Their last meeting, which took  place on January 25, focused on the importance of institutional memory in considering campus food prices and accessibility prior to the pandemic, addressing the increase in cafeteria food prices, and the need to spread awareness of the ‘food crisis’ at McGill. 

Wednesday’s meeting discussed the various food related groups at McGill and the importance of joining forces to increase their impact. Organizations like SNAC, Midnight Kitchen (MK), McGill MealCare, and Le Petit Marché Étudiant, all work towards similar goals: providing affordable, sustainable produce to students, increasing food accessibility on campus, diverting food waste, and closing the gap between food producers and consumers. In 2013, the Concordia Food Coalition was formed, which unites disconnected groups advocating for food accessibility within Concordia University. The coalition oversees the Concordia Farmers Market, and incubates student-led initiatives including the Hive Cafe Co-op. They also oversee research on topics related to campus food sustainability and sovereignty as well as extensive needs assessments, surveys and interviews of Concordia food groups. The meeting members noted the importance of looking to Concordia for inspiration regarding their fight for food justice in Montreal. 

Members at the meeting specifically called attention to the need for more research and surveys to get a better sense of the student bodies’ perception on food accessibility. The most recent survey done regarding food and dining services was conducted in Winter 2018, of which the Daily was shared a copy of the results. The purpose of the survey was “to better understand the needs/expectations of the McGill community and identify opportunities for improvement in order to enhance services offered.” Notably, the results show that value for money followed by quality of food and beverages and general cleanliness ranked as the most important aspects of food services on campus, at a rate of 93 per cent, 90 per cent, and 90 per cent, respectively. Specialty beverages and fair trade products ranked as the least important aspects as 46 and 35 per cent of participants respectfully labelled them as ‘not very or not at all important.’ Furthermore, when asked about the performance of certain aspects of food services on campus, 76 per cent of respondents listed ‘value for money’ as ‘fair or poor’, while 6 per cent ranked ‘value for money’ as ‘excellent or very good’. Conversely, customer service and general cleanliness were ranked most frequently as the ‘excellent or very good’ aspects of campus food services at rates of 42 per cent and 40 per cent respectfully. Those present at the meeting called attention to the need for a more recent survey to be done, given the recent rapid inflation affecting food prices and the increased meal plan cost. Attention was also called to the  UBC 2022 Academic Experience Survey that indicated that approximately 40 per cent of undergraduate students and 50 per cent of graduate students feel food insecure. The group at the meeting called attention to the need for a similar study at McGill to assess the status of food security of its students. 

While representatives of Midnight Kitchen were present at the last meeting, none were present at this one. However, the importance of Midnight Kitchen was highlighted. Midnight Kitchen reopened in September after its closure due to COVID. In 2018 Midnight Kitchen had been forced to reduce its operations since March 2018 due to renovations occurring in the University Centre where their base was held at the time. During the pandemic, MK moved its services to focus as an emergency food bank. Prior to COVID, in 2019, Midnight Kitchen was able to serve about 300 meals weekly for pickup, and before 2019, they were serving up to 1,000 meals weekly. Now, that number has reduced to 50 meals per week due to budgetary issues, according to members at Wednesday’s meeting. Beyond its biweekly free vegan lunch offerings, MK provides free catering services for events that align with its political mandate, operates a garden seasonally, and hosts workshops and lectures relating to food preparation and security. Similarly, Concordia’s People’s Potato, a collectively-run soup kitchen offering vegan meals to students and community members, was noted. 

The last issue on the agenda for the meeting concerned the high cafeteria prices. Members at the meeting placed part of the blame for high prices on the privatization of dining services on campus. Most recently, in 2014, the private company Compass became a provider for food services at McGill. While Concordia’s food services are provided by Aramark, which served McGill until 2014, the university maintains multiple student-run food cooperatives including the Hive and Reggies. 

The next food security meeting will take place in person and online on Wednesday, February 8, the location will be determined. Follow @ssmu_ea on instagram for updates.

The post Food Insecurity on Campus appeared first on The McGill Daily.

