the
STRAND
VOLUME 64 | SPRING MAGAZINE
Dear reader, These past couple of years have felt akin to wandering aimlessly through an incessant desert. Whenever we thought we might be nearing an oasis, it turned out to just be a trick of light. An unfounded hope. A mirage. The Strand’s spring 2022 magazine features nine pieces that consider the theme of “mirage” through various lenses. In this collection, you’ll find a dissection of the Canadian myth, a tribute to Don Quixote, an exploration of grief, a visual explanation of the science behind mirages, and so much more. I am so grateful for the work I get to do with The Strand, and none of it would be possible without my fantastic team. Thank you to the magazine editorial team, Holly, Anna, and Tehlan, for all of your support and for your care in shaping these pieces with our contributors. To Mahathi for lending your expertise to designing the print magazine, both at home and in the office (we finally got to use the office!). To Faith, Roensa, and our copy team for editing all of our written content with sharp eyes and unwavering attention to detail. To Seavey, Shelley, and our art team for creating beautiful illustrations that fit the written content like gloves to hands. To Kelsey and our photo team, for carrying out a stunning photoshoot that ties the entire magazine together. To Adam for designing a companion website for the print magazine so that our work can reach far and wide. I want to thank our contributors for allowing us to publish their wonderful stories. And I want to thank you, dear reader, for taking the time to peruse our little magazine. I can’t begin to express how grateful I am to everyone who has put their energy into The Strand over this past year. It’s been a tough one, but your dedication is beyond inspiring. Amidst the mirages, your support has been unbelievably real. Take care, Khadija Alam Editor-in-Chief
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Editor-in-Chief Khadija Alam Managing Editor Holly Johnstone Features Editor Anna Sokolova Senior Copyeditor Faith Wershba Art Editor Seavey van Walsum Design Editor Mahathi Gandhamaneni Features Associate Tehlan Lenius Visuals Team
Faith Dong, Aida Javan, Yoon-Ji Kweon, Amie Leung, Natalie Song, Helen Yu
Copy Associate Roensa Salija
Art Associate Shelley Yao
Cover Art
Design Team
Seavey van Walsum
Copy Team
Khadija Alam Mahathi Gandhamaneni
Photo Team
Photos & Editing: Kim Ngan Phung & Arthur Dennyson Hamdani Models: Asmi Shukla & Polen Light Makeup & Support: Tasnim Anzar Props: Anna Sokolova
Janna Abbas, Pooja Ajit, Eva Chang, Kieran Guimond, Max Lees, Adam Lam, Jane Wen
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Table of Contents Mirage of memory
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Barbara Athanasoulas
Untitled
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Delusional hero, delirious times
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Girls in mirrors
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Physics of mirage
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midnight
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June
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Take off the rose-tinted glasses
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Why I dreaded making chai
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Max Lees
Jevan Konyar
Sarah Abernethy
Seavey van Walsum
Eva Chang
Rion Levy
Abi Akinlade
Zeeniya Waseem
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Mirage of Memory
Words & Photos by Barbara Athanasoulas Illustration by Amie Leung
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When the tea towels are in the wash, I still reach for them on the hanger below my kitchen sink only to grab at air. I feel kind of stupid. I knew the towels were in the wash, but still I reached for the hanger. Grief is like the muscle memory of the mind. I’ve had fourteen years to process, filter, and review every memory of my father. But my recollections have become more muddled than anything else. I mostly blocked the memories of his absence. His long nights at the office or extended business trips. A few fond moments crystallized—jumping into his arms from the stair landing, lying on the couch with my head on his Santa Claus-stomach, how he flipped pancakes without a spatula. A few worse ones, too. Dragging over a chair, a coffee table, and a deck of cards when he was too weak to
I remember blankets of snow when my father died. But now, fourteen years later, I wonder how much of that memory has been filled in from bleak movie scenes. Does it matter if it snowed? I’ve lived with that memory long enough that the cold air and precipitation on my face weigh just as heavily as the grief I still don’t know how to put down. Describing my grief inaccurately felt like a greater sin than the lie of I’m fine. Maybe that’s why I preferred the comfort of other people’s words. My metaphors are always lacking, just short of truth. Explanations of grief come second-hand, never fully encapsulating the way the world shifted. Loss is universal, but grief is personal. Grief is like remembering, it’s like forgetting.
