July-August 2019 – This Magazine

The New Nancy Drew

Sarah Ratchford — Wed, 14 Aug 2019 18:18:28 +0000

At three-thirty, when local high schools let out, I regularly caught the Dufferin bus near my place in downtown Toronto and used the long ride northbound to Yorkdale Mall to snoop on teens’ conversations, Shazam songs they were playing too loudly on earbuds, and read flirty chat messages over their shoulders. While I kept a notebook open and jotted down lines of dialogue and character notes, nobody ever guessed I was a writer. I wrote two young adult novels at that suburban mall, sitting in the food court and a café.

The bus route passed a company promising private investigator training and I felt like I’d missed my calling. Becoming a writer was second best. I was meant to be a fearless detective, like my childhood idol Nancy Drew. Growing up in bleak 1980s Parkdale, decades before gentrification swept through, I learned to slip my keys between my fingers, make eye contact, memorize faces and license plates.

I hoped my body language communicated that I was a fighter. It was the late 1980s and Paul Bernardo was disappearing teen girls my age, but I refused to stop going out alone at night. I spoke my mind
to the racist skinheads recruiting at my high school. I tried to live like Nancy, who ran toward danger rather than away. The intrepid detective never asked for permission and solved mysteries using her wits. She provided a semi-empowered but unattainably perfect prototype of girl. Since my parents were feminists who took me to protests, didn’t let me watch most television, and dressed me in the same clothes as my brother, I always felt out of step with other girls. Feminine social morays were strange and mystifying. So when I became a teen, I imitated Nancy.

At the age of 10, I’d been gifted an almost-complete set of Nancy Drew hardcovers by my uncle—a man I barely remembered—and devoured all of them. Twice. I hunted through used bookstores for copies of the missing books and bought them with allowance money.

The ones I owned were published as far back as the 1930s and 1940s, the era of Rosie the Riveter, when men were away at war and women were encouraged to get jobs. That Nancy was independent, had her own car, an obliging attorney father, and a housekeeper who handled all the cleaning and cooking. She preferred the company of her BFFs Bess and George, and only called in handsome Ned Nickerson when she needed backup and the girls were away. In the 1950s, Nancy developed lady-like decorum and hesitated more; by the 1970s, she was a shadow of her former self, a pretty upper-middle class girl who solved mysteries.

Even when I first read the books, I knew they were problematic. Nancy, perpetually 16, didn’t go to school or have to put up with being treated like a cute little brainless girl. Adults believed her when she told them a heist was about to happen. Almost all the people she helped were white and well-heeled, heiresses, or innocent old ladies swindled out of their fortunes. The bad guys were frequently “swarthy” and poor.

Now, when I teach writing for young adults at UBC, I bring in books from different decades to show how the genre has changed to embrace novels that depict the intersectional world teens live in and realistic issues they’re facing. Examples of Judy Blume’s oeuvre and even Carrie represent the 1970s, but I have trouble finding a Nancy Drew that doesn’t perpetuate racial stereotypes and criminalize poor people. The series has been remade multiple times, but by the 2000s, it had devolved into little more than suspenseful Harlequin Romances for teens.

All that changed this past year. The movie Nancy Drew and the Hidden Staircase featured Sophia Lillis as a skateboard- riding tomboy detective. But it’s the five-issue Dynamite Entertainment comic book series by writer Kelly Thompson and artist Jenn St-Onge that won back my heart. Nancy has an asymmetrical punk haircut with bleached tips, Bess is decidedly plump again, and George is openly queer. Their social circle includes people of colour from a range of social circles. Nancy’s still righting wrongs, only now they actually matter, like the suspicious death of her mother. The characters are real, the suspense is palpable, and she’s an age-appropriate shero for tweens. These comics appreciate what was fun about the original series but address its flaws.

I no longer have to feel embarrassed about my fantasy of becoming a detective. And, finally, I can bring Nancy Drew into my writing classes as a springboard for talking about how problematic teen heroes can be recreated and find new readers in 2019.

Smoke Signals

Sarah Ratchford — Wed, 14 Aug 2019 17:32:50 +0000

Top: Herman Creek; photo by Terry Hill · Bottom: Herman Creek, 16 months after fire; photo by Ralph Bloemers

As you pass the trailhead of the Pacific Crest Trail on the western edge of Cascade Locks, Oregon—the terminus point of Cheryl Strayed’s hike in Wild—the path curves upwards. It curves away from the river, away from the highway, and into a stand of second-growth Douglas fir trees. I’m on a guided hike with Roberta Cobb, the caretaker of a stretch of the PCT that extends about six-and-a-half kilometres from the Bridge of the Gods to the next trail junction at the Herman Bridge Trail. As we hike, Cobb and I pass trees ringed with charred bark; when we look up towards the canopy, we can see if the tree is dead or living. From many points along trails in this area, you can see down to the wide, fast-moving Columbia River, home to several different species of salmon. Members of the Yakama, Nez Perce, Warm Springs, and Confederated Tribes of the Umatilla hold treaty rights for subsistence and commercial fishing on this river and its tributaries and, if you look closely, you can spot the platforms where fishers use hoop nets to catch coho, chinook, steelhead. Cobb uses her hiking stick to point out native plants, some of which she’s seeing on this trail for the first time since she began to hike it over 30 years ago: calypso orchids, Oregon grape, trillium, vanilla leaf, Oregon anemones. The moss, which used to be up to 10 or 12 inches deep—“there are parts of this trail that felt like hobbit land,” Cobb says—just began to re-emerge this year and has only managed to develop, so far, a thin cover.

Cobb and I are hiking a post-fire forest. I was invited here by Travel Oregon. It was the first travel-writing invite I’ve ever accepted—most conventional travel writing doesn’t appeal to me much but I have an abundance of curiosity about how communities rebuild after fire. Two years ago, on Labour Day weekend 2017, a teen lobbed fireworks into the Columbia River Gorge in Eagle Creek, just west of us on an extremely popular hiking trail, igniting a blaze that tore through the underbrush. The fire burned up the top of the ridge and then burning debris fell down, inciting further burning at the top, says Jessica Bennett, Cascade Locks’ Fire Chief. The fire hopped from ridge line to ridge. It lasted over 12 weeks and became, in a year that also saw the horrific destruction of the Thomas and Detwiler Fires in California, the top priority fire in the nation for three weeks. Bennett was on a wilderness rescue across the river when she received the first call, just after 4 p.m. on the second day of September. A little later, as Bennett came around the east side of Beacon Rock, on the Washington side of the river, she was able to get a clear view down the gorge. What she saw was unsettling: a huge plume of smoke swirling upwards from Eagle Creek. Bennett’s fire crew— fire fighter and paramedic Rebecca Gehrman and a couple volunteers—had already been dispatched on-scene with a bladder bag of water and some tools. But the flames were already taking up roughly an acre of land. They’d jumped the trail, and were moving quickly up steep terrain composed of loose shale and dry grasses.

