Where are you from?

At the heart of it, Living Hyphen was born out of this question. Our inaugural issue of Entrances & Exits invited artists and writers from all across Canada and from over 30 ethnic backgrounds to contribute their work in exploration of this question.

When I was putting the magazine together so many moons ago, I opened each story with the artists’ name and their “hyphens” or “where they’re from”. I assigned these “hyphens” based solely on the contents of the story they submitted or the sound of their name.

But mid-way through this process, I stopped myself. I was making assumptions about people I didn’t really know.

So I reached out to each contributor, and I asked not “where are you from” but rather, “how do you identify?”

And let me tell you, that simple shift in questioning opened up entire worlds to me.

In almost all of the writing workshops that I facilitate through Living Hyphen, there is always one prompt that I love to guide writers through. I kick off by asking everyone to create a list of words or short phrases from their native tongue, or their parents’ or ancestors’ native tongue. These can be words that they love dearly, words that they can recall hearing often, or words that they might not even know the translation of. I ask them to list any and all the words they can think of in under a minute. And then we take the next ten or so minutes to write a story using some of those words.

We then take turns reading out loud our stories to one another. Without fail, this exercise is always such a deeply moving experience. To hear someone speak out loud their stories with words in their native tongue sprinkled throughout is a precious gift. Oftentimes, we don’t really know the specific translations of the words spoken. But you can always feel the spirit of the story and the force of the intimacy of what is being shared.

As Living Hyphen’s Editor-in-Chief and writing workshop facilitator, I am acutely aware of just how significant language is. Language affects not just how we perceive the world but also how we move through it.

I am also acutely aware of just how limiting and limited it is. More specifically, I am acutely aware of just how limiting and limited the English language is.

According to the 2016 census, we live in a country where 7.5 million people — 21.9% of the total population — are foreign-born individuals who immigrated to what we now know as Canada. Many of these people may not speak English as their first language.

It has never sat well with me that we celebrate these holidays for particular cultures or “minority” groups on specific days of the year – or months, if you’re lucky or large enough of a population. Black history in February. Women’s history in March. Asian heritage in May. Pride in June. National Indigenous History Month in June. Filipino heritage…again in June. Latin Heritage Month in October. And the list goes on…

While the creation of these holidays may have been well-intentioned and a symbol for progress at the time, the reality is that it is performative in essence and limits us to the bare minimum.

It encourages all of us to learn of these histories, heritages, cultures, and communities only during these specific times of the year instead of all year round as an integrated part of our educational curriculum and our collective consciousness. It’s lazy at best, and deeply harmful at worst.

It’s harmful because these heritage months subtly reinforce the mentality of scarcity that plague so many of us who are part of these underrepresented communities.

“Justine, if Living Hyphen is all about amplifying diverse and historically underrepresented voices, then why is your Creative Director a white man?”

A handful of people have asked me this since launching Living Hyphen and to be quite honest, I’m surprised more people don’t continue to ask. It’s an important question and it’s one that I dwell on a lot especially now as Josh, our Creative Director, and I ramp up on the design process of Issue 2.

Here’s the thing — I believe deeply in amplifying diverse voices, but I also believe deeply in allyship. These two truths are not, in any way, mutually exclusive. If anything, achieving equitable diversity is impossible without allyship. While it’s important for our communities to create alternate spaces for ourselves, we also need allies to use their existing power and access to resources to share opportunities with us, to lift while they climb, and to redistribute their power.

Being an ally means being willing to act with and for others in pursuit of dismantling systems of oppression to achieve equality and equity at all times. Even when it is uncomfortable and inconvenient. Especially when it is uncomfortable and inconvenient.