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get up from the couch. Orange pill bottles that seemed to take up half the kitchen counter. Telling my mom, I’ll see him when he comes home, when she asked me to visit him at Princess Margaret after school. The shadows and fluorescent lights distorting my
who knew him as baba, and then as a dying man. People can tell me what he was like, and I can fill in the rest with comparisons. I’ll always remember him, but I’ll never know him. I’ve always liked a good story, though.
memory of his nearly unrecognizable body on the night he died. Cancer’s a real bitch, you see. In the years after, I tried not to ask about him unless someone else brought him up first. You can only hear “you have his smile” so many times before you start avoiding mirrors because it’s the only thing you see in your reflection. No matter how much anyone tells me about my father, it’s only what they remember, what they feel they can speak of when it comes to the dead. I was a seven year-old
I used others’ stories, personal and fictional, to inform how I should remember that period in my life. People cry at funerals, so I must have cried at his. The dead are buried on bleak winter days or stormy nights, the sky held aloft with aesthetically cohesive black umbrellas. Mourners are wrapped up in sadness between layers of scarves and black coats. Children stand stoically at their parents’ sides, fat tears running down red faces. Only, I don’t remember wet cheeks. I do remember my cousin daring me
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to eat packets of sugar from the coffee station in the basement of the funeral home. I don’t know if there was snow. I remember wondering why they have to bury a coffin so deep. I don’t think it matters whether or not it snowed. I made these memories, if not in real life then in my own mind. I fed my mirage until it solidified into a story that I could tell myself on many sleepless nights. The other option was to live off scraps of incomplete memory. The next morning, the guilt of letting mirages guide me through
Crewe, your father detained by the most extraordinary circumstances. You read Percy Jackson and imagine he left for some greater, more godly purpose. You stand in the front pew of the same church you’ll return to every Sunday until you’re eighteen years old. You wear the black hairband your mother wrestled you into instead of the red one that you like, and you wonder when your father will sit up from the open casket and say gotcha. That last one was a real memory, I think.
the night was pushed aside for the continued necessity of living life. When you’re a child hurtling headfirst into loss, you soften the landing with stories. You watch A Little Princess and imagine you’re Sara
On the tenth anniversary of my father’s death, my grandfather died. That sounds like a cinematic coincidence, doesn’t it? He was my maternal grandfather, but still— uncanny. He seemed invincible. We
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used to say, Pappou never gets sick, because the germs are afraid of him. At eighty years old, he was still shovelling snow for every house between ours and his. And then, all of a sudden, he wasn’t. A lifetime of neglecting doctors visits, then it’s all over in a year of inpatient wards and a nursing home. I think people asked me if he was like a father. He wasn’t like anything, he just was my grandfather. That’s what we were, and I never intended to demean my relationship with him by using him as a replacement. I never wanted to misshape what I had left of my father by trying to fit my grandfather into his place, forcing pappou into baba’s empty chair at the kitchen table when I knew he preferred to sit next to me. I remember him so well, I can almost always catch when sentimental mirages cloud over the hard details. After ten years, I could recognize the mirage-to-memory pipeline before the facts slipped down the drain. I didn’t need to find ways to soften that grief anymore. When it comes to my grandfather, I know that he would say my name like he was always excited to see me. I know his hugs smelled of cigarettes, that he chewed with his mouth open. He taught me how to eat my vegetables, forking them together with the foods I liked. I know he used to swear under his breath in frustration at law-abiding drivers. He drove like a maniac, and nearly cried when he had to sell his beloved Buick as scrap metal. I know that when dementia set in, he started calling me by his sister’s name.
