“Keith. You are not like other boys. I can see that,” she says.
“Kay? Kay? Feel the ground underneath you. Can you feel it?” I nod. I hear Beck’s firm voice in the present. I begin to feel the rocks and sand on my tailbone. I feel the sun on my face. I can see the silhouettes of people above me. “Good. Breathe. Can you look around you? It’s me, Beck.” I see him. “Look around. Take your time. Can you see things that are blue? Can you find at least three things that are blue?”
Firuzeh’s sweatpants. Beck’s eyes. Liv’s shirt. The sky.
“Good. Keep breathing. Now, I want you to be here. I want you to be here, seeing everything around you, but I want you to punch back at me. Can you do that?” I nod. I punch at Beck standing above me. It is a half-hearted punch, as I am still slowly coming back into myself. “Can you use your breath each time you punch? Can you make a ‘ssss’ sound when you punch this time?” I try. The exhale tightens my core, and the punch is stronger. The colours around me are more vibrant. Beck’s voice is clear. I am more in my body. “Again. Again. Again.”
Firuzeh, Liv and Bahadur clap for me, and the sound of their applause is crisp. My breathing is deep. My arms are warm. “Kay? How are you doing?” Beck searches my face. I give an affirmative nod from my position on the ground. “This time, I want you to punch left, right again and again, non-stop, and I will back off when I feel your energy push me back. Does that make sense? Can you do that?” I shake my head, unsure of myself.
Beck looks right at me, although I am uncertain if I am looking back at him. “Kay? I need you to remember why you’re doing this. Remember how these actions are connecting all of us. I want you to feel that power running through your body.”
I take a deep breath and begin. I punch, again and again. “Ssss. Sssss. Sssss. Ssss. Ssss. Ssss. Ssss.”
“Lying with a man as with a woman is an abomination,” Ma says as she brushes out my curls, my scalp bleeding.
“Ssss! Sssss! Sssss! Ssss! Ssss! Ssss! Ssss!” says the little boy with every punch.
“Do not be deceived. Neither the sexually immoral, nor idolaters, nor adulterers, nor men who have sex with men, nor thieves, nor the greedy, nor drunkards, nor slanderers, nor swindlers, will inherit the kingdom of God.”
“Ssss! Sssss! Sssss! Ssss! Ssss! Ssss! Ssss!” Soap bubbles bursting. Soap souls going to heaven. The sound of applause in the congregation upstairs. “SSSS!” the boy exhales, extends a punch, and the daycare washroom collapses in a pile of dust. Ma covers her ears at the deafening sound. “SSSS!” A soundtrack of Liberace plays at full volume. Thousands of fairy costumes fly through the air, and a kaleidoscope of scripture passages explode into beautiful fireflies protecting his tiny body. “SSSS!” Another final punch and the lattice of the Winchester church implodes. The steel framing melts. Every wall hiding every secret crumbles into shadows. Ma, in tiny pixels, becomes grains of sand. She watches in pain as her body is wished away by wind, by time, by my own breath.
Applause. I hear applause. Firuzeh and Liv embrace me. I am crying. Bahadur squats beside my supine body, crying too. Beck is covered in sweat. He tosses the punch mitts and extends a hand to help me up. I stand. I hold Beck and continue bawling, fully trusting. Fully in my body.
Firuzeh looks at me and ceremoniously rolls up the sleeve of her T-shirt. I tearfully do the same. We touch shoulders. Liv, Beck and Bahadur join in, rolling up the sleeves of their shirts and touching deltoids. A circle. Joy.
As the days pass, our drills become more graceful, become muscle memory. Some days Beck holds us each at the waist, guiding us sideways as we shoot three targets using an AR-15. Some days Liv has us practise loading ammunition in the dark. Some days we review the plan of attack. Each day ends with us dirty, covered in dust and watching the waxing of the moon.
While we train, Bahadur and I witness another curriculum that does not include us. Every morning, Liv and Beck make their way to a clearing and practise the embodiment of their resistance, complete with corresponding movements and words said out loud:
When I do not act, I am complicit!
When I know wrong is happening, I act!
