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I am given no chance, I am overdetermined from without. I am the slave not of the “idea” that others have of me but of my own appearance…I progress by crawling . And already I am being dissected under white eyes, the only real eyes. I am fixed. Having adjusted their microtomes, they objectively cut away slices of my reality. I am laid bare…. When people like me, they tell me it is in spite of my colour. When they dislike me, they point out that it is not because of my colour. Either way, I am locked into the infernal circle. [Emphasis added.] — Frantz Fanon (1967, p. 116) Occupying downtown Toronto: A new politics of authorship T o be authored, Fanon (1967) continues, the Black body enters, so to speak, a social imaginary, a discursive space in which it is already constructed , imagined, and positioned. When the child gazed at and pointed her finger toward him and said,“Look, moma! A Black man,” Fanon wrote that he was fixed in that gaze: the gaze of Otherness. To fall under that gaze is to find oneself within discourses of closure where the Black body is already authored, read, and constantly stabilized across time, language, culture and space (see also Hall, 1990; Foucault, 1986). Here, I am talking about the White communicative state of mind:“Oh, they all look like Blacks to me!” To discuss the impact and the outcome of this gaze, I shall begin with a personal anecdote , where I show how I became fixed, known, and already spoken and talked about. As a continental African, I moved from being “tall,”“Sudanese,” “a basketball player,” and so on—adjectives that were used to patch together my identity in Africa—to simply “Black.” Thus, along with my research participants , I “became Black” (Ibrahim, 2000a, 2003a). 83 THERE IS NO ALIBI FOR BEING (BLACK) Race, dialogic space, and the politics of trialectic identity Awad Ibrahim 5 ? May 16, 1999, was a culminating day in my understanding of what it means to become Black in North America, specifically in Canada. It was the day I was hailed as “Black” by an authorized speaker who possessed an authorized language. The following is an extract from my diary, where I titled it Being under surveillance: Who controls my Black body? Published elsewhere (Ibrahim, 2003a,b), it is cited here to demonstrate three things: first, how the“Black” body is hailed; second, how, in downtown Toronto, my Black body does not belong solely to me, but it speaks a language of its own; and finally, to explore the social context of everyday racism (Essed & Goldberg, 2002), where my research participants form, perform, and circulate their identities.1 May 16, 1999: The story of the “dark man” It was 1:10 p.m. on a sunny and unexpectedly hot Sunday. I was more in the mood for poetry than for prose, and bicycling on St. George Street had never been as light. However, it is frightening how lightness can so easily whirl into an unbearable heaviness, and how heaviness can cause so much pain. It all began when I had just crossed the yellow light of Bloor Street West. I saw a white car curving into the bicycle lane and I heard hereafter a siren coming from it. Since I was bicycling, I was neither able to fully verify the car nor who was driving it, nor why it was requesting me to stop. However, when it was fully halted before my bicycle, I realized it was a police car. From it came veering a rangy white man with full gear and a pair of sunglasses, along with a clean and handsome gun. My immediate thought was that it must be the bicycle helmet, since I was not wearing one, and seeing that there will always be a first time for our social experiences, I whispered to myself, “Oh God, this is the first ticket of my life.” I was deadly mistaken. He approached my bicycle and said,“Have you ever been in trouble with the law before?” Shocked beyond any imaginable belief, I said, “No,” and added:“Can I know why am I asked the question?”“You fit the description of a man we are looking for, who just snapped a bag from Yorkville,” he said,“and I just saw you around the Yorkville area.” Suddenly, he began a walkie-talkie conversation with a dispatcher, and I realized, when he said, “I am talking...

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