Pappou is definite, unchanging. I welcome others’ stories of him, because I don’t fear them taking up the empty seats where my own recollections should be. I knew my grandfather. For my father, my foremost memory will always be grief, and then. Grief, and then his full head of grey hair rubbing against the roof of his car. Loss, and then his face behind a video camera. The sweeping sense of displacement his presence would have in my life today, and then the way he called me koukla in a voice my head can’t recreate anymore. Baba is clouded, a few details making their way through the fog. Grief might be a mirage. Every time you think you’ve found its end, the light shifts, the image changes. No matter how you devote your attention elsewhere, it’s always on your horizon, in the corner of your eye. I won’t define grief. It’s not feasible. It changes. It’s fluid, like memory. It’s a reflection of yourself, of how you decide to deal with it. It’s your mirage, showing you exactly what you want to see, only to fall apart when you reach for it. You look back years later and wonder how you ever fell for such an obvious illusion, only to realize you’ve just been building new, equally confining definitions of grief every day since. WORDS Baba, Dad Pappou, Grandfather Koukla, Doll
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Untitled Words and Photo by Max Lees
The hunting party sets out Into the mudsucking swamp stumbling through thick fog and shooting at answers to a question they’re still looking for Carrying black-and-white binoculars, chanting to a two beat stomp chasing ghosts and waving excitedly at some object in the distance conjured by their burning gaze, blink and it slips back out of existence They’re looking for a bridge, loosely strung across the chasm between the blizzard and the bonfire, careful crossing open-eyed or you’ll drop your sanity down there, Down where your own dead body and the bodies of your shadow’s friends are twisted into incoherent shapes, inside out and multiplied in bizarre attempts at circular symmetry Look up or look down, the high-wire bridge gives a sickening lurch and in a fit of laughter you find yourself tossed back into the flames, surrounded by piles of junk, gold frames cheap paint costumes snagged on broken strings magazines with
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glossy covers a gramophone that doesn’t play movie film and high-heeled shoes vintage photos endless colours The flames go on singing and dancing and burning while the snowstorm blows relentlessly in deafening silence, Out in the blizzard there’s a throne for a familiar corpse frozen, staring blankly as if he might still blurt out the secret of the cold wind written in the stars, as if he might just spring up and take us to the bridge that doesn’t exist, as if by keeping his eyes in a pickle jar we could use them as goggles and the universe would rearrange itself as a kaleidoscope of straight lines calculated from a single centre point So we run the other way, jump headfirst into the flames of our own creation which we insist were always there, as if there are no stars but in paintings and no vast expanse of nothingness, banging our heads together to drown out the silence, drawing new bridges and magic staircases, Digging for a holy grail that sinks deeper the longer we search, dancing on tiptoes on the edge of an imaginary crevice, endlessly painting pictures that we will not finish until ice burns without melting and rivers run both ways, until the tower of I topples and the empire of eyes turns inwards, until the bridge collapses and nausea turns to laughter, until dead men lay to rest and flowers bloom from their ashes, until we lose the key and its black box, until we learn to feel our way through the blinding grey area between the artist and its playground
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Don Quixote: A delusional hero for delirious times When you can't keep up with the world, make yourself a new one
Words by Jevan Konyar Illustration by Shelley Yao
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The world we wake up to every morning is crowded with bureaucratic nightmares that make everything from renewing a health card to applying for a job a heroic ordeal. Still worse are the megalithic programs superseding them; unrestrained entities, organisations and devices that steal our attention and our data, instruments that writhe around faster than their lumbering counterparts. The world our parents knew, the one they raised us to thrive in, is falling apart by the day, and its disintegration is only accelerating. Crises materialize and quickly give way to others like crashing waves in a storm (which, given our environmental situation, are also going to rear their ugly faces a lot more). We’re living in a world too interconnected, too chaotic for us to keep up with—much like Don Quixote, the hero of Miguel de Cervantes’s comedy of the same name. W.H. Auden described Quixote as a Christian saint, and Thomas Mann saw his story as a hopeful irony. Don Quixote is uniquely manifold as a narrative, nestled in a parallax that contorts it into unrecognizable shapes depending on which character you take as your vantage point. In one sense, it chronicles the misadventures of a bumbling Early Modern schizo and his gullible sidekick. In another, it recounts the story of a man who denies the decline all around him by
laying reality aside and embracing his animating illusions. This is the difference between Don Quixote as a comedy and Don Quixote as a tragedy: to produce the former, we have to read it from a looking glass set firmly in a concrete reality; to find the latter, we have to imagine the world as the gentleman Quexana sees it. In one case he dies as Quexana in the final pages of the book, where he lays down in bed never to get up again. In another, it’s the moment he, as the knight, loses the filter of romance and idealism through which he’s been looking at the world. The tragedy follows a Carlylean hero, a knight who disavows the rotting husk of Early Modern Spain and forces the sheen of a lost golden age onto it, taking everybody else with him: Sancho and his family, the Duke and Duchess, and the Priest and Barber. They all, wittingly or not, play along in his game. What’s important about the infectiousness of his antics is that Quixote doesn’t escape into his illusions. They aren’t catatonic dreams; rather, they’re intertwined with the world. His universe is built from pieces of everybody else’s, but moulded to become pieces in a patchwork-like epic. Don Quixote doesn’t daydream of far-off castles in his room, he transforms an inn into one; he doesn’t recall the fictional danger he’s read about in an ivory tower, but truly suffers as he traverses
