The Havdallah Ritual

Before beginning our discussion of this week’s assigned reading, we performed the Havdallah ritual, done every Saturday after nightfall. Havdallah marks the separation between Shabbat and the rest of the week. The ritual consists of four blessings: a blessing on wine (or grape juice), a blessing on spices, a blessing on fire, and a blessing on Havdallah itself. The ritual begins with the lighting of a special braided candle, whereby several wicks come together to form a single flame. Unable to locate such a candle, we instead used several rainbow birthday candles “because they were gay.” We then sang the four blessings while passing around the spices for everyone to smell. I’ve been told that we smell the spices to awaken our senses to the new week. The final blessing, the blessing on Havdallah itself, is a blessing for the separation between all things: the separation between light and dark, between the sacred and the mundane, between Shabbat and the rest of the week. The ritual ends when we extinguish the flame of the candle into the wine (or grape juice). Before I extinguished the flame, I told everyone: “The longer the sizzle, the sweeter the week.” As I dipped the flame into the grape juice, the fire sputtered and gave a weak sizzle. Everyone laughed, and we joked about how the week would be quietly sweet.

Havdallah has always been my favourite ritual. Something about the darkness, the candlelight, the singing, the scent of the spices, the sense of closeness and community; something about the ritual has always been deeply beautiful to me. Perhaps it is the way it occupies this liminal space between light and dark, between the sacred and the mundane, between myself and everyone else singing the li-li-li’s of the blessings. The Havdallah blessing may be for the separation between all things, but I think it is also about the connection between all things. When you sing the Havdallah blessing on the fire, you’re supposed to hold your hand up to the flame and fold your fingers over to see the shadow of your fingers on your palm. And this is supposed to be a reminder of the separation between lightness and darkness. To me, it is also a reminder of the way that lightness creates darkness, the way the flame casts the shadow, the way that separation is also connection. After many years of not practicing Havdallah, leading this service for IJV was a sweet reminder of my connection to Jewishness and the Jewish community.

And this is why IJV McGill is so important to so many young Jews. After being alienated from our Jewishness, whether it be through Zionism or something else, IJV McGill allows us to come back to it, each in our own ways. Whether it be through ritual, political action, or community gathering, we are all offered a way back to our Jewishness.

Critiquing Herzl’s Der Judenstaat

For the first meeting of IJV McGill’s “Shabook Shalom,” we read the second chapter of Theodor Herzl’s infamous Der Judenstaat (The Jewish State), titled “The Jewish Question.” Herzl is considered one of the founders of political Zionism, and his pamphlet Der Judenstaat described how and why a Jewish state should be formed. IJV McGill decided to focus on this piece first, because it provides a starting point for discussing political Zionism and all the reasons it needs to be critiqued and condemned.

Tali Ioselevich, one of the core organizers with IJV McGill, explained that “Zionism is the belief that a Jewish state has the right to exist, and that it must exist with a physical territory, that it must be attached to land.” In other words, Zionism, as it is known today, is a colonizing project. There are several different types of Zionism: Zionisms that believe that a Jewish state could exist on any piece of land, anywhere, and Zionisms that believe the Jewish state can only exist in Palestine. There’s liberal Zionism, which may believe that the nature of the occupation in Palestine at the moment is wrong, but still believe in the right of a Jewish state to exist in Palestine. There’s far right Zionism, which is generally very anti-Arab and believes in any means necessary to set up a “safe” Jewish state in Palestine.

After covering “Zionism 101,” the group explored how anti-Semitism and Zionism are intertwined. As Herzel writes in Der Judenstaat, “the Governments of all countries scourged by anti-Semitism will be keenly interested in assisting us to obtain the sovereignty we want.” In other words, the anti-Semitism of European governments would fuel Herzl’s Zionist project. European governments would support the project because it would gradually remove Jewish people from their countries. In the pamphlet, Herzl positions anti-Semitism as natural, and not as something to be fought against. Rather than attempting to fight oppression, Herzl wants to simply escape it.

I get confused when Jewish Zionists call me a self-hating Jew for my anti-Zionist activism. My stance, and the stance of IJV McGill, is to stand up and fight oppression, not to ignore it or try to escape it. Meanwhile, the mandate of Zionism, at least as Herzel explains it, is to accept anti-Semitism and find an elsewhere to exist instead.

But when we try to escape oppression, the question becomes: where do we escape to? And how is escape a colonizing project? The kind of “sovereignty” Herzl is seeking in his escape is the power to colonize land. Isabel Setel, a member of the Jewish reading group, wondered, “How is this sort of sovereignty the answer to oppression?” Notions of sovereignty based on the colonization of land and peoples can only produce new oppression.

Questioning Belonging

Rather than seeking an elsewhere to belong to, Jewish folks should be questioning the very terms of belonging. Who gets to belong, where, and how? How are discourses of belonging based on notions of both inclusion and exclusion? And how can we short-circuit these discourses to open up space for a sense of community, connection, and sovereignty beyond colonialist relationships to land?

Shabook Shalom opens up space to begin having these discussions. This is a space where we can question notions of Jewish belonging on Turtle Island and in Palestine. We can begin to ask, what does it mean to be living in diaspora on colonised land? What is the meaning of a homeland after generations and generations of wandering? How can anti-colonialist and anti-Zionist Jewish stories and perspectives be a part of wider discourses surrounding transformative justice?

