Another day, and yet not like any other day:
* Went to church this morning with Mum
* Had 'family lunch' with Dad, Mum, Nadine and a delicious pork roast
* Went to see an amazing Quebecois film called 'Monsieur Lazhar' about an Algerian refugee applicant who applies to teach at a school in which a teacher has committed suicide and left the 11 and 12 year old students traumatised by the events
* Sorted through winter/ summer clothes in an initial preparation for deciding what to send to Hawai'i and what to give away here
Such insistent, strong, gentle links between pasts and futures: such a luxury and opportunity to take the time to reflect while in this 'in-between' space and time...
Saturday, 7 April 2012
Friday, 6 April 2012
feet
Such a big day! More walking... some shopping... some great kai... Kansington Market... the Art Gallery of Ontario... the Bata Shoe Museum... and finally a trip to the local shop to get supplies for tomorrow so we can cope with the shops being shut for Good Friday.
Yesterday Mum and Dad found an amazing bookshop which is Caribbean-owned and specialises in Black/ Caribbean/ African/ 'ethnic' and 'social justice' books. We went back today and found some beautiful books to bring home: one called Multiplication is for White People which is about strategies to shift the racism inherent in educational systems which mean poorer non-white children and young people are still more likely to be underserved by educ; one about Zora Neale Hurston (the amazing earlier 20th century African American woman writer who Alice Walker worked hard to bring into the collective memory and collective bookshelf; another one about teaching and social justice; some awesome kids books for Matiu; and the second of bell hooks's two books that focus specifically on teaching. Her book Teaching to Trangress is one of my favourite and most important books (the phrase 'education as the practice of freedom is so deeply and vastly inspiring and humbling), and Teaching Community - A Pedagogy of Hope, which I have heard about and looked for and am very pleased to have now acquired, looks like it will be just as fantastic.
This evening Mum got me to soak my feet, which are sore and starting to crack and blister, in hot soapy water. She got a towel to wipe them, and we joked a bit about the symbolism of the washing of feet in the Easter season.
Easter is ultimately about sacrifice and community; it's about the collective - here and now, but also across time and place. We skyped with whanau today (Megan and Matiu are with Amy and Vaega in Hamilton with some of V's whanau), and I thought about Grandad seeing as this is my first Easter since his passing. I cannot help but recall the years of Easters spent with whanau, in which the rhythm of the weekend involved time at church, time together, time eating hot cross buns and, eventually, Easter eggs. But the eggs are not until Sunday, and there is a lot to happen between now and then.
Tonight is Maundy Thursday. Tomorrow is Good Friday: an opportunity to reflect, mourn, remember and - yes - hope.
Yesterday Mum and Dad found an amazing bookshop which is Caribbean-owned and specialises in Black/ Caribbean/ African/ 'ethnic' and 'social justice' books. We went back today and found some beautiful books to bring home: one called Multiplication is for White People which is about strategies to shift the racism inherent in educational systems which mean poorer non-white children and young people are still more likely to be underserved by educ; one about Zora Neale Hurston (the amazing earlier 20th century African American woman writer who Alice Walker worked hard to bring into the collective memory and collective bookshelf; another one about teaching and social justice; some awesome kids books for Matiu; and the second of bell hooks's two books that focus specifically on teaching. Her book Teaching to Trangress is one of my favourite and most important books (the phrase 'education as the practice of freedom is so deeply and vastly inspiring and humbling), and Teaching Community - A Pedagogy of Hope, which I have heard about and looked for and am very pleased to have now acquired, looks like it will be just as fantastic.
This evening Mum got me to soak my feet, which are sore and starting to crack and blister, in hot soapy water. She got a towel to wipe them, and we joked a bit about the symbolism of the washing of feet in the Easter season.
Easter is ultimately about sacrifice and community; it's about the collective - here and now, but also across time and place. We skyped with whanau today (Megan and Matiu are with Amy and Vaega in Hamilton with some of V's whanau), and I thought about Grandad seeing as this is my first Easter since his passing. I cannot help but recall the years of Easters spent with whanau, in which the rhythm of the weekend involved time at church, time together, time eating hot cross buns and, eventually, Easter eggs. But the eggs are not until Sunday, and there is a lot to happen between now and then.
Tonight is Maundy Thursday. Tomorrow is Good Friday: an opportunity to reflect, mourn, remember and - yes - hope.