“We knew we weren’t going to fight the fire,” Gehrman says. Their objective, instead, was to get to any hikers trapped on the trail and help them and a way to safety. Gehrman and her crew couldn’t get to the hikers, but thankfully, the Forest Service did: they found about 140 people on the Eagle Creek Trail and had them hike out over 22 kilometres in the opposite direction, away from the fire, towards an area called Wahtum Lake. Many of these hikers, expecting a short jaunt into the woods to take in the scenery and take some photos, were wearing flip-flops, swimsuits, T-shirts, and shorts, not necessarily carrying water

or food. They weren’t prepared to start walking the equivalent of a half-marathon and they weren’t prepared to shelter overnight at the bottom of the canyon, the river further cooling the chilly early fall air. As the forest service guided the hikers out, the fire grew: the affected area was estimated at 300 acres by 11 p.m., and then—surprising Bennett and other fire experts, because fire isn’t generally as active at nighttime—it ballooned to 3000 acres overnight.

Late last April, I moved back to Vancouver after spending three years in Montreal; my partner, Will, our toddler and I lived in Surrey and I commuted into East Van by suburban bus and SkyTrain. As the summer stretched on, the air filled with wildfire smoke. Most days, as the SkyTrain passed over the Fraser River, the sun was a glowing pink orb in a hazy rose-gold sky. Everyone Instagrammed it. I Instagrammed it. Over three thousand people were evacuated from their homes and the fires set a new record for area burned, which had been set just a year earlier—over 13,000 square kilometres to 2017’s 12,161. It was only a couple years after fires tore through Fort McMurray, in Alberta. South of us, the Carr Fire was burning, to be followed soon after by the horriffic Camp and Woolsey Fires, which together consumed great swathes of California, tragically killing 96 people. Like it had been with Fort Mac, the footage of people escaping the areas was terrifying: cars slowed to a crawl on highways flanked with flames. It was impossible not to think about fire, to feel lucky every day that we were safe, other than for the smoke. As I write this, we’re heading back into fire season: it’s early May, and there are already fires of note burning on the Nechako Plateau, just west of Prince George, and just outside Fort St. John, on the north-eastern edge of the province.

Where I live now—Powell River, B.C., about five hours northwest of Vancouver on the northern Sunshine Coast—was logged extensively in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, with old-growth logging hitting its heyday in the mid-1920s. This logging, plus a general policy to put out forest fires, has resulted in a forest that Eric Whitehead, who forages mushrooms and other wild foods for his company, Untamed Feast, now describes as “relatively boring.” “You have your second-growth Douglas fir trees and salal,” he says. “Salal, ferns, and second-growth Douglas fir.” Whitehead likens this to a “monocrop.” “We know about farming, how when you get a huge monocrop of something, if disease comes in it wipes everything down,” he says. While allowing pocket burns would have created multifaceted forests in B.C.—different kinds of trees of all different ages—the policy of avoiding as much fire as possible, in addition to the impacts of climate change, instead left the forests vulnerable to the mountain pine beetle, which has decimated trees across the province and left us even more susceptible to serious fires.

In Cascade Locks, 68-year-old Mayor Tom Cramblett—who also pilots river cruises down the river on a 147-foot sternwheeler—remembers that the tree composition of the gorge looked very different in places when he was young. The Yacolt Burn had blazed through in 1902, taking out Douglas fir and leaving, for a time, a blend of new plants and trees in its wake. Cramblett remembers, in particular, huckleberry fields up near Wahtum Lake, and bear grass fields on the Benson Plateau—people made the huckleberries into jam and pies, and made baskets out of the bear grass. “Douglas fir wipes out everything,” he says. “We protected the trees, and the noble fir moved in there and the huckleberry fields are all gone.”

In other words, the way we think about fire and interact with fire—like the way we think about and interact with many aspects of the environment that sustains us—may need to change. In B.C., logging remains an important economic driver; Whitehead underscores that in the area I live in, the forest is becoming less of a forest and more of a tree farm, one we might find ourselves needing to fertilize if we don’t begin to let more dead wood replenish the soil. In wilder areas, he says, we’d do well to let more fires burn, and to opt for controlled burns— wildfires set intentionally in order to manage the forest and help avoid out-of-control, unmanageable forest fires. The B.C. government earmarked $10 million of its wildfire budget this year for prescribed burns, and including one in Keremeos, in the fire-plagued interior, targeting 192 hectares.

Everyone I spoke to in Cascade Locks remembers where they were when they first learned of the fire. Caroline Lipp, co-owner of the Thunder Island Brewing Company, found out the severity of the fire when a customer tagged them in a photo from the brewery’s patio: looking southwest, the customer captured smoke billowing into the sky. Kim Brigham-Campbell, a fisher and a member of the Confederated Tribes of the Umatilla, could see it from the window of her fish shop. Ralph Bloemers, an attorney who works with conservation groups, was driving back to Portland on highway 84 just a few minutes before the highway was closed. He saw the fire moving fast—wind-driven embers, huge chunks of debris floating down to the highway, helicopters up in the sky looking puny in comparison to the fire. Shelley James, who owns Cascade Locks Ale House and is a volunteer trail angel, accepting mailed-ahead supplies from hikers, could see it from the Ale House’s backyard. Residents and business owners of Cascade Locks were lucky—no one died or was seriously injured, and fire fighters managed to divert the fire away from the town three times, preventing it from burning. But it was still traumatic, and many townspeople are still healing. “I was really worried that the whole town was going to be gone,” says James. “You can still smell smoke in my truck on a hot day when you lift the windows up. My sleeping bags will always smell.”

For some people, like the Mayor, considering the ways in which fire is a natural part of the cycle of the forest helps to ease the anxiety surrounding it. Bloemers and Roberta Cobb, the PCT caretaker, both participated in community forums on forest ecology and trail maintenance last fall and over the winter. Bloemers organized a trip into the charcoal forest with the local elementary school, to see nature moving forward as a metaphor for their own healing. “We started by asking them to share their own stories of the fire,” Bloemers says. “And then we took them out onto the ground.” In small groups, the students did a treasure hunt to find things like woodpecker holes—the black-backed woodpecker thrives in post-burn forest—and trees that had been burned, but were still alive. Bloemers also filmed work parties on trails that were impacted by the fire; he’d clip a GoPro to a tree or leave one on the ground as he helped to move rocks. On the Angel’s Rest Trail, he reflected on the fact that the trail, which is popular for its views, has those views because of a fire that burned in the early nineties. Bloemers says his goal is to show the benefits of fire—to deliver a message that is both hopeful and shares the hard truths.