Apartment-hunting tips and red flags: 

1. Dwelling Unit By-Laws: While dense, it might be a good idea to familiarize yourself with Montreal’s By-laws concerning the sanitation and maintenance of dwelling units to make sure the apartment you’re looking at is safe and adheres to these regulations. 

2. Pests: If you can spot mouse traps, droppings, or other signifiers of pests, chances are those pests will still be there when you move in! While pests can be fairly common, it’s important to keep in mind, and might be important to ask the current tenants about the severity of the problem, and how their landlord has helped them. Landlords are required to take corrective action within 10 business days upon alert of the presence of vermin, harmful insects, rats, or mice. 

3. Ventilation and mold: Old buildings – particularly those with poor ventilation – tend to be more susceptible to mold and other water damage related issues. When touring the apartment, the presence of mold can be indicated by spots in all colors (though often black or green) on walls, ceilings, carpets, around windows, in closets, etc. An earthy smell can also indicate the presence of mold, along with the presence of stains, buckling, peeling, or other signs of water seeping through walls or ceilings. When touring, notice if there is a build up of condensation on ceilings or windows, which could be a sign of poor ventilation. While exposure to damp and moldy environments may not cause any adverse health effects, some people are particularly sensitive and can experience a reaction to a “mold allergy” – an overall unpleasant experience! According to the City of Montreal’s by-laws, there may be no accumulation of moisture causing damage to the structure of the building, nor may there be visible presence of molds. Furthermore, ensure that bathrooms are installed with a window or mechanical ventilation, in line with the city’s by-laws concerning sanitation and maintenance of dwelling unitsunit. 

4. Heating, air conditioning, and insulation: With hot and humid summers and cold frigid winters, climate control is a crucial consideration to make when apartment-hunting. Notice if the apartment is properly insulated – are the windows double-paned? Do the walls feel thin? Can you feel a draft? Are there radiators, or another form of heating, throughout the apartment? The cost of hydro is also important to consider. Some landlords include the cost of heating and electricity in their rent, while others don’t. With the former option, you’d likely be paying a fixed cost month to month. With the latter, however, depending on the rate you pay with Hydro Quebec, you may be paying depending on your consumption for the months. In the winter, with the cost of heating this bill may go up significantly (which is why it’s especially important to make sure your apartment is well-insulated!). Pro-tip: after having been subscribed to Hydro Quebec for one year, you can enroll in the Equal Payments Plan, wherein the invoice will be the same price month to month regardless of consumption. Whether or not you can control the heating is also an important consideration to make. 

5. Light and Windows: Light and windows can be an overlooked yet very important factor to consider when looking for an apartment. A not-so-fun fact is that in Montreal, landlords can rent apartments with “bedrooms” listed that do not have a window. Rather, in bedrooms in Montreal without windows are only required a partition that allows for “borrowed light” from another room. 

What to look out for on the lease: 

1. Repairs: Ensure that the landlord is assuming responsibility for all repairs in explicit terms, and not using coded language to slouch off responsibility. Considerations for repairs should also extend to furniture as well, if the apartment is already furnished, considering that the furniture has likely been used by many tenants before you. 

2. Payment: The lease should clearly specify an agreement on the terms and conditions for paying the rent. However, notably in Quebec it is illegal for landlords to require postdated checks and/or charge additional amounts in the form of a security deposit or other charges. 

3. Rent: In Quebec, when a lease is signed, it is within your right to ask for a written notice stating the lowest rent paid in the 12 months before the start of the lease, or the rent set by the Tribunal Administratif Logement (TAL). However, this request must be made within 10 days of signing the lease. 

4. Subletting: Are you going on exchange for a semester or want to go back home for the summer? Subletting your room or apartment allows for this flexibility without having to pay rent for a place you are not staying in. A lease cannot state that a tenant is not allowed to assign or sublet the unit. 

Know and protect your rights: 

1. Visiting rights: Have you ever had your landlord or repairman randomly knock on your door? You should know that landlords must give 24 hours notice before entering the apartment – whether that’s inspecting the dwelling, or doing minor repairs. The same rule of 24 hours notice applies to scheduling visits for future prospective tenants, which can only be scheduled between 9 AM and 9 PM. 

