myth and the city

I find the concepts of myth and urbanism combining in my mind more and more lately. There's magic in cities, and there's heroes and heroines, legends, and - if a neighbourhood's been around long enough - there's folklore.

As I experience the stop-and-go rhythms of rush hour traffic in my daily commute to work; it leaves me quite a bit of time to examine the scenery. This is where myth comes into play, as strange, fantastical tales develop in my head, but in an urban setting.

Old school fairytales a la Hans Christian Andersen, mix with the multi-racial city of my imagination, all to a Roni Size-influenced soundtrack.

I amuse myself by picturing Queen Street West yuppies running around and screaming, spilling their extra-hot soy lattes (no whipped, please), as Toronto gets attacked by a raging dragon. God knows how many airport limo drivers out there think I'm crazy, as they honk and overtake me as I sit there, giggling.

It's a pastiche of childhood literary memories, altered by an infatuation with pulp fiction and real beat poetry, combined with environmental concerns, and interpreted in the context of an ongoing lover's brawl with the city I live in.

The Little Mermaid becomes a horrific genetic mutation - half snakehead, half human, and nowhere near amazing. She haunts my nightmares, reeking of sewage, wearing zebra mussels as pasties. Take it as a warning.

Snow White's an African albino, modelled after an old acquaintance called Yellowman, who hustles her way through the city, loses seven years to mental illness, and is finally rescued, not by a white prince on a white horse, but by the implementation of culturally aware social services.

I gotta write this down.

the things people say, now/every night and every day, now

Hanging out in Yorkville for Toronto's very successful rip off of Nuit Blanche reminded me why sometimes, I really do like this city. Props to the organisers, I was well impressed and I had a blast - thank you.

The night started off by finding a free parking spot within five minutes of getting to Yorkville (score!), walking past oodles of yuppies to the ROM, where we checked out a fascinating and stimulating exhibit by Cuban artist Carlos Garaicoa. The ROM was crazy packed with families, couples, singles, and just peoplepoeplepeople of all ages checking it out. It wasn't just about the exhibition (which was amazing), as it was about the fact that here was a public space open to everybody for an entire night. This is what cultural accessibility is all about.

Afterward, we decided to make a cameo at the Ballroom Party, which consisted of a gymnasium, hundreds of balloon-like balls, and 10 year old DJs. Let me tell you, there is nothing cuter than 10 year old DJs. Not even fluffy little bunnies.

Due to time constraints, we were only able to check out a few other spots really briefly, but that little dose of fun was great.

Saturday night was all about eavesdropping and overheard fragments of conversations. As private conversations were made accessible by the simple act of having them in a public place, I managed to collect quite a few snippets of conversation.

Eavesdropping is the aural equivalent of voyeurism; there's a secret delight in receiving information you have no right to. Engaging in passive eavesdropping, as well as passive voyeurism, when there is no perverse intent behind it, is like finding a treat.

Here are a few of my favourites from Saturday night:

Two older ladies, yelled at the Bloor/Avenue intersection:
"Do you know the story about the opaque glass [in the ROM's crystal]?" "Which story?" "You know, about the opaque glass." "Yes."

Gino, on cellphone:
"We're on Dundas West.... we'll meet you on Dundas West..." (repeat til fade)

Two youths, outside the Ballroom party venue:
"Is this where the kids are?" "Darren's thing?" "Yeah." "I think this is it."

In the smoking section of a house party (a.k.a. the front porch):
"AKS.KJNKJBFDW:KF(@MNSE@END{@F#@*&@$UHSGRK;JHP&T@PIUHJ"
There were about 20 people on the porch, and I swear, everyone was talking, no-one was listening, and I couldn't make out a single word from the cacophony.

And the best - a totally random and apparently unsolicited - from a young tall male:
"Eeeuuuuurrrggghhh!"

if it wasn't for jigsaw puzzles, i wouldn't have this analogy...

When I’m asked why I write I answer, “because I need to”. I write obsessively-compulsively – when I need to write, I can’t think of anything else until I spew out whatever it is that has needs expulsion from my brain.

Imagine you came across a 10,000+ pieces jigsaw puzzle. But you didn’t know what the finished image was going to be, the pieces kept on changing shape, and all you knew was that if you didn’t complete it you’d go certifiably insane. However, you’re guided primarily by a force similar to intuition, and you know pieces fit because not only do they lock together but you know deep down in your gut, the two pieces are a perfect match. It just feels right. And when you’ve finished, and you’re satisfied with the completed puzzle, you feel so relaxed and at ease with the world.

