Author: Word and Colour

words inspired by colour wordandcolour.com

On Mental Health: “Fight or Flight”

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It was an invisible voice, driving him onward.

“Run.”

He took comfort in knowing he wasn’t completely alone, but he paused, motionless, for someone else to lead the way.

“Hide,” the voice repeated, this time almost a shout.

Faint rustling, as someone else approached, were muffled through his own heavy breathing as he turned to stare, head on, into yellow evolving eyes. He was face to face with death.

He remained, unmoving, assessing what it would mean to his survival: the choice to fight.

He glanced behind his shoulder, out of options, as the eyes grew less distinct and he was forcefully pushed back into his helpless body, unable to run, no longer in time to hide.

Heart beating wildly, chest rising, yet he felt no air reach his lungs.

“Freeze.”

He opened his eyes and the room was no longer spinning—chest no longer growling. His stomach felt heavy, a bead of sweat meandered down his right cheek. He swiped at it, halfheartedly, with the back of his hand. There was no forest, no golden eyes staring him down, just a microphone in hand and an audience on looking, an uncomfortable pause between applause and speech, hanging in the air as they waited for him to begin.

“Yes-” he cleared his throat.

“Thank you all for coming out tonight.”

The hairs on his arm still stood on end. A shiver ran through his body. “Keep calm,” the voice now instructed.

He closed his eyes to shake himself of the attack, there was a bottle of Valium waiting for him at home, for now, the task at hand remained.

word by Annie Rubin 

From the author: “The harsh edges, intensely vibrant colours, and the vivid animal-like quality of the artwork inspired an intensity motivated by animalistic instinct. The jagged edges and bright lines were reminiscent of a sense of anxiety, in this case manifested in the form of a panic attack. Such an episode takes place as the body’s natural “fight or flight” instinct to combat present danger replaces logic. While many people have suffered from panic, our society rewards silence around the issue, perpetuating a stigma around mental health.”

colour by Marina Gonzalez Eme

On Gender Roles: “I am an extra X”

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Trigger warning: rape

I am the perpetual embodiment of two letters. I am an extra X, and that’s all I will ever be.

Before I even heard my name they saw me on a screen. They sang with joy because I had an X and not a Y and the spare bedroom was already painted a dusty rose. Dad’s heart sunk because I dashed his dreams of taking my team to state.

When I was born they cried and hugged and congratulations overflowed out of Hallmark cards. I got a card too. It noted my extra X. During my third month they called me beautiful and cradled me more gently than they did my brother because my X baptized me as a paper-doll.

They kissed my cheeks and tucked me into floral flannels grandma gave me when Mom had a party with pink paper plates from the dollar store.

When I was five every boy was my prince and I decided that my wedding would be on a white sand beach with lilies in my bouquet.

When I was seven I finally started to colour inside the lines and I hated subtraction but my teacher told me that that was okay because girls are better at art anyways.

When I was nine my mom caught me trying on her makeup and scolded me for using the wrong shades. When I was 12 I cried because the boys wouldn’t let me play soccer with them anymore.

When I was 13 I cried because my ex-teammate shattered my heart.

When I was 19 I dropped out of physics because my test sheets were covered in X’s and I figured I was better at English anyways.

When I was 23 my heart was broken for the fourth time and my friends told me to forget about the X’s on the back of my hand. He bought me a drink or maybe it was six and I let him taste the seventh one on my tongue even though I hated that song and his breath reeked of Jack Daniels.

When I was 24 they still told me I shouldn’t have worn that skirt that night.

When I was 27 I said I do and they called me beautiful and cried and hugged and gave me tips on how to please my prince.

When I was 28 they bought me pink paper plates at the dollar store.

When I was 30 I typed X’s and O’s into a dusty keyboard and my boss called me “doll” and I was in charge of the coffee machine and I called it my life.

When I was dead the obituaries read “daughter and mother and wife” and nothing more. X marked the spot and they dressed me in floral and kissed my cheeks and the Hallmark cards came pouring in.

Sometimes he brings me lilies.

