Diaspora Wails

By : Karine Mkrdichyan

what they never tell you 

is when you leave 

when you flee 

you will 

never 

get back 

this thing more 

gripping than genocide 

colonialism occupation war 

 

you will lose you 

 

when you take someone’s identity // you take the air out their lungs

 

diaspora seduction 

mythic you are 

unattainable 

always slipping 

out my grasp 

 

you cant reassemble what was 

we are shattered cross this dirt 

 

a dream cant be strangled 

or realized 

these cut deeper 

than 

any government 

bullet.

Karine Mkrdichyan is a writer and poet based in Los Angeles.

REMEMBER ME

 

“Remember Me”
By Andrés C. López

I am calling on the voices of our ancestors
Those from the past and future
So that when I speak
I speak the words we were never meant to hear

(Repeat throughout)
Remember me                                      Remember me
                                                               When I am gone
Remember me                                      Remember me
                                                               When I no longer traverse the physical side of our spirits
Remember me                                      Remember me
                                                               When you feel like you’re alone
Remember me                                      Remember me
                                                               When you think you’re the only one
Remember me                                      Remember me
                                                               Remember me
Remember me                                      Remember

                                                               I belong
                                                               to a plethora of communities and identities
                                                               And yet in the politics of belonging
                                                               I am lost in the noise
                                                               because I do not exist

                                                               I do not exist
                                                               in the imaginaries of a society that thinks
                                                               they’ve already killed me

                                                               …

                                                               But I am still here
                                                               I come from a long line of people who are still here
                                                               I am the incarnation
                                                               of the blood, sweat, and tears
                                                               of groups of people never meant to survive
                                                               of communities that have been silenced and killed
                                                               of groups of people who cannot afford
                                                               to never look back
(repeated)                                              to forget
I am here
We’re all here                                        I am here
                                                               
                                                               I am here
                                                               as the manifestation of
                                                               the lives, land, and history that was stolen from us
                                                               I am here
                                                               because other people I will never meet or even know
about
                                                               can’t
                                                               I am here
                                                               because the Academy thinks I can be their token
                                                               I am here
                                                               because of the courage of Black women to share
                                                               their vision for new futures through their words
                                                               I am here
                                                               because in the story of where I was born
                                                               I wound up receiving the paper
                                                               that afford me the privilege of passing
                                                               as someone from the U.S.
                                                               And yet the inevitable question always comes up,
                                                              “Where are you from?

                                                                I am from here,
                                                                and from there
                                                                and from a lot of different places
                                                                I carry with me

                                                                Can’t you see it in my body and my brown skin
                                                                Can’t you feel the lashes of the whip
                                                                that my grandmother took for sugar cane?
                                                                Can’t you see the silence in my eyes at the knowledge
                                                                that you stole everything?

                                                                I am from here,
                                                                and from there,
                                                                and from a lot of different places
                                                                and I’m trying to remember what you took away from us

                                                                I’m trying to remember
                                                                the lives of ancestors come to past
                                                                the ways of our people
                                                                and yet I cannot undo the fuckery that are my homes
today
                                                                I cannot undo the destruction
                                                                I cannot undo
                                                                me

                                                                All I can do is try to move forward
                                                                All I can do is remember
                                                                Remember
                                                                Remember

                                                               So that in a future soon to come
                                                               We will never be forgotten
             
                                                               Remember me
       
                                                               Remember

                                                               Remember


Andrés is a Latinx trans and queer writer, poet, musician, and scholar. His activism, pedagogy, work, and artistic projects center the lives and experiences of queer and trans folks of color. Currently, he is a doctoral student in Women, Gender, and Sexuality Studies with a Minor in Queer Studies at Oregon State University. Andrés is also one of the Editorial Assistants for Feminist Formations, a journal published by Johns Hopkins University Press.

Engaging the Future in Dreams: Race and the Failure of Fandom

By: Angela Stanley (Theme 3)

A teen mother gives birth to a baby. “Congratulations, it’s a girl!” the doctor says. A family comes together to raise the child. Their collective goal is to give that child the best future they can. The family hopes that this little baby can realize dreams beyond her circumstance. Dreams of gaining an education beyond that of her parents’ and close family. Dreams of entering into a lifelong career and not just a job to make ends meet. Dreams of following her passion. Dreams of a white wedding and children. Dreams of grandchildren and a life fully lived, experienced and seized. Dreams of ‘a passing’ on to the great beyond with no regrets, surrounded by love. These were the dreams that birthed me into being.

