November 11: On the Flight from Paris to Nairobi

November 11 - On the flight from Paris to Nairobi

I am writing this first blog entry on the 8 hour flight from Paris to Nairobi. This is after the 7 hour flight from Toronto to Paris with about an one hour layover. It’s officially 7:40am EST on November 11 as I’m writing this and I haven’t slept for more than 20 minutes since 7:00am EST on November 10. But I’ve decided that I’m going to give you all the ins and outs of this trip . TIA.

It’s Remembrance Day in Canada, and before I left (I was unsuccessful of trying to see it at TIFF), I was watching All is Quiet on the Western Front. And ***spoiler alert*** when the German soldier killed the French soldier and then tried to save his life, it really had me thinking about the Black trauma we (I) have that masquerades as ‘culture’ and personality.

(I’m going to save that for a longer post/piece of writing at some point, but long story short, my entire existence and livelihood is predicated on unrelenting trauma that I choose not to reconcile.)

Yes, I can get into the geopolitics of WWI, but at the core of it, this - what we remember on November 11 (Vimy Ridge in particular) is how we (Canadians) forged our Canadian identity independent of us as British subjects. That is the narrative we have been told. That is the narrative that we remember/are told to remember on this day. Je me souviens, no?

But have we reconciled with the trauma that is now our Canadian (white) culture? That politicians sent thousands of young white boys to get slaughtered by other young white boys over dirt and mud? Boys that are the grandparents and great-grandparents of those that shout for ‘freedom’ on the streets of Ottawa? Those that continue to propagate and perpetuate systemic racism and oppression in the name of ‘freedom’? Has there been a truth and reconciliation that (white) Canadian culture is founded in trauma and violence, and the one way to pretend that trauma and violence doesn’t exist is to commit more trauma and violence? Hurt people hurt people.

Enslavement ended in 1834 in Canada.

Canadian boys killed German boys  from 1914-1918.

German-Canadian and Italian-Canadians killed Canadian-Germans and Canadian-Italians from 1939-1945.

Ukrainian-Canadians and Russian-Canadians are at war as we speak.

White neighbours traumatizing white neighbours under the Canadian flag.

I’m on this trip to represent the University of Waterloo, but I’m also here to reconcile with my own trauma. My work isn’t equity or anti-racism, nor is it harm reduction:

It is navigating and reconciling my trauma and shining a light on the collective trauma of other Black/black/‘black’ bodies.

But I can’t do that for the Old Stock Canadians. I can’t reconcile trauma that you all decide to not only forget, but celebrate. Like a festering wound that grows, and the only way to heal is to inflict pain on those that look different from you. Those that can come under phenotypic reductionism of little melanin.

Until (white) Canadians go ‘back’ (and they don’t have to go back very far, geographically or historically), we will continue to fight over masks, over class sizes, over keeping kids in schools, over Critical Race Theory, over Truth and Reconciliation, over equity, over Kyrie Irving, over my ‘rightful’ place at the University of Waterloo.

I’m travelling the globe to reconcile my trauma, maybe we should be honest about Vimy Ridge.