Tag: Blackness

  • 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. #LIB2026 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.

  • How to Exit Without Offering Your Body as Proof

    How to Exit Without Offering Your Body as Proof

    for the ones who leave before they’re broken

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

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

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

    1. Listen to the tremor.

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

    Listen sooner. Listen earlier.

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

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

    You are allowed to go
    before you unravel.

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

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

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

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

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

    3. Take the small exits. They count.

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

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

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

    We are allowed to step back without falling apart.

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

    4. Stop narrating your no.

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

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

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

    That’s not your responsibility.

    Your no does not need subtitles.

    5. Let someone you trust hold the knowing.

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

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

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

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

    Let it be honoured like a prayer.

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

    You don’t have to go ghost.

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

    Not everything sacred needs to be hidden.

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

    The Exit Is Its Own Kind of Arrival.

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

    Let them.

    What they see as abandonment
    might actually be a return.

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

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

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

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