Back in B.C., Eric Whitehead is studying last year’s burn maps to decide where he’ll pick morel mushrooms this year. Morels are a symbiotic mushroom and their fungus grows underground, like a little net that connects to the rootlet hairs of trees and shrubs. But the fungus produces fruit as a stress reaction, when its host trees are dead or dying—like after a fire, or logging. Whitehead, who grew up on a farm, and picking wild mushrooms, says that it took a few years for the beauty of the post-fire forest to kick in for him. After that, he says, “you’re walking through and you find yourself photographing little things that are just so excited for the raw opportunity to just kind of colonize the space. And then in time you started to really get it—oh yeah, this is part of the program. This isn’t a disaster here. This is part of the cycle.”

Mitch Hicks, the Chief of Enforcement for the Fisheries Enforcement Department of the Columbia River Inter-Tribal Fish Commission, stresses tempering any optimism associated with the Eagle Creek Fire—it was, after all, a human-caused fire that endangered lives and livelihoods. Tribal fishers from the Yakama, Nez Perce, Warm Springs, and Confederated Tribes of the Umatilla were in their high season—several different species of salmon run overlapping—when the fire hit on Labour Day weekend. “There’s positive effects from fire, absolutely, there are benefits,” he says. “But not in this way… There are prescribed ways to have healthy forests that are not harmful to people and don’t victimize people, and don’t victimize the environment, because the environment can be victimized as well.”

On my last full day in Oregon, my family and I hiked along the Herman Creek Trail to the Herman Bridge Trail, which Roberta Cobb had recommended when we were out on the PCT. Will pointed out a slope studded with “volcanic bombs”— lava that had been hurled from a local volcano and cooled into rocks during its descent through the air. Earlier, on the patio at the brewery, I’d marvelled at the stunning exposed cliff faces of Table Mountain: hundreds of years ago, Mayor Cramblett had explained, a massive landslide had cleaved off the mountain, partially damming the river. If I take a long-term view, it’s possible to read the landscape and see evidence of disasters past all around us—both to appreciate the resilience of the forests, rivers, and rocks, and to reorient my anxieties about climate-change-related disasters so that I am focussing less on how they may impact me, and more on the duty of care I owe to mitigate their causes and effects.

Deciding Factors

Sarah Ratchford — Wed, 14 Aug 2019 16:04:10 +0000

Being a Plains Cree non-binary lesbian with a non- functioning uterus makes baby-making hard. And the looming pressure of total environmental and climate collapse has made a lot of my friends choose not to have children at all. Is it selfish to bring a child into the world as it stands now? And can I do it alone? These were the questions I was facing as I also recognized that turning 40 meant I didn’t have a lot of time to keep dilly- dallying on the baby thing.

I asked for a referral to a fertility clinic to freeze eggs. I had been juggling some concerns when I decided to go this route. For one thing, my home province of Saskatchewan had routinely been non-consensually sterilizing Indigenous women, usually coercing them during child birth with the threat of not letting them have their babies if they didn’t comply. That wasn’t why my uterus didn’t work though. I had fibroids, bloody gory periods, and a lot of cramping every month. When I finally convinced the doctors to give me an endometrial ablation I thought that was the end of it. I didn’t want to be pregnant, which probably seems at odds with the desire for children.

That came later, but through my whole life I had never wanted to be pregnant. Children yes, pregnancy no. I also ended up needing to take ongoing lifesaving medications in my adult life that are not meant to be taken by pregnant people—another strike against going that route, had I wanted to.

I wanted to use my own eggs because of the continuous genocidal policy in Canada which aims to
reduce Indigenous populations or displace Indigenous children into non-Indigenous families. I wanted
my baby to have a status card, like me, so they could access some health benefits; I wanted a baby I could raise with knowledge of their Plains Cree background and spirituality, history, and language. I wanted a baby who I could teach about our ancestors and take to ceremonies and gatherings, knowing they were a part of us. I wanted a baby who I could link to a long lineage of survivors and who I could raise to be a good loving healthy person with some of the good parts of me. And if there were some of the more di cult parts of my genes in this child’s life, I wanted to know that so I could help them get tested for adhd or assessed for mood disorders or any other more random family medical things that came up.

I thought I would face gatekeepers when I started trying to make a baby. I’d looked into adoption and saw a couple of ways I might be ineligible to be considered as an adoptive parent. I have bipolar disorder, so I thought maybe my doctor would try to talk me out of it or not refer me on account of that. But she was happy to and didn’t think there was anything unusual or bad about me becoming a parent. Likewise, when I started giving my medical history to my fertility specialist, I thought he would refuse to continue on with me. Going to a fertility clinic in Saskatchewan could have been different I suppose, but I felt supported by the medical system in Toronto in possibly making an Indigenous baby, which was an immense relief.

I met with the specialist and was given the statistics on ivf. Some eggs wouldn’t be viable. Some eggs wouldn’t fertilize. I was told some would have genetic issues that could increase the possibility of miscarriage. Out of 15 eggs, at my age, there would likely only be one that could turn into a baby. They were dire statistics. I had 10 antral follicles for an egg to mature in, which meant I would probably get at maximum 10 eggs. Not 15.

In my early to mid-thirties, closer to prime fertile age, I did write o the idea of having children. The world
just seemed doomed. With capitalism grinding it down, a massive extinction event, corporations getting away with poisoning and murdering ecosystems and people, I wasn’t sure. As a person marginalized in multiple ways, I knew I didn’t have a whole lot of power as an individual to stop this kind of ongoing catastrophe. And so, I’d decided, I wasn’t going to bring someone into the world to be faced with this kind of bleak future. But this decision didn’t stick.

When I started taking follicle stimulating hormone shots, I had to keep doing blood tests and ultrasounds to monitor what my ovaries were doing. At the beginning, the doctor said I might only get a couple of eggs. It was a depressing prospect since the cost of an ivf cycle and egg retrieval is about $10,000 to $15,000 here in Ontario (unlike other provinces, Ontario covers some of this). That was a lot of money for only two eggs. I was fortunate that I had just enough from a couple of contract jobs I had done to pay for it, but as a full-time artist I didn’t have enough to do more than one cycle. Being single and living alone meant I had to start doing my own shots in the days between clinic visits. The first day I had to do a shot alone I woke up with tingling fingertips, a typical symptom of anxiety for me. My hand shook when I brought the needle to my glute, but I was surprised at how easily it sunk into my esh. After, I felt a kind of rush thatI had managed to do it alone.

