Category Archives: Writing

Home is Forgetting

(for K.)

1. The Winter

“look at the moon,” she said, my mother:
“it can hold your weight.
yes, yours– even with
all your guilt and wandering,
and all of your demands.”

she said this driving, gesturing
over oaks and poplars
into grey, black sky
looking for a place to spend the night.

“you were a careful kid,” she said,
“fat-cheeked and five years old,
sitting on the co-op blacktop with your
feet bare,
too scared to play.”

(this is back when I still thought
her whims looked like selflessness,
not survival)

“there are two things you should remember,”
she said, then, rolling
down the windows to feel the wind:

“the moon will always take care of you.”

and

“one day, you will have a home.”

I held my heart steady,
guarding against Want.

in the car window my face reflected dense
and blurry–
not the kind of face someone could love.
but she kept driving.

2. The Fall

You think you’ve found a home. You
write letters,
collect tattoos and talismans.

You are learning how to cultivate:
Your thirst, your body, the distance between
your unrecognized parts, the planes
and shadows of your face.

You study the watery light coming through
her windowpane and think you could stay
here for a while,
but you’ve been wrong before.

You think you might have love too weak
to hold all the parts of her that need
cradling,
keeping together.

3. The Beginning

the mountain has been changing.
every day a different colour; old leaves.
these new colours are for you: primary
reds and yellows,
leaves the colour of limes and pennies.

the colours are brightest in october,
which is when they learn that it’s okay to
let go (into the unexpected).

this is not fear, but not-knowing,
and no safety–

but always, still,

finding shelter.

A Cough

My friend Jeremy died eleven days ago and I have a cough. It’s the frustrating kind- the kind that hovers just below the surface. I try, pushing my lungs out, but I can’t get deep enough into my own chest.

I want to rip everything apart and scratch, and then soothe, smoothe honey along my windpipe to make it all go down faster.

I’m back in Montreal and my world here is oblivious. Jeremy came to Montreal in November, two months before he died, travelling to see his lover. He was excited, wearing a neon-orange sweater. He came to my apartment first, stood in the doorway sheepish and smiling, dark-rimmed glasses, his hair just beginning to grow out from chemo. Soft, feathered, and the colour of duck’s down. He sat on the couch and he and my partner talked about how much they loved Kylie Minogue and Mean Girls. He pet my kitten gingerly. “Cats don’t usually like me,” he said. The cat fell in love with him against all odds and rubbed her head against his thigh.

Right now it’s March but still frosting, the days alternating between powdered snow and the kind of ice that hides underneath the sidewalk so that you slip when you least expect it. I go to school thinking about intertextuality in A.B. Yehoshua’s Friendly Fire and same-sex love in Li Yu’s fiction, conceptions of Welsh masculinity and their connections to nationalism, words that blend together until the essays I’m writing come out with no help from my brain or heart or spleen, academic words slotted together like a mad-libs puzzle. I hold on to the words that mean very little because they help my body and brain keep buzzing and they help the bile stay down where it’s supposed to, somewhere dark and knowing that I can’t address just yet.

In December we met for tacos in a little place on Hastings. They were fresh, the tortillas soft and pliant, feeding sauce down our chins like a funnel. Jeremy was still in school then. We flirted with each other gently and he showed off his fashionable pen. We went to a diner for brownies and coffee. He wasn’t hungry, after a while, but he made himself eat, and I watched him.

Back in Montreal, now, quiet room, hum of appliances that sound like rain. I’ve been avoiding this because writing right now seems superfluous. What on earth could be worth saying?

I’ve been thinking about the water dispenser I bought for my cat, worrying about it. The plug is warm when I touch it and I keep checking, worried that something might happen. In the middle of the night I wake up to make sure that it hasn’t gotten hotter, that nothing has spilled. I don’t like the thought of water and electricity. I don’t like the holes her claws have made in the bag of cat food- I picture the meat inside spoiling, insides rotten, outsides grey. I sleep with three pillows so that I don’t have to lie back fully. I eat cookies, brownies, soup, and fruit, and when I put a hand on my stomach it’s with gratitude. My legs, arms, belly, my heart, my chest with its cough. Holding me here.

What do you do when you stop writing?

Wake up to your girlfriend’s Ellie Goulding alarm at seven-twenty in the morning.
Take your cat to the vet because her sutures are infected.
Spend forty-five minutes on the Immigration Canada website.
Buy litter made from recycled newspapers.
Fly to Vancouver.
Draw women with big eyes and blonde ringlets.
Watch Canadian television.
Speak in class.
Sign forms.
Shave your legs.
Fry fish.
Peel a kiwi.
Look at your journal.
Wait.