When the oppressed tell me I am wrong, I open my heart and change!
When change is led by the oppressed, I move aside and uplift!
And each morning, Bahadur and I have followed them to the clearing, overwhelmed with curiosity. At first, we experienced the same discomfort we would feel when witnessing white folks taking up too much space with their guilty tears or their complete denial. Each morning we waited for the shoe to drop, for their ritual to suddenly become performative. It was obvious to us that it had taken years for them both to arrive at this level of awareness, because their chants were said in a whisper, their movements delivered with authenticity. There was something about their efforts having nothing to do with us, that their unlearning and undoing was not leaning on our labour of explanation nor our praise, that made this a ritual for us too. It forced Bahadur and me into a place of ease, of witnessing, of relaxing while folks processed their allyship. It felt foreign to us to not have to bear this burden. Foreign and delicious. It became our daily morning event, without Liv or Beck even knowing of our presence.
One morning, Bahadur and I watched Hanna make her way to Beck and Liv in the clearing.
“Where are you going?” shouted Peter from inside the house.
Without turning, Hanna shouted back, “Where does it look like I’m going? I’m off to spend some time with our son!”
Once she got to the clearing, she stood with her cane bearing her weight and asked questions.
“So, you do this every day?”
“Yes, Mom.” Beck wiped sweat from his brow.
“But why every day?”
“Because we have to unlearn every day.” Beck went down on his haunches and retied the shoelaces on his combat boots. He looked back at his mother, whose face was twisted in confusion.
Liv chimed in, hoping to clarify things. “Oppressing others is learned from the minute we’re born, Hanna. It’s like trying to sink a beach ball in the water. It pops up every now and then, whether we want it to or not.”
“And when it pops up, we either pretend it’s not there or we ask oppressed people to help us keep it down or we ask them to praise us for sinking it.” Beck tentatively held his mother’s hand. Hanna shuddered at his touch. Her face and neck were red. “For me, the most challenging part is not crying. It’s hard to not feel shame, to not feel guilty for having this much privilege. But shame or guilt doesn’t help anyone.”
The rest of the day unfolded with Hanna unable to look us in the eyes. Over dinner, she quietly crunched away at crackers, her eyes focused on some unknown point on the horizon. When she rose from the table to leave, the crumbs that had gathered at her waist fell to the floor, and she absentmindedly wandered back into her bedroom for the night.
“I’m really sorry you have to watch my mom struggle through all this,” Beck said awkwardly once she was out of earshot.
“No, no. We’re all accustomed to this type of discomfort,” said Firuzeh, smiling eyes meeting mine, then Bahadur’s.
Miraculously, Hanna returned to the clearing the next day. Her eyes were swollen from crying.
“When are you making breakfast, Hanna?” Peter called from the house.
“You’re perfectly capable of opening a can of cocktail wieners,” she answered as she made her way to the clearing.
“Hi, Mom. Are you ready?” Hanna nodded wearily. She proceeded to learn the set of movements and the set of chants and adjusted them to suit her level of mobility.
Some days, she argued with Liv, her left hand flapping in the air as if to dispel any of Liv’s truth into the ether of their collective shame. “I gave them all a place to stay, didn’t I?”
During these times, Liv would hold her palms up as if to calm a wild animal she had cornered with truth. “Yes, you did give them a place to stay. But we need to dig deeper than that. What makes us be
lieve we are better than them, that we are entitled to certain privileges? That’s what has led us here.”
Hanna would storm off, pushing past branches and brush towards the house. On these difficult days, she would intercept me in the hallway of the farmhouse and say, “I’m a good person!” then make her way to her room to cry some more. I would force my arms to my side, willing myself not to assist her in her process. I have done enough of that in my lifetime.
Some days, Hanna would change her tactics. “Why do you and Liv need to lead this fight?! Why can’t we leave this uprising to them?”