The end of my ivf cycle was looming and the process was scaring me. To retrieve eggs they have to insert an ultrasound wand vaginally and then use a needle to aspirate each follicle and take out the eggs. The specialist said I would be under conscious sedation so I could still move around, but I would be sedated and not remember. The thought made me nervous, speciffically the word “conscious.” And I didn’t understand how conscious that meant I would be.

I’d grown tired of waiting for a partner to show up to have a baby with. Which is why I had begun this process. It had been a long wait. I was turning 40 and I’d never even had a girlfriend who was serious enough to live with. I’d had a string of unrequited loves and if I was going to have a baby I needed to start working at it even if it was alone. I needed a surrogate though. I had a recruited a close friend as a sperm donor—a kind, funny, smart man who I trusted. I just needed someone to carry this baby. Though, by freezing eggs I was buying myself some time.

When the day finally came I was solo, in a small room that smelled like a sandwich, with my legs up in these sort of slings, being shown a dish with my name on it on a monitor. This is where the eggs would go. They gave me conscious sedation drugs and the next thing I remember is waking up in the recovery room, where I sent some incomprehensible texts to my friend who was coming to pick me up.

Honestly, being single and going to fertility clinic appointments alone is hard. I became acutely aware that things were just easier if you were part of a couple. Couples at the clinic were in it together; they went to the appointments together, they brought each other coffee, they had quiet conversations about their options. They were supporting each other. I was alone and had been for a long time.

They got 13 eggs. Ten were viable. Pretty much all from that amazing champion right ovary. They are in a lab freezer somewhere on Bay St. Now, a year later, I am taking the sperm donor to the same clinic to bank his sperm, and about to pay the rent for another year of storage for my eggs, still single and still looking for a surrogate.

Recently, news came out that we only have 10 to 12 years left to get our shit together before climate change becomes irreversible. It’s looming. Is it responsible to bring children into this world? I feel like that’s a loaded question because the flip side of it is that if we don’t bring children into this world,
why would anyone care what happens? I know that’s not my way of thinking, but it’s a peculiar kind of call to apathy. I like to think we can still change this future. I know populism and conservative governments are going to exacerbate the problem. But I still feel there is a future and I still feel that I could be a good parent.

I really want to contribute to helping the next generation of Indigenous kids be born and raised in healthy, happy homes. I know how small our populations are compared to the rest of Canada. I feel that my genetic line of Plains Cree medicine people and warriors had something important to give to the planet’s future. I think it was a feeling of resistance that made me want to have a baby. I know my ancestors have survived smallpox, wars, Spanish Flu, residential schools, day schools, and depressions. I know my ancestors have created amazing works of art, have shaped Canadian history, have been strong leaders and caring parents and fostered a sense of community responsibility amongst each other. These qualities felt like things some small being coming into this world would need and could use to make things better for themselves. I felt that there were spirits and medicines and mysterious forces that could give this person a good foundation to do something amazing in their lives. At the same time I know a lot of people put too many expectations on their children, and I don’t want to expect my kid to be the one to save the world. But I do think I could give this kid a good start.

aabiskose

Sarah Ratchford — Wed, 14 Aug 2019 15:54:15 +0000

Nookaa starts her new job in seventeen minutes and still decides to take some time deciding what androgynous items of clothing to wear, responds to a text from her partner to “talk” later that day, and also reminds White Boy #326 where the closest movie rental place is, right on Commercial Drive. In the cab she wonders why she would let a cishet white man into her life again, why Nookaa even keeps replying to his messages on Tinder and gives her number so freely to him. Some perverse longing perhaps, some ingrained conditioning to always aspire to be some white man’s wife. One day she will unpack that and today is definitely not that day.

Her boss asks if she goes by a different name and what her pronouns are. Nookaa smiles. Tomorrow she will wear a dress and a pale turquoise lipstick as celebration. An ex-partner texts her: Hello. How are you? She can already tell from the use of a period instead of a comma and lack of frog emojis they also wish to “talk.” She calculates capacity: first time in sixteen months working, an already scheduled “talk” later, and a first date with a cishet white man tonight. She sucks her teeth frustrated and responds: hey! srry, can’t talk—definitely not today—started a new job. She has already muted the conversation and begins making a lengthy work to-do list.

After work her partner and her end up breaking up in Grandview Park, only to end up at the pub on Gravely for Wing Wednesday. The server addresses them in gender-neutral terms. They laugh about how they never defined what their relationship would look like. As they walk towards Broadway, Nookaa hugs her now-ex farewell, hustles back to her apartment just off the Drive. She can’t help but reflect on how in the past three months she went from having three partners to none. She thinks something she was doing may be wrong and she will eventually have to unpack that, but tonight is definitely not that night. She texts White Boy #326 that she’s far too tired for anything else other than just the movie.

White Boy #326 ends up being 15 minutes late, but he’s as charming in person as he is on Tinder. Surprising. During the movie Nookaa asks if she can rest her head on his chest, hear his lurching heartbeat whenever a monster jumpscares them. After the movie, he holds her, breathes her in, his finger sprawling runes across Nookaa’s back. Their kisses are slow, a tangle of his nose and her septum ring; his ragged moans taste like broccoli she notes which makes sense as he works at a vegan restaurant out on Main Street. They have messy sex on Nookaa’s white roommate’s red corduroy couch. They talk throughout, licking each other up in a frenzy of teenage-esque exploration. Before he leaves a little after one in the morning, they kiss deeply in the hallway and he whispers that he hopes to do this again and Nookaa doesn’t believe him. She knows she will eventually unpack that, but tonight is not that night. She puts her hair up and showers. Remembers just before bed to take her spironolactone and estrace.
She crawls back into bed and sighs herself to sleep.

The Rottweiler

Sarah Ratchford — Wed, 14 Aug 2019 15:42:06 +0000

Illustration by Cindy Fan

The Graceville Motel stands thirty feet from the town’s main road. Its lime-green siding has faded. Swirls of dirt frame the white doors. I can see marks where someone attempted to wash them; whoever it was never bothered with the edges of the doors. It’s like they scrubbed down the middle and said, “Close enough.”

I wait inside my Civic. “The Living Years” by Mike and the Mechanics crinkles through the stereo. I adjust my hearing aid’s volume. The song sounds distant. Graceville sits four hundred feet below sea level. Changes in elevation always a ect what little hearing I have. Even in my right ear, where I have no hearing, fluid lurches when I drive up or down a hill, which gives me hope that my hearing in that ear might awaken again one day.

But I’m also losing my hearing in my left ear. Someday it’ll disappear completely. It may be soon.

I shut off the car and step out. The air tastes metallic. I walk toward the far end of the motel. The word office hangs over the only clean white door.

