We Have Done Enough by Anique Jordan. Documentation by Nabil Shash.

The energy that fills the room at a book launch surrounded by community is a feeling like no other. Walking into a reconfigured venue with familiar faces, soulful melodies, and warm hugs is one of those experiences I’m grateful to have been a part of before everything changed amid the pandemic. These are the kind of events that remind you just how small a city like Toronto really is. Celebrating a book—an anthology, no less—that weaves perspectives from Black artists, Black organizers, Black parents, Black educators, and Black thinkers was bound to have forged new connections by simply bringing people together under one roof.

That Sunday afternoon in February, Lula Lounge welcomed a number of Black people and allies who came together to hear more about Until We Are Free: Reflections on Black Lives Matter in Canada edited by Rodney Diverlus, Sandy Hudson, and Syrus Marcus Ware.

Until We Are Free is meant to be a book through which Black Canada can write itself, wherein contributors share a balance of personal experiences living across Turtle Island, their own reflections being involved with movements for Black life, and the value of understanding Black liberation as inherently connected to Indigenous sovereignty.

After hearing from most anthology contributors, Pascale Diverlus, co-founder and former member of Black Lives Matter – Toronto (BLM-TO), wrapped up the launch with an announcement of yet another project borne out of the group—the creation of Wildseed: Centre for Art and Activism. Embodying its namesake, a novel by Afrofuturist author, Octavia Butler, Wildseed is a multipurpose community hub conceptualized through reflections on Black histories and hopes for radical Black futures.

It’s eerie to think about how much the book and hub launch once felt like the end of an era. Since 2014, Black people and our allies had been on the ground and behind computer screens, disrupting “business as usual” to demand justice for Black people who are disproportionately killed by police. Through six years of public education and activism, it seemed as though public opinion on anti-Black racism had shifted. For a brief instance, it felt like we had entered a moment in which Black people could catch our breath. In a paper for the Yellowhead Institute called “To Breathe Together: Co-conspirators for Decolonial Futures,” PhD candidate Sefanit Habtom and doctoral graduate Megan Scribe describe it as a moment in which we “conspire to breathe life into something new.” Even as we entered a pandemic in which “communal space” was given entirely new meaning, material like Until We Are Free and spaces like Wildseed gave me hope that Black people could use the brief plateau as an opportunity to reflect upon and learn from what had been a global movement. Wildseed and other cultural sites created by Black people across the diaspora remind us that we can leverage our resources to create more livable futures.

The timeline between the launches in early February and early March 2020, and May 2020 when everything changed yet again, made me think of what possibilities open up when we think critically about time. On one hand, the mere concept of time has become much less linear amid COVID-19, during which every waking day feels like an eternity, while months seem to pass with the blink of an eye. On the other hand, revolutionary ideas are made possible when we shift the terrain and think differently about seemingly catastrophic moments—we may as well work with, rather than against, those blurred timelines to imagine our worlds anew.

Bedour Alagraa, assistant professor of Africa and African Diaspora Studies, University of Texas at Austin, shared her thoughts on texts by Walter Rodney, Frantz Fanon, and Eduardo Mondlane to make sense of those critical shifts. During a talk in late 2019, she asked questions like: what happens when we begin understanding labour as cultural practice? Or when we think of struggle as being borne out of cultural expression, rather than the other way around? As a Black woman who uses artistic curation and activism as mechanisms to support, co-create, and engage with spaces rooted in community care, I can see how this era marks a break in which each of us can play a role in creating more breathable futures.

As anxiety-inducing as it had been to work through the uncertainty that went along with the first few months of COVID-19, it was also a pretty introspective blip in time until the week of May 25, 2020. In the wake of George Floyd, Regis Korchinski-Paquet, Tony McDade, and other Black people killed by police on Turtle Island and beyond, it began feeling like we were living in a time loop of Black death. Not only because it felt like just yesterday that some writers, theorizers, and other creators began speaking about the contemporary moment as a post-BLM era. In a much broader sense, it felt like a time loop because Black people have been sounding the alarm about structural violence in Canada, the U.S., and around the world for more than 400 years.

I submitted my master’s thesis during the pandemic, a project that wove together a review of literature and mixed media alongside my own analysis on a convening of Black artists, Black organizers, and Black people who were neither artists nor organizers. Through my research, I gained a better understanding of how radical creative practice—sit-ins, cookouts, protests, festivals, bookstores, newspapers, and after-school programs alike—help to chart a more livable city.

Among the number of new ideas that came out of our conversations, participants who were Black artists shared their experiences entering activist spaces. One participant in particular mentioned that she is limited to predetermined contributions when she is brought into organizing spaces. As a visual artist, she revealed that she is never asked to contribute intellectual work: “I don’t feel like I’m asked to come in to think of how to live a better life with everyone.”

It’s so disappointing to be reminded how often the work of Black artists is devalued. Particularly because it goes against everything Until We Are Free, the creation of Wildseed, and what Black studies scholars like Bedour Alagraa teach us about culture—Black creative practice is as essential as it is expansive.

I had the chance to speak with Toronto-based multidisciplinary artist Anique Jordan about some of the tensions between artistry and activism. When I told her what the participant had shared with me during a focus group meeting, Jordan explained that she resonated with that experience as well. Jordan shared that work by Black artists is often critiqued in extremes where it is read as either missing political commentary or offering too much. Contrary to either extremity, Jordan interprets Black artists as intellectual labourers. “Our work can be leveraged to create new meaning,” she said. “As artists, we’re constantly fine-tuning those skills…. We’re taking risks and offering real sound ideas toward change.”

When I asked what motivated her own creative practice, she went on to share how much she is inspired by the people who she grew up around in Scarborough. Community workers, youth, and block party organizers who wouldn’t necessarily consider themselves artists are some among many to whom Jordan’s work is indebted. I completely echo her sentiments: even though I moved away from the area some time ago, most of my own curatorial and scholarly work is inspired by Scarborough. The East Side is where I first learned the meaning of community.

Black cultural workers and everyday Black people are the primary audience of Jordan’s newest project—a mural that has been installed in front of NIA Centre for the Arts. “It’s affirming. It’s a reminder. We have done enough, and here are all the things we’ve done.”

Now more than ever, Black artists are moving away from work that centres pleading our humanity to general audiences. Just this past summer, activists and artists came together to paint “Defund the Police” outside of Toronto police headquarters and Hamilton City Hall. What I found most distinct about these two actions was that each volunteer surrounding the disruption faced inward while the streets were being painted. Rather than raising awareness by speaking with people who passed by, the organizers seemed to be most focused on ensuring the painters remained energized and that they were kept safe. Similarly, after an online petition to remove a Sir John A. Macdonald statue was met with inaction by Montreal Mayor Valérie Plante, activists circled the statue and pulled it down themselves during a protest to defund the police.

Jordan’s new mural project and the crowd structure for Toronto, Hamilton, and Montreal’s “Defund the Police” actions remind me of the beauty that comes out of inward-facing imaginative practice. In an article on liberation for Canadian Art, Denise Ferreira da Silva, artist and academic at the University of British Columbia’s Social Justice Institute, writes that “creative work returns to the person and to those who knew and love them.” While contending with violence, Black creative practice offers a place through which humanity is re-centred. Da Silva also reminds us just how expansive Black liberation work can be.

I think a lot about Saidiya Hartman’s writing and the attention she pays to sharing stories about Black women who are most often misremembered. Through its own form of literary creative practice, Wayward Lives, Beautiful Experiments: Intimate Histories of Social Upheaval speaks of “the chorus” as a vehicle that helps us meaningfully imagine otherwise. “Inside the circle it is clear that every song is really the same song, but crooned in infinite variety, every story altered and unchanging: How can I live? I want to be free. Hold on.”

When it comes to creating futures in which we all live more freely, everyday people and Black artists play just as important a part as activists on the front line. Ultimately, magic happens when we simply bring people together within a creative space—whether within an anthology, at a venue, at a block party or within our own neighbourhoods.

Dear art thieves,

Yes, that’s what you are. No, I don’t care that you just really liked my work. No, I don’t care that I didn’t use a watermark. It’s my design, you took it, you didn’t get my consent. You’re an art thief.

I know we live in a time where millions of delicious chunks of media are dancing on our fingertips—accessible, saveable, easy to find and use. I know you love following blogs on the social network Tumblr that post inspirational art (without crediting the artist), and cute online corkboards on Pinterest that post soothing illustrations (without credit), and so-called feminist Facebook pages that post sassy memes (without credit). But that does not mean you can take my art without my permission.

I’m talking to you, girl who was selling my stuff on her online store. And I’m talking to you, Instagram account with hundreds of likes for displaying my work without credit. And you, tattoo parlour that used my work without my consent. And I didn’t forget about you, art student who plagiarized my work for an assignment. And you and you and you, dozens who have overtly stolen my art, posted without credit, or attempted to sell it for profit.

I’ve been creating artwork for years. And for years, most of it went unnoticed. In April 2016, an illustration of mine—a floral EKG line, captioned with the words “healing is not linear”—blew up online. It was an earlier piece in an affirmation series I decided to create. Now, I’ve made more than 100. It’s a labour of love—I don’t get paid to make these pieces that I post every Monday. I do it because it’s something I care deeply about, something I believe in. I have a day job to keep me afloat. I’ve paid my dues, and you, art thieves, swoop in and steal the fruits of my labour in an attempt to catapult yourself to sudden Instafame without the years of work that actually went into my social media rise.