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his country. He’s still living in the real world—he’s just imposed his own rosy vision onto it. I’m no literary critic, and, even if I were, I don’t think I’d have anything new to say about such a monumental text. You could teach half a Vic seminar on Don Quixote (in fact, I know somebody who does), but that’s not what I’m here to do. What I think, and what I hope I can convince you of, is that Quixote can help us navigate the ordeal of living in this hellworld: he can be as much a model for an active life as he is a subject for a contemplative one. Like Quixote, we’re living in a time of unprecedented uncertainty. Like Quixote’s Spain, the world in which we live has lost the direction it once had. You don’t need to ask anybody if they lay awake at night worried that they’re losing time, drifting endlessly through a world doing the same—it’s common knowledge that we all do. Having lost all ends to work toward for the time being, and having all power to create new ones paralyzed in this abyss, things can seem hopeless. That’s why I say that to keep going on, we, like Quixote, have to take a leap of faith into an ocean of belief, however insane, and swim away from this mess. Escapism, I think, isn’t named properly: to entertain escapism is to shrink away, not get away; it’s to hide, not to run. When I talk about swimming away, I’m not
preaching escapism; I’m endorsing romanticization, which sits on the precipice between delusion and stoic acceptance. What’s needed is to reimagine the world through a kaleidoscope, not look beyond it with a telescope nor too far into it with a microscope. With no other option, we have to believe that what we’re doing is something more than it is, to have faith that we’re part of a project that we might not be anymore. Quixote imposes the sights and sounds of chivalric adventure onto his life to save it from the shackles of banality. I don’t read chivalric fiction, and in all likelihood nor do you, but the Quixotic form isn’t tied to that. Take it upon yourself to find it and use it to paint the greyscale pieces of reality with vibrant shades of your choosing. There’s meaning in fiction, so squeeze it from the story and lather it generously onto every day. Stay in the world, but colour it with crayons that you pull from stories. In the entropy of a world moving too fast for anybody to make sense of, the only way to get by might be to self-impose the illusion of bondage to some end—pretend you’re a knight with a mission. In a sea of confusion and shifting sands, the only order and stability we can find might lie in the oasis of delusion.
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Girls in Mirrors The art of trying things on
Words by Sarah Abernethy Illustration by Yoon-Ji Kweon
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i.
For the past forty minutes, she has combed through her sticky, sweaty bangs, ensuring that they sit right atop her cheekbones. If she holds her shoulder up just enough to her left ear, you can see her collarbone protrude from its place; angular, skinnier. Even as the sun beating off the glass behind her burns her legs, she knows it all will look better in the picture. It’s the illusion that lasts. Every five minutes she has three seconds to run one foot away from her iPhone and assume position before the screen goes “click!” She will repeat this until she gets the perfect picture. On King Street, passersby see her and snicker—they pretend that what she creates is not what they consume. That she is not a worker bee buzzing back and forth across the sidewalk. Click! Not right. Click! Better. Click! That’ll do. Not perfect now, but she can make them perfect later. ii.
The mirror of the studio is lined with the backs of a dozen twelveyear-old girls in white, pancaked tutus. Ducklings in a row, not yet swans. It is dress rehearsal. The recital is tomorrow at 2 pm, and again at 7 pm, just like the professionals do it (that’s what Ellen said). Last week they were sent home with forms to give to their mothers—white flyers, with little printouts of adult women’s faces on them. The adult women are definitively foxy (that’s what Sophia said). The faces show the parents where to put the stage makeup on the girls’ faces. No one gave them to their families, though. Doing your own makeup was the best part of the whole deal. The sheet demanded pinks only. Strictly no red lips. Mascara on the top lashes, but “never on the bottom lashes girls, that’s too much.” If you took a camera and zoomed into their faces, you’d see the streaks their fingers left on their foreheads of their mothers’ bronzer that should’ve been left in the bathroom drawer. Backstage, they are awkward and gangly. Sophia loses her left slipper. Marijke gets Cheetos dust all over her white tights. Ellen cries because her father told her he can’t come to the show. But then they nestle up close to one another in the wings. The lights swell, the music plays, they count to seven, and the world begins on the stage.
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iii.
You can see lots of things online, but you can also make a lot of things up online. This is a fundamental truth we learn early on. When you don’t get invited to that party, you can make it look like you’re at your very own. There is an art to posting stories with your other friends, who nobody from school knows. Photos of dressed-up outfits but you’re going nowhere important, or somewhere altogether contrived. Snapshots of older boys, alcohol, dancing, the skyline. Social media strategy has its place just as much in high school hallways as it does in brand marketing. iv.
