • Fort Street

    Fort Street

    May 9th. Sunny. I’m walking past the Winnipeg Police Service headquarters at 11 in the morning when I turn off Graham onto Fort Street and the timing is what it is. Two men coming from the gym, laughing, easy with each other and with the morning. They glance down at the man on the sidewalk as they pass, barely adjust their path, and keep moving. He’s Indigenous, wrapped in a Canadian Red Cross blanket, folded against the building at 11:15 a.m. The Red Cross blanket is the detail that stays with me. The disaster relief organization’s blanket, on a man on a sidewalk, on a weekday morning, in a city where urban Indigenous homelessness is not a crisis in the sense of something that arrived suddenly but a condition, the accumulated result of specific decisions made over a long time about whose life constitutes an emergency and whose constitutes a landscape. The two men are already half a block away, still laughing. They didn’t break their conversation.

    Disappointment but not surprise. I knew before I turned the corner. The body knew before the mind finished the sentence.

    I arrived on the afternoon of the 5th and went looking for the river almost immediately, dropping my bag at the hotel and walking out before I’d properly settled. I followed the Red River east, crossed the pedestrian bridge into Saint-Boniface with the Canadian Museum for Human Rights rising behind me, visible on the way over, visible on the way back, not demanding to be addressed.

    In Saint-Boniface there’s a mural large enough that you see it before you understand what you’re seeing. Louis Riel at the centre, the Basilica behind him, Red River cart to his left, flowers below all of it in reds and yellows that don’t apologize. The body stopped before I decided to. I had no claim on this image and stood in front of it anyway because it was asking me to.

    A few streets over I found a bookshop and was served in French without explanation required. I left with Gabrielle Roy, De quoi t’ennuies-tu, Éveline? suivi de Ély! Ély! Ély!, and opened her on a bench before I made it back to the water. She was doing something to me immediately, her descriptions of this land so precise and so felt that reading her while moving through it produced a particular disorientation, the prose arriving slightly ahead of the landscape, the landscape confirming it, the two things in a conversation I was overhearing.

    The Forks is where the Red River meets the Assiniboine, the reason the whole city exists where it does, and I sat near the water that evening trying to be honest about my relation to it. This is not my river. I don’t mean that as a dismissal: this is the only honest position available to me. The Red River named a people who built their identity from unresolvable multiplicity, French and Indigenous and neither and both, named after a river valley that named them back, and I can hold that without claiming it. I read Roy at the water’s edge as the light changed, her sentences about the prairie moving through me alongside the current, both patient, both older than anything I was bringing to them.

    I sat there unsettled in a way I didn’t immediately know what to do with.

    The conference was the next morning. A labour union, its members doing work the state has largely abandoned, had flown me out to speak about decolonizing gender and the kind of care built outside institutional frameworks. There was something clarifying about that specific framing, being brought here by people who already understand that the official structures don’t hold, to talk about the communities that build their own. The room was practical and attentive in the way of people who work with their hands and their relations and don’t have patience for abstraction that doesn’t land somewhere. I tried to land somewhere. I think it did.

    That night I went back to Roy. The hotel room, the flatness of the city pressing in through the window even in the dark, her sentences doing their patient work. She wrote about this land as someone who had been changed by it, who didn’t arrive with the landscape already interpreted but let it instruct her. I was trying to do something similar and was aware of how much further she had gone.

    The following evening, I went to a drag show at Club 200. Someone I’d met at a ball in Tiohtià:ke, one conversation on the sidewalk in the afterglow of the function, had said if you’re ever in Winnipeg. I was. The room was warm and specific and full of a kind of attention that felt continuous with the Forks and the conference and Roy and the mural, different surfaces of the same thing: people making something real in a place that doesn’t always make it easy to. I stayed later than I meant to.

    I carried Roy through all of it. On a bench, at a counter with coffee, back at the hotel. She kept describing the land with a care I was trying to learn from, the way she held the prairie’s scale without flinching, finding in its exposure not emptiness but a particular kind of honesty. Everything visible. Nothing apologizing for being what it is.