A being that has embraced some of those dreams while repudiating others much to the chagrin of those dreamers. This is the trouble with passing on dreams to another. There is always the possibility that the one for whom we have dreams and expectations of, will fall short of them. However, is it that we have fallen short of the incorporation of those dreams or that we have birthed dreams for ourselves? The future is a diaphanous concept, one that exists as something that we believe to be true but is so hazy that it can easily slip through our fingertips. However, we put an enormous amount of energy, time and resources into it.

What do I imagine when I think of the future? As a recent convert to the trekkie life. I’ve been fascinated by the hints of today that I see in the future depicted on the show. I’m currently on the final season of The Next Generation and I am surprised, although I am not sure why, by the fact that I very rarely see myself on this show embodied within the main cast. Even the most uncomplicated representation of black womanhood, i.e. the physical presence of a black woman, only makes a guest appearance. In fact, the only representations of blackness are men (Lt. Cmdr. Geordi La Forge and Lt. Cmdr. Worf, and the only representation of women are overwhelmingly white. This echoes the sentiments of black feminists of the 1960s, which undergirded the 2016 twitter hashtags #alltheblacksaremen #allthewomenarewhite, that confronts the erasure of black women and their involvements in civil rights movements and mainstream society and representation.

The main cast of Star Trek: The Next Generation

Copied from: http://www.startrek.com/database_article/star-trek-the-next-generation-synopsis

Perhaps, I am picking on Star Trek a bit. Perhaps I am expecting too much from a show that premiered in 1987. This show was meant to be a depiction of a time lightyears into the future, but I found myself thinking a lot about the stereotypes that seemed to overwhelm the narrative. If we take the example of Lt. Cmdr. Worf, it was curious to me that he happens to be from the Klingon warrior race as opposed to the Vulcan race. Being Klingon comes with a fascinating array of weapons, impressive fighting skills and its own specific language. However, I cannot help but parallel this to the way that black people are thought of within a north American context. In particular, black males are thought to be practically always reaching for a weapon, sometimes that weapon is a toy truck or their very bodies. They are believed to be just so much stronger than the average (read: white) male or female. That is to say they have innate strength and fighting skills. And they have their own ‘language’ although to be fair, among mainstream society Klingon is more legitimate than African American Vernacular English (AAVE), patois, or creole. The latter two are spoken by people within the Caribbean and the Caribbean diaspora. It is fascinating to me how people can find words like ‘bae’, ‘turnt’, or ‘gyal’ totally unintelligible but will launch into entire rhapsodies about the sentence structure of Klingon and Elvish, without even thinking of the racist implications that underpin what they perceive to be intelligible.

I think what is forgotten when we discuss the future is that the future on television requires the belief of the viewing public of today. In this regard, the future is really not about people and personal relations, it is actually about the language, the technology even the clothing that we can conceive of. In a future represented on television, creators do not dream of a cast equally represented without a heavy turn to stereotype. It cannot. The North American mainstream viewing public is not ready to see that. If they were, we would not have so many movies and TV shows where the saviours of ‘the future’ are all white, and where the idea of a black stormtrooper causes shockwaves and negative backlash.  

For many of us, the future can be something that exists days or years ahead while for others it exists alongside the current time period. It exists in alternate societies that house mutant families or individuals with extra sensory and fantastical abilities. It requires a special letter for admittance and a knack for hiding within the normal to create space for the fantastic. But how can we plan for a future when very few of the futuristic examples reflect who we are? Whose future are we cheering on when we watch the latest mutant, post apocalyptic, magical future?

Even in the area of fantasy and dreams where one can be anything they want, and do anything they want, I am forced to scavenge to find someone that looks like me. I remember reading the first Harry Potter book and imagining myself in Hermione Granger. She had my black hair struggles, she was just like my friends and I who were smart and had lofty scholarly ambitions. It was a disappointment when the role was played by a young white girl whose hair could only be described as mildly teased in the movies. Then the stage play for Harry Potter and the Cursed Child cast a black woman as the adult Hermione Granger, and I thought to myself, ‘perhaps she was me after all’. Nonetheless, without that casting I am forced to make do with imagining myself within the character’s body that matches some my personality traits, if nothing else. I am told that to believe in this future presented to me I must imagine myself not existing, I must suspend belief in my existence except to show up as an older wiser alien being whose mothering instinct comes with a full bar rail.

