Safe Spaces

Inspiration:

Within the spaces of our community, we shed the expectations and pressures demanded of us by mainstream society, and find the safe space to be ourselves. It is here, and in the sanctuary of fellow outsiders, do we feel welcome to express our experience. Whether through art, poetry, or over a bottle of wine, we spill our stories with those who share similar experiences of oppression and resilience. Community spaces are sacred ones, and for many of us serve as shelters from the rest of the world unable to understand who we are.

For me, community has served as a significant vehicle in the decolonization of my identity; reclaiming the pride in my heritage, deconstructing the misconceptions of beauty, and in finding the liberation of my genuine and complete self. As member of the Filipinx and Asian Diaspora of Toronto, and a part of the queer community, I believe that community spaces are vital in creating important connections, cultivating artistic exploration, and in the development of a positive sense of self.

In our exploration of more diverse spaces to accommodate the current identity politics, I believe it is important to be mindful of our conceptions of diversity and inclusion. In creating safe spaces for our stories to be heard, are we excluding voices, stories, and listeners from those we believe would not resonate with our subjective breadth of experience? Who is welcome here, and who is not, and why? In an attempt to reclaim our identities from the aftermath of colonization, are we participating in the very same acts of division and suppression?

This piece is in honour of the sanctuary community spaces serve, but is equally a call of action to bridge the connections between them.  It is a call to share stories with those outside our safe spaces in order to grow together, to develop the expanse of our experience, and to expand our ability for empathy. We create communities in order to generate places where we feel heard and understood, but in doing so we have the tendency to close ourselves to the connections and relationships with which we perceive as different from our own. If we opened ourselves to our differences, I think that we would learn that all of us venture on a similar quest for acceptance and sense of home.

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Imagine if we had enough room for love;

if we could meet each other with the same patience

we took to love our mothers,

our children,

our closest friends,

our lovers.

Imagine a world like that.

But the world has yet to reach this transcendence.

And so, as protection from its many imperfections,

we have built a home

as shelter from its entropy.

We are safe here,

to be exactly as we are.

 In this home we have decorated the hallways,

ornately dressed the fixtures,

and draped the windows with fine silk as expressions of our freedom.

This space is sacred,

and we have painted the walls with lavender

and blessed the rooms with sage,

for our stories to live here.

 We spent many years within the comforts of this place;

enriching ourselves in the company of those who understood us

and appreciated our uniqueness.

In the refuge of one another,

we were never alone.

And after awhile, we had forgotten the desire to venture outside.

 Centuries we spent securing the foundations of our sanctuary,

and we felt it our duty to ensure that nothing, and no one

take it away.

And so, we erected a tall concrete gate to encircle the property

as security from the burglars, the arsonists, and vandals.

Only those who were like us

are invited inside.

 But I envision a world where our experiences

did not separate us from each other.

One where our identities did not become our identifiers;

mechanisms of categorization that sort us into the spaces where we belong

and the spaces we do not.

We have cultivated rich communities of Diasporas, artists, activists, and survivors

in retaliation from the binaries of society,

but in the process of reclaiming our voices,

we have tuned out the same calls for resistance

from those beyond our own tribe.

 I long to hear you.

And so, I have drawn the curtains,

unlocked the doors and released the deadbolts.

I have arranged the furniture to clear up space,

and prepared a feast to sustain one hundred guests.

It took many hands to dismantle,

brick by brick,

the wall we had constructed from a place of fear.

And it is with this vulnerability that we welcome you to our home,

to listen to your tales of survival and to share ours too.

There is enough room for all of us here.