I think it’s cute when you decide to answer my messages with a long story of how deeply the illustrations in my affirmations series—like “you have survived so much” written over a mountain range—resonated with you and how much you care about mental health. What about the mental health of the artist you stole from? It really tickles me pink when you quietly remove the work in question, without an apology or acknowledgement of your wrongdoing. It’s even worse when, after I call you out, you proceed to lecture me on how better to protect my work or how hard it was to find the source. You really know how to make a girl smile.

I know what you’re thinking: It’s “just art” and I’m “just an artist.” Who cares about the time and energy that went into making the piece? Its only purpose is to serve you, completely unattached from the artist who made it. It’s on the internet, so that must mean that everyone can use and exploit it, however they choose. Right? Wrong. It’s my work. I made it. It’s for me, the creator of it, first. It’s for those who see it, second, after I choose to put it online to show them. I own the work. It’s my blood, sweat, and tears.

You should know that my livelihood is important. Like you, I’m trying to make a name for myself in this world and earn some money doing what I love. I deserve to be paid for my labour. When you don’t credit me, I don’t get recognition and it affects my career. When you steal my work, you’re taking potential profits from me.

The saddest part, art thieves, is that all you had to do was ask for consent to use my work or recreate it for your own leisurely purposes. Most of the time, I say yes. Sincerely, The girl who creates the beautiful things you like to steal.

—HANA SHAFI

Sandeep Johal. Photo by Britney Berrner.

When Vancouver-based artist Sandeep Johal read Shauna Singh Baldwin’s novel, The Selector of Souls, she was deeply moved. The story of two Indian women tackles difficult gender-based issues Johal often finds herself considering: female foeticide, infanticide, femicide, domestic abuse, dowry, and rape. Soon after reading it, Johal was bringing a fictional goddess from the novel to life. She drew the goddess in her signature style: a black-and-white line drawing with patterns of geometrical shapes, and collaged bursts of colour. The result was a strong mandala-like human figure, empowered by many arms, and embracing onlookers with a steady gaze.

As Johal set out to add to the series, she learned about the murder of Natsumi Kogawa, a Japanese international student studying in Vancouver. She was heartbroken, crying as she drew another goddess form dedicated to Kogawa. Johal couldn’t stop: “It was like I was a woman possessed,” she says. She drew for three days straight, creating nine more portraits of women who had died from gender-based violence. Each portrait is captioned by words spoken by the women’s loved ones in the wake of their deaths. Johal completed the project with three vibrant paintings inspired by scenes from The Selector of Souls. She named the series Rest in Power, restoring strength to the memories of the women who had died brutally and unjustly.

NO ONE LISTENS 24″ x 30″, Acrylic on Wood Panel “She isn’t worth naming. Release this atman, girl-body. Let it return to the place that continues long before and long after this world. Let it take shape when this world is a better place for girls. No one listens to women’s wishes.” —The Selector of Souls, Shauna Singh Baldwin

More than half of the women Johal commemorates in Rest in Power are South Asian. Among them is Jaswinder Sidhu, a 24-year-old Indo-Canadian woman who was murdered in 2000 in an honour killing after she married a rickshaw driver. Like Johal, she was born in British Columbia, and if she was still alive today, they would be the same age. The artist also dedicated portraits to Amandeep Atwal, Jyoti Singh, and cousins Pushpa and Murti, women whose lives were cut short by murder and sexual assault in Canada and India.

Johal’s work draws on the aesthetic of Indian textiles and patterning to bring viewers into difficult topics that many people tend to avoid. “I’ve always been interested in pushing boundaries and talking about uncomfortable things because my parents didn’t want me to. It made them uncomfortable whenever I questioned things in their culture,” she says. In September, when Rest in Power went on display at Vancouver’s Gam Gallery, Johal’s mother told her daughter she was proud of her.

For Johal, the project is a cathartic process. The work helps her feel hope in the face of the rampant gender-based violence in South Asian culture and beyond. “Every time I see another headline about a woman being assaulted, or raped, or murdered, I get so angry,” she says. “And then I get really sad. I’m trying to process this grief I feel around what happens to women.” The artist has reached out to the loved ones of the women she has dedicated work to, hoping to give them prints to show they are being remembered.

Rest in Power is an ongoing project, and as drawings are being purchased, Johal is replacing them with portraits of other women. But it isn’t her only project on the go. In August, she painted a vibrant mural called Girls are Fierce like Tigers on the side of an Indian restaurant in her neighbourhood. The mural depicts Durga, the mother goddess of the universe who fights for liberation and peace. Johal is also working on a new portraiture series called Hard Kaur, celebrating the lives of remarkable women from India’s past and present. She’s already done drawing studies of 16 figures, including poet and freedom fighter Sarojini Naidu, South India’s first female taxi driver Selvi, and sex trafficking abolitionist Ruchira Gupta.

Johal hopes her art continues to empower women and inspire conversation. She will keep paying tribute to the women who embody resistance to gender-based violence, both in this life and the afterlife. “I want them to know that they’re loved and they’re not forgotten. And we’ll keep telling their stories to keep them alive.”

OBSESSIVENESS AND EXCITEMENT, NEVER GROWING OUT OF THEM, OIL AND ACRYLIC ON CANVAS, 40 X 60 INCHES

Wei Li’s painting speaks for itself. Her brush strokes tangle and twist in flashes of brilliant colour, in sumptuous variations of texture. It seems almost to evolve as you look at it, as if it might rearrange itself the moment you glance away. The startling immediacy of Li’s craft makes it no surprise to find her work, Obsessiveness and excitement, never growing out of them, among the 15 finalists in this year’s RBC Canadian Painting Competition.

Li, who emigrated from China in 2010 and now calls Edmonton home, characterizes her art as being about emotion and memory, and the subjective experience. “I try to bring the very complicated hybrid experience into my painting so it becomes very complex,” she says. “Something a little bit hard to recognize but you can sense it, you can feel it.” Her style is also remarkable for its use of “painterly gestures,” an intuitive method of painting that requires the artist to rely on instinct and experience. “I make decisions based on the moment when I’m painting,” Li explains. “I believe all the energy I put into the process will somehow find a way to stay on the canvas.” If Li’s work so far is any indication, that energy will not only stay on the canvas, it will also leap off to greet us.

The RBC Canadian Painting Competition, established in 1999, is an award intended to bridge the gap between emerging and established artists. The winner will be announced October 17.

On air with Calgary community radio station 90.9 FM CJSW, a non-profit based in the University of Calgary // Photo by Bryce Krynski

THE CHEERY BANTER between a cartoon moose and flying squirrel has rung out over Calgary airwaves every Friday afternoon at 2 p.m. for the past 14 years. Dedicated listeners know what the goofy bit signals: it’s time for radio magic.

“And now…”

“Hey, Rocky!” Bullwinkle interrupts. “Watch me pull a rabbit out of this hat.”

“But that trick never works.”

“This time for sure.” Bullwinkle is undaunted. “Presto!”

In drops a charging drum beat and bass line by Juno-winning band Shadowy Men on a Shadowy Planet. Then, we’re off on another two-hour radio-making experiment on CJSW 90.9 FM, Calgary’s campus and community station. A crowd has assembled in the on-air booth on the third floor of MacEwan Hall at the University of Calgary to hear that storied show intro for the last time. After kicking off the weekend for countless Calgarians over the past decade and a half, Chad Saunders has just kicked off his final show.

“Well hi, everybody. Welcome to My Allergy to the Fans here on Friday, January 8th. So exciting—2016! I hope everyone got their calendars all in order, preferably from their favourite restaurant or mechanic shop and you’re just ready to go. This is the last My Allergy to Fans …”

Saunders stands in front of the microphone, chair pushed back, arms akimbo. CDs and records are strewn in piles to his right. A laptop is flipped open to his left. The sound board, a wide flat console with dozens of knobs, lights, and buttons, concentrates the room’s myriad audio devices at his fingertips.

CJSW’s on-air booth resembles the bridge of some sort of steam-punk spaceship. Cassette decks and turntables rub shoulders with sound mixers and a fleet of monitors. The station’s Twitter feed streams on a screen fixed to the wall while another provides access to the digital library— a growing collection of 7,600 albums. Saunders, however, prefers the frenzy of analogue, manually mixing from vinyl, CDs, cassettes, and his laptop. He manages this flurry of activity while taking calls from listeners and zipping out the door and past an illustrated skateboard deck that reads “The Chad Saunders Music Library” to find the perfect gem among 100,000 meticulously filed albums.

Voted Calgary’s favourite radio personality for six consecutive years, from 2008–2013, Saunders’ inimitable brand of slapdash radio has been incubating since he first walked through CJSW’s doors back in 1990. Over the past 25 years, the lanky 43-year-old has been a volunteer, board member, program director, and served an 11-year tenure as station manager. But now with his full-time gig as the director of operations and special projects for the National Music Centre ramping up with the opening of a new 160,000 sq. ft. facility, Saunders has made the tough call to retire the show. We’ve gathered in the booth to witness him try and pull a rabbit from his hat one last time.

“I see my pals from Blist and Matt Masters,” Saunders looks through the glass at the band setting up in the performance studio. Masters is an alt-country musician who ran as the NDP candidate against Stephen Harper in the last federal election. Sabo Forte and Andy Sparacino, who played the character Tron in the Fubar movies, comprise hip hop duo Blist. The unlikely collaborators, who dub themselves Blasters for the next two hours, are here to mark the end of an era. “They’re getting all warmed up and ready to go,” says Saunders.

