They Said This Would Be Fun Read online

  When our experiences are treated like they don’t matter, we learn to deal with them ourselves, especially when the institutions where we spend the first years of adulthood aren’t equipped to support us. But young people in post-secondary institutions today are up against a host of serious, life-changing issues.

  In Canada, university-age young women face the highest rates of sexual assault and inter-partner violence in the country, and are stalked, cyberstalked, and harassed more than any other age group. Carding disproportionately affects young Black and Indigenous men. Young people living with a shaky socio-economic status are pressured to get a degree, and both have been linked to an increase in mental health issues. Racism and discrimination have devastating physical and mental health effects on students, which is linked to poor academic performance and dropout rates. And we are experiencing all of this while navigating the school system. Before our brains have even finished developing. Before we even get to know who we are.

  So yes, our experiences matter. This shit is actually happening right now to our young people.

  On top of all that, students of colour are living and studying during a time when the far right is using universities to its own advantage. Endless stories have made the news: white pride groups putting out pro-white flyers on campuses; white nationalists using university spaces to spew anti-immigration, anti-LGBTQ2S+, anti-woman hate under the guise of free speech; hate groups trying to convert young, angry men into joining their cause. All this coverage highlights white supremacy, not the students living under it.

  We promise students that university will be the time of their lives, that they will come to know themselves, that it will be fun. But for many of us, the whole university experience—the independence, parties, exploration, sex, wild nights—may not be possible. Not when we may deal with racism, sexism, homophobia, transphobia, and assault—physical and sexual—from our peers and the people around us. This perceived utopia can also be unbearable and unsafe.

  I wrote this book to bring attention to what is happening inside our schools. For years, I’ve collected these moments, trying to find the right format—a play, a blog, a novel—but nothing seemed more fitting than a memoir. I’ve used my own experiences, as well as examples from across Canadian universities, to illustrate that this is a nationwide issue that demands attention.

  Thanks to the generosity and selflessness of my grandfather, I’ve had the privilege of going to university, an opportunity and luxury I know many do not have. I hope to put this privilege to good use here, by illuminating the not-so-secret lives of university students: the messy, complicated, exciting but harrowing experience of what it’s like to be a student and woman of colour today.

  Nothing in this book is sugar-coated for you. It’s raw. It’s glaring. It’s imperfect, as is real life. I did not make all the right decisions, or all the smart ones, and I’ve made peace with that. I have done my absolute best to recall everything as accurately as I can. At times, this book is distressing, and at other times you will laugh. Some events may bring back painful memories of your own.

  I have chosen not to hold back because, for so long, young people have been infantilized and shamed for talking about the things that affect us. We’re told we haven’t worked long enough, lived long enough, been through enough to have our own pain validated. I hope this book will be an urgent reminder that dismissing the experiences of young people today will have serious, permanent implications for our entire society.

  Finally, this book is for anyone, past or present, who has struggled to make sense of their post-secondary experiences. For those of you who feel alone and unheard. For those of you who want to learn more, and for those of you who courageously speak up and tell your stories, even in the face of denial and harassment. And this book is especially for those of you who came out at the other end, broken but not beat, resilient but still soft.

  I see you.

  all

  wanted

  was

  to

  be

  wonder

  woman

  The first time I ever held a bong, I deep-throated it.

  It was a month into my first year. Malcolm, a friend from my floor in residence, had an older brother named Chris, who lived with several guys off-campus. They invited Malcolm, my best friend Taz, and me to hotbox one weekend. I had only started smoking weed the month before; when I got high, the entire dorm floor came to my room to watch me laugh uncontrollably.

  Chris had some cute roommates, and I wanted to impress them by handling my weed like a champ. We sat in their living room, talking about our first month at Western, as one of the guys crushed up the bud. I was feeling pretty calm about this—I could handle a joint. This would be easy.

  But there was no rolling paper in sight. Another one of Chris’s friends pulled out a big-ass glass bong from behind the sofa. He put it on his lap, scooped up the crushed weed, packed it into the bowl, then lit it up and took a hit.

