Black History and White Geography

           

            Tuesday, June 21^st was my last job of posing for the ladies of Studio 1181 in Mervish Village, since their space, the vintage video store above, most of the other buildings in the area and Toronto landmark, Honest Ed’s, will be demolished to make way for a major transformation of the neighbourhood starting in 2017. I first worked for the group back in the 80s when they were located in Leaside and their address actually was 1181. Their ages range from 77 to one of them pushing 100, so they’ve decided that they won’t be looking for another studio after leaving this one. Helen, the woman who does the booking is 88 years old and gorgeous! She was not there for my last gig because she was back home in England. Jane, the 77 year old baby of the group, is originally from Minnesota. She told me that Helen is planning to live in Spain. Apparently there is a colony of retired Brits living in Spain, much like the Canadian “Snowbirds” who live in Florida. The other Jane, also in her 80s has always said that mine is one of her favourite faces to draw and that she’ll want to hire me privately in the future. Lots of people have said that, but very few have followed through. Twenty dollars an hour with a three-hour minimum is a lot for one artist to pay. I told them that I was going to miss them because they’re one of the nicest, if not the nicest group around, and I’m not the only model who feels that way about them.

On the evening of Tuesday, June 21^st, I rode my bike under an endless sailing field of sleepy voluminous clouds on my way to Shab-e She’r.

I took my usual seat at the back. The air conditioning was on even though it was quite pleasant outside.

When Bänoo Zan went to the front to start taking names for the open stage, she announced that new people and minorities would be especially welcome. I told her that I was both new and a minority because there is no one else like me.

As Bänoo was walking past me I asked her if she could shut off the air conditioning, and she did. I could feel the results almost right away, but was hoping it would not get so warm that people would want it back on. It was feeling pretty nice, but opening the front door would have been a nice way to get some fresh air blowing into the room.

I chatted with Michael Fraser, and since he’s a high school teacher, I wondered if the academic year had finished yet. He told me, “After next week.” I asked if he’d be going anywhere for his holiday and he answered that he’d be visiting his sister in Massachusetts. I said that I have relatives all through New England and he shared that it’s the only part of the States he’s ever been. I informed him that while the accents may be different between the Maritimes, where I’m from, and New England, the speech is similar, so we don’t call the sisters of our parents “ants” like they do everywhere else in the States and Canada.

I noticed that the air conditioning seemed to have gone back on by itself.

At 19:00, Bänoo announced that we would begin the readings in two minutes. She was only three minutes in surplus of her promise.

To start, she gave her usual speech about Shab-e She’r being the most diverse open stage in Toronto, and gave a bit of history as to how it came about. Banoo landed in Toronto from Iran in 2010, and started going out to the available poetry events in the city. What she discovered was that literary readings in Toronto did not reflect the diversity that one sees on the streets of Hogtown, so she set about to try and build a better mirror. She told us that a few minutes before, some Iranians came, expecting us all to be speaking Persian, but left when they found out otherwise.

The first performer on the open stage was Andrea Thomson, who sang and recited a piece that she said was about the return of hope, optimism and empowerment. Her composition was intermixed with parts of the song, “What A Wonderful World” by Bob Thiele and George Weiss and she began singing the first verse followed by her own words – “ … They’ve invented a bathmat made of moss … We were trained into passivity … ostrich palooza … posting inconsequential statements on Facebook …” She sang the second verse of the song, then – “ … Maybe it’s a simple matter of alchemy … the word ‘possibility’ teasing our lips like raspberry … They’ve built bus benches into swings in Montreal … The lure of a heart suddenly too seductive to ignore …” She sang the third verse of the song, then – “ … We needed to stand stupid and hopeless … We have only just begun.” Andrea ended with the final verse of “What A Wonderful World”.

