held in the street
the murals watched. we didn’t march fast. our orange shirts carried what couldn’t be said.
refusals
mother toshiro sankofa
palestine in the frame. ballroom at the centre. blackness, unshaken.
#tiohtiàke #refusals #blackness #queerness #fragments #holdings
we brought softness with us
pink sky, mesh shirt, keffiyeh on the straps. joy is not the absence of struggle. it’s what we carry through it.
we don't march for approval
bodies say what systems won't
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
saying it anyway
the sun was generous. the grass didn’t mind. but the quiet felt too practiced.
i spoke because not speaking would have been a kind of surrender. not to correct. not to clarify. but to stay present, even when presence felt like exposure.
merchant city
this is where the wealth came in. sugar. cotton. tobacco. extraction and enclosure made into ornament.
the names are still here— merchant, plantation, st. vincent— not by accident. this city remembers through what it refuses to rename.
i walk this route not to map it, but to feel where the archive ends.
this dérive isn’t about finding answers. it’s about tracking the infrastructure of forgetting. what the buildings obscure. what the street names naturalize. what passes for neutral.
these façades aren’t just stone. they’re policy. they’re inheritance. they’re proof that the empire never left— just rebranded.
the empire loops
found in glasgow. a plaque for john a. macdonald. not torn down, not defaced— just waiting. quiet. official.
the story is familiar. lawyer. prime minister. nation-builder. but here, the stones don’t pretend neutrality. they know what they financed.
this isn’t a canadian monument. it’s an imperial one. because macdonald didn’t just build a country— he extended a project. settler logic made portable.
the plaques change languages, but the story stays the same.
the empire loops. it doesn’t end. it reappears in bronze and sandstone, across oceans, still naming itself as legacy instead of violence.
not where it belongs
spotted in a museum across the ocean. a totem pole far from the coast from which it came.
the plaque talked about artistry. not land. not theft. not how many hands it passed through before arriving here, under spotlights.
i didn’t read the full description. didn’t want to. the object already said more than the label ever could.
some things don’t lose power just because they’ve been displaced.
a map to the door of no return
left lisbon. mozambique. maranhão.
it’s written cleanly, like logistics. like movement is neutral.
but this isn’t a voyage. it’s a structure.
i stood in dc, beneath that sentence carved into the wall, and felt how small archives can make the wound.
western cape archives, south africa. reference number. no names.
the record survives. the people were meant not to.
#washingtondc #traces #blackness #fragments #refusals #drift