Blind Contour

(songs and essays, 2019-2021)

• ACKNOWLEDGEMENT

• INTRODUCTION

• I. DENIALIST

• II. SUPREMACIST

• III. CHARACTER WITNESSES

• IV. THE BEST PLACE I EVER LIVED

• V. TURN THIS SONG OVER

• VI. PAYCHEQUES

• VII. WAITING FOR THE EARTHQUAKE

• CREDITS AND THANKS
  
  

ACKNOWLEDGMENT

I was born a settler on the unceded territory of the Sḵwx̱wú7mesh (Squamish), Səl̓ílwətaʔ (Tsleil-Waututh) and xʷməθkʷəy̓əm (Musqueam) Nations and have lived on these lands almost my entire life. I wrote these songs in my apartment and in my local coffee shop, but whenever I got stuck I drove up to Ch’ich eliwxih (also known as the Mt Seymour Watershed) and went walking through the trees.

I cannot claim to have a land-based practice. I am a settler on this land and a tourist to its traditions. But there is no doubt that the trails I walked as I first hummed these tunes were integral to this writing. As I walked, lyrics and ideas that I had been struggling with suddenly became untangled, and new possibilities emerged.

I know there is danger here. Dissatisfied with aspects of one’s own culture there is a temptation to hold up someone else’s as an antidote. I know that to do so is to misappropriate. At the same time, if our acknowledgements are to be more than perfunctory then they must recognize the sacred and spiritual dimensions we have been told are inherent to the lands we occupy.

INTRODUCTION

“If radical change is truly desired ... then those who have the bounty of privilege should shoulder the greater risk, and should be willing to transform, divest of or spend such privilege by all methods available.”

-Xaviera Simmons

In the spring of 2019, I was approached by Barbara Adler, one of the curators of Sawdust Collector, with an invitation to be one of their New Works artists for the fall season. Sawdust Collector is a weekly experimental performance series that takes place in an underground venue in Downtown Vancouver, late most Tuesday nights. I have enormous respect for Barbara and her co-conspirators, James Meager and Cole Schmidt, whose dedication to fostering artistic community in a city that is openly hostile to such efforts is nothing short of heroic. New Works asks three artists to perform three times over the course of a season. They are encouraged to use the platform to workshop new material.

When I was asked to be involved, I was five years into a songwriting hiatus. I had stepped away from writing and performance after the amicable dissolution of my band, The Nautical Miles, with whom I released five records over the course of 14 years. I stepped away for a number of reasons, among them the fact that, as a white artist, my relationship to performance had become fraught.

Increasingly aware that white people were being asked to cede space and resources to artists who have been marginalized by a dominant, appropriative culture, my practice had begun to feel like an imposition, or even a trespass.

I had been speaking to other white artists who were navigating these tensions, some of whom had also adopted non-participation as a tactic. But the problem with retreat is that:

1. Not participating in your own culture breeds its own form of toxicity. Everyone needs to belong and contribute to a culture that they can feel proud of;

2. It is an abdication of our responsibilities. Again, the labour of dismantling white supremacy must fall to white people. We cannot transform our culture
   without participating in it.

Despite hearing these calls for years, to date my response can be largely characterized by inaction. I’ve adopted a defensive strategy: listening and learning. Education is undoubtedly important, but it does not ask us to subject ourselves to any risk, nor does it do anything to decrease the risk for those on the front lines of these battles.

We’ve been asked, repeatedly and explicitly, to address the racism and violence inherent to our culture. So, when Barbara asked me to participate in her series, I knew that I didn’t want to say no. I also knew what I needed to work on.

Blind Contour is a series of songs and short essays that interrogate white culture, from inside of white culture. I wanted to respond directly to the assertion that white supremacy is a problem white people have created and are responsible for solving. I also wanted to reckon with the fact that I have no idea how to do this work and to inculpate myself to a culture that I have sometimes preferred to pretend I sit outside of.