Just as the Havdallah ritual acts as a reminder of both separation and connection, our radical Jewish politics explore notions of separation and connection as they relate to Jewish community and social justice. As Jewish people living in diaspora, we constantly occupy this liminal space between light and darkness, between the sacred and the mundane. Occupying this space is beautiful and powerful; here we can work magic, here, we can start discourse, here, we can begin to imagine a world beyond colonialist projects.

Shabook Shalom will be meeting every two weeks on Saturday evening. Reach out to IJV McGill if you’re interested in getting involved!

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“Symbols of Resistance: an Exhibition Celebrating the Convergence of Black Artists and their Stories” opened on the first day of Black History Month, and will be on display at Galerie Mile-End until February 28. The exhibition is the culmination of the Montreal Black Artists-in-Community Residency, a twelve week residency created in response to the lack of spaces and opportunities for Black artists to make and showcase their work. The residency provided space for eight Black artists to develop work centred on Black identity, to engage with, and to create for and with their communities. The artists interweave their own personal stories with the histories of their communities and ancestors. The theme of resistance was common to all of the artists: resistance expressed through the everyday and ordinary aspects of Black life, self-care, hair-care, textiles, and head wraps. These artists centred their work around Black identity by reclaiming history from erasure and (re)creating their own archives.

At the vernissage on February 1, we heard from Annick MF — one of the organizers — and from all of the artists about their work. We welcome you into the magic of the evening through their words below.

Annick: For those of you that don’t know, this was an exhibition that came out of a 12 week residency, and the goal is to also take this artwork on tour for a year. One of the things that we felt is that often these conversations are only held around Black History Month, like “Oh, this is the nice time to talk about Black folks,” and then it’s like, “Oh, they just don’t exist anymore.” So we want to make sure that this conversation goes on further, and that Black artists have opportunities long term, so we’re trying to take this artwork on tour. If you know anyone who wants some art and has money [laughter], they can holla at us. Also, we invite you to come to the Finissage which is going to be on Monday the 26th. Come back to the space to close the ceremony with us! I also want to mention that a lot of the artists in the space decided to use new mediums. And that was one of the most interesting experiences for us as organizers of the residency — to know how much work goes behind these artworks that we see. I think sometimes we come into an exhibition and think, “Oh wow, this is really beautiful!” But we miss the amount of hours and hours of conceptual and literal physical work prior that comes into that. How much work goes into the process of even just picking a medium, like is wood the best medium, is canvas the best medium? A lot of care and attention was put into that. All of these artists worked together and in parallel to make this project come together and we’re really proud of them and really excited for you to be here experiencing this, and you’re going to meet the artists right now!

Reclaiming my time space: G L O W Z I

G L O W Z I : My piece is called Reclaiming my time space, and what I wanted to represent is the idea that even though we’re not Beyonce, or people who are victims of police brutality directly, such as Trayvon Martin, we’re still important, our experiences are still important. So the idea with my piece was to reclaim the space of ordinary Black folks, because I feel like when we look at the media we have this pressure to be like, “Okay, so now I see Beyonce and Kendrick so now I have to do something.” And you’re in your room, which is all messed up, and you’re like, “I’m not going to be Beyonce, but I’m not quite like other people I see in the media, so where am I?” So the idea was just to remind Black people while they look at the piece that no matter what they’re doing, they’re symbols of resistance. Because just going to school, just having a job, just following your dream is something that is pretty hard to do here in a system that doesn’t necessarily want you to be able to do that.

Audience member: Why particularly self-portraits?

G L O W Z I: It comes from a story where my mom always told me, “You’re a canvas and you can model yourself however you want.” And it seems like it has just followed me all my life, because I keep changing styles, changing the way I look. And I keep using my face or my body as a medium of art. So, I would say that it’s pretty much that the first canvas that you will have — and that you will have until you die — is your body, so why not use it?

Audience member: Why do you use the golden metal wires in your work?

G L O W Z I : The golden wires represent the idea that on a regular basis, we are still slaying. We don’t need to be walking in the halftime show like Beyonce to be doing amazing stuff and to be slaying. I see Black people slaying everywhere, I see them right now! [laughter] And also using metal, there’s the idea that it’s resistant but it also knows how to move. It’s the idea that even though it’s hard to move it, it can still move around and change shapes, just like Black people change their way of acting in order to cope with what we’re being exposed to.

Natural: Kay Nau

Kay Nau: About my piece — instead of talking about the symbols and all that, I’m going to talk about the stylistic choices I made, which is comic art. All my life I’ve been told that comic art is not art, by teachers, by people. So at first, when I got this residency, I was like, I’m going to do realistic renderings, because that’s what I’m used to seeing in galleries and what my teachers always tell me, “This is what art is.” And then I was like, “Nah.” [laughter] “Nah, screw this, I’m going to go with what I normally do for myself.” And it’s kind of like a little slap in the face of, you know, me being a little sassy and being like, “This is comic art and it’s on the wall of a gallery now.” And that’s kind of awesome!

Audience member: Was there a choice for the really striking red and blue?

Kay: Yeah, actually. Red and blue is not only the colour of the Haitian flag, blue is also the colour of the Quebec flag, red is the colour of the Canadian flag, it’s also the colour of France and England’s flags, which are colonizers not only of Haiti but also of Canada and Quebec.

