by Ian Williams
Honey Dijon is a Black trans woman. Aesthetics and politics are not separate.
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I order a second pot, eight quarts large, while listening to Solomun’s Boiler Room set in the next Chrome tab. The second-to-last song in the two-hour set is called “Horny.” Between that song and the final one, he puts on his headphones for a few moments then takes them off. The final song is “Hoping.”
I used to wonder why DJs are so fussy with their headphones. Sometimes they hang them around their neck. Sometimes they press one side against an ear. Sometimes they wear the full set. I discovered that they are able to listen to two songs at once in order to beat-match the present track with the upcoming one. Unlike the rest of us, caught up in the moment, DJs occupy both the present and the future.
Any day now I will have my sit-stand desk, my silver bench. I will have a gigantic pot of soup on the largest burner. I survey the empty room and conduct the furniture into various arrangements. Two bookcases here, three there, a couch in the corner for naps, a desk facing the window.
I had a dream
In the past, when I lived in Calgary, I went through a dance phase. I’d walk to work with headphones on, enter my office, and dance like Ellen (cancelled) to start the day. Then I’d sit down and write Reproduction for hours. I suppose dance phases counteract periods of increased stillness—lockdown, sitting, confinement to screens.
In the early days of the first lockdown, back in Vancouver, my partner and I slow danced to Billie Eilish whisper-singing “I had a dream I had everything I wanted.” Before that, between the South Korean wave and the North American wave of the pandemic, I danced with my buddy and goddaughter to Dua Lipa’s “Don’t Start Now.” In twenty years, we had never. In both cases, our bodies were anticipating restraints.
Personally, I am of the school that everybody can dance but not everything will be recognized as dancing. To dance, just find a song you like, pick a body part, and keep the beat. And because we associate dancing with personal expression, which itself involves a kind of freedom, you’ll soon want to do more than keep the beat.
How do you teach someone to be free?
When postracial believers proclaim that freedom is there for everyone, you just have to take it, I remain as unconvinced as a wall-hugging dancer. If you have been socially controlled and disciplined in your desires to the point of total disconnection from your body, you’re bound to be skeptical when someone tells you, C’mon, just dance. Likewise, for someone unaccustomed to freedom, shaped by the stereotypes, brutality, threats, confrontations, and shame of race, seizing freedom means rejecting the very skeleton of your identity—
Can you hear that?
Bro, that’s corny. You know we can’t hear jack.
Listen.
Stop being corny.
Still no?
A white man is encouraging you to dance to music that only he can hear through his headphones. So surrounded is he by “We Are the Champions” in his noise-cancelling headphones that he cannot hear anything beyond the bubble, not your explanations, not your protests, not the traffic approaching you on all sides. To him, you appear to be dancing to the wrong song. To you, he appears to be dancing to your endangered life.
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My car arrives before my furniture. I had loaded it onto the truck clean in Vancouver and now it returns to me covered in mud and a mohawk of snow. I file a claim with the company. Within twenty-four hours, someone writes back apologetically. Get the car washed, send us the receipt, and we’ll reimburse you.
Speaking of reparations, I am still in an empty condo. I await the things that belong to me.
BETWEEN US
My partner is Asian. I am Black. Or she is Taiwanese and I am Trinidadian. Or she is American and I am Canadian. She speaks English, Mandarin, and French—sometimes all in one day. I speak English comfortably and French longingly.
My brother is Black, as you know. His wife is white, as you know. He is Trinidadian turned Canadian turned American. His wife remains American.
How is it that neither of us ended up with Black women?
This question occupies me periodically. Even if you believe that I shouldn’t trouble myself with it—love is love, the heart wants what it wants, and so on—you still have to admit that we are conditioned to see pairs that resemble each other. In America, 90 percent of people who marry do so within their race. Only 26 percent of Black women are married, compared with 48 percent of all women in the United States. If those two numbers say anything, it’s that you expect to see me with a Black woman and that many Black women are available, therefore— And here the question reasserts itself.
Depending on who you ask, people in interracial relationships can be interpreted as self-hating, race-betraying, whitewashed, and/or privilege seeking. In Vancouver, my partner and I got the full gamut of looks, from encouragement to surprise to disapproval, from people inside and outside our races. I reckon it’s the same with my brother, depending on the American neighbourhood.
Because race is typically cast as an ongoing struggle between Black and white people, what I think surprises people in my brother’s case, down in the South, is that there can be intimacy between the two races. In my case, the surprise lies in the combination of me and my partner; people pause when they see evidence of interracial intimacy unmediated by whiteness. Interracial, to most people, refers to Black and white, usually a Black man and a white woman. Chiayi and I are a provocation, a curiosity. And, to be fair, sometimes we’re unremarkable.
Did something go wrong in my childhood? Do my brother and I have higher degrees of openness? Doubtful. There was a period when I said I would only date immigrants, people who knew a culture outside North America. Those were lean dating years. When I trace my life, I understand the forces that led to my racialization. Some of these involve white people. Many do not.