If we are to take on this work, then white people need to start having tough conversations with ourselves and with each other. I am noticing these conversations have started to emerge in my social circles and at work, but I still do not see these ideas reflected in our music. We have become good at parroting anti-racist ideas, at signalling virtue, even at platforming artist of colour, but where are these ideas manifest in our own creation? How is white culture transforming itself to align with our professed ideals?

Blind Contour is my response to these questions. I began with the essays, which I used to disambiguate my thinking on these topics, which can sometimes feel slippery. The essays then became source material for the composition of the lyrics. At the Sawdust shows, I read the essays aloud before each song. I have never been more terrified to perform in my entire life. Nor have I ever had so many meaningful conversations with audience members after a show.

These essays and songs were written intentionally for white audiences. I make this distinction in case there is any misunderstanding about who I am speaking to when I use words like ‘we’ or ‘our’ or ‘you’ in the songs and essays. I also make this distinction because I can say with confidence that these are things white people need to be thinking and talking about. I cannot make that same assertion for anyone else.

That said, everyone is welcome to these works. I offer them, with humility, to the expertise of the listener and the reader. They are imperfect, in form and in content, and I will accept any challenge made to them as a gift, and with a promise to respond.

I. DENIALIST

“Racism is a phantom that only half of us can see.”

-Ryan McMahon

I spend a lot of time on the internet, reading responses to events like the ones I describe above. Moments when the racism at the core of white culture is laid bare. The responses that I read -- the ones that are liked and shared by people in my bubble and inserted into my social media scrolls -- are most often written by activists, academics, and artists of colour.

I owe a great debt to these thinkers (and not only because their writing was almost certainly improperly compensated). Over the years, they have taught me an enormous amount about my own culture. Among many other things, they have helped me realize that white supremacy is not a historical spectre, as I was taught to think of it during my formal education. Rather, it is a system that is still enacted and upheld by white culture, to the benefit of white people, and it remains ubiquitous to the point of invisibility, at least to those who inhabit it.

These observations may seem facile, here at the start of 2021, but that should not be taken for granted. Let’s not forget that – what? – a year ago most white people balked and blistered at the suggestion that our culture was supremacist. Now, our Prime Minister is being asked explicitly to denounce it as a clear and present danger. These shifts in culture can seem swift, but they happen because of the work of thousands, who have struggled for decades, to move the dial slowly towards a truth that, by our own admission, should be self-evident.

The greatest minds of our generation have had to spend an unforgivable amount of time convincing white people that racism exists. Their analysis and criticism allows us a level of cultural literacy we never could never have achieved on our own. How will this generosity be repaid?

The Internet is the media by which I have encountered this analysis and criticism. It is also a media that most effectively captures the ways in which anti-racist assertions are met with the crushing weight of white culture’s denialism. Comment sections index the full spectrum of this denial: from violent rejection, to arrogant dismissal, to something else a little more subtle, but equally dangerous.

This latter version of denial does not dismiss racism as a fact, but yields only that it is an aberration. A blemish on a culture that otherwise does not require reform or abolition. This scapegoating is much easier than naming these acts of violence as the inevitable by-product of a culture complicit in centuries of cruelty.

We pretend not to recognize these monsters as our own. In so doing we sidestep, again and again, any accountability for their actions, their rehabilitation, or for the application of the justice that is owed to their victims.

//

Increments
You slept in on the morning of the violence
Woke to a full diagnostic of the incident
Numb to it

Feigned surprise
As a choir of apologists apologize
Well-rehearsed in pretending not to recognize
Those hollow eyes

Unconvinced
By the thin, panicked smile of the revisionist
“We’ll just rewrite the 80s, make it feminist
Non-interventionist”

‘Cause you know that face
From a dream or a memory you can’t quite place
Two round holes that you cut into a pillowcase
The only trace

Phantoms
Desperate to be seen
Dressing up for Halloween a season early

Bite lips
Insist they don’t exist
Cloak ourselves in myths of moderation

The dream begins
You are searching your city for a long lost twin
They are reaching out towards you with a phantom limb
Paper thin