    Gabrielle Roy, *De quoi t'ennuies-tu, Éveline? suivi de Ély! Ély! Ély!*, face down and open on a marble counter beside a glass of water and a ceramic mug. A piece of darkly toasted bread in the foreground. The cover painting is a landscape, deep greens and blues, a body of water, land curving at the edge. The back cover text is partially legible in French.
    De quoi t’ennuies-tu, Éveline? suivi de Ély! Ély! Ély!  Somewhere in Winnipeg, between things.

    The Exchange District is right next to the Fairmont where I’ve been staying, neither of which I chose. I’ve walked through it almost every day since I arrived. The buildings are genuinely beautiful: ornate stonework, terracotta detail at rooflines, warehouse facades that speak to a moment of civic confidence, a city that built as if it expected to keep building. Many of the buildings now stand empty. I feel this as texture before I understand it as fact, the particular quality of a street where the architecture is present but the life isn’t quite, where you are aware of your own footsteps in a way that means something. There’s a gap between the ornamentation above and the sidewalk below and that gap is not accidental. Investment moved out of this city the way investment moves, quietly, structurally, with the consequences landing on specific bodies in specific places. What I keep returning to is not the emptiness of the buildings but the decision, ongoing and recursive, to leave them empty rather than house the people folded on the sidewalk beneath them. Anti-Indigeneity is not only ideology. It’s an allocation of resources, a determination of what counts as an emergency, a Red Cross blanket on a Fort Street sidewalk on a sunny morning while two men laugh their way past and the buildings above stand ornate and vacant. I walk through it and feel the logic before I can fully name it.

    Anti-Blackness is operating here too, on its own terms, and I’m not going to collapse them. What I’ve been watching for four days is both, simultaneously, on people whose bodies this city has decided are not the ones worth protecting. The weight of already knowing and seeing it anyway is its own specific exhaustion.

    I’m walking down Main toward Portage and asking myself whether I could actually live here. One of the positions I applied to was at the University of Manitoba. I never ended up visiting it. By the 9th, it doesn’t feel like the question it did on the 5th. The city has substituted a different one.

    The mural and Fort Street and the empty Exchange and the river that isn’t mine and Club 200 and the conference and the man wrapped in the Red Cross blanket are all the same place. They don’t resolve into a verdict. They accumulate into something I’ll be sitting with for longer than the flight home.

    I finished Roy this morning over breakfast. Her last pages, the land still doing its patient work on her, the sentences still making room for what the prairie keeps insisting on. I had been reading her as I moved through the territory she wrote about, and something about that had made the whole stay more porous, more available to being changed by what it actually was rather than what I had expected. I closed the book and walked out.

    The wind at Portage and Main hits you before you’re ready for it. Nothing interrupts it for miles in any direction. That’s the thing about this place: everything arrives at full force, unchanged by whatever it passed through to get here.

    I kept walking.

  • Peel Basin, 09:15

    Peel Basin, 09:15

    Under the Bonaventure Expressway. The Five Roses sign at an angle I hadn’t expected from here. REM trains to my right, sliding past without sound from where I’m sitting. Water. I’m always near water these days, and I’m starting to think that’s not incidental.

    A bus passes overhead and the whole structure hums. Rain making texture over the basin, fine and persistent, the kind that doesn’t announce itself. Black railings, rusted, graffiti-covered, dripping. Lines of water just waiting to fall. Sand. One of those public workout structures no one is using at this time on a Saturday morning. A group of runners in high visibility spandex and shorts run down the bike path. The city in every direction, and Griffintown beyond it, for rent signs on every building.

    I’ve been coming to this city as someone who’s leaving. I didn’t notice until I sat down.

    I developed a habit, somewhere in the last year, of waiting for the role that already speaks my language. The one where the job posting uses words close enough to mine that I can step in without translation. I projected myself so completely into those futures that when the doors didn’t open, I had to grieve whole lives I had never lived. And then came the questions, quieter and more damaging than the disappointment itself: I thought I was made for this. I didn’t even get an interview. What do I do with that?

    Yesterday, I applied for more jobs than I had in all of last year. Something loosened. I sat with the grief and then I just started applying. Not waiting for the role that already recognizes me. Apply, and release. The worth of the work is established in other rooms, by other accountabilities. A search committee is not the final word on any of it.