That’s the closest I can get to describing what the writing process is like for me. I’m obsessed with a piece, I think about it non-stop until it’s done and only then can I get on with my life. The sentences are like jigsaw puzzle pieces and I only know they fit when they feel right. And even after I think I've got it all sorted, some of the pieces change shape on me. Writing is extremely frustrating, infuriating, and gratifying.

Oh, and I love jigsaw puzzles. But not the ones guaranteed to drive you up the wall.

principles of a timeless muse

Is it strange that Calliopeia has been figuring in my dreams? I picture her floating around me, uttering words in different languages. My 21st century muse is darkskinned, quotes Dostoyevsky and Master P, and has a pierced eyebrow. Nothing like the Calliopeia of ancient days. Maybe she's me, circa 1998. There is a resemblance.

I've been re-reading Howl - although I have it memorised I like the shape of the words on the paper. I wonder if Calliopeia visited Ginsberg, and if she did, what form she took.

These days, I'm more in need of a muse for living, one to help me recapture my love for life, one to allow me to look beyond all the bad things in this world. I feel so jaded and world-weary, so pessimistic and cynical.

sick and twisted, pt. II

Living in a North American city, we're so far removed from the ugliness of death. Not the gentle kind of death that visits the elderly in their sleep, but death at the hands of the most brutal and violent incarnation of the Grim Reaper.

Looking at photographs from modern day wars, untouched, unedited photographs that were preceded by "Warning: the graphic nature of these images may disturb some viewers."

I saw a headless baby. I saw a torso - not a body, but a torso. I saw intestines spewing out of a corpse like some old Stephen King story. I saw people missing fingers and hands and arms and toes and feet and legs. And I saw fingers and toes and hands and feet and arms and legs, minus the people.

I read the reports of people who were there, and they gave me names and histories to attach to the people whose bodies were ripped apart. I wept, and I couldn't help it.

The images will give me nightmares, but I can't and I won't look away. I wasn't there, and I feel guilty that I wasn't there. I feel guilty that I am safe, and I would give up my own too-comfortable life if it meant that no other baby would have his or her head blown off.

As I've said before, this world is a twisted, sick, messed up place.

grind

the hustle's overrated
sorry, but i'm about to knock it.
been working nine-to-five
or seven (am) to twelve (am)
thinking, is that all there is?

so let's keep dancing.

dancing through through it all
trying to find grace in getting by
getting through, getting on
without getting stuck.

i'm tired of the dance and grind
i want to unwind and wind
like a gypsy.

roam like a nomad on winding roads
with no destination in sight
as opposed to working toward an
unseen
unknown
unfelt



End.

art, exploration, and black queens

I went for a walk in the rain, and I got soaked to the skin. It's something that I haven't done for years - it's rarely ever warm enough to do that here. I'm sitting down to write this while the clothes I'm wearing dry. I could go and change, but inspiration struck while I was braving the elements. And to be honest, I quite like this exercise.

While I was on my walk, I started thinking about a project I did while in university. The class was a pretty intense exploration of the issues, thoughts, and environment of creating purposeful art. We explored topics such as space, identity, representation, and audience, and out of my entire seven years spent in full-time postsecondary education, it was the class that had the greatest shaping influence on my future work.

I was reminiscing about a class assignment where each student had to create an art project that would represent them. At the time, my biggest critique of the class was that the space it had created was too "safe". Everyone and their work was welcome, and no criticism for future development was ever uttered. It made it hard, as I expected a class that explored art and its issues to teach me how to improve, refine, and develop my ideas. However, I now know what it feels like to have a safe space in which to display, discuss, and explore my work, and I am forever grateful for that.

But I was thinking specifically about my self-representation. Initially, because of my training and education in mass communications, I had decided to brand myself, using advertising techniques to crystallise my identity into visuals I could display in the 15 minutes presentation time I had.

The image was a re-creation of the Queen of Spades, which I had chosen for several reasons. First, the symbology associated with the Queen made her (to me) the most intriguing character in a deck of cards. She's the only queen carrying arms, and the weapon I chose for me as QoS was the quill (the pen is mightier than the sword and all that jazz). As a black woman, I found the descriptor "Black Queen" incredibly apt, and spades are sexier than clubs.

