Is this what the novelists meant by ennui?

In the evening of the day I went to the Hazlitt office to interview Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie about her new novel, Americanah , I came home and wrote a very angry blog post. I published it, then made it private, published it again, and eventually relegated it to permanent draft status. I've since come up with a guide to circumventing that kind of needless anguish: if in doubt, don't fucking publish.

Just before sitting down to talk with Adichie I had come across something useless via social media that I took as a major slight. I rode my bike down Church breathing huge gulps of wind, knuckles tight around my pink handlebars, thinking all the while how easy it would be to just swerve into traffic and make something, ANYTHING, happen that wasn't this feeling. Nuts, right? Obviously I did nothing - how do you see it? Am I brave or a coward? - and met Anshuman at the office door on the brink of tears. After composing myself in the bathroom (meaning: carefully sopping up brimming tears with toilet paper so my blush wouldn't streak) I emerged and went into #beastmode.

Adichie uncoiled during our 40-minute interview, which made me feel very bawse-like. It was a lovely chat. If I had workaholic tendencies I could see myself escaping the vagaries of my personal life through work, to my own demise. Luckily I am perpetually ensconced in my feelings; work, and only satisfying work, is just a temporary salve.

And so I came home and wrote a thing, because this is what Adichie told me:

"I feel grateful to be read but I would be writing anyway, even if I wasn’t fortunate enough to be published. Writing matters to me. My sense of meaning comes from my ability to write."

Read the interview here.

A disclaimer, re: "scenes"

I wrote about Toronto's "exploding Indie R&B scene" for The Grid. It was a chance for me to finally address, from the inside - to the inside - that people in this city are doing things that are being noticed internationally. Perhaps, I posit, it's due to the fact that there are now dedicated series of events and parties that showcase the weirder, untethered side of R&B/soul/reggae/rap/etc., etc.

But yeah, duh. There have always been weird brown folks, but there's a new individualism to the R&B-inspired sounds young people are making. (As derivative as some of these songs may sound to an old head). Anyway, as an addendum to the piece, here are just a few more Canadian artists to check:

Short Stories - On The Way

Walked into a drag show expecting all P O P, and was surprised enough by this jam to Shazam it. Shazam-ing in public. I love the metronomic rhythm of the Satellite beeps da most. Sampha and Koreless do #hubblewave.

On the way. The drag show was for charity; it was a small space and there wasn't a great turn out but we had a good time. At one point I indulged the host, a girl I'd met twice through him, by coming up on stage and telling dumb jokes. It was hot under those lights and I felt like everyone could see the beads of sweat gathering on my forehead and upper lip. I talked into a mic and made some people laugh. My heartache subsided, just until I stepped back out into the blue night, but I briefly felt my old self sigh, happy.

Lost in the cherry blossoms, my breath.

Don't let me be misunderstood...

But no, actually, as Taiye Selasi told me in our interview for Hazlitt, let's get over that fear/anxiety of being misunderstood and just embrace it.

As soon as I relieved myself of the agony of being misunderstood—cue the Nina Simone—I was just like, let me be misunderstood then.

That resonated with me. Most artists, at least those who don't suffer from largesse, probably deal with this in some way. But It made me wonder if that's the prerequisite for people of colour making art that interacts or intersects, in some way, with a wider audience. Misunderstanding is in-built; your task is to transcend that.

As someone who never quite fit in, it took a long while before I was okay with constantly being misinterpreted by the various social circles/stata that I was trying to navigate. That's apparent in my writing. Bahia and Liza, the writers of Pomme Is French For Apple, once told me that they don't worry about their audiences trying to understand their predominantly patois play - it is what it is and if they're open to getting it, they will. Last night, at the exhibit/panel for My City My Story some of the young photographers touched on this as well. (How fortunate/special to gain artistic confidence so early in a career!) Photography as a way to share a very specific perspective - to look in the mirror, and see themselves reflected, misunderstandings and all.

Oh right, so I am jobless right now....

As my conspicuous absence from blogging, writing or updating this site indicates, I've been totally busy doing... nothing. JKJKJK. Yes, I am currently unemployed, but I have been keeping busy. Before I finished my contract at the CBC, I wrote another piece for VICE Canada about needing a job and, like, how shitty it is to work in media right now.

"No one is out there saying, “Yo, this is not a reliable or particularly pleasurable path to gainful employment.”

True story.

So, I still need a job (and this is why I talked about fear in my previous post: fear of pissing off the people that hire) and I'm still on the fence about making a living as a writer. But, I will still write, because how could I not? This is so much a part of my identity right now it would be like making an entirely new person and I am not so much into abandonment. Instead, I will do as the brilliantly in-touch Margaret Atwood suggested in a recent interview: "Read and read and read and write and write and write. And get a day job."

In the spirit of writing for the sake of writing, I should express something before I finish this post. My first week being unemployed was very difficult. I woke up with nothing to do. The weather was shit obscuring any hope for an end to this painfully long winter and exacerbating my S.A.D. This caused me to: cry a lot for hours on end, stare listlessly at walls and screens, almost break up with my boyfriend, act generally manic, deplore my existence.

This is a mental health alert. Because I have a tendency to dip in and out of depressed states, this was my warning signal. And, in truth, I felt I'd already hit rock bottom so succumbing to the ease of being sad and angry and ditching a relationship because it felt like an easy solution to my problems was an easy way out. I can't live like that. Literally. I've spent too much time being paralyzingly, heartbreakingly sad to not at least try to swerve before a bleak spot. And so I did the simplest thing: the second Monday of unemployment I started a routine. I got up and went to the gym and made sure I had plans for every day of the week to get me out of the house and doing things that weren't just shopping or roaming or coffee dates (though the latter did figure heavily).

This was important for me to say because I've classified it as "funemployment" and a lot of people do, but it's really not fun. Particularly when you have skint savings and aren't eligible for E.I., and when money is a very real concern. But it's during those kinds of moments when checking in with yourself, preserving your sanity, is especially crucial.

For Store Brand White Boys Who Have Considered Denial When The Order Of Things Is Enuf

So belated, but I wrote this piece for VICE Canada, that I am simultaneously proud of and terrified by.

We’re past the easy part of multiculturalism – integration, assimilation, tolerance, eating roti. Now time for the hard part: practicing equality with consequence and straight up not being a dick.
We can’t dismiss multiculturalism when Islamophobia fuels pop culture. Or when our native population continues to be oppressed and ridiculed in plain sight. We can’t talk about securing a post-racial paradise divorced from the reality of the existing power structures and individuals that benefit from preserving the status quo.

That shit is hard to write, b. More difficult than managing the praise, because DON'T LOOK AT ME, is the fear of the unknown reactions. Obviously it's neither healthy nor productive to speculate, but the reality of writing something so honest and so personally political, is that it outs you in some way. And when you are working within a complex system, but railing against it in some way, that can have consequences.

The bright side is that it also has positive consequences, and allies have come forward and made themselves known. And who am I even trying to kid? That piece wasn't written for people who don't understand, because I'm not trying to change the minds of the unwilling. That piece was written for my friends, and for my peoples. It was an attempt at being a voice of reason - a minor reprieve from the 24-hour news cycle of crazy - that's positive despite it's cynicism, because it reflects our reality.