I came across Okuda San Miguel’s Equilibrium mural piece a hundred times during my summer internship with Egale Canada. The gigantic 23-storey high mural across from the office always had me pause and observe. Maybe it was the contrast of such bright colours in a concrete environment or the striking features of the beings depicted. Or that Okuda San Miguel has travelled worldwide to create art pieces, inspired by the rainbow flag’s colours. In a thousand years, will this be a hieroglyph, a glimpse into a time that is long gone? People will wonder about it, just as I wonder about my ancestors’ existence.
People have asked me what I have been doing over the summer. I found myself answering that I was doing a human rights internship. I dropped the international qualifier because how do I explain that I am doing an international internship when most of the things I have worked on were domestic Canadian issues? Some elements made the internship feel international. Most people I worked with came from different places or had worked internationally. Egale is involved in International public law as well as Canadian law. Toronto is massively different from Montreal, and the Toronto Transit Commission is a foreign entity where my dreams died a couple of times. However, even with these elements, I still could not say it is international. I got to stay in Canada.
Who gets to stay and who gets to go? Mobility questions have always interested me. After all, as a Haitian descendant, mobility is in my bones. I attended a pride event at Tory’s LLP, where the guest lecturer, Latoya Nugent from Rainbow Railroad, told her story of resistance and displacement as a Jamaican queer black activist woman. She is here now, working with the organization, helping other queer folks escape life-threatening situations: just like she escaped Jamaica not too long ago. Her story made me think again of the intricate relationship between mobility and visibility for some folks who defy the social order through a different way of existing. Invisibility will be forced onto people who wish to live authentically, affecting their ability to move or stay as they want to, just like Latoya Nugent’s story. The world becomes smaller every day for these folks. When you visibly challenge the social order, places and homes are no longer homes. On the other hand, it is sometimes through invisibility that people assert their survival and mobility. I think of the maroons’ escape from plantations, furtive in the shadow of the night: to be invisible is to be undetectable and hopefully left alone to assert this mobility. Nowadays, this assertion of mobility can come in many ways. One of my queer friends shared how they had to have long hair before visiting family in Egypt: invisibility creates the possibility of exploring the expansion of the world. I say that not in an accusing way. It is a reality that I have come to understand about how queer folks, especially of certain diasporas, create safety for themselves through a strategy where mobility and visibility are intimately linked.
The mural I observed so many times on Jarvis Street may be a sign that will carry those strategic stories through time. Down the line, I hope that whoever looks at Equilibrium in the next millennium will know that we always existed, however complex our relationship with mobility and visibility may be, as it was for my ancestors’ existence.