She had done everything between the ages of twelve and eighteen that she thought she was supposed to do. She gave soccer a go when her father said it was a good idea, and gymnastics when her coach said she’d be better suited for it. Her mother suggested she settle for tennis. She tried that too. When her older sister started wearing thick lines of black eyeliner, she squished in beside her at the bathroom counter and followed suit. She taught her to roll her skirt up and make a mean face. To scrawl punchy lines on protest signs. Or, she’d pretend she’d never done so when the girls in the hallway would whisper a little too loudly. Those days she was good at wearing whatever it was that they did. Her teachers said debate club, model UN, student council—she said: okay, sure. A boy suggested she ditch her glasses? Maybe he knew best, or maybe she’d finally call him an asshole, just to see how it feels. Sometimes she wonders when she will be old enough to stop trying on, testing out, and playing pretend. v.
Tippy-toes on the kiddie-stool to see above the countertop. Her eyes absorb every inch of her face in the glass. Awestruck. One day, she could make colours from light; a prism. A refraction, not a reflection.
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Illustration by Seavey van Walsum
midnight
Words by Eva Chang Illustration by Aida Javan
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rosewood straddled art and the study of it, an anxiety disorder and an inflated ego, a yellow sertraline pill and a jeweled black corset. they straddled boys and girls, sometimes. they loved the clinical study of the body, naked in chiaroscuro; sex; being a drag queen; being an academic; pop music; and lady gaga praising ryan murphy for being unafraid to reference or to not reference. sometimes they thought they were better than everyone else. the room closed in on rosewood, a square shaped den without a window; the posters really just made it more claustrophobic, but rosewood called it cozy. not today, though, as they had feverishly been trying to understand NFTs all afternoon while hopped up on coffee from the local market. this was for a journal article. their actual assignment for class was to comment on the concept of furniture and decor as “pleasure objects,” which was on the backburner for now. they crouched over the laptop, which was placed on a large cardboard box, a makeshift desk—the only one that could fit given the space rosewood had. so little space. it felt closeted, mordant. all their drag, makeup, mirrors, and textbooks ate them up. with downturned eyes, they returned themselves to the blindingly
white document before them. not a single word written down for their essay. yet. it reminded them of those late nights in high school, when rosewood couldn’t bother to follow the strict instructions of standardized test practice. why are they valedictorian they took all the easy advanced courses—no. that was just gossip. rosewood worked hard to succeed, but with that came the attention of their high school peers, who couldn’t stand themselves in comparison to rosewood. rosewood was always smarter, more mysterious, more intimidating. they’re so full of themselves rosewood let their thoughts sink in and muddle up whatever focus they had. within the strange ooze moving through their brain, they dredged up their tainted thoughts and entertained them until they couldn’t take the self-deprecation any longer. rosewood closed their laptop and headed towards the bathroom, hoping that spontaneously going out for the night would ease their problems. they were a complicated matter and no less without the drag on. rosewood, the drag persona, was much worse, but they had no one to apologize to for the person they became every weekend. they danced to intoxicating loud
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pop music in front of the mirror, piling on makeup that rendered their face dark, stormy, and inhuman. it took them a couple of hours, but they barely minded, seething in determination to prove some amorphous idea of everyone they despised wrong. they then shimmied into a simple black Mugler-inspired dress that fell to the ankles. with a sizable slit up the thigh, rosewood, in short, looked like some sort of evil slut (that was good). most of the time they didn’t pad, and tonight was no different. their legs stretched far down from the four-inch heels, muscles taut. they felt like a thing, a man and a woman finally. the fantasy, realized. oh, and the dress had pockets; they slipped their sertraline pill into one of them and embarked. **** their heart pounded in heavy, steady beats as they paused at the bar. don’t act nervous. adjusting their fur stole for the last time, rosewood closed their eyes, feeling fake lashes press against their eyelids, before approaching the bar. their heels clicked loudly against the tile floor. they’d never worn a dress that showed so much skin. at least, not out in public. although it was uncomfortable, they felt a certain freedom in how it draped over their bare chest. even their lined lips, dra-
matic eyeshadow, and arched eyebrows comforted them, somehow. forgoing the happy pill in their pocket, rosewood opted for a rum and coke, double shot. it came with a cute little umbrella because of the night’s tropical theme. they then sat in the back and observed the show, leaving tips surreptitiously in the jar that the bartenders passed around. the queen on stage slithered to the music with an imperceptible fire, one that belonged to a muse. as the song hit its climax, she twisted and dropped to the floor. getting up just as fast as she had fallen, she hit what seemed to be a choreographed eight count, shooting her arms out, then bringing them back towards her chest. the crowd cheered, but rosewood only sunk further into their shadows. their face, their flaws, masked by the dark enclosing in. “i love your dress,” someone said from behind rosewood, tapping on their shoulder. despite the loud music, it seemed as if this stranger didn’t even need to yell. rosewood turned, clinging to her words. their dress was too black for anyone to notice its intricacies. rosewood relished in the finely placed details—the upturn of the shoulder pads, the handspun lace—for themselves. they loved art devoid of dirty eyes and unbearably cishet critics that might taint rose-
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wood’s fantasy. “thank you.” “i’ve seen you around before.” rosewood’s breath hitched. she had? because… “me too.” not in the queer scene, but from their university—a grad student, at a talk on camera obscuras. she had been so prim and proper, and she still was. she adorned her loose white shirt and perfectly fitted slacks with a healthy dose of silver jewelry. rosewood nursed their drink, swirling their nailed finger around the rim of the glass. “did you enjoy my lecture?” she asked, and rosewood nearly crumbled realizing that she knew them from university. rosewood nodded. they recollected her deep, smooth voice, and the way she had paced with confidence as she spoke. she had a brilliant thesis. eccentric, bold, clever, all at once. rosewood tingled at the thought. it must’ve been that ache, their empty bedroom, the suffocation that drew rosewood to her. she noticed them, perhaps because she could see rosewood evoking art, even in the shadows—and rosewood found themselves even more drawn to her erudite energy. the two of them didn’t really need words after that.
