“The future feels daunting. Maybe writing together, walking together, witnessing these times together in this way will help us to forge ahead differently. At the very least, it might help us to limit our doom-scrolling.” ¹

Enacting decolonialism.

Laura: In my distrust of university academia, i am always on guard whenever i first enter a classroom. The negative experiences outweigh all other emotions or memories and i am forced to mentally put up walls and become somewhat detached. But also, i feel bored. i always dreamed of going to university to have deep conversations with other minds and to build up our ideas together. But the truth is, university is a colonial machine with deep links to capitalism and most people within it have their own agendas that seek to gain rather than give. It is a far cry from this imagined place of innovation, and it is an even farther cry from a place of decolonization.

Everyone is still coming to terms with understanding colonialism and their own placement within it; no one ever really talks about decolonization, let alone enacts it. And i am stuck there, in a classroom that has hurt me more than a few times, trying to keep my shit together, and overworking to find scraps of this “thing” i am looking for. It’s a thing that i sometimes forget or lose sight of but it’s something like a place. There is a sense of displacement within the university that has me feeling even more dry than i already feel, having been displaced from my own Dene lands. i am always looking for a place of comfort, of home — a place where i don’t have to dissociate, a place where i can quench this thirst for radical imagination and well-being.

Irem: I come from a borderland. I cross transnational borders to make a living. I deal with border control on a regular basis. My displacement and homelessness are not only abstract feelings that I contemplate every once in a while, they form an empirical reality. It is a somatic experience. It is a mental turmoil.

In his speech at the University of Toronto encampment on June 14, 2024, inspired by Joy James’s Captive Maternal, Fred Moten talked about the problematic betrayal of the people who are nurtured by their communities, who become sacrifices to the institutions in the hopes of changing the world. However, the dilemma of betrayal here is that these people who are sacrificed to the institutions end up offering more comfort to the university admins, faculty, and colonialist structures than their own communities. As I listened to them speak, I felt deep grief in my core. I, among many others, have been in this imposed exile which has been packaged and delivered to me as a personal achievement. This so-called personal achievement is a prolonged practice of regulating our emotions, bodies, and time to accommodate colonial institutions and their doctrines. In many different and (somehow also) common ways, our displacement from our homelands meant that we cut ties with our more relentless sides. We learned to regulate our boredom in classrooms to make space for people who don’t look like us, comfort their emotions, and affirm their politics. We had to sit tight and tell our students to sit tight when our course directors imposed an arbitrary grading system on our students. We had to comply with the rules of the english language and format our writing so that we became valuable members to the academic industrial complex.

Accomplices for a less shitty world.

Laura: As depressing as all of this is, i am a naïve native that carries this heavy weight of hope with me, so i continue to let myself become trapped within academia’s clutches in order to do whatever it is that i can do as an individual no matter how alone i am. i let myself hope that maybe i will be able to do just one little thing in this giant bureaucratic apparatus. i let myself get caught up in it all. But every once in a while, someone comes along and lets me know that it is not where i need to be at that moment, and that this is not something that an individual can defeat alone. These chance encounters that i make within universities give me strength and, in some way, keep me going. Keep me going in a way that doesn’t create self-sacrifices for the institution, in a way that’s like a combination of care and fire. Because it is in finding others with similar goals and hearts that you become stronger, angrier, and more passionate, and it changes how you move forward because it’s not about just you anymore. i am quick to struggle by myself as i am accustomed to it, but it is entirely different to witness someone else struggle. i want to then do everything within my power to prevent it. It’s about becoming accountable for each other’s wellness, and it’s about finding fellow accomplices who are working towards building a less shitty world.

Irem: What exactly does it mean to accuse universities of colonialism? It means that these institutions cannot keep up their liberal humanitarian façade without my presence and input. Without me and Laura (and many more students like us), the university would be exposed as one giant war machine.² Without me and Laura, the faculty would act as managers (and even more realistically, correctional officers). Without me and Laura, the four walls of the classroom would transform into a prison cell; a cell that disciplines the inhabitants’ behaviours and regulates their bodies. This is what I mean when I accuse universities. So, talking to Laura for the very first time felt like plotting an escape with my cellmate. 

Being a queer international student from the Middle East, I always feel isolated in this imposed exile. But when Laura and I started collaborating, it felt like we were defying the system, like two little kids cutting off school to hang out in the woods. Or finding one drop of water to keep me going in an extremely hostile desert. This is where our radical collaboration grows its roots and becomes powerful.

This poem has not magically decolonized the classroom. Decolonization is only for those who dare to dissent. By dissent, I mean a community-building practice where care and love become exercises in collective autonomy against the empire. And here in this poem, we dare to dissent and position our efforts as part of the collective and ongoing work of decolonization. Dene and Turkish parts in the poem are consciously not translated to present untranslatability as a resistance to the colonial hegemony of english and as an empowering reconnection with our languages.

