15th Anniversary of the Human Body Project

15th ANNIVERSARY

I'd wanted to come up with something to "celebrate" 15 years of performance art/activism/openly expressing pain and connecting it to our brutal and destructive culture (or my new word for it, patriarkkkapitalism).

I've come to find it useful for my fragile sanity to see my work as ritual. The ritual of a white woman, with no ancestral/cultural ties to anything non-oppressive.

On March 25, 2006, I started using my vulnerable naked body and emotional self, to share and create space for vulnerability and to mirror humanity's vulnerability in the extinction crisis. The first Human Body Project performance took place in the conservative town of Lethbridge, Alberta, when Greta Thunberg was three years old, long before social media or Brené Brown were talking about vulnerability, or Elizabeth Kolbert wrote The Sixth Extinction, or an anonymous artist known as ESP created the extinction symbol.

1st Human Body Project performance
March 25, 2006, when I was 44

Since starting, my closest friend of my younger years and my cousin, both white women who grew up in the same era and place as me (Calgary, Alberta, born in the 1960s), committed suicide and I live with a Stage 4 ovarian cancer diagnosis.

Unlike my two peers, I believe I am only alive because I have been able to some degree to express my pain and how it connects to the larger culture (and some intense medical intervention... I also have a CT scan this anniversary week. Please feel free to send good vibes for tumor-free results.)

I've actually been feeling the pain of the world since I was a child. Here's a poem that I wrote in Grade 5 that recently surfaced.

Grade 5 poem

As many of you know, I have been doing performance art in fringe theatre festivals for more than 10 years (I'll be in the upcoming 2021 Victoria and Vancouver fringes) and once had a career as a post-secondary instructor. I also held monthly, naked Vulnerability Vigils on the street for more than five years but I am no longer robust enough to commit to these actions.

If anything, I am even more outraged and grief-stricken than when I started. The scale of destruction has dialled up so high but, as a culture, we HAVE ALMOST NO LANGUAGE OR STRUCTURE to discuss, understand, or change what we are experiencing. Also, total collapse in Western countries hasn't happened yet. So, even though poverty, housing precariousness and homelessness, debt, addiction and overdoses, refugees, incarceration, scapegoating (BIPOC, queer, women, etc), and, oh yeah, a global pandemic... as a culture, we still favour la-la-la-la-la.

UPCOMING RITUALS

My 15th anniversary week will be spent focusing on trees or forest ecosystems to be more precise.

Why? Old growth forest ecosystems are almost extinct while BC forestry practices are and have been grossly destructive for decades.

NOTHING, however, is more egregious than the current CLEARCUTTING of the forests holding THE VERY LAST STAND (less than 2%) of old growth trees left on Vancouver Island by legal corporate entities acting under legal circumstances, enabled by the 'Nother Disappointing Party NDP, or New Deforestation Party, who won't even implement their own old growth report that calls for a moratorium on old growth logging.

For the last 7 months, a courageous group of grassroots forest defenders, known as the Fairy Creek Blockade, have been camping at several locations to protect these last stands. Now there is an injunction to be heard in BC Provincial Court on March 25th and 26 to use the weight of the state to stop the blockade.

New Deforestation Party

March 19, 2021

I took part in the province-wide BC Forest March.

March 22-26, 2021

Fairy Creek Blockade Vigil

noon-2 pm

Mar 22-24 at BC Legislature

Mar 25-26 at BC Provincial Courthouse, Victoria

https://www.facebook.com/events/947870206018081

March 27

The Last Stand for Old Growth

11 am

BC Legislature

https://www.facebook.com/events/137096194981783

ANOTHER RITUAL: IN WHICH I RECENTLY ENGAGED IN A FUTILE DISCUSSION WITH A LEGAL ENTITY

My anger cup runnethed over and I wrote a futile letter to a "legal entity" that has already shed it like a microscopic flake of skin.

I share the exchange here because it's a pretty useful illustration of "customer service" in the corporate age and how legal corporate entities and their shareholders are NEVER HELD RESPONSIBLE FOR ANYTHING because of legal financial and tax structures while wages for normal people are a joke and any community protections beyond the bare legally mandated minimum are pretend.