Lonely streets
All the ghosts look away before your eyes can meet
You peer out at each other safely underneath
Cold white sheets

Phantoms
Desperate to be seen
Dressing up for Halloween a season early

Breathe deep
Rock ourselves to sleep
In the darkness we repeat this incantation:
It’s just an aberration

II. SUPREMACIST

“Who has the right not to explain themselves? The people who don’t have to. The ones whose subjectivities have been naturalized.”
-Miguel Gutierrez

My culture organizes its wealth and its power around this myth. We cling to it because we secretly hope we might one day be bequeathed the mantel ourselves, but also because it excuses our bad behaviour. We like to ask ourselves “can we separate the art from what the artist did?”, a thought experiment made familiar by the frequency with which our culture has protected high profile racists and abusers.

Can we separate the art from what the artist did? The answer is of course we can. We do. But why should we? Why not expand the criteria of great art to include a rigorous ethic of care and accountability? In remaking our culture - as we have been asked to do - we must normalize the notion that no one’s art is worth causing harm, abuse, or violence. No one’s. We don’t need it. We never did.

Something else I’ve often heard repeated by artists is that great art – timeless art – must remain autonomous and should not be instrumentalized by politics. I am increasingly suspect of this position, for a variety of reasons. First of all, whose arbiters get to decide what artworks are canonized? Also, has it not been accepted that there is no such thing as ‘apolitical’; that it is a fantasy? Neutrality is not apolitical, nor is the assumption of universality.

Convinced of our own genius, convinced that our artmaking is inherently good, and convinced that any challenge to it is somehow corrupted by a political agenda, we’ve adopted whiteness as an unspoken synecdoche for all cultures. We attempt to write songs that can mean anything and everything, which, of course, is the same as meaning nothing.

In the past, I never considered who my audience was. I assumed that the songs I wrote were for “everybody”, despite the fact that I have always made music in bands whose members were almost exclusively white and played to almost exclusively white audiences. The context I was working in was imperceptible to me. I have since been taught, by Miguel Gutierrez and others, that decontextualization is a privilege that not everyone gets to enjoy. Or would wish to.

If we can no longer pretend to speak for everyone, what is it that we have to say for ourselves? Maybe it is time we explain exactly what we mean. For if we are to inhabit a culture we are proud of, if it is to be generative and generous rather than extractive and appropriative, I believe we need to start by understanding each other. If we are to transform, we must first understand what we are transforming.

So, this is me explaining exactly what these songs are about.  Maybe it feels tedious. Maybe the didactic nature of this exercise won’t result in any timeless classics. But maybe we shouldn’t concern ourselves with making great art. Maybe we don’t need to right now. Maybe greatness is the wrong criteria. If our art was worthy in service to our genius, could it not be worthy in service to something else?  

//

In the film
I am played by
A chiselled jawed
Blonde and blue eyed
Everyman
Cool and classless
Pursuant of
A dimpled actress
Feeling bored
And frustrated
Talents unappreciated
But then comes
A shadowed stranger
Says, “you’re destined
Mankind’s saviour”

In the crowd
We mouth the verses
Close our eyes
Like Sunday Service
Bow our heads
Lift our hands
A movement
With no clear demands
The chorus swells
Asserts a truth
The supremacy of youth
The poetry of indignation
Absent risk or provocation

In the afterglow
Of crisis
Curled around
Our devices
I watch you slip
Into a dream
Your finger still
Upon a screen
The secrets we tell
Our machines
Are whispered back
To us in dreams
And in the dark
We lay defenceless
As desire is turned against us

We speak our love
In the language
Of the supremacist

III. CHARACTER WITNESSES

“There can be no love without justice.”
-bell hooks

Even whiteness itself is amorphous, responsive to political and economic opportunity, as historians such as Howard Zinn have taught us.

In my culture, ambiguity is everywhere. It is what allows us to hold up two opposites as truth. It is the way that Liberalism lies. It is what allows a racist to tweet that “diversity is our strength”. It is what allows a self-declared feminist to make billion-dollar arms deals. It is what allows us to claim to believe climate scientists and still mortgage mega-projects against our children’s future.  

