They Said This Would Be Fun

by Eternity Martis

  My grandmother died at the end of March 2000. She did not get to see the melting snow make way for the bloom of purple tulips, her favourite. I was almost nine. Our house, my safe place, wasn’t the same.

  My thirty-one-year-old mother, who worked the early morning shift, had no time to make me elaborate lunches, just microwaved frozen meals that hardened by noon. She found other mothers who could watch me before school started, and take me to class. After school, she took me to the mall to eat—sometimes Taco Bell, other times our favourite Indian restaurant—denying the exhaustion etched on her face.

  My mother stepped up as the matriarch of the house, taking on domestic chores for the first time and trying to make me and my grandfather Indian dishes with Shan spice mixes she got from the grocery store up the street, where my grandma had shopped. As the fumes of her ketchup-infused chana masala permeated the house, we ate in silence, and she watched, knowing that it wasn’t my grandmother’s cooking and none of us would get that ever again.

  In the evenings, my grandfather helped me with my homework and took me to the movies. I looked forward to our Sundays together, when we swam at the community pool then went to Chapters, the bookstore. My grandfather would sit patiently at Starbucks for hours while I ran my fingers along the rows of book spines, desperately wanting to have my own book wedged among the others on the shelves.

  I had always loved reading. As a child, my room overflowed with books that my grandmother read to me every night. I asked for more and more; I shoved them in my closet, rereading them and reorganizing them for fun. I refused to throw a single one out, even as they went on to fill two bookshelves in the basement and all the extra storage space in my room. My family encouraged my love of reading; an only child, books took me to an imaginary world where I could feel less alone.

  It was hard adjusting to my new life without my grandmother, and books helped me escape our new reality. But once I finished my latest read, I felt overwhelmed by loneliness again, ripped from my temporary, colourful cocoon. So I started to think about ways that I could keep the stories going, ploys to stay in my protective bubble: I started writing.

  While my Grade 4 teacher taught us math, I wrote a children’s picture book about grief. While my Grade 7 teacher taught us factually incorrect, homophobic sex-ed from our Fully Alive textbook, I was writing scandalous Good Charlotte and Mest fan fiction that resembled a high school TV drama. I continued to pen fan fic until I turned fifteen, when I traded being an emo loner for friends and a social life. By Grade 11, I started writing op-eds for the school newspaper, which soon earned me my own column. I wrote throughout study period and lunch, in my evenings after homework, and at night before bed. That year, I won a short story contest for young writers.

  My grandfather took notice of my endless notebooks and large stash of pens. Each morning, just as he’d done as a child in Karachi, he woke up early to read the newspaper. Then he’d leave me clippings from the Books section—profiles and reviews of South Asian authors—on the living room table so I could read them on the way to school. “This fellow is Pakistani,” he’d say, beaming with pride as he traced his finger over the page. His finger smudged the ink like when he used to help me with my homework. See, you can do it too.

  I’d read the article over and over, willing myself to feel inspired. But I couldn’t identify with their success. Instead, I saved the clippings and stored them in a box, hoping one day to look back and feel what I wasn’t able to then.

  My grandfather continued to save me newspaper clippings, even after I graduated high school and moved to London, even after I began writing more about what it meant to be a Black woman on campus. On the weekends I came home to visit, he’d leave them on the table—more successful South Asian authors, more wins for our people. “This woman won an award for her book,” he’d say, pointing at her high-resolution headshot. See, you can do it too.

  When I started my Master of Journalism at Ryerson University in Toronto, the clippings included stories by South Asian journalists in addition to authors. By this time I was writing my own stories about anti-Black racism and reporting on issues affecting Black communities. My grandfather printed them out and kept them for his own collection, to share with people he knew. Still, he wanted to know if I planned on writing stories like the ones that brown journalists covered. “How come you don’t write about South Asian culture? It’s your culture too.”

  It was never accusatory, and yet I felt put on the spot. Until that moment, I hadn’t given it much thought, and with good reason. It had been the culture I was raised in, but the way I navigated the world—the issues that people who looked like me were dealing with—was very different than what I was born into. I couldn’t admit that although I was born and raised in that culture—and belonged to it—I would never identify with it the way the rest of my family were able to.

  That year, on a clifftop restaurant while vacationing in Sorrento, Italy, I had my first conversation about my identity with my grandfather. Over a Margherita pizza, I told him I was grateful for never having been treated differently, but the avoidance of discussing my identity had created a disconnect in the way that they understood my experiences. I described the years of struggling in high school, then at Western, and then being one of the few journalists of colour in the industry.

  I was unsure if I had ruined our relationship and our vacation. “Is it because you’re half Black?” he asked. It was the first time he ever said it—Black—the first acknowledgement in twenty-three years. He recalled moments of racism throughout my childhood, when he didn’t think I was old enough to understand what was happening. We talked about his own trouble fitting in at school as a young, poor boy; his struggles in coming to Canada from Pakistan with nothing but hope; the sacrifices he and my grandmother had made in order to raise his family and keep a roof over our heads. The pain of those hateful comments as they tried to build a life here. The purpose of the clippings was to remind me of where I came from. And that, like him, like those authors, I could do whatever I aspired to.