I open it and step inside. The counter, shelves, and tables are swathed with dozens of stuffed squirrels. Some of them wear hats; a few of them wear capes and sequinned vests. At a table in the back, a small man with a broad face plants a blue cowboy hat on a squirrel with its mouth wide open. Knives, glue, thread, and black glass beads are spread across the table.

The man smiles at me. “Ah! Bamba schmecken?”

I adjust my hearing aid again. Every sound, every voice is distorted, two-dimensional, unreal.“I beg your pardon?”

“Yebamba ye check in?”

“Yes.”

He snaps up from the table and ambles over to the counter, carrying the squirrel like an infant. “Yemamey?”

“Pardon?”

“Your name.”

“Sorry. Adam Pottle.”

He draws his lips back and hisses. Through my hearing aid it is grating white noise, and I wince.

“Sairrybout yergranpaw.” He scans a list under the counter. He points to the register tucked between two squirrels wearing sombreros. “Sinemeer.”

“Sign?”

“Yeh.”

I pick up the pen. A frayed white string ties it to the register. “You deaf ehr somning?”

“Yes.”

He speaks slowly, his lips and tongue stretching and smooshing like taffy. “You’re in room thirteen.”
He spits in my eye with the “thirt.” I wipe it away. “Can I be in room ten?”

“Berked.”

“Eleven? Nine?”

“Awl berked. Awlyerfammy. Ah think theer ahlunch.”

He hands me a key with a faded plastic tag, 13 written on it in blue pen. “Ahm eeakeev.”

“Pardon?”

He points to a sign on the wall: yakiv yamesenka–taxidermist.

“Yewann a squirrew?”

“No thanks.”

I return to my car. A passing semi makes a sound like a dinosaur in a fifties movie. I cringe, dialing down my hearing aid’s volume.

I open my car and pull out my bag and my suit. Grandpa died a week ago. I haven’t seen him in years. Auntie Millie told me a softball hit him in the head after a Graceville Slugger crushed a home run. The funeral’s in an hour.

I’m not sure what to say. I’m not close with any of Dad’s family. It’s like I’m attending a stranger’s funeral. I don’t know anyone’s voice. I might turn my hearing aid off and nod as they talk about Grandpa and cuss Dad for not being there. After Auntie Millie texted me that Grandpa died I called Dad and asked him how he felt. Dad said he’d made his peace with it. I wonder if he’d been waiting for Grandpa’s death, if he’d imagined it, fantasized about it. I know little about Dad’s childhood. He never talks about the past. If he’s missing the funeral, something must’ve happened.

Anything’s possible. And I’m unprepared.

I stick the key into the grimy door and push it open. The TV is on, playing a music video for a slow, synth-driven pop song. I drop my bag and suit onto the bed. The TV shows a close-up of a young girl riding a Ferris wheel at night. The carnival’s bright lights blaze through the darkness behind her. The girl, who must be ten or eleven, stares at the camera. Her glittering blue eyes are smeared with blue eye shadow. Her red lips open wide, undulating like a jelly fish: “Aaaaammmmm nawwwwwwwwwt heeeeerrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrre…”

I glance around for the remote and, in the far corner by the lamp, a black dog sits upright, as though just waking up. The dog, a rottweiler with the thick bulk of a weightlifter, is covered in dirt.

“Hey boy.”

The rottweiler jumps onto the bed, his dusty paws stamping on my suit cover.

“No no no! Get down! Down!”

I nudge the rottweiler off the bed and pluck up my suit cover and dust it off . I hang it on the clothes rack by the bathroom; the metal rack drops, crashes to the floor. I pick up the suit and drape it over a chair. The rottweiler stares at me, panting. I kneel down, holding out my hand. He trots over to me and drives his head into my chest, nearly knocking me over. I laugh and scratch his back and behind his ears. Dirt crumbles to the floor as I pet him.

On his red collar I find a gold tag. One side reads SALVADOR; the other has an inscription: if found please call. I flip the tag over and back again. No phone number.

Someone knocks at my door. The rottweiler barks. Even to my ears, it’s sharp, deep, like dragging a heavy chair across a concrete floor.

“It’s okay, boy,” I say, patting his head and adjusting my hearing aid.

I open the door. Auntie Millie, Auntie Billie, and Auntie Iphigenia, all with coiffed blonde hair and black dresses, stretch out their arms and pull me into a hug. I bend awkwardly. It’s like being hugged by Cerberus.

“Oh!” Auntie Millie recoils. “Huzzdog izzat?” Salvador sits at the end of the bed, watching us.

“I don’t know. He was here when I arrived. Maybe he’s the owner’s.”

“Yuhkeev dozenav uhdog,” Auntie Billie says.

“I kannut stahn biddugs.” Auntie Millie cups my cheek.

“Owerroo?”

“Hmm? Oh I’m okay. I think.”

“Yoowa good man fuhbeaneere,” Auntie Iphigenia says.

“Buhd yehr dad. Aht little coward.” “I e.”

“Ih needs tbee suhd.” Auntie Iphigenia’s face scrunches up. She stiffles a sob. “Ahm sairry, Ahdem. Ah ope yeh nevveh follow your dad’s foodstehs.”

“Okay, Auntie.”

“Yeh wanna ride widduhs?” Auntie Millie says.

“Ride?” My voice cracks. I clear my throat. I’m losing my voice too. “No, I can drive. I gotta change.”

“We’w waid fehr yeh. We’w aww drive togetteh.”

“Gimme ten minutes.”

“Suh gootuhseeyeh,” Auntie Iphigenia says between sobs. “What was that?”

“Gootuhseeyeh,” Auntie Billie says.

“You too.” I close the door to undress and step into my suit.

Salvador watches. The girl in the music video keeps riding the Ferris wheel. The room fills with her yodels. I dial down my hearing aid volume.

“Thirsty, boy?”

I cup my hands under the bathroom faucet to bring him water. He drinks from my hands, his tongue tickling my palms.

He licks my face. I chuckle. Although I grew up with dogs, I haven’t had one in years. I miss this.

I pull on my jacket. It squeezes my armpits. I’ve gained weight since I last wore it. I can’t remember when that was. I seldom attend events requiring suits. Grandpa’s funeral is the first funeral I’ve attended for a family member. There’ll be no captioning, no sign language, and no script at the service. Whoever speaks could be saying anything, leaving me to imagine Grandpa’s life, how he impacted people, everything open to interpretation.

I nuzzle the carpet with my toes. The room feels like a tent—the walls thin, porous. I pull on my dress shoes, sitting on the bed. The air bears down on my head. Cars scrape past out outside. The girl’s voice grates on my ear. I try the buttons on the TV, but they click emptily. I check under the bed for the remote. I reach under, grasping a long black leash. I pull it out. It’s dirty too.