Montreal, 1985: Po B.K. Lomami, Carl-Philippe Simonise, Valerie Bah

Po: We noticed that there isn’t a lot of Black representation in the public archives from the eighties. We started from that fact, like, there were Black people in Montreal in the eighties, like obviously, but they aren’t in the public archives. So from that we started to think, “Okay, we can find those archives.” We started to ask questions like, “What about personal archives?” And that’s where we started finding a lot of answers, like people opening their personal albums to show us what it was like in the eighties. From all that research, we decided to create our own archive with all the information we have, all the research we did. And also with our own experience, including the fact that we were wondering, “Where are Black queer people in the archives?” And they are nowhere. We went to Archives Gaies du Quebec and we couldn’t even find them there. So we were like okay from my own experience, queer Black people, they’re kind of everywhere. Like, even if you go to church, we’re fucking everywhere [laughter]. From that we were like, okay, let’s restage a scene from the eighties, ’85 in particular, with all the information we have or we want to recreate. I think we can connect to Black struggles throughout history, like it’s always the same questions asked again, the same issues. Nothing is new, it’s just new vocabulary. It’s the same discussions, the same questions. So from that we started to do that for the art piece, just starting in an apartment that was built in the thirties in Côte-des-Neiges, which is like, I don’t want to say a non-white neighbourhood, but like, white people are not the majority there. Then we went to Balattou, which is a club that was created in the eighties or so, and from there we started a scenario, a story-board, with what could be Black activists talking and Black activists gathering. But not just about the struggles, it’s also about enjoying life, having a romance, just being people that have struggles sometimes but are still people. And they’re there because we can’t find them in public archives so we needed to make them visible with our own research and imaginaries, so we intertwined the archives with Afrofuturism and our own perspective. So we end up with our photo series, made in the apartment in Côte-des-Neiges and then in Balattou — we want to thank Papa Touré who opened the Balattou for us on Monday night, a really cold one, just for us to do the photoshoot. There’s also a personal photo album and a zine that includes the dialogue of what could be a discussion among Black people in Montreal in 1985, discussing about politics, or about wanting to flirt with somebody, or just having a life.

Valerie: It was very important to us, in staging Black folks in the archives, not to try and establish our place in this empire, this white settler project on unceded land. So the discussion in the actual scenario is of the activists arguing and disagreeing about Black liberation struggles around the world, and it ties back to their condition in Montreal.

Po: Yeah, you should read the zine, there’s drama and everything.

Audience member: Did you use technology from ’85?

Carl-Philippe: A budget from ’85. [laughter]

Sisterhood, Crown, Vasso: Aïssatou Diallo

Aïssatou Diallo: (translated from French) My name is Aïssatou Diallo and I am originally from Guinea. I have been drawing and creating art for the past ten years, and I started doing digital graphic design two years ago. I made the three pieces there, the first is called Sisterhood, the second is Crown, and the third is Vasso. This concept was not what I originally planned to do; there were many modifications during the process. But in the end, that, the art, is me. I am comfortable with and feel liberated using the medium of digital art because it is involved with my work. My main idea is to express who I am as an individual, but also express codes that represent the symbols of resistance. You can see these codes by what you wear, your hair, these things, and so my pieces are made by you and are visible to everyone. My pieces are not only a claim of the symbols of resistance, but also show how we share culture. I am looking for an answer to these questions and interrogations of resistance and this is what I expressed in my three pieces. For the first piece, I show that you must know yourself and others in order to share culture. It’s based on a photograph I took of a woman’s back, I was asked if the two women are the same person, and I am leaving that up to interpretation, but the idea behind the piece is “Watch your back” and “I gotchu” as well. The second shows that you must be proud of who we are, where we come from, and that it is important to share these different sides of us with other people. The third shows a mother and child, and it is also essential to show how we pass down and share ideas with the children of the next generation. We explain what it means to be a woman, and especially what it means to be a Black woman from Africa, and so on.

Baggage & Navigation, Stretched Strength, In the Search of Home: SIKA

SIKA: (translated from French) My works here are essentially an introspective exploration based on an emotional congestion that I carry around like every other person in society. I decided to visit this congestion again through three different dimensions: emotional, physical, and spiritual. I wanted to make visual material to combine with another project of mine involving musical expression. I wanted to mix the disciplines of both projects together. I wanted to reflect the presence of Black artists in Montreal, to see how this has affected me, and what carries me forward. I wanted to develop a new technique and explore unfamiliar methods for this specific piece. I benefited from working with a new palette: shades of blue. I also wanted to generate content about the strength and endurance of the Black community. I wanted to show our views, values, and marginality in society. I felt the need to create, so I benefited from the residency. It strengthened my work and formed it into an introspective scan I used to inspect the facets of my reality and my identity.