With unruly brown hair, a runaway metabolism and goofball sense of humour, Saunders is a charismatic host. But his popularity also speaks to the power and potential of community radio. On CJSW’s airwaves, Saunders had the latitude to take chances. Listeners never knew what was going to happen next. In December, I heard a song in which Fabio, the Italian fashion model, softly intonated about his favourite ways to surprise his girlfriend. That same show included an excerpt from the Baby Pac-Man Read-Along Story Book, as well as vintage soul, garage rock, and plenty of local bands. The freedom Saunders had to speak his mind and play what he wanted allowed for a level of originality not possible on the more regimented mediums of public and commercial radio.

The appeal of community radio’s one-of-a-kind content is enhanced by how listeners are part of the action. Stations rely on their audience for funding, but also to become volunteers and to produce shows. Community radio is participatory from the moment you tune in; listening is a form of self expression. Whenever I see CJSW’s green-andwhite sticker on the back of someone’s car, I feel an instant kinship—an ally in an ongoing effort to realize a weirder, more progressive version of Calgary. The sense of belonging fostered by community radio offers another dimension to listening, one that goes far beyond the passive consumption of entertainment.

All these elements—local focus, crowdfunding, active listeners, and originality—that helped build such a loyal following for My Allergy to the Fans also positions community radio to flourish in the 21st-century media landscape. The relentless tide of free content on the internet has upended the economic model for broadcast television and print publications. Commercial radio is still profitable in Canada, but new online competitors materialize regularly. Community radio’s grassroots, guerilla-style approach to broadcasting presents a resilient media model for the digital age. Examples are starting to emerge of community stations like CJSW stepping up to fill widening gaps in local media coverage.

CJSW’s Donation Wall, designed and illustrated by Silas Kaufman // Photo by Bryce Krynski

CANADA’S BROADCASTING ACT recognizes three sectors—public, private, and community—that make use of the nation’s radio frequencies, which belong to citizens as part of the public domain. The Canadian Radio and Television Commission, which regulates the broadcasting and telecommunications spheres, defines community radio’s role in terms of creating content “rich in local information and reflection.” The medium must also meet the needs of the community not addressed by CBC and private commercial stations. Volunteers are involved in every aspect of running a community station (the main difference for a campus station is that students must also participate).

In 2014, 165 campus and community stations were included in the CRTC’s annual Communications Monitoring Report. Together, they make up 16.3 percent of all the radio and audio services authorized to broadcast in Canada. Barry Rooke, the executive director of the National Campus and Community Radio Association (NCRA), says the number of stations operating today is around 185. He estimates the community radio sector adds between five to 10 stations annually, although the growth of campus stations has flat-lined. The NCRA also has several member stations that don’t require a CRTC license because they broadcast solely with an online stream.

Community radio’s mandate to reflect the richness and diversity of local communities is becoming increasingly important as traditional media outlets continue to disappear. Twenty-two Canadian daily newspapers have closed down over the past five years. For example, Nanaimo’s Daily News and the Guelph Mercury shut down in early 2016. Each paper had served their community for over 140 years. The alternative weekly, FFWD, which ran the popular Best of Calgary survey that crowned Chad Saunders the city’s favourite deejay, published its last issue  in March 2015. And this past January, Postmedia downsized and merged the newsrooms of Calgary’s two major dailies; now one team covers local news for both papers in a city of 1.1 million. Parliament’s Standing Committee on Canadian Heritage formed a panel in late February to study the national crisis of local news coverage in print, broadcast, and digital media.

“People are starting to recognize that there is a gap,” says Rooke, “and they are looking for solutions to find content that suits their street and their neighbourhood.” For example, he adds, when Picton, Ont. station County FM launched in October 2014, it attracted 80 dedicated volunteers within a year. The local programming includes music shows, hourly news updates, and regularly-covered community events. Local stores have turned their dials away from stations in nearby towns and now blast their homegrown one, says Rooke. Having filled the void of local coverage, it’s been embraced by the community.

In addition to practical information about events and local issues, stations like CJSW offer organic and personal connections to manifold communities. At 30 years and counting, Megawatt Mayhem, a weekly two-hour show on CJSW, is Canada’s longest-running heavy metal program and a lifeline for that community in Calgary. The station is also home to several multicultural programs that broadcast in 10 different languages. Community radio is indissoluble from the spot where it’s created. People from a place engage others about that place. This rootedness—which includes old fashioned conversations replete with “ums”, “uhs,” and meandering digressions—keeps the medium relevant.

Ivan Emke, an associate professor in social and cultural studies at Memorial University’s Corner Brook campus in Newfoundland, has seen the transformative effects of community radio first hand. Emke volunteers with Ryakuga, a non-profit communications company that encourages rural communities to experiment with grassroots media projects. Ryakuga has helped several small towns in Newfoundland set up their own community stations. Emke defines humans as meaning-seeking creatures. We continuously process new information in an effort to make the world intelligible. A big part of how we create that meaning is through conversation.

“For isolated communities, including communities that are in the middle of huge urban areas that are themselves an entity or ecosystem,” says Emke, “they need to maintain some sort of control over the story about themselves.” The hosts of Megawatt Mayhem, Kevin Woron and JP Wood, have helped connect Calgary’s heavy metal community over decades of interviews with musicians, information about upcoming shows, and discussions about local bands. Community radio provides the forum for the kind of dialogue and exchange of ideas that allows individuals to rally around a common identity.

Maintaining a volunteer-run radio station, however, is no small feat. Rooke estimates that up to 40 percent of the NCRA’s 95 members are losing money or just managing to stay afloat. Revenues fluctuate wildly from station to station with about a quarter running on less than $12,000 annually. CJSW’s annual budget, by contrast, is $700,000. It supports seven full-time staff members and 300 volunteers, making it a flagship community station in Canada. As a community and campus station, CJSW raises 39 percent of its budget from a student levy. Some of CJSW’s financial stability can also be attributed to its location in a young and affluent city, but the station is also a fundraising superstar—by necessity. Every October, CJSW asks listeners for a significant chunk of its operating expenses. This past October, in the middle of a severe economic downturn, it raised a whopping $255,689 in under eight days, which is a national record for the sector.

Community stations depend on listeners, not advertisers, for survival—but investing during a funding drive also gives listeners a stake in the station. In this way, community radio offers a continuum of belonging versus passive entertainment. At CJSW, you can phone, tweet and, as of February, text the deejay in the booth. All these points of contact encourage people to ramp up their involvement: from listening, texting, and phoning to pledging money, volunteering, and hosting a radio show.

Certainly, something sturdy has taken root on the third floor of MacEwan Hall. This capacity to attract fresh ears while staying relevant to longer lobes is a big part of CJSW’s success. Volunteers range from ages 12–70. New people are attracted to the station while veteran members remain committed. Many Calgary bands, artists, and arts organizations have connections to CJSW. Kerry Clarke has been doing her Thursday afternoon show, Alternative to What, since she moved to Calgary in 1987 to work as CJSW’s program director. She put Saunders on the air for the first time back in 1991. Clarke works as the artistic director for the Calgary Folk Music Festival. Both Reggae Fest and Afrikadey!, big summer cultural festivals, were started by former CJSW deejays. “CJSW has really shaped the community,” says Clarke. “You talk about somebody who is doing something awesome in Calgary and quite often there is a route back to CJSW.”

“HAVE THE BEST TIME,” says Saunders. We’re almost at the show’s halfway mark and he’s chatting on-air with Hayley Muir, whose soul and rockabilly program, Dixie Fried, is moving into the 2 p.m. slot next Friday to take over after My Allergy to the Fans.

“I’m so excited. It’s like, I’m a little nervous,” answers Muir, who is also the singer for local punk band The Shiverettes. Muir and band mate Kaely Cormack founded Femme Wave, a multidisciplinary feminist arts festival, this past November. She started volunteering with CJSW in 2009 and has been doing a radio show almost ever since. Despite all the experience, she’s intimidated by the expectations around her new time slot.

“Why?”

“I don’t know. Well, one of the callers this morning was like, ‘Oh, those are some big goofy shoes to fill,’ and I was like, ‘I know, right!’”

“They’re clown boots and they’re canoe-sized and we just float down the river in the summer in them.”

“Cool. I can do that.”

“That’s how you get to Folk Fest—just hide in the clown shoe,” says Saunders. He dedicates the next song,

“The Name Game” by soul singer Shirley Ellis, to Muir.

The exchange with Muir is classic Saunders. Leapfrog adlibbing is his thing: an off-hand remark expanded into a joke, which sparks into a running theme. He never planned a show the night before because he wanted to react to what was happening that day, whether it was a big news story or a gnarly bout of Calgary weather. In many ways, My Allergy to the Fans was a front row seat to the inner workings of a wild imagination.

One of his jokes is still going strong after 11 years. It began as an April Fool’s prank in 2005. Saunders, along with a few others, hosted the morning show as if the station had been taken over by The Cobra, a commercial station with the tagline “All Metal! All the Time!” The three hosts impersonated over-the-top characters reminiscent of the 1984 rock-music mockumentary This is Spinal Tap. Saunders, clad in a blonde mullet wig, aviator sunglasses, and a skin tight leopard print t-shirt, became Jett Thunders (the costume later added a pair of shimmering pink pants). And then Thunders somehow survived the prank. His trademark blonde mullet and pink pants still haunt Calgary’s music scene. He emcees concerts and music festivals and is the mascot for the Calgary Underground Film Festival. An ’80s-era, classic-rock super fan, Thunders gave a PechaKucha (a TED-style talk that uses slides) lecture in 2013 and regularly chimes in on local issues through his own Twitter and Facebook accounts.