***** she had rosewood against the wall of the white tiled bathroom, pliant. rosewood thought of the arch of their back, the spread of their body, movement carefully studied and portrayed just as da Vinci had studied corpses and men to paint the women on the Sistine Chapel. her hair curled over her forehead, smile upturned but the corners of her lips blended into her skin, and that’s when rosewood could lose themselves in the ecstasy of her art. she pressed her hands into rosewood’s pockets, feeling their thighs through the barrier of the fabric. aggressive. after a couple moments of fumbling and kissing, she paused, her nail scratching against the bottom of the pocket. she dug up the sertraline pill and held it in the light, in between the two of them, to observe it. they both paused. she laughed a little, drunkenly. “i get it,” she whispered. rosewood’s chest seemed to sink and rise at the same time. or were they just breathing? what did normal breathing feel like? “open up,” she then said, tapping on rosewood’s chin and very likely leaving a small imprint of foundation on the tip of her finger. she slipped the pill into rosewood’s mouth, pressing it against their tongue until
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its outer coating began to melt. once she took her fingers back, rosewood obediently swallowed. “thank you,” rosewood breathed out. “i almost forgot.” someone pounded at the door, most likely desperate to piss and ready to fight about it. the pulsing fire was fizzling under the surface and rosewood was not the same. they crashed in on themselves. “let’s get out of here,” they whispered quickly. she nodded, fumbling to give rosewood their purse. glitter stained the bottom half of her face as it brushed past the brighter rays of the purple light. eventually, they managed to exit the small bathroom. rosewood’s head bent down like they were praying for forgiveness, the strands of loose hair shrouding their face, metaphorical thin gold halo hanging over their skull. they shielded their eyes delicately from the glare of the pulsing lights. with a cluttered mind, they clutched the hand of their makeout-partner-turned-official-hookup (was this really happening?), letting her guide them. they didn’t know how they managed to grab an Uber, how they decided to go to rosewood’s apartment. rosewood let them in. hours must have went by and they kept going past that, until rose-
wood couldn’t seem to recognize the unique little dents and crevices of their ceiling anymore (too much time spent with their eyes rolled back). the fire under rosewood’s chest settled as their lover’s hands roamed over rosewood’s skin and vice versa, but it began bubbling back as the alcohol subsided and the heady realization of how ruined their makeup was settled in. rosewood knew then that they were a mess and not something to be perceived, no longer a piece of art but a dusty sculpture in desperate need of restoration. “i think it’s time for you to go.” they watched the shadow of her exit the room and listened to the apartment door slam shut. ***** an alarm promptly woke rosewood at 7:50—for class at 8:00. so they embarked, mistakenly wearing the underwear from last night. night was one cycle of their life, and the day, another. the glitter from last night wouldn’t wash off entirely; nonetheless, rosewood engrossed themselves in lecture. Qing Dynasty pleasure objects were in fact a fascinating topic, and rosewood planned to pull together some more substantive research over the coming weeks. there was that research award to be won in the spring, after all.
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June Words by Rion Levy Illustration by Natalie Song
I prefer my peaches without their skins Because then I’m left to only chew The sweetness of their flesh While their skins and pits can run and hide. I prefer my people, too, like I prefer my peaches I want to know the riches of their minds Untainted by their façades and frights And I feel saddened when what I find Is dense, sour fruit.