Thursday, 5 April 2012
Book
People of books. Students, scholars, researchers, critics, teachers, activists, writers, performance poets... these are the people I spent time with and heard from today. They're writing, reading, researching, enjoying, discussing, writing about, analysing, archiving, translating, drawing on, editing and teaching books, in a million different ways.
People of the Book. We stood in a room full of Muslim prayer mats: Jewish and Christian visitors to the Textile Museum here in Toronto. We talked about family links, customary practices, things we knew and things we hadn't noticed before... we ate together, walked home, wished each other Happy Easter and Happy Passover, went our separate ways.
People of the Book. We stood in a room full of Muslim prayer mats: Jewish and Christian visitors to the Textile Museum here in Toronto. We talked about family links, customary practices, things we knew and things we hadn't noticed before... we ate together, walked home, wished each other Happy Easter and Happy Passover, went our separate ways.
Wednesday, 4 April 2012
salt
"We sweat and cry salt water so we know that the ocean is really in our blood."
- Teresia Teaiwa, Banaban/ African American poet & scholar
A long streetcar ride today: Mum, Dad and I went out to Toronto's 'beaches' area to enjoy burgers for lunch on a park bench looking across sand, water and a flat horizon. This could be a scene from home. Well, visually it could be, anyway. Olfactorily - 'smell-ly' - it couldn't be: Lake Ontario is massive and amazing and lovely but doesn't smell like the sea.
I love it here, but it's not home. Like people from large flat spaces who move to islands and get island fever, I get continent fever when I'm landlocked for too long. Tonite I took Anne and Michelle's girl Shonagh to watch 'The Hunger Games' in which a post-American America is obsessed with a televised show in which 24 children and young people are forced to kill each other until there's only one survivor. The kids are put in an 'arena' within which cameras are everywhere and they are manipulated by the rulers of the game (and the country) throughout. Every once in a while, the constructed nature of the arena is emphasised: a grid is visible where sky used to be; an interlocking pattern which reminds everyone they are ultimately constrained by their environment. It's how some people feel on islands - the borders between land and sea feel like confinement or even incarceration - but it's how I feel some days on a continent. I love it here - I do! - and I can appreciate this is where things make sense for some people, just as I can appreciate that beaches don't have to smell like salt in order to beaches even though saltless air quietly interrupts me when I smell it beside a giant stretch of water.
I love it here, but it's not home. This afternoon, before going to the movies and after going to the beach, I sat in my office in Aboriginal Studies and worked on some papers. Outside my room, students were practicing Anishinaabemowin, one of the Indigenous languages of this area, as one by one they went in for their oral tests throughout the afternoon. Meanwhile I was playing some waiata from home - not just from Aotearoa but from Taranaki - on my computer while I worked. This isn't home, but I'm here at the moment and this place has been good to me. The two languages (Anishimaabemowin and Maori) gently flowed along, edging into one another and diverging at various moments, quietly drawing lines in the sand about language, replenishment, survival.
Salt: preserve, flavour, heal, fix. Salt: ocean, sweat, tears. Salt: of earth.
- Teresia Teaiwa, Banaban/ African American poet & scholar
A long streetcar ride today: Mum, Dad and I went out to Toronto's 'beaches' area to enjoy burgers for lunch on a park bench looking across sand, water and a flat horizon. This could be a scene from home. Well, visually it could be, anyway. Olfactorily - 'smell-ly' - it couldn't be: Lake Ontario is massive and amazing and lovely but doesn't smell like the sea.
I love it here, but it's not home. Like people from large flat spaces who move to islands and get island fever, I get continent fever when I'm landlocked for too long. Tonite I took Anne and Michelle's girl Shonagh to watch 'The Hunger Games' in which a post-American America is obsessed with a televised show in which 24 children and young people are forced to kill each other until there's only one survivor. The kids are put in an 'arena' within which cameras are everywhere and they are manipulated by the rulers of the game (and the country) throughout. Every once in a while, the constructed nature of the arena is emphasised: a grid is visible where sky used to be; an interlocking pattern which reminds everyone they are ultimately constrained by their environment. It's how some people feel on islands - the borders between land and sea feel like confinement or even incarceration - but it's how I feel some days on a continent. I love it here - I do! - and I can appreciate this is where things make sense for some people, just as I can appreciate that beaches don't have to smell like salt in order to beaches even though saltless air quietly interrupts me when I smell it beside a giant stretch of water.