Finding cracks in cement buildings.

Laura: It can be hard to find anyone to connect with who understands such things, much less try to reach towards a world that many can’t bother to imagine outside whatever stifling structure they have been given. i found a connection to Irem who i sensed maybe held a similar dissatisfaction with the academic/colonial/soul-sucking world we are in. When Irem would speak in class, i kind of felt relief because it meant that i didn’t have to speak more, because she said what i was thinking. These moments are rare. i find that when i don’t have to speak — when i can save my own selfish energy — i have found someone i want to know more of. Someone that makes being in this classroom more tolerable. We would speak here and there, but mostly it was when we were faced with making a group project (which i was not exactly looking forward to) that Irem offered me a chance to do something that felt more meaningful.

Irem wrote a poem. The poem was entirely of her creation, her feelings, her brilliancy and, perhaps feeling that we were feeling the same things, she asked me to collaborate. i started working on mirroring the poem from my own perspective. i thought about these feelings of deep isolation and alienation, and how this university place has affected me. I thought about the buildings, and its cold structures, and how i am always trying to find cracks in them. Cracks filled with life, slowly working towards loosening its grips to this land. i thought about the structures of home in contrast to institutional buildings and how, in my Dene language, home means fire, kǫ́. It is where fire is lit, where people gather in one place around that fire for warmth. i felt a heat from this poem. It was subtle in its anger, but also seeking warmth.

i am not a fluent Dene language speaker. i was born away from my lands and did not grow up knowing my language. So, i work hard to come to know my language no matter how far away i am from knowing it all. We both found it important to integrate our languages within the poem. Just like how people can know what the other is thinking or feeling without speaking, our languages have their own elements that are not translatable. In both our languages, english cannot properly communicate its meaning, and both of us stumble with our languages in some way.

Regardless, i love each and every single letter of my language that i have come to know, and the closest thing i have found to embody my language is poetry. The creative words in poetry can disrupt english and its ties to colonial rules, and it creates a coded practice for readers to work towards spending time with it to decipher meaning and feeling. And just like our ongoing collaboration and connection, we both work in a way that isn’t about giving and taking, but is more about giving each other time. It is also about giving each other a place to learn from one another, lean on one another, and be able to shit talk to one another to our hearts’ content.

Irem: During the time of writing this poem, our practice of collaboration was not a practice of refusal.³ It was a confrontation with the system. Therefore, instead of a refusal, our practice of collaboration draws attention to the empire and how deep its extractive and exploitative practices reach to colonize our bodies and minds. I, temporarily occupying space on this stolen land, have been grieving for the loss of my home, myself, before the alienation of my displacement, and this personal achievement of being “sent away.”

Laura, as my co-conspirator in this alienation, has been showing me new ways of dreaming and imagining “beyond tenure and peer review and the structures that have been imposed in these lands by white supremacist colonial capitalism.”⁴ We could talk about all the fancy ideas we came up with while we were creating this piece. But what is more important here is that we dared to recentre care and solidarity in this process. The requirements of the classroom and the university were temporarily suspended after we started working together because we dared to turn our attention away from them. Our attention, focus, interest, enthusiasm all lie in this poem, even though it might not be immediately accessible to readers. They all lie in these lines because our collaboration was a genuine process of (un)learning and interaction. We talked about our languages, our homelands, our grief and alienation. We gossiped and complained about these humanitarian institutions that try to kill us (and no, I do not mean this in a figurative way). We held each other both figuratively and literally to become overflowing, rich, and glorious waters to each other in this hostile environment.

“In collaborating, we learn how to systematically describe experiences of damage and resilience, lack and regeneration as inextricable from one another.” ⁵

The following esoteric poem, written in Dene, English, and Turkish, connects us through our shared embodied displacement, alienation, grief, exploitation, ongoing searches for home, and demonstrates creative collective co-resistance.

1. Robyn Maynard and Leanne Betasamosake Simpson, Rehearsals for Living (Toronto: Alfred A. Knopf, 2022), 27. ↩︎
2. See “Statement of Solidarity with Students Protesting in Solidarity with Palestine,” CUPE 3903, https://3903.cupe.ca/2024/05/06/letter-of-solidarity-with-students-protesting-in-solidarity-with-palestine/. ↩︎
3. Leanne Betasamosake Simpson, As We Have Always Done: Indigenous Freedom through Radical Resistance (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2017). ↩︎
4. Zoe Todd, “(An Answer),” Anthro{dendum}, January 28, 2020, https://anthrodendum.org/2020/01/27/an-answer/. ↩︎
5. Allison M. Guess, Mistinguette Smith, and Eve Tuck, “Reaching to Offer, Reaching to Accept: Collaboration and Cotheorizing,” American Quarterly 68.2 (2016): 411. ↩︎