FROM SUDAN TO ‘SIJUI’ AND ALL BLACK LIVES IN-BE-TWEEN By Yusra Khogali Ali A thesis submitted in conformity with the requirements for the degree of Master of Arts Department of Social Justice Education Ontario Institute for Studies in Education University of Toronto © Copyright by Yusra Khogali Ali 2018 From Sudan to ‘Sijui’ and all Black lives In-be-tween Yusra Khogali Ali Master of Arts Social Justice Education Department Ontario Institute for Studies of Education University of Toronto 2018 ABSTRACT In this thesis, I write from a personal, political and embodied place using first person accounts and my personal narrative as a Sudanese Muslim activist, artist, and organizer to speak back to the Canadian state and its creation of me. From a place of epistemic self-assuredness, I write, re-write, unpack and speak back to these constructions using Evocative Autoethnography and Critical Discourse Analysis. Drawing on an anti-Black racism theoretical framework, I humbly offer the beginnings of a new mode of analysis which I name Black turbulent consciousness where I present the term ‘sijui’ and ‘sijui situatedness’ as an additional entry point into existing notions such as liminality and in-betweenness. By engaging in an in-depth look at my location and linking my experiences to the condition of Black life/lives in this country, I aim to paint a larger depiction of anti-Blackness, islamophobia, and fear of a Black freedom(s) in the West. ii AKNOWEDGMENTS I began my M.A Degree in Social Justice Education at OISE in 2014. A year later I co-founded the Black Lives Matter Toronto Movement here in Canada. Ever since, my life has entirely transformed. As I come to the completion of this degree, it is enveloped with many lessons, wisdoms and blooming realizations. I would like to thank my supervisor Dr. Rinaldo Walcott for his generous care, support and guidance throughout this entire process and for influencing, inspiring and deepening my understandings of Black life through all his powerful and prophetic contributions to Black people globally. I also want to thank my second reader Dr. John Portelli, for his time and energy in shaping the final version of this work. This thesis has come with so much sacrifice; blood, sweat and tears. It is the product of a community. To my blood family, I love you. My chosen family; IA, CMG IJ, KK, RN, DM I love you. Thank you for holding me up through it all, through ease, hardship and everything in between! To the Black OISE student fighting to finish their degree and pushing through the whiteness of the academy – you are enough, you have so much to give and you got this! iii TABLE OF CONTENTS: Aknowledgmemts iii Table of Contents iv List of Appendices vii Introduction 1 CHAPTER 1: PERSONAL LOCATION, BACKGROUND, CONTEXT 4 Allow Me To Re-Introduce Myself. 4 Be-coming Black through Poetry 6 Wake Work is NOT Woke Work: Form/ations of BLM-TO 9 Black Lives Matter Toronto: A Call to Action 10 Public Enemy Number One: #YusraKhogali 19 Education as ‘Liberation’ and as a Site of Violence 21 Paying for the anti-Black experience: Postsecondary Education 27 Black Liberation Collective Canada 32 Uses of Black Rage as Compass 34 The tensions of being an East Africans Organizer 38 CHAPTER 2: THEORETICAL AND DISCURSIVE FRAMEWORKS 43 Brief Overview of Settler Colonialism 43 Anti-Black Racism 46 Black Turbulent Consciousness in the Third Space/Force 56 CHAPTER 3: RESEARCH DESIGN AND METHODOLOGY 65 Qualitative Design 65 Autoethnographic Approach 67 Limitations and Delimitations 70 Critical Discourse Analysis (CDA) 72 CDA Data Collection and Analysis 74 CHAPTER 4: DISCUSSION 76 White Lies 81 iv White Supremacy and Discourse of Power 86 Discovery and Cartorgraphy 89 Expulsion/ Removal/ Resignation 91 Unwell/ Stupid/Crazy 93 Conclusion 95 REFERENCE LIST 97 v LIST OF APPENDICES Appendix A Page 104 vi 1 INTRODUCTION “Canada [is] a racialized space, and more specifically, a Black space.” - (Walcott, 2000, p.7) In the edited collection; Rude: Contemporary Black Canadian Cultural Criticism, Walcott (2000) introduced the notion of “creative insubordination” (p.8). Here, he described the ways in which artists utilize creative spaces both as a site of performance and resistance. It is in that vein and with those permissions that I write this thesis. By this, I mean I write from a personal, political and embodied space. I write as a Black woman refusing to make justifications for making herself present in text, research, and the social world. I've come to understand myself as a set of living histories and contradictions, as having knowledge yet consistently being in a space of becoming a knower. I make no apologies for this thesis in which I write from an ontological place and in the first person. Like many