Dear Thriftys:

I was just in your Broadmead store and I'm here to tell you why I am going to take a long break from shopping at Thriftys, where I spend thousands of my family's hard-earned dollars every year. It was my go-to chain grocery store. But today your company tapped into a deep vein of anger.

As a family, one of our values is doing what we are able to mitigate the impact we have on the environment. One of the ways we do this is to recycle. Our municipal recycling does not take plastic bags. We used to take them to Thriftys at Saanich Centre where we usually shop but since Covid, that store has not been taking plastic bags. Here's my first point, using Covid as an excuse to not do this TINY service is complete BS. At this point, every schoolchild knows that Covid is rarely if ever passed through touch or being near something that has been touched.

I did not know that your Broadmead store was also not accepting plastic bags because I don't usually go there and different stores do different things. I had some clean plastic bags in my car so I took them in when I went in there to buy groceries today. I went to the area where there would have been collection and since this store also no longer collects them I threw them in your garbage.

 

Two shopping-bag-size bags full of plastic bags. Not a huge amount. I was annoyed that I couldn't leave them there for collection but I would have left it at that. I haven't easily found places to leave plastic bags anymore so, yes, I decided to throw them away in surrender.

Not one, but two, of your employees spoke to me in a condescending way about not putting those two small bags of garbage in your garbage. One suggested I go to Country Grocer to recycle my bags. Here's my second point, I'm pretty sure if I was younger or a man, those employees wouldn't have spoken to me like that.

Larger point: I have little choice about whether or not I shop at chain stores owned by shareholders. Your company pretends to care about what you call customer service. What you actually do is make profits for your shareholders by selling items that mostly come in plastic. We know you feel no responsibility to your employees on the frontlines: paying them wages that they can barely live on; not or hardly increasing sick days during a pandemic; making them do illusory tasks like spraying the conveyor belt at cashiers' desks after each customer; etc. No wonder they are resentful about having extra garbage bags to empty or maybe they just feel like taking their bitterness out on an easy-target older woman.

We know that any "caring" you do, like the FORMER TINY service of recycling plastic bags (I wonder, did they actually go to any recycling depot?) is minuscule compared to the MOUNTAINS of plastic your industry creates; the human illnesses and animal suffering caused by industrially-produced food; the unfair and, often, harmful labour systems needed to keep the food chains going, etc. Your company takes ZERO RESPONSIBILITY.

I know whoever is reading this is also an employee but I'm writing anyway to say it's grotesque the way you operate without any actual ethical standards but within what a beleaguered population will tolerate and within "legal" guidelines. ZERO RESPONSIBILITY.

As I said, I'm under no illusions that I can avoid corporate grocery shopping but, because of today's "customer service" experience and my anger cup running over, Thriftys will not be my store of choice for a while.

Here's the thing: you could actually do better.

Sincerely, Tasha Diamant.

Hello Tasha,

Thank you for contacting Thrifty Foods Customer Care. Customer feedback is an integral part of our business and we welcome all comments from our customers. We’re sorry your experience didn’t match your expectations.

Thrifty Foods recognizes that single-use plastics have a negative impact on the environment and are committed to working on solutions.  It is a very complex issue that all retailers and manufactures are facing, and definitely a priority for Thrifty Foods. We agree that there is more we can do, and our company is committed to reducing single-use plastic packaging and items.  We will source more reusable options and we encourage our customers to use reusable shopping bags, like our Bag for Life.

For further information as we continue this journey, please visit our Sustainability link on our Corporate website at www.sobeyscorporate.com

I will send your concerns about the store level customer service to the Broadmead Management Team and your concerns about single use plastics to our Sustainability Team.

Again, thank you for taking the time to share your comments.

Yours Kindly
Holly | Thrifty Foods Customer Care

Dear Holly:

I appreciate it is your job to send me this response, which is not a response.

A real, non-gaslighting response would be to acknowledge that Sobeys exists to make money for Sobeys' shareholders.

A real, non-gaslighting response would not encourage me to look at corporate propaganda like your sustainability link on the corporate website, which is only there as a cost of doing business so that Sobeys can make money for its shareholders.