Creative freedom—the ability to take risks, face-plant, and wear mullets—gives community radio an edge on its commercial counterparts in the digital age. And CJSW station manager Myke Atkinson believes it’s only a matter of time before commercial radio falters big. “It’s like a stack of Jenga bricks,” he says, “and they keep pulling one out and, at some point, there are no more things you can take out before the whole thing just falls apart.” Commercial radio’s increasing homogeneity, he argues, will be its downfall. Digital streaming services such as Spotify or Google Play already provide instant access to a greater volume and variety of music. And now Beats 1, Apple’s new 24/7 internet radio station, has live hosts curating shows from New York, Los Angeles, and London. Then, there are our cars: Once they’re manufactured to make listening through a smartphone as seamless as it is to press the button for radio, commercial radio, says Atkinson, is dead.

It’s been decades since commercial radio hosts have chosen what music to play. Letting anyone—never mind a whirling dervish like Saunders—play and chat about the music they love is too big an economic risk. Instead, program directors use software to calibrate each hour so that something appeals to everyone. It’s hard to see how this algorithmic one-size-fits-all approach can survive the rise of online music streaming. While community radio can be messy, it’s always fresh. This past October, CJSW started podcasting—every broadcast is available online to playback on demand. Web traffic has increased fivefold. It would be pointless to time shift commercial radio because it’s too similar from one show to another, from one week to the next.

Community radio’s inherent flexibility has also allowed CJSW to cover events and topics in original ways. In 2010, in the months leading up to the surprise election of Naheed Nenshi, CJSW launched an ambitious municipal election coverage project. Joe Burima, the station’s first full-time news and spoken word director, with the help of an intern and a team of 10 volunteers, interviewed all 88 mayoral and aldermanic candidates. “We felt that an ongoing issue with municipal elections—hell, all elections—is that the public did not have digestible information on candidates and their platforms,” says Burima.

The project put every candidate on an equal footing. Everyone from frontrunners to low-profile candidates were asked the same set of questions. Podcasts of the interviews with aldermanic candidates were posted online as part of an interactive map of the city. Interviews with mayoral candidates were broadcast during morning programs in the last two weeks before the election. Calgary’s 2010 municipal election had the highest voter turnout in over three decades. Fifty-three percent of eligible voters cast a ballot— a 20 percent jump from 2007. A bunch of factors contributed to the higher turnout, but CJSW’s coverage also developed its own momentum and became a respected source of information during the election.

“I WAS ALWAYS A QUITTER,” says Saunders as he brings up the levels on his microphone. The band is performing an ode to My Allergy to the Fans to the tune of Grease’s “Beauty School Drop Out.” Masters, Andy Sparacino, and Sabo Forte harmonize and diverge as they sing the farewell tune. Sparacino hits some surprisingly high notes for a burly guy with a red beard and penchant for trucker hats and flannel shirts. The song is funny, but also poignant.

“I quit that beauty school and for 14 years I just spent some time doing this radio show, but imagine all the perms that I saved the world from,” says Saunders. He drops the levels on the band to talk and then raises them again. “We’re going to do this for hours until you fade us out,” says Masters.

The Blasters pick up extra members as more musicians stop by to bid Saunders adieu. The performance studio is packed with instruments and crisscrossing wires, but the audio quality is excellent. In 2009, CJSW expanded from a dank hodgepodge of subterranean corridors to the airy environs of MacEwan Hall’s third floor. State-of-the-art equipment and bright open spaces give the station a more modern atmosphere. After moving into the new space, staff and volunteers set to work increasing the power of the broadcast signal from 4,000 to 18,000 watts, developing online podcasting, digitizing the library, and allowing listeners to text deejays in the booth.

Recently, CJSW launched Coming Up Calgary, an online event listing, including details for everything from Flames games to spoken word open mics. It’s a direct response to the shuttering of FFWD Weekly, whose listings CJSW hosts relied on to discuss local events. Coming Up Calgary is an extension of the station’s mandate, but it’s also a new frontier—a move beyond radio. Many volunteers also create their own podcasts, some of which quickly find traction and get thousands of downloads through iTunes.

Community radio remains beset by obstacles: fundraising, developing an audience, finding resources—it goes on and on. But the medium also has remarkable potential. Community radio is proving its resilience during a paradigm shift in how we learn and communicate about the places that we live. Calgary is a much richer place to call home because a ragtag collection of 300 amateurs have access to a broadcasting signal that reaches the city limits and beyond.

“Matt Masters and Blist, everybody. You guys are my Bruce Springsteen moment, that’s all I can say. Alright, gang. Signing off—My Allergy to the Fans. Blist, Matt Masters—thank you for joining me. Not enough words,” Saunders’ voice cracks. He hits play on his last song and The Beach Boys’ “Wouldn’t it be Nice” floods through thousands of speakers and eardrums across Calgary. Radio magic.

“Having a message should be cool,” says Toronto hip-hop artist Rich Kidd on the power of rap. Kidd hosted First Out Here: Indigenous hip-hop, a documentary by Noisey, in which Kidd visited Winnipeg, Regina and Toronto to meet with Indigenous hip-hop artists. Kidd, born to Ghanian parents, says he drew a lot of parallels between Black and Indigenous communities when it comes to the social and political issues both face. “I don’t enter things with expectations,” says Kidd, ” but I knew that anything I would encounter would exceed what I thought just because there’s a lot of history.”

Audio engineer David Strickland was one of the Indigenous artists featured in the film. Strickland, whose clients include Drake and Jamie Foxx,  says he doesn’t like the terms “native or Indigenous hip-hop.” He’s proud of his indigenous culture, but adds that he’s not limited by it because he tries to avoid being pigeonholed. “There are a lot of people who don’t know that we have that quality of artists. We are not all a certain way—so I say, be subjective.”

The film focuses on artists such as Drezus, Winnipeg Boyz, and T-Rhyme all reflect on the issues that surround their culture and community, from missing and murdered aboriginal woman to discussing the challenges they face trying to earn respect and popularize their music outside of the indigenous community. Strickland hopes the film helps shed some light on the artists’ talent, not just the Indigenous struggle. His advice to emerging indigenous hip-hop artists in transcending stereotypes and reaching mainstream success is simply: originality.

“Don’t just talk about the girls and the bling,” says Strickland, “that’s the problem in hip-hop, everyone is trying to cover everybody else, but back in the day we had 20 different flavours.” Kidd is also reminiscent of  mainstream hip-hop—even referring to Tupac as sort of the “Che Guevara of hip-hop” of his time. “There was a point in rap where it was cool to be militant about what you believe,” Kidd adds, “and to stand up for your culture, beliefs and rights – that focus is so far off now.” Kidd believes that those that control mainstream and commercial music aren’t interested in promoting songs with strong messages, largely because they have the power to affect change.

“If we are told that this f**kery is going on day after day,” he says, “then we’re going to want to change it.” Kidd adds that the hip-hop community has the opportunity to watch these issues like “eagles” and to “intercept the path of where our generation is headed by leading them to the right direction and using our voice for positive change.”

The film was screened for the public by the Regent Park Film Festival in April and is available on YouTube through Vice’s sister channel Noisey. 

Illustration by Kat Verhoeven

I was maybe, what, eight years old? There I was, standing in my literal cave of a stinky basement—a carved-out hollow of dark, dank stone under my rickety old house—scrounging through books piled high into mountains of dust. I whipped out one book. The cover stood out: A woman with flowing ebony braids is striking an ultimate power pose atop a flying carpet. At her side sat a man with eyes agog in admiration. Aladdin and Jasmine, I wondered? No, far from it. It was so, so much better. Her name was Princess Cimorene, a protagonist girl with gumption, confidence, bravery; she was everything I wanted to be. And that was my introduction to the Enchanted Forest Chronicles, an epic fantasy series and my all-time favourite set of books.

I remember it as the first time, in my burgeoning mind, that I never wanted a book to end. This book was different. There was magic and enchantment, sure, but the true fairytale aspect was Princess Cimorene herself. A girl with some ’tude, some spunk (oh, and, yeah, she fully, coolly befriends dragons). In the following years, however, I’d come to learn Princess Cimorene was a minority. As much as I fell in deeper and deeper love with the genre, I was not heart-eyed at all over the dearth of characters like me. I soon discovered it wasn’t enough for authors to plop a female character into the story (which was rarity enough)—I wanted complex female characters, vulnerable ones, strong ones, ones that felt real and diverse. It felt paramount to me that I, and other readers like me, could see themselves in these stories.

In his November 2012 Tedx talk, “The Mystery of Storytelling,” literary agent Julian Friedmann argues prehistoric caves were the earliest cinemas. Hunters would go in, look at the paintings, and imagine the fear they’d feel when they went out in the bushes. They rehearsed it. It’s the same reason we use literature, theatre, and cinema. “When we’re looking up at the screen,” he says during his talk, “we’re certainly not looking at you, we’re looking at ourselves, because only we are the storytellers.” They gazed up at the walls and, in place of dragons and wizards under the flickering torchlight, they saw beasts, and in them they saw themselves. But where do girls and women, people of colour, and those on the LGBTQ spectrum go when they want to look at themselves?

