This week’s blog post includes a linked audio file. Just click on the link below if you would like to hear the post read aloud. Scroll down to read the text.
Maddi Chan (she/her), our guest blogger this week, is a queer, mixed-race femme of and in the Caribbean diaspora. She is a PhD candidate in English & Cultural Studies at McMaster University. Her research explores how 19th-century Caribbean women’s articulation of embodied self-knowledge and queer intimacies disrupt the institutionalization and masculinization of Western medicine. Her project seeks to collaboratively reimagine reading the body in and of the text/archive through an epistemological reorientation that accounts for the contributions Caribbean women have already made in shaping the world(s) we inhabit and in producing alternative methods to know, feel, and move ourselves in them.
On Sunday Morning Rituals
Before I stopped going, I attended church with my great grandma and, until I could drive us there myself, we relied on various relatives to take us. Every Sunday, grandma woke early to prepare a large pot of curry beef. As the pot approached a steady simmer, she shuffled around the house to get ready and I waited in the kitchen by the door, enveloped by the aroma of roughly chopped garlic and Lalah’s curry powder, the lingering scent of hair spray and floral perfume that followed my grandmother’s movements. Mindfully attuned to the clock’s stubborn persistence, and the familiar drone of running engines and impatient relatives, I would begin to calculate, and recalculate, the time we had left.…if we have a 5-minute drive, plus a 2-minute walk from our parking spot, and of course, gotta add the additional five minutes grandma will need to make small talk, then:
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we’re running out of time.