Crowning: Chelsy Monie

Chelsy Monie: Hi everybody. I’m very nervous, I don’t know what to say. My work Crowning focuses on the headwrap and just trying to take back all the histories and all the places the headwrap has been. Initially I knew I wanted to work with headwraps, and I knew I wanted to work with history and location, but I didn’t know how to translate that into my work. So I did a lot of research and I spent a lot of time looking at maps and thinking about the idea of mapping. What I ended up doing is using topographic maps, which are maps where lines and curves are used to represent the reliefs on land, which means mountains, rivers, hills — all represented by lines, which is what you can see in my work. What this allows you to do is to read the headwrap as showing a location that is in space and time and this is only emphasised by the grid, or lines of longitude and latitude. I’m really trying to have the real question of how we can look at space, not only as places we may walk through but we can look at space through the clothes that we wore, through the things that we did in those spaces. I used wood because, based on the histories and based on what I found out, headwraps are so tied to Black bodies and wood is a natural fiber, so to me, the way I see it is headwraps are in a sense natural to the Black body. That’s what the wood is there to represent. As you can see in the images my eyes are blacked out, and as much as that’s because that looks really cool [laughter] it’s also because I want viewers, other Black people looking at my art to see themselves within it. Blacking out my eyes really removes my soul from the art, right now it’s a canvas for you to look at and see yourself in any given space and time. My work necessarily is very involved with Black identity and I really want to show the Black reality as something that is artistic and something that is specific to us, so I like to take things that Black people do every day and they think, yeah, this is just us, and project it and put them in spaces like these where people can actually come and visualise them in a different way. In part of my work I am doing multiple, multiple things and one of them is I wear a headwrap everyday for this month. This was really to question my relationship with headwraps, because usually I find myself wearing headwraps when it looks nice or I don’t wanna do my hair. But what I’m really wondering is how will my relationship with my body, as well as headwraps and time and space, change when I wear a headwrap every single day. And today is a lot! [laughter] This is my headwrap for today, tomorrow I’m going to leave my house and have to wear another one, and go on and on. I’m really interested to see what it is that happens to me and how I perceive myself and also perceive headwraps. I grew up in Cameroon and then in Tanzania, and women all around me wore headwraps. I grew up with my mom going to church on Sunday and she would always have a headwrap, but I never thought of it as anything more than that. I think wearing a headwrap every single day really pushes me to see beyond that. Another part of this project is I have collaborated with photographers around the world to bring actual representations of headwraps to you. What the photographers have done is they have taken pictures of people in headwraps in the spaces they navigate. That’s what I want to share with everybody, because headwraps, like I said earlier, are natural to the Black body, and it’s very interesting how, though we live on many different continents and many different countries, we can still be identified by this one singular thing. The last part of Crowning is on the 28th of February. I am inviting Black people everywhere to wear headwraps. I think this is really a mark of solidarity and also helps us to connect to all the histories we may not necessarily connect with on a daily basis. This is really a chance for everybody to decide that okay, today we’re going to stand up and celebrate this one thing we think maybe is just a mundane thing we shouldn’t pay attention to. I am circulating two hashtags because you know, I’m a millennial, it’s 2018. [laughter] So the hashtags are #UbuntiCrowning and #UbuntuTalks. What I’m inviting people to do is wear a headwrap on the 28th, take a picture of yourself with the headwrap and you can post it on any social media platform using those two hashtags and those will be projected onto my website, which is Ubuntutalks.org. The reason it’s very important for me to project it is so as to archive this day in time. And when you look back, Black people, or POC in general, have not always been given the ability to archive their activities. It’s very hard for us to look back in history and find out what did this Black person do, and that’s something we have to change. We have the resources now, and I think it’s very important for us to start to archive and document our activities so that future generations may be able to look back and see what we’re doing today. That’s it!

“Symbols of Resistance: an Exhibition Celebrating the Convergence of Black Artists and their Stories” is on display at Galerie Mile-End, 5445 Avenue Du Parc from February 1-28, 2018.

This artist talk was significantly edited for clarity and length.

The post Symbols of resistance appeared first on The McGill Daily.

Kai Cheng Thom is a writer, spoken word artist, therapist, wicked witch, and lasagna lover who divides her time between Montreal and Toronto, unceded Indigenous territories. Her poems and essays have been published widely in print and online, and she has performed in venues across the country, including Verses International Poetry Festival and the Banff Centre for the Arts. Her first novel, Fierce Femmes and Notorious Liars: A Dangerous Trans Girl’s Confabulous Memoir was released by Metonymy Press in 2016, and her debut poetry collection, a place called No Homeland, was released by Arsenal Pulp Press in 2017. Her book for children, From the Stars in the Sky to the Fish in the Sea, was published in October of the same year. Kai Cheng was also a featured columnist for The McGill Daily from 2012-2014, writing about race, sexuality, and gender. She sat down with us on a sunny Saturday morning to talk about queer community, #MeToo, sinning, living in diaspora, dreams, love, and radical healing. This interview will make you laugh, cry, and really want to sit down and talk with Kai Cheng.

The truth of the heart

Arno Pedram (AP): Hello.

Kai Cheng Thom (KCT): Hiiiii.

AP: So my name is Arno.

Tai Jacob (TJ): I’m Tai.

KCT: I’m Kai Cheng Thom. I wrote some books that all came out at the same time. I didn’t mean for that to happen, but they all came out last year. I also write for the internet sometimes. I used to be very much involved in, like, Montreal activism and queer activism culture, and now I’m not so much, partly because I moved to Toronto, and partly because I am getting older, and I’m like, I don’t know what I’m doing with my life! Also, I’m visiting Montreal right now because my wife Kama La Mackerel lives in Montreal.