    I’m finishing a PhD in fields being actively criminalized south of the border, at a political moment that has shifted so much since I started that some days it’s hard to remember what the urgency was supposed to look like from the outside. When I began there was appetite. Now the appetite has moved, or curdled, or gone underground, and I’m here with a dissertation about fugitive care and speculative health and Black queer survival, graduating into a structure that is rapidly deciding this work is a liability.

    And yet. The peer review. The publications. The editor’s face at the ball. The collaboration still coming. Something has expanded inside the work that I didn’t plan for. The quality of attention is different than it was three years ago. I can feel it when I write, the way a sentence finds its own weight now, the way I trust the observation to carry more than it used to. I didn’t manufacture that. It accumulated through drift, through coming back to the same water in different weather, through learning to let the body lead and follow after it with language.

    I can’t be expected to always produce from what I carry in my body. That wouldn’t be research. That would be extraction.

    I also deserve care.

    I also deserve care.

    Not to break the fourth wall or anything, but I keep thinking about these posts. How they might eventually compile into something. A monograph, maybe, or the evidence of one: a methodology demonstrated rather than argued, drift as a way of knowing, the fragment as form. What I’ve been building out here, in public, might already be the work. Not preparation for the work. The thing itself, accumulating. That feels important to say out loud, even just to myself, under the expressway, in the rain. And then an Amtrak train rolls backward across the bridge over Wellington, toward Gare centrale, and I think about Avery Gordon, about haunting, about what it means to walk grounds that announce their own history on interpretive signs beside empty lots.

    This is one of the birthplaces of industrialization in Canada, the signs say, and the land they mark is largely vacant. The apartments going up in Griffintown are full of people who arrived after whatever the land remembers. Irish famine migrants came through here in 1847 carrying typhus, tens of thousands of them, and the ones who didn’t survive were buried in mass graves not far from where I’m standing. The Black Rock near the water marks some of them. The neighbourhood that bore their labour and their dying was eventually abandoned, then razed, then rebranded as a market for luxury condos with exposed brick and river views. The exposed brick is original. I’m walking through it, making my own record, adding my body to the account.

    The running club has crossed to the other side of the canal. I don’t know when that happened.

    I want to stay in this city. I have wanted to stay. But I know what it means to be this particular person at this particular moment in this city’s politics, and that knowing sits in my chest differently than the wanting does. They are both true. They do not resolve each other.

    I don’t have a job. I’m tired. I said that in my previous post and it was real and it needed saying.

    And also: I’m not stuck. I have a place to stay, for a few months or longer if needed, with a friend I love. The flexibility I’ve been reading as precarity is also, just barely, freedom. The frantic searching, the plans that keep changing because they always do because that’s the nature of these structures, maybe that’s what has been keeping me half out the door. Engaging with the city as someone already in transit. Already gone.

    I think receiving the news by the canal on that day unbraced something in me. The body did the work and the mind caught up later, slow and a little embarrassed. Maybe this is the same thing. Maybe I need to let myself unbrace again: to be here, in Tiohtià:ke, under concrete, watching water. To hold the basin, the railings, the grey of the sky, without requiring any of it to resolve.

    Maybe when I stop the frantic searching, direction makes itself clear. It has before. I have evidence of that. I can use it.

    Pacing and waiting and unbracing at the Peel Basin. The rain drips and the texture changes. A REM train speeds back toward the mountain. The water waits.

    Maybe that’s enough. Maybe that was always enough.

  • Eastward

    Eastward

    The ice is gone.

    I notice this before I’ve settled fully onto the bench, the oat milk moka still warm between my hands, the pines along the boardwalk doing their slow work in the wind. Habitat 67 sits in my peripheral vision the way it always does. The Jacques-Cartier Bridge. The amusement park still closed for the season, rides standing idle behind the fence. This is the same bench, the same eastward orientation I keep returning to without quite deciding to. The Grand Quai in late April looks like a different river than the one I’ve been sitting with all winter, and in some ways it is. What I’m looking at now is water that has finished its holding. The ice that was here, the particular piece I wrote about once, the one that had taken the shape of a perfect triangle and pointed east the day I submitted my application, is gone. The river took it. That’s what rivers do across a season, with what they’re given.