The movements of my life, from Trinidad to Canada to Asia to America and back to Canada, do not conclusively answer the question of how I came to be with my partner, but they do make another important point. Even when whiteness is decentred, there remain innumerable tangled racial dynamics between and among racial groups. In Trinidad, Blacks and Indians vie for political control of the country. In homogeneous parts of Asia and Europe, the Black foreigner remains an object. In America, Black people from elsewhere negotiate their relations to African-Americans. And so on and so forth. Frankly, there are too many combinations to map here.
TRINIDAD: HOMEBODY
In Trinidad, my age and innocence did not preclude me from being racialized. I understood, for example, a categorical difference between Blacks and Indians. While I was being seen and not heard, I overheard adults having dull political conversations about which way the Indians would vote or about policies that would favour one group over another. What I didn’t understand, I sensed: Blacks and Indians practised a form of racism on each other to ward off a more fundamental and sinister racism that had to do with white people. In their joint fear of and reverence for whiteness, I beheld a unifying force, the way feuding children put down their sticks when a more formidable bully enters the playground.
I understood that Portuguese and Spanish people had soft hair and lived elsewhere on the island, places I have never needed to spell until now—Morvant, Lopinot, Arima, Mayaro. Chinese people looked different from us but spoke with Trinidadian accents. I understood that mixed-race people, most often Indian and Black, had their own category—Dougla.
I understood colourism. Light-skinned women got jobs as bank tellers. The flight attendants who welcomed us aboard flights between Trinidad and Tobago were fair and young. That combination was so frequently admired that I came to learn that these women were pretty. It was like learning the blond + skinny combo in North America. I used to correct lazy assessments of cute and hot with, No, you mean she’s blond and skinny. That’s
not the same as pretty. I’ve stopped. I’m worn down these days.
I understood from TV that white Americans lived in a different world from us Trinidadians and that Black Americans lived more like the white Americans than like us. I heard that white people and Black people in America didn’t get along, but on TV the Cosby family was as happy as the Keaton family, so it didn’t worry me. I had marbles and G.I. Joes to collect.
I understood that British whiteness differed from American whiteness. The aura of the English colonial presence still lingered, decades after Independence. Our formal pronunciation leaned toward British English rather than twangy American English. Same with our spelling. My mother announced teatime and suppertime (still does). Football over soccer. Cricket over baseball. Lady Di over Madonna. Oxford over Harvard. I was one of those colonial kids who lined the street in 1985 to see the Queen roll by in a black car. My mother wanted to do the same twenty years earlier in 1966 (but didn’t/couldn’t).
Trinidadians understood the cool ferocity of white British imperialism, its unshakable dominion over us. We felt allegiance to English ways but also palpable relief that white people were for the most part gone, except around Carnival time. It was like the freedom from the disapproval of a stern grandparent who didn’t live with us. We felt the aura of whiteness, rather than its presence. There existed households like mine that were split down the middle between the two cultural powers, so when my father decided to emigrate from Trinidad, my mother was pro-Britain, where two of her sisters were nurses, while my father was pro-America because it promised him opportunity.
In the end, they compromised on Canada.
Over their lifetimes, my father would become disenchanted with the United States while my mother would continue to watch royal weddings and buy commemorative magazines of royal baby pictures.
I felt secure in Trinidad. There was physical danger, sure. People drowned or got hit by cars. There were monsters that sucked your blood if you were out at night. That was part of the reality of childhood. I suppose I felt safe from racial violence. I picked up from overhearing adults, from the kids who spent summers abroad, that there was something large and powerful that didn’t like me. But at least it was elsewhere.
Then we moved elsewhere.
CANADA: BODYCHECK
At the first place we lived, I had the bizarre perception that all Canadian adults were white but kids could come in multiple shades. This was in Brampton, a suburb-turned-city northwest of Toronto. Back then, in the late 1980s, teachers, librarians, salespeople in department stores, bank tellers, bus drivers, catalogue models, every employed adult with the exception of church people—white. In Trinidad, everyone from our politicians to police officers, bankers to bakers, shared a physical familiarity with me; I was never disoriented or displaced by one racial group dominating another.
I crept toward a pernicious logical conclusion. Everybody non-white in Canada had to be from elsewhere, therefore everybody non-white had less claim to the country. Everyone non-white should defer. There wasn’t a thought to people preceding white settlers, Canada’s Indigenous people, apart from a spiritless unit on the Inuit in elementary school. They were swept aside with the same temporal irrelevance as dinosaurs. Extinct. What would become of the rest of us? Would our parents grow extinct? Would they go “back home” as they threatened—or perhaps dreamt? Maybe my non-white friends themselves would grow into white people.