2. Major repairs or renovations: Generally, major repairs or renovations must respect the tenant’s right to stay in their home – it is illegal for landlords to violate the “right to maintain occupancy.” If major work is being done, landlords must notify the tenant in writing at least 10 days before the work begins. This notice must include: the type of work being done, the date it will begin, an estimate as to how long it will take, and other conditions under which the work will be done. Also, work can also only be completed between 7 AM and 7 PM. Furthermore, tenants may ask to postpone the work and to reduce their rent while work is being done.

3. Heating: In an apartment wherein the heating is controlled by the landlord, the landlord is legally required to maintain an appropriate room temperature regardless of the time of year. There is actually no law nor municipal bylaw that specifies a temperature apartments should be kept at, but it is generally accepted that around 21 degrees celsius is a comfortable temperature. If you find that your landlord is overheating your apartment, you can file an appeal with the TAL. 

4. Rent increase: Landlords must notify you of rent increases within 3-6 months before the lease ends for leases of 12 months of more. For leases of less than a year, you must be notified within one or two months of the lease ending. Did you know, you can refuse a rent increase? By notifying your landlord that you refuse a rent increase, they can either accept your refusal, try to enter a friendly negotiation, or contact the TAL to rule on the change of rent. 

Finally, it’s always good practice to keep a copy of your lease as well as dated proof of all communications with your landlord.   

If you have any concerns or are wanting to appeal any changes your landlord has made, access the Tribunal administratif du logement where you have access to your rights as a tenant and can contact an informations clerk to aid in your applications and documents. You can also find resources with the Syndicat de locataires MTL; they meet biweekly every week on Saturdays at 3 PM, in person and over zoom. You can also consult educaloi.qc.ca, which has a useful guide for navigating housing and property law. 

The post Renting 101: Montreal Tenant’s Rights appeared first on The McGill Daily.

The McGill Daily (MD): Could you tell me a little bit about what ElleLui is?

Eloise  Haliburton (EH): ElleLui is a fairly young community-oriented organization. We think of ourselves as community organizers. Lucia [Winter] and Taylor [Douglas] started it a little over a year ago. Especially given the context of the pandemic, they found that though there are other lesbian and sapphic oriented organisations in Montreal, a lot of them were still not running events. So they were like, “instead of having a little party with my friends in my living room, let’s find somewhere that we could have a few more people together.” It’s gotten a lot bigger now, but I think the mission remains the same. We want to be a space that is welcoming to everyone who identifies with the lesbian or sapphic experience or the queer experience. There’s so many different labels, but just a space to create and foster community, which is often not as available to people who aren’t cis, gay, and male.

For a whole bunch of different reasons, traditionally, a lot of queer spaces are not too oriented towards people who are not what Lucia, Taylor, Ray (Resvick), and myself are. I’m on the project because I wanted to work with that mission, and Lucia and Taylor started it because they wanted to help create a space like that.

MD: Could you talk to me a little bit more about how one does find non-cis male spaces that are still queer – both from an organizer perspective and as an individual looking for these spaces? 

EH: It’s definitely challenging. I think one thing that has been really valuable in connecting with new people is other organizers, for example, QueerMTL. They’ve been very deliberate about resharing our stuff, which allows us to connect with people who may be looking for queer spaces but who don’t know exactly how to start finding lesbian and sapphic spaces. 

My main source of queer community was roommates, partners, and lesbian meme accounts. I think there’s a lot of value in the digital queer community, especially for people who are closeted or who live in more rural areas where their queer community is not immediately around them. So, for me, when ElleLui started their events, that was probably the first in-person queer event I had gone to in Montreal in a really long time. But for us as organizers, I think there’s a lot of time and energy that Lucia and Taylor put into building relationships with different venue organizers so that we can have those conversations on the importance of a space for us. Because I think a lot of people get that it’s important to have queer spaces, but the kind of details and minutiae of what a safe queer space actually looks like is something that can only be developed and created when you have an organizer or owner who’s willing to listen to you about those details. Part of it is looking at spaces that have already been used by other organizers and part of it is building relationships to find new people. But Lucia can speak more to that.