  I was mesmerized by the bubbling water and the thick white smoke trying to escape through the ice cubes in the stem. Everyone continued to chat as they took hits, and I participated in the conversation half-heartedly, trying to figure out how to get that thing up and running so I could avoid looking like an amateur.

  Malcolm took his turn, then Taz. I watched her light the weed in the bowl. She leaned over, her long hair blocking my view, but a gurgling sound came from the bong. She pulled out the bowl and the smoke disappeared. She survived. But how the hell did she get her mouth over the opening?

  As she exhaled, coughing and giggling, she passed it to me. It sat in my lap like a large rock. I looked down the stem—it was pretty big. Surely there was a trick to this. Only one way to find out.

  I bowed my head towards the opening, then stretched my mouth as wide as I could to wrap it over the rim, wondering what kind of inhuman jaw structures they all had to be able to make it work.

  “Lordamercy!” When I heard everyone start to scream and laugh, dropping to the ground one by one in fits of hysterics, I still didn’t know that my mouth was supposed to go inside the stem, not around it. For the next three years, Chris and his roommates called me Deepthroat Girl.

  * * *

  ///

  When it came to partying, I was a late bloomer. While the kids I went to Catholic high school with were getting trashed every weekend at house parties, I wandered the halls for the first year and a half, the lone Black emo kid. I wore black clothing, pink eyeshadow, and bows in my hair. I accessorized my school uniform with spiked rubber bracelets, and dyed my hair various shades of red. I carried around a photo album containing pictures of my favourite bands—Good Charlotte, My Chemical Romance, Fall Out Boy, AFI, From First to Last—that I’d printed out, wasting all the ink in my Lexmark.

  By the end of Grade 10, I formed a group of equally out-casted girls: Shailene, a perpetually eye-rolling, indie biracial chick who couldn’t escape the racist jokes of her new white boyfriend’s friends; Arina, a badass transfer student, from an Armenian school, who had the latest Air Jordans; Jessa, a rich, progressive white girl with a bad attitude and a love of vampires and serial killers, and Tasmina—or Taz.

  I met Taz in our second-semester science class. In the hallways, she smiled at me—reassurance that there were people who didn’t think of me as a loner. At lunch, I’d see her leaning against the lockers with a group of science geeks, pretending to be interested in their at-home experiments, or sitting by herself and eating her home-cooked Indian meals. One of those days, I approached her.

  “Isn’t it the worst when you want to eat curry but it smells so strong?” I said.

  “Yeah, I’m pretty tired of the white kids in the cafeteria complaining,” she said with a weak smile.

  “Wanna come eat lunch with us instead?” I asked her.

  “I would love that.”

  We bonded over our brown families—both
of us with overprotective mothers and lax father figures—and about how excited we were to get out of this teenage hellhole.

  Together, the five of us hated everything about and everyone at high school: the hypocrisy of Catholicism, the gender roles that teenagers played into, the cafeteria politics, the school rules, the joke of a sex-ed curriculum, the shitty people. Adulthood was within reach; we just wanted to graduate and get out of there.

  But we were also little feminists, unbeknownst to our own selves. Jessa and I found an escape in literature, and for our assignments we took up queer, feminist, and Black authors: Dionne Brand, Toni Morrison, Sapphire, Virginia Woolf, Jessica Valenti. We all refused to hold ourselves to men’s standards, growing out our leg hair in defiance of the male teachers who stared at our legs as they scolded us for our short kilts. As the battle waged over kilt length, we hiked ours up higher.

  We protested the patriarchy at all costs. We worked hard at the gym to get our bodies strong—a fuck-you to the boys who body-shamed muscular women. We bought lingerie to admire ourselves in, and gifted each other sexy underwear and pyjama sets for Christmas. We swore and smoked and burped out loud, and kissed each other in the back aisle of the movie theatre as our bags of beer stolen from home rested at our feet.