I’ve heard Andrea do the above piece before and researched some of the information she includes in the piece about progressive human friendly innovations that have come into our world recently. I had exposed one of her claims as misinformed, about a high-rise apartment building in Milano which she had said was “made” of trees and shrubs. The building in question is actually made of concrete, with extra large balconies serving as little parks for each dwelling. I noticed that Andrea had changed the piece this time to make her information about that building more accurate. I don’t know if corrected it on her own or if she’d actually read my review.

In reference to Andrea’s mention of bus stops made into swings in Montreal, I’ll have to once again be a researching killjoy and point out that this is not the case. The swings are a popular art installation called “21 Balançoires” on the Promenade Des Artistes. They are only set up from late spring until the early fall, during the festival season in Montreal. Because they are near the Place Des Arts metro station, some outsiders have gotten the notion that they are bus stops. But the busses stop across the busy street and if you wait for them on the swings you might miss your bus.

            Bänoo declared that she always feels especially blessed when former features like Andrea Thomson come back to Shab-e She’r.

            Next on the open mic was Valérie Kaelin, and from her excellent poem – “Original skin … we each sleuth out the largest organ … Here I am … wound, split-boned, sequined and fringed … It knows only its knowing … against foolish wanderlust … The original skin … it means well … the presence of animal … inclement weather … It’s hovering, radiant hand … The mind streaming … loneliness the common enemy of its heart … From delegate tracings bitten by the cold winds it acquires the furrows … survival … needful … finds metaphors … wild creatures to domesticate … Worried skin … in this arises the sanctuary laws … to dress our yearnings …”

            After Valerie was Diana Manole, who informed us that George Elliott Clarke, the poet laureate of Canada, had selected one of her poems for his Poem of the Month Gallery.

            The poem that Diana shared with us was called “Deflowering English” – “With my rough accent … my chronic inability to remember the place for modifiers … A double act of rape and enslavement … my syllables copulate with yours … our thoughts and accents contaminate English … But how can a word ignore its own accent … Revirginising the English language for a redemption we are not ready for.”

            Then we had a story poem called “A Mirror” from Hari Kumar – “It was found in an Egyptian tomb … I put it on the ceiling to watch myself lying bare … He’s so beautiful … He looks at me dreamily and closes his eyes… I feel his lips on mine, currents shake my body … His fragrance is mine, his taste is mine … The night lights up, the air ignites … We erupt inside each other … Now in each other’s arms, sweetly spent … I see him stretch in the mirror above … He mimics my love … his face … waves of anguish … The glass shatters … We will be one again …and in the sliver that stabs my heart I see his bleeding eyes …”

            When Harry was done, Banoo took a moment to once again sing the praises of diversity at poetry readings by saying, “If you only make sense to people like you, you are not making sense.” She also reminded people that since Shab-e She’r does not receive any government grants, it survives by donations. She said that anything under $3,000 would be accepted, and anything over that, come and talk to us.

            Next on the open stage was Shagufta, who said that her poem was based on research on South Asian women receiving a virginity test upon entering the U.K.- “The feel of his latex gloves as he opens me to the cold table … I stare at the ceiling … my legs flopped … The stinking smell of lubricant … A light snakes round and pours into me … Oh, my secret snatched … Speculum … I am nothing more than my flesh … My heart … my skull … heavy as chalk … Status confirmed … I remain open … humiliated … I think instead of my mother.”

            I was sceptical about this having happened, first of all because it didn’t make sense to me why British immigration services would give a damn whether or not a woman from South Asia was a virgin. But a little research online showed that it did happen just as Shagufta said, except that it would have been helpful if she’d clarified that it happened in the 1970s and that the practice was terminated before the end of that decade. So the story behind this fucked up turn of events is that most South Asians moving to the U.K. back then needed to apply for a visa in order to do so, but for some reason the Home Office waived this requirement for unmarried women as long as they were scheduled to be married within three months. In order to prevent women that were already married from cheating the system, some genius with the Home Office had the naïve notion that South Asian women do not have sex before they are married and so a virginity test would detect any women that were trying to get a visa under false pretences. A historically deeper degree of ignorance was behind the very concept that the detecting of a torn hymen during a virginity test provided any proof at all that a woman was not a virgin, since many activities other than sex throughout the lives of girls and women can cause their hymens to tear. Most of these tests were given in India or Pakistan before the women left for Britain but some happened at local hospitals shortly after arrival and even some right there at Heathrow airport.