Lucia Winter (LW): A lot of the venues that we started off working with were spaces that had never hosted queer events before. It was definitely an effort to get venue owners to really understand the intricacies of what queer and specifically lesbian spaces look like – and should look like – in terms of accessibility and safety and conscientiousness towards different genders and different sexualities, and what that means in practice in a venue. Like Eloise said, we have worked with places that other organizers have worked with, but we’ve also forged a lot of our own connections, which I think makes this a little bit special in the sense that Taylor’s and my idea going into this was that we wanted more mainstream, visible, full-of-lesbian spaces. We’d be taking over spaces that were for everyone and making them specifically lesbian. 

MD: What does a safe, positive, queer, sapphic space look like? What would the test be for a venue?

LW: I don’t think there’s any litmus test, necessarily. But to be honest, a lot of the relationships that we’ve forged with owners have mostly been – this sounds awful – vibe-based. We’ve had venues where they’ve, for example, charged people for water, and we’re like, “that’s not something that we do at our events and water should be free.” That’s just something that we believe. And they either go “oh, okay, I hadn’t considered that. We’ll give free water,” or they go “no.” For me, if we get too many of those types of “nos,” then it’s not worth it. Because people expect a certain standard in terms of accessibility from event series that call themselves queer safe spaces. And free water just happens to be one of them. Gender-affirming security is one of them, gender-affirming bartenders, et cetera. So it’s not really one thing.

EH: I think also having the ability when we’re working with venues, to say “okay, this is the space that you’ve created, and for this night while we’re running our event here, we need to be able to do things the way that it’s important to us.” Thinking about one relationship that we had recently, we got to a point where we were able to have a conversation with the people working at the door to say, “hey, look, we need you to be on our side.” It’s important for the people who are working there to be able to say, “hey, I get that you like this venue, I get that you come here other times. But tonight we need you to understand that this is a space for people who are allies or who are within this community.” And it’s interesting. I have had a lot of conversations with people who don’t seem to be part of our community and maybe people who think our community is “super fun” – and, no, this isn’t a fun, hot, sexy, for-your-eyes lesbian party. This is a space that is important to protect. It’s not to say that people who aren’t lesbian, sapphic, or queer can’t be in the spaces. It’s about knowing that people who are in our spaces, regardless of gender and regardless of the labels that they put on sexuality, can understand the need for these spaces.

MD: You mentioned that you usually take spaces that aren’t necessarily queer and transform them for your events. Why is it that you take these normally non-queer spaces and use them for queer events? Or is it out of necessity?

LW: It’s mostly out of sheer desire to go to a queer space at a club or bar that I think is really cool that isn’t necessarily queer. That’s not to say that there aren’t already amazing queer-owned spaces that are very affirming that we work with quite often. But there is something very lovely about working with a venue that perhaps hasn’t done a queer event before, who then works with us and realizes, “oh, this is a community that our venue hasn’t catered towards and we can.” And you start seeing them putting on more queer events that have nothing to do with us, and that is lovely to see. It’s a very real footprint that I think that queer events can put on mainstream spaces.

MD: Why is there a need for physical spaces versus virtual spaces for people to gather?

EH: I think everyone’s journey to figuring out who they are – cis, trans, queer, straight, whatever it is – is complicated. You need to have experiences with people you can see yourself in to understand that. For me, it was a whole journey, but being able to be in spaces of queer attraction and queer expression is pivotal to building confidence and understanding who you are. There was one event where someone came up to me, I was working at the door, and was like, “can I ask you something? This is my first time here; my friends just heard about it and they said we should go. But I didn’t know until tonight that maybe I was into women. It’s literally being here that I realized, what do I do?” And that’s what this is about: having spaces where people can be queer, grow in their queerness, express their queerness in ways that maybe they didn’t know they wanted to before, or in ways that they don’t feel like they could in other spaces. That’s what this is about to me.

LW: Causing sapphic panic. I love that. That was cute.

EH: And by the way, if that person ever reads this, I think about you. Yeah, I hope you’re doing well. 

MD: So what is it like to exist as an independent collective, and how do you interact with other queer groups around Montreal? 