A real, non-gaslighting response would not tell me that the issue of single-use plastics is "complicated." Lol. Complicated" is another word for "we are a profit maximization business that doesn't operate ethically because we are not legally bound to and every other corporation does the same thing so if we started actually making a difference in packaging (or the other issues I mentioned: employee pay and benefits; unfair labour practices in the food supply chain; animal suffering in industrial food production) but that chipped away at shareholders' riches... well, that's not how we operate... but, hey, we're a customer service business because we say so."

A real, non-gaslighting response would address what I said about Covid not being a valid excuse to no longer accept soft plastic recycling.

A real, non-gaslighting response would actually say, hey, we're going to reinstitute soft plastic recycling.

After I left Thriftys today, I heard on CBC radio that Sobeys just bought Longo's in Ontario for more than $350 million.

Is that for "customer service," "sustainability," "reducing single use plastics," reasonably priced groceries, or to pay people like you and the thousands of frontline workers who breathe scary air every work day for low wages and crappy benefits? What do you think, Holly?

Please cc this to your manager, not that it will make a difference.

All the best, Tasha

Hello Tasha,

 

Thank you for your recent email. It is always appreciated when a customer takes a moment out of their busy day to share an experience with us, good or bad.

 

First and foremost I apologize for how you were made to feel. We are in the customer service business and must deliver excellent service at all times, clearly we did not deliver. Please know we will be following up accordingly with the employees involved.

 

Again, I apologize for your very frustrating experience.

 

Sincerely,

 

Gordon Simons

Store Manager

Thrifty Foods at Broadmead Village

Dear Mr. Simons:

The last thing I want is for your employees to be reprimanded. Maybe instead you could remind your whole staff that older women are people too. It’s one of those things that everyone could be reminded of now and then.

I’m not sure if you read my original letter but my main complaint is with the rich shareholders of Sobeys, who, I learned from CBC after being in your store, just bought Longo’s in Ontario for upwards of $350 million.

Neither you nor I nor any Sobeys’ employee will benefit from this merger, e.g., when they bought Thriftys. As you and I and your employees and especially the shareholders of Sobeys know, Thriftys is not actually a “customer service” business, it exists to make its shareholders money.

I am offended that your managers expect you to send me this gaslighting letter and reprimand barely-above-minimum-wage employees. It’s truly offensive.

If there was one thing you as a manager might be able to do that would make a tiny bit of sense to me: reinstitute plastic bag recycling as an ACTUAL customer service.

Please cc this letter to your managers.

Thank you for your time, Tasha

And that's the last I heard from them.

Thanks for reading and for being on whatever "journey" you are on at this challenging time for humanity.

All the best, Tasha

PS If you haven't seen it yet, here's a beautiful documentary that film producer Muniré Armstrong made about my work Radical Vulnerability

Or here's one of my own My Own Little Desperate Pride Parade

Also my social media linky thingers

Instagram @tasha_schmopey_diamant

Facebook Tasha Schmopey Diamant

Twitter @HumanBodyProj 

Montreal Massacre Memoir+Passing the Baton

I've written an article-length memoir about my time working as a fact-checker at Maclean's magazine during the Montreal Massacre, 30 years ago.

You can read it here https://medium.com/@tashadiamant/a-montreal-massacre-memoir-3930f46d4fa9 or at the bottom of this post.

So I've been doing the performance art and activism that falls under the umbrella of the Human Body Project since 2006.

For many of those years, I was committed to showing up once a month naked, or nearly naked, on the street, primarily as a way to disrupt cultural norms and share and create space for vulnerability at a time of grave vulnerability. I started to use the Extinction Symbol when I learned about it in April 2014 (see photo). I think it's a pretty good bet that I was the first person on the planet out on the streets, naked, holding the symbol to equate my vulnerable body with all of our vulnerable bodies in this Extinction Crisis.

Now, all over the world, in acts of protest, hope, and rebellion, millions of people use the Extinction Symbol (created and shared in 2011, btw, by a still anonymous London artist known as ESP, for anyone to use to raise awareness of the rapidly accelerating approach of the finale of the Anthropocene). Here in Victoria there are regular actions taking place where people use the symbol.

At the very first Human Body Project event in Lethbridge, Alberta, people left me art and notes. I wanted to find a particular one tonight to read again but couldn't dig it up. It was from a woman, probably about the age I am now, whose first language wasn't English. I still remember the wrench and gratitude I felt reading the first line: "You are a woman who do too much." 

