The views expressed in the texts do not necessarily represent the views of the artist.
i.
No one in the village will tell her. The repossessed house. Her childhood home. The rotting wood. Four rooms. Iron stove. A table. A mother and a father. Two sisters, little brother. Grandmother. Sand dunes, grasslands, reed-lined backwaters, tiny white farms. Disassembled.
Poïesis clangour. Percussive bowing. Scavenging emptiness. Improvisation, nomadic process. Obsessive. The marginal and maimed. That which is cast out. A place of no place. Into the nothing. Riffing off these lines. Her mother reporting the bad news. Or retelling old bad news. Keeping track of shapeless, violent births; confessions and letters; the omen unfolding in real life. Shuffling. Slurring. Inept.
A purple iris. Faceless, carrying her. Name folded into another name. Put black paint back to its unblemishedness. Unbruised.
ii.
Wading in warm mud. A womb. Tales of sexual predation. Cruel loneliness.
This article contains references to a variety of forms of abuse.
I do not have the privilege to consider discussions of violence as intriguing places to display my intellect. I do not have the privilege to enter these talks as though it’s a game, to ‘play’ and say things in the tone of a dramatized television series politician before leaving the ideas behind when I exit the arena.
Instead I teach and I speak and I read and I write and I talk and I laugh and my body is still injured by the lazy romanticizations of violence from people who consider it meaningful because of its perceived deviance and sense of foreignness from their experiences, like the teenage boy who thinks he will become a man the first time he has sex. I am patient and I learn and I speak to paid listeners and I meditate and I fight and I exercise and I control addictions to substances or work or hobbies or people and I am still haunted by ghosts and still I react to conflicts in public that others have the luxury to laugh off.
Look at the people around you. Whether you are on the bus or at work or in line or in class or at the gym or in a library or in a grocery store or on the sidewalk many of the people around you do not have the luxury to ponder the presence of violence because they are hurt, trying to heal, about to be attacked again.
I often see groups of people who have not been injured ruminating among themselves over how violence feels or should feel or if it exists at all. Never do these talkers consider to ask the person with the snapped rib if their pain feels real. The argument seems instead that it is impossible to break a bone if the person speaking has not had their bones broken.
Whole cities, planets, must not exist to these people.
Survivors of violence do not have the luxury to engage in such conversations about the illusory nature or impact of violence because we are busy tearing off band-aids and pouring peroxide over wounds or wincing as wrists are pulled and re-broken. We do not consider to ask one another for proof because we have seen the x-rays.
Right now, you likely can’t tell which person around you is surviving violence because we have learned that hiding the tangible evidence of the faults for those who have attacked us is more important than our well-being. Complicated by the fact that Canadian society prefers to punish those who have been attacked than to address those who attack others, we blend. Because so much violence is also not as tangible as a bruise, hiding it is easier than you might think.
While many of these survivors around you listen to the opinions of those who have not been hurt about the proper ways to heal, know they do not take them seriously when they choose to philosophize about the existence or impact of violence. Let’s say a few volleyball players who have never played hockey suggest that hockey should be banned from television because it is too violent. In the least, they suggest, remove all checking from the sport. As a hockey player, how seriously do you take their opinion?
“I often see groups of people who have not been injured ruminating among themselves over how violence feels or should feel or if it exists. Never do these talkers consider to ask the person with the snapped rib if their pain feels real.”
1. The first glaring flaw of the anti-trigger warning speaker is that they believe their opinion to be binding. How seriously do surgeons take the advice of people who have never studied medicine?
2. The weakest and least creative arguments use violence as seasoning. Ask a survivor how much violence improved or ‘exoticized’ their life. How appreciative they were for the growth provided by the experience. The impulse to use trauma tourism as an attempt to expand the perceived depth of one’s personality or work is a mistake. Put in the work or do not touch the subject.
3. The laziest flaw of anti-trigger warnings is a confused connection to censorship. This is the volleyball player who, when a goalie asks for a helmet, suggests that goalies should not wear helmets because they won’t play if they wear them. Besides ignoring the request, this reaction is based on a bizarre logic and seems inspired by a fear of complexity, more designed to rationalize intellectual laziness than to resolve an urgent problem.