Most times he forgets.

He tells them that I was beautiful. I suffocate. I am an extra X, and that’s all I will ever be.

word by Hannah Chubb

colour by Marina Gonzalez Eme

Issue #218: You’re Not Racist If You Find Me Pretty

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“You’re not racist if you find me pretty”

Sitting downtown Montreal, mid-afternoon spring, at the kind of booth that makes your pelvis sink, in the kind of café where you can stay for hours without buying a thing.

And no one has cleared the cups of soggy knotted teabags. The staff are wearing collared polyester and leaning against the display cooler. The windows are level with the sidewalk and people’s shoes and ankles and bicycle-wheels pass by our heads.

*

Earlier  I saw someone smoking under the awning in the rain and thought of you. I thought of how beautiful you are, and I don’t tell you this, but know that I could and that would be alright too. Tomorrow is your third date with someone more than cut and paste.

*

What do you do on a Friday night?
I wash my arms.
Oh.
And your life? What are you doing?
Nothing.
I love you.

*

Because she couldn’t hear past the barking anymore, the low growl and the hiss.

 

No, you’re not racist if you find me pretty.

 

Attends: tu penses que je suis raciste? ?
Je voulais juste savoir
 d’où tu viens
je te trouve          belle.

 *

Your curiosity tastes like vomit. Your curious  entitlement to interrogate my ancestral origins,  colonial narratives of migration, grief, diaspora that we have not unraveled and yet exist through—

to draw forth the accumulation of every other moment before this when a dark body has been a site of violent intrigue.

Because she looks exotic: sweet–potato caramel, something to bite into with pleasure.

Flesh beneath your tongue, your words are never innocent, loaded with power you may not have asked for, granted by default you entrench entitlement.

*

This is your responsibility, white man: swallow your tongue,

direct your gaze to what’s
charging your bark.

 

We are not laughing.

//

You say you’ve been watching men jogging and you’ll let me know how it goes.

 

word by Alisha Mascarenhas

colour by Jasmine Okorougo 

 

Issue 217 (Gender, Sexuality): “IN THE BATHROOM”

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“IN THE BATHROOM”

May and Silas lie on the bed. May knows that it would be worthwhile having sex right now—to feel close to him, to remind him that she is not ordinary. Right now she would rather have sex with her substitute science teacher (he had that hair that she liked, it licked up the back of his neck) or the butch woman who had stared at her in the waiting room at the dentist after school yesterday. The staring had made her go red in the face and her vagina spasm in a way that Silas’s gaze hadn’t in months.

 

Silas turns his slender frame towards her. He is fine and delicate. I’m bored, he grins, let’s cuddle. She grins back and stretches out her arms to pull him in—her arms over his shoulders as always, her body bigger and darker than his will ever be. They kiss and then she pulls back just enough for him to pull back too. Do you want to, he asks, hot breath smelling of closed rooms and wet toilet paper. She pauses. Yes. His eyes coat her in beauty—when he is aroused she feels like he sees her better. She can toss her head and whinny, like a mare, and he will kiss her pulsing veins. They help each other to pull off their clothes: her undies, his exhausted boxer briefs. There is always a laugh here, when her undies are down around her ankles and she is shifting and twisting to fling them off. Sexy, he says.

 

Moans. Noises she never makes at any other time but that she consciously makes now. Light, quick breaths on his collarbone and light, quick bites of his stretched out neck skin. She doesn’t feel like it until his penis goes in. Then it does feel good, good, like she tells him.

 

May rolls over, taking Silas with her until he is underneath. She can feel the sweats of each of them slipping and creaking against each other.  She is provocative up here. Silas is beaded lightly all over and his eyes bulge. May resists an urge to reach out and gently move his hair from out of his eyes. This must be over quickly before the sheen wears off and he starts to see the hair on her arms, her pores. Silas tells her he loves her. She feels the warmth of the words in her fingers and her vagina aches just behind and below the labia when she looks down to see his light tuft and her dark one, their tufts, bouncing against each other.

