stood there teaching, not to perform, but to remember. to speak of what refuses extraction. to name what pulses under erasure. black keffiyeh against the chest, kiki futures on the screen. the room knew. not everything had to be said. some things shimmered between us.
#kjipuktuk #drift #blackness #queerness #refusals #fragments #holdings
the conference ended. or maybe it didn’t. people lingered like the performance was still going. hallway laughter. cups half-full. a woman nodding too hard at nothing.
i had asked my question. black faces in every slide, but no data that spoke to us. just placement. just image.
the speaker deflected. clean. soft. the room let it happen.
i stepped outside. cold air, wet pavement, nothing sticking.
then he said it. ben énervé, hein? like anger was the problem. like clarity was a disruption. like i wasn’t still there.
i found him. calm. exact. you don’t get to narrate my presence.
he laughed. i didn’t.
i walked home with the cold in my hands. still here. still mine.
theory. metaphor. refusal.
how we stayed alive.
the murals watched. we didn’t march fast. our orange shirts carried what couldn’t be said.
palestine in the frame. ballroom at the centre. blackness, unshaken.
#tiohtiàke #refusals #blackness #queerness #fragments #holdings
pink sky, mesh shirt, keffiyeh on the straps. joy is not the absence of struggle. it’s what we carry through it.
we lay down because they can’t.
this was a die-in. healthcare workers, gathered in the middle of the city, bodies on the ground for gaza. we were there not just as clinicians, not just as queers, not just as people trained to care— but as witnesses to a system that pretends to be neutral while choosing a side. we already knew that silence wasn’t an accident. we’ve seen it before—in the wards, in the media, in the funding reports. but still, there’s something about laying your body down on cold ground that makes the grief feel sharper. and makes the refusal feel real.
my keffiyeh wasn’t a symbol. it was a practice. a reminder. a commitment to name genocide where others equivocate. to be present when presence costs something.
the pink triangle on my chest traced a line back to act up, to queer resistance in the face of state abandonment. but this wasn’t about metaphor. this was about gaza. about children buried under rubble. about medics killed in white coats. about naming what we know, and what our institutions refuse to say.
i didn’t speak. i didn’t need to. sometimes protest is not what you say but what you don’t move to stop.
#tiohtiàke #refusals #holdings #blackness #queerness #traces #surfaces