A hard thing to say, and a good place to start

I met my sister for tea today. I had emailed her, asking if she had time. I told her I had been thinking about a lot of things, like ancestry and rootedness. When we sat down (wood table, Earl Grey, chocolate-banana loaf in front of us) she smiled slightly, said “ancestry and rootedness?” in a tone I worried was mocking. I wanted to meet with my sister because I thought she could give me something—an insight, maybe, or a shared vulnerability—that would help me understand the family I’ve been born into, and my place in the world, so that I can feel proud of my light brown mixed self instead of vaguely confused and afraid of being found out, like a fake.

I want to hear that I’m okay, that I am legitimate. I want to be picked up by my sister’s words and normalized, cradled. I want to find a home in them, in this woman who is twenty-some years older than I am, older and browner, an adult who is not my white “colourblind” mother. I love my mother—love her earnestness, her genuine care, her openness to what I bring to the table—but sometimes I stand in front of her and my heart aches.

My sister sat in front of me looking interested, but skeptical. She held her mug and gazed at me with eyes dark as bruises. I told her about how difficult it’s been, trying to reconcile who I am when my father has made every effort to raise me as far away from Sri Lankan community as possible, and when my mother thinks that the epitome of good parenting is to never once mention race. My sister nodded and told me that she was one of three brown children in her high school, and that she coped with the isolation by completely convincing herself that she was, in fact, white. Of course, that didn’t affect the man who said approvingly, “I’m always impressed with how well you people speak English.” Being culturally “white” hasn’t meant much to the people who, confused with my appearance, constantly ask me where I’m from.

In my father’s basement framed portraits of my Sri Lankan grandmother gather dust in gilded frames. They’re hidden because my mother paid to have them framed and mounted, presented them to my father, and then asked him for a divorce. They’re too painful for him to look at and so he hides them, but they’re beautiful. She’s beautiful. She has a long face and long hair and sad eyes. In the first photo she’s young, turning halfway sideways like a fashion model, and by the last she’s old, brown skin in colour this time, with the same sad eyes and a half-smile on her face. She looks small and too human to live up to the myth and legend I’ve built around her with my father’s help.

I feel like there are ghosts everywhere. Ghosts of stories that should be told, that deserved to be unearthed and stroked and flattered and whispered. The stories I know in my bones.

I hate coming home because I always feel like I’m not doing enough, not being enough. I spend my evenings hooked up with headphones to my laptop, watching television to distract myself from the fading grey and pink sky outside. It’s so beautiful that it makes my heart hurt and I don’t want to look at it. If I look at it I think of my father, whose seventieth birthday is coming up in August and whose death I’ve been fearing my whole life. I think about my friend, hooked up to his machines in the hospital, and how shaky everything is, and how much of a cliché. Hate myself for not being different, not being better. For not cleaning up my father’s house, because the floors and walls are sticky and browning-beige. For not buying new mugs for my father and spending time with my mother, walking the dog, dedicating myself to more creative projects, becoming this incredibly self-sufficient yet compassionate and loving artistic machine that gives and gives and gives and rests only to inhale some macrobiotic tofu and quinoa-kale salad before stretching, jogging down to the beach, and doing yoga by moonlight. I’m not even kidding.

I haven’t been writing because I’m always conscious of giving away too much. But in the end, what does it matter? What does self-possession and ego matter? I’m beginning to think that all I can do is be as honest as possible, despite the ego’s incessant distortions, and if someone finds this interesting, or compelling, or relateable, then there will be something golden in all this mulch. Otherwise it’s just a convenient writing exercise and a way to process all of this.

Travel sketches

In Montreal: a young woman with her hair pulled back under a flowered scarf, secured, talking on her cell phone, brown bomber jacket, a little heavy around the cheeks and jowls. The rain: sweat plastered to her forehead, the dark brown ridges; watch the way she sucks the end of a cigarette and leaves it cocked, bundled in a jacket with her legs bare, watching the street turn slick. The woman in pastel velour, the man with a fuzzy upper lip and hands shoved deep inside his pockets. And then the snow: in the face of a blizzard, the first instinct is to smoke. Bodies pitch forward and hold their shape, cigarette trembling, fingertips burning numb.