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Take off the rose-tinted glasses, Canada
Words by Abi Akinlade Illustration by Helen Yu
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The Bible’s Book of Exodus refers to “a land flowing with milk and honey”; it alludes to an idyllic utopia in which its inhabitants never suffer from grief or hunger. According to the likes of Doug Ford and Don Cherry, Canada—the country that has yet to secure clean drinking water for First Nations peoples living on reserves, that heavily discriminates against Black people in one of its most diverse cities, and was recently terrorized by hordes of antiCOVID vaccine mandate truckers and protestors—is one such utopia. Don Cherry is a famed hockey commentator who was fired from Sportsnet in 2019 after berating new immigrants for supposedly not buying poppies to commemorate Remembrance Day. In his “Coach's Corner” segment, he stated, “You people … love our way of life, love our milk and honey. At least you could pay a couple bucks for poppies or something like that. These guys paid for your way of life that you enjoy in Canada.” On social media, and even here at UofT, there were plenty of people who argued that Cherry’s comments were either true, taken out of context, or did not warrant the reaction that he received. Similarly, Ontario Premier Doug Ford commented in October 2021 that new immigrants should shoulder the burden of remedying Ontario’s labour gap, stating, “You come here like every other new Canadian, you work your tail off. If you think you’re going to collect the dole [unemployment benefits] and sit around, it’s not going to happen. Go
somewhere else.” It’s common knowledge that many immigrants migrate to the Western world to seek refuge and better opportunities, but for Canadian “icons” like Don Cherry and Doug Ford to use this rhetoric against them, and to further imply that they come here to capitalize on the “Canadian way of life” is egregiously xenophobic. Aside from the fact that many people argue there is no established “Canadian way of life,” neither Cherry nor Ford’s comments had any basis in fact. There were thousands of immigrant soldiers who sacrificed their lives for very little recognition in Canada’s war effort. Stevan Purewal, a World War I historian, went so far as to say, “If we associate the poppy with Flanders Fields, then the Sikhs and the Punjabis in particular have a stronger association with the poppy than the Canadian Expeditionary Forces by virtue of being in Flanders Fields five months before the Canadians even got there.” To Doug Ford’s point, Immigration Minister Sean Fraser stated, “It’s not just that one in three Canadian businesses are owned by an immigrant, but also that newcomers are helping to tackle labour shortages.” The question we must consider is why so many citizens born in Canada have the mindset that immigrants must contribute something tangible to the country they’re migrating to, that they must do something to earn the title of “Canadian citizen.” If we live in an egalitarian nation, why do
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immigrants, including myself, feel the need to provide the pacifying disclaimer that we’re “grateful to live here” before we can even begin to criticize the country that raised us? The answer is actually fairly simple: the Canadian myth. As a nation, Canada prides itself on being nothing like our neighbours to the south. Our frantic yet paperthin attempts to romanticise our history only serve to make it all the more obvious that we are chronically unable to own up to our failings. I hate to break it to Trudeau, but you can’t call the residential school system “a dark chapter in Canada’s history” when unmarked graves were still being discovered in 2021. We are often taught in Canadian history that slavery in Canada “wasn’t as bad as the American slave trade,” and that cities in Nova Scotia were stops on the Underground Railway that led slaves to freedom. Why did no one stop to consider that slavery that “isn’t as bad” is still slavery? Why were we never taught about what happened to the former slaves once they fled to Nova Scotia, and how they were treated by their white neighbours? We’re able to find amusement in the stereotype that we apologize too much, and drag out the “o’s” in our profuse “sorry’s,” but when the time actually comes to apologize—as in meet the bare minimum requirement for the abuse of residential school victims and Indigenous genocide—it takes decades. We have built our legacy and tenuous sense of identity on being one
of the most multicultural countries in the world, yet polls show that the majority of Canadians support curbing immigration (despite their clear desire for capitalistic gain). To acknowledge that Canada has played and continues to play a primary role in the oppression of BIPOC people would be to shatter the facade of the “true North.” It would, effectively, uncover all that our government has worked so fervently to sweep under the rug. As people of colour, as immigrants, we know where the bodies are buried. Focusing on the fact that the United States is plagued by school shootings and police brutality is a figurative way of shifting the blame—Canadians need a scapegoat so that they can say, "Hey, look over there! I’m so glad that’s not us." Except… It is us. White supremacy doesn’t observe arbitrary and invisible borders. Racism and xenophobia didn't just magically disappear when Pierre Trudeau introduced the Multiculturalism Act in 1971. If anything, the obstinate refusal of Canadians to recognize our own complicity in upholding racist systems is even more insidious. The United States is the devil we can see, but it will always prove impossible to fight oppression unless we begin to vociferously acknowledge its existence in our country—to break the mirage, to pierce the veil, to choose to take our rose-tinted glasses off and finally see ourselves for who we truly are.