 

Silas pulls her hips tight in against his own and heaves at her, the sound a bath drain slurping. May breathes out and pulls the sheet across her shave-cut legs. She will bring herself to climax later, will run the tap to quiet her sounds, in the bathroom.

word by Laura McPhee-Browne

From the author: “I saw this art piece as the collage of a girl going through the emotions of becoming a young adult.

 
This art piece brought back to me the insecurities, anxieties and play-acting aspects of being a young woman, and I decided to write a story that delved into the mind of a young woman trying to be ‘normal’ and to do ‘normal’ things, such as having satisfying, meaningful sex with her boyfriend, despite the ambiguity and complexity of such an act.
 
Through my story, I also wanted to get across how much pressure there can be on young women to be ‘nice’, to be ready and willing, and to be relaxed, and to sacrifice their own pleasure and well-being for the sake of men, when this is an impossible and unrealistic expectation. I believe that the various slogans in the art piece, ‘BEING NICE IS COOL’ and ‘DON’T FRET’ are the slogans that young women chant inside themselves, when really it should be okay to not be okay.”

colour by Jasmine Okorougo

Issue #215: On memory and colour

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When I look at my hands I start to cry. Leathered and worn, dry skin flakes between my fingers and my lifelines seem etched into my palms, my hands are permanently stained; dark hues of purple and green crept below the surface, and stayed there. My life is on my hands and I can’t hide the fact that I have graced many a wall with my personal epithets. I staked my claim, marked my territory with a manifest destiny-type vengeance and sought out every clear space, every void, and every emptiness to fill it.
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My face is wet and I let the tears fall freely from my face. My hands lay in my lap, unmoving, poised for continued inspection. They tell every memory and moment and hurt with the knowledge of a past ached for.
  art colour memory
In the summer time heat, the humidity was thick and held the paint in the air around me. I searched the streets for new ground and found beautiful canvasses in the neatly tucked away spaces between buildings, inside dimly lit tunnels and parking lots; these were areas ripe for beautification. Can always at the ready, I would surveil the area and quickly throw up my tag. I would come home tinged in color, turned sepia, a danger to all white surfaces in my vicinity. I would take my black off, strip down bare, lay on my back, raise my arms in the air and look at my hands with intense interest. Color caked in the crevices of my cuticles and my knuckles darkened by the paint in the creases of my skin. I would lay there until my arms were tired, feeling the adrenaline leave the extremities of my body. Right index finger bent, I would practice above my head, my tag lines fluid, clean and quick. They littered the pages of my school books, and even now, the discarded envelopes that formerly housed my bills, bank statements and junk mail. I make my mark everywhere, although no one else sees it now.

word by Cora-Lee Conway

colour by Pichi&Avo

10 Reasons ‘Acceptable Protesting’ Is An Oxymoron

1. The clearest example of dominance is the ability to determine the legitimacy of ‘acceptable questions’ and how they are asked.

You can only question me if you ask my prepared questions. Raise your hand – wait for my answer. I’ll get around to answering if it doesn’t threaten my control.

‘Kettling’ tactics in Montréal on an ‘illegal’ protest

2. Riots in Baltimore exemplify that oppressed people have never sat idly by: a voice and resistance exemplified in violence is more a reflection of the violence they are subject to on a daily basis than an aberration or ‘deviancy’ of which they are often presumed guilty before innocent. 

3. When you’re doing well in a game, the last thing you think is to question if the game is fun or fair for everyone: because you judge the world from your treatment, your bias brings you to believe that if things aren’t bothering you, people who are bothered must be overreacting. 

Celebrities who question those who do not have faith in the game because they are being slaughtered are assuming that everyone enjoys the same privilege, and that only questioning in an ‘acceptable way’ will bring about change. 

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“The anger and the selfishness of the brutality of those claiming the right to violence in Freddie Gray’s name needs to cease,” said David Simon, creator of The Wire. 

4. “Designated protest-space” is an oxymoron. 

Let me count exactly how many of you there are so I can plan exactly how to erase you – don’t move.

