Black Writers Matter

by Whitney French

  Whenever I think about the future I think about these drawings, me riding down an endless suburban street on a skateboard, baggy pants, chain dangling from a belt loop, sun shining.

  When I was about eight years old my teacher pulled me out of class one day and told me I was going to take a special test. I went into a little room next to the computer lab where you usually only went when you were in trouble, but my teacher made it clear that I was not in trouble. In the room there was a woman I didn’t recognize. She wasn’t a teacher or lunch supervisor or parent volunteer. I assume we introduced ourselves, but I don’t remember. The woman asked me a bunch of different questions. She asked me to name five reasons why paperback books were better than hardcover. She asked me to arrange a series of flashcards in chronological order: a house at sunrise, a house during the day, a house at sunset, and finally, a house in the night. I sat with the woman for about an hour, just her and me, and then she sent me back to class. A few weeks later, my teacher had a meeting with my parents and told me I was gifted.

  It didn’t really mean anything to me. All it meant was that I got extra work if I finished a lesson plan early. There was another kid in my class who had been tested and who was also gifted. We were friends and would do our extra work together, sitting separately from the rest of the class. I’m sure we had little egos about it.

  —

  I wake up really early the morning after Lisa Robertson/karaoke with a hangover and a plan to declare bankruptcy so I can get out of credit-card debt. I have so much credit-card debt, and suddenly it seems very important that it all goes away right now. Bad out. I have been putting it off and off and off. A collection agency calls me now. I have a mini half-conscious panic attack in my bed that eventually leads to clarity. I’m going to declare bankruptcy, I decide. I don’t have any assets anyway. I don’t know how to drive, and owning a home feels like it’s out of the question. I open up my laptop, which sleeps next to me in bed like a surrogate boyfriend, and do the research.

  Bankruptcy is wiped clean off your record in six years. I get out of bed and look out my window to the bakery across the street, the bakers setting up shop for the morning rush. It is still raining. The leaves on the trees are all yellow. In six years I will be thirty.

  I take a shower and the whole time I’m like, Bankruptcy, bankruptcy. I call Zoe to tell her the plan. She says I should be more strategic about it. She says, “I want to move back to Montreal.” I say, “I want to blow my life up and maybe move back to Toronto! Wanna swap?” She says, “Ha ha, yes, but where to work, and for you, where to live?” I hate that we live in different cities. I just want to watch tv on the couch with her like we did when we were kids.

  Zoe is four years older than me, but we’re also twins. I send her money when she needs it and she sends me money when I need it, no questions asked. I feel certain that one day we’re going to be rich and famous, or at least professionally successful and materially comfortable. I tell Zoe that I hate my job. She says, “Me too.” She says she thinks the baby she’s nannying may be a secret evil supergenius. The baby is also teething and keeps trying to bite her. “Have you talked to Mom recently?” she asks. I haven’t. “I have to go do work but I’m so hungover”, I say. “Poor bunny,” she says. “Yeah, I have to go deal with this crazy evil baby. Call me later this week; let’s strategize.”

  ­­—

  I go to Cafellini to do work. I used to work in an office, but then one day my boss was like, “We’re turning your office into a conference room,” so now I work from home, which means from this cafe called Cafellini just outside Beaubien metro. The space is small with an awkward seating arrangement and only three outlets in the most inconvenient spots. When I started coming to Cafellini regularly the barista handed me a one of those punch-hole buy-ten-get-one-free cards.

  She said, “You come here often,” as if she were surprised to have a repeat customer.

  All the baristas seem like best buds. They hang behind the bar, laughing and chatting during shift changes. They’re all Francophone, white. They’re always smiling. One of them makes a silly joke and they all groan. I imagine their lives are like a sitcom, the Quebecois version of Friends. They probably go out drinking together, just really living it up, you know? I am jealous. Working by myself can get lonely.

  I work as a content writer for a digital marketing company. I write blog content for small businesses to increase their SEO, so they’ll show up in Google searches more frequently. The trick is to embed keywords, or commonly searched terms, into the blog content to boost web traffic—so for instance, if I’m writing content for a plumbing business, I’ll use terms associated with plumbing: pipe, valve, burst, faucet, sink. I mostly write for plumbing businesses, as well as a few contractors, a registered massage therapist and a German shepherd breeder, about whom I feel morally ambivalent. Every day I write between 1,500 and 3,000 words (depending on how productive I am that day) about plumbing, roofing, the benefits of massage, or German shepherd grooming tips. I get paid fifteen bucks for every article I write. My boss is always so impressed by the calibre of my work, which is frustrating. I have a BA and it’s not rocket science—why wouldn’t I be good at it? It’s not very stimulating as work, but a job is a job. I wish I could work at a hip coffee shop like Cafellini, but my French isn’t good enough. At least I’m not at the call centre anymore. Zoe says I have a unicorn job, because finding reasonable work with limited French in Montreal is basically a myth. Mom says my job is very millennial. When her dad was my age he worked in a factory; now I work at my computer.