I love it here, but it's not home. This afternoon, before going to the movies and after going to the beach, I sat in my office in Aboriginal Studies and worked on some papers. Outside my room, students were practicing Anishinaabemowin, one of the Indigenous languages of this area, as one by one they went in for their oral tests throughout the afternoon. Meanwhile I was playing some waiata from home - not just from Aotearoa but from Taranaki - on my computer while I worked. This isn't home, but I'm here at the moment and this place has been good to me. The two languages (Anishimaabemowin and Maori) gently flowed along, edging into one another and diverging at various moments, quietly drawing lines in the sand about language, replenishment, survival.
Salt: preserve, flavour, heal, fix. Salt: ocean, sweat, tears. Salt: of earth.
Tuesday, 3 April 2012
A city
Mum, Dad and I had a day of checking out a few important Toronto sites today: the Eaton Centre (a big indoor mall); IKEA (our favourite furniture and meatball shop); and, finally, after a glass of wine and rested feet, Winners (a big discount clothing chain) and Whole Foods (a yuppie munchy crunchy organicky supermarket). Yes, a city in four stores.
For us, all of these stores were bigger and deeper than mere consumerist debris - the reasons to go to them were more about memories and human relationships than about stuff - all of the shops have been places where I have, in the months leading up to their trip here, imagined returning with my parents; imagined their responses to this place, these places. Have been very excited about the idea of them being here with me, have looked forward to hearing what they think about it all.
(And yet: tonite on the table in my lounge sits a rather large pile of newly-acquired things.)
When we took the subway to the Eaton Centre this morning, and emerged into the gentle sunlight while we passed between the train and shops for long enough for Mum and Dad to get a sense of where we were, Mum turned to me and said, "It's amazing that a city can work for so many people..." and inwardly, of course, I agreed. Yes, it is amazing! So many people - so diverse, with completely different lives and priorities and networks and schedules - who manage to live alongside one another, quietly and unconsciously intersecting with one another only in the baldest of city contexts: a streetcar, a road, a school, a footpath, a store, an event, an emergency. It's amazing, I was thinking, how all of these people manage to make it thir home, to make it work for them, to find opportunities to grow and excuses to stay stagnant. And it is amazing - I still believe that - but Mum wasn't finished.
"...and not work for so many others."
For us, all of these stores were bigger and deeper than mere consumerist debris - the reasons to go to them were more about memories and human relationships than about stuff - all of the shops have been places where I have, in the months leading up to their trip here, imagined returning with my parents; imagined their responses to this place, these places. Have been very excited about the idea of them being here with me, have looked forward to hearing what they think about it all.
(And yet: tonite on the table in my lounge sits a rather large pile of newly-acquired things.)
When we took the subway to the Eaton Centre this morning, and emerged into the gentle sunlight while we passed between the train and shops for long enough for Mum and Dad to get a sense of where we were, Mum turned to me and said, "It's amazing that a city can work for so many people..." and inwardly, of course, I agreed. Yes, it is amazing! So many people - so diverse, with completely different lives and priorities and networks and schedules - who manage to live alongside one another, quietly and unconsciously intersecting with one another only in the baldest of city contexts: a streetcar, a road, a school, a footpath, a store, an event, an emergency. It's amazing, I was thinking, how all of these people manage to make it thir home, to make it work for them, to find opportunities to grow and excuses to stay stagnant. And it is amazing - I still believe that - but Mum wasn't finished.
"...and not work for so many others."
Monday, 2 April 2012
Knitting
Following up on the theme of 'strands' from yesterday's blog, today I had the opportunity to see more threads of my life connect and interlock. Mum and Dad met Anne, Michelle and their kids - so strange they had never met before! (Well, Mum and Dad met Michelle very briefly in Wellington last year, but so briefly...)
While we got ready this morning, Mum asked what else we would do today. I said that brunch at the Lyden-Elleray's tends to be a wonderful all day affair, and I was right! After a delicious brunch (enjoyed at a table decorated by the whole faily, including Ngaire's fabulous nametags for our places at the table), we kept talking... and talking... and talking. It was a lovely morning, and afternoong, and early evening. As we talked, we knitted. Well - Michelle, Anne and I knitted. Mum sewed. Dad - well, Dad enjoyed the conversation and took photos on his iphone on occasion. (An iphone as craft - something to think about!?)
There we sat, working on our various projects. There went our conversation, like my needles and wool: in, around, under, off. In, around, under, off.
