Tonight is April 23, 2015 and I am sitting in my room in Vancouver,
unceded Coast Salish Territory.
Never ceded. No treaties.
I write this on/from stolen land.
Theft. Of land. Of people. Of home. Of possessions. Of generations.
From this site of ongoing genocide, I stretch backwards into the memory of my ancestors.
On this day one hundred years ago there were no boxes.
There was no bubble-wrapped.
Not even bones were marked “fragile” as millions of miles were moved beneath feet.
One hundred years later and I’m packing. Moving again. Fourteenth time in three years.
I don’t seem to know how not to move. It is/has become/remains my DNA.
Moving is a history that doesn’t need fact checking or corroboration.
I know it in my own story. I know it in my body. Moving is my surviving.
At some point it will be good for you to consider staying.
These lands carry the legacies, the lived, the absences, the murdered and missing. These lands hold the realities of genocide and slavery and headtaxes and internments and detention centres and policies and borders and pipelines that divide, divide, divide — take babies from mothers, take homes from people, take communities and leave them to die.
These lands carry all this weight.
At some point it will be good for you to consider staying.
Somewhere.
The only place I want to stay is called solidarity. It is a place I aspire towards and a place I daily work to ground my body, my self, and my responsibility as I unlearn all the mislearnings fed to me. As I stop the perpetuating. End the cycles of violence — first inside my own body and my story, and change what I do with my hands. Change how I stand on these feet. Change how I stand with people, friends, family, lovers, comrades.
One hundred years and
We were survivors and resistors before and since.
One hundred years and we are still surviving.
One hundred years and everyday is a remembering, not only of this time and this marker.
This year feels wrong, says my friend, my comrade, my fellow Armo queer.
I agree.
What to do with the rhetoric of this year? The images? The statements?
The lack of statements?
The Let History Decide, the factcheckarmenia
The president, be careful not take into your mouths the words you have already used
(prior to election that is). Careful, Obama. Careful. Your geopolitical allies watch you.
But what is another omission in the face of so many omissions?
Power cannot mouth genocide because… ERASURE IS SILENT. Imperialism is implicit when Imperialist Power is evasive evasive evasive: AND YOU ALREADY SAID IT WAS GENOCIDE…
Yes to policy and governments and oppressors acknowledging. Acknowledge it. Say it.
And not just this genocide. ALL OF THEM.
RecognEYES.
SAY ALOUD THAT WE ARE STANDING ON BLOOD. THAT OUR HOMES ARE BUILT ON BLOOD. THAT BLOOD IS ON THE HANDS OF POWER.
Acknowledge it and then
STOP THE WARS.
STOP THEM.
STOP!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!
If Obama would have said the word, what then? What hypocrisy for our communities.
I live on unceded territories with a government that has recognized the Armenian Genocide and still participates in the ongoing genocide of Native peoples, still panders to Israel, still empowers Stephen Harper, still shoots men of colour in the streets, still opens borders to oppressors but deports mothers with children, still criminalizes the poor, still sanctions pipelines.
Until all of us is free, none of us is free.
And so it follows: none of us is free.
Keep your words. Your statements. Your speeches.
Change.
At some point it will be good for you to consider staying.
Somewhere.
In the mix of all that is being said and shared this centennial amidst the so much that is distorted and destructive and killing people now, now now:
I am remembering and writing to and thinking of
you, my amazing queer and trans* hyes.
you, my amazing mixed and poc and “middle eastern” and SWANA and diasporan people.
you, my friends, my chosen family, my comrades, my loves, my hearts.
our struggles are connected. and ours, us queer and trans* folk who have survived to be here sometimes twice or thrice exiled of family and home and community.
In this moment of one hundred years upon hundreds of years
it is the way one queer armenian kisses their lover. the way we have been and are still finding ways of coming together. it is our touch. our bodies, our hair, and the way we shape and grow into our scars.
i love the stitches at your chest. the swell of your heart and hips.
it is as much the homes we have created inside this permanent impermanence as our shared and unshared memories of homeland and home. our losses of blood and family. our losses of body and memory.
it is us. now. rising. and saying.
all oppression is connected, and i stand with you
in the struggle.
in this struggle.
At some point it will be good for you to consider staying.
Somewhere.
i’d like to stay here. with you.