To quote this publication’s theme, “credibility has a lineage…it requires power to maintain its credibility” (Cheuk, 2017). The future on earth as per the lineage of the imaginaries of the 1960s to the 21st century seems to occlude me. It is for this reason that I find myself drawn to Jose Munoz’s work on dis-identification (Munoz, 1997). In particular, I am interested in his theory that one must dis-identify with the mainstream in order to accrue the parts of the self that get lost when one is forced to assimilate to mainstream culture, or in this case mainstream futurity. And I am bolstered in my hope for the future in part due to the versions of myself that are increasingly available outside of mainstream television viewing.

My future is imagined in these moments. These moments of futurity that are embodied within the lives of those within my chosen community point to their own lineage. The credibility of its existence is visualized as it is lived by those who exist outside of the mainstream media, whose stories are too messy, too fantastical, or even too ordinary for this medium. This futurity also finds a home in those ancestral dreams. For me, rewriting futurity requires imagining myself outside the mainstream within the realm of dreams. Dreams that encompass the far-flung future or the future as captured within someone else’s present. Dreams that have to exist outside of the mainstream since even the best depiction of my future within it, centers my oppression, not me.

References

Muñoz, J. (1997). "The White to Be Angry": Vaginal Davis's Terrorist Drag. Social Text, (52/53), 81-103. doi:10.2307/466735

Bio: Angela Stanley is a first year PhD student in the Gender, Feminist and Women's Studies Program at York University. She holds an MA in Critical Disability Studies, also from York University. Her research pays attention to the intersection of race/culture, queerness and disability in order to understand how people make sense of their intimate and sexual lives. Her work so far has centered on the perceptions of beauty, sexuality and desirability that inform how young queer and disabled  people create intimate and/ or sexual partnerships.  

 

Normalizing Dystopia

By: *Margot Bergman (Theme 2 & 3: Land & Place/Re-writing Futurities )

This month marks the one year anniversary of the Fort McMurray Wildfire. Another dystopia made real. I feel for the people of Fort McMurray and the hardship they endured during the fire, and in the recovery. My love for the community and the place of Fort McMurray exists in tension with my critiques of the industrial mega projects for oil extraction that sustain this city. I write, think, and research from this place of contradiction.  

Environmental movements have drawn upon the fantasy universe of J.R.R. Tolkien's Mordor to describe the landscapes of the oil extraction found north of Fort McMurray, Alberta. Oil sands, bituminous sands, tar sands – this oil deposit has many names. Deep open pit mines and large tailings ponds, filled with toxic byproducts of the oil production create the visuals of Sauron's kingdom in real life. 

 

(image credit: Alex MacLean, https://www.desmog.ca/2014/07/02/photos-famed-photographer-alex-maclean-s-new-photos-canada-s-oilsands-are-shocking)

This land is also Treaty 8 land. Home to Cree, Dene and Metis people who have taken care of this land for millenia. The 'discovery' of oil in the tarry sands of the Athabasca River banks, and the subsequent technological 'advancements' that made extracting this oil profitable have radically transformed the landscape of these territories and the ability to sustain life on them.

My family has had a hand in these transformations, both in Fort McMurray, but also in the projects to 'settle' the West more generally. As white, protestant and European my ancestors were given free land under the Homestead Act of 1862. Mirroring their migration West for economic opportunity, my own immediate family migrated to Fort McMurray for the opportunities and economic prosperity possible in the oil industry. Opportunity and prosperity that come as a result of Indigenous displacement and environmental destruction.

Yet, however industrial and destructive, this landscape is not hidden from view for those who live and work here. The summer I worked at one of the mines, the bus that dropped me off and picked me up each day drove past the tailings ponds every single day. Like any industrial space, it is dusty and utilitarian. Located in the vast boreal forests of Northern Alberta, the work site is a stark shift from the dense forests that line the highway north. Yet, it was also normal.