In Newark: Liberty Airport, a dull American sheen, a faint rumbling in the background and a circular Jamba Juice advertising flatbreads. At the bookstore, my debit card won’t go through so I charge another twenty dollars for water and Eric Jerome Dickey, a break from Adichie’s mesmerizing Biafran tale. In the States, I feel wide-eyed and disbelieving, everything too big, too shiny, a little too much to absorb at once. But the people are fascinating: the huge white biker, bald as a baby with one horn implanted in the centre of his forehead, wheeling a very tiny suitcase; the executive couple, him leaning back to check the ‘Executive Class’ sign, to make sure that he in fact deserves better service than he is receiving, she saying thank-you stiffly but staying quiet, both of them with matching Louis Vuitton suitcases.

In Los Angeles: I meet a sixty-year-old security guard, dark-skinned and wrinkled as a walnut, with one tooth and a flirtatious laugh. He limps but walks quickly and I hurry to keep up with him, my heels clacking noisily. On the plane, my seat-mate is a balding, widening software engineer whose best friend is a parrot, and brightens noticeably when I tell him I’m going to visit my girlfriend. Tells me that his relationship with his parrot is the longest he’s ever had.

Clone

i don’t know enough about critical race theory.
in class Lena sits, sipping coffee out of a styrofoam cup, and still looks revolutionary,
her chin up, out, she speaks a mixture of
english and spanish
“tomorrow’s el dia de los muertos; I know the best place for el pan de muertos”
we’re a class of white girls (me: white girl, brown skin)
talking second-wave feminism, girl with rosy cheeks in the front row saying she leaves decolonization in the classroom because it doesn’t really affect her anyway
lena purses her lips like she’s hungry
tells me to look up munoz, so i go to the library like a pilgrimage
on the cover ze’s exposed & black & kinky with long blonde hair and the librarian no longer wants to look at me
i don’t understand much except munoz saying maybe if
you’re queer and something other than white you act one way and then another
depending on what crowd you’re with
(white & hetero normativity)
i can’t tell anymore what part of me is acting

i wish my clone was split by
halves, white and brown
bisecting my body, split & rubbed
raw like a grapefruit

in class my eighty-year-old professor
tells us Triveni is where the Yamuna and Ganga rivers converge
with Sarasvati
who is invisible
the water is light and black, like a braid
his voice is old and soft, worn-in leather shoes
he reminds me of my father
(when my father dies no one will be left
to bridge the old world & this new one, here)
i can’t be left here without him

and meanwhile, my professor’s talking
he doesn’t recognize me
another white girl with brown skin
i need him to tell me
all the things my father was afraid to tell me
(“this is where you come from/where you make sense”)
i want to be like lena
spanish in class
sinhalese
i don’t want to be afraid of the civil wars left by british divide-and-conquer

divide by half

& conquer

On Building Queer Communities

Today, as part of the international writers’ tour Sister Spit, Michelle Tea gave a “Building a DIY Literary Career” workshop. She talked about the importance of learning how to read your work aloud, of open mic performances, of being open to the opportunities that come your way. Throughout, she used the word ‘queer’, the word ‘community’. She kept talking about building a writing community, about supporting queer writers, about finding out what would best serve your community of queers. The truth is that I find it hard to relate to those words, together: queer, community. I love a lot of the queer people I’ve met here in Montreal, but there’s something about the over-arching collectivity– all the queers in a room, together– that, for me, can feel exclusive, alienating, cliquey, white. I find myself a little intimidated by how cool everyone looks; I think before I speak because I don’t want to say the wrong thing. I’m conscious of how I am perceived. There are always those people who know everyone, the social epicentres, like an asymmetrically-coiffed, upside-down version of the popular kids from high school. So as Michelle Tea kept talking, telling stories about her amazing-sounding writing community in San Francisco, about the days of open mics and slam poetry in the early 90s, and about the community that inspires her and sustains her, I couldn’t help feeling jealous of her sense of wholeness and of the way she has found her place in the world.

How many people have found a community? A real community, one that feeds and nurtures and sustains, that invites relationships that cross boundaries and geography and time? What does it mean to be queer? Who is left out of that equation? Is it enough to have political ideals in common? What about the parts of people’s identities, thoughts, selves, that contradict their radical queer personas? I don’t want to be part of any community that erases ambiguities and contradictions; that’s where all the magic lies.

A Michelle Tea memory:

When I was seventeen, I read Michelle Tea’s Rent Girl, and realized that being a writer doesn’t have to mean MFAs, agents, big publishing houses, and being marketable.  All you need is clarity of vision, and a story that won’t let your readers go. In Rent Girl, Tea isn’t trying to appeal to a mainstream audience or get a fancy publishing contract; it’s her story, and it celebrates some of the people she encountered, turning the everyday into something bigger. Something that can connect with other people.

