"That taught me there is love in abundance,
a commitment to self,
and that we do not have to give up parts of ourselves...
Those that have Indigenous blood, those that have
immigrant blood.
Those that speak pidjin with the might of their uncles
and aunties
and become new uncles and aunties, and the cycle
starts all over again."
- Coyote Park, "Heart of a Shapeshifter: 2 Spirit Love Medicine"
Last night, I left off my mini-treatise on a cliff hanger. "...It is not enough..."
What am I not confronting about what it means to write about a settler colonial city?
It is a refrain from the poem 'Negus' by the Late Kamau Braithwaite. I return to this phrase because "It is not enough" - culturally bound to the idea of semi-colony - renders floating or aimlessness as something not to be problematized. What characterizes the scale of my genre as a lack is the fact that it cannot hold all the truths in the definition of a place like Tkaronto/Gichi Kiiwenging.
Place dysphoria functions to break the illusions my furtive imagination remains beholden to. One of my favorite authorial moves to "write the city" in my genre is a move from Lexis to rhetorical import. A proverbial 50-pound bag of Onions that I peel (wearing goggles) for my audience from the title on. The example that comes straight to mind is the urban mise-en-scene popularized by Michel de Certeau, "Urban" doing much of the work of conveying the easy dry outer layers of brittle cosmopolitanism. Step by pilloried step, stopping to look with vision charged with third-space intensity, I direct a drama.
I may have never even been there! like in winning competition designs, but through the specialist persona that comes with the territory, I assume the dais and use spatial deixis to portray the built objects I percieve.
Arguably, beyond genre, there is no context that can ensure the validity of Certeau-like questions. To break it down further, I'll use the words of our unnamed narrator on the beat. "My theoretical framework was that place governs the practice of self-fabrication. Even when we aren't alert to the force of history bearing down upon us, it's there all the same. Everyone from northern Alberta was a historian of it."
Important to me are the concepts from the work of Indigenous land-based storytellers here in Tkaronto. An initiative by the name First Story Tours ran from 2013 to 2018 (before I returned to the city) as an Indigenous-led space activation project. Their work precedes my own in both time and rhetorical goals.
As the authors worked with intimate knowledge, cultural and ethnic meanings of explaining "here and now" raised questions of who was permitted to know as they knew. And that belonging - above all other criteria - was the carry-go theme that place-based ideologies of nationalism exploit. M. Jacqui Alexander writes of hegemonic identities, among these identities are tourists. At the local language of street tours, there similarly emerged an incongruity in the relationality non-Indigenous people have to this place.
Reality is created in metaphorical process. On top of all the meaning that I have gathered in spaces of the city, my analysis bears a fruitful nothing. Not a slack jawed awe, but a hesitation and confounded expression at the carry along of it all.
In closing. Well, I lost the quote but, either the Author or the Unnamed protagonist says, "Writing...an act that negates the brutalities one experiences at their intersections." Ultimatley, the genre-defying work of "A Minor Chorus" in my life was to break the notion of genre and open up the verse of architectural discourse to a system of reciprocity.
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Thank you for reading! It has been an honour to share with you this meal! i'm playing around with idas that have bounced around for a while to arrive at something new...I dont know what that looks like yet but I know I'll find it at the nib of a working pen. Good intentions and blessings to you all.
>CITATIONS
‘Why Do You Need to Know That?’ Slipstream Movements and Mapping ‘Otherwise’ in Tkaronto, Karyn Recollet and Jon Johnson (2017)
'Pedagogies of Crossing: Meditations on Feminism, Sexual Politics, Memory, and the Sacred', M. Jacqui Alexander, Duke (2005)
'A Minor Chorus', Billy Ray Belcourt, Hamish Hamilton (2022)