by Ian Williams
* * *
—
At that MLA convention in Philadelphia, Toni Morrison was one of the featured presenters. The room was full. I squeezed myself into the back. I was just a boy from Brampton, trying to get a job among glittering people from expensive schools, but she seemed to speak straight to me:
Certain kinds of trauma visited on peoples are so deep, so stupefyingly cruel, that—unlike money, unlike vengeance, even unlike justice, rights, or the good will of others—art alone can translate such trauma and turn sorrow into meaning, sharpening the moral imagination.
If both paths led to the same security, I would have written a novel instead of a dissertation.
I’ll confess something. I didn’t think I was going to win the Giller because some of the other finalists had been on the list before. They were bridesmaids two or three times; it was their turn. I didn’t think I would win because it was my first novel and a challenging one, a multicultural story and the world was swinging back to white supremacy. And, to be honest, I didn’t think I was going to win because I was Black. Esi Edugyan, a Black woman, won the year before for the second time, a rare feat. No way would they give the prize to Black folks two years in a row. And André Alexis, a Black man, had won a few years before, so no way, and Madeleine Thien, an Asian woman, before that. The prize was becoming unrecognizably non-white. Canlit wouldn’t go Black. Then, the year after me, Souvankham Thammavongsa, a Laotian woman, won. She passed on the advice she lives by: Live as if you’ve already won.
* * *
—
Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak was on the same round-table panel as Morrison. In situations where I am hyper-visible as the Only and called upon, implicitly, to represent the entire race, as if there is a single Black position on any issue but multiple white positions, I recall Spivak’s double bind. Add Black to her identity markers below:
The question of “speaking as” involves a distancing from oneself. The moment I have to think of the ways in which I will speak as an Indian, or as a feminist, the ways in which I will speak as a woman, what I am doing is trying to generalize myself, make myself a representative, trying to distance myself from some kind of inchoate speaking as such. […] But when the card-carrying listeners, the hegemonic people, the dominant people, talk about listening to someone “speaking as” something or the other, I think there one encounters a problem. When they want to hear an Indian speaking as an Indian, a Third World woman speaking as a Third World woman, they cover over the fact of the ignorance that they are allowed to possess, into a kind of homogenization.
It is not fair that one Black person has to represent the race while a room of white people represent only themselves.
IN PUBLIC
There is no guarantee that Black people are inclined to help each other out. Our interactions are not all head nods and fist bumps. In fact, a Black person can guard the position of the Only to prevent others from achieving a commensurate level of success. It’s a disturbing reality, especially in a culture where winning is defined as being the only one to have succeeded. For two Black people socialized into whiteness, beholding each other in a room of greying white administrators, for instance, can be tense. Is she the kind of Black person who hangs out with Black people publicly? Does he think I’m one of those affirmative action brothers? Will I offend them by presence? Will she think I’m hitting on her?
I used to worry about approaching Black people through the white rain. I understand how much labour went into building the fragile tower of our acceptance. How dare I knock it down by offering my hand?
* * *
—
A few years ago, I spent some time at the Banff Centre for the Arts, working with a team on a documentary/text/dance production. My role was challenged from the outset (insert white man: “Let’s be clear about who’s running the show”) and the entire project never fulfilled its intentions, as far as I know. I did my part and went back to working on my first novel, Reproduction.
During that month, I saw no Black people. No artists, no business people, no administrators, no food staff. I didn’t notice at first, but the moment I did, I couldn’t return to ignorance. My eyes grew hungry for someone like me.
On the evening of the premiere of the dance performance, I was in champagne-flute conversation with a friend when I saw a Black man, wearing a cowboy hat, next to an Indigenous woman and their baby. I told my friend that I was going to do it, I had to, I was going to say hi. She pretended to release a dove with her hands and off I went through the white rain. I don’t remember the conversation with the man. He probably introduced his family. I probably made a joke. He was chill. We don’t exchange Christmas cards or anything. And although there was no bond there, I felt better about the world afterward.
* * *
—
I was having lunch with my publisher one day at a swanky place in Toronto. I had been living in Vancouver for a while by that point. Skin hunger was gnawing. The host led a Black man and a white woman, similar dynamic to ours, to a nearby table. I divided my attention. Eventually, I went to the bathroom, then on the way back stopped at his table, interrupted, said I’d been overhearing parts of his conversation, said he reminded me of someone, was he a creative type? Had we met? We tried to superimpose our histories. No overlap. We did not offer each other jobs. But we could not deny a kind of symmetry. He made a card of himself on the napkin and gave it to me. That was all. That was enough. And I felt a world better afterward.
* * *
—
James Baldwin knows about being the Only and the First.
