mad pride as a specific movement in history emerged from parkdale, toronto. when i visited parkdale this spring, i was reminded of the times i’ve spent at gallery gachet and other dtes spaces roughly a decade ago. i’ve stopped being as involved in dtes and chinatown organizing in the past few years. many other people i know have as well, for roughly similar reasons that we keep close to our chests and whisper among ourselves. many friends/comrades/community members still involved often feel at the edge of leaving, too. on the one hand, it is a deep privilege to be able to leave a space like the DTES. on the other, what does it mean to not be able to leave, if the cost of staying is, well, us?
the constellation of reasons for people leaving a movement or space isn’t as simple as ‘burnout’ or vicarious trauma, though they’re both significant. one truth i feel good about naming is that geography-based organizing can be excruciating for those with complex trauma. over time, i’ve developed some partial version of agoraphobia that prevents me from going to different places in the lower mainland. leaving the house is awful because the specific routes and spaces i avoid remind me of periods in time. geography, then, is history. is memory. is an emotional, somatic flashback.
fighting gentrification and saving lives from colonial urban policies and creating language access and intervening in the poisoning crisis and bridging intergenerational and intercultural communities. (can’t imagine doing any of this while having a flashback!)
i was recently sharing with someone i know that i learned the hard way that i’m not fully equipped for the kind of community work where i play a primary support-role for elders and older aunties of colour figures, which is a significant amount of chinatown-based work for chinese diaspora with heritage language skills (or more) like myself. admitting this is, erm, hard. it feels shameful, like something you’re not supposed to say, not supposed to feel. under a certain light in some corner of the internet, someone will most likely conceive it as just plain ageism.
on a personal level, my decision to set this boundary for myself has been wise. not everyone is emotionally equipped to handle this kind of work because not everyone has a neutral relationship to elders and auntie figures where your role in the space is simultaneously (and suddenly) interpreter, cultural translator, emotional supporter, and community member. when i put it like this, it’s clear that the role many of us are expected to perform is massive. imagining oneself a failure for not being a unicorn kind of person who can do this work unscathed is a losing battle. and that’s a different (though not altogether separate) battle, in a sense, than fighting for one’s communities.
all this is to say: it is important to know what your limitations are. it is important to honour deeper boundaries with yourself when showing up for and being inside communities. this is a very difficult thing to practice when communities are in constant crisis, not just locally, but globally. free palestine, free congo, and free sudan. etcetc.
a few days ago, i attended a celebration of life for a community member i had only met once in person. because of how important chinatown was to him, the event took place at dr. sun yat-sen garden. because of how important palestine was to him, guests were informally asked to wear their palestine pins and kufiyas. the fact that the garden, which only a few years ago had horrendous pro-cop leadership, was suddenly filled with kufiyas, was suddenly filled with the poetry and grief and laughter and whisper-gossip of queer and trans people of colour, was a bittersweet expression of communities coming together and transforming a geography in ways that couldn’t have been conceived a few years ago. i wish he could have been there to witness it, in person.
(we don’t need more young ancestors, thanks!!)
for several years now, i’ve been trying to write into the grief i feel towards community members whom i ‘only’ knew in passing, or didn’t know at all, whose departure nonetheless feel like a giant wound in a huddle of cells and constellations i fail at pretending i’m not a part of. i realize that i’m buoyed to write into and about this grief because as a traumatized, mad person, keeping people at bay is a defence mechanism with the intention of keeping me from loss. when that loss is inevitable, no matter what.
over time i realized: we don’t have to have known someone intimately to feel their absence. if each person is a universe, we are losing multiverses by the second with multiple genocides and crises around the world. and none of that is inevitable. you can’t tell me that we all don’t feel the impacts of that scale of loss, psychically, spiritually, mentally, and physically. no matter who you are. no matter who you are.
i’m interested in the ways that grief teaches me that this defence mechanism of keeping others at bay doesn’t work: i always feel the regret and what ifs deeply. i always feel a life cut short deeply, no matter if the reason i didn’t get to know them better was happenstance, the hubbub of a busy life, or my own fear of intimacy.
for me, being able to step into a space and transform one’s relationship to its traumatic histories is a form of mad liberation. in that sense, the act of celebrating and memorializing a life in the ways they would have wanted it celebrated and memorialized teaches me that ritual is a balm that guides us towards collective liberation and wholeness, more generally. and ritual, perhaps, is not necessarily the same set of traditions that predetermine what ritual looks like. traditions for rituals can and will change over time, and those changes in turn changes us.
leaving a space, whether it’s a place or not, isn’t always cowardly. leaving can be a gift, a seed, a guide towards a different relationship to a place, a form of respect for oneself and others. the living generations of my family have all left places for new ones (which are old ones, with its own stories we do not belong to). being an immigrant/emigrant means leaving, and that leaving is never simple, never seamless, never harmless, and never without changing the place you left and the place you’re leaving it for, forever.
if, in one sense, return is impossible, transformation (of self, place, lives) is inevitable. we are always changing, fluid like water, roaring like the waves. the sea is mad, on principle. may you live forever, em, through every droplet that falls into every crack in every chinatown, from every river to every sea.