  —

  Later that afternoon it is still raining and I am still at Cafellini doing work, kind of, when my roommate texts me to ask for our landlord’s number. My mind immediately goes to bedbugs. “Is it bed bugs???” I text back. “No,” she texts, “I need a letter for my student loan application.” I send her our landlord’s number.

  I am always so worried about bed bugs, ever since that stupid sublet I had a few years ago brought them after he went to the Sochi Olympics. That sublet was the absolute worst. He moved into our apartment for six months and totally took over. He watched hockey on the tv in the living room every night and left dirty pots stinking of mac and cheese to stew in the sink for days at a time. My other roommate and I dubbed the sublet a Trustafarian, a rich white kid who moves to Montreal in order to ‘slum it.’ How could he afford to go to Russia to see the Olympics when he worked at a call centre for minimum wage? You have to watch out for people like that in Montreal, the white kids from Calgary or Vancouver who wear ripped jeans and always talk about how broke they are even though they go to Europe twice a year and never seem to have jobs.

  One time I got high and watched the first season of The Simple Life with the annoying Trustafarian sublet. He was like, “Paris Hilton is so stupid,” and then I had to explain the cultural significance of The Simple Life to him. In the first season of The Simple Life, Paris and Nicole spend six weeks living on a farm with a working-class family in rural Arkansas. Paris and Nicole are positioned as these rich bimbos while their hosts are positioned as the pastoral ideal of hard-working moral purity. Running parallel to this portrayal is a second one that positions Paris and Nicole as enlightened cosmopolitans compared to the cultural ignorance and naivety of their rural foils. The competing frames create the central conflict of the show: working too hard leaves little room for one’s aesthetic and cultural development, while having unlimited access to everything you want without having to work for it can erodes one’s moral centre. The show is basically about capitalism. If I could quit my job tomorrow to do whatever it is that I wanted, what exactly would I do? Is work a moral imperative? I told my Trustafarian roommate, “That’s what The Simple Life is about, man.” After I finished my explanation, he was like, “Wow, you’re really smart.” Part of the reason I don’t want to go to grad school is because I don’t want to go further into debt to have people act all shocke
d when I say something intelligent.

  Anyway, our Trustafarian sublet brought back Russian bed bugs from the Sochi Olympics. We cleaned our apartment and ran all our clothes through the dryer a bunch of times and had the place fumigated and then we were fine, but I’m still on edge about getting them again. There are no bed bugs in my apartment right now, thank god. The rain still hasn’t let up. I only wrote a single article today: The Benefits of Installing a Backwater Valve. I am no Lisa Robertson, writing poetry for the cultural elite. The barista at Cafellini tells me that they’re closing for the day. I write my boss an invoice for fifteen dollars. I finish the rest of my Americano, which has gone cold.

  —

  Some days I feel unmotivated to write. I don’t finish a single article, and because I get paid by the article, I don’t make any money. Sometimes I work over the weekend, to make up for lost time. I don’t watch movies or tv anymore. I’m too exhausted after work to do much of anything. Some days I think, What’s the point? Nobody actually reads the articles I write. The articles are written to be read by the algorithms that scan the content for keywords so they can arrange Google results when someone searches a particular keyword. Basically, I write for an audience of complicated, highly intelligent software programs.

  If a robot could write these articles, they would hire the robot. That’s how everyone lost their factory jobs. Robots. I know that I am expendable, even though my boss is often “surprised” by the quality of my writing. I want to quit my job without giving any notice. I want to blow my life up and just walk away. I want to declare bankruptcy because it feels like a bottom to hit, from which I could rebuild.

  On the way home from Cafellini, I call my mom and ask her what she was doing with her life at twenty-four. She says she was travelling with her boyfriend at the time, living out of the back of a van. How romantic. My sisters and I are the first in our family to go to and graduate from university. Mom says Zoe and I have access to futures she and Dad couldn’t even fathom as possibilities at our age. I counter with this hypothetical: which is worse, to see no future at all or to see a future that is constantly just out of reach? Mom and I often come to these stalemates; I think it’s a generational thing. Mom is sad I’m not coming home for Thanksgiving. I am sad too, but also relieved. I won’t have to answer any questions about my job, where I’m headed in the future, etc. With sadness on one end of the spectrum and relief on the other, I am left in stasis, unsure what to feel. I tell Mom that I love her and end the call.

  That other little gifted kid, the one with whom I did my extra work in elementary school, she lives in California now. She’s a bioengineer. I don’t know her salary, but I’m sure it’s impressive. She’s white. Her family is middle class, supportive. We see each other maybe once a year, when we’re both back in Toronto for the holidays. Otherwise, she only exists to me via social media—hiking up a mountain in the Bay Area, giving a lecture at a women-in-tech conference. I like her and still consider her a friend, but I’d be lying if I said I wasn’t jealous.

  I think about the “Me at 16” drawings. What would a “Me at 30” drawing look like? I only wrote a single article today (fifteen dollars), two yesterday (thirty dollars), and four the day before that (sixty dollars). I feel out of options. Rent is due soon and I don’t have enough.