“It’s different, Mom.” Beck would hold his mother’s shoulders and stare deep into her eyes. “We’re not leading it. What we’re doing has been planned by activists who have fought their entire lives just to live, to work, to love. Everything, from what we’re saying in our chant to how we’re moving when we say that chant, has been guided by them. They have done that work. And believe me, Mom. They had to do a lot of work on me to get me where I am now. I will continue to do that work, on myself and those around me, for the rest of my life. And you know what? It feels good. It feels good to wake up and stop pretending. It feels good not to be afraid, not to set myself apart, not to defend what wasn’t mine in the first place.”
Hanna looked around helplessly. “But why my son? Why do you have to fight? What if you die? What will happen then?! You might not have a life to live!” She attempted to embrace Beck to soften his approach, but he held firm.
“Mom, I need you to understand that, for me, even having a choice to fight is a gift. People right now are being raped, killed, taken away from their children, being forced into workhouses. I will not let that continue. I choose to fight.”
Hanna shook her head wildly to keep Beck’s words from sticking. “Not my son! I’m not one of those evil Boots! I’m a good person!”
Liv had had enough. She approached Hanna until they were face to face, Liv’s glare demanding connection, willing eye contact.
“Look at me right now, Hanna. I don’t give a shit if you think you’re a good person.” Liv was seething. Bahadur and I looked at each other with mouths agape. I turned back to the trio, wondering if this exchange would transform from peaceful conversation to a rowdy episode of the Ricki Lake Show.
“How dare you! You watch your tone with me.”
“No.”
“Excuse me?!”
“I said, ‘No.’ I will not watch my tone. I won’t. We’re trying to enact change, Hanna. We’re not here to make you feel better.”
Liv wiped the hair from her face and retied her ponytail as perspiration surfaced on her blushing skin. “I was once like you. I once believed that a few good deeds were a job well done. I thought I was one of the good white people. I wasn’t like my family, who lived in small-town Ontario all their lives, who could trace their English lineage all the way back to colonial times, who would collect the arrowheads found in the garden and place them on the mantel like prizes they’d won. Surely, I didn’t benefit from the land they took away. Surely, I was not complicit in their actions. As long as I looked at my great-grandfather with shame for his slave ownership, his penchant for Black women, as long as I recited the Indigenous land acknowledgement every morning to my fifth graders, then I was doing the work, right? Oh, and even better, to show everyone how progressive and Queer I am. Hell, I could shack up with a Mohawk woman! Save her by having her live with me in my fancy home in Hamilton. Yeah! I’m not a slave owner. I’m me. I’m a good person.” She shouted towards the tops of the trees, pacing. Hanna cowered, trying her best to maintain her grimace.
“Erin didn’t deserve that. She didn’t deserve to be my little experiment, my statement, my cause. But she stuck with me. I shudder to think of how many times I put her in a position of explaining herself, to be paraded around to my family and friends and at my school, to deal with my fetishizing her, using her to assuage my own guilt. My great-grandfather had his arrowheads. I had Erin. It was . . . it is disgraceful. Everything I did with her was to prove that I was a good white person.
“Next thing on my agenda was to have a child together. Of course, it could have been me who got pregnant first, but no, I really wanted, deep down, a Brown baby so I could parade it around too. Another arrowhead. I still remember us driving an hour east to our donor in downtown Toronto, booking two separate hotel rooms, running the sample into ours, and Erin propping her legs up on the wall after inserting the semen. She was like, ‘Wow. Isn’t this romantic?’” Liv stopped pacing and sat on a tree stump. She paused and swallowed back the sweetness of this memory. Her tone softened.
“I watched Erin grow. I loved seeing her get out of the shower. I would pretend to brush my teeth, but really, I was looking at her. She would towel off her tummy and I would wonder how I got so lucky.” Liv looked up at the treetops for a moment. The hum of cicadas. “When labour started, we drove to the hospital. We were so excited. Between contractions, Erin was on her phone telling her grandmother and her aunties to start heading over from Six Nations to see her. I can still hear them all on the other end cheering, even though it was three in the morning. They must have been waiting for news from us. The labour went faster than we expected. We got in there, and they checked Erin’s dilation and they were like, ‘She’s ready to push.’ Baby Myles was on an express train out. Once he arrived, he let out this healthy cry, and Erin and I laughed and laughed. We were so happy. I didn’t know you could smile that wide, ever.