I have come to believe that the gulf between what we say we believe and what we do (or in most cases what we don’t do) is where white supremacy takes root.

I wonder if disambiguation is a tool that we can use to combat white supremacy. Do we understand what we mean when we say that we are, for instance, committed to anti-racism? Do we understand the consequence of that position for ourselves and for those we’ve made commitments to? How much are we willing to risk defending those positions?

We need to answer these questions unambiguously if we are to be held accountable to our commitments. In the absence of accountability, all solidarity is a performance.

Admittedly, songs are an imperfect tool to combat ambiguity. The song writing traditions that I participate in are deeply invested in metaphor and abstraction, and it has used these tools to great effect. The canon of popular song has imprinted itself upon our culture in profound ways. The love song, for instance, has imposed a particular fiction upon my understanding of love.

Character Witnesses is an attempt to disambiguate the love song. It asks yet another question: what would it look like if we could disambiguate our love until it is synonymous with our concept of justice?

//

Lionized
Untested and unscrutinized
We claim to love without condition

What if we
Expressed our love as bravery?
Would it still be as freely given?

This is the fear in the pit of your stomach
This is the way you perform it in public
This is what’s offered when help is requested
This is your courage once courage is tested

Measure me
By the trust that I receive
From those I’ve told I’ll stand beside them
Measure what I do
By how much it offers to
Those whose love has been denied them

Here is a lineup of character witnesses
Justice applied in particular instances
Here is the long list of all our excuses
Here’s how they sound when repeated back to us

Here are the names and addresses of monsters
Here are the tools to dismantle their culture
Here is a ledger of where they’re invested
Here is the number to call if arrested

IV. THE BEST PLACE I EVER LIVED

In the early 2000s I did an undergraduate degree in Environmental Studies at York University. There was a lot of discussion about ‘Indigenous ways of knowing’. We read textbooks about it. I remember being asked by one of our professors, a white man, “how long does it take for someone to become Indigenous to a place?”

Almost all of the education I received about Indigenous culture has been white-centering. I was taught that the tenants of an Indigenous world view could be adapted for use in my own culture – uploaded like an application that would run on an existing operating system.

Of course, this world view is an imaginary, dreamt up by white culture – cobbled together from misrepresentations, simulacra, and screen objects. I’ve stopped asking what it means to be Indigenous and started asking what it means to be a settler.

 My culture’s relationship to the land is inseparable from the market economy. When land values become untenable, we move off the land, or use our capital to purchase investments in other places so that we can afford to stay. As Métis artist and academic David Garneau puts it:

“Indigenous lands are converted by colonists from a sacred and eternal relationship with the people into property separable from the people.”

All of my friends and family – and I mean all of them – participate in this market, myself included. Not only do I dream of owning property, but I have articulated and am enacting a plan to do so, even though I know that this will make me complicit in an economy of dispossession.

As the beneficiaries of this economy, my culture has failed to imagine its alternative. But let’s not confuse a failure of imagination with a lack of imagination. The colonial imagination carves up our territories with a precision that is astonishing. Our nation is shaped in our minds and then fused onto the land. From municipal property line to sprawling international border, Canada exists as a vector image, incorruptible at any resolution or scale. Our sense of security and wealth are defined by these rigid borders, so much so that any suggestion that they might be redrawn is immediately perceived as a threat.

The Final Report of the Truth and Reconciliation Commission – a document that my culture is currently using as a framework for its relations with Indigenous people – is silent on the question of land, as Mississauga Nishaabeg writer, musician, and academic Leanne Betasamosake Simpson reminds us:

 “Land is not mentioned in any of the (TRC) recommendations, in part because the commission was set up to focus on individual suffering in residential schools. Yet, residential schools were a strategy used by Canada to break the connection between Indigenous peoples and our lands, so the state could access the land for settlement and for natural resources.”

94 recommendations and no mention of land.