  —

  Later I go over to Mada and Kaeten’s apartment on St. Andre for our low-key Thanksgiving dinner. It’s still raining out. I wear a long trench coat and bring an umbrella. I arrive first with a salad. Mada and Kaeten make a lasagna, but the bottom element in their oven doesn’t work so they’re having trouble cooking it evenly. Mada takes the dish out of the oven and places it on top of a burning element. “That should cook the bottom, right?” she asks. Kaeten and I are like, “Yeah, sure.” After a few minutes, Mada moves the glass lasagna dish to one of the unlit elements to cool down. There is a moment of silence and then the glass lasagna dish explodes into a thousand little pieces with a bang. It literally blows itself up. Bits of glass go all over the kitchen and into the living room. We sweep up the glass and throw it away.

  “What should we do about the lasagna?” asks Mada. Kaeten thinks we can salvage it, but Mada is not so sure. Together they rescue what they can and put it onto a new pan that they place in the oven. Ella and Kalale arrive and we tell them about what happened. They laugh. “Don’t you know that putting a glass dish directly onto heat is a bad idea?” Sometimes you just have to improvise, and sometimes that improvising doesn’t go the way you want it to, so you have to improvise a solution. We decide to eat the lasagna anyway. Who cares? We start eating. No one bites into any glass. The lasagna is delicious. Outside, the rain has finally cleared. Kalale says she had a lot of fun at karaoke the other night, and I agree.

  So what if I’m not in grad school? So what if I’m getting paid a measly wage to write blog articles no one will read? I’m not an engineer in California. I don’t know how I’m going to pay rent this month. Everything is a big deal until it’s not. I’ll figure it out. I have to trust that eventually my life will come together and then probably fall apart again in some new way. At least I don’t have bed bugs anymore. Of course, swallowing glass is always a possibility, but I have to trust that I won’t.

  Hunger Games

  A Quiz

  — Rowan McCandless —

  If you feed a fever and starve a cold, what should you have done about your eating disorder?You had no idea you even had an eating disorder. It always seemed a part of you, like a parasitic twin syphoning your self-esteem.

  You had some idea but were terrified to commit to change.

  Nothing. After all, you were told Black girls don’t get eating disorders.

  Reach out for help because Black girls do get eating disorders, and there was no way you could overcome it on your own.

  Is this a trick question?

  You didn’t want to believe that you even had an eating disorder. You were just extremely disciplined, had an abundance of food intolerances, a profound and abiding compassion for all living things except, perhaps, for yourself.

  Who are you trying to kid?

  All of the above.

  Growing up, when people said, “You have such a pretty face,” it wasn’t meant as a compliment._______ True _______ False

  You couldn’t fight Mother Nature; big bones ran in your family._______ True _______ False

  Check all that apply. Having an eating disorder gave you a semblance of:_______ Control when life was complete chaos.

  _______ Power to compensate for being powerless as a child.

  _______ Safety in a world that did not feel safe.

  _______ Mastery over your body; you could bend it to your will, whip it into shape, force your flesh into a package considered more palatable.

  _______ Self-esteem and validation within your family and society at large.

  When you finally summoned the courage to walk through the doors of the Eating Disorders Program, which best represented your thoughts?Turn and run. Run, run as fast as you can. Things weren’t as bad as they seemed, as you calculated how many calories you’d burn by bolting out the building to your car.

  You rationalized that there were far worse ways to abuse your body than having an eating disorder.

  Things were as bad as they seemed. So even if you had to force yourself, you were going to participate in the program.

  You should have arrived earlier and saved yourself the embarrassment of walking, in full view, in front of everyone seated in a semi-circle.

  Why didn’t you try to lose more weight before entering the program?

  One of these things was not like the other—you were the only woman of colour in the group.

  You thought of a million other places you’d rather be.

  Forget those million different places. You needed this group, this program to get well.

  You were afraid that you didn’t belong in the program. Th
en what would you do?

  You were afraid that you did belong in the program. Then what would you do?

  You were terrified that making peace with food and with your body would lead to massive weight gain.

  So obsessed with surface and appearance, your family wouldn’t accept you if you gained weight.

  So obsessed with surface and appearance, society wouldn’t accept you if you gained weight, and you already had one big black check mark against you.

  You couldn’t imagine life without an eating disorder.

  All of the above.

  When you looked in a mirror, your image was often distorted, as if you were standing in front of a not-so-funhouse mirror at the carnival._______ True _______ False

  The bathroom scale weighed and measured your worth._______ True _______ False

  Fat is not a feeling._______ True _______ False

  Giving up your eating disorder felt like you’d be:Abandoning your best friend.

  Ridding yourself of your worst enemy.

  Both (a) and (b).

  You found the program and your counsellor to be:Supportive.

  Helpful.

  Guided by a feminist perspective.

  Empowering.

  Safe.

  All of the above.

  Check all that apply. Have you ever wondered why your mother:_______ Never ate a meal with the family at the dining-room table?

  _______ Seemed to live on cucumber and cottage cheese?

  _______ Refused to have her picture taken?

  _______ Stayed with your father despite all his affairs?

  _______ Blamed you for ruining her life?