These days, more and more, fantasy and sci-fi are our pop culture cave drawings of choice. The genre has played an ever-larger role, gradually increasing in dominance since the Second World War, says Lisa Makman, a Columbia-educated Ph.D. and English lit lecturer at the University of Michigan. Just look at cultural staying power of Harry Potter or Game of Thrones’ cult following. We have superhero movies galore, what seem like an endless amount of post-apocalypse books and movies, and a surplus of monster-human and dystopian love triangles. The new Star Wars grossed nearly $120 million at the U.S. box office on its first day. That’s not to mention the hundreds of spin-offs, imitations, and other popular shows and books—we’re saturated. And, yet, in a series of worlds where there are, quite literally, no boundaries, why have so few authors and creators imagined a world of diversity?

Fantasy and sci-fi have nothing and yet everything to do with reality. The twin genres aren’t about escapism; they’re a search for meaning. In them, we see a mirror of the world reflected back— our own modern struggles dancing in the cave light. In many cases, when we read fantasy we’re hoping for a sort of redemption: from war, from nuclear weapons, from broken hearts, from a depleting ozone. There’s a reason dystopian fantasy is on the rise. One of the most influential fantasy writers, J.R.R. Tolkien, coined the term eucatastrophe: “the sudden happy turn in a story which pierces you with a joy that brings tears.” He argues that a eucatastrophic state privileges us with a glimpse of truth—one that liberates us from our limitations. That’s why we read fantasy: truth.

Fantasy is all about truth. Alison Gopnik is an American psychologist who, in a 2005 Slate article, argued in favour of the genre. Those enmeshed in the world of fantastical lore, she argued, are more secure in their physical and psychological environments than those with a lessened propensity for the magical. “Children may love fantasy not because they can’t appreciate the truth or because their lives are difficult,” she wrote in the article, “but for precisely the opposite reason.” Such stories are important because, rather than offering readers escape from their woeful environment, they let readers embrace a single-minded determination towards truth. In other words, fantasy lets us work out our shit—but how do you do that when you can’t see yourself in the narrative?

When I got sick in my early 20s, fantasy became excruciatingly important to me. Doctors had no idea what was happening. I felt lethargic and on the verge of falling asleep all the time. I lost my job as a salesperson at Indigo. I couldn’t leave my bed for over two months; even watching TV became too tiring. Even now, way after the fact, doctors still have no idea what happened—the best they can surmise is that I contracted a devastating virus. But what I do know is this strange time in my life let me a lot of time to think. I’d imagine what was happening in my body. I felt like I was living in a corpse, everything was failing, weakening, into nothing. That’s where the image of the snake came in.

In my feverish, weakened state, I kept imagining a glistening snake in my lower abdomen, a venomous serpent. It felt like a mythical battle going on inside my body. Later, I was sure the recurring image was an instinctual urge to fight for my life. I felt on the verge of death and so everything became primal. I would imagine the snake shedding its skin and in it I wished for my own rebirth. When our ancestors looked up at the churning grey sky, they saw anger. In the sun and abundance of crops, they saw benevolence. When we have no answers, we construct tales. Centuries ago, they made gods. For everything prolific and small, we weave stories where answers have yet to present themselves. That’s what I was doing in those months. Without paper or pen, I was writing a fantasy story in my mind, discovering my truth, working it all out.

An interminable hope impelled me toward these stories—I would get better. The mystery illness would abate. Escapism buffers us against reality, even as it continues to be plundered. Fantasy helped make me proactive; I visualized what I could not see. After I recovered, I kept writing stories, but they evolved. I incorporated dragons as main characters in my story, and they would coalesce with female characters. I made these characters wild, defiant, feminine, and strong— exactly the kinds of women I’d always wanted in the books that I read.

In all the various mainstays and tropes in fantasy, women and dragons inhabit close quarters in our psyche—and this relationship has played out time and time again in literary and cultural scenes. Silken-haired Game of Thrones fan favourite Daenerys Targaryen is best known, for example, as the mother of dragons. After her husband dies, she cremates his body and burns herself along with three petrified dragon eggs in his remains. The eggs hatch, and she goes from being a child (who, it must be said, was “given” to said husband as a gift and political pawn), to a boss-ass bitch. It’s the quintessential rise of the phoenix.

Yet even Daenerys, often lauded as a model for awesome women characters, is problematic: she comes with some serious white savior issues, a whole lot of indecision, and much—too much—is made of the men who follow her out of devotion to her beauty and goodness. She’s as much of an example of how far we’ve come as she is of how far we have to go.

I often wonder where, as Game of Thrones continues, she’ll fit into Carl Jung’s theory of the dragon as the arch-enemy of the hero: “[The] mother dragon which threatens to overwhelm the birth of the God, which the Hero must defeat before becoming the Hero.” In Jung’s world, the father figure triumphs over the matriarch—a trend we often see in real life, but also in Sleeping Beauty’s puissant Maleficent. Though she’s recently received an Angelina Jolie remake, this spunky, spiky lady is best known as the evil dragon who battles the heroic prince. And loses.

Dragons are a classic villain, says Jordan Peterson, eminent psychologist and University of Toronto professor. He points to Medusa as a prime example. Even on her best hair days, this lady turned men into stone. She represents what Peterson says is man’s ultimate fear: a woman rejecting them. Taking a Darwinian approach, Peterson theorizes that when a woman rejects a man, he’s also rejected by nature—because, as gatekeepers to reproduction, women symbolize the power of nature, natch. When a (male) knight tames the dragon, he also tames the woman, ensuring survival through his offspring. It’s a fascinating theory, but one that reduces both women and men to their pure biological makeup. I suspect Peterson’s right—it’s a classic case of fantasy, but also one that needs to change.

Too often both women and dragons represent wild natural forces, either within us or outside us, but always ones that must be tamed and conquered. After watching a video clip in which mythologist Joseph Campbell describes the Western dragon as a symbol of the untamed wild, it struck me that in myth women, too, usually symbolize an uncontrolled element of nature. In her seminal book Women Who Run with Wolves, Clarissa Pinkola Estes analyzes the roles of female characters in classic tales. “Wildlife and the Wild Woman are both endangered species,” she writes. “Over time, we have seen the feminine instinct nature looted, driven back, and overbuilt.” To Estes, the Wild Woman has been mismanaged just like the wild lands, relegated to poorest land in the psyche. I can’t help but agree.

It’s truly hard, if not seemingly impossible, to break away from archetypal figures. Since the dawn of stories, through goddesses and sorceresses, powerful women have graced our imagination. And there are shining examples of diversity like my treasured Enchanted Forest Chronicles stories. At the same time, we’ve collectively kept women largely in narrow roles—and that’s not to mention both the stereotyping and scarcity of heroes who are people of colour or LGBTQ. Luckily, I’m not the only one who’s desperate for more diversity. While change seems slow, many authors are starting to defy standard narratives, and many of them are Canadian women.

I spoke to Vancouver-based author and teacher Linda DeMeulemeester about the inspiration behind her award-winning children’s fantasy series, Grim Hill, which follows two sisters who move to a new house and battle supernatural forces. DeMeulemeester was drawn to the power women have in Celtic mythology. While other mythologies portray women with power and supernatural abilities, DeMeulemeester stresses, that power often resides in their ability to weaken men. That’s not what she was after. Instead, legendary Celtic figures like Queen Maeb intrigued her—these mythological women who held wealth, power and influence of their own accord, not in relation to their sexiness. “Influence is the key,” says DeMeulemeester, “that they had power to make important decisions and contributions.”

Influence also means it’s not all about muscles. While it’s nice to see women with sheer physical strength, I’d also like to see more stories where women can depend on cleverness, wit, talent. Ontario-based children’s author Alison Baird agrees. As a young woman, Baird was in love with larger-than-life heroines. She recognizes now that these books, often women-authored, were likely written as a way to address the need for strong, brave, proactive female figures in fiction. But eventually, she became disillusioned with the trend. The heroines felt a little too strong, a little too unrealistic. “I could not, as a nonathletic bookworm,” says Baird, “relate to a woman who could wield a broadsword and handily defeat a male opponent on the field of battle.” The female protagonists in her many fantasy books rely less on physical strength and more on strength of character and cleverness.

This concern harkens back to an age-old question: Can women still have it all? My answer is: why the hell not? Fantasy gives us room to be optimistic: we strive towards admirable characters and learn from evil ones. Fantasy gave us one of TV’s greatest feminists, Buffy the Vampire Slayer, a character that flips patriarchy the middle finger,shows that feminine doesn’t equate weakness, is never defined by a man, shares her power with other women, and on. (Though she’s also a pint-sized, white blonde.)

Yet, Buffy went off-air in 2003. More recently we have Marvel’s Jessica Jones, a complex superhero who helps us confront rape culture and sexual trauma. There’s also Rey from Star Wars, who, it should be noted, was criticized for being too awesome—some film buffs, views, and pop culture writers called her a Mary Sue, a term used to deride a woman character who’s good at everything. Apparently, to them, she was unrealistic. Let’s just pause a second to ponder this: In a world full of fantastical scenarios, it was the heroic woman that caused them to stir uncomfortably in their seats. And let’s not even get started on the noticeable lack of Rey toys in the Star Wars sets, despite her status as the main character.

Strong women characters who are in charge of their own fates isn’t a new trend, says Liz Johnston, manager of Toronto’s Mabel’s Fable Childrens Book Store. It’s often one book, though, that makes it mainstream and enlightens the populace, like the recent Hunger Games. (Although it’s worth debating whether protagonist Katniss’s ultimate reward of a husband and babies is a positive message or not.) Johnston says that the number of female protagonists in popular dystopian fiction has helped advance diversity. Once something becomes so widespread and popular, she says, it makes it easier for book publishers to pick it up. She’s noticed many publishers are now starting to move away from books targeted toward males, which is a welcome change.