A story about connecting:

That summer, my first away from home, I lived in a ramshackle East Van house, sharing it with two women who were both older and seemingly more sophisticated than I was. The first woman spent hours updating her internet dating profiles. She bought endless pairs of stiletto heels, and wore them around the house until their clatter on the hardwood floors gave me a headache. The second woman stir-fried vegetables at our gas stove, wearing nothing underneath her flannel bathrobe. She decorated the walls with posters of queer icons, emerging from her incense- and pot-scented bedroom every morning in heels and a flyaway femme bob, or else leather and a sheer camisole, seamlessly transitioning between high femme and androgyny. I ate beets raw, made a zine with some of my writing and awkwardly left it in the washroom, hoping my roommates would read it and think I was cool, too. I tried to illustrate my short stories, trying to imitate Lauren McCubbin’s intense visuals, trying to turn my middle-of-the-road, coming-of-age narrative into something transcendent.

One night, I came home to find my second roommate– the gender-fluid, spiky-haired, loudly sexual queer who’d attracted me to the apartment in the first place– sitting on the stairwell, still wearing her heels and chain-smoking. Up ’till then we hadn’t spoken much; our schedules, and my shyness, kept us in separate orbits that rarely came into contact. But she touched the space next to her, and I sat. “I read your zine,” she smirked. “It was pretty cool. I didn’t know that having sex with a woman was on your life goals list.”

I felt like an idiot. She told me, then, her stories of sex for work and sex for fun, of the female-bodied people she fucked for pleasure and the men she fucked out of pity, and for cash. Told me the story of staying up too late on a job, coming home messed up on drugs, sitting in the shower like a scene from a movie while her lover slept in the next room.

“I read Rent Girl,” she said. I had bought it for her the week before; somehow, I knew she’d love it. “It was really good.”

In that moment, with my roommate– that moment three years ago– I felt it. Queer solidarity, community. Michelle Tea told her story, in all of its messy, loud glory, and something about it connected with me, and it connected with my roommate, and as a consequence the two of us managed to connect just a little bit more. And it’s not a fairy tale. We never became best friends and we never talked much, after that. But, that night, we both realized that we had potential to get to know each other better; that, if we tried, we could be each other’s allies.

I felt the same way at the workshop today as I sat in a roomful of queers excitedly hanging on to Michelle Tea’s every word. We aren’t a community, yet, even if we identify in a certain similar way or have friends in common. We aren’t a community because we haven’t done the work to nurture and know one another—that work is long, and difficult, and it’s never over, when it’s done well. But the possibility, the potential is there. It’s wide open, as long as we stay honest.

Take a chance on me

I got home at ten, ended up watching three hours of Project Runway and old music videos with my roomies. Everything from ABBA to Right Said Fred. If I had a video camera, I would love to duplicate one of those ABBA videos, complete with the blurry picture and four heads stationed at perfect right angles.

In class today I peeked at some girl’s Macbook (they should shoot a Mac commercial in McGill lecture halls– everyone has ‘em) and she was reading an article about how schools deaden your creativity. No shit; but maybe it’s too easy to blame the dry spell on long hours and early mornings, coursepack readings and conferences. There’s more than enough to write about in themes of genocide and decolonization, globalization and piety. Learning should be inspiring, and if it isn’t, then that’s my fault. Right?

Why am I so scared to write?

Earlier today a friend and I were talking about how we’re one of the first generations who will have to deal with having so much of our personal lives on the internet. “How will we ever be politicians?” I guess the tolerance level for awkward embarrassing personal details will have to be higher, too, given the amount of compromising celebrity tweets out there.

This is what I do– talk in circles to avoid what I really want to talk about. But I haven’t yet gotten a hang of this blog thing, where you have to strike the right balance between sincerity and self-deprecation with a dash of wry cynicism thrown in.

Essays essays essays!

So. I am a bit embarrassed about putting my school-related essays ( some of them are too brief to be real essays but too structured for blog posts… I shall call them essaylets) out there because they absolutely reek of undergraduate gender studies. However, they are gathering dust on my hard drive and…well…having the titles there on my ‘Writing’ page makes me feel kinda fancy.

Topics include femme identity (specifically how it relates to women of colour; 2010 Olympics and the DTES (old news by now, I’m afraid); radical queer spaces; the age-old virgin/whore split as played out in pop culture; “the personal is political”; transphobic feminism; and reproductive justice.

You can find these essays & essaylets here, or just click ‘Writing’ above. And if you think I’ve got everything backwards, let me know and teach me a thing or two.