Meanwhile, in our cities, we negotiate the crises of affordability by trying to time the market, leaving our neighbours to do the same. Debt becomes the cost of belonging. Hostages to this system cannot help but fear the consequences of a movement that asks for #landback. The next few decades will reveal the true extent of our solidarity with those whom, we acknowledge, are the true stewards of this land.

//

I was born into this city
Watched it grow up next to me
Barely 30 years
Into its second century

Now construction cranes are clawing back
Another square inch of sky
Can’t remember when my city
Stopped looking me in the eye

Let’s have one last round of drinks
Before they start tearing the building down
Cocktails are infused
With the last traces of Chinatown

Stumble home down side streets
That they tell the tourists to avoid
Streetlights in the puddles
Cut with traces of an opioid

People talk of leaving
Sometimes even I do
All I ever wanted
Was somewhere to belong to

Standing at the bus stop
Hoping for a Number 8
Standing on the sidelines
Hoping markets will self-regulate

Stand before the audience
Take care to acknowledge land
But not that its continued occupation’s
Part of our retirement plan

People talk of leaving
I wonder if we ought to
All I ever wanted
Was somewhere to belong to

It’s too late for the island
Too late for the valley
Studio or bachelor
Two-bedroom, single-family

Wealth as its own virtue
Land as its expression
A generation saves up
Towards its own dispossession

Cindy says she’s leaving
But where she’ll go she isn’t sure
They parcelled up a city block
And sold it out from under her

She says, “I stuck it out and gave this city
Everything I had to give
I’ll remember this apartment
As the best place that I ever lived”

V. TURN THIS SONG OVER

Reflecting  back on the experience of stepping away from songwriting and shedding my identity as an artist, what surprises me most was just how easy it was.

Perhaps this is another tenant of white culture: our perceived ability to step in and out of a culture. If asked to define culture, I think a lot of white people would describe it as something that we can choose to participate in and, by the same token, opt out of.

Whiteness scans the cultures it cohabitates with and decides which aspects of them it would like to perform, transmuting them through the act of appropriation. Historically, the suggestion that there are cultural properties, or even entire cultures, that are off limits to white people, has been ignored or dismissed.

My culture is produced and consumed as a transaction. Creation is the province of professionals. Something that is ticketed. Something you can acquire the rights to.

Métis visual artist and scholar, David Garneau, writes eloquently about the brutality of appropriation in his chapter in the book Arts of Engagement;

“Through the alchemy of colonial imagination, combined with brute power, sacred and cultural objects are transmogrified into commodities, melted for their gold value or collected for their artifact or art value… The desire of the colonist is directed not just at appropriating these material things, but to displacing their local symbolic value. This decontextualization erodes the culture by removing the gravitational centre.”

Here, Garneau helps us understand that cultural appropriation replicates colonial violence.

He goes on to describe what he calls “screen objects”, replicas of sacred cultural objects that were passed off to colonists to satiate their desire for possession. This allowed their rightful owners to keep the real goods for themselves, at least in some cases.

My experience of Indigenous cultures will always be mediated, and I am sure that there are many ways that screen objects still exist today, unbeknownst to me. But today there is perhaps less need for subterfuge. Today whiteness is asked explicitly not to appropriate.

As an artist who works in popular song, I feel this tension acutely, North American popular music is a cavalcade of appropriation. As Rhiannon Giddens teaches us, even folk and country music (long assumed to be the dominion of white culture) has roots in African and African American musical traditions.

This puts us in a bind. What happens when an appropriative culture is asked to no longer appropriate? An empire built on extraction is now being asked what it has to offer in return. How will we answer?

//

Turn this song over
Consider its purpose
How much was gifted?
How much was purchased?

The pulse of a culture
Held in your hand
Feels distant as fathers
And their dreams of an unpeopled land

Dream of the future
Relive the past
But here in the moment
Our culture feels
Like we are touching it through glass

So we perform it
Like its imaginary
The backdrop against which
White women marry

Like something we try on
Whenever we want to
Dressed up for the party
One that we were not invited to

Excuse the question
So hard to tell
What’s our intention
Singing songs
The same ones that the racists sing

And some of this feels real
Some of it pretend
A conversation with a man
That you pay to be your friend

Getting close enough to touch
Using a digital zoom
Somehow it always disappoints
Like every photo of the moon

What’s the sound of this music
Unappropriated?
What’s the shape of this country
Repatriated?

