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I am still processing this, but my initial reaction is simply, "wow". Much to reflect on. I love when someone shares so openly. It makes you realize how many ways there are to move through life, to love, and even to create. Some of my own fears, insecurities, and concerns were echoed here, and it was comforting to be reminded I am not alone.

Written in the form of a letter to her 6-year-old, this memoir-ish essay is both intellectual & easy to understand. Julietta Singh, born in Canada to a White mother & Brown father, has created a queer family with the biological father of her child in the US. Singh writes about the life choices she makes, trying to live up to her social justice theories, and preparing her daughter to be her best self in what looks like the end times. #LGBTQ

I love Canada—the raw beauty of the North, the art and music that springs from it, the hardiness of lives lived there, the incredible differences among those lives. Yet its enduring histories remain like an untreated bodily disease—like a cancer eating away at the social brain. Like acid, churning away in the guts.

Weighing the conqueror against the thief, we surmised from the logic of the stickers, conquest was seen as noble, while theft an act of cowardice. Conquest implies military force & with it a righteousness in the taking; it is the act of proving yourself capable of breaking another body (or people, or region, or nation) & of executing enduring control. Thieving seemed like the more nuanced & dynamic act, an act that might be engaged in simply to ⬇️

I admit that at a conceptual level there is a crucial part of me that wants to throw in the towel on human life. To say, once and for all, “Yes, let us humans all become extinct, and let the world live on without us.” Yet motherhood complicates this conceptual willingness. Because there is a body—your body—that I cannot bear to lose. A body I refuse to surrender to capitalist ruin.

5🌟Singh deconstructs the sad, hard truths of our society and world with an honesty many will connect with. On mothering and the inner struggle to uphold righteousness in a world geared on whitness and colonialism. This is a letter to her six year old daughter, and her future self. Impossible beautiful and heartbreaking. I felt this book so heavily and appreciated her words so very much. Please read this book. #canlit #bookreview #bookblogger