TJ: That’s a name drop! (everyone laughs)

KCT: Giant name drop. I’m married to someone famous! And yeah, Montreal is always going to be the city where my heart came into being and where I found myself and also was destroyed, and found myself again.

TJ: That sounds a lot like the story of Fierce Femmes and Notorious Liars, which was one of the three books that all came out at the same time. I was wondering, in what ways is this book an allegory for your actual life experience?

KCT: Oh, not at all.

TJ: Really?

KCT: I don’t know, it’s really funny. People ask this question in different ways a lot and I love answering it. So Fierce Femmes and Notorious Liars, the subtitle of this novel is “A Dangerous Trans Girl’s Confabulous Memoir,” and when you put the word memoir in the title of your novel, people are always like, “Hey, oh my god, I’m excited to read your memoir!” And I’m like, “It’s not my memoir, it’s the memoir of the character who is fictional.” But of course, people notice certain superficial similarities, like this character being an Asian trans woman growing up in a city where it’s always raining on the west coat, and moving to a city where everyone is speaking French and smoking cigarettes. I used to be an English major in theatre, and my favourite play that we studied was Tennessee Williams’ A Streetcar Named Desire, a classic play about an aging Southern belle who’s also, like, a deep racist and you know, a horrible person. But Blanche DuBois, that aging Southern belle, has a line where she’s being accused of being a pathological liar, which she is, right, she’s lied to everyone in her life and kind of tried to trick everyone into seeing her as something that she’s not. And she says, “I never lied in my heart.”

AP: “Never inside, I didn’t lie in my heart.”

KCT: Yes, oh my god! (Laughter)

AP: It’s my favourite line.

KCT: I love it, I love it. And that’s what Fierce Femmes is about. You know, it’s the truth of the heart. And so, nothing that really happens in the novel “happened” — and I have to also say that for plausible deniability, which is the joke I always make — but that novel is the truth of what happened to me in my heart.

Sin and punishment

AP: Okay, so let’s get into activism and queer spaces.

KC: Sure!

AP: Having read your article “Righteous Callings,” I was wondering: how do we manage accountability in social spaces, activist space in particular, in the context of a call-out culture, and how does shame fit into that?

KCT: Mhmm, just like a nice, light question. Oh god, I don’t fucking know, but I’m gonna take a try, because you asked me the question. Whenever this question comes up in any kind of interview context, I’m like, let us set the stage, why am I being asked. And I think people are asking the question because I write about it a lot, and I just want to make it really clear that because I write a lot about accountability does not mean that I am an expert in accountability. It just means that I think about it a lot and, also, that I put these thoughts on the internet. All that to say, I think we live in a culture, in addition to call-out culture, of celebrity culture, in activist space. And we do this thing where we’re like, oh my god Kai Cheng Thom, Kim Katrin Milan, Mia Mingus, all the big names, and some names are bigger than others obviously. And we’re like, “Those people are perfect and the example of how we should live our lives.” And that is terrifyingly similar to certain religious communities, where beautiful ideas around accountability and goodness are then pinned to people who are actually very fallible. Because, I mean, scratch the surface of any celebrity and you will find a sinner. All this to say, I have done bad things. I’ve been called out for some things that I think are fair, others that I don’t think are fair. So take everything I say with a grain of salt! Coming back to accountability in social space, the truth is, I think we’re obviously going through a crisis of accountability in all space right now. In so many countries, in so many places, with the #MeToo movement. And I think the powerful and amazing thing is that the veil is being ripped off of the shame of survivors, and, like, the shame of people who have experienced violence, who have been silenced for such a long time. Maybe this is the first time in history that this particular kind of movement is happening. But I think we are conflating the conversation of punishment with the conversation around accountability and justice.

TJ: I have questions about this actually. Specifically, about that really good article you wrote for GUTS, called “#NotYet,” in response to #MeToo. How do you work at the intersections of the work surrounding sexual violence and work surrounding prison abolition?