“A few volleyball players who have never played hockey suggest that hockey should be banned from television because it is too violent. In the least, they suggest, ban checking from the sport. How seriously do you take their opinion?”
4. The thin foundation of anti-trigger warning advocates is the suggestion that it is possible to speak about a topic without being political. That language has the capacity to be objective-as though omission and history and socialization are separable from experience as a socialized person speaking a language. This is particularly embarrassing to hear when the people are speaking English. Ask nations across the world how they came to learn this language.
5. The person without a history of violence who resists trigger warnings suggests that the bodies around them do not matter as much as the protection of their isolated beliefs.Neurologists have demonstrated that memory of pain and language registers in the same part of the brain as does immediate physical pain.
The last objective of any serious critical discussion should the impossible attempt to exempt ourselves from complicity through passionate defenses of laziness in order to avoid fixing a critical problem. Passive inaction is required for many forms of violence to continue. Don’t be an accessory to murder because your ego was too threatened to adapt.
To the anti-trigger warning camp: grow out of the lazy philosophical presumptions of being able to speak for ‘all’ and ask how to become the accomplices of survivors in your classrooms, in your workplaces, in your romantic relationships, and among your friends, who may not have felt comfortable sharing their history of trauma with you. If they don’t want to talk about it, don’t probe. If they do, help them to destroy the insecure ways of socializing people that has normalized and required violence to exact legitimacy (see: mass incarceration; we’re legitimate because we attacked ______ to keep you safe). This philosophy of power has trickled into the structures of our social relationships.
These models of social power relations are outdated and will be crushed. What side will you be on when they are history? The side furiously suggesting that they were not affected by words? Or the side that acknowledged the humanity of those around them and who worked to dismantle the violence that they internalized, from where their luxuries were drawn?
“The last objective of any serious discussion should be the impossible attempt to exempt ourselves from complicity through passionate defenses of laziness in order to avoid resolving a critical problem.”
I want to conclude with a complication of the “survivors” I’ve been using in this piece. I am referring to survivors of violence. I am a ‘survivor’ of child abuse. I do not aim to speak on behalf of all child abuse survivors. We are nuanced. The last time I checked, for example, a cousin of mine was abusing women in the way that he was abused by a woman as a child. I would likely be doing the same should I have lived through his exact conditions because conditions are largely responsible for the development of abusive behaviours (to avoid pain). I fail and I have failed others and I continue to fail for a variety of other attacked groups. Accepting the imperfections of my attempts because of my status as a nuanced human being seems vital to moving forward, toward healthier and less-violent ways of organizing and relating to each other. Protecting self-assessed conceptions of my illusory perfection through passionate defenses of laziness does not.
If you are unable to move past the guilt, and you are not a person dealing with trauma, know that we do not take your tantrums on violence seriously. You may threaten us. You may even attack us. Know that these reactions prove that our society relies on violence when it does not want to do the work of fixing a complex problem. Aligning yourself with passionate laziness is a bad look. Engaging with complex issues requires patience, and we are ready for you to learn how to be an accomplice and join us in the fight. Know that we will also be complete without it.*
The colour, “bla bla bla,” was provided by illustrator Marie Mainguy, who does not necessarily endorse the opinions of the author
16 minutes left of class. The seconds drift onto the floor, clustering like fallen leaves or crumpled love notes around her converse shoes. Laughter seeps sideways from her mouth – I inhale her sounds. Filling the blank spaces on the corners of my notebook with cryptic doodles. Inside jokes nestled on the pages, shading in the loopy curves with tenderness. She slips me a mint, like any other day, under the roaming eyes of the teacher and spinning discussion, which floats to the florescent lights in a hazy, vapid way. I follow the din upwards, over her curly hair and alight on the fire alarm, with vague notions of apprehension and pensive yearning.
Today, the mint is imbued with significations, defining our comfy closeness on her worn yellow couch and clandestine ice cream escapades (alternating spoons of chocolate ripple and gossip) with flaming gravity. We snicker together over something trivial, then with giddiness I alone levitate equidistant to her forehead. The bell sounds and the class streams out. We tumble to the water fountain together and pause. She splashes over me with her usual locutions while I take a long sip of water.