While recently browsing the children’s section at Indigo, I noticed two categories: “LGBTQIA” and “We Need Diverse Books.” Admittedly, I didn’t know whether to feel happy or uneasy. While I want increased awareness, I also hope the day will come when such classifications won’t exist—that diversity will be just as much a part of fantasy and sci-fi books as plot, spaceships, and magic.

I think about Tolkien, whose work I like but also find uncomfortable. Traversing the plains of Middle Earth while reading Lord of the Rings as an adult, physical descriptions of some characters—the evil ones—snapped me out of my eucatastrophic state. I was transported back to my living room couch, shaking my head. As John Yatt wrote in the Guardian: “Perhaps I’d better come right out and say it. The Lord of the Rings is racist.” Tolkien’s evil characters have dark skin, slant-eyes, broad features, and dreadlocks. After I wrenched the spear of truth from my heart, I thought, “Damn, this Easterling—enemy of the free people, sallow and swarthy, dark hair and dark eyes—sounds just like my uncle.” So maybe, for now, I’m just happy to know children browsing the many colourful covers can find themselves.

Almost universally, white is seen as divine and a force of good, where as darkness is evil. When these features are projected on characters, I start to drift out of these worlds. I’m trying to see myself in the forces of good, but the good doesn’t look like me. My hair is thick, dark, and curly. My eyes are an almost black-brown, cupped in dark circles. I’ve never read a description in a book that refers to my features as angelic, and let’s face it, neither have most readers. Because angelic is an assumption; one of beauty, one of light features, one of worthiness.

Even in writing this article, I realized my sources were a pretty homogeneous group: they were all white. While I’m glad to have spoken to women—and those who identify on the LGBTQ spectrum—it was clear that it’s not just characters of colour who are absent, but writers, critics, booksellers. When Léonicka Valcius started Centennial’s book and magazine publishing program in 2011 she realized the same thing: “I walked into my class—of 60 to 70 people—and saw it was primarily white. There were a handful of people of colour, and a handful of men. That was another ‘huh’ moment.” Later, she came to the conclusion that CanLit “felt like very dead white guys writing about the Canadian experience that meant nothing to me.” That’s when Valcius started the #DiverseCanLit movement, a weekly Twitter discussion about all things diversity in Canada’s publishing world. Valcius says books are like time capsules, and when people look back to CanLit, they should have an opportunity to see how everyone—not just a select few—lived.

Certainly, I’m happy that J.M. Frey exists. Frey is a Guelph, Ont.-based science fiction and fantasy author, as well as a pop culture scholar and a self-described fanthropologist (a term used to describe employing anthropological techniques to study fans and fandom.) She is best known for her book Triptych: a sci-fi novel that follows three narrators as they recount major turning points in the life of a character named Gwen Pierson. Frey’s goal is to write intersectional, feminist novels, but she admits it’s hard to train herself out of writing the genre’s tropes.

She knows it’s frustrating for female readers and writers, especially those who identify as LGBTQ and/or as a person colour, to read or watch prolific fantasy tales. Echoing my earlier thoughts, she asks me: How can an author imagine all these incredible things, yet not imagine a diverse world? While she agrees fantasy is evolving, she also concurs that it’s doing so slowly. “For those of us who want better now, now, now,” she says, “it’s difficult to know we could have much more inclusive media, and more protagonists who are different.”

New Brunswick-based fantasy author KV Johansen adds that “the tendency still exists to use the heterosexual male as the default main character.” Lately, in an attempt to redress past favouritism toward male heroes, publishers are pushing for female protagonists—to the exclusion of men and boys. For Johansen, it’s not a perfect solution. Like me, she hopes we’ll soon outgrow this exclusionary categorization for the sake of equality. She’s not holding her breath, though, noting that there seems to be more reluctance in some segments of “fandom” to accept women, non-white, and non-straight heroes than there is to accept other inverted expectations and clichés—like “aged-and-creaky-archetypes and traditionally villainous creatures.” In other words, readers can get behind a good vampire, but not necessarily a complex, Black, gay, woman hero.

Later, though, when I speak to John Sellers, the children’s review editor for Publishers Weekly, he cautions against getting caught up in what’s meant for boys and what’s meant for girls, or certain categories. Sellers says publishers have an increased interest in diversity in children’s books, including a movement to stop “gender publishing” and start giving kids permission to read what they want to read. Books are packaged more neutrally and even so-called romance books are trending toward typographical covers. “Stories about people of colour, sexuality and identity,” he says, “have been more widely explored in recent years.”

While Sellers and others like him acknowledge the push towards diversification, publishers only make up one part of the equation. Opportunities must exist for readers to see themselves in stories, and for writers to create stories. It’s not enough for those books to be published; they have to be widely promoted, taught in schools, and made easily available. We should all be happy we have people like 11-yearold New Jersey girl Marley Dias, who launched the social action project and book drive #1000BlackGirlBooks after she became tired of reading about white boys and their dogs. She aptly called her assigned school books “monochromatic”.

Whenever we read a fantasy or sci-fi book or watch a movie, it’s our own self-discovery that’s the driving force of these many great quests. Vital to the exploits and the encounters is the identity that is revealed—and challenged—throughout. I’m hopeful that Sellers and others are right: that we’re seeing a change in the genre and using our great imaginations to craft a bigger world. Because everybody, not just beefy white dudes, deserve to open the doors to adventure, just like I did that day in my smelly basement.

Spoken word poet Zeinab Aidid // Photo by Setti Kidane

Nasim Asgari is looking at the tofu sitting in her shopping cart, waiting for her mother to join her at the food aisle at the No Frills store in north Toronto. I wonder what it’s going to taste like, she thinks. She adjusts her headscarf. Tomorrow she’ll start her trial 40 days as a vegetarian. It was time for a diet change. Time for a proper cleanse.

Asgari tries to spot her mother in the crowd but can’t recognize her among the other Muslim women shopping there this afternoon. She turns back to examining the tofu, oblivious to the older white man walking down the aisle. “The animals are out again,” he says under his breath but loud enough for her to hear. “Welcome to the First World.”

The moment feels like a dramatic slow motion film scene for the then 16-year-old. The man never looked directly at her but his words took her mind off tofu. Slowly they hit her eardrums and connected to her mind: Oh, that’s for me.

In that moment, Asgari said nothing. Upset, she went home that night, almost a year and a half ago now, and translated her emotions into lines of poetry in her journal. She performed those lines for the fifth or sixth time on March 8, 2015 at “When Women Rule the Night,” an International Women’s Day event held at Beit Zatoun, a cultural centre, gallery and community meeting space located in the west side of Toronto. She named the poem “Breath of a Warrior”—a literal translation of her Iranian name. Nasim means breeze. Asgari means warrior.

She smiles now when she recalls the man’s words, but her eyes give away the confusion she felt. The man had called her an animal simply because of the scarf she chose to wear, a decision she made when she was nine years old. He wasn’t the only one. A couple of days later after the grocery store incident, she was standing at a bus stop, when a man, probably drunk she thinks, ambled up to her. “Oh you Muslims,” he says, “you’re going to kill us all.”

He told me this is Canada,
And people who look and dress like me should have no business here.
He felt the need to remind me of the country I’m in,
As if the white colour on the flag
Represents the colour of the skin
Of the people who ‘should’ belong here.

“The Quran says to greet ignorance with peace,” says Asgari, so she turned to spoken word poetry to calmly create a counter-narrative against hate speech. She has chosen to embrace her “animal” self. She has released her suppressed inner voice and speaks out loud now of her Muslim experience in Toronto. She and other like-minded young Muslim women have formed a pack of poetesses that empower each other, not only through their own encounters with bigotry and cultural clashes, but those of other Muslims around the world, from the unwarranted deaths of Deah Barakat, Yusor Mohammed Abu-Salha, and Razan Mohammad Abu-Salha at Chapel Hill, North Carolina in January 2015 to the foul and false images of Muslim women that ISIS propagates in Syria. Closer to home, the group was part of the movement strongly advocating the welcome of Syrian refugees to Canada.

They do it with pens and voices, not teeth and claws.

In London, Ontario, 23-year-old Rozan Mosa performs her rhyming spoken word poetry, clad in a niqab. “Simply standing on stage is powerful enough to get people thinking about their prejudice,” says Mosa.

Muslim women like Asgari and Mosa are part of an evolving tradition of slam poetry and spoken word in North America that is reactionary in nature and activist in function. It grew more prevalent among Muslim American youth initially in response to the events of 9/11. In his report on “The rise of Islamic rap,” Peter Mandaville, director of the Ali Vural Ak Center for Global Islamic Studies at George Mason University, writes that Islamic hip-hop met a need for youth who were “searching for music that reflects their own experiences with alienation, racism and silenced political consciousness.” For Muslim American women, it was a new channel, making a space for their voices in a male-dominated field. In 2002, Palestinian-American poet Suheir Hammad’s performed her poem “First Writing Since” on Def Jam Poetry, an HBO spoken word TV series hosted by Mos Def, marking the shift.

In Canada, MuslimFest, an annual three-day festival in Mississauga, Ont., and one of the largest Muslim arts and culture festivals in North America, also emerged as a response to 9/11. Founded in 2004, it was meant to answer the question: How can we move forward as a community and show youth that Islam is more than the stereotypes portrayed in media and elsewhere? “Muslim Canadians come from such different backgrounds, cultures and experiences,” says Maduba Ahmad, a 23-year-old organizing member of the festival. “MuslimFest is a platform that allows them to just take their identity, whatever they associate it with, and vocalize it.” They’re speaking to themselves and also to the 25 percent of the attendees that are not Muslim.