  We were wholly unladylike and totally bored of our suburban teen existence. On weekends, I’d pick everyone up in my mom’s ’98 Honda Civic so we could go to the sex shop to buy condoms in case any of us ever lost our virginity. In the evenings after school we’d head to Jessa’s house to watch True Blood reruns, nodding in agreement about the kind of relationship drama we wanted one day. When Obama was elected president, we skipped class and threw a dance party, jumping around in our bras and lace panties and swinging our kilts in the air. That a nation like America could elect someone who had spent their whole life on the outside felt reassuring to people like us—like we would one day find our place in the world too.

  After graduation, we all went our separate ways, except for Taz and I, who together headed to Western. We wanted the keggers and wild house parties, dancing under strobe lights at all hours of the night, beer showers in lieu of champagne. I wanted partying to help me break out of my shy, painfully introverted shell, and so I immediately dove headfirst into any juvenile behaviour I could.

  Residence was the perfect environment. Each weekend, there were parties on every floor. Fifteen or more people would cram into a tiny room to play beer pong, flip cup, or Centurion (a torturous game where you take a shot of beer every minute for a hundred minutes). Rooms were humid and sticky with body heat, as people danced and kissed and hugged and fell down while the vibration from loud music radiated through the furniture. Surfaces reeked of spilled vodka, rum, and coolers; spittle flew as drunk people slurred and shouted, pushed and shoved by others trying to get to the washroom to throw up. By 3 a.m., people were either passed out in bed or in the hall, or on the way to the campus hospital to get their stomach pumped. It was chaotic and messy, and to my surprise I fit right in, playing drinking games, perfecting my fist bumps and fist pumps (it was the era of Jersey Shore, yeah buddy!), dancing like a maniac in front of people I liked and trusted.

  The lucky people who had a decent fake ID talked about the kinds of partying that took place outside of the university grounds. I couldn’t find the ID of a Black girl anywhere in the vicinity, so I clung on to stories about epic parties from those who returned to tell the tale, waiting impatiently for my turn when I came back in the fall. Until then, most of what Taz and I knew about London was from reading “Outside the Bubble,” a weekly flyer that people taped to bathroom stalls to let you know what was going on in the city.

  We counted down the weeks until we moved out of residence for summer break, then the months until our nineteenth birthdays. When we returned in September, legal and ready to party at every bar in downtown London, we could only imagine what fun we’d get ourselves into.

  * * *

  ///

  I saw them the moment they entered the bar.

  Three ghoulish figures, eyes glowing in the dark like nocturnal animals, floated towards us through the dense crowd of Halloween-goers. The hairs on my arm shot up. Every movement slowed and blurred, as if time and space had abandoned me. The bass from Ne-Yo and Pitbull’s “Give Me Everything” vibrated through my body, but I couldn’t hear the words.

  I was at Jack’s with Taz and Malcolm. We were finally in second year, and legal, and we wanted to spend our first adult Halloween at this charmingly dingy bar on Richmond Row that reeked of bleach and tequila. Dressed in expensive store-bought costumes, we threw back Jägerbombs from water-stained shot glasses.

  But my excitement was short-lived, and my friends’ was about to be too: as these bodies moved closer, eyes still on mine, I wondered how I could warn them about something I didn’t quite understand myself.

  The white people walked right up to Taz, Malcolm, and I, the only people of colour in Jack’s. Three for three.

  Dressed as cotton pickers, with overdrawn red lips, denim overalls, and straw hats with blond hair peeking out the sides, their faces were painted the most offensive coal black I’ve ever seen. A thin layer of unpainted white skin surrounded their inexpressive blue eyes.

  Two guys and a girl stood before us in blackface, smiling smugly, mouths closed, not saying a word.

  “What the hell is this?” My mouth had taken the lead before my mind was able to decide on the appropriate reaction, but they said nothing, only smiled.

  Malcolm laughed so hard his drink spilled out of his mouth. “This is absurd,” he said between gasps as he walked away.

  Taz stifled her own laugh. But, I was growing angrier and more intimidated.

