Authenticity at Jane and Finch: African Dutch Wax Fabrics

A pile of Vlisco prints at a Jane and Wilson shop

By Adwoa Afful

During my early childhood, my Ghanaian immigrant parents decided to move our family to the north Toronto neighbourhood of Jane and Finch. Jane and Finch hosts one of the largest Ghanaian communities in the city, so I became quite accustomed to seeing small parades of women (and occasionally their spouses and children) covered head to toe in African print fabrics.

While we lived there, I barely took notice of these women or the beautiful multicoloured and intricately patterned textiles they dressed themselves in. I also grew up in a household where what seemed like small mountains of similar fabrics were haphazardly arranged in cardboard boxes and large Rubbermaid bins and stored in the basement. Usually they would sit there for years. During epic bouts of spring cleaning, I would mentally label them as “Ghana Stuff,” and then put them back where I had found them.

I mostly took these fabrics for granted, and rarely thought of their potential cultural significance. I was equally apathetic about their origins and history. In my mind, the fabrics were sent to us in big brown airmail packages from relatives in Ghana, and so were Ghanaian. Then, last year, I read Eccentric Yoruba’s excellent post “African Fabrics: The History of Dutch Wax Prints” on the blog Beyond Victoriana: a multicultural perspective on Steampunk. It seems that the fabrics that I had thoughtlessly labeled as “Ghana Stuff,” were actually the products of an interwoven (pun intended) history of the West African, Indonesian, and Dutch textile manufacturing industries.

Across Steeles, by Roxana Parsa

 

Roxana Parsa is an Iranian-Canadian illustrator and writer based out of Toronto; she has worked with the McGill Daily and is currently on staff with Shameless magazine.

My Big Banana Body

By Karen K. Ho

I am five feet, eight inches. I am also Chinese. Surprising but true: not all Chinese women are short, skinny and small-footed. I suspect this perception and outdated stereotype comes from a period when nearly all Chinese people were very poor and had rice-heavy diets. Many Chinese women are still short and skinny, but my guess is that that’s less about genetics, and more due to a modern obsession with thin-ness and a lower prevalence of fast-food outside major city centres.

Growing up in north Scarborough, I always felt like my head was in-between two cultures, Chinese and Canadian. I only just realized my body reflects that in-between status too. There are parts of me that are completely (stereotypically) Chinese, and there are parts that are much more Canadian (or, maybe, north American).

In this top-down, completely unscientific survey, I’ve tried to figure out once and for all if my physical makeup is more reflective of my parents and ancestry, or whether I’m a product of Canada, the only land I’ve known my entire life.

Hair:
It’s black, straight, thick. The kind seen on the heads of many Chinese, Filipinos and other East Asians and Pacific Islanders. To me, my hair lacks personality, and over the years I’ve attempted to perm it and/or dye it unnatural colours like blue, purple and red. This doesn’t exactly make me more Canadian, just an angsty 20-something. People all over the world chemically alter their hair. What grows out of my head is very Chinese.

Tricked Into Catholicism?

By Heather Li

That I grew up Roman Catholic strikes me as absurd. I am an obvious Chinese woman whose parents were born and raised in a marginalized Chinese community in Calcutta, India (now, Kolkata). Aren’t Catholics supposed to be Italian grandmas with wooden crosses in their kitchens? Or pale Irish schoolchildren lining up nervously outside church? I can’t tell if other people think my Catholic roots are strange too and they’re just being polite. Maybe the fact that seven in 10 Canadians identify as Roman Catholic or Protestant means that an Asian person claiming Christianity in multi-everything Toronto is simply ordinary.

For a long time it felt extremely ordinary to me. I was born in Toronto, attended two Catholic elementary schools in North York, and spent four years at an infamous all-girls Catholic high school in Willowdale: St. Joseph’s Morrow Park, more affectionately known as “St. Ho’s.” (Compared with what I later heard public students did in junior high, the majority of us in our hiked-up kilts were far from sexually obsessed hos.)

Take That, Mandy Moore: A Sikh Girl Goes Bang

By Navi Lamba

My first haircut, at age 15, was the result of a three-month campaign of begging and pleading with my parents. My father is a bit of a disciplinarian (speaking of hair, his staunch mustache helped cultivate this image). It was very important to him that my two siblings and I maintained our Sikh identity. This meant we weren’t allowed to participate in a number of social practices, including consuming alcoholic beverages, staying out past 6 pm or cutting our hair. My parents patiently explained to me that growing out our hair was an important part of Sikhism. Of course, my parents could never get very far saying this to a 15-year-old with incredibly thick and wiry black hair (prone to tangles) who wanted nothing more than to blend in with her peers.

Passing, Or Something Like It

By Paul Aguirre-Livingston

A t-shirt given to the writer by his late father, Juan.

I am a person with white skin. I concede to the idea that, by certain interpretations, I am considered “white.” I unwillingly accept that a white skin colour represents the infallible truth of the status quo. It affords some of us certain positions and privileges. I acknowledge that I may have benefited from those privileges that I was previously unaware I even possessed. (Deeply unaware, even.) That error in judgment is easy enough when, well, I do not identify as “white.”