In the 12 years since the festival launched, other platforms have also emerged to create spaces for Muslim poets, specifically Muslim female poets. One of those is the Muslims Writers Collective (MWC), an initiative aimed at cultivating a vibrant Muslim literary tradition that began in 2014. At such events, most of the audience, according to Key Ballah, a 25-year-old published poet who heads the Toronto chapter of the MWC, are women. I see what she means when I go to the inaugural MWC meeting in Toronto in February 2014. Out of the 50 people in the meeting space in the basement of the MaRS Discovery District at the footsteps of University of Toronto, only three are men. In five minutes, these women come up with a couple of verses of poetry on mental health, cultural confusion, identity struggles, and the definitions of home. “Our job now,” Ballah says, “is to continue to provide a space for these women to speak their voices.”

As these spaces flourish, community leaders I spoke to have noticed more women coming forward, especially as news coverage of Muslim-based issues, unwittingly, gives them material for their art. “We try to provide a unique, alternative space that doesn’t always exist,” says Yasmin Hussain, violence prevention coordinator at the Muslim Resource Centre (MRC) in London, Ont., where Mosa first performed. Like the MWC, the overarching goal isn’t to bring more women to the stage but create spaces that are more inclusive and safe for them to be comfortable and empowered to enter. “They are valuable and valid,” she says, these spaces that encourage and support the lesser-known insights and stories shared.

To do so effectively, some platforms choose specific topics that introduce women to the spoken art form. Platforms like Outburst! Young Muslim Women’s Project, an awarding winning project by the Barbra Schlifer Commemorative Clinic in Toronto that began September, 2011, are spaces specifically for Muslim girls to speak out about violence in their community. They create sisterhoods, embracing and empowering young women like Asgari.

In 2014, the MRC led a spoken word workshop where 21 Muslim girls wrote a collective piece called “As a Muslim Woman.” The first chorus rings out with relatability: “As a Muslim woman I am tired of representing one billion people.” As a young Muslim female writer, I can’t help but nod in agreement. These women channel, or allow the translation of, interpretations of Islam that emphasize teachings on women’s rights, gender justice, and independent identity. These identities, in terms of religion, race, and gender, are the tools they use to break free of their cages and change the perception of the wild. Asgari calls
it an “inner revolution,” and in many ways it has become one.

Spoken word poet Nasim Asgari // Photo by Tara Farahani

At Beit Zatoun’s “When Women Rule the Night” event, Asgari watches the performance of another Muslim girl, whose youthful energy exudes from her smile, her louder-than-life laugh, and her Persian eyes as she performs to a still and attentive room. “Tell them about me,” the performer says, both her hands point at herself. The crowd replies without missing a beat, “this woman that I am.”

Tonight, Beit Zatoun is a makeshift coliseum, and the tigresses have been released, ready to tear apart anti-Islam, antifeminist, anti-human bigotry and stereotyping. About 100 people, three-quarters female, mill about the wood-panelled town hall type of room with high ceilings and haunted-house style chandeliers. Today is a safe space for the female performers to share their personal truths with the audience. No judgement, no insult, no backlash. We’re all just listeners and observers to the stories and journeys these women let go of on the stage.

The venue’s name is Arabic for “House of Olives,” a fitting name for the cathartic atmosphere the room embodies. In a Quranic parable, the olive tree is referred to as “a blessed tree … neither of the east nor of the west, but whose oil would almost glow forth, though no light touched it.” Every performer seems to be an olive from that tree tonight, not embodying a geographical location, but shining bright in the spotlight.

Asgari is the last performer at the open-mic portion of the evening. She stands against a wall off to the side before she’s called to stage. Her eyes are closed but her lips are moving—she’s rehearsing. She wears a blue and yellow scarf on a black dress with a full-length chiffon coat. She’s introduced as “a 17-year-old high school student who will blow your mind” by this evening’s emcee. As always, before she begins, Asgari calms her nerves by saying a verse of the Quran to herself. She lifts her head, moves one step back from the microphone and raises her arms.

If hatred knocks at your door,
Greet it with a smile,
But tell it it has come too late,
For love is already having tea inside.

Asgari’s hand gestures in this performance make it seem like she has the wings of an albatross. The big sleeves of her coat rise and fall with every arm movement. She seems to soar on her words. The audience snaps their fingers melodically, indicating some kind of collective cerebral connection to her words and her emotions. Some nod their heads, some express their love more audibly—“soul grunts,” they call them. When her voice softens, the audience goes silent. When she raises her voice louder, the audience responds proportionally.

They’re responding to a transformation of a small girl into an impressively powerful woman. In mere minutes she gives the crowd goose bumps, makes them laugh, makes them cry, and lifts their spirits. When she’s done, she walks away to the thunderous applause of the crowd. Quick hug to the emcee, some smiles to her friend, and a couple of high-fives. She once described the process of performance as a release of energy, transferring the heavy thoughts in her head into space. That’s why, after most performances, she leaves for a moment, to escape the thoughts she left floating around in the room, to escape, what she calls, the uncomfortable vulnerability of her open mind and soul.

Afterwards, women come up to thank her for her voice. Some hug her, some hold her hands. The cerebral connection is acknowledged physically. We are the same, suggests the hug. Thank you for understanding, suggests the two-handed hand shake. Some, like me, just nod and smile with tears in their eyes to indicate that for five minutes, our inner struggles were her spoken thoughts.

The loudest voices supporting Asgari at these performances are her friends from Outburst!. Asgari joined the organization in 2014. There, she found a family of young women who accepted each other without judgement and listened to one another’s voices. They called their group a sisterhood and have grown to become just that: supportive, dependable, and present.

One of her “big sisters” in the crowd is Zeinab Aidid, a21-year-old Somali-Canadian with beautiful long black-to-brown braided hair and big, brown eyes. She says she has been obsessed with def poetry jam since she was 13 years old, when she went to a spoken-word event at a Muslim festival in Mississauga. There she became entranced by Amir Sulaiman, who was then one of the only prominent Muslim spoken-word artists. He performed a piece that the CIA once questioned him on because it deemed the words “anti-American.” His wife, Liza Garza, also a singer and a poet, wasn’t allowed to perform because the organizers didn’t want female performers, something that annoyed Aidid at the time. But, Sulaiman brought his wife on stage anyway. Between the life-threatening power of Sulaiman’s poetry and Garza’s performance with her baby strapped to her body, Aidid couldn’t imagine doing anything else.

Aidid tossed a couple of braids on her face towards the side as she casually told me how she used to wear the hijab all through high school. She doesn’t anymore. We were sitting in a reading room in the University of Toronto, at the end of one of the building’s signature long, wooden Hogwarts-esque tables.

She pulled out her driving licence: a picture of a younger Aidid wearing a headscarf. “I wasn’t pressured or anything. I just felt that it was a lie,” she says. “I was giving off this vibe that I was a devout Muslim, but I wasn’t.” She’s working on a new piece about her experience with the hijab, trying to convey her guilt over not experiencing what other Muslim girls do.

Even though she was born and raised here, Aidid doesn’t consider Canada to be her home: “I don’t feel any attachment to this land, but then what land do I have an attachment to?” Poetry, for her, is a way to document alternate narratives to find that sense of belonging. “I never read a story in a textbook I could relate to.” Asgari has told me the same thing. An animal can’t call a cage home.

One frigid February evening in 2015, I arrive at Reverb, a Regent Park community centre program where Aidid is a mentor. It’s taking place at Daniels Spectrum, an arts and culture hub, where I see Aidid talking to some of her “sisters.” We’re sitting in another makeshift coliseum, set up in the third floor lounge featuring an open concept kitchen. Fifty emerging spoken-word artists and poets are sitting in a semi-circle, many of us on wooden chairs, plastic chairs or stools. Some lounge on a rug with large floor pillows that’s at the centre of the room. A rustic wooden “Welcome Desk” sign hangs above the performing space, microphone all set up. “This is a safe space,” announces the emcee. “We’ll be hearing some truth tonight. We’ll be hearing some honesty tonight.”

In Grade 7, my English teacher was a tall, bald, tubby British fellow who never wrote on the chalkboard behind him but used his versatile voice box to prove the power of poetry. “You have to read it to know it,” he used to say, “but you have to read it right.” He would demonstrate. First, he read Shakespeare’s “Shall I compare thee to a summer day” in his loud, booming headmaster tone, onerously emphasizing every other word with his right arm powerfully flailing up and down. Then he read it in his soft, melodic tone, the volume of his voice decreasing as he concluded the poem, the last line just a few decibels above a whisper.

I’m reminded of this today as I hear Aidid voice her piece about her cousin who was shot over a stolen phone that happened to belong to a drug dealer in a gang. When Aidid told me the story at U of T, she looked away and spoke vaguely, mentioning that lately her writing had been “consumed” by her cousin. She tells the audience this too when the emcee affectionately calls her to the stage in a booming sports announcer voice as “Z-Money”—a joke from Aidid’s high school days when she wanted to be a rapper. Today, Aidid looks right at the audience and tells her cousin’s story softly, powerfully, emotionally, fiercely.