5. The revolution will not only be realized through one-hundred and fifty character sentences.

6. The revolution will be realized on twitter and in protests and riots and speeches and community centres and cooperatives and within state institutions and on the lawns and in what companies grocery stores support and on our highways and ports and in the design of our video games.

Dwelling on the legitimacy of a method produces rust in the movement. People of all skills and activities come together to articulate the practical application of a question in different ways and none are less valid.

Divide and conquer is a tactic used to suppress dissent by wasting the valuable energy of people who believe in the same idea in fighting each other.

No protester should be told to go home and write because they are protesting the wrong way.

No tweeter should be told to go in the streets.

No writer should be told to go and cook for the movement.

No cook should be told to start designing posters.

No artist should be told to cook.

No politician should be told to write.

Past revolutions have been a product of many talents and types of people converging for a single goal. The diversity of their talents, physical and mental abilities, their interconnectedness, and their dispersion was necessary for the change.

7. The goal of the anti-oppressive revolution is to confront and radically change a fundamentally insecure system that requires dead bodies to show its supporters that it is doing something.

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via ahscolwara

8. Focusing on the reaction of an attacked community rather than the act of their being attacked is a useful tactic to sidestep accountability.  

9. But non-violence is the only way, because MLK.

MLK, who was threatened by the FBI and then assassinated by the US Government (the Government was found guilty of conspiracy that resulted in his assassination)… that MLK?

“A riot is the language of the unheard.”

-Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. 

10. The narrative of ‘our city’ in talks against protests assumes the city was working well for everyone in the collective ‘our’ and not systemically destroying people. It reveals a care more for buildings than human beings. 

Awareness of social and economic inequality and the profit-driven push to incarcerate, murder, and erase entire groups of people is prompting a revolution, today.

Which role will you take?

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art by Marcus Denomme & words by Liam Lachance, a writer at our upcoming live art event

Review: Justseeds Vernissage Confronts Injustice

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Justseeds’s artists Mary Tremonte & Jesse Purcell put up a wonderful exhibit last Friday – with Tremonte DJ-ing and Purcell showing off artwork from the thirty person collective, as part of the Howl! Arts Festival. Justseeds is a decentralized network of artists that produce pieces highlighting social, environmental and political injustices.

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buy this print now by Jesse Purcell

One project, “Celebrate People’s History,” has been fifteen years in the making, and recognizes and commends ‘little people protesting big things’ through print art.

‘Big events’ include the Ejército Zapatista de Liberación Nacional (EZLN) in Chiapas, Mexico, protesting the American Free Trade Agreement in 1994, or the 2011 Wisconson protests that opposed the Wisconsin Budget Repair Bill.

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buy this print now by Sue Simensky Bietila

For those of you who missed Justseeds’s event last week, don’t worry! You can still check them out online at justseeds.org

Allison Kutcher, 28 Apr 2015

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Review: Howl! and CKUT host panel on austerity

image via Ecole De La Montagne Rouge

As part of the Howl Arts Collective Festival, CKUT FM invited four panelists to discuss artistic resistances to austerity in a live broadcast at Casa del Popolo. In discussing the relation between art and the movement against austerity in Montreal, the chief question was: What is the role of artists in the fight against austerity?

According to the panel – which included artists Edith Brunette and François Lemieux, graphic designer Kevin Yuen Kit Lo, and photojournalist Amru Salahuddien- artists have a choice: they can use their creativity to smooth over the bumps or they can reveal societal tensions through their creations.

However, if art can be used as a space where it is possible to dream, to envision a new future and to picture new social relations, then artists have not only the option, but the responsibility to define and depict an anti-oppressive future in order to raise awareness about austerity and engage discussion.

In addition to the discussion by the four panelists, La Chorale du Peuple, founded in 2011 during the occupation of Square Victoria, denounced neo-liberal policies and inequality through their songs: “Que la vie est belle” and “Ça fait rire les Libéraux.”