Black feminist thinkers who came before me, I understand the deliberate efforts made to subjugate Black women’s ideas and theorizing in the academy. However, it is the common, yet complex, “daily conversation, and everyday behavior[s] [which make] important locations for construct[ing] a [Black] feminist consciousness” (Collins, 2000, p. 251-252). Therefore, I use the notion of insubordination not only as a point of entry into the analysis of my work but in the choices I have made to write/unwrite and disrupt what is understood as ‘correctly’ or ‘academically’ writing, presenting and producing research. In fact, I would argue this is the work of undoing and decolonizing the academy which is required of those of us invested in our freedoms. As stated by Gordon (2006) as cited in Browne (2015): Fanon’s insight, shared by Du Bois, is that where there is no inner subjectivity, where there is no being, where there is no one there, and where there is no link to another subjectivity as ward, as guardian, or owner, then all is permitted. Since in fact there is an 2 other human being in the denied relationship, evidenced by, say, anti[B]lack racism, what this means is that there is a subjectivity that is experiencing a world in which all is permitted against him or her [them]. (Browne, 2015, p. 110) I refuse that world. Rather, I have intentionally chosen to write myself into this thesis and into the social world from a place of deliberate and epistemic self-assuredness. “Self- assuredness brings with it a kind of insubordination. It requires that one be aware of the various kinds of relations that serve to place subjects in subordinate positions” (Walcott, 2000, p.9). When we accept positions of insubordination—when we actively respond to and operate within this context—we open new realities, we make Black life explicitly visible and make new formations of Black existence possible. Using an Evocative Autoethnographic (Coffey, 1999) methodology informed by an anti- Black racism theoretical framework, my thesis seeks to utilize my first person accounts and personal narrative as an activist, artist, and organizer to speak back to the nation state and its white supremacist, Islamophobic and sexist creation of me as a ‘threat to the state’, ‘person of interest’ and ‘Black supremacist terrorist’. To do this I drew upon a Critical Discourse Analysis and Black Redaction as proffered by Sharpe (2016). Critical Discourse Analysis “focuses on how social relations, identity, knowledge and power are constructed through written and spoken texts in communities” (Luke, 1997, p. 84). I apply this method in order to analyze two articles written about me by Canadian and American media outlets. First: Black Lives Matter Co-Founder Yusra Khogali Needs To Resign https://www.huffingtonpost.ca/james-di-fiore/Black-lives-matter- toronto-yusra-khogali_b_14635896.html by James Di Fiore written in the Huffingon Post on August 2, 2017. Second: Who is Yusra Khogali and Why Does it Matter? Written by by Pamela Jablonski, in the Bearing Arms on February 16, 2017. https://bearingarms.com/pamela- 3 j/2017/02/16/yusra-khogali-matter/ . And finally, I will engage Sharpe’s (2016) practice of Black Redaction in order to ‘imagine otherwise’ using an article I wrote in the Toronto Star on April 10, 2016 entitled, I was vilified for telling the truth about racism in Toronto - https://www.thestar.com/opinion/commentary/2016/04/10/i-was-vilified-for-telling-the-truth- about-racism-in-toronto.html. Redaction as defined by Sharpe (2017) points us “toward seeing and reading otherwise; towards reading and seeing something in excess of what is caught in the frame; toward seeing something beyond a visuality that is, [...] subtended by the logics of the administered plantation” (p. 117). Building upon the works of several Black scholars, I humbly offer the beginnings of a new mode of analysis which I have come to name as a Black turbulent consciousness where I offer the term ‘sijui’ and ‘sijui situatedness" as an additional entry point into existing notions such as liminality and in-betweenness; I encourage Black people to be steadfast in what I have also named a Black spirit of suspicion. My thesis seeks to speak about myself for myself and back to myself by engaging in introspective deep reflection, review and reckoning with myself in relation to and in relationship with the world in all of its complexity. Through an in-depth look at my location (Turtle Island), my ancestral lineage, compounding colonialisms and my activism within these geographies I aim to link my experiences to the condition of Black life/lives in this country in order to use the ‘self’ to point to a larger depiction of anti-Blackness, islamophobia, and fear of a Black freedom(s) in the west.