LW: I think one of our priorities is collaborating with people whose visions and missions align with ours. And we’ve collabed with event series like Sweet Like Honey MTL, which do events for BIPOC queer people and lesbian/sapphic people, and Blush Party, who have been around since 2019. And we’ve collabed with a graphic design studio that’s queer-run. We are collaborating with a classical music collective. We are using whatever influence we have to branch out and help other series or just have fun with them. We’re independent from any established institution, but I would say that part of our success has been the fact that the queer community of Montreal is very interdependent and very interconnected. Part of working with other groups, other event series, other initiatives, is affirming one another. We strengthen each other. And I think that’s the only way to create a healthy community. We are all friends now, we all go to each other’s events, we all support each other, and that’s really important. We all throw fun events together and do something good. That feels really good.

MD: I see that ElleLui has grown fairly quickly. How do you see this collective growing in the future?

LW: I can tell you my dream, which is to put on festivals for queer people. I think that if I were to make ElleLui my full time job, which as of now is not possible, I would do that. But my dream is to put on a sapphic festival with sapphic artists and singers and get sponsorships to do that. In the meantime, it’s really a matter of continuing to create fun events that people go to until we can get to a point of influence where that would be possible.

MD: Finally, how can people get involved?

LW: We have an artist call-out form on our website where artists can upload their materials and we can take a look to see if we can work with them. We also have a volunteer sign-up form, and we have an event idea pitch form if people have an idea to put on an event.

EH: We have way too many events going on. But in January, I think we’ll definitely pull some ideas from there and reach out to people if we end up using anything. You can always hit us up on Instagram @elleluimtl and send us your material. We have an open mic night once a month, more or less, and that’s a great place for people to come out, share their stuff with the community – and we have hired people from that before. Or you can email us at info@elleluimtl.com.

The post Fostering Queer Spaces and Causing Sapphic Panic appeared first on The McGill Daily.

But what makes certain neighbourhoods more vulnerable to gentrification than others? Montreal’s Mile End neighbourhood is an interesting case study. This area unofficially spans between Mount Royal Avenue to the south, Van Horne Avenue to the north, Hutchinson Street to the west, and Saint Denis Street to the east. 

During the 1960s and 1970s, Mile End was known for its garment industry and for being home to immigrants of Jewish, Greek, Irish, Portuguese and other backgrounds. Then, due to the collapse of the manufacturing industry in North America, many of the garment factories closed in the mid-1990s. After this came a key step in the gentrification process – the arrival of artists. The 1990s brought in artists such as Arcade Fire, Grimes, Ariane Moffatt, and many more who were attracted by the low rent for apartment and studio space in the area. 

Soon after, Ubisoft, a French video game company, opened its Montreal subsidiary in a former factory. From 1997 onward, Ubisoft Montreal brought an influx of 3,000 new tech employees, an indication that the Mile End inhabitants were changing. There was active encouragement from the government at both the federal and the local level to encourage tech companies to situate themselves in Canada and Montreal. In fact, political lobbyist Sylvain Vaugeois sensed the business opportunity that the multimedia industry might bring and devised a plan to provide tax credits to large video game companies willing to establish officesin Montreal. This incentive involved both a federal and local government investment of up to $25,000 in subsidies per employee for 500 Ubisoft employees over five years. Soon after, Quebec established a new tax credit to be applied to other companies as well to cover a maximum of 37.5 per cent of eligible labor expenditure if a multimedia title is available in French and up to 30 per cent if a title is not. 

Critics have often argued that the tax credits the government has provided are mainly beneficial for foreign corporations and that they hurt local tech companies. They find the tax credit allows mainly video game companies to offer workers more money and draws talent away from other tech companies. 

With the low operational costs, government incentives attracted companies like Microsoft and smaller organizations like Thales, which began to move into the neighbourhood. Soon after, condo companies, restaurants, and new boutiques opened up to house, feed, and dress the growing new tech inhabitants and their higher incomes. Real estate firm Shiller Lavy has been notorious for buying commercial buildings and raising their rent. They have bought over seven buildings on St-Viateur Street, including Le Cagibi, a famous vegetarian cafe-indie showbar that was forced out of Mile End and into Little Italy due to rent increases and has since closed permanently. Local businesses and their patrons in the Mile End are not too pleased with the recent changes that the neighborhood has been experiencing. In particular, Mile End Mission, a neighborhood charity, noted its difficulty in serving the most vulnerable in the rapidly gentrifying area. They indicated that they used to serve about 20 people per week and now see nearly 300. 