Salvador pads up to me, his entire rear end wagging. “I’m sorry, boy. I can’t take you right now.”
Salvador nudges the leash and whines. He paws at me.

His whines are full, gleaming almost, like a squeegeed window. “We need to find who you belong to.” I hook the leash to Salvador’s collar. Salvador jerks me to the door. “Just a short one. I’ll take you to pee.”

I open the door and he launches out into the summer air, hauling me with him. Even though I’m over two hundred pounds, I barely hold him back enough to shut the door.

Two doors down, Aunties Millie, Billie, and Iphigenia lift themselves into Billie’s Ford, tucking their dresses beneath them.

Auntie Millie waves and shouts. Her words sound like distant quacks.

“I’m just taking him out a minute!” I say. “I’m right behind you!”

Salvador leads me into the trees behind the motel. A dialing sound arises in my hearing aid, a signal to change the battery.

“Hold up, boy. This is—hey!”

Salvador traipses down a short hill along a path worn in the grass.

“You need a special spot to piss or what?” He pulls me into a small clearing. I smell warm earth.

Sunlight drops through the trees in white tatters, pattering on a stream that makes a sound like pouring milk.

I stretch my jaw; fluid lurches in both my ears, plugging them. I pinch my nose and blow. My left pops; my vision wobbles for a moment. Salvador sits by my feet, staring at something across the stream. I groan and touch his head to regain my bearings.

Salvador barks. I hear the dialing sound again, followed by a fierce gurgling noise, like a dragon digesting a grenade. I can’t tell if it’s coming from in front of us or elsewhere. I can never pinpoint sounds. It could be Salvador himself for all I know. Salvador growls and crouches. The hairs on his back sharpen into quills. Fifty feet ahead, the bushes shake. I kneel down and put my arm around him. He widens his stance. The trees sway. The gurgling crescendos into something clearer, a chorus of multiple voices retching into the air a horrible noise somewhere between a roar and a laugh. It’s so loud my right eardrum snaps inward.

“What the fuck?”

A tall slimy black object slithers out from behind the trees, an oily hulk gliding over the earth and into
the clearing. Dozens of mouths—sharp-toothed, oval, heaving with what can only be bottomless grief, or joy—scream at me, at the air, at each other.

I gasp and clamp my hands over my ears. Salvador barks at the thing. Like quivering cells, the mouths begin to join each other, growing larger, growing louder, singing, screaming, cackling. I can’t tell if it’s mourning or celebrating.

I jerk Salvador’s leash.

“Come on!”

With a goopy sucking noise, the mouths join to form one enormous mouth, its black teeth grinning at me. I haul on Salvador’s leash. He stands but doesn’t move.

“Boy! Let’s—”

The black mouth squats until it’s almost a puddle, then leaps across the stream and stretches open in mid-air, swallowing both Salvador and me. I cover Salvador and keep my head down. The thick wet darkness roars with what sounds like hundreds of voices. I shut my eyes and hold Salvador close and try to listen, to grip onto one of the voices, but there are too many speaking too quickly: “Huuhhhllllll! Blehbingher! Cerpaqwelzatoid!”

The voices dissolve, it’s night, the clearing is gone. Up ahead, spread across a gravel lot, stand rides, game booths, a Ferris wheel. Music plays: waves of yellow and blue and green and red sway on the air in tune with the music, like carnie Northern Lights.

Salvador starts trotting toward the carnival. I follow, patting my jacket, which is caked in dirt.

We walk through the entrance, past the game booths. There are no people, yet the rides clack and twirl and whip through the air. I adjust my hearing aid. The battery’s gone dead, but that matters little. Every sound here makes a mark on the air, scratches and curves and smears that grow in size as they do in volume.

At the elephant ears vendor up ahead, two squirrels hop onto the counter. Both wear purple capes. Squiggly brown notes zig from their mouths.

“Salvador, what the hell is this?”

Salvador barks at the squirrels. The air around his mouth seems to blink with each bark. The squirrels chitter at each other, the brown notes clashing in the air like fighting birds. They turn and skip off the counter and run away down the gravel aisle. Salvador chases them, yanking me with him, the air folding around his head as he barks.

We pass the Ferris wheel. The wheel’s lights blink on and off with the music. The ride is empty.

The squirrels clamber up a game booth counter framed by orange lights. Salvador stops running and sits. Behind the booth lies a closed silver casket. The squirrels take their place among dozens of other squirrels encircling the casket in what seems to be a ceremonial arrangement. Squiggly lines zip from their tiny mouths, forming a bristling crown in the air.

I step into the booth, leaving Salvador behind. The squirrels part to let me pass. Their brown squiggles fall and fade. They go still, almost solemn.

I open the casket.

Salvador and I walk back to the motel. A squirrel bounds past us on the grassy trail. No brown squiggly lines zag from its mouth.

“Sound can be light.” My voice cracks. “Light can be sound. Anything can be anything. Even death.”

Aunties Millie and Iphigenia lean against my door, waiting for me. Iphigenia shouts at me. Even from the corner of my eye, I see her wide-open mouth. Salvador and I try to step past her. Her head bobs, attempting to match my sight line; Millie pulls her back, fails. I hear something like “your father.” I open the door and Salvador and I step into the room and I shut the door. Iphigenia batters the door. I take out my hearing aid and sit in the chair at the far end of the room, lifting my feet so the vibrations can’t reach me.

Dad will die someday. As the oldest child, I’ll have to give the eulogy. I don’t know what I’ll say or if I’ll still have my voice or if I’ll even attend his funeral.

I lie on the bed, still in my dirty suit. I don’t hear Auntie Iphigenia anymore. Salvador rests against my knees and I fall asleep scratching his ear.

I wake up. It’s still night. Salvador is gone. There’s a divot in the bed where he lay. I run my hand over it. It’s warm and dusty.

Poem in Which Ahad Appears

Sarah Ratchford — Wed, 14 Aug 2019 15:18:59 +0000

The house behind mine caught fire I saw petal scrap

ashes floating down first and thought it was a wild fire

thickening the sky like the last summer I was on a bench

with a boy I didn’t want to date couldn’t say no

because he had a body I had the time it takes to get
clean from one habit and forget we had a four-dollar bag of ice

between us a walk to the lake where we sunk in the damp

grass and coughed heartily as if the veiled yolk of a sun
was our season I heard there was an old lady who lived
in the house that caught fire I heard this after
I told my landlord about the fire I said the alley kept us safe

kept us separate from the fire that did not have tongues
that was not licking   but was a whole body rolling
o the roof   sparing the quiet house its shell
of a shiny yawn fossil in a place already
steaming with whisper dripping like that memory I have
of my dad telling me about his good friend whose name
was Ahad   the one who set himself on flames the one
who walked o a pier into the water   I can’t remember

bechara Ahad poor Ahad whether he died by water
or re what does it matter? I had to spit to speak
when I called the re ghters the throat suddenly like clay

its wetness closing drawn out by smoke.