Apart from the white blanket, there was an ideological covering over Canada. Canadians wore modesty—genuine in its insecurity but false in its self-chastisement—as a protective identity, especially when it came to Americans. We played the part of America’s younger, polite, simple-minded, hockey-playing sibling. Too innocent for racial awareness, let alone discrimination. Canadian innocence persists, to a degree, to the present. This positioning of moral superiority over Americans shuts down dialogue about Canada’s own discriminatory practices against numerous ethnicities. So humbleproud are we of our beloved status internationally that we uphold the Multiculturalism Act, the inclusion of POC, as a domain where we finally beat the Americans at something. But everything that is possible in the US is possible in Canada. Shootings. Poor Black areas. Suspicious looks at Black bodies. Kids streamed into technical futures instead of academic ones. It’s all here.
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My family moved when I was in middle school to a more affordable area of the city, meaning more diverse. Those streets had kids from everywhere. Indian kids, Pakistani kids, Vietnamese, Chinese, Black kids from across the Caribbean (not too many Africans and fewer African-Americans), immigrant white kids from Italy, Portugal, Poland, waspy white kids, mixed kids, phenotypically unidentifiable kids. The baseball or street hockey teams resembled a future-friendly multicultural world. We were a drawing of diversity.
Over the years, Brampton has since undergone a radical transformation. Like animals sensing a tsunami, white people fled Brampton as Indian and Pakistani immigrants moved in. By the most recent census numbers, the three largest groups are South Asians at 44.3 percent of the population, Europeans at 26 percent, and Blacks at 13.9 percent. The city has now gained a reputation among the other suburbs of Toronto as an ethnic enclave, just like Richmond Hill for Asians and Vaughan for Italians. You can read visible discomfort on the faces of non-Indian people as they gaze upon strip malls with Hindi signs. Neighbourhood conspiracy theories circulate about how South Asians are getting money to buy all the new developments in Brampton, about how they are “taking over” the government. That rhetoric of ethnic groups “taking over” historically precedes the reassertion of white dominance.
In Brampton, we witness the irony—or is it hypocrisy?—of white inclusive policies. White policy-makers congratulate themselves on the majority presence of a single non-white group. The presence of Indians in Brampton means that the area is diverse. Checkmark. Move on. In this way, the diversity of an area causes the white imagination to dismiss the area. Move out. Diversity to them means difference between groups. What white people rarely address is the incredible diversity within a group. A Black area comprises Somalis and Ethiopians and Ghanaians and Jamaicans and Haitians and descendants of Black Canadian slaves, etc. Same with South Asians. The Indians in Brampton are not all Indian by nationality, but Sri Lankan or Pakistani or Bangladeshi. The signs on the strip malls may not be Hindi but Urdu. The language we hear around us is more likely languages, plural. Within the Indian diaspora, people can prefer other identities: Sikh or Punjabi or Gujarati or Bengali or Brahmin.
My parents did not move out of Brampton. I’m there often. We are not a part of the majority group in the city. We were never. I can imagine what white nostalgia feels like. One sees businesses opening and closing according to the desires of the rising community, but not yours. Exclusion. Displacement. At the worst of times, people knock on my mother’s door to ask if she’d like to sell her house. Communication is occasionally difficult with older South Asian people. But that’s where my foray into empathy ends. I actually don’t resent South Asians for transforming the landscape of my childhood. I don’t grieve. I still feel free to wander the malls, to patronize the same post office my family has for decades, even if it is under new management. I see a community that is not organized by whiteness, that is unapologetically present, that inhabits the buildings, colleges, and schools built by others as if they always belonged there. I see young people flirting in the streets, new immigrants waiting on the bus to deliver them to an overnight shift, old men on park benches leaning on canes. They have formed friendships late in life, so far away from where they started. Did they consider this life for themselves when they were young, handsome, and tall in Punjab?
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When I walked with Chiayi through our neighbourhood in Vancouver, people seemed to relax. She would stop in front of houses and take pictures of people’s gardens. I stood on the sidewalk, scanning the st
reet. No one gave her looks for taking photos of their lilacs. She would ask homeowners about their coyote squash and wisteria. They offered us grapes from their vines. Such things never happen when I am alone. I am aware of the kind of privilege and access that her race grants me.
Once, when we were walking, I stopped in front of a house I admired and a man came out. I saw that, when he noticed me, something in him rose, like a tinted car window, like he thought I might return later and rob his house. But when he saw Chiayi, the window rolled down. He told us that he built the house himself. He told us about the architect. I listened politely. I tried to visibly admire his house, but not too much.
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In Vancouver, there is a similar fear of Asians taking over, not so much the city’s civic life but its real estate. Headlines: RACE AND REAL ESTATE: HOW HOT CHINESE MONEY IS MAKING VANCOUVER UNLIVABLE; IMMIGRATION HAS “UNDOUBTEDLY” ESCALATED HOUSING PRICES IN VANCOUVER, TORONTO, SAYS STUDY; VANCOUVER HAS BEEN TRANSFORMED BY CHINESE IMMIGRANTS; DOES CHINA’S MONEY THREATEN CANADA’S SOVEREIGNTY?; IS YOUR CITY BEING SOLD OFF TO GLOBAL ELITES?