  “Can’t you talk? What the hell is your problem?” I yelled at the three people in front of me.

  Still no answer. They continued to stare at me in silence, unblinking, leering. A bead of sweat trickled down my temple.

  “You think this is funny? Say something!” My ears were ringing. Drunken bar patrons pushed past me and into the crowd. So many bodies around me—witnesses—yet no one stopped to help. All I could hear was my own voice screaming at these smiling white kids, with their black faces, to speak.

  They looked back at me, composed, still smiling, daring me to lose my mind. I wanted the smug grins to dissolve off their faces, leaving behind remorseful tears. I wanted to give in to the humiliation and cry tears of my own. I wanted to join my friends and laugh until this no longer felt threatening, until this moment that should not still exist today was nothing but a distant, repressed memory.

  I don’t know how much time passed, but it felt like hours. Then, still smiling, they turned their black, painted faces and slowly disappeared into the crowd.

  They moved on to their next victims, three South Asian people who had just arrived and were getting drinks at the bar. I made eye contact with the woman in that group, whose eyes, glassy with terror and pain, reflected my own. Then I looked away. I did not intervene; I couldn’t. I turned my back and remained silent.

  Something changed that night. My illusion of safety was shattered, and a feeling of deep discomfort made its permanent home inside me. It wasn’t the first time I’d experienced racism since moving to London, but it was the first time it had been so malicious. What I didn’t know was that it was only the beginning.

  * * *

  ///

  When I was seven, my mom dressed me up as a sexy French maid for Halloween. This sounds a whole lot worse than it actually was.

  Fed on the sugary and fried treats of the ’90s, I was big-boned and round all over, with cankles and paws for hands. If the Notorious B.I.G. and I had grown up together, I definitely would’ve been mistaken for him.

  I was the first and only grandchild in twenty-two years. Everyone did their part to care for me. In the mornings, I woke up to my grandmother’s cuddles and hugs, and a nicely packed
lunch waiting to go. My mother dropped me off at school on her way to work. After my grandfather got home in the evenings, we’d lie on the couch watching TV as he cracked my knuckles—his way of showing affection. When he went to bed, my grandmother let me watch Jerry Springer.

  I was spoiled; in my household, food was love, and my grandmother loved me dearly. On the weekends, I’d wake to the wafting smells of her cooking—nihari, ball curry, keema, potato balls—and murmurs of her gossiping on the phone with her sisters while sitting in her nightgown. Throughout the week, she indulged my every sugary, starchy desire—burgers, fries, McDonald’s pizza, hot dogs, Kraft Dinner (wieners or it was trash), milkshakes, Dunkaroos, Lunchables, Teddy Grahams, Mr. Noodles, Fruit Gushers, Nerds, Hubba Bubba, Bugles, Pillsbury Toaster Strudels—in large quantities, all day, every day. If I wasn’t eating, I was overfeeding my Neopets and Tamagotchi to the point of food explosion.

  By the time I was six years old, I was so large that we were shopping in the teen section to find clothes that fit me. And at my soccer finals, which I bombed by being both out of shape and having asthma, the cute teenage coach couldn’t find a jersey that fit me. I held up the line as he, very nicely and with great discretion for a young man, found me something from the older girls’ team. Our group photo tells the tale of a sad, Black girl in an adult-size, swamp green, cotton T-shirt, surrounded by all the cute little white girls in their beautiful, silky, emerald green jerseys.

  What I really wanted as a seven-year-old was to be a mermaid for Halloween, but with my dreams of the sea crushed by a lack of size options, we scoured Party City at the last minute for something in the adult section that wasn’t sold out. Hence: sexy French maid.

  My mom thought it was quite fitting considering I went to a French Immersion school, and at this point, any humour was welcome. The costume came in a clear plastic pouch with a photo of a sexy, slim white woman taunting my too-young eyes with ideas of what women should look like. Inside the bag was a feather duster, a headpiece, an apron, and fishnet stockings, which we decided a second-grader could do without.