West Coast Relationship Woes (It’s Not What You Think) // Tawahum Bige
As part of our guest edited month exploring Urban Ephemera, Tawahum Bige discusses community and friendship building on the west coast.
Poetry slams were one of the first places I started really building a community. In only four years that I’ve been in Vancouver for, countless community spaces have closed, whether performance or service related. Café Deux Soleil has been the most steady, close-to-permanent community space I’ve encountered in this rainy city and still stands as of writing this. Inside its walls are grungy, booths, tables, seats that have barely held together over the past few decades. The raised stage a foot off the ground is a place for kids to play with toys during the day, and a performance space in the evening. On that stage in April 2019, with a full room for Vancouver Poetry Slam finals, I shared a piece about my late brother, who committed suicide in 2015. I dived into my grief, line after line of emotion and analysis of colonial settler state in relation to my family. I realized part way through this performance that I did not want to be on the Vancouver Poetry Slam team sent to the national spoken word festival this year. I just have to slow down and get a time penalty. Each line I took my time with, and for the first time, I felt my voice crack with tears and choked back sobs into the microphone. The whole audience held me, spiritually and emotionally, and I feel like I held them too. I didn’t get a time penalty so, when I came in fourth, I had to step down from the team the old-fashioned way, to let the person who came in sixth become the fifth member.I’m grateful for the folks I’ve met through Slam, especially in my journey from isolation to social connection, from Surrey to Vancouver. But if there’s one thing I have learned meeting poets, performers, artists, musicians and activists on these unceded Musqueam, Squamish, and Tsleil-Waututh territories, it’s that we aren’t the most reliable. We regularly cancel (I’ve begun hearing the term “Van-cel,” because it’s such a particular Vancouver practice). Though we are powerfully emotional artists and activists, many of us have similar triggers with our trauma. Many of us trigger each other. Everyone’s harmed and been harmed. I’ve walked into Indigenous activist and artist spaces thanks to Slam, and in the same breath, found myself on the outside circle looking into those spaces. There’s a pain that comes with pursuing relationship. Sometimes that pain looks like a two-plus year friendship circling the drain after a few too many ghosted text messages, and a whole whack of undiscussed conflict. Sometimes it can feel like I really went out on a limb to support them in tough places. Sometimes that pain arises because that two-plus year friendship looked a lot like unhealthy imbalances in communication, connection and conflict. Sometimes I’m the one who fed into that unhealthiness, whether it was through toxic communication, whether well-meaning or coming from a place of pain. Sometimes it makes common spaces a difficult place to maneuver without hurting someone’s feelings.This isn’t meant to be a story about those conflicts. This is a story about how hard it can be to find any kind of regular, stable and healthy friendships in the 21st century, a difficulty that exponentially grows per intersection of oppression. But, it’s also a story about the blessings of building stronger bonds through my Creative Writing classes at Kwantlen Polytechnic University and the kind of community we’ve created from the ground up.Grieving my brother taught me that grief exists everywhere. When we get passed up for a promotion, when the concert we went to was disappointing, when we break up with lovers, when we lose contact with friends, when we watch the world burn around us.The irony is that losing friends, and feeling isolated, causes a grief that I can’t handle alone. It forces me to keep meeting people. I want to believe community is out there; I still seek it out. I believe I see it on my campus.In a carpool through Surrey last winter, a peer of mine went off about the lack of student culture on campus, and I remember urging her to make it happen. She just so happened to be the type that loves to throw parties and threw them in high school, but fell out of practice. This peer, who is now one of my closest friends, rambled on about this challenge, and that excuse. I slightly challenged her, “You know, I get it. There’s always going to be reasons not to do something.” She’s an Aries and so she heard the challenge, loud and clear.Now, the lit-mag on campus is running beautifully after her management, the Creative Writing Guild flourishes with events. Slamapalooza, the Kwantlen poetry slam, has been revived through her work and the work of another close friend of mine who started half a decade ago. We’ve gone to the Canadian Festival of Spoken Word together, and will be returning in October—and the folks it brought together last year are great friends of mine. Those students now organize events, perform, encourage others to come around. We connect with local musicians.This past week, I saw my friends’ band, Sleepy Gonzales, play at JW Studios in Gastown. I rarely go anywhere to dance. But with their music blaring, my ears ringing, and the soft encouragement that is their vibe, I flailed for their entire set. After loitering at the event past their showtime, the band and I drove out to Surrey, where we connected with more of our friends in a 13th floor apartment in Whalley. We enter, and the main lights are dim, and the walls speckled with glowing orange, blue, purple, and red—the friend who I had that fateful carpool with, one cold rainy night, she loves to string up lights. The floor is a giant puddle of mattresses, the foam and blow-up variety. Our four friends are sprawled across this little lofty apartment, and jump up to greet the three of us walking in. All of us met at Kwantlen Polytechnic University. All of us are writers, poets, musicians, activists. And honestly, all of us are way too busy to actually have social lives—working, studying, trying to find our place in the world. But we make time for each other. The sun comes up behind a hazy grey sky, some of us asleep, the rest of us chatting about art, spilling tea about peers and talking politics and idealist worlds. We accept each other’s weird eccentricities. Space is made for mistakes, reciprocal emotional labour, deep overshares and a whole lot of healing. So many of us are grieving. So many of us have had experiences similar to mine with community. But we’re surviving, possibly beginning to thrive, even. Trust doesn’t come easy for us, but we’re trying. And we believe in a vision of indispensable and long-lasting relationships.
Lutselk’e Dene, Plains Cree, Two-Spirit, Nonbinary poet, Tawahum Bige resides on unceded Musqueam, Tsleil-Waututh and Squamish territory. Published in Red Rising, Prairie Fire, EVENT, and Poetry is Dead magazines, Tawahum’s poetry makes vulnerable the process of growing, resisting and being a hopeless sadboy on occupied Turtle Island. They’ve performed on stages including Talking Stick Festival, Verses Festival of Spoken Word, and have completed the first ever Indigenous Spoken Word residency at the Banff Centre in 2018, with their BA in Creative Writing. They invite you to join them on this journey that is both emotionally personal and deeply political.