In “Stranger in the Village,” he makes a point about the difference between being the first white man to be seen by a Black person and the first Black person to be seen by a white person: “The white man takes the astonishment as tribute, for he arrives to conquer and to convert the natives, whose inferiority in relation to himself is not even to be questioned; whereas I, without a thought of conquest, find myself among a people whose culture controls me, has even, in a sense, created me.”
Both America and Canada are created on white power. That’s not inflated rhetoric. I mean that the institutions and priorities that shape both countries have white ideologies at their foundation. The difference between the two is that white Americans and Black Americans have been in each other’s hair from the founding of their country and that the major shifts of domestic policy have had to reckon with a large Black presence. There’s still a huge attempt to keep the words American and America white and to hyphenate Black Americans as a category, an offshoot, an accessory of the dominant group. Yet a Black American is understood to be from America and not anywhere else. In Canada, there’s still a sense that a Black Canadian is from elsewhere—not Canada. Maybe the Caribbean or Africa. White Canadians keep looking for a source of that Blackness, whereas white Americans know that Black people are as much a historical part of their country as white people are.
All those years that I was surrounded exclusively by white people, I felt myself nipped and tucked, smoothed and eroded, by the contact. I imagine that the North American white person’s self-definition functions similarly against the existence of Black people, as if Black people were a fence, holding hands, around their self-concept. Only that fence is electric. In the white imagination, Black people are always charged while white people become charged by contact. Everything outside that fence, all the other fields of unknowability, belongs to Blackness. In the same way that the geocentric Earth relates to space, as the most important point rather than a small and insignificant interruption to the vast darkness, so whiteness positions itself in relation to Blackness.
We could just as easily flip ground and background.
THE DRIVE HOME
1.
Pierre and I are driving back to Vancouver from Surrey along a highway that slices through farmland. He’s not so much driving as strolling alo
ng the highway. It’s Saturday afternoon, unpleasantly hot, so we go back and forth between turning on the AC and opening the windows. In the air, there’s wildfire smoke, calls for racial justice, and a virus.
Pierre’s in good spirits. He tells me that he’s been on a staycation for the past two weeks. Didn’t look at his e-mail. Sat around eating ice cream and watching Netflix stand-up comedy specials.
A car passes us. The driver looks over at us, annoyed. Strolling has become crawling. My right foot pushes down reflexively. I’m mildly embarrassed at my role as an accessory to slow driving.
Pierre catches me glancing at the speedometer. He’s five kilometres below the speed limit.
Notice how I’m letting everyone pass? he says.
You’re giving them a head start, I say.
But he doesn’t speed up. A few minutes go by and, compared with the other cars, it now feels like we’re in reverse.
Did you get another ticket or something? I ask.
He takes his eyes off the road to look at me. He seems spooked.
In the time I’ve known him, he’s received tickets for driving through intersections with red-light cameras, for parking in no-parking zones when he used to deliver food to pay for school. Something’s different this time.
He says, A cop pulled me over recently.
We both get serious.
I was on my way to meet a client. In Surrey, actually. I was going twenty kilometres over the limit and this cop—he was in a regular car—gave me a ticket.
I wince. That sucks, I say.
Pierre is silent for a while. He is reliving the incident. We are on the same stretch of highway as where he got pulled over.
I know I was going fast, Pierre continues. I was overtaking, so I sped up. Obviously. He snorts. And I looked into the car and I saw his eyes and I knew it was a cop right there and then and that he got me. So he flashes his lights and follows me until we get over the bridge. And that’s where I pulled off the road. The cop got out and approached on your side. I saw him walking toward me in the mirror. I put both my hands on the steering wheel like in the movies and he put his hand on his gun. The whole time he was talking to me, he kept his hand on his gun. You know the first thing the cop asked me?
What?
2.
I was in the Vancouver airport on my way to San Francisco for a book event. At the immigration counter, I got sent to the oh-no room. Most of the people in that room were people of colour, including a family where the mother was Middle Eastern and the father was white. The father and two daughters were quickly released, but the mother remained in the holding area with me. As they left, the girls, wearing matching coats, alternately looked back at their mother and up to their father.
When it was my turn, the first thing the white immigration official said to me was not Good morning or Hello, not How are you? or Where are you travelling to today? It was, Have you ever been arrested?
I heard both a question and a threat. The officer detained me for more than ninety minutes. I had to surrender my green card and I missed my flight to San Francisco.
3.
What? I say again. What did he ask you?
“Is this your vehicle?” He thought I stole it.
Pierre drives a 2003 Mercedes-Benz Kompressor. A few days before Christmas one year, we went shopping for cars together in, wow, Surrey again. The car salesman was a caricature of a car salesman whose large head emerged from a low-buttoned shirt. He counted a wad of money on his desk as fast as an automatic money counter. He informed us that the advertised price, the price Pierre was prepared to pay after attempting negotiations, was not the actual price. He wanted another five hundred dollars. I stood behind Pierre, very Papa Bear, and said to him, You can walk away. Just because we drove all the way out here doesn’t mean you have to buy it. Pierre, twenty at the time, thought in silence while the salesman and I looked at him. He wanted that car so badly. But he walked away with his four thousand dollars, all the money he had, and bought his Mercedes from someone else.