In addition, I selected the phrase "cherchez la femme noire" as the caption for the image. Obviously the black woman thing again, but there's more to it. Searching for something implies a need or desire for it, and means that its whereabouts are unknown, creating a sense of mystery. The expression describes a technique in the card game Hearts, where the player seeks to collect the entire hearts suit (each card = 1 point), and the Queen of Spades (valued at a whopping 13 points). It's an all or nothing attempt to gain a lead in the game; players try to keep their scores to a minimum. As each player reaches 100 points, they leave the game, and the most efficient way of winning is cherchez-ing for the Queen of Spades, because the player who successfully pulls it off receives no points for that hand, while all other players receive 26 points, the value of all the point cards (all other cards have no point value). I liked that idea - find the black lady and win, giving yourself an advantage in the game, or life. Is that not what life is like for partners of black women?

In retrospect, the most interesting part of the image was that I had decided that a faceless black mannequin should represent me as the Queen. I had used the same mannequin in a different activist-art project examining my religious and cultural identity. I find it fascinating (and oh so true on many levels) that I chose a faceless mannequin to represent my Self.

I have never presented that artwork. For the class, I ended up presenting a slideshow of images that I had either manipulated or created that portrayed different aspects of my identity. I chose modern-day cartography to represent the geographical - I stress the modern because I have always been acutely aware of whether I was in a land of colonisers or colonised. I used my feet to represent the physical - my life has been shaped by movement, movement from one place to another, movement through dance. For culture, I used my name written in the script of my mother tongue, a visual I am in love with because it is the most beautiful script in the world. For identity, I symbolised the rebel in me with an image was of my hand curled into a fist, within a black leather motorcycle glove.

I think I need to revisit my original project, but to take it away from the branding aspect. I think it's time I undertake another exploration of Self. It was excruciatingly difficult back then, and I can't foresee it being any easier today.

london april 30 1999

I was in Soho the day the bomb went off.

More specifically, I was in Soho Square with Marcy and Tony. Marcy had wanted to go to Covent Garden, but I wanted to go nowhere in particular and do nothing in particular. I had almost completed my university degree, and life was good and slow and chill. But Marcy won. Tony had to leave us to make his shift at work. Some bar in Angel.

Marcy and I walked down to Covent Garden, I can't remember how we got down there. Probably the long way, through ChinaTown, around Leicester Square. We (she) achieved what we (she) had set out to do, and started walking home, which was a fourth-rate hostel in Endsleigh Gardens, and not much of a home to head back to. We walked back, taking a slight detour so we could head north on Charing Cross Road. Although it was a longer route, it was safe, and fun, and filled with many people I knew well, who led interesting lives, and who were always glad to see me.

Charing Cross Road had been cordoned off. Marcy and I had been hearing sirens for most of our walk back home, but when you lived, worked, studied, and played where we did, sirens were part of our everyday white noise. But the cordones were surprising, and so were the number of policemen. Cops on the street were nothing to wonder about, but the number of them, along with the ambulances and fire trucks, were definitely not normal.

A nail bomb had gone off in Soho. Brixton and Whitechapel had been bombed on April 17 and 24, and no suspect had been found so London was nervous. And what everyone had been fearing (and Southall had been expecting), had happened again.

I remember the fear and apprehension. But most of all, I remember the anxiety. After we had gotten past Soho, taking a longer and unwanted route, they started bringing the casualties to the hospital just around the corner from ours. I'd been to that same hospital to get a broken thumb set - it took me half a cigarette from our place to the emergency ward.

The rest of the evening was full of worry+people+ringing phones and pagers. Worrying about people I knew who lived or worked or hustled in the area and trying to get a hold of them. Worried about people worried about me and trying to reach them as well, including Tony, who had been trying to find me.

The next night I went to Hanover Grand, to a weekly night that had quickly turned into a show of support by and for London's gay community. It wasn't much of a party - everything was still so raw and confusing. Soho's got heart, still - they might want us dead, but we'll still party. A misconstru(ct)ed we-shall-overcome sort of vibe.

I don't know why I've been thinking about that day so much. I don't want to, nothing positive ever came out of it. Three people died in Soho, London's gayest neighbourhood, and my neck of the woods in my mid to late teens. Brixton - just down the road from where I grew up, and chock-a-block with black folks - was bombed. Whitechapel, so Bangladeshi it should be renamed and home to many friends, was bombed.

A neo-Nazi group called the White Wolves claimed responsibility for the three bombings, and somebody called David Copeland was sentenced.

I don't want anything but to forget - I have no desire for closure, for PTSD counseling (I don't need it, nothing happened to me or mine), I just want to wipe the days those bombs went off out of history.

I have a tendency to distill events into the life lessons they have taught me, and on April 30, 1999, I learned something I'd rather have never found out - people die for the ugliest reasons, at the hands of other people they've never met. Ergo this world is a twisted, sick, messed up place.