I'm passing the baton on the monthly actions. I'll still show up wherever and whenever I feel called. For instance, someone in my neighbourhood put hearts and Extinction Symbols on over 40 Garry Oak trees last week. These mature trees are mentioned in a development proposal submitted to the District of Saanich and will be cut down if the development is approved. These are a "protected species." This is "normal practice." 

The hearts lasted less than a week. Whoever put them up will have to make some more.

In other news, I found out tonight that I'll be in the Winnipeg Fringe in July! I've never been to Winnipeg (except briefly one February, long story) and I'm excited to put on a show there!

So if you'd like to consider being my patron to on Patreon, I could for sure use some help getting to the Peg! https://www.patreon.com/humanbodyproject

Thank you for your attention, love, Tasha

ps Here is the article

A Montreal Massacre Memoir

by Tasha Diamant

Wednesday, December 6, 1989, the day Marc Lépine targeted, shot, and killed 14 young women at a Montreal engineering school, I was a 28-year-old researcher-reporter at Maclean’s, “Canada’s national newsmagazine.”

The magazine’s deadline was Friday night, it went to print on the weekend. In my four years at Maclean’s there were only minor copy changes to the magazine on Saturdays unless there was a late-breaking story. I don’t recall a single instance of going home late on a Friday night and coming in Monday morning to see a different cover. Except on December 11, 1989.

The Montreal Massacre was and still is the deadliest mass murder committed by an individual in Canadian history. It was incredibly shocking.

You might think that the murder of 14 women (he also wounded 14 others, including four men, then shot himself) by a disturbed man who declared that he was motivated by his hatred of feminists would be a no-brainer for the cover of the nation’s weekly. But until the Saturday after the massacre, the chief editor of the magazine, Kevin Doyle, was firm that this was not a cover-worthy story.

That was pretty shocking too.

The murders had set off a national discussion around male violence against women, which became (still is–see Wikipedia) a faux “debate” because many preferred to label Lépine a madman. Working with a reporter that week, I asked him why he kept using phrases like “women’s groups are horrified.” First of all, women’s groups? Like the Girl Guides? And, did they have to be the only ones who were distressed?

As a subordinate researcher-reporter, or fact-checker, I was not privy to editorial meetings. But according to various colleagues at the time, Doyle was unwilling to accept that there was an underlying culture of male dominance and misogyny that had helped create Marc Lépine.

I remember a former editor telling me that in one of the meetings that week, apropos the existence, and statistically arguable prevalence, of male violence against women, Doyle opined, to various nods, that he had never known of any women who had suffered from domestic abuse. That editor did not feel safe enough to tell him that she had been such a person.

Doyle was of the camp that saw the murders as a one-off by a nut-bar. This contention apparently clouded his view regarding the newsworthiness of the dead and wounded.

Many people tried to convince Doyle that he needed to put the story on the cover. I may have been the one who swayed him.

The culture of the magazine was white, male, rigidly hierarchical, with a vibe of 1970s-era Presbyterianism thrown in. (Doyle was Irish-Catholic, but no matter. As a friend of mine used to say about grey and buttoned-up Toronto, which wasn’t always the hipster haven it is now, “It doesn’t matter who comes here, Jamaicans, Italians, whatever, they all become Scottish Presbyterians.”)

Think of me as a slightly more grown up and less feisty Nancy Wheeler (Stranger Things) at a slightly fancier publication with slightly more contained Canadian chauvinism. I was a young woman of half-Greek heritage from, in some ways, the more freewheeling city of Calgary. When I left journalism in the early 1990s, I pursued a career as an artist. In 1989, except for our receptionist of Indian ethnicity — i.e. India. I never saw a single visibly Native person in that office tower — I was close to as exotic a person as had ever worked there.

It took a lot of guts for me to go into Kevin Doyle’s office to tell him that I felt very strongly that the Montreal Massacre needed to be on the cover of the magazine. I had to speak to his personal secretary to ask for an audience. I was ushered to a chair outside a closed door until I was allowed to enter. The office was a somber, important-looking chamber with its dark wood paneling and royal blue velvet curtains, quite dissimilar to the generic cubicle where I worked. Though I had been in Doyle’s office before in the role of minion, to drop off a document or some such task, I had never been invited to sit there except briefly at the time I was hired. There was absolutely no question that I might pop by to chat. Maclean’s was a boys’ club and Doyle was a very shy and repressed man.