“I thought the nurses were supposed to clean him up, then place him on Erin’s chest, but they wheeled him out of the room in his little bassinet instead. I thought, well, they’re medical staff, they know what they’re doing. I was still kissing Erin’s face and thanking her for giving me this beautiful gift. Then, just after Erin birthed the placenta, a nurse comes walking over to us all official and stern.
“Erin asked, ‘Where’s our baby?’ The nurse hands us a clipboard with a contract on it. She tells us that if we want to get our Myles back, we have to sign this contract for Erin to be sterilized. I lost my shit. They almost had to call security on me. I was hysterical. Erin was screaming for our baby. I was running down the hallways of the hospital searching for Myles, calling out his name as if he could call back. This was a nightmare. A horror story. This wasn’t happening to us. I was going to change it. By the time I ran back into the room where Erin was, she was holding Myles, bawling her eyes out. She had signed the contract. She told me, ‘I had to. I couldn’t live without holding my baby.’ I was so angry at her. I had the audacity to say, ‘How could you? They don’t have a right to do that!’ and she looks at me and says, ‘You don’t know what it’s like to not have rights.’
“She got a tubal ligation. We got our baby. And I got the wake-up call of my life. I was one of the many good white people who never believed that forced sterilization of Indigenous women could happen in Canada. It was just a news story of something vague and unproven. And once I saw it happening, right in front of me, I knew I had to name it for what it was. I knew I had to call it genocide.
“Shortly after the tubal ligation, and after we heard of the supposed wildfires in Alberta, we knew we had to change things. We decided together that Erin and Myles would go into hiding. I would leave my teaching job, change my name, dissolve the house and join the Resistance.
“And you know what is the most shameful thing about it all? It took the mutilation of my partner’s body for me to understand what being an ally is. That’s how deep it runs, Hanna. What will it take for you to wake the hell up? What are you willing to lose? What horrible thing are you willing to watch before you understand that you have to change?”
Hanna reached out to Beck’s body to stabilize her stance. Liv pivoted herself around to face the forest and cried silently. Hanna stepped forward with the instinct to apologize and console, but Beck held his arm out and gestured for them to give Liv some time alone.
The training continued. Despite Hanna’s frustration that no o
ne among us would coddle her, would lessen the blow of these lessons by affirming her or congratulating her, still she returned. Still she trained.
“I wonder what internal dialogue goes on inside that woman’s brain to have her come back for more,” Bahadur said one morning while wiping their face with their T-shirt.
I rolled my eyes. “I kind of don’t care. Whatever it takes for her to learn and do the work is good for me.” We chuckled.
In the time it took for Bahadur to finally figure out how to shoot a target, there was a shift in Hanna. When we first arrived at the farm, the tip of her nose pulled away from us, more like away and up, as if allowing her body to share the same spatial plane as us was too much of a risk. She began to share space easily with us. She began to ask us sincere questions that stemmed from sincere curiosity about our lives. She began sitting quietly to listen with her whole body, with her whole gaze, while we spoke.
In the clearing one morning, Hanna said quietly, “Last night I had an idea.” Excitement brimmed in her eyes. Liv and Beck looked at each other, then gathered near Hanna.
“You know how you said that being an ally is a verb and not a noun? That I had to ally every day? And I shouldn’t ask for praise? I was thinking we could add another movement. Something to train us to never ask for praise. Something to keep the focus on them instead of us.” There was a pause.
Liv nodded. “That’s a great idea, Hanna. But is there a way we can do that without it being performative?”
“What do you mean?”
“Like . . . a lot of oppressed activists complain about how much space we take up congratulating ourselves for doing this work.”
Beck chimed in. “That’s tricky, right? We want to show prospective allies this important element, but we need to do so without being showy.”
We watched from afar as they experimented with the movements. Hanna finally showed them a promising gesture. She placed one hand firmly over her mouth and the other hand in the air. “No, wait. Let me try again. That seems like I’m telling them to be silent. That’s not what I’m trying to say. Wait a second.” She thought for a moment, then performed another gesture. This time she used both hands to cover her mouth, then moved her hands to her heart in humility.
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