The water is icy and clarifies my thoughts. 6 months of uncertainty. 6 weeks of contemplation. I’m bobbing here, staring at the grandeur of the stars from this makeshift raft. Her crocked elbow is my mooring. The water ebbs unceasingly. I feel seasick (or is it butterflies?). She’s never had a boyfriend. We’ve held hands in the hallways. Oh to hell with it, I dive in.
My statement, a small confession of love, comes to her in small timid waves. We are the last ones in the building. I’m fixated on those worn converses again; her feet dance nervously while I’m a shipwrecked mess, letting the waves pass through my lips. The rocks hold me steadfast on the hopes for our relationship; they are sharp and make my voice waver more than I’d like.
Her features are catatonic. She contorts her face into a sympathetic smile. I surface into the glaring sunlight. Her face is burnt; she doesn’t understand my watery, viscous existence. These mermaid musings mean nothing to her. My ears are clogged. I feel the palpable pressure of her discomfort; my skin is cracking as impressions of my declaration sink into her body.
Another bell sounds. I slink back into the water, my element. Half coherent and murky, I don’t need to define myself or reveal my pinings to anyone. I’ll cry tonight, alone, but gather my tears as jewels. Later, I’ll string them together and wear them on my neck, something beautiful and brave.
For now, I drift away. A current pulls her brisk minty existence away from my waterlogged love.
From the author: “I was inspired by this artwork to write a story about an experience of revealing your romantic affection to a friend of the same gender. The blue material at the bottom of the piece expressed to me both bed sheets and water. I interpreted the water as a symbol of renewal and rebirth, which I related to coming out with your sexual orientation.
The positioning of the legs also gave me the impression of figuratively “diving in” to a relationship or a new experience. The opaqueness of the blue inspired me to think of the colour as a form of protection, which I developed later in the story. Furthermore, the vertical tiered nature of the piece affected the progression of my story, while the Facebook friendship sign symbolized the ambiguities of relationships, especially during adolescence as we have a tendency to question our sexuality.”
It’s winter and it is snowing pastel. Réal is selling the magazine again, in front of the pharmacy. He is a camelot in French. It means he stands on the corner and holds out a periodical to passers-by. In this digital age, one would expect a mobile app to do the job – but Réal is ubiquitous to me every day, in every weather.
His permanent frown had led me to assume he was a grumpy guy. My dad would have said Réal just didn’t flex his smile-muscle. I had just moved to the area where he was assigned, and he had quickly become a landmark to avoid. Crossing over to the southern sidewalk, dodging his broody stare, I would wonder if he was trying to repel us.
Us, one-time customers, potential long-term subscribers, do we get a smile?
I might have irreversibly fallen for the comfortable trimmings of preprogrammed greetings: into barista prickly welcome, fake customer service friendliness, miscalculated voicemail inflections. All I had to do was talk to him, and his forested eyes lit his nested face, teeth standing strong like elder mountains, uncovered by a dissipating set of clouds.
I had to question Réal about his salesmanship. We had broken down our assumptions, flooded the gutter with cigarette breaks and all apprehensions of human contact had melted away with the season. Had he ever tried to vary his approach? Tried talking to people directly? I wanted to ask him, in a medical way, would he try smiling?
I said, Réal, how can you get more people to buy your magazine?
He gets fifty percent commission – the rest goes to support persons without homes. Increasing the clientele helps people in need. I wanted to feel that I could help Réal help customers help the magazine help the homeless.
He said he had tried many approaches, but the way he was doing it right now was the way that worked best for him. It just wasn’t him otherwise.
His frown was his unique selling point and I was someone who had fallen for it.
It is nice that flowers come right after snow. You would expect the castaway autumn leaves to leap back onto their branches, like a rewound tape, so as not to startle the scenery. Like an old hand-drawn cartoon, autumn colors swirling in reverse, smudging circles into the background. But spring here comes like an overdue vagabond, and Réal is a perce-neige in French. It’s Flower for “snowdrop”. But instead of insinuating gravity, perce-neige pushes its stem through the ice asking for the sun.