A problem underlined by Amru Salahuddien, an Egyptian photojournalist who was on the ground during the Egyptian uprising, was the lack of connections within the international anti-austerity movement. Though the fight against capitalism seems to be a fight that has a certain level of continuity across time and space, the lack of links, not only on an international level, but also within our own communities, has rendered the anti-austerity movement quasi-ineffective.

Salahuddien parallelled the Egyptian and Quebecois students, stating, “while in Egypt, bullets were used against the protesters, the weapon used by the government against Quebecois students was neglect.”

Despite the possibility of connections between these two groups of protesters, Salahuddien criticized the fact that very little support was given to either group by the other: that, though our world is said to be shrinking through technology and social media, there is little global awareness or concern for movements that do not affect us directly.

Concluding the discussion was a conversation about hope, where panelists suggested that if art is used as a tool in the fight against capitalism and the structures of power, it is because artists have hope for a better future, despite their use of seemingly sinister artistic tools, like irony or dystopia, in depicting their criticisms.

Thank you to Howl Arts Collective and to Casa del Popolo for hosting this interesting panel discussion- click here for more events happening this weekend!

Jiliane Golczyk, 23 Apr 2015, Montréal

On Beauty Standards: “Deep Hues and Curves”

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“Deep Hues and Curves”

It was her thirteenth birthday and she’d asked for red lipstick, strapped heels, and an appointment to have her eyebrows waxed. We went to the mall together to try on dresses for the celebration. She wanted pale blue to match the balloons.

She picked one with a frill along the neckline that accentuated her small waist and cut off above the knee. She had flat-ironed her springy brown hair and twirled a smooth lock around her finger as she gazed at me from the floor of the changing room.

“This would look better on you,” she moaned.

I winced. What was unbelievably clear to me seemed positively inaccessible to Ella. How would she react if I told her she looked like Brooke Shields in the pale blue—smooth-skinned, perfect frame?

What I would give to look anything like that.

Instead I mustered a weak, “I like it.”

I saw a spectrum of colour in her eyes.

She shook her head and tossed the dress to the ground. We finally settled on a violet strapless cocktail dress that draped across her body regally.

I came over early to help set up. Her mother asked me to tie the knots as she inflated helium balloons. I watched Ella stride down the living room stairs in the purple dress, lips tinted bright red, eyes lined, she flashed me the kind of grin that said you’re in on the secret.

I smiled back, twisting the elastic of another balloon around a ribbon and letting it float to the ceiling.

How reassuring it must feel to be factory-made.

“Let me do your hair!” She sang, running her fingers through my messy blonde.

I followed her upstairs, where for a moment as she braided, I watched her lock eyes with herself in the mirror. The colour drained from her face and she looked away, turning back to me. “Will you help me go blonde?”

It was somewhat an absurd request, but one to which I was compelled to oblige. The title of best friend came with great levels of moral responsibility.

It was five and guests were supposed to arrive. Her mother was frosting the cake in the kitchen. It was chocolate, Ella’s favourite. She proceeded to dip a slim finger into the bowl of frosting, receiving a glare in return, and a harsh murmur of disapproval. Promptly, she ran her hand under the faucet, sugar dissolving in water, before turning back to me.

“She’s right,” Ella whispered.

I didn’t ask about what.

“I don’t need it.”

I found myself by her side for the remainder of the evening. It felt natural, shadowing her: my image of womanhood. She grasped my hand as she blew out her candles.

After her mother sliced the cake, I watched Ella stare at the plate placed in front of her. She prodded the chocolate with a fork, all the while inhaling the wafting smoke of blue striped candles. Not once did I see her lift the fork to her mouth.

word by Annie Rubin

colour by SHAKA

From the author: “Adolescence is the time when our ideals of beauty are explored most thoroughly. As we grow, we learn about ourselves through our parents, our friends, and through what we see in the media.

Often, though, we are our own worst critics—what we see in the mirror is far more flawed than what our friends might see when they look at us.

Each of us are made up of many colours, and once we begin to accept our uniqueness, we can rest as confidently as this figure sprawled upon her couch.”

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