  This moment forged a path for my family to become my fiercest advocates. When I come home on the weekends now, newspaper clippings about books by Black authors greet me on the table. I see myself in these writers; their successes fuel my own. Over lunch, my grandfather and I catch up to talk about what I’m writing, and discuss the latest news stories to do with discrimination. My mother and I have long, engaging conversations about race and she listens instead of dismissing me. There are no longer silences or excuses. Instead there are furrowed brows and anger—for me, that I live in a world that they now see will not shield me from a problem they thought was long over.

  It took some time, but my eagerness to invite them into my world and their willingness to listen has put us in a place where I feel supported talking to them about what I experience. And though there’s still a part of my mother that doesn’t get my decision to identify as Black, she is starting to understand that perhaps people don’t see me the way she does—that I don’t see me the way she does.

  My family is learning that the best way to support me is not to deny our stark differences but to embrace them. It’s about believing that I can experience anti-Black racism and still be their Pakistani child. It’s about actively learning how race informs who we are and how we see the world, including in our own families. It’s about breaking down the parental power dynamic and being willing to learn from their child. This is allyship. This is love.

  It is not a betrayal to see and experience the world differently from the rest of your family, and it is not the responsibility of any multiracial child to have to explain how they identify. Multiracial bodies are heavily politicized sites of learning and possibility. We are uncomfortable conversations, and messy identity politics. Our blood is a mix of contradictions: love and hate, oppressed and oppressor, and pain and healing.

  * * *

  ///

  We were about
to start the hora, and David had just told me that a guy had made a comment to him about the nigger at the party.

  I was the only Black person at Krista’s wedding. As we got ready to dance, the wannabe white supremacist who had just called me a nigger stood beside me. His hand reached out for mine, clammy palm outstretched, the last two people to connect the circle. I looked at him: hairy, sweat all over his face and in the armpits of his dress shirt, hair matted to his wrinkled forehead, his tinted bottlecap glasses slightly foggy. And because I didn’t want to make a scene among the good white folk, I put my hand in his.

  Krista had warned me that he would be at the wedding. Everyone knew about his extracurricular activities on white supremacist and neo-Nazi forums, and how he frequently spoke about his disgust for Black people, Jews, and women—despite the fact that he was Arab. The irony was not lost on me.

  Krista and I had met in second year, and now, as we were going into fourth year, we had become good friends. This made my decision over whether to attend her wedding even more difficult. For months I wondered whether I should retract my RSVP. Not for my safety—I had other friends who would be attending—but rather in protest. But I didn’t want to make Krista and her husband choose; I worried that if I asked, they’d pick him.

  I put on my best poker face during the ceremony and the reception. I drank scotch and chatted with my friends, occasionally watching him from the corner of my eye. We avoided each other all night.

  After dinner, a group of us were sitting outside when David, my friend’s boyfriend, told me about the comment. He had told the white supremacist that he wasn’t okay with him talking about me like that. The guy was not a very good white supremacist—he tried to backpedal his comments.

  As David told the story, I instinctively felt my wrist flex. Flat palm. Maximum damage.

  The rest of the group thanked David. It was such a nice, cool thing to stand up for me, they told him. For years afterwards, at get-togethers with Krista, her husband, and their friends, I had to hear about how a white man had come to my rescue. Her husband eventually ended his friendship with the white supremacist, but the story lived on. I don’t think anyone ever asked me how I felt about it, or questioned why a man like that was there in the first place. Nobody thought about the impact of having to relive this moment at every get-together, where it was retold for entertainment. I was the voiceless victim saved by a white man—reassurance to themselves that not all white people were bad, that they could be allies.

  But I was not defenceless, and nor had I ever been. I wasn’t hurt about being called a nigger—especially by some guy who was too much of a coward to say it to my face. I had options: I could have gone back into the reception hall and confronted him. I could’ve ignored it because he wasn’t worth a conversation. I could’ve taken my flattened palm and driven it sharply up his nose—I knew how.

  That night, after the wedding, I thought about Angela. She and my mother had had a falling out when I was still a kid, and at that age it didn’t occur to me to ask for her number to keep in touch. For years, I’ve wanted to call her and thank her for doing what my own family wasn’t able to.

  Angela was the only one to tell me the truth: I was a Black girl. This world didn’t give two shits what family I grew up in, how Black I was, how mixed I was. She was preparing me for the reality that having this skin meant I had to be informed and always ready to fight for myself. I didn’t need sugar-coating or denial. I needed someone to see me the way my family couldn’t.

