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.
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.
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 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.
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.