The cliche of this metaphor of knitting is astounding, and I won't spell it out for fear of being so cheesy that the depth and gentleness of the day is lost. It's a cliche that fits, though... one that nicely sums up the real thing that was happening today: the knitting, pearling, knitting, pearling, stiching, sewing, making, finishing, knitting, pearling, knitting... of so many, many strands.
While we got ready this morning, Mum asked what else we would do today. I said that brunch at the Lyden-Elleray's tends to be a wonderful all day affair, and I was right! After a delicious brunch (enjoyed at a table decorated by the whole faily, including Ngaire's fabulous nametags for our places at the table), we kept talking... and talking... and talking. It was a lovely morning, and afternoong, and early evening. As we talked, we knitted. Well - Michelle, Anne and I knitted. Mum sewed. Dad - well, Dad enjoyed the conversation and took photos on his iphone on occasion. (An iphone as craft - something to think about!?)
There we sat, working on our various projects. There went our conversation, like my needles and wool: in, around, under, off. In, around, under, off.
The cliche of this metaphor of knitting is astounding, and I won't spell it out for fear of being so cheesy that the depth and gentleness of the day is lost. It's a cliche that fits, though... one that nicely sums up the real thing that was happening today: the knitting, pearling, knitting, pearling, stiching, sewing, making, finishing, knitting, pearling, knitting... of so many, many strands.
Sunday, 1 April 2012
photoshop life
"I mean, how often do the various parts of your life get to come together like this, in the same room?" - so said my friend Sarah tonite, at her place, where she hosted a bunch of us for a delicious dinner attended by her father, auntie, uncle and a family friend, as well as me, Bridget, Nadine and Ash, as well as my Mum and Dad!
Mum and Dad arrived in Toronto last nite (well, technically it was 3am this morning - because their flight from Vancouver was delayed by 6 hours!)... We've been having a ball, making plans for trips and things to do in this lovely city, and catching up on various family gossip and updates.
This afternoon we went for a walk around the place, and on the way we took this photo:
Here they are, Mum and Dad, standing in the street in Toronto! I mean, how strange! Two very different parts of my life, in the same photo? Surely this photo is doctored! Surely it's... photoshopped?
Actually, the wierdest thing about having them here is how wierd it *doesn't* feel! I mean, it's very exciting of course - and there 's so much I'm excited about showing them etc - but it also kind of makes sense.
Hmmm. I seem to live a photoshop life, in which people and places don't always stay in consistent relationship with one another: where people move, and places change, and people from 'there' come 'here' and vice versa. I suppose the strange thing is that it seems so strange and yet also so normal: I wonder if the algorithm in my head that calculates the links between people and place has become timid, no longer able to be certain about what's to be expected and what's an exception.
This doesn't mean I'm taking things for granted, and it doesn't mean it has been anything but a very exciting day! But, I guess on some emotional level I'm getting ready for living outside Aotearoa again: a blurring of the concepts of home (Aotearoa) and home (elsewhere). A deliberate ease with the idea that my life is made up of mobile, flexible, grounded, supple, interconnecting strands.
Mum and Dad arrived in Toronto last nite (well, technically it was 3am this morning - because their flight from Vancouver was delayed by 6 hours!)... We've been having a ball, making plans for trips and things to do in this lovely city, and catching up on various family gossip and updates.
This afternoon we went for a walk around the place, and on the way we took this photo:
Here they are, Mum and Dad, standing in the street in Toronto! I mean, how strange! Two very different parts of my life, in the same photo? Surely this photo is doctored! Surely it's... photoshopped?
Actually, the wierdest thing about having them here is how wierd it *doesn't* feel! I mean, it's very exciting of course - and there 's so much I'm excited about showing them etc - but it also kind of makes sense.
Hmmm. I seem to live a photoshop life, in which people and places don't always stay in consistent relationship with one another: where people move, and places change, and people from 'there' come 'here' and vice versa. I suppose the strange thing is that it seems so strange and yet also so normal: I wonder if the algorithm in my head that calculates the links between people and place has become timid, no longer able to be certain about what's to be expected and what's an exception.
This doesn't mean I'm taking things for granted, and it doesn't mean it has been anything but a very exciting day! But, I guess on some emotional level I'm getting ready for living outside Aotearoa again: a blurring of the concepts of home (Aotearoa) and home (elsewhere). A deliberate ease with the idea that my life is made up of mobile, flexible, grounded, supple, interconnecting strands.
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