From the author: “This foot goes naked every other second. It made me think of how someone could find themselves bare from one day to the next, how the cycle of homelessness can be brought upon by a single striking event. Conversely, the shoe appearing reminded me of the resilience I’ve witnessed, from support networks and individuals that work within and through issues of homelessness and displacement.”
She dreamt in tiny fists. The fever pushed at her eyelids when she kept them shut, and leaked out and over when they were open. Each morning Nathanael came to her with tea and the newspaper and an orange but every afternoon she woke to find the tea cold and the orange so soft and pungent she had to pick up and throw it away, an effort that made her grunt—a wild sound against the curtains.
She didn’t know what day it was, or what time it could possibly be. She only knew that she threw the oranges in the afternoons because of the clock that ticked like loss on the blue wall. Sometimes she threw the orange at the clock, but it was invincible.
Each hour became a cold and wobbly upper arm that no one ever touched or thought about. Perhaps this was what depression was like, she thought, as she blew her wretched nose and spluttered into the sleeve of her dirty nightie, but it wasn’t: she could see that through the waves.
Once, after throwing the orange and wondering for a long time whether it had landed on the air vent where she imagined it heating up and bleeding out onto the floor, she sat up and turned and bent her legs and lifted, and then she stood.
Her head was still on the pillow as she rocked gently there on the carpet. Eventually it met her in its place and together they walked to the corner of the room where the orange lay, nowhere near the air vent, perched on top of a yellow dress she had forgotten all about.
She laughed then and coughed and a purple snake slid past her foot before she tipped herself back in and under the covers.
Nathanael came at night to pick up the oranges and dispose of the bits of newspaper she had used as tissues. One night he had six heads—one night, seven incredulous eyes. Then there was the night that he had one face, and it was beautiful, and she wished she would recover so she could love it better and kiss it more.
That was the night it was over. Suddenly her stomach ached for food; it writhed and echoed with hunger. Can I have some soup, she asked, lightly and without commotion. Nathanael smiled and opened the curtains to the moon.
From the writer: “When I first saw this piece of art, I was instantly reminded of a dream; a feverish dream of the sort you have when you are ill with the flu, and sleep is confused and brief and uncomfortable, with a sort of sick surrealism just around the next corner.
When I have had a serious case of the flu in the past, I remember thinking in quick bursts about things that later made no sense. I remember having no appetite except for relief from the heat and the pain, and I remember feeling like I was going to be sick forever and ever. This story is an attempt at encapsulating how it feels to have the flu, and the dream-like nature of being stuck inside an unrelenting fever.”
Mufasa is dead. The new king explores his new jungle with the same good blood in his paws as his father: Tempted by hyenas with black voices, he says, watch the throne- let’s go, Nala. The death of a perfect someone is meant to piss you off: Evil characters aren’t supposed to survive. You learn that lions are either good or evil, and it’s up to you to kill the right one.Painting Scar evil means giving him dark features that people will associate with having an empty heart, alligator tears, blackness associated with evil, subtle racism sold in cartoons, animals succeeding or failing through their relationship to the perfect hero warns kids that if you don’t try to become perfect, you’ll become Scar: Sad. What the fuck, this guy’s criticizing cartoons, I just liked the songs, get over it, Hakuna matata, brother.I know: I get it: We shouldn’t analyse everything to death, weren’t the colours nice, just enjoy Rafiki, dickhead.When stories show people who are all good or all bad, the Americans and Russians of Hollywood explosions; the Scars and Mufasas of cartoon jungles; when the story of a crack dealer going to jail is played before the CEO of a billion dollar drug dealer announcing it will take advantage of your desire to help others and introduce a pink line of drug packaging; when the viral video of the poorest black person saying something stupid is prefaced with a Lexus commercial; when good or bad characters are included in any form of media you are supposed to feel one of four things: 1. Don’t become bad, this is how to stay good, this is what I should buy, and this is the group that can help bring me there… just look at what happened to Scar: All that fire. 2. Good people help bad people become better, so they don’t die, like Scar, because they are so nice. 3. You can become good if you work harder: It’s possible to become perfect: You can become white, rich, and saved. We sell a cream for that. Ever heard of hell? 4. Bad people always lose to good people, so stay on the good side and don’t forget that bad and good people exist: We’ve done studies: Your heart is either full, or broken: This rumour that human beings are actually mixes, with hearts of daffodil yellow or pylon orange or mint green is just a rumour: Mufasa was not sometimes helpful, sometimes in need of help, sometimes tired,sometimes intelligent, sometimes unsure, sometimes fun, sometimes strong, sometimes boring, sometimes patronizing, sometimes insecure, sometimes excited, sometimes friendly, sometimes introverted, sometimes: All this realism, no, he is always perfect. The complicated nature of people isn’t sexy.It’s hard to sell when you’re trying to hook people in for a later message, the whole become good thing, Join Us, and you want people to stay in the room or to read the next page. Insert an empty page between chapters, or double-space your pages, but it had better have fake characters. When we sit up from the death of Scar, from a video warning us not to become poor, from a book talking of a perfect love, we need to wonder who benefits from the way you now think. How hard do you now work, how much are you buying, are you going to Church? In order to give people credit, we need to look at them like human beings, where there is no objective standard of pure good or pure bad. You’re stuck in a jungle, and that hierarchy rarely changes- except in the death of a king. And who replaces Mufasa?