    I came back because the body knew to, before the rest of me had a reason.

    Yesterday the city was warm.

    I had finished a book on a terrasse on rue Saint-Paul, the last page coming the way last pages do when you’ve been living inside something long enough — not with surprise but with a recognition that the shape had completed itself. I sat with the last sentence for a moment before closing it, the way you sit with the last note of something before the room starts being a room again. Espresso. A crepe. The sun was doing what it had no business doing in the last days of April and rue Saint-Paul was receiving it without question, the old stone of the buildings holding the warmth differently than the glass towers do, softer, like the city remembering an older version of itself. People moved slowly. Faces turned up. I had nowhere to be and the body knew it and settled accordingly, shoulders dropping to a place they haven’t reached in months, the jaw unclenching, the particular luxury of a Tuesday that belongs entirely to itself.

    I walked to the Lachine Canal after. The streets through the old port were still carrying the warmth, the light coming off the cobblestones at the angle it only reaches in spring, low and honeyed, the kind of light that makes the familiar look briefly precious. The Daniel McAllister was sitting in the locks the way it always sits, red and massive and indifferent to what the afternoon was doing around it. I found a patch of grass near the water, soft from the recent thaw, and lay down with my backpack as a pillow and let the sun press into my face and chest and the fronts of my hands. The body settled into the ground. The canal moved beside me with the particular quietness of still-cold water in a warm month. Somewhere across the water a bird was doing something persistent. I closed my eyes.

    The body was already somewhere it recognized. Water, the eastward pull, the quality of attention that arrives in me when I’ve been near this city’s waterways long enough to stop performing being near them. I didn’t know I had brought anything. I thought I was lying in the sun on a warm day with a finished book and nowhere to be. The email came into that. I stared at the water for a long time after. Not thinking. Not yet. The canal kept moving the way it had been moving before the email arrived, indifferent to the reordering that had just occurred inside my chest. The sun was still doing what it had been doing. The Daniel McAllister hadn’t moved. I lay there with the phone face down on the grass beside me and let the body do what it needed to do with the information before I asked it to do anything else.

    Not even an interview.

    I knew it before I opened the email. Had known something was coming since morning in the way you know certain things through the body before they arrive as language — a low settling, a particular quality of stillness that isn’t peace. I had been waiting eight weeks. The waiting had lived in my shoulders, in the bracing I’ve been writing about for months, the compression that doesn’t shift with rest or movement. And then the day had been so good. The book finished, the sun, the terrasse, the city briefly being the version of itself that makes you forget you know better. I think now that the body had been preparing the whole time, had been carrying the knowledge forward through the morning and into the afternoon, had found the water and lain down beside it because it knew what was coming and wanted to be somewhere it could receive it.

    Four days before this, I was at a ball.

    The editor of a collection on queering research methods was in the city — they had already read the chapter I submitted, the one that takes ballroom as its methodological site, had held the manuscript in their hands and followed the argument through — and it happened, the way things sometimes happen in this work, that there was a function that weekend. Le National was filling up as they arrived, the air carrying that particular charge a ballroom space holds before the first category is called, sweat and cologne and anticipation and the low thrum of a sound system that knows what it’s there for. This is my place. The place where my body remembers things about itself it forgets in other rooms.

    The commentator was electric that night. It’s the girls I see, it’s the girls I know, it’s the girls I LOVE! — the chant landing and lifting and landing again, the whole room carrying it forward without being asked, the way a room becomes a body when the conditions are right. For Bizarre and Face the effects came out, light and smoke and the particular theatre of a category that understands spectacle as argument, and the walkers moved through it like they had built the universe the effects were gesturing toward, because they had. Then the commentator called for the DJ to cut the beat. Someone deserved their flowers. The praise came slowly and specifically, the way real recognition does when it isn’t performed but meant. I turned to them and said: imagine what a moment like that does for your self image.