            Following Shagufta was Nick Micelli, singing acapella a song about the participation of Irish immigrants in the U.S. Civil War, called “Paddy’s Lamentation”, which he said research has shown was written by an unknown Canadian composer – “It’s by the hush me boys … listen to poor Paddy’s narration. I was by hunger pressed … so I took a thought I’d leave the Irish nation … Take my advice, to America I’ll have ye’s not be going. There is nothing here but war … and I wish I was at home in dear old Dublin … When we got to Yankee land they shoved a gun into our hands, saying ‘Paddy, you must go and fight for Lincoln!’ …”

            As Bänoo was introducing the first feature, Michael Fraser, someone reeking of several days of tobacco smoke came and sat beside me.

            Michael read from his latest book of poems: “To Greet Yourself Arriving”. He took the title from a line in Derek Walcott’s poem, “Love After Love”. Each poem in Michael’s book is an homage to a different Black figure.

            Michael began with a poem inspired by Neil Degrasse Tyson – “Sometimes I think this never happened … I know we are all living parallel lives … Hitler rules this blue orb … When we were single cells … when we were stardust … surprised to hear the barefaced brownboys wonder within …”

            From a poem inspired by Howling Wolf – “I can hear the train coming … Mama left before I could spell my name … A dead man tuned my first guitar … Hell is a mama that never wanted you.”

            From a poem inspired by Gil Scott Heron – “Blazing … winter in America … Pure pulse … you know he’s the real … What’s going down … Power to the people … You stand in the shade of his blow-out fro … You have to keep on keeping on … The revolution will not be televised.”

            I never quite understood the expression, “the revolution will not be televised”. Even before television, as long as there have been journalists, they have covered revolutions, and so of course the revolution will be televised.

            From a poem inspired by Frederick G. Douglass – “Yesterday I found the person I used to be … Words carried me away from him and multiplied in my leathered hands …as his thin illiterate memory left nothing …”

            From a poem inspired by Cilia Cruz – “ … The sutured swell … the two-toned background singers … the oak or amber beads … the pewter mic … the plumed papaya queen … the capered feet … the bass rumble … the half-pint whose smile lights the sun.”

            From a poem inspired by Barack Obama – “ … His voice the cleansing of space … He refuses to swing at England’s red face … The world expects miracles … No one could possibly be from where they claim … like freed slaves scooting north …”

            From a poem entitled “Underground” – “Crickets squeaked wings … Even near the border they were always one cough away … When they crossed into Ontario, Africans knee deep in the vomit of snow … They dreamed of cotton … running barefoot into morning.”

            Michael then read a poem inspired by Joe Frazier, but first explained that he didn’t celebrate Ali because Ali had used colourism against Frazier – “You’d have loved to drop Ali … You insisted on calling Clay by his earthen name … Cameras and tape recorders came towards you like locusts … Beyond the ropes, men are broken.”

            Michael’s final poem was inspired by the Black Panthers – “Because Watts was burning … blasting my Jim Crow past … Let the safety click speak up in public … Perched on painted lady porches … Ozzie and Harriet time … Our soldiers felled in Vietnam … I couldn’t choose bus seats … I was half time in law offices … My children walking coatless to winter schools … I linked up with Stokely Carmichael and Angela Davis … clipped the magnum to my side and finally decided to wake the hell up.”

            The last few times that I’ve heard Michael Fraser read, he shared poems based on research into African Americans who were conscripted to serve the United States as soldiers a few hundred years ago. My problem with that book was that he was too far from the subject matter to be able to conjure up and command any enticing imagery to give power to the poems. This night’s reading was a little closer to home, but still far from the watermark Michael had set with his first book of poems that talked about his own life. Those poems were tactile and beautiful because they were about things that touched him on a deep level. Michael is a schoolteacher and a family man. I’m sure that he’s being touched every day by real experiences that could make for much better poems than those that are derived from research.