KCT: So I think we have a really powerful and beautiful statement, a beautiful activist truism, now blowing up in the mainstream, which is: “I believe women, I believe survivors.” This is a really important statement, in that survivors and women have not been believed for a long time. And that statement, I think, finds its greatest use in situations of support. Whether you’re providing a social service in an institution, or you’re providing support for your friends, the thing you don’t want to do when your friend is like, “I’ve been hurt,” is to say, “Really? Can you tell me exactly how? Does it fit into a legal standard?” And this comes from a history of women’s shelters operating in the United States and Canada where, by law, the definition of sexual assault excluded sexual assault and violence between married partners. But believing survivors has taken on, I think, and maybe I’m wrong about this, but I think it’s taken on a different kind of meaning when we talk about justice and accountability. I think in the mainstream there is a move to conflate, “I believe survivors,” with, “And that means the person who is the perpetrator should go to jail, or go through some kind of punishment.” And we really have not figured out how to separate the idea of punishment from the idea of justice. So like, if I have been harmed, that means the only way for me to feel like that harm has been seen and addressed is that the person who hurt me is being punished. And that is really hard to let go of. To be honest, like I really wish that some of the people that have hurt me would be punished. But from a place of values, when I really think about that, then I’m like, okay, that doesn’t solve the problem of violence. Carceral solutions to violence only displace violence into the prison system and also disproportionately affect vulnerable people, because the truth is that punishment doesn’t happen to the powerful. Punishment only happens to people who can’t stop it, who don’t have the power to stop it. And the activist response to that, which is shunning, or to remove people from social circles, only displaces violent people into other communities, and those people are then angry and traumatized by the loss of their community and so the cycle just spins and spins. And then the secret truth, I think, about activist communities, in the same way the secret truth about religious communities is, is that all of us are sinners. And the extent of the sin varies, it obviously does. But I think all of us, if we were to look into our past, would find something bad that we have done. And it’s so important to talk about this. I’m actually really happy, in a weird way, that the Aziz Ansari story is unfolding the way it does, because the reason there has been so much pushback around that story is that Aziz Ansari, who in his own way is sort of like a figure for liberal and leftist communities, what he did is actually normal — not good, but normal. And when we start to understand that violence is normalised and normative, and happens all the time, we can realise that, actually, most of us are participating in it in some way, from either colluding with the perpetrator to being the perpetrator. Then, I think we can start having a discussion about shame: shame is a normal and healthy response to having done something bad, but it cannot stop there, and we cannot let shame silence us. The most important truth that we need to come to terms with, as believers of justice, is the truth of the harm that we, ourselves, have caused, and not the harm that we think other people have caused — because the truth is, the place where we will have the most impact is in our own hearts and relationships. And I say that as someone who has, you know, a trail of shattered relationships behind me. So there you go.

Being bad

KCT: As a therapist I have the privilege of speaking to people in an intimate way about things that they’ve done that are abusive, that they know are abusive, and the pattern that always comes up is, “Look what you made me do!” The desire to shift blame onto another for one’s own personal pain, trauma, behavior, taken into its extreme, is an abusive pattern. The best part of the movement/moment we’re in is the part that says, “Look at yourself, and also love yourself.”

TJ: Something that I value so much about your work, specifically the article “Righteous Callings” is the way that you incorporate yourself into your analysis, and you start off “Righteous Callings” with this line, “I have always believed that I’m a bad person,” and that’s also been a theme in this interview, the idea of sinning, being bad, and religion. It keeps coming back! But I wonder if perhaps this is the wrong framework, if perhaps we could move beyond sinning and badness to just, “This is who we are.” Because sinning still implies that it is wrong, what if it isn’t wrong? What if it is just who we are and we’re constantly working towards something… ?

KCT: What I’m terrified of about this thought, what I struggle with in moving towards this thought is this: “What if I’m just trying to let myself off the hook for being bad?”

TJ: I know, that’s exactly why I stopped my question halfway, because I thought, “We’re actually bad.”

KCT: So much of the righteousness, self-righteous part of social justice is like, “See how you’re bad! See how you’re racist!” and the right response is, “You’re right. I am a racist,” and that’s of course true in some ways but also, there is this desire in me to be like, “But also, this is a human being human and growing up surrounded by a giant fucking terrifying system of trauma and systemic oppression, and this is all of us!” Does that mean I’m not being accountable? I guess we could question the framework of accountability itself, that, you know, we should do at some point. But also I’m like, “If I said that, what would happen next?”

TJ: I’m wondering what the motivation is? I guess the desire to be good, constantly, actually is a utopic desire — a place that is actually no place. What if we can think of goodness as always inaccessible, and that being okay?

KCT: That would be amazing! And you see people trying to create homelands that are free of sin: like with the Islamic State, a perfect caliphate, similarly with the cultural revolution in China, creating a communist land free of the sin of bourgeoisie. Whoever is doing that is creating this trap of desperately trying to be good, never getting there, blaming everyone else, hurting everyone else. I would love that to be able to say, “It’s okay…not to be good,” but then how do you respond to things that are violent? That need to be changed? But I think those two things are not incompatible!

Kill your heroes?

AP: I feel like a lot of queer culture has built itself around guides, and the history of queer communities often is: in your life you meet certain people who allow you to get further and further into your exploration of queer identity. Should we seek to have no more guides? Or should we try to keep it in a spiritual, social, kinship way?

TJ: That’s really interesting when looking at the similarity between religious communities and queer activist circles.

AP: And also in relation to fame.

KCT: I think it’s always most illustrative and interesting to talk about how I’m actually impacted by this. I often talk about the hypocrisy of celebrity culture and how much I hate it, which is, you know, kind of burning the ship that you’re sailing in, because, obviously, hello?! So much of what I have in my life is because I’m a micro-celebrity. I became a micro-celebrity, basically, as an alternative to becoming a sex worker. I’ve never said that out loud before, but that is true. The options that I felt were open to me in my life, as a trans woman of colour, were sex work or doing the queer celebrity gig. And I chose queer celebrity because, honestly, I found sex work too difficult to get into; I didn’t have the skills. I also found a different career path in social services, but that too is really tied to my queer celebrity. Part of the problem with queer celebrity is that it’s a neoliberal culture — it’s a brand! I’m sorry to pick on fellow micro-celebrities, but most of us are making anywhere from a tiny amount of money, to a moderate size amount of money from speaking, running, touring, modeling, all these other things. And so many of the queer youths that I work with have this in mind: “Oh I could be a YouTube celebrity, I could be a speaker/ writer/ artist/ whatever lifted by the activist community into the realm of fame.” Because it’s neoliberal, and we have to make money, so we’re always trying to be the next critical thing. And I just want to be suspicious of that as someone who is also, supposedly, anti-capitalist, and also, this is how I pay most of my rent guys! When it comes to guides: who doesn’t look up to someone and say, “I wish that were me/ could be me?” That’s so powerful! I don’t want to take that away from people! And I couldn’t!