4.
Whenever I enter my vehicle, I stage a veritable Broadway production. I pull out my keys early. I unlock the door many times with the remote from a distance to signal, Yes, this is my car. I am approaching my car, everybody. I shall enter it forthwith. I stage this production a lot at night and in parking garages. The worst thing would be to reach the door unprepared, fumbling for my keys while white people look at me suspiciously over their shoulders.
When Pierre admitted the same fear, we had a voluble bonding session. No way! You too? He told me about a guy who was rubbernecking him outside his house as he was trying to get into his car, about the time someone broke into his car, smashed the rear quarter window, and thus compelled Pierre to get it fixed immediately so people wouldn’t think he was driving a stolen vehicle.
Do our efforts even matter, though?
Weeks after Pierre got pulled over, police in Colorado drew their guns and handcuffed a Black woman and her children. They thought she was driving a stolen vehicle. Turns out it was her car.
In Winnipeg, a man posts on Facebook:
To the “gentleman” who decided that he needed to make me late for work this morning by stopping me to make sure that I was not stealing my own car,
YOU ARE THE PROBLEM, NOT ME!
I can’t “move back to where [I] came from”—I was born in this country.
Yes, I’m actually a doctor—I’m glad you were able to read my scrubs.
The other man had blocked his car, then interrogated and insulted him. He assumed the only way this doctor could afford to buy his car was by selling drugs.
In England, Danny Rose, a British soccer player, gives an interview: “I got stopped by the police last week, which is a regular occurrence whenever I go back to Doncaster where I’m from…Each time it’s, ‘Is this car stolen? Where did you get this car from? What are you doing here? Can you prove that you bought this car?’ ”
5.
I tried to explain to the cop that I was passing, Pierre says, but he wouldn’t give me a chance to talk, so I just kept quiet, and his hand was—you know—the whole time.
By this point in his story, my entire body is tense.
And this cop, he was the standard white boy. Blue eyes, clean-cut. And I was thinking, like, Just tell me what I did and give me the ticket, man.
And meanwhile everyone’s passing—
And looking into my car, straight at me, because he’s talking to me through the passenger window. And everyone’s speeding more than me. And I want to say, Why don’t you go after those guys?
Instead, the cop interrogated Pierre. He humiliated him. Humiliation, like shame, does not require an audience. The officer was silencing him and breaking him, not as a spectacle for the people in the passing cars, not even for the officer’s own pleasure, not entirely, but simply because he could. Who needs a reason when you’re dealing with Black folks? Why gives way to why not. The officer looked into Pierre’s Mercedes and read his demeanour, heard his soft voice, and knew that this kid would compliantly play along to the script. The officer knew that none of the white kids want to play with him. So he played with the Black kid who is under command from society to play. If, out of his uniform and off the job, he had met Pierre, and Pierre had committed a minor social irritation, the word n might pulse in the officer’s head, but he would leave Pierre alone.
I urge the story forward.
So he’s interrogating you about all these irrelevant things.
He didn’t believe I was a designer or that I was going to meet a client. He asked me about that, like, three times. He asked me what I studied in school. He asked me which school. He asked me my immigration status.
Totally irrelevant, I say.
I had already given him my licence and insurance. Could I have those if I was here illegally?
&nb
sp; Maybe he was illiterate, I say.
6.
I met Pierre at a Filipino church. I was new to Vancouver, trying to find a congregation with people my age who practised an informed Christianity. Including myself, there were three Black folks at the church that day. I remember Pierre’s height, his fancy mixed-metal watch, his collared white shirt under a sweater. He was reserved when I spoke to him. The following week, I went back and he was there again. I asked him if he wanted to do something later, and I think we hiked a trail.
He said he’d been going to that church for five weeks and every week the members greeted him as if he were visiting for the first time. Every week, they asked him to stand and wave. At what point would he belong?
Over the next few years, Pierre and I spent every Saturday together, trying out churches in the region in the morning, making lunch, doing something outdoorsy in the afternoon, then watching a movie in the evening while eating heart attacks from Fatburger. We’d cycle through films by genre, through Kevin James, Kevin Hart, Denzel, Will, Matt Damon. We had a horror-movie phase that ended with the truly terrible film The Human Centipede. He introduced me to Black French rap, waxed eulogistic about Kendrick and J. Cole on long drives out of the city.
We settled on a church in Richmond, not too far from the airport. That church has the greatest concentration of Black people either of us sees in a week, which is to say about ten.
7.
Only with clichés and the invincibility of youth can Pierre make sense of the disorienting incident with the officer.