Even as I child I drove by these ponds with my parents for company 'take your kid to work day' events or out to site after the buses stopped running to take my Mom home after she worked late. There are also tourist attractions just outside the sites. 'Giants of Mining' features the massive machinery used to mine the oil out of the ground. As well there are walking trails in the reclaimed areas -  a place where there used to be mines but have now been turned into a nature reserve, on which one oil company manages a herd of Wood Bison. School trips to these attractions and family outings with visiting relatives made these landscapes familiar. It is easy to dismiss the significance of the resistance against the tar sands when you know the place so intimately that you become desensitized to its most striking and destructive views. The normalization of the landscape proved to be the basis for this fiction.

(image credit: Alex McLean, https://www.desmog.ca/2014/07/02/photos-famed-photographer-alex-maclean-s-new-photos-canada-s-oilsands-are-shocking)

Instead of Mordor-like moonscapes, you see “overburden” being removed to access the oil. Instead of tailings ponds as threat to wildlife and groundwater, you see scientific advancement, experiments testing the latest innovations in cleaning up the ponds, and eventually a new area to be reclaimed for bison grazing land. Why all the fuss, it’s not like they're hiding it?

When I returned to Fort McMurray and the tailings ponds for the 2014 Healing Walk, led by the Athabasca Chipewyan First Nation to draw attention to the impacts of the oil industry in the region, I realized just how desensitized I had become. Walking the loop that passes the Syncrude and Suncor sites, elders led ceremonies in the four directions to heal the toxic waters. Walking the 16km loop took hours in the hot sun. I watched as people around me stood next to the ponds and wept. Those who didn't shed tears still fell solemn, and their unease made me question why I was calm and unaffected by the sights. Across the highway from the grassy meadow filled with wildflowers where we stopped for lunch you could hear the air cannons booming, the sound carrying across the tailings ponds to scare birds from landing on the deadly waters.

(image credit: Michael Stewart, http://rabble.ca/blogs/bloggers/michael-stewart/2014/07/healing-boomtown-final-healing-walk-offers-hope-breaking-tar-#.U7wiykHmgOc.twitter)

As the tailings ponds evaporate sand is left behind; leaving wide stretches of land next to the highway looking like a desert, dunes rippled by the wind where once a dense forest stood. It is these sandy stretches and the deep open pit mines that people have described this place as a moonscape, Hiroshima, and Mordor. Visiting celebrities often coin these terms. Many do the flyover tour, to lend their fame to the Athabasca Chipewyan First Nation or to make an example of the region in the fight against climate change.

The tar sands are at the heart of so many struggles. At the Healing Walk were land defenders, water protectors, and activists from all corners of Turtle Island. People fighting the pipelines needed to move tar sands oil, that threatened their communities. Projects named Keystone XL, and Kinder Morgan's Transmountain and the Northern Gateway pipeline. People who lived next to the refineries that processed this oil told us how their air and water was polluted with impunity. The impacts that tar sands oil had on communities far and wide connected struggles and drew me into the ways in which I had understood this place, and had normalized what the consequences actually were.

What happens to a dystopian landscape when you become used to it? What work is required to re-sensitize you? What futures can be imagined?

Re-encountering my hometown and the industry that sustains it in 2014 shaped how I understood dystopian. It wasn't a near future wasteland devastated by climate change or nuclear war of the novels and movies we all know, but the reality of what is already being destroyed, and more troubling, what is acceptable to be destroyed.

My friends and family back home, who have worked in mining and oil and gas for decades, think I'm too pessimistic. Or more accurately – too unrealistic. When I fail to produce solutions or alternate energy sources out of thin air, I am charged with not 'living in reality'. I am denying the reality of how to fill a gas tank, how to heat a home in the middle of a Northern Albertan winter, or more damning, not being real about how to pay for either of these things.

Not living in the real world is an interesting accusation. The insistence to be realistic references a reality that has a credibility, and to quote the prompt from this theme on dystopia, “credibility has a lineage. It has an epistemology. It has a historicity. And most of all, it requires power to maintain its credibility.” (Cheuk 2017). In essence, we deny some facts to maintain our own fictions. Fictions that keep oil flowing, and as a result have the power of the state and all of its violence behind it. But denying the experiences and realities of those who suffer the consequences of these industries and economies, is to live in another kind of fiction.

Dystopian fiction and films are meant to shock us, meant to forewarn us about the path we have been on for centuries and the destruction it will lead us to. But they also offer futures that can still be re-imagined, futures where the failures of our most vicious systems and structures provide the wisdom and food for building a new, just world. The Healing Walk gave us a glimpse at this future, and a fiction worth fighting for.