“The Door of No Return is on my mind. I am crossing the place which holds it; the place which holds the before of history. It is a return, but aptly it is in the air and it is a glancing pass at the Door of No Return. The door is not ont his map. The door is on my retina.” Coming home, reading Dionne Brand.
If you’re an elementary teacher in Toronto, come through to Continuing Dialogues: An Equity Conference for Elementary Teachers, put on by the ETT’s (Elementary Teachers of Toronto) Anti-Racism, Equity, and Social Justice Committee, on May 4, 2013. I’ll be presenting, and simultaneously trying to listen in on the other workshops.
Read my new stuff, which I actually wrote yeaaaars ago (in February). Or don’t.
For this series, I’m interested in the way we talk and don’t talk—about mixing, hybridity and amalgamation—and how crossings are represented and circulated. Sometimes, are they even mixtures at all? In light of the “post-racial” myth (a nightmare, really—a ghost that embodies dispossession and folly), visions of the future are often articulated in terms of a “new minority,” that is to say, on the basis of an exalting color-blindness. An all-Brown world! (via crossings: undone presents, pyrrhic futures | THE STATE)
dependencies
“Another myth that is firmly upheld is that disabled people are dependent and non-disabled people are independent. No one is actually independent. This is a myth perpetuated by disablism and driven by capitalism - we are all actually interdependent. Chances are, disabled or not, you don’t grow all of your food. Chances are, you didn’t build the car, bike, wheelchair, subway, shoes, or bus that transports you. Chances are you didn’t construct your home. Chances are you didn’t sew your clothing (or make the fabric and thread used to sew it). The difference between the needs that many disabled people have and the needs of people who are not labelled as disabled is that non-disabled people have had their dependencies normalized. The world has been built to accommodate certain needs and call the people who need those things independent, while other needs are considered exceptional. Each of us relies on others every day. We all rely on one another for support, resources, and to meet our needs. We are all interdependent. This interdependence is not weakness; rather, it is a part of our humanity.”
This is from Disability Politics and Theory by Toronto organizer A.J. Withers, which I need (/want) to read. I like to stay away from words like humanity and weakness but I *am* thinking. The quote was posted on one of my favorite people’s Facebook wall (I’m not sure he knows that). We spent a summer in a feminist reading group together in Toronto before I applied to grad school and every week we met my mind went all druggy.
Charles Bukowski, Post Office
Isn’t it always eat all of the french fries or none at all? Do all of the work or none at all? Love all of the person or none at all? Hate all of myself or none at all?
Excerpt from “Acholi Love” by Okot p’Bitek in Transition, no. 17 (1964)
“
I would rediscover the secret of great communications and great combustions. I would say storm. I would say river. I would say tornado. I would say leaf. I would say tree. I would be drenched by all rains, moistened by all dews. I would roll like frenetic blood on the slow current of the eye of words turned into mad horses into fresh children into clots into curfew into vestiges of temples into precious stones remote enough to discourage miners. Whoever would not understand me would not understand any better the roaring of a tiger.
Aimé Césaire, Notebook of a Return to the Native Land
My legs by Whitney Mallett
From ‘Like Crazy’
I thought I understood it,
that I could grasp it,
but I didn’t, not really.
Only the smudgeness of it;
the pink-slippered, all-containered, semi-precious eagerness of it.
I didn’t realize it would sometimes be more than whole,
that the wholeness was a rather luxurious idea.
Because it’s the halves that halve you in half.
I didn’t know,
don’t know, about the in-between bits;
the gory bits of you, and the gory bits of me.