And it doesn't get any better, kid.

this skin of mine

I sometimes forget the privileges that are afforded to me as a black woman. I forget that some people appreciate and revere my dark skintone. This isn't about exoticism or fetishism - a black girlchild called me empress. I was blocking her path, and only realised it when I heard a voice say, "Excuse me, empress".

Empress.

The sound of it stilled me. The girl was taught, in the Rastafarian way, that darkskinned women were regal, and deserved to be treated as such. I don't know if I deserve the title, but I accept it with gratitude. Thank you for reminding me what blessings my skin brings me.

nine things I learned watching the world cup in toronto

1. There's way more Angolans in Toronto than I was led to believe.
2. And way less French.
3. Half of Little Portugal is Brazilian masquerading as Portuguese.
4. The Koreans can party way harder than the Germans.
5. But not as hard as the Ghanaians.
6. Riot police are only required in certain neighbourhoods (where the Third World countries hang out).
7. Toronto is lacking a certain je-ne-sais-quoi. Literally.
8. It is possible to drive by Toronto police with three men on the hood of your car, while you're smoking weed, and running a red light. You just have to be surrounded by Africans.
9. There's no such thing as cultural integration in Toronto - it's all bullshit. Now I know exactly which neighbourhoods are inhabited by which cultures, and exactly where the boundaries of those neighbourhoods lie.

I'm also beset by an irritation toward CBC Toronto's coverage of the World Cup, which was very much along the lines of, "Aren't we special? We have many many cultures celebrating! Look at how ethnically diverse we are.", by a bunch of white folk who could never understand what football means to Canadians of different backgrounds, and who have totally missed the point.

The celebrations held by each nationality after their team had won showed a much stronger allegiance to their homelands than their adopted lands, and the message that came across to me by the collective revellers was, "My body and mind belong to Canada, but my heart belongs back home."

I'm willing to bet that somewhere out there, Toronto law enforcement officials are breathing a collective sigh of relief: there'll be no more large gatherings of minorities partying hard (Beware! Ethnic people celebrating!). The riot police can pack away their gear, less cops will be on the streets, and no emergency measures for impromptu block parties will be taken. Not until the Toronto Caribbean Carnival (Caribana), at least.

krump, interrupted

I love krump. I love the aggressive freedom of it. I love the physical force behind each move, the assertion of presence. I love the fury in krumpers' faces. I love the sweat-veneered krumpers' bodies. I love how the body states, "I wish a motherfucker would!"

i’m grown, ma! now what?

Where to start? I’m going through a quarter-life crisis.

I’m in my mid-twenties (more like late twenties to be honest, but whatever), and by all yardsticks of my society, I’m doing great. I have a career, I earn a steady paycheck, and I can afford real food. I’m in bed at an hour I used to scoff at, and I don’t get tax refunds anymore. My sixteen year old self would be disgusted.

But I feel like I’m chomping at the bit, and all that’s doing is wearing down my teeth.

I’ve also got itchy feet, which doesn’t help at all. The minute I achieve any sort of stability, my nomadic ancestry decides to assert its presence. All of a sudden, I’m online looking for travel deals and reconnecting with long lost friends who are anywhere but here. I find myself mentally calculating how I would distribute my possessions (books – ship to parents; furniture – sell, donate, or chuck; pets – pawn off on roommate).

I’m off to indulge myself in a little self-absorbed existential crisis.

self is Other

Third culture. To me, the phrase conjures up images of mould growing in Petrie dishes. The third generation of such a mould, perhaps, carefully reared in a sterile laboratory environment. Someone once told me that the phrase third culture referred to children such as myself. Children of twentieth century migrants, children who belonged neither to the culture of their parents, nor the culture of their host land. People like myself who created a new, hybrid third culture, a marriage of the heritage of our parents with the culture of our adopted homeland. But what happens when you have not one adopted homeland but two or three?

I was raised on four continents. I came of age four different times in four different lands. My life began on the Dark Continent, and the sun and the sand of Africa sear through my veins. I was a child and then a teenager in both the warmest and coldest of lands, both literally and emotionally speaking. And now I live in one of the Promised lands, across the oceans, the farthest away from my birthplace.

I find my composite culture to be both a blessing and a curse. My appearance is ethnic-identity-unknown, my facial characteristics and body type only identify me when gazed upon with a knowing eye. I have the luxury of presenting myself as belonging to a number of cultures, some of which I have legitimate claim to, some I don’t.

My portrayals of persona depend on my mood of the day – from demure Arab to flamboyant ghetto princess. From the code of the desert to the law of the streets. African Queen. Buppy (yuppy? guppy?). Nubian princess. Daughter of the desert. StrongBlackWoman. Most days, I scoff at these labels. Other days, I feel trapped in their limitations.