I don’t come from a clear lineage of Caucasian-ness – not genetically, culturally, or socio-economically. My father immigrated to Canada from Chile with his parents in 1980, and my mother is Canadian-born with Irish heritage. My father, like my grandfather, was dark-skinned (with our origins in northern Chile, the closest tip of the country to the equator), and my mother is fair-skinned. Shortly after I was born, my mother left, and I went to live with my paternal Chilean grandparents. When I was eight, I lost my father and these grandparents adopted me.

Jesus Saves

By Lisan Jutras

About 10 years ago, I found myself taking the St Clair streetcar through a rainy autumnal haze to a church near Old Weston Road. I wore a grey dress and my good shoes and I was alone and I was going to see a concert by Donnie and Darryl, the Gospel Midgets.

I was glad I dressed up because the vibe was pretty formal. Underneath the cross that hung outside the church, casting a neon reflection of the words JESUS SAVES onto the wet pavement below, a crowd was massing. I showed myself into the church and took a seat  among families dressed up, bald dads with maroon shirts and matching handkerchiefs carrying little girls in layers of lace, moms in bright suits and shiny pumps, grannies in yellow silk and Mrs. Doubtfire glasses. The church got more and more full until every seat was taken. There had to be 500 people in there. Even after the pews were filled, people stood at the back of the room.

And everyone was black. Except me.

Carlton, Karmin and Why White Rap is Just Wrong

By Jesse Kinos-Goodin

There’s an episode of the Fresh Prince of Bel Air where Carlton tells Will that he borrowed his Public Enemy tape to jog to. “You like Public Enemy?” Will asks, to which Carlton replies by singing in what can only be described as the whitest, most Vegas showman-sounding voice possible, “Get up get, get, get down, 911’s a joke in this town.”

“That used to be my favourite song,” deadpans Jazz, a line I’ve used a million times since.

Carlton was the symbolic white person — from his privileged lifestyle and tucked-in shirts to his complete obliviousness to black culture. Carlton’s “whiteness” not only made for one of the sitcom’s funniest running jokes, it also sent a message to a young, impressionable me: Black (Will and Jazz) is cool; white (Carlton) is, well, not.

What We Talk About When We Talk About Whiteness

By Navneet Alang

When we launched the Ethnic Aisle almost a year ago, we did so because we wanted to hear the voices of people from ethnicities and cultures that were sadly missing from mainstream discourse. So we’d understand if you were a little skeptical of this, our White Issue, which will see white writers talk about… well, being white. Sounds a little strange for this site, doesn’t it?

Yet, despite the fact that it’s everywhere, we rarely talk about the various forms of whiteness as cultures or ethnicities unto themselves. Far too often, whiteness is a kind of assumed norm without a name—something neatly encapsulated by the fact that no-one ever calls grilled cheese or steak “ethnic food”. Instead of thinking about things like Western dress, sexual mores or eating habits as specific ethnic, cultural practices, we treat them as if they just are. In such a situation, the “normal” ends up becoming the normative—the thing everyone just assumes is the default.

But in a city like Toronto, where just over half of the population comes from some place else* (see below), it won’t do to keep talking about things that way. So, we asked some local writers to shed light on the experience of being white in a kaleidoscopic, multicultural city. Our point isn’t so much to have yet one more view from a white person as it is to think about where whiteness fits into a modern city where, soon enough, no one group will form a dominant majority.

If you think the idea is misguided, then that’s what comment sections are for—and, to be honest, we hope they’ll be lively. But along the way, perhaps we’ll do a little something to demystify whiteness. Maybe we’ll learn about exotic dining habits, which, as we understand it, involve eating a kind of loaf made from meat, at 6pm. Perhaps we’ll come to understand more clearly why a set of miniature crystal animals is less tacky a wedding gift than handy, no-strings-attached cash. But most of all, what we hope is that in thinking about “white” as just one of many identities, we’ll move away from treating it as the norm—and get a little closer to the idea that we are all, each in our own way, “ethnic”.

*To clarify, this is not to imply that Toronto’s visible minorities are somehow not Torontonian or Canadian – simply that, statistically speaking, half of Toronto’s population is foreign-born. It’s this fact makes “demystifying whiteness” as the norm and centre such an an important project.

The Problem with Food and Authenticity, Part Two: Your Mom

By Chantal Braganza

Part Two: Your Mom

There is a blog post by Lea Zeltserman I keep returning to when I think about this. She was reacting to a New York Times review of a hip, nostalgic and probably quite nice Brooklyn deli called Mile End. The kind of place that makes noodles for its kasha varnishkes by hand, because that’s the way the owner’s great-grandmother made it, and was therefore the right way. Neither would ever buy their bow tie-shaped pasta at a store.

“No, she didn’t,” writes Zeltzerman, “and neither did my Russian great-grandmother. Clearly. But they weren’t trying to pass on a sense of authenticity out of the goodness of their hearts. Our grandmothers didn’t buy noodles at the store because they couldn’t. There were no store noodles to be had, and if there had been, they wouldn’t have had the money. What they got to do was spend an entire day in the kitchen making handmade noodles. Now, those same constricts of poverty have become laden with moral implications.”