Turn this song over
What could it become?
What might it offer
To those that it was stolen from

Dream of the future
Relive the past
But here in the moment
Our culture feels
Like we are touching it through glass

VI. PAYCHEQUES

At the centre of this mythology are two immovable exceptionalisms; racist exceptionalism coupled with individual exceptionalism. My culture insists that we have a shared destiny, but also insists on relegating the responsibility for that destiny to the individual.

White culture individuates us. It teaches us that when we fail, the failure is ours alone.

Under this paradigm, hardship is intrinsic to our individual journeys. It is not to be understood as injustice, only as a temporary and necessary instance of adversity within a grand narrative. Everything happens for a reason and what doesn’t kill you makes you stronger. In this particular story, true solidarity is an impossibility.

So it is that when I find myself in moments of despair my instinct is to retreat instead of reaching out. In my darkest hours, I am made to feel unworthy of my community. I sit with my pain, resigned to the bipolarity of my own esteem. The degree to which we are worthy of love has become a metric of our success.

Beware. The toxicity of our myths has also infected the language we are using in their dismantling. White Supremacy. White Privilege. These concepts are premised on a binary, placing whiteness on the positive side of the equation. Even our anti-racist movements position white people as the ones with something to lose, asking what we are willing to sacrifice in the name of justice.

But as Stó:lō author and poet Lee Maracle writes in My Conversations with Canadians:

“If you participate in dismantling the master’s house and ending all forms of oppression, you are helping yourself… whenever Indigenous people achieve reform or end injustice, you benefit”

Instead of asking what we have to lose, what if we started asking what we might stand to gain?

As we come to grips with the fact that everyone, including white people, suffer as a consequence of white supremacy, we run the risk of conflation. Under white supremacy some are othered. I am individuated. These processes are distinct and have hugely different stakes and impacts. But both serve to further the concentration of wealth and power. I am undoubtedly a beneficiary of that process. This song is an attempt to ask: but at what cost?

//

Getting shit-faced with my brothers
On a sadness there’s no name for
Convinced of our own genius
Like the men that we were named for

Crane our necks to watch the violence
Turn away before the slaughter
Watch the hurricanes approaching
Name the storms after our daughters

Darling there’s a sadness I have seen
One I have been trying to avoid
But keeping down the darkness inside me
Limits my capacity for joy

Always thought I was unworthy
Left to reckon with my failures
Always thought things would be different
Once I untangled my anger

Waited to feel better
Dreamt of the hereafter
To feel the soft touch of a lover
To hear my children bray with laughter

Darling there’s a sadness I have seen
One I have been trying to explain
It’s a place where each of us have been
Still we do not dare to speak its name

Darling there’s a sadness I have seen
One I have been trying to deny
Even as its building by degree
In the spaces between you and I

It’s as if living paycheque to paycheque
Is just a game poor folk like to play
As if there is not enough justice
So some have to give theirs away

As if pleasure is something to save for
A debt to be serviced with pain
We threaten each other with losses
Never ask what we might stand to gain

Halfway down the hallway
Somebody graffitied
A list of good intentions
Numbered them like treaty

VII. WAITING FOR THE EARTHQUAKE

Without question, our culture needs to be able to speak about intentions, impacts, and consequences with greater empathy and nuance, but the fight against ‘cancel culture’ does not achieve this. By grouping disparate instances of abuse under the same banner, wholesale dismissal of call-out tactics serves to protect abusers and maintain the status quo. It is intellectually dishonest and dismisses the struggles of those who have fought tirelessly for equity and justice where it has historically been unevenly applied.