    They were watching the room the way you watch something you’ve read about but hadn’t yet felt in the body. And I was watching them watch it, and I was also just there, inside the thing my chapter is about, the thing I have been trying to describe in academic language for years, and for a few unrepeatable hours the distance between the researcher and the researched was not a methodological problem I was managing but simply gone. They saw the work in its own element. Saw what the work knows that the chapter can only point toward.

    The hiring committee reviewed my file and moved on without making contact.

    These are not the same kind of not-being-chosen and my body knows the difference. It also knows the longer record. The tissue that received the email yesterday has received other decisions, earlier ones, ones that arrived before I had language for what it meant to be assessed and found not quite right for the available position. The committee doesn’t know that. The file doesn’t carry it. But the body holds the full archive anyway, and what lands on it now lands on everything already stored there — every room that looked at what I was and made its calculation, every process that moved forward without me, every form of not-being-selected that taught me, before I had words for any of it, that my belonging somewhere was conditional on someone else’s decision. The hiring committee is not the first institution to review my file and conclude I wasn’t what they were looking for. The body has been here before.

    What I know is that my work circulates. It reaches into rooms before I do. The professor who was hired for the anti-colonial social work position I applied for once asked me to lecture in one of their courses, on anti-Blackness, because of the strength of what I had built. The editor came to the ball. The work is not invisible. What it is, is illegible to the institutions that would need to legibly credential it in order to shelter it. There is a difference between being seen and being chosen, and I have been living inside that difference long enough to name its specific texture — the way it sits in the chest distinct from ordinary disappointment, distinct from failure. This is not failure. It is something more precise and in some ways more exhausting than failure, because it requires knowing the value of what you’re holding while watching the institution decide it doesn’t know what to do with you.

    I have to pay my bills. I don’t have a job. In a few months the PhD will be finished and the structure it provided — the funding, the timeline, the container — will be gone, and the practice is already closed, and the position didn’t come, and I am sitting at the bottom of every scaffold at once. I know the work has value because I have watched it have value, repeatedly, in rooms that received it on its own terms. I am also scared in a way that doesn’t care what I know.

    A triangular piece of ice, pointing eastward, on the surface of the Saint Lawrence in late February.
    A triangular piece of ice, pointing eastward, on the surface of the Saint Lawrence in late February.

    I came back to the Grand Quai this morning because this is where I picked it up.

    Eight weeks ago there was ice here. A piece that had taken the shape of a perfect triangle, pointing east, and I had stood at this water and let that mean something on the day I submitted the application. I know what I felt standing here, the particular quality of a sign you don’t go looking for, the way the body receives it before the mind has decided whether to believe in that kind of thing. I let it mean something. I carried it forward through eight weeks of waiting, through the compression and the bracing and the not-knowing, and I brought the weight of it with me to the canal yesterday and it was still there when the email arrived.

    The ice is gone now. The river took it back sometime in the weeks I was waiting, dissolved it into current the way it dissolves everything it’s given across a season. I’m looking at open water. The same eastward orientation, the same bench, Habitat 67 still on the opposite shore, the boardwalk’s pines still swaying slowly in the wind. The place hasn’t changed. What it was holding is gone.

    I’ve been watching this stretch of water long enough to know what it looks like when it’s finished holding something. This is what it looks like.

    So I put it down.

    Not the work. Not the knowing. Not the particular exhaustion of being this person in this work at this moment. Those travel with me. What I’m putting down is the version of the future I had been carrying in my chest since January: the particular mornings I had been imagining, the quality of quiet in a small town, the body that might exist there, less braced, more available to itself. The version of myself that had a title and a campus and a room where the work could happen on its own terms. I had given that version a lot of grace. I had let it become specific. I had let myself want it.

    The ancestors came from the direction this water runs. The shard of ice that pointed east is already out there somewhere, dissolved into the Atlantic, returned to the water that carried my people. I’m not the first one to sit at this river and give something to the current. I won’t be the last.

    The trucks are still beeping in the distance. The pines are doing their slow work in the wind. Habitat 67 and Île-Sainte-Hélène and the Jacques-Cartier Bridge still sit in my peripheral vision, the amusement park still closed, the rides standing idle. The oat milk moka has gone cold in my hands. The sky is the particular grey of a day that isn’t going to change its mind.