More than 20 years after the first video game company set up in Mile End, Montreal has been listed number 15 on CBRE’s 2022 Tech Talent Rankings. Montreal International estimates there are now about 200 video game studios and 15,000 industry workers in the city. The effect of this gaming hub has affected many parts of the city as well. Local universities have opened new programs focusing on game development and technology. For example, Concordia University has an official partnership with Ubisoft to provide a course on game design. 

While the growing number of tech companies choosing to locate themselves in Montreal has created a boom in jobs and placed the city on a global map of the tech world, it does come with the cost of smaller local businesses in the city. The government needs to further support local businesses to ensure that the Mile End that has attracted so many tech residents maintains its historical and cultural significance. 

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Anderson’s third feature film, The Royal Tenenbaums (2001), marks his entrance into the auteur hall of fame. The Royal Tenenbaums follows three uniquely talented siblings who are brought back together when their estranged father announces that he is dying. The film features a star-studded cast of actors who continue to appear in Anderson’s subsequent films, including Bill Murray, Owen Wilson, Anjelica Huston, and Seymour Cassel. Other directors that recast the same actors include Martin Scorsese and Paul Thomas Anderson.

Is the continued use of the same actors indicative of the inaccessibility of Hollywood? Probably. It is beneficial as well as constructive to gain familiarity and rapport with the same set of actors. However, in doing so, directors continue to gatekeep the spaces within the film industry which they occupy. Wes Anderson in particular continues to place the same white men at the forefront of his films, and if he does incorporate POC voices, they are either used to uplift or add layers to the white man. In The Royal Tenenbaums, the only two POC characters are Henry Sherman (Danny Glover) who is treated with complete contempt by fallen patriarch Royal Tenenbaum (Gene Hackman), and Pagoda (Kumar Pallana), the servant and right-hand man to Royal. Despite Danny Glover’s fame, his character is relatively inactive in the film and continuously dismissed by all characters. Pursuing Royal’s ex-wife, Henry Sherman seems to endure Royal calling him “Coltrane,”’ as well as other racist name-calling, as though Tenenbaum’s racism is just another flaw in his character that he is ultimately forgiven for. More can and has been said about Anderson’s fetishization of POC characters and non-Western settings, but that requires a whole other article.

By repeatedly featuring the same actors, Anderson creates a world that binds all his movies together, so that audiences can’t help but recall similarities between characters played by the same actor. The format of Anderson’s films further places them within their own world. Wes Anderson seems to enjoy incorporating writers, directors, and other artists within his films, to the point that he formats his films to resemble different forms of storytelling such as plays or books. The Royal Tenenbaums begins with a library book of the same title being opened, and the rest of the film is divided into chapters. The mother (Anjelica Huston) furthermore publishes a book about her children within the film. This continued reference to books and the concrete chapter division throughout the movie continue to reference the authorial power of writers. In his other films, Wes Anderson creates these artificial frames. In The Darjeeling Limited (2007), Jason Schwartzman’s character writes a book that Anderson subsequently makes into a short film titled Hotel Chevalier (2007). The Grand Budapest Hotel (2014) begins with a young girl visiting the grave of the author of a novel telling the story of the Grand Budapest Hotel. This narrative gimmick can get convoluted. The various forms of storytelling allow Anderson to bring audiences’ attention to the artificiality of storytelling and the presence of an author to create such fantasies. The distance Anderson creates between character and story allows the director to place himself into the narrative – clear in his precision towards symmetry, colour palettes, and quick pans. Anderson is not trying to create a realistic narrative but to tell a story, or a story within a story. 