Rather than bristle against "cancellations", Desmond Cole offers that we speak instead about consequences. Consequence Culture. I prefer this frame because in determining what consequences are appropriate we have to first consider the specifics of each situation.

As a culture, we are unaccustomed to consequences. The systems we have set up to deliver justice are, by our own admission, deeply cruel, but they are also deeply racist, so white people rarely have to encounter this cruelty. Justice is something that happens to others. Something awful that is to be avoided at all costs.

As white people, we have begun to acknowledge that our culture is premised on white supremacy, but we still refuse to take any personal accountability. Of course, the best way to avoid being held accountable is to do nothing. To say nothing.

But inaction is no longer an option. We have been asked explicitly to take on the labour of dismantling white supremacy and have been told that this work is urgently needed. As with any crisis, things move fast. The facts on the ground shift, the discourse changes, and the stakes are raised. In this context, we will surely get things wrong. Our efforts will often be ineffectual, obfuscating, unwelcome, and damaging. The impact of our actions will be different than our intentions. We will make mistakes.

The criticism we receive in the wake of these mistakes should be welcomed as a gift. Listening to feedback, acknowledging our missteps, correcting our behaviour, and then trying again: this is how we will get better. This is how our culture will transform.

A blind contour is a drawing exercise where an artist sketches a subject without ever looking down at the page. The purpose of the exercise is to get better at seeing, and to train the hand and the eye to work together.

I hope that these songs and essays will be understood as blind contours. As sketches. As exercises. They are my attempt to get better at seeing – and understanding – what is right front of me, using the tools I have at my disposal.

I do not present them as completed works, but rather works-in-progress. I offer them knowing they contain mistakes and knowing that there may be consequences for those mistakes. I offer them in the hope that they might encourage others to make similar efforts, even at the risk of making similar mistakes.

We can learn from our mistakes. We learn nothing from inaction.

//

The contested territory where our culture sits
Has a nation painted over it
And when we close our eyes we see the shape of it
In our poetry, in our politics

In the prayers that we repeat on anniversaries
At the cenotaphs, in the cemeteries
In the lessons that we learned from the atrocities
For which we were named beneficiaries

Truth stood out on the blockade
Held it for a decade
We pretended not to notice it

And now we populate our platforms
With promises of reform
When the call is for abolishment

Don’t mistake the way things are
For how they’ve always been

What should we tear down
In the meantime
While we’re waiting
For the earthquake?

The future we were told was preordained for us
Now seems mutable and precarious
Battle lines are drawn and boundaries readjust
Between what feels safe and what’s dangerous

Our city’s built of polished steel and poured concrete
Still it shifts sometimes underneath our feet
As we stumble home along its lonely streets
Past the phantoms cloaked in their thin white sheets

Now that we’ve all seen the violence
Broadcast into the silence
Of a nation under quarantine

Are we surprised that abolition
Is just the starting position
Towards a reimagining?

Don’t mistake the way things are
For how they’ll always be

What should we tear down
In the meantime
While we’re waiting
For the earthquake?

CREDITS AND THANKS

Music produced by Corbin Murdoch & Jesse Gander
Engineered & Mixed by Jesse Gander at Rain City Recorders
Mastered by Alan Douches at West West Side Music
Guitar & Voice - Corbin Murdoch
Voice - Rachel Tetrault
Weissenborn & Dobro - Tim Tweedale
Drums - Barry Mirochnick
Bass, Organ & Synth - Jesse Gander

With thanks to: Jesse Gander & Rain City Recorders; Rachel Tetrault, Tim Tweedale, & Barry Mirochnick; Allan Douches & West West Side Music; Barbara Adler, James Meager, Cole Schmidt & Sawdust Collector; Ziyan Kwan & Peggy Lee for sharing the Sawdust stage with me; Hannah Turner; Sam Tudor; Nick Lakowski; Kali Malinka; Jenn Kuhl; Yolanda Clatworthy; Freya Doyle; Kim Harvey, Christine Quintana, Pippa Mackie & Kelsey Kanantan Wavey for help workshopping ‘Paycheques’; David Newberry.