    I’m still here. I’m still undone. The water already knows what to do with what I’ve brought it.

  • Consequence as Weather

    Consequence as Weather

    The coffee shop near the Palais des congrès is already full of Liberal Party of Canada convention delegates when I join the line outside. Cop cars are parked down the street. Inside, every table has a staffer. Suits. Baseball caps. lanyards. Louboutins under a table where someone’s set a Prada bag on the chair beside her. Laptop messenger bags open across tables the staff need to turn. Pins with Mark Carney’s face. Meticulously curled hair. Khakis. The particular self-assurance of people who’ve decided their presence anywhere is appropriate. Then one woman moving through the room with an umbrella from the Fairmont, the red of her dress the party colour, coordinated, intentional. She passes a barista without looking at her and something tightens in my chest that’s been tightening for days.

    I’m wearing a keffiyeh and I notice the moment they notice it. Something shifts in the room that nobody names. A delegate near the door clocks it and looks away with a speed that’s its own kind of statement. I’m used to being read in spaces like this, used to the particular attention that Black presence draws in rooms that have decided they’re for everyone. The keffiyeh adds a layer. They know it and I know they know it and we all sit with our coffees pretending the room isn’t doing what the room is doing.

    The REDress Project places empty red dresses in public spaces to hold the shape of the women who are gone, the ones this government decided this week, this specific week, don’t require sustained investigation or resources. The woman with the Fairmont umbrella didn’t choose red for that reason. The colour was assigned. Coordinated. By a party that also welcomed Marilyn Gladu across the floor, a woman whose votes against queer and trans people are part of the parliamentary record, and called it coalition. This is the party that marches in Pride parades. That points to marriage equality as proof of its character. I’m a queer person in this room and I’ve known for a long time that the shelter had conditions. My body doesn’t receive Gladu as shock. It receives her as confirmation, one more piece of evidence landing on top of everything already stored, every previous moment the walls showed how thin they were. That’s how it accumulates. Weight settling into the chest and the shoulders and the jaw, invisible from the outside, carried forward into every room where you’re told to be grateful for the protection. The woman in red moves through the coffee shop. The barista clears a table. None of them look up.

    This is my coffee shop. At the counter there’s a different kind of exchange available, the kind between people who’ve been showing up for each other across enough ordinary mornings that the terms are established. We don’t have to say much. I make a joke. He laughs in a way that’s also an exhale. We talk briefly about what it costs to serve people who treat you like infrastructure, who order without eye contact, who leave without acknowledgment. Nobody says Liberal Party. Nobody has to. The room keeps doing what it’s doing around us.

    Three tables away a delegate checks his phone. This government is complicit in a genocide and has spent considerable resources avoiding that word, and cut funding for investigations into missing and murdered Indigenous women, girls, and Two-Spirit people this week, and has used every available tool to avoid the connection between those two sentences. The funding, the votes, the abstentions, the phrasing carefully chosen to avoid the words that would require action. Somewhere a family is in rubble. Somewhere a child is being pulled from concrete. Somewhere a woman is missing and the file’s been defunded. Here we are, here I am, here they are, in Tiohtià:ke on a blustery Thursday morning. The woman in red passes the window on her way to the Palais. The Fairmont umbrella catches the light.

    I finish my coffee. Close my book. The room’s still full when I push through the door and turn south toward the Palais des congrès, toward the metro, past the cop cars still parked where I left them.

    Around the Palais the police are everywhere. The apparatus arranged in a perimeter around the people who command it, who fund it, who’ve always been the reason it exists in the form it does. The woman in red moves through that perimeter without breaking stride. I’ve never been the person that apparatus was arranged to protect. The people I love have never been that person. The people whose deaths we mark and carry forward, the ones the red was supposed to hold, whose files were defunded this week, the ones in rubble whose names this government will not say, have never been that person. The police are at the Palais des congrès because the people inside it put them there.