            There was to be the usual break, but first there was a raffle for a small package of books. After a few numbers were called by Kate Marshall Flaherty of people that didn’t answer because they must have left, someone of course eventually won the prize.

            After the break, as she has tended to do lately, Bänoo had one of the open stage readers serve as a sacrificial lamb to help to re-gather the attention that had been broken by the break, so the feature wouldn’t have to work as hard. She chose Ali Ibrahimi for this task, who read a poem entitled “Truth and Reconciliation” – “Platelets repurposed … schoolhouse dons … moving lawns … Tomorrow we will see truth again …”

            The second and last feature of the night was Soraya Peerbaye.

            She began with poems inspired by her trip to Antarctica. She informed us that when one goes to Antarctica one is asked not to pocket anything.

            From her first poem – “Coal eyes albatross … bones hollowed for flight … Icebergs … the continent opens its mouth … syllables of snow … blue, luminous … spectrum sharpened to shadow of mirror … a white room asylum …”

            Soraya’s second poem was called “Throat Song” – “Harmonic intervals of cloud … Carcasses ransacked … broken into eggs in the shadows below … a droning undertone … frozen, unable to rot.”

            She told us that she went to Deception Island where there was once a whaling station that closed in 1929. The carcases were abandoned and the current landscape looks like Mars – “ … Whalebone … boat hull … on an island named Deception … I press my hand to each body … Even decay wants to live … The mining of a living ore … Sea lulls bone … Rail of wind and rusted lungs … Constellation of a holocaust and still beauty … A whale marked by a flag and left floating … Wash their hands in warm blood …”

            In the second half of Soraya’s set, she read for us from a series of poems based on the gang assault and murder of Reena Virk in British Columbia – “ … Salt marshes … throats and the breasts of birds … There had been a tumult of rumour … He testified how her jeans slid from her hips … amidst exotic blackberry … stems blackening … She started mumbling words … wanting something to catch … In Warren’s testimony she drowned … Two girls … One standing … He stood on the shore … saw Kelly raise her hand … Smooth ligament scars … Her face pressed to the estuary floor … floods her mouth, her nostrils … I’ll make her eat her words … How could he see from the moonlight glimmering on the water … Kelly’s jacket … She said her jacket reeked like blood, like rotten fish … The edge of the hand brought down like a hatchet blow … Pressure against soft palate … the tongue in the wave …”

            From “Slow Time” – “Here the force is ice … A series of shadow lakes … pine cones holding themselves close … salt lines on tree trunks …”

            From “Stones” – “I will take anything that is given … What do the pebbles tell you … That it became harder … Watery night against her open eyes … clutch of tongue between her teeth …”

            Soraya’s final poem was “Lagoons and Lakes” – “I liked diving … a glass of Fanta cracked my lips … licked the fine, bitter dust … Here it was sweetwater … tilted and teardropped …”

            Soraya Peerbaye’s poems about Antarctica were some of the most inspired writing presented at Shab-e She’r that evening. They created atmosphere and tactility; they trembled with the emotion of the experience of being there. Her set of poems about Reena Virk’s murder suffered from the same distance as Michael Fraser’s poems about famous strangers. She couldn’t call up any strong images because of course she wasn’t there to mine them from the moments of the event.

            Bänoo immediately returned to the open mic, starting with Anushka.

            From Anushka’s poem – “I speak for my grandmother … spit revolution … for the dissolution of self … I will speak in my mother’s tongue … This tongue will go dry … for the sister beaten to death by her brothers for wanting a divorce … We have been silent for too long.”

            Next was David Bridges, who informed us that it was National Aboriginal Day. His poem was called “Be Cause” – “Orlando ordeal … because you slaughter those disgracing your fanatical cause … This is the American way … as guns and roses grow freely … Counter insurgency of compassion … May the black rose know the white rose has no shadow.”