I remember the earth. I remember when oceans were blue, and you could buy a woman dinner without having to split the bill. I remember before water ran black, when you could roam the streets at night, gazing at stars. I remember the end of the world. You’ve been told it collapsed with the nuclear reactor, those companies, that kitten, but I remember that it died with chivalry. I remember objectively, and I understood the fall completely: What was the point of living if it wasn’t to protect something? The earth had protected us with oxygen, gravity, and water for thousands of years, just as we had protected our women, keeping them safe like delicate flowers. We understood that women were strong, and deserved our respect, these tough, delicate flow- hold on that’s contradictory let me try again: In a time of text messages and technology, we had strayed so far from what was natural: The wind and water the earth had given us; lessons our ancestors had shared with us, those morals that told us what was true, untainted, passed down by our fathers to us from a time when things made sense: A man did what a man did, came home to dinner, kept real problems to himself and the bartender, or shot himself in the face: Things were working: Women acted like women, and everything worked perfectly, in the past: “Dating” a woman meant what it really should: To protect and provide for them, these strong, delicate flowers, being delicate but really strong and intellige- Sorry okay confusing I know last try: Things made sense. People today: walking into newspaper stands because of texting, finding ‘love’ in the club: They’ve lost touch with purity, as our oceans did. I’m not sure how much to blame each person- the system is a big thing that trains everyone to act, sure- but we were the only generation who acted free of the system, with independent ideas. Everything was better when lines didn’t overlap, and you didn’t need to understand how it worked: Your wife looked up to you, and you didn’t ask why. You could knock some sense into a kid, because they needed discipline. You were there to protect your woman from the evils of the world, because they needed protection. Sometimes, for example, you bought her dinner. Ask me if she ever paid for dinner. The answer is no: Men were strong, rational protectors, and so we didn’t need someone to pay for us. The world was together, controlled and pure. You really got to know someone in dinner dates, where you paid, and brought the prepared version of yourself, saying things you had seen on TV or that people had told you, your father, mother, teachers, friends, things that you didn’t understand but it didn’t matter. You avoided awkward conversations on who you were, and how you felt, because the point of talking to people was to make them feel comfortable. You saved those times for when you were really intoxicated. And now- look at what we’ve done. I remember the earth. I remember a time before we tried to convince people that women were our equals- I mean how do you protect someone who is your equal- how do you show power, and buy them dinner? I remember a time before the death of chivalry, when we lived on planet motherfucking earth.*
Flywheel, clutch disk, crankshaft. Breaking it down to understand why it worked the way that it did. No, not how. Fan belt, rocker arm, alternator. You will itemize the parts, yes, all of them, for the project, with a brief description of their function, yes, every one, and how they affect the engine when it is running- it’s the logical place for us to start the class. Wise words from Telford, AUTO 1102A. Breaking down a family photograph to figure how odd shapes fit. Black palms smudged a hand-drawn draft of the 2010 Camry 2.4 litre, fingerprints smearing a tin hood, near a dent from the past winter. Bent, imperfect. Her mother out for the weekend, the garage cold, a window might have been left open, or the furnace had stopped working, but she wasn’t sure, and who was to blame her.