TJ: And it’s more than that too, that person is helping you survive.

KCT: Yeah! This person is helping you maybe not harming yourself, or ending your life. What I do want to speak against is the concept of infallibility. Because that is so scary both for the people who have idols and for the idols. “Kill your heroes.” The thing queer communities love is celebrities, but the community also loves to hate celebrities. What if we set up a system where we don’t kill, or eat, or burn anyone? Inherently, the idea of having a hero that you then kill, or burn, or eat is disposable, disposability culture. So I’m wondering if we could allow for there to be guides, celebrities, with an understanding that people are humans and actually do some terrible things in life to survive, and also humans do some shitty stuff in life all the time, because they’re human.

No homeland

AP: I’m wondering how identities of queerness, being in a diaspora, not being able to speak your language as you would like to, intersect. I found this in a place called No Homeland, and I particularly resonated with the part where you have this recognition of someone that you see as part of your (diasporic) family, and you feel the need to bond because diasporic identities are so lonely and unique. But even then, we come to feel a tension between our diasporic identity and queer identity, we could ask ourselves: is queer identity a Western identity, a white thing?

KCT: a place called No Homeland is my favorite piece; I wrote it over ten years! That topic is the primary theme of the book, as the title indicates: feeling connection to different places, but also massive disconnection from those same places, and language and identity is so much a part of that. I do not really speak Chinese very well, even though I’ve taken some courses, but there are many different kinds of Chinese that vary between generations, even within my family. What we’re trying to access is a homeland that is frozen in time, a fantasy, that actually doesn’t exist anymore: you can never really go back. But there are different ways of accessing homeland. In some ways the homeland that is really yours is your immediate family: parents, siblings, uncles, which can also be full of trauma for some people. And there are different things we do, like making different foods, trying to access different pieces of culture. The truth is, living in diaspora and being queer means we are so many shades removed, and that can be a terrible and painful thing. It also is, I think, an amazing and powerful gift, when you realise that what is happening to you is the result of your family’s resilience, and a breaking of the narrative of nationalism and homonationalism that entrap most people and most queer culture. When you walk into a queer community, you immediately disrupt it as a person of colour, and when you walk into queer cultures in “the homeland,” you bring this Westernness. I think something interesting is that contemporary Western identity politics are actually very based on essentialism, which feminism and post-modernism tried to break out of for a while. People now are really hammering down, “Are you a POC? Are you a BIPOC? What kind of person of colour are you? How much do you pass? What is your white skin privilege? What is your adjacent-ness to whiteness?” All these terms are coming up, right? I think if you just take a second, it’s easy to realise that everything is fluid and that your experience is your experience, the story you carry is the story you carry, and there is something very freeing about that. When I run into queer Chinese people from the mainland, Singapore, Malaysia, Hong Kong: it’s always different, and there is always a point of connection. What you get to have is a memory, the ghost that your parents gave you, and you get to let the past go, and I think that’s really important actually — to embrace living in this “place called no homeland” is to be able to let go of the past.

TJ: Also living in diaspora is constantly living in a liminal space.

KCT: Exactly. I am of the opinion that all things are happening at the same time — that all traumas are happening past and future, and I love that — when we are talking about diasporic people, the past is always going to be with us but the future is with us too! And we’ll always be a part of that.

AP: I have a hard time writing in my first language, French, or my second, English, in relation to what I am discovering now about this whole part of my Iranian heritage. It doesn’t have to be, but it’s like English allows at the same times that it limits diasporic creativity. How do you feel about English, what do you think English has allowed you and what do you think it is pushing away?

KCT: Another hard hitting question. I love it! Yeah, I have a complicated relationship with English, like most diasporic writers. And English is so much my first language and my best language. So I was raised speaking Chinese and English, and then, you know, more and more English, and then I really stopped speaking Chinese at all, and then I learned French when I moved to Montreal. But yeah, language is so complicated and does have its limitations, and is such a form of colonization, right? And I think the truth is, I might not be a writer if English were not my best language, because I feel like with English I’m always trying to figure out how to say things that don’t exist yet. And maybe they would exist for me if I spoke my mother tongue more fluently. So I think English pushes me, to find more ways of expressing meaning, and to find new ways of saying things. Also, most of my literary exposure has been through English, some through French also, but like, all of my major references are to English writing, even if the English writing is diasporic or post-colonial. I’m so shaped by that. And I actually do sometimes wonder how limited my politics are because so much of them are in English, and therefore also from the American canon.

Dreams and nightmares

TJ: What are your dreams?

KCT: So, I’m not gonna lie to you! I have a really strong dream that keeps coming up. Literally, when I’m sleeping, but also its a fantasy life. So I am currently married to Kama, but I am also dating a white guy, whom I love, who is definitely the dude who has treated me the best in all the world of all the dudes I’ve ever met, and he’s in tech. And I have this fantasy that he’s going to become a tech millionaire, that we’re going to live in Silicon Valley, and that I’m going to be like a tech millionaire’s trophy wife, and host parties and be disconnected from the world and just float in this billionaire’s palace for the rest of my life.