The antonym of self is Other.

i'm in love with a gangsta

When I heard the radio version of Tallahassee Pain’s – what unfortunate initials – song “I’m in Love With a Stripper”, called “I’m in Love With a Dancer”, I had a ‘scuse-me-while-I-kiss-this-guy moment. My mind substituted “dancer” with “gangster”, and I believed it.

At first I was like, is this a tribute to gun-toting, doo-rag wearing, weed-smoking brothers with metal-coated teeth? And I thought about it for a while (through the first verse), and started listening properly right at the chorus. With lyrics like, “she’s poppin' she’s rollin' she’s rollin'”, and "she can pop it she can lock it", I became convinced that in fact T-Pain was performing an ode to female gangsters.

And I loved it. I was over the moon. I thought this was a milestone in terms of the recognition of women who weren’t over-pretty and utterly useless bimbos that seemed to figure in every rapper’s life. I had this mental image of a female gangster (gangstette?), sort of Queen Latifah in Set It Off but straight, coming home after a long day of drive-bys, drug deals, and general gangstering to an r’n’b crooning man who had cooked her dinner.

Before I go any further, I’d like to point out that this delusion lasted until the second time I heard the song a couple of hours later, and I was under the influence of nothing. Unless you consider one Advil two days earlier as mind-altering.

It wasn’t long before I realised that the song was actually a misogynistic recitation of what one particular working girl could do with her attributes. Needless to say, I was very very disappointed.

But I still believe that paying tribute to female gangsters is a way more interesting subject than singing about strippers. Just my opinion.

sometimes you can hear the water

I’ve been thinking about histories for the last little while. Landscape histories, architectural histories, geographical histories. I’d been having conversations over the past week or so that revolved around the physical past. And it was weird, these conversations just seemed to happen, with no prodding on my part, and it was only in retrospect that I noticed the common thread.

Sometime last week, I was sitting on the stoop in front of my apartment building late at night, when an elderly couple walked past. The gentleman had lived in my neighbourhood for fifty years, and he talked about how the street I lived on used to be a river when he first moved here.

“Some time, late at night,” he said. “Two three in the morning, when it’s quiet, you can hear the water.”

And after a bit of cane-waving, the gentleman and his wife shuffled off.

I could wax poetic about how in order to experience nature in a city we’d have to wait until the traffic died down, and then kneel down in the middle of the street, ear pressed to the asphalt, and hope that the sounds of rushing water weren’t coming from the sewers. But I’ll save that for another day.

Another conversation I had was with a friend of mine who had spent most of his life in farmland. He had grown up in a house that was built in the early twentieth century, and told me about a visit an older lady had made to his home. She’d grown up in the house, and had invited herself in to take a look around her childhood home. The elderly lady came back a while later, grandchildren in tow, with a photograph of the house as she had remembered it.

And then I bought a magazine called Dwell that examined modern residential architecture. I fell in love with a transformation of a shophouse in Singapore into an über-modern residence. I fell in love with the idea that you would never have guessed that behind an ancient and almost decaying façade was a restored/redesigned/refashioned interior. That has got to be my favourite residential transformation to date.

I live in a city where copycat housing is everywhere – entire neighbourhoods look disarmingly identical. To me, that’s purgatory. If I had to live in a neighbourhood that looked like that, lunch would include antidepressants. It would drive me out of my mind. I can feel myself slowly going crazy (crazy going slowly) at the mental image of myself trapped in the middle of a block where the only thing that would set my house apart would be the shape of the doorknocker.

it's about time

I've been resisting writing a blog for a few years. In the beginning, I believe it was because I was intimidated by the idea of posting my writing for all to see and judge. Then I started writing for money, and learned how to disassociate from my writing (both a good and a bad thing). Once I got over that hurdle, I started creating excuses for not starting a blog - do I have enough time (I never have enough time); really, who would want to read what I write (who cares - isn't keeping a blog supposed to be cathartic anyway?); am I really arrogant enough to believe that there is a place in the public sphere for my writing (considering the democratization of communication courtesy of the Internet, it's not arrogant at all); and most recently - and probably the excuse that carries the most truth - can I commit to posting regularly (yup, commitment issues galore)?

So I decided to satisfy my ego, express my emotions (you poor sods), exercise my democratic rights, and test my ability to commit. But having resisted for so long, I needed to devise an excuse for blogging. I wanted a creative outlet. So here it is: this is where I'll chat pure lyric.