Shazia Hafiz Ramji is the author of Port of Being, a finalist for the 2019 Dorothy Livesay Poetry Prize and Gerald Lampert Memorial Award. Her writing has recently appeared in Poetry Northwest, Music & Literature, and Canadian Literature. She is at work on a novel.

Hissing of Summer Lawns

Sarah Ratchford — Wed, 14 Aug 2019 15:08:53 +0000

Wheat fields in the wind

pulsing with air welling

up inside a glittering of

green on summerland grassland,

the hissingof August lawns as air
snakes out of blades
like auto lot inflatables,

one-legged air-dancers
for a yawning audience,

gazilions vying for envy,

sashay stirring up sway
in tinsel tassel anemones,
an aquatic shimmering
of chartreuse piano keys

twinkling across pastures,

meadow combs, pleasured
by submitting to a barber
out of love with reflection,

the melancholy of offering
six hours for consideration,

how outside sees you, a face

and glass in osmosis, the day

like dolphins during coitus,

up for anything in an ocean,
a gleaming saline ray ocean,

a mercury ripple plain ocean,

that was turned against them.

James Lindsay is the author of Our Inland Sea and Ekphrasis! Ekphrasis!. His next collection will be Double Self-Portrait in 2020.

Breaking Up With Bjork

Sarah Ratchford — Mon, 29 Jul 2019 20:00:10 +0000

Illustration: Roz Maclean

Dear Bjork,

The year leading up to my 30th birthday almost killed me, quite literally. The stress from my living situation at the time was pushing me to the edge of my sanity. I was living in a place I didn’t want to be in because I had gotten priced out of the place I’d shared with my ex. My mental health was in flames. The increased tension on my body brought heightened levels of pain due to fibromyalgia and I couldn’t sleep.

Do you remember what we did on our birthday that year? You would have been turning 49 and it was my 30th. The last year of your 40s and the first of my 30s.

This era of my existence was heavily soundtracked by Robyn, Gotye, Joanna Newsom and your own Biophilia, Vespertine, Medulla, and Vulnicura. You were a big part of things then, my then-still-favourite

In an effort to provide a self-witness to my arrival at 30, despite all the forces working towards the contrary, I made a plan to get new ink on my birthday. I had been thinking about getting knuckle tatts for a while. Not sure what words to land on, I eventually decided on lyrics from “Who Is It?,” “Carry my joy on the left. Carry my pain on the right.” I got the letters “p a i n” across my right lower knuckles and “j o y” across the left in fuchsia cursive.

A year and a half later, after learning of your history of artistically interpreted racism and renouncing myself of your presence in the name of respecting my Black life, I sat with the tattoo artist again. I had spent the last 12 months with the lyrics of a white woman comfortable throwing around the n-word and appropriating marginalized cultures emblazoned on my skin. In that time I had many moments to consider what it meant to carry an emblem of someone who did not value my personhood. Though there were ways I could rationalize the place of the tattoos themselves as just meaningful words, I needed the ceremony and reshaping of embodied alteration. Pain on my right. That felt true regardless of its association with you, but, joy?

Joyful isn’t a characteristic I would ever use to describe myself. It was certainly not a reining element of my life as it perched on the outside edge of my twenties. Alongside the anguish, however, I somehow managed to cultivate abundant creative growth and spent more time with my grandmother than I had since childhood. Though joy wasn’t my most frequent lived experience, it was one I wanted to nurture and call into my life as echoed by your lyrics.

Pain I can trust. Pain teaches me. Pain will always be a part of my existence as a sick body and mad mind. I kept “pain” on my right, in beautiful femme script, a quiet a affrmation to lean into beauty as much as I lean on my cane for support. Pain, like poetry, is sewn into my marrow. It is how I think and the backdrop for how I view, understand, and process the world. Poetry is my first language, the conduit and keeper of the joy, pain, destruction, and delight I live within.

A pink shadow of “joy” remains under a word more attuned to my lasting truths. Now, I hold “pain” in my right and “poet” in my left.

I don’t need your words to give life to my experiences anymore, I’ve found my own.

Yours truly,
a scorpio pain poet melannie monoceros

Glenn Copeland’s Musical Rebirth

Sarah Ratchford — Mon, 29 Jul 2019 19:54:10 +0000

PHOTO BY JURI HIENSCH

From his time studying classical music in the 1960s to decades spent writing songs and performing on CBC’s Mr. Dressup, Glenn Copeland has long been interested in looking inwards to “the core of one’s own being.” Seventy-five and a practicing Buddhist, he has never been too concerned with signifiers of success or following musical trends. For decades, Copeland humbly kept on, making music for few others’ ears with an enduring sense of humanity. Both his songs and his story invite pause and contemplation.

That rare sense of slowness has led Copeland—who performs under the name Beverly Glenn-Copeland—to a resonant, if still surprising, rebirth in recent years. In late 2015, a record collector took notice of Keyboard Fantasies, an album Copeland recorded in the woods in Ontario in the 1980s, and bought out the remaining supply of tapes for resale. Soon, enough interest had gathered to warrant a reissue of the record; not long after that, Copeland was performing live in front of capacity audiences across Canada and Europe for the first time in decades.

A new generation of listeners is finding resonance in music that sounds at once futuristic and fundamentally natural. The songs on Keyboard Fantasies are constructed with looping melodies that invoke both folk songbooks and hymnals. On a few songs, he sings meditative reprises in his round, patient voice, allowing every note to ring over a base of synthesizers. It was a record made with then-cutting-edge technology about slowing down and understanding your relationship with the surrounding world; it moves at a pace that feels like a salve in a time of overstimulation.

Listening to the record now, Copeland understands how it might feel almost spiritual in the contemporary moment. His music has the effect of damming your attention, gathering its current so that you might take notice of the beauty and connection around you. On the song “Ever New,” he sings
the words “we are ever new” like a mantra. Copeland, a trans man who believes in the recurrence of matter and energy, embodies the truth of this statement. He tells me that “there’s nothing in the universe that’s not natural”—a thought that reflects both his work and his own identity. It’s natural, he says, to shift, to change.

Copeland’s career, too, celebrates incessant newness: from folk music to Mr. Dressup, his course has rarely stayed the same. But for Copeland, this path feels inevitable. He now jokes about lacking other talents and being ego-bound to music-making, but confesses that both sentiments felt true in the past. Those feelings once felt like a burden, but time and perspective have opened Copeland’s eyes to the purpose of his life as a musician.