Anderson shows a real appreciation for storytelling and his films are unlike anything else seen before. But at the same time, maybe we have seen this story before. The trials and tribulations of white men have been told before. While Anderson tries to portray the universal complexity of human emotions and relationships in his stories, how universal can that be when the story is always white and male? Through his own insertion into the stories and the continued use of the same actors, Anderson can only really tell one kind of story, the story of upper-middle-class white pseudo-worldly men. I love his films; they are charming, unique, and altogether create a sense of magic instead of striving for cold realism. Nonetheless, Anderson is limited to telling a certain kind of story in a certain kind of style. We have yet to see him expand beyond a comedy-drama genre. Other modern auteurs have been able to expand to different genres, as seen in Edgar Wright’s latest film Last Night In Soho (2021). But as Anderson continues to make more films (such as the recent The French Dispatch) are audiences eventually going to tire themselves out of the incessant witty banter and the aggressively charming characters? Only time will tell, but I think it would be interesting to see Anderson expand beyond what he knows, even though his usual formula is certainly successful. 

The post Stories within Stories appeared first on The McGill Daily.

The library was created specifically to service Black and brown people, and is stocked with books dedicated to the Black experience. The free library includes sections on prison writings, global Black resistance, class organizing, among others. Noname tweeted that her favourite sections of the library are “Fuck The Police (abolitionist text)” and “Black Capitalism Won’t Save Us.” The book club’s patreon explains that their “goal is to one day open physical library locations in every black hood across the country.”

So, how did Noname transition from performing at Coachella in 2018 to creating a free library in 2021? 

Noname, AKA Fatima Warner, began writing poetry after taking a creative writing class in highschool. She spent time as a teen in the YOUMedia lab, a Chicago Public Library initiative that emphasizes project-based learning led by mentors to empower teens to create various forms of art, along with other famous Chicago musicians such as Chance the Rapper, Saba, and Mick Jenkins. In 2016 she released her first album, Telefone, for free on Bandcamp. The album is centered around important telephone conversations she has had growing up. Her soothing voice explores Black pain, particularly that of Black women. Using money she earned from touring and guest appearances on projects by Chance the Rapper, she paid for her next album Room 25 (2018). This smartly constructed, wordplay-filled album explores her triumphs and failings as she rises in fame. 

Noname does not shy away from her faults, but instead humbly accepts and learns from them. Warner’s former stage name had racial connotations. She later became aware of these implications, explaining in an interview her ignorance as a teenager and her need to do more research. She further explains her moniker; “for me, not having a name expands my creativity. I’m able to do anything. Noname could potentially be a nurse, Noname could be a screenwriter. I’m not limited to any one category of art or other existence, on a more existential level.” 

Noname could also be a library owner. By not defining her profession from the beginning, Noname has allowed herself to transition to anything she is passionate about. Part of that freedom comes from keeping a lower profile. Noname rarely does photoshoots or brand deals, telling the Rolling Stone, “I don’t like doing things that I know are going to build on my celebrity because that’s not ethical to me when I’m trying to be anticapitalist and also trying to present myself in a specific way.” Her disinterest in fame is clear when she announced in November of 2019 that she would no longer be making music. In now deleted tweets, Noname explained her disillusionment in performing to predominantly white crowds, saying “I refuse to keep making music and putting it online for free for people who won’t support me.”  Another tweet included a photo of a woman wearing clown makeup with the caption: “Me consistently creating content that is primarily consumed by a white audience who would rather shit on me than challenge their liberalism because somehow liking Lizzo’s music absolved them of racist tendencies.” She further expressed distress over the unhealthy relationship between the artist and the fan. At the time she stated that “I’m just tryna read and organize” and that her upcoming album Factory Baby will be her last. Despite the tweets now being deleted, she has made no further announcement about the future of her music career. 

So far Warner has only released the single ‘Rainforest’ from her album. She explains that her new album will be more radical, informative, and solution-oriented than her previous ones. Beyond her music, she encourages her musical fans to support her book club through donations and buying merchandise. While she does contend with the fact that she could produce more music to raise money for the book club, she wants to focus on what she is working on now. 

From the beginning of her artistic journey, Noname has never confined herself to one medium of expression. She explores the Black experience through her poetic lyricism and actively supports her community through her book club and new library. Noname exemplifies the journey from creating art as self expression to using her fame to give back. 

The post Noname’s Transition from Rapper to Librarian appeared first on The McGill Daily.