    What stays in my body is the knowledge that nothing I feel or say or write will reach these people in any way that costs them anything. They’ll leave the Palais and return to their lives and the decisions they make will continue to land on the same bodies they’ve always landed on and they’ll sleep. That’s what impunity actually is. The ability to move through the world without your actions ever returning to your body as consequence. I’ve spent my whole life in a body where consequence is the weather. Where what I do and how I move and what I wear and who I am carries risk in rooms like this one. They’ve spent their whole lives in the other kind of body. The kind the police are arranged to protect. The kind that gets to feel frustrated about service at a coffee shop without that frustration being a threat assessment. We’re in the same city on the same Thursday morning and we’re not in the same world.

    These systems don’t hold forever and the people inside them know it even when they perform certainty. I’ve watched enough of these rooms to recognize the particular discomfort of people who’ve learned to read threat and have started to feel it coming from directions they didn’t expect. It’s in the way the delegate clocked my keffiyeh and looked away. It’s in the way entitlement requires an audience that keeps agreeing to the premise, and that audience is getting smaller and louder about its refusal. The collapse of these systems will be disorderly and the people with the least protection will absorb the most of that disorder on the way down. That’s not a prediction. That’s the pattern, repeating. The keffiyeh. The barista who laughed in a way that was also an exhale. The agreement these people depend on is breaking and they can feel it.

    The most honest thing that happened this morning was a small pastry set beside a coffee without a word, between two people the room wasn’t watching. I’ve been thinking about that on the walk down here, about what it means that the thing that held the most required the least. The police were outside the coffee shop when I left. They’re all the way down the street and around the Palais des congrès, the same apparatus, just more of it, arranged in a perimeter around people who’ve never had to think about what a small thing costs or what it holds. I’m still thinking about the pastry.​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​

    Fediverse Reactions
  • Salt

    Salt

    The ice is sweating. Moisture gathering at the surface, at the precise line where the ice meets the water it’s in the process of becoming. I’m watching it from the bench on the pier, the same bench, the same eastward orientation I keep returning to without quite deciding to. Gulls have settled at that line and they don’t move. They know something about thresholds. They sit exactly where the transformation is occurring and they stay.

    The St. Lawrence in late March. The ice still holds toward the middle, grey-white and flat. At the edges it’s releasing, the surface doing its slow work, and the water that was held all winter is beginning to find its way back into current. I’ve been sitting here long enough to watch it happen. I haven’t moved either.

    There’s a specific quality of attention this place produces in me. I come here when the body has been holding too much and needs to set it down somewhere that can receive it without asking what it is. The body keeps returning to this exact spot, this exact orientation, facing east, the city at its back, and at some point the repetition itself becomes information.

    I put the city at my back when I sat down. I know what’s there. I know this city the way you know something you’ve loved through several versions of itself and several versions of yourself — its pace, its particular generosity, the specific texture of its contradictions, the way care gets built here inside difficulty. I’ve walked these streets through enough seasons to have accumulated a real knowledge of this place. That’s most of what I know about how to survive.

    The most enslaved people in what is now called Canada lived here. In these streets. In these buildings’ predecessors. They moved through this geography, were bought and sold in it, built what became the city now sitting behind my left shoulder. Montréal, Québec City, the towns along this river — the institution put down roots here, made its records here, established itself in French and in English and in the silences between the two. The history is documented and specific and present. It’s in the soil the city was built on. It’s in the financial foundations of institutions that are still standing. The place holds this whether I acknowledge it or not. What I try to do is be someone who doesn’t pretend otherwise while I’m standing here — who doesn’t let the beauty of the water or the particular way the light falls on the ice in March do the work of making the ground feel neutral.

    Follow the St. Lawrence east and you reach the Atlantic. The Atlantic is the route of the trade. The trade is the origin of my lineage. The river in front of me, moving in the direction it has always moved, is carrying water toward the ocean that carried my ancestors. The body standing at the edge of this pier and the current visible at the edge of this ice are not separate things. There’s a line from here to there that is literal — longitude, current, the specific direction water moves when the land finally releases it into the sea. I keep facing east. I keep coming back to this exact orientation. The body keeps choosing it. The eastward pull runs deeper than this lifetime’s accumulation of difficult days and necessary walks. The ancestors are in the direction the water goes. Facing east, here, at this river, is a form of relation.