TJ: Wooow. Wait, I’m sorry, but this happens for a moment in Fierce Femmes.

KCT: It does.

AP: It does.

KCT: It does. And sometimes life is very fascinating because I didn’t meet this boy until right after Fierce Femmes was published. And like, the names are also very similar. Anyway! So, I have this fantasy dream of being lifted into wealth and into heterosexuality and into safety, out of queer community, out of activism, into like the 1 per cent, living a life of safe luxury. That’s a fantasy. It’s also kind of a nightmare, obviously. Because what happens in the book, Fierce Femmes — oh, I guess I can’t spoil what happens in the book — but you know, the character in the book who has that for a moment, doesn’t really enjoy it. And I don’t think I would enjoy it if I had it, either. But I think this says a lot about what I fear right now. And to be really honest, what I fear is queer community and I fear this political moment. At the same time, all of my loves are in queer community, and all of my strengths and all of my gifts come from queer community. And all the potential to change the world in a positive way comes from this political time. But it’s terrifying. Let’s be honest, I think we’re all fricking fucking terrified!

TJ/AP: Yeah, yeah, yeah.

KCT: Because, you know, a despot, like a nationalist despot, is in control of the most powerful nation in the world. All of our idols are falling from the stars, for good reasons maybe, but are still falling, and I think we’re all kind of falling with that. And the longing for safety is ingrained in us, and I think it’s an essential thread in white, queer American community, this idea of safety also being tied to economics and if you can just be wealthy enough and married enough and heterosexual enough, then you can be safe. When of course, everything that Fierce Femmes is about is releasing these ideas of safety to seek out transformation, to seek out justice, to seek out connection, to seek out magic. So I guess the shadow dream to my dream of becoming a tech millionaire’s trophy wife is the dream of continuing this life and finding more freedom in that. The dream of being a tech billionaire’s wife is embracing the unknown, and I think that’s what we all grapple with, right? And we have the choice of being assimilative or upwardly mobile, in the same way that my parents really, really tried to fit in — this is like the dream of a different kind of world.

Forgiving and being forgiven

TJ: What is the role of relationships and friendships in healing in social justice movements? We kind of touched on it before, but could you expand? I’ve been thinking about friendship as the root of freedom and the communities that we form being alternative universes.

KCT: If we can return to a cliché for a moment, it’s been said that love is the answer, that our relationships are the answer, that within the microcosm of our intimate partnerships and chosen families we create these spaces of not constantly having to experience otherness, of not having to experience non-consent. But we know the truth about a lot of our friendships and family relationships, especially at this age, is that of course violence is replicated in queer family, how could it not be? We are traumatised creatures trying to build, and when we are doing that we are going to fuck it up, a lot. So I think the revolutionary potential in relationships is the potential for honesty, for saying, “Wow you really fucked up and hurt me badly,” and for forgiveness. And this is what trauma takes away from us: the potential to be forgiving and forgiven. When we live in traumatic environments with parents or caregivers, we are taught to believe that making a mistake will erase us from the possibility of having love. There’s this horrible, beautiful quote in the God of Small Things where this child is being chastised by her mother, and her mother says, “Do you know what careless words do? They make people love you less.” And there’s this terror in queer communities of being loved less because of careless words. You say something that’s a microaggression, or you do something that is politically incorrect, or is problematic — that’s the word, right — then we will be loved less and less and less, we live in terror of this, right? And one thing I wish was more present in queer community, that actually was present in a weird way in the Christian community I grew up in, is this idea that you could be forgiven if you were honest about your mistake. I mean, it didn’t work out for the Christian community that I grew up in, but it was an idea that was around, and I feel like it is actually not that much around in queer community right now. But now as a therapist, what I know is important for recovery from trauma is the ability to break a relationship and to repair it again, and to have faith that we won’t lose each other.

Returning to the body

KCT: It’s so human that we fuck up and people leave us and it SUCKS, right? And then there’s just that moment of totally being lost in the pain, and there’s something about how pains returns us to the body that is so important. And I think we have to listen to that, the body tells us things, that people are important and that it’s bad we fucked up, for one thing, and also that relationships are changing. You know, as we’re talking about this experience of getting into these close relationships, and you hurt each other and you love each other again, I think sometimes people resist that idea for the good reason, because I think a key factor of abuse in intimate violence is someone saying you have to forgive me, and things have to be the way they were again. Like, if I said “I’m sorry, now we have to be friends exactly the way it was,” and that’s actually not possible. When you hurt someone you do change the relationship forever, and sometimes we change it in a way that is better and more close, and sometimes we change it in a way where it’s time for it to be over. And forgiving and being forgiven, or having forgiveness as a value, does not mean someone has to still be your partner after you’ve hurt them or still be your friend, or even that you have to like each other. It just means that you’re allowed to exist together, right? And that grief and that pain is what transformation feels like, but also is what allows us to change. Pain is what tells us, “Okay, I really have to change my patterns,” or “Oh, that person was really important to me, and I grieve that loss.” I think we spend so much time trying to avoid that pain that we end up sometimes locking ourselves into really difficult and sometimes violent patterns.

This interview has been significantly edited for clarity and length.

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