  As a child, I’d spent so much time with Angela, sitting quietly on the milk crates in her garage, listening to her and my mom tell their profanity-laced stories while I drank chocolate milk. She knew I could never actually inflict the kind of assault she’d taught me, but that wasn’t the point. The palm strike wasn’t to show me how to break someone’s nose; it was to get me ready for the inevitable day that I was angry and fed up, and caught off guard by that word. Nigger. In a world that would often leave me feeling out of control, it gave me permission to harness that fury and anger. To have the option for revenge and decide not to use it—that was more potent than their words. That was power. And if I were ever in danger—well, at least I knew how to defend myself.

  To live our lives unashamedly and openly, we always risk pain—at our own hands, at the hands of our families, at the hands of a stranger. Angela knew that, and she knew I’d learn that too. She taught me that I had permission to feel that pain and to react to it if I needed to; but most of all, that it would be an inevitable part of my life. Only I could decide if it would consume me.

  I hope one day we meet again.

  The Necessary Survival Guide for Token Students

  The Token Partier

  WHAT TO EXPECT: Paranoid that people are pointing, laughing, and talking about you? They are. Drunk people will approach you just to say that you’re the first Black person they’ve ever spoken to (you might also be the best-dressed, best-smelling, best-looking—the list goes on). You’ll be approached by some idiot who will eye you like a Swiss Chalet quarter-chicken dinner and say, like a boy who has just discovered the joys of masturbation, that he’s never danced with a Black girl before. Will you be his first? If you’re a guy, you may get searched or denied entry or service at the bar because of your “urban wear.” This is a lie—there are a hundred Post Malones and Machine Gun Kellys partying it up inside right now and we all know it.

  HOW TO DEAL WITH IT: The good news is that Black people have the upper hand in these spaces. When you combine us with the dark ambiance and hip-hop music, people think we’re extra scary. Give them the look (you know which one). This will make any guy back off, and the girl who body-slammed you on her way through the crowd with her friends will apologize like she’s begging for her life.

  visible

  bruises

  Joshua,

  The halls of our high school were buzzing with frantic, excited whispers, not at all the appropriate tone for what had just happened that weekend.

  I texted you as soon as I heard about it. We both loved Chris Brown. We loved him and Rihanna as a couple even more. But now, just before the Grammys, they had gotten into an argument in a car. He had been caught in a lie again, and she’d grilled him for the truth. As they argued, his eyes became dark—there was no soul. He started to hit her, punch her, over and over. She waited for it to stop. Months later, she’d say that their relationship was tumultuous, obsessive, co-dependent. Brown was charged with assault, and photos of Rihanna’s battered face became a permanent fixture on the internet.

  During school, the sounds of Brown’s music, which filled the halls on LG phones and on CD players as kids rehearsed their after-school dances, were now replaced by angry conversations about Rihanna. She had ruined the life of their beloved, attractive American superstar. She was mouthy. She was sassy. She was probably bitching at him. She wanted attention. She should’ve let it go.

  We were both sixteen. It was the first time I had seen violence against a woman. Not you—growing up, you saw it often in your own home. I couldn’t understand how someone could do that to the person they loved. I couldn’t understand you, making jokes about it already. But the students around me were convinced Rihanna was no victim; their list of reasons growing longer and more outrageous. She was probably cheating too. She started it. She did it to herself. I shamefully wondered if, in the collective blame, there could be some truth.

  “She must have done something to deserve it,” you said as we walked to Chemistry class, a month before you became my first boyfriend, my first love. “I’d probably do the same.”

  And you would, when your hand curled into a fist against my jaw two years later.

  * * *

  ///

  We had crossed paths often over the years. You were the class clown, not necessarily popular—at least not with the white kids who dominated the social food chain—but your other Asia
n friends thought you were cool. I was a keener, a straight-A student and president of the youth leadership group, and I desperately wanted a thrill. You looked at me and smirked as I passed by you in the halls. When you shouted out, “Eternity, you’re gonna live forever,” I rolled my eyes and kept on walking, but really, I liked it.

  In class, you helped me with formulas. When I got impatient, you let me copy your answers. In return, I edited your essays. I thought you were equally badass and nerdy, both overly confident and terribly insecure. I was intrigued, and I asked you to hang out. Tuesdays became the day we took the bus to the beach and smoked the cigarettes I never knew how you got. In between puffs, you asked me to be your girlfriend. I said yes. You were the first boy I ever kissed.

  You were patient and gentle as I navigated this new romantic territory. You’d already had girlfriends; I was scared you would compare us. After school, we’d sit under the highway overpass and listen to the whooshing of cars above us; you kissed the back of my hand when it was clasped in yours. On the weekends, you’d take the bus to meet me at the mall, so we could take photos in the booth by the Yogen Früz and then see a movie. You were embarrassed you only had enough money to cover your ticket, not your popcorn. Afterwards, we’d hang out at my house watching TV and eating pizza. You made me laugh, and you liked the parts about me that had once been the reason I roamed the halls alone. It wasn’t long before we exchanged I love yous.

  How could you hold my hand and then later slide yours up my kilt as I pushed it away? How could you tell me you were happy we were waiting, and in the same breath throw your weight on me until I was immobilized, your hands clumsily yet forcefully trying to unzip my pants?