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Why I dreaded making chai Comforting the Unseeable in a Brown-immigrant household
Words by Zeeniya Waseem Illustration by Faith Dong
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Making tea for your parents might feel like just another mundane process, but as a South Asian first-generation immigrant child, each step was once accompanied by the dreadful reminder that the warmth of chai will never be enough to cure my parents’ generational struggles. While I do not drink chai often, I have always recognized its power to comfort and connect; my parents drink it every night before they sleep (no matter how tired they are). It is what they first suggest to take when I feel sick— saying “gharam chai sey gala saaf huta hay” (meaning, “the warmth of chai cleans your throat”)—and it joins our laughter and conversations at family gatherings. When my parents do experience difficulties—such as those generational pains which connect their past to the present—the thought “let me make them some chai” often approaches my headspace. Those sorrows, which have flowed through bloodlines, disentangle their embodied beings. This pain causes their bodies to exist in nonexistence as much as it introduces itself in new spaces. Chai offers a somatic warmth that holds an intention of love and care, but my mind could not escape the fact that it was just a somatic warmth, it was just something temporary, it was just symbolic of all that I cannot do to help my parents when I wish to. Chai as comfort felt like a limited form of love, representative of my helpless-
ness—which is exactly why I dreaded making it. These feelings were connected to the acknowledgement that my parents’ hardships arise from sources that I cannot control, from moments I lack complete presence in, from mapped localities I cannot trace, and from places I cannot see. There is a generational “gap” that prevents immigrant children from completely understanding the experiences that their parents share, either directly through words or indirectly through emotions. Yet, I would not necessarily call this barrier to understanding a “gap”; a gap illustrates more of an emptied, hollowed out space that divides the lifetimes of our parents and our own. Rather, this limitation of understanding is more like a gravitational field in which the connection between our times is indirectly felt through an invisible generational force; it is a connection based on intertwined constraint; it is a tension between unknowingness and acceptance; it is when the unseen is felt; it is the Unseeable. The process of making chai for my parents is analogous to this indirect sharing of generational experience I hold with them. The chai bag is first dry, carrying its flavourful contents of herbs and leaves. This bag reminds me of my mother and father; however, the contents in the chai bag carries stories and lessons instead. When dipping this chai bag in warm water, its
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contents stain its surroundings—introducing flavor, and curating something which can be humanly felt and humanly experienced. Nonetheless, some of its contents are always left stuck in the chai bag itself, never escaping its confines; its work is tasted indirectly. Just like the confines of the chai bag, there are parts of my immigrant parents’ lives which will forever be left incomprehensible, unexplored in their entirety, or even silenced. These parts exist as coloured stains for us children—only partially accessible. The generational puzzle pieces of my parents’ stories—those which have catalyzed emotions of regret, worry, and sadness for them—are what I wished to completely access and control, as I hoped to fix my parents’ struggles when attempting to comfort them, to remove their pain. And this does make sense, as we commonly wish to see our loved ones feel well. However, chai clearly did not hold the power to do this, and therefore its mundanity led to its futility in my mind. But I came to realize that my entire perception of comfort was completely wrong: my approach was more about comforting myself—my own hurt from seeing my parents’ hurt—rather than comforting my parents themselves. Indeed, chai did not take away the discomfort in my parents’ life when they were experiencing generation-
al hardships, but its warmth, its flavor, and the fact that I placed effort into its creation never failed to bring a smile upon my parents’ face. They always found the act valuable. You see, the purpose of chai is to nourish someone’s humanity, but attempting to fix someone's pain is rather equivalent to erasing authentic human experience—this is what I did not know. Chai as comfort does not serve to remove the presence of sorrow but rather to increase presence within it. Comfort is not about removing emotions, but understanding them, listening to them, and being with them; removal is rather equivalent to emotional repression. In and of itself, the act of giving chai—with the intent to make one feel somewhat better—validates one’s feelings. Every human holds their own Unseeable that leaves stains on others’ existences; they have stories and thoughts which can never completely be understood by an outsider. However, the act of showing love to another despite the unknowns carried within their stains must be cherished, as it symbolizes the mutual acceptance of our complexities. I now choose to remind myself of the power that making chai holds, creating impacts that surpass the confines of the chai bag. Its stains accept feelings, acknowledge humanity, and encourage being, even within the unseen—this is comfort.
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VOLUME 64 | SPRING MAGAZINE