    Ancestral presence feels like a quality of attention, a pressure in the chest that arrives when you’re standing somewhere that holds more than it shows, a recognition that moves through the body before the mind has assembled the full sentence. I’ve felt it here before. I feel it today. Something in the body responds to this geography in a way it doesn’t respond to other geographies, and I’ve learned to follow that response without demanding it become more legible than it is. I’m not the first Black person to stand at this water. I’m not the first to face east from a shore on this river and feel the weight of what the water knows. There’s an accumulation in a place like this — of the people who came before, of what they survived and didn’t survive, of the specific grief of those who were brought here and those who were born here into conditions not of their making. That accumulation sits in the body alongside everything else, indistinguishable sometimes from ordinary grief, sometimes from the particular tiredness of carrying one’s own history through a world that keeps asking you to set it down. I stay with it. I’ve stopped asking it to become more coherent than it is. Some knowledge arrives in sensation and lives there, and the staying is the practice.

    The gulls haven’t moved from the line where the ice sweats. I keep returning to what they seem to understand about that specific location — the threshold between states, the place where one thing is becoming another and the process is incomplete and you can see both at once if you look closely enough. The grief of knowing what the water knows is structural. It predates you and will outlast you. It lives in the body as inheritance rather than as event. The grief of standing at a river that runs toward the place your people were taken from, in a city built in part by their labour and their captivity, in a body that carries the record of all of it — that grief has no clean edges. It doesn’t arrive in a single moment and it doesn’t resolve in one either. It moves the way the ice moves. A slow release at the surface, the held thing finding its way back to motion, not all at once but gradually, at the line between what was solid and what is becoming current again. The holding is structural, which means the release is too: slow, incremental, happening at the edge where the conditions finally allow it. This is one of the few places where the grief the body carries and the geography underfoot are in direct relation. Where the river is already doing the work of holding the history, because it runs through the same history on its way to the sea.

    There’s a practice in returning. Each time the body is slightly different — more tired, or more clear, or carrying a different weight — and the place receives that version without distinction. What accumulates is a relational knowledge, built through repeated presence, through being changed by a place over time and being willing to notice the change. I know this stretch of the St. Lawrence in winter. I know what the ice looks like at different stages of forming and releasing. I know the quality of the cold here and how the wind comes off the water and where the light lands in the late afternoon. That knowledge was built through return, and it means something that it was built at this geography. The body knew to come here today. It knew the turn toward the water before the thought to turn had fully articulated itself. This is what happens when a practice has been sustained long enough that the body has internalized its logic. The walks have their own intelligence. The route has its own memory. And underneath that memory, older routes: the ancestors returning to water, finding their way to shorelines for their own reasons, carrying their own knowledge of what the water holds. Some of those routes were interrupted. Some were destroyed deliberately, the paths erased along with the people who made them, the knowledge scattered in the violence of what was done. The practice of return is partly an attempt to hold what was held, to keep a thread from breaking entirely, to maintain a relation to geography that was never supposed to be maintained. I have this river. This body. This bench facing east. I’ve stopped waiting for more before taking it seriously.

    The ice is still sweating when I finally stand up. The gulls have shifted slightly but they haven’t left the line. The water at the edge is darker now than when I arrived, more current visible, the release progressing through the afternoon. I stand there for a moment before turning back toward the city, facing east with the cold on my face, feeling the specific quality of attention this place produces and letting it finish what it was doing before I interrupt it with movement. The river will keep doing this after I’m gone from the pier. The ice will keep its slow release toward the edges, the sweating at the line, the water finding its way back into current. The St. Lawrence will keep running east the way it has always run, carrying whatever the city gives it, moving toward the Atlantic with the patience of something that has been doing this longer than anyone alive can remember. The ocean it runs into will keep holding the history it holds. The salt will stay salt.

    At the end of everything, it all returns to that. The ocean that carried my ancestors. The river that runs into it. The body standing here, made of water and what water holds, at the edge of a geography that is mine and not mine, claimed and unclaimed, loved and not yet finished being grieved. The ice sweating slowly back into motion. The gulls at the threshold. The city at my back, built on what it was built on, holding what it holds.

    The water already knows all of it. I come here to remember that I do too.