they still whisper her name like it’s dangerous.
but this isn’t a whisper.
it’s a scream, wheatpasted to brick.
marie-josèphe angélique—enslaved, accused, executed.
not for a crime,
but for refusing to live quietly in a world built to crush her.
je me souviens, they say.
but they don’t mean her.
they mean the colony.
they mean the order she tried to set fire to.
this paper will peel, fade, dissolve into dust.
but she was never paper.
she was kindling.
and we’re still burning.
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.
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.
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.
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.
theory. metaphor. refusal.
how we stayed alive.