            After David came Rula Kahil, who told us that Banoo was going to kill her, but because she has a birthday coming, she had written a “Poem for Banoo” – “Curly hair … innocence that resides in the layers of your silence … a presence that is constantly present … The friends we are in between lands …”

            Then Banoo invited me to the stage where there is no stage. I read part two of my translation of Boris Vian’s “Un Coeur D’or” – “ … Very gently, Candy Breeze lifted the razor he had been holding and passed the sharpened blade over the taut, white knuckles of the murderer …  One by one, the tendons of his fingers snapped like the over tightened strings of a guitar, and with each cut, there resounded a feeble note …”

            Following me was Megan Hutton, who told us that she represented some kind of diversity in that she is a 70 year old lesbian that has been with the same woman for 31 years. She said she sat through the Vietnam war and has been a playwrite, but now that she is older she composes poetry. She shared two poems.

            The first was entitled, “Primal Desire” – “Carefully folded into that interior you call self … you roll under my tongue … Darkness hides your armour … the push and pull that is you … fall to the earth with confusion … I wonder if your silence is a language.”

            Megan explained that her next poem described an encounter between a  down and out man and a couple of uptight Forest Hill lesbians. She called “Fast Eddy” – “My eyes dance on his words … a dishevilled stranger … The risk of opening up to two unlikely participants with matching purses … he asked them what day is Monday … He remembers his place … My drinking, my downfall … left over from a Christmas he can’t remember … warn, peeling and chapped … Recites The Cremation of Sam McGee … believing for a time in a future he can still imagine …”

            Before inviting Alexia to read, Bänoo took a moment to thank her team and said that her nightmare is not having one.

            Alexia told us that this was her first time reading her poetry in public and that she is a student in Andrea Thompson’s spoken word class at OCADU.

            Her poem was called All At Once” – “It doesn’t happen all at once … Your mother hands you a pad … Am I a woman now … It’s just your period … You take her offering into the washroom … the pad unfolds like a lily blooming … you will bleed into this whiteness … You are not allowed to speak of it … There are models in commercials who do this really well in white bikinis … You bear your period like a champ … You must repent … You must collect the red brightness of it … offer it to the moon … Keep secret stains behind the nails lest you forget your mother was wrong.”

            Next was Geoff Lepper, who read a poem he’d written for a friend who is terminal, and he cried through most of his reading – “Perhaps we are all like icicles hanging … She was a child of life … More than tables, she walked into walls … People looked at her and wondered … People don’t simply walk through walls … She’d had every intention of walking through walls … Her spirit still dictated that she walk through walls … Life is much more than being at home, full of tears … Those who thought of her as having poor sight … This woman of joy gave all who knew her positive spirit.”

            After Jeff, was Mind the Gap, who asked if we wanted her to cheer us up. I think that the answer was yes. She interspersed her poem by singing the refrain from the REM song “Losing My Religion” – “That’s me in the corner, that’s me in the spotlight, losing my religion … Come into my office … I’d offer you a seat at my desk … I am amused … We can have cigars in the armchairs … I want you to see my paintings … That’s me in the corner, that’s me in the spotlight, losing my religion … So please come into my office.”

            Then we heard from Kate Marshal Flaherty, who read a poem she’d written about Norval Morriseau’s painting, “Skinwalker” –“ … I don’t have the word for story in Ojibway … The deeper thin lichen teal … sunsets like copper pots … Your skinwalker … I hide under its hide … Miigwetch the only word I know.”

            The final reader on the open stage was Sarah Flogan, with a poem called “The Rash” – “The ice cold of the iron bars … She is pinned, mute … She summons air … arches her back … puts on a sweater to warm her belly, gathering her strength … she steps forward.”

            After helping put the chairs away I chatted with Cy Strom and Natasha Khan. Natasha had only just arrived. She asked if I’d done a song this time on the open stage. I told her that I’d read a story. As I recall, Cy described it for her as having been about a murderous criminal who meets his end at the hands of a child that is even worse.