“I don’t know what to say right now,” said one of my friends. “So I just look at whoever I’m with and say “it’s CRAZY.” And then we both nod. I have no idea if we mean the same thing at all.”
It froze for the first time in Toronto this week. Pathetic fallacy. My soul is frozen, my ability to speak is frozen. I remember learning that the war in Vietnam was called “the living room war,” because Americans could watch it on their TVs while they were eating dinner. What is this war? Genocide visible through countless digital platforms. No pause button. I’m frozen.
This is a blog about fitness and movement. That seems like an impossible thing to think about right now.
A friend’s dad died last week. On the weekend he told me he noticed he had suspended all of his sense of movement, attentive eating. Grief distances us from our bodies. “Start moving, just a little bit,” I said. “The rest will come back.”
When my mother was dying, every time I left the hospital I walked hard, ran in the blasting sun, further and longer than I’d run in years. Pounding my feet into the trail near her house, the house she’d never come back to. Trying to get rid of the hornets burrowing into the little sidewalk between the garage and her house. Crunching through the fishflies that laid their annual blanket on the city as my mother died. Then after she died, I couldn’t move. Had to force myself to walk along the river, into the western sun, tapping my watch to make sure I was still moving as time slowed down.
Many of the steps of my life have been in Uganda and Rwanda, tending to children without families because of genocide, genocide directly caused by settler colonialism, when the Belgians set two Rwandan cultural groups against each other, setting up a power keg of power and resentment that eventually exploded when the Belgians left. Part of me is there right now, in the horrific memorial I went to 15 years ago where bodies are laid out in former classrooms, preserved in lime. The sign pointing out that French soldiers played volleyball on a mass grave.
After my mother died, I added my mother’s family name to my own. Partly to honour her, and partly to root myself clearly in my own settler colonial history. My family were among the first French settlers in the Windsor Detroit area, in about 1710. Adding the name Desmarais onto mine is a daily reminder that we have to surface and own the paradoxical, uncomfortable truths of our lives, of our ancestors, of our histories. The stories of how my people displaced — a white-washed word for genocide – the Ojibway (Chippewas), Odawa and Potawatomi Nations who formed the Confederacy of the Three Fires of peoples, who shared that land my ancestors moved onto. My ancestors who created the structures I get to live in today. For a long time I leaned into the parts of my identity where I was marginalized — my francophone family that lost their language, my queerness, my female-bodied experience. My adult journey has been to own the parts of my identity where I am the oppressor.
I watched the horrors of the Hamas attack, and I grieved. And I watch as Gaza is razed, and I grieve. It seems self-evident to me that everyone should be able to recognize zionism as settler colonialism, that this horror is what happens when you occupy land and behave as though the people already on that land are “other,” are less than, must be vanquished. Are not human. It’s happened over and over again in history.
I know not everyone sees Zionism this way, that the unique history of the founding of Israel in the wake of the holocaust means for many people, critique of israel equates to anti-semitism. I grieve for the fear and pain so many North American Jews are experiencing. And I grieve for the pain of North American Palestinians.
We need a way to own the paradox, this truth of humanity and history that we can be both victim and oppressor. That the quest for safety, for a better life, cannot endure when it means oppressing another people.
I am frozen in this moment, in this grief, in the powerlessness. Movement in every sense seems impossible. There is only breathing, trying to feel my humanity, my grief. Creating space to hold the complexities, to be with others in their grief, their fear, their need to connect. To collectively call for a #ceasefire and move toward a time where everyone can live with dignity and safety.
Cate Creede-Desmarais lives in Treaty 13 territory, the traditional territory of many nations including the Mississaugas of the Credit, the Anishnabeg, the Chippewa, the Haudenosaunee and the Wendat peoples.