Her friend left when the heavy work was finished. Alone, with cylinder separated, she considered how their tastes were so different, seeing that their brains were formed under similar variables, having grown up in the same neighbourhood- over two fences- with similar families- alcohol holidays, massive debt- leaned on the same desks- MPS, NGDHS, The Gonq- and dated the same guys- straight white drunks. Twice, they dated brothers.
She liked Buzzfeed, her friend: Reddit. Maybe that was it. Her friend liked Vine, her: Youtube. Her: Gmail, Dropbox, Wikipedia. Friend: Yahoo, iCloud, Google. Mac? PC. Samsung? iPhone. Identical wiring soaking up different images and words to influence different tastes. She dropped the box wrench. She played out the thesis, considering how it explained her friends’ preference for pubs (from watching Arcade Fire and Chvrches videos) while she preferred the club (Drizzy VEVO).
Separating fan belt from crankshaft pulley, she compiled a list of things she had learned from the internet in 2013:
1. Haters own keyboards
2. Miley Cyrus invented grinding
3. People are happy on Facebook
4. All Americans own pistols
5. All gay people are white
6. All black people can dance
7. All hipsters rock beards
8. “Québecois” means “Franco-Québecois”
9. “Anglo-Québecois” means “quiet”
10. Traveling makes you intelligent
11. Lizard people are a legitimate concern
12. Over 6,000 Québecois-white-tailed-deer were hit last year
She put aside the blueprint and tore out a new page
Things Learned Independent of The Gonq Buzzfeed Wikipedia Facebook Youtube Friends & Parents
take away the tourists, the hipsters, the families
take away the seniors
take away the guitars, the bongos, the singers, the accordions
take away the homeless
take away the flowers, and lock up the mowers
take away the blind, whose vision of the place was illuminated by the smells of spilt Cheval Blanc, cigarette and charcoal barbeque
take away the water- drain it away- and plug up the fountain with cement
take away the first dates, the talkers, the shy, the too-cool-to-drink-non-organic-juice kids, the sex workers, the second, third marriages
take away the coffee cups and styrofoam boxes, wine bottles and green tops of Kiosque Mont Royal strawberries
take away the drugs
take away the music
take away the lights: Gut electricity from dépanneur fridges
take away the curd from La Banquise
you can’t take away how the light of fireworks fell through trees: How the branches split apart the light to produce nets of shadow, bending phosphorous light to tattoo blue faces black. When we met under the leaves.*
colour by Mugluck Parc Lafontaine, Montreal, 2013. Tous droits réservés Mügluck words by Liam Lachance
They wouldn’t have found each other on a PlentyofFish search.
IsabelleXoxx: looking for fun Franco-Québecois 22 Likes: movies that start with credits, lobster Interesting Story: virginity lost on picnic table Interests: recommending healthy food via Facebook, diving, watching people in cafés
MarcusForLife: LIFE IS A ROLLERCOASTER OF EMOTION 😉 Anglo-Albertan 28 Likes: bloopers at the end of a solid flic, lizards Interesting Story: lost v-card in Diddy’s limo #SWAG (!) Interests: kegstands, Micky Ds, BURNINGMAN ’08-’11
No, without a mutual dentist, they wouldn’t have met, let alone shared some seriously awkward first date dialogue: To Isabelle’s story on training her husky to defecate without a raised leg, our sly Marcus responded with yeah? Only touched one, really, at dinner.
Oh?
Oh, ha, no: It was on vacation.
Oh.
As though being on vacation cancelled the fact that you had eaten a dog. Committed murder- but it was on vacation! In any case it wasn’t the stuff of those Hollywood movies between attractive white kids, but maybe that was the point: The desire to know how you could live like that, eat dog, kept them talking. Part personality-colonialism, sure- how cute, you’re so abnormal– but it worked, and they snapped together like puzzle pieces that need different shapes to fit. Pieces that wouldn’t have snapped online because they would have ticked boxes to search for themselves. For dog-eaters. People-watchers.*
wordandcolour 
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