run like the wind

running like the wind

fathima — Mon, 08 Mar 2010 08:54:33 +0000

I actually enjoy running. But you wouldn’t know this if you were to judge by the death wheeze I get after 30 seconds of spirited jogging.

We’ve had this conversation before.

fathima — Sun, 07 Mar 2010 22:50:45 +0000

“Whether I shall turn out to be the hero of my own life, or whether that station will be held by anybody else, these pages must show.”

– David Copperfield, Charles Dickens (1917)

Uncle

fathima — Wed, 03 Mar 2010 21:51:44 +0000

I saw a brown uncle in a tweed jacket as I walked home this afternoon. I gave him a tired smile as we passed each other, but I guess after almost twelve hours straight of jail support, I get that hooligan look — unwashed mussed hair and red eyes. He gave me a dirty look.

This conversation happened word-for-word.

fathima — Mon, 22 Feb 2010 01:40:06 +0000

My parents moved into a new house 2 weeks ago. They’re still meeting their neighbours, one of whom came over today to meet us. I hear my mother coming down the hallway, introducing her to my siblings as she encounters them, and then saying something about how I’m home on break from school in BC. She calls me out of the kitchen where I am having elevenses at 3PM.

- Assalamu alaikum, Aunty.
- Wa alikummus salam. It’s nice to meet you.
- It’s nice to meet you, too.
- How old are you?
- Uh … 24.
- My daugher is 23. She lives at [X] and [X]. She got married two years ago. She comes home nearly everyday.

My mother’s face stiffens.

Kitchen

fathima — Fri, 19 Feb 2010 11:01:12 +0000

February, and the sun is out, so all the blinds are up, and the windows and the front door open. The kitchen is chaos. I wash dishes under its angled roof, hemmed by bright yellow walls, hot water breathing up steam and clouding up the tiny window. I have a cold, and I’ve taken out my nosering to making sneezing less of a production. There’s a wad of tissue in each of the pockets of my jeans, the thin denim grimy from the previous night spent under a tarp in the rain in the tent village. Tomorrow is for laundry, for fresh underwear and crushed sweaters. There’s a pot of lentils and potatoes simmering on the splattered stove. It smells incredible; I have come to believe in the transformative power of coconut milk. There’s a carton of overpriced orange juice in the fridge, and there’s ginger to brew into sweet tea. There are cheap strawberry wafers on the counter and figs in the cupboard, and I’m feeling just a little lightheaded.

Sade’s singing about a Long Hard Road, and I sing along, scratchy-voiced and sniffling. Outside the landlord’s kids are playing, one four-year-old and one two.

And these are good days, this combination of dirt and sharp light.

19th Annual February 14th Women’s Memorial March

fathima — Wed, 17 Feb 2010 10:00:41 +0000

February 14 2010 marked the 19th annual Women’s Memorial March, organised by the residents of Vancover’s Downtown Eastside to commemorate the lives of murdered or missing women from the neighborhood. Approximately 2,000 people attended the march this year.

Much love and respect to the elders and the bereaved, and to everyone who has suffered not only the loss of loved ones, but the wilful erasure by state institutions of that violence from mainstream consciousness.

More pictures on Flickr.

About midway through the march, the procession paused in front of the Vancouver Police Department, where elders spoke about police complicity in violence against Aboriginal women in Canada.

There are over 500 cases of missing or murdered aboriginal women in Canada. Except for a mere handful, those cases remain open, triggering a demand for a public inquiry into the policing of crimes against Aboriginal women. The violence and policy apathy is especially pronounced in British Columbia — 15 women were murdered by Robert Pickton after the police officially began investigating him.

Even the UN has demanded Stephen Harper investigate why the deaths and disappearances of aboriginal women remain unsolved (Nov 2008). To date, the Canadian government has not responded.

Greetings

fathima — Fri, 12 Feb 2010 02:01:02 +0000

Hello, Weldon!

TBD

fathima — Thu, 11 Feb 2010 01:09:38 +0000

The interview process will take place on Thursday February 11th at a time between 10am and 11:30am at a location to be determined.
– email, Feb 9.

Know This

fathima — Wed, 10 Feb 2010 07:32:25 +0000

The other night I went to the world’s worst hip hop show. I need to believe it was the worst, though it likely wasn’t, because if this city can do worse than this, I’m giving up on all hope right here and right now.

I’m not going to get into how fucked it is for a hip hop show to consist of white boys in dreadlocks rapping to an almost exclusively white audience (including one guy in a do-rag), because others have written about that phenomenon more intelligently and less crassly than I could. But there were some details specific to the show that I’d like to believe were unique.

One of the rappers wore a fur tail (fake, I’m hoping) pinned to his bottom; he never explained why. He and his partner performed a song about how they got his sister off pads and onto menstrual cups; he used the word “temple” at one point, but I can’t remember the exact reference because I’m mostly suppressing the memory.

During the intermission the MC said, “I don’t know why anarchists haven’t taken over hip hop,” which made me swallow my drink the wrong way, setting my trachea on fire. I nearly hacked to death.

Perhaps less surprising (given the show was billed to an activist community), but no less gagworthy, was when the rappers called on their soundcheck person to do an impromptu performance — only because she was female. That kind of unselfconscious tokenism around gender dovetails beautifully with how resistance in hip hop music and cultures gets co-opted by white anarchists who think screeching “Fuck the system!” ten times makes for an acceptable hook.

There’s a lot of discussion around the larger phenomenon of young white men co-opting rap and adopting its assumed culture (no matter that that stereotype gets constantly teased by current mainstream black musicians), but there’s something more specific to how white activists co-opt these things. My sense is that their self-identification as “activists” is precisely the mechanism by which they allow themselves to be this ludicrously oblivious to the racial politics that they’re fooling around with. In other words, the problems of entitlement and self-awareness not only do not become less pressing within activist and/or anarchist communities, but in fact are re-entrenched through this notion that by being activist we’re all necessarily beyond this kind of petty squabbling over the ever-fraught intersections of art and history.

So it’s nice to come home to songs and videos like The Remnant’s “Know This“. The lyrics are cheesy as hell (will boys ever, ever get off the woman-as-muse hack), but the boys are pretty and have style, and the filming is so cute (I wish I’d filmed it). And, for the P&P aficionados among you, there’s a Jane Austen reference in there (or so he says, someone else run a check).

I want to get old, grow a gut that I suck in when I’m next to you. Sixty odd years old and still trying to impress you.

Taunt

fathima — Wed, 10 Feb 2010 05:43:02 +0000

“The result would be to taunt the tort.”
– Wittman in Fiala v. Cechmanek (2001)