I replay it in my head
My aunt collapsing into my mother’s arms when
we got there
Her children crying at her feet
My uncle calling in to work
‘It’s March 23, 2012. This is employee #7752, I
will not be coming into work today because I
will be burying my son’

She repeats the last line three times. The first time is soft. She chokes up and holds back tears the second time. She pauses. The crowd listens silently. No snaps, no soul grunts, no verbal applause. Only Aidid’s voice pierces the room the third time. When she finishes, she walks away quickly to roaring applause. Her sisterhood meets her at the back with supportive hugs. The next speaker thanks her for sharing. He’s been reminded of a similar experience he had, a shooting at a pizza joint. He was happy they could collectively mourn, remember, and move on.

A couple of weeks later, I was walking down the street one sunny afternoon, heading to an Outburst! event, when Asgari tells me, “sometimes existing just feels heavy.” Aidid turns to her, “You should write that down.” Asgari replies, “I think I might have somewhere.” They stop at a red light, watching the red hand, waiting for it to turn green.

Young women like Aidid and Asgari trace their ability to tell such poetic stories to their ancestry. In most cultures, the origins of spoken word can be found in the oral tradition in religious, cultural, and familial setting. It is the oldest form of poetry that has evolved over time, but its core principles still remain—consciousness of how words sound out loud, the cerebral thread that connects speaker to audience, and the power of the tone of voice.

Aidid emphasises how words are part of her blood: “Somalia is a nation of poets,” she says. “My dad’s quite creative too. I’ve never seen him write, but he tells stories.” Asgari credits her parents for giving her a poetic name that she channels, which she addresses in “Breath of a Warrior.”

There is a reason this oral culture is handed down. MWC’s Ballah says Islam is poetic in nature, and poetry has historically been an integral part of Muslim culture. A fable recalls how Prophet Muhammad entered a verse of the Quran into a poetry competition without attribution. The entries were put up for display and a poet from afar read the verse and declared it to be the most inimitable piece of poetry he had ever come across. Islamic folklore is also littered with examples of women being unable to tell their stories. Many were slave girls fighting for their voices to be heard. Some were queens and princesses, fighting for a female narrative.

Ballah has her own stories to tell. Her book of poems Preparing My Daughter for Rain was published in 2014, the same year she started wearing the hijab. On Jan. 7, 2015, the day of the Charlie Hebdo shooting, she was spat on by a woman at a subway station. Her assailant missed. A couple of years earlier, while she was at university, a drunk young Muslim man, so ashamed and saddened by his actions, began reciting Quranic verses in an attempt to prove to Ballah, to God, to himself that he was a Muslim.

I swear I am Muslim—he slurs.
I say: I know. No—he says—you’re judging me,
look.
And he holds his hands over his ears and he begins
to recite
[…] and he tries again and again, never getting
past Bismillah
He keeps on saying ‘No you don’t understand.
I am Muslim, I am Muslim, I am Muslim, I am
Muslim.”
I know, I say.
And he holds the bottle to his mouth and he almost
swallows it whole…

In this way, identity and culture continue to be lock and key to the trappings of personal struggles and societal perceptions. Ballah is finishing her new self-published book titled Skin and Sun, documenting her struggle to understand her position in the world as a Black Muslim woman, set for release this year. This summer, she’s set to speak at Duke University as part of a panel that discussed Muslim women who use art as a medium to express themselves.

Asgari is also set to release her first collection of poetry, at the age of 18. Eighty-nine backers raised more than $5,000 on Kickstarter for the book to be published. Called What was Swept Under the Persian Rug, the image on the cover of the book is a powerful gothic photo of Asgari standing on a Persian rug in a desert landscape, her head raised to a grey sunset sky, her arms wide open, her coat made of faded Arabic lettering. It’s the still image encapsulating the moment before lightning strikes and thunder roars, all at the beat of a woman’s command.

Growing up in a low-income household in a small Quebec town, Starchild Stela passed the time drawing. “It was one of the few things I felt I received validation for,” they say. As a teen they started to graffiti and moved to Montreal where they have been working since. Within the last five years the artist says they have become more dedicated to their art, a mix of soft and bright colours—with feminist messaging. The artist often refers to it as “radical cute culture” or “radical softness.” Feminist messaging is incorporated in their artwork with mottoes such as, “I believe you,” and “unapologetically feminist.”

The mix of art and feminism in their work is organic and can’t be disassociated, they say. “My work comes from my heart and guts,” they add. “I started to explore feminism and anti-oppression politics while I was processing traumatic gender experiences. It helped me understand trauma in a larger context.” As their understanding of feminism evolves, so does their work. Stela’s earlier work was a nod to how much they loved 1980s and ’90s manga as a teen. Now, they say their work—with its soft, luminous imagery—reflects their personality as an adult.

“I also want to dedicate myself a bit more to radical softness,” they say. “I would love to co-organize a radical softness art show, and maybe a pop-up gallery for a month.” They have a strong interest in community building and are excited to collaborate more with friends and other artists. Like with hosting art-making workshops as therapy for survivors of sexual violence: “I’m interested in focusing on my experiences with coping with trauma and art-making as survival.”

A former This intern, Hillary Di Menna is in her second year of the gender and women’s studies program at York University. She also maintains an online feminist resource directory, FIRE- Feminist Internet Resource Exchange.

UPDATE (SEPTEMBER 5, 2017): The subject of the story’s pronouns have been updated from the original point of publication.

Illustration by Hannah Wilson

YOU DON’T EXPECT the word “amazing” to come out of someone’s mouth so often when they speak about difficult issues every day. Splitting her time between New York and Toronto, Kim Katrin Milan is an an educator, writer, artist, yoga instructor, and activist. She does so much that a casual viewer would be forgiven for thinking her website is about a collective group, not one person. But Milan does it all herself—and with a positive attitude. All her work is purposefully connected: when speaking about social justice with one community, for instance, she may spend the first half of the workshop doing yoga. Everything she does covers the same themes of activism, leadership, equity, and justice.

These themes have always been part of Milan’s life. She intentionally surrounds herself with diversity. Her work itself allows her to be good to the people in her life. Take her studies in transgender issues, for example, says Milan. Her husband, Tiq, a writer and activist, is also a transgender man—Kim says her work allows her “to be a better partner and a better support” for him. Milan speaks about her community often, but what she really means is communities, plural: the LGBTQ community, the feminist community, the Black community—she wants them all to have support and equality.

When Milan was 17, she worked at Transition, an organization for students leaving high school. It was then that she realized how many people need support. Later, in her early 20s, she launched the People Project with Natalyn Tremblay, an independent artist whose work explores identity. The organization provides alternative education, mostly in Toronto, to various communities and uses art to help those communities speak about difficult subjects in creative ways. In 2015, it launched the Pride Community Mural Project and invited queer and trans newcomers, immigrants, refugees, and non-status people to contribute to the mural, showcasing the diverse challenges of those who are new to the city.

Independently, Milan runs workshops all over North America. People and organizations reach out to her when they want to speak about difficult subjects, like racism and sexism. She recently ran a workshop at McMaster University with her husband on the politicsof desire and consent. She likes to open each workshop by speaking broadly about a subject (How do we work across difference?) before narrowing her focus to specifically address her audience (What are some examples of ways people are changing the world?). Often, she’ll look at a specific social or political culture, such as rape culture, and eventually build toward breaking down systems of oppression on a smaller scale—and confronting how to “interrupt those systems.”

After her recent workshop with Tiq, a 17-year old boy approached Milan to admit his realization that sexism played a big role in his cultural background. Listening to her, he had decided to talk to other men and challenge rape culture. This is one of the many times Milan has seen her work make a difference. She wants the people she speaks with to know that they can affect change, even on a small scale. She still keeps in touch with the student and says he kept his word to open conversations with other men.

For Milan, it’s important that she continue to connect with youth—no matter how big her work or her profile become. She wants “that 16-year-old gay boy in Ohio who sends me a message to still feel like he can” and “that young girl in Indonesia who is queer and just coming out to still send me a tweet and know that I will hit her back and be like: ‘I got you.’”
She speaks excitedly about her part ownership of the Glad Day Bookshop, the oldest LGBTQ bookstore in the world, adding that she is the daughter of a librarian. She is currently working on her own book, which she thinks will help take her social justice work to a new level.

Creativity is the string that runs through everything Milan does. It especially shows through in the art and performance shows she curates—like with “Fan the Flames: Queer Positions in Photography,” which was at the AGO in 2014. She wants to educate people, but in an artistic way. “It’s like people don’t know that they’re learning things but they really are,” she laughs, “and they have a really beautiful experience at the same time.” This year at Pride in Toronto, Milan hosted the Cipher Cabaret with the Buddies in Bad Times Theatre. They used fast-paced presentations on the topics of queer culture through theatre and technology to “spark some conversations and connection” and to “re/define queerness for the 21st century.”

When asked how she does it all, she responds using hummingbirds as an analogy; Milan has them tattooed on her wrist. When she was young, she had conversations with her grandmother about the way the birds flap their tiny wings so hard that at the end of the day “they almost have a heart attack, they are going so intensely—but that’s just how they’re made up.” She is, she believes, the type of person who excels by doing many different things. She adds that she loves the people she works with and doesn’t look at it as a job. To her, it is a calling.

Still, she’s incredibly busy. During one week, she did a TEDx Talk in London, Ont., then flew to New York for the Out100 Awards, then held meetings with new colleagues, and finally did a workshop on social entrepreneurship and women’s leadership. “Every day,” she says, “is profoundly different.” But it is all part of her lived experience.

While reflecting on her life, she remarks that youth are always asked what they want to be when they grow up. What they are really asking, she says, is “How do you want to make money?” What we should be asking, she says, is: “What kind of person do you want to be?”