Diaspora Dialogues

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excerpt

the inviolable heart

by

It is my fifth birthday and I become aware. A canary is trapped inside my chest cavity. Its claws cannot grip the slippery bones of my rib cage. It flies in circles searching for a safe place to rest. It finally perches on the conical pouch that forms the left ventricle of my heart. Its feathers are fluffed, eyes half-shut, wings droopy with exhaustion. The unfamiliar stillness scares me more than the constant fluttering. Breathing becomes difficult. My lungs spasm and squeeze the bird between sinew and flesh. Its beak lacerates muscle tissue. A tiny stream of blood spreads over its yellow crown of feathers. My wounds heal but the bird never moves again.

A month later my family leaves the Philippines in a silver jet plane to immigrate to the province of Ontario in Canada. I imagine that the x-ray machines at the airport will reveal my secret but the tall white man at the border just smiles and allows us into this strange new country.

I am now an adult and I do not know if the bird is sleeping, dead or paralyzed with fear. When I die, please remove it from my chest.

Published in TOK: Writing the New Toronto, Book 6. Purchase the book to read the full piece.

Toronto locations referenced in this piece

“Such elegant street names to camouflage the poverty and racial conflict that came with living in the Malvern Jungle . . . ” —Malvern Jungle

Switch

by

Snazzy pauses at the corner of a brick building at the edge of Moss Park. The ground reeks of pee and puke. Looking upward, she sees the tip of the steeple on the old stone church. The doctor’s office, where her mother had taken her as a child, is located directly across the street from it. Wiggling her nearly frozen toes, she wills her feet to keep walking.

Christmas wreaths, lit by small red candles with yellow plastic flames, hang from lampposts. Their light mutes the stars. Between contractions, Snazzy counts the ornaments, and the city blocks, to her destination. Each time a new pain, sharper than the last, threatens to buckle her knees, she stops, massages her lower back and breathes deeply.

When she steps off the curb and out between parked cars, a driver leans on the horn and swerves to avoid hitting her. She crosses the street, shuffles up the walkway and peers through the glass in the front door of the doctor’s office. Except for a sliver of light in the hall and blinking, multi-coloured Christmas bulbs in the front window, the office is dark. She tries to open the door anyway, but it is locked.

Published in TOK: Writing the New Toronto, Book 6. Purchase the book to read the full piece.

Toronto locations referenced in this piece

“Snazzy pauses at the corner of a brick building at the edge of Moss Park. The ground reeks of pee and puke . . . ” —Moss Park

Death at Number Sixty-Nine

by

On a Saturday morning Mulla Jamaluddin was explaining a dakhila, an example, to his young pupils in a classroom in the grand new Salam-e-din Mosque in Toronto’s Rosecliffe Park neighbourhood.

“One day in Baghdad, a notorious robber was finally captured after a great deal of effort by the sultan’s police,” Mulla went on in his dry, modulated voice, gesticulating with his arms, and the children at their little desks all leaned forward, eyes sparkling with curiosity, and surely mischief in the pressed smiles of some. “He was called Yusuf the Robber and he was hanged at the public square, where many people from the city came to watch and cheer as the scoundrel died. Whereupon, the great mystic and man of God, Abu Junaid, pushed his way through the crowd and kissed Yusuf the Robber’s feet . . . ”

At this point my master knew he had picked the wrong sort of example to narrate, one not easily comprehensible to the tender minds of his audience—for he paused and looked up briefly above them at the framed picture of the Kaaba as if for guidance.

Published in TOK: Writing the New Toronto, Book 5. Purchase the book to read the full piece.

underwater city

by 

It’s spring. The sparrow dies instantly. Quick 
bang, the streetcar suspended. Small black 
body. You can still see white, speckled, small 
grains of rice across the back, twittering youth. 
You insist on a proper burial. Together we glide 
through the city, bird cupped in our palms. The 
concrete, post-rain, bleak and lunar. We speak 
elliptically, sleep-talk about death, wings 
immobilized in flight. The air thickens, we 
breathe out. Our hulls contain us, solemn as 
prayer, our delicate shells of bone . . .
Published in TOK: Writing the New Toronto, Book 5. Purchase the book to read the full piece.

Dear Monsters, Be Patient

by

The news of your birth disturbed and excited the city. For weeks afterward, the grainy surveillance featured on local and national news broadcasts. A still from the footage appeared on the front page of the Globe and Mail and on posters displayed in post offices, subway stations and grocery stores. The chief of police stood for the cameras before a blue velvet curtain and asked the public to come forward with any information regarding the identity of the woman in the video. “Or the baby she bore and left in Union Station,” he mistakenly reported.

According to reports, the last person to see your mother was a VIA Rail ticket agent who, arriving early to his morning shift, came upon a woman standing at the foot of a stairwell as she dropped you, face down, onto the cement floor. At first the agent mistook you for a toy doll because you were small and naked and soundless. When blood began streaming out of your nose, the guard called out for help in the empty corridor and the woman ran up the staircase. When asked to give a description of the woman, the ticket agent said, “It was dark so I couldn’t make her out all that well,” and then added, “she moved like she was either young or scared.”

Published in TOK: Writing the New Toronto, Book 5. Purchase the book to read the full piece.

Toronto locations referenced in this piece

“The chief of police stood for the cameras before a blue velvet curtain and asked the public to come forward with any information regarding the identity of the woman in the video. “Or the baby she bore and left in Union Station,” he mistakenly reported . . . ” —Union Station

Going Home

by

“We’re going back to Barbados,” my mother announces. She says this as she stands in her kitchen, wearing beige capris, black t-shirt and slippers. She is suburbia incarnate. She says it surrounded by dishes my dad has dirtied but refused to wash. She says this as the radio, which has been tuned to one station for the past 21 years, blasts the CBC news at six. She says, “We’re going back to Barbados,” with a big smile on her face, as her hand rhythmically lathers her homemade concoction of diluted dish soap and freshly squeezed lemon, specially made to “cut the grease” on the dirty dishes.

I’m sitting at the kitchen table, eating fried bakes with cheese, pulling the gooey dough apart, popping it in my mouth. I’m sitting there eating and my mother is so distracted by her thoughts of Barbados, she makes no comment about the food in my mouth. She doesn’t stare at me with her large round eyes, she doesn’t peer at me slowly, letting her eyes roll over me up and down. She doesn’t poke or prod me, shaking her head and saying what I already know—“You really need to lose weight.” She doesn’t pinch my waist or lean toward me to whisper, “See, you’re jiggling, you really REALLY need to lose some weight.”

Published in TOK: Writing the New Toronto, Book 5. Purchase the book to read the full piece.

Toronto locations referenced in this piece

“I would wait for her to appear and smile. More often than not, she wasn’t there. “Those people are crooks,” she would say referring to the airport parking authority . . . ” —Pearson International Airport

“They always wanted the best for us. It’s what led my mother to convince my dad it was a good idea to buy a house in Jane and Finch . . . ” —Jane & Finch

“We would wait and wait for an opening, because there were no traffic lights in front of 2901 Jane Street. Then we would run across the street as fast as we could, to wait for the bus that would take us to the Wilson subway station . . . ” —Wilson Subway Station

“From there, it was on to Union Station. At Union the doors to the double-decker train would open and our adventure would begin . . . ” —Union Station

“And so my parents picked up and moved to Vaughan, close enough to Jane and Finch to still be a part of it, but far enough away to never have to be . . . ” —Vaughan

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