Panhormonium

by Rafaël Newman I have always been tall. Or rather, I have been aware of my above-average height since puberty, when freakish physical change kicks in, mischievously, in concert with enhanced self-consciousness. At age 14 I moved with my mother and siblings from the Vancouver suburbs to midtown Toronto, where the students at my new…

Dad Jokes

by Rafaël Newman Around ten years ago—before the physical and cognitive decline that began during the pandemic; before his removal from autonomy to a care home in the north end of Montreal; before his death there at the beginning of this month—my father entrusted me with his personal collection of jokes. As he approached his…

Fabula rasa

by Rafaël Newman The initial syllable of the English word “island”—or rather, just its very first vowel—is descended from the Proto-Germanic *awjo, meaning “an area on the water.” The element “land” was subsequently added to differentiate the word from other inflections of the Proto-Indo-European root for water, *akwa-. Our “island” is thus cognate with its…

Winter*reise

by Rafaël Newman I am not outside the language that structures me, but neither am I determined by the language that makes this ‘I’ possible. —Judith Butler The force of recent attempts to increase minority visibility in the performing arts, principally in the US, by matching the identity of the performer with that of the role—in…

Uncannada

by Rafaël Newman I’ve been visiting Ontario this month. Which is a wildly non-specific thing to say, since the province of Ontario, though only the second largest of Canada’s constituent divisions, boasts a surface area greater than those of Germany and Ukraine combined. But while I would normally designate as my destination the city in…