Black Markets, White Boyfriends and Other Acts of Elision

Ian C. Nelson is Assistant Director of Libraries, University of
Saskatchewan; and Director, Saskatoon Gateway Plays, Regina Summer
Stage, and La Troupe du Jour.

Rashid was born in Dar-es-Salaam but has lived in Toronto since
childhood. He is a writer, editor, activist, and cultural organizer
whose name occasionally appears in the pages of Quill & Quire. As a
poet, he is a linguistic conjurer who stirs such respected writers as
Daniel David Moses to pen tantalizing comments on his work.

About half of this book is taken up with poems on the platonic theme of
lovers broken apart and going through the world seeking their other
half. The lovers of Rashid’s world are members of the same gender, and
the “otherness” is one of color and culture as evoked by the
volume’s title. The earlier poems as printed (their actual chronology
is not indicated) appear less mature and somewhat crippled in metre by
odd line endings, with the suggested phrase continuing or picking up
after a pause or a stop. This affectation is of the same ilk as the
forward slash in the language/words of Himani Bannerji’s introduction
to the volume. The later poems demonstrate a more mature control of the
Janus word and the clever surprises of imagery that mark Rashid’s
work.

It is clear that Rashid has oblique things to say about the gay
sensibility and the omnipresent plague, but “[t]he most that you’ll
ever know / is that this place is a strange island.”