Copeland’s story continues: this summer he’s touring music festivals across Canada, with stops including Yellowknife, Dawson City and Calgary, with his new backing band, Indigo Rising. He’s also at work on a reissue of his 2004 album, Primal Prayer, and will star in a forthcoming documentary about his life and work. All the while, he’s trying to maintain some semblance of a quiet life at home in in Sackville, New Brunswick.

On the phone from Sackville, Copeland repeatedly expresses gratitude for the attention of a new generation, one which is “totally tuned into the fact that we are killing the earth,” which knows issues like climate change and wealth inequality are “not natural.” He believes the new listeners of Keyboard Fantasies are both receptive to the humanity the record expresses and keenly aware of how we currently stand to lose it. “We don’t get how vulnerable all of us are and how we need each other,” he says. “There’s just an almost indefinable difference between you and me.”

Is it fair to want my partner to learn my first language?

Sarah Ratchford — Mon, 29 Jul 2019 19:31:20 +0000

It’s one o’clock in the morning and I’m tired. Matthew and the three or four remaining guests are in the living room and I smile as I hear their laughter. I’m sneaky. I grab the speakers’ remote-control and lower the volume gradually, every minute or so, until Dolly Parton is hushed in her desperate pleas to Jolene. Someone demands more tequila and I open a cupboard and stash the bottle there, regretfully informing the group that we have run out. The neighbours might put up with a birthday party, but I know their patience is thin. Matthew walks into the kitchen and holds me close, whispers a quick thank you to me for planning this party for him. “Of course, babe, I adore you,” I say, while doing the dishes, trying not to smash a wine glass, “your happiness is the world to me.” He pauses, and I smile. He must be emotional. “Babe, you’re drunk,” he says, and I realize that I have been casting stones in my head while I’m equally wasted. “You’re speaking to me in Arabic.”

It’s 3:30 a.m. and the winter is howling outside like a pack of wolves. My nightmare stays with me after I wake up and I feel triggered to an intensely violent memory of mine. I know how to handle this, I think to myself, and I start attempting to fill my head with positive thoughts. When I’m triggered, I can’t feel my body anymore—it’s a foreign land to me.

The only part of my body I feel is the tense muscles in the base of my neck. I want to rub them, but my hands are still back in the nightmare. I hear Matthew ask if I’m okay and I whimper. He wakes up and starts massaging the back of my neck; this feels nice. He is saying things to me, calming things, his voice is sweet; it echoes in my soul.

For the life of me, though, I can’t seem to understand a word he says in English—my brain is too foggy to navigate his words. It’s too shackled to translate his words into my primary language in my head.

It’s 8:30 p.m. and they’re not born yet. My child is in bed trying to trick me into staying up for one more minute and I insist that it’s time for them to fall asleep. I see myself older, my salt and pepper hair perfectly curly as I always envision it being in my older days.

I know that this child of mine is not going to be my biological child. I have promised my future child that they will not inherit my collective traumas. I have promised them that I will be a better father than my own dad and a better mother than my own mother. I promise their unborn soul that they will be loved. I also promise that they will inherit my heritage. They will carry my story and the stories of my ancestors. They will be Assyrian, like me—and will speak Arabic, like me. I promised them to learn about whatever racial identity they came from and teach them about it too. They will be a beautiful mix for our modern family.

In my head, I pull the fairy tale book of Kalila and Dimna from a shelf and start reading to that child of mine, in my Arabic velvety words, stories of jackals and elephants and kings of forests. I even do voices. That unborn child of mine will love me doing voices.

I want Matthew to learn Arabic and he knows it. He knows that it’s important to me because it’s my language of love, it’s the language I want to hear when I need comforting, and he has come to see how important it is to me that our future children feel this connection to my roots in their upbringing.

Learning Arabic is not an easy task, I admit. Statistically, Arabic is the second hardest living language to learn after Japanese. Also, the fact that our alphabet is Semitic, while English, French, and German—languages he speaks to various degrees—are all Latin languages. Finally, English is a small language, meaning that the word pool of English is limited to around six million words, while Arabic’s word pool is an ever-expanding 560 million words.

“How do you say walk in Arabic?” Matthew asks me.

“Well, it depends! Where are you walking from? Where are you walking to? Which direction are you taking? Are you going west or east? How are you feeling as you walk? Are you walking softly with joy in your step, or walking fast with anger in your head?”

“Okay, okay, I get it: Arabic is hard.”

Sometimes I wonder if it’s fair to ask him to learn Arabic. I speak English fluently and even when I mispronounce an English word, there is enough love in our relationship to see that as a joyful moment of laughter. I spoke English fluently before I met Matthew, I didn’t learn the language for him—although
I have met other couples where one partner had to learn English to communicate well with their spouse.
I also ask myself if it’s fair to compare languages to begin with. Languages carry with them not only a way of communicating but, they also carry culture, song, dance, metaphors, and tradition. Even the voice I use when I speak English is different; English is a nasal language that’s high pitched, while Arabic is a language born in the throat with rolling r’s and spitting kha’s.

Even in their ways of describing the same things, the two languages are vastly different. I find it beautiful that in Arabic when you feel joy you say that your heart is turning to ice, while in English you say that joy warms your heart. It’s not fair to compare one expression to the other: what’s fair is to see both expressions for what they carry in subtext—an intimate tie that tells you about the environment these expressions were born in and the people they represent.

I don’t believe that the issue here is communication: Matthew and I communicate wonderfully. I believe languages represent a way of connection and bonding. There will always be a part of who I am and where I come from that will not be revealed to Matthew unless he learns Arabic. A heritage that will
not pass down to our children unless we both connect to it in our own essence.

The global dominance of English as the prominent language of communication is rooted in colonial practices and cultural occupation. Our personal relationship—essentially, our love—is impacted by the supremacy of English whether we like it or not. Unless we pay close attention to it, we will always communicate well, but will we be able to connect? I would love for our relationship to be a practice in respecting each other’s heritage and the depth of our connection to a land and a tongue.

A final story: I tiptoe into the bedroom. Matthew is already asleep and I slip out of my clothes and into bed next to him. He mumbles something and I smile. I rest my hand on his side and he turns around, smiles to me, and whispers “hello, murderous humanoid.”

I smile and tell him to go back to sleep. The next morning, we laugh about this. I post about it on Facebook and our friends laugh. In a year, I will be sitting around a dinner table with his mother and brother, sleep-talking will come up and I will tell this story. One day in our late 50s, he will be joking with me and he will call me a murderous humanoid in an ominous voice.

I wonder how many times I have woken up in the middle of the night and whispered something so meaningful, so funny, or so dark to him in Arabic. I wonder how many times he smiled but did not understand.