My colleague Victor, who is still a good friend, says he remembers clearly: “You went into Kevin’s office to argue for it, and cried much of the time, and he was won over.” My own memory doesn’t include the winning him over part.

It was late on Friday when I spoke to Doyle. I couldn’t believe he hadn’t yet changed his mind. I know I felt very emotional. To me, not putting the story on the cover was equivalent to an insult to the dead women and, by extension, any woman who had suffered violence at the hands of men. And Lépine was a madman. It wasn’t an either/or.

Victor added: “My memory is that the Christmas party at Kevin’s house was the Sunday between closing the issue and its appearance on the stands. So I guess December 10. And there was much relief that he had been swayed.”

I remember the Christmas party at his house quite vividly. But I don’t remember that sequence!

Kevin Doyle was only ever “friendly” to me once. Under the influence at that Christmas party, two days after I had been in his office making my passionate appeal, he grabbed me from behind and held my body against his. I, politely, quietly, not saying a word, slunk out of the clutch and manoeuvred into another room.

He sort of apologized. There had been other breaches of propriety that night and, in a mass memo to staff the following week, he mentioned accidentally mixing alcohol and medication.

It’s interesting to me now to realize that I don’t remember the convincing of Doyle or whether the party incident had happened before or after the Montreal Massacre. In other words, in terms of who I was at the time, it doesn’t matter.

Doyle was my boss. I don’t think I would have been more or less uncomfortable going into his office to talk to him about the importance of putting the massacre on the magazine’s cover whether the inappropriate hugging incident plus lame apology had or hadn’t occurred. My attitude would have been something like this: Sometimes old guys (much younger than I am now!) get drunk and paw young gals that work for them. Sure, it was gross, but it was part of the world of work and the world period.

For my work friends and I, ironists all, and on lower rungs of the ladder, it was another log on the fire of hilarity fuelled by our seniors. None of us used the word I used above, “inappropriate,” or the word “disrespectful.” He didn’t threaten me or hurt me. We didn’t take it seriously. Bosses, like fathers and school principals, had their reasons. Different rules applied to them. And we had the comfort of believing we were cool. Poor Kevin Doyle, with his ironed jeans on weekends, he was the farthest thing from cool.

I had never experienced domestic violence. But it was an issue that I knew to be grossly hidden, and its victims, mostly women, unfairly treated by partners and society alike. It was around me, even in my privileged circle. My best friend Suzan had been slugged unconscious by her lawyer boyfriend earlier in the 80s. He was given an absolute discharge on account of his good standing in the community. Also in the 80s, a woman, who had been a school friend and grew up two doors down on our prosperous street, was murdered by her husband who then killed himself, as is the style. In my later life, I befriended an older woman who in the 1970s and 1980s lived on a farm where her then husband raped, beat, and chased her with a gun. She often slept in the chicken coop. Her ex-husband has never been charged with a criminal offense. Her grown children don’t or won’t or can’t acknowledge what she went through. It’s a story she rarely tells.

I strongly resonated with the issue. It was fully on my emotional radar. Still, I wasn’t yet at a stage to articulate why it was so painful to me. Abuse against women being in the category of menstruation and other terribly dangerous taboos. Nor was I able to see how so many of my own personal struggles were caused by being a feminine, creative being in a competitive, masculine world. (Suzan killed herself in 2013. I’m sure lawyer-hitter was not the reason but I’m also sure that her inability to find peace in this iteration of culture was.) Like the female engineering student survivors at École Polytechnique in Montreal who said that they were just going to school and weren’t “feminists,” I did not think of myself as a feminist.

I don’t exactly wish to vilify Kevin Doyle (now deceased). As I recall him, I see a man struggling with measuring up to the required standards for a person of his gender, time, and place. I was 28, female and “artsy,” nowhere near being a confident or comfortable person. He was the boss, a middle-aged man and “powerful,” also nowhere near being a confident or comfortable person.

For about two of my four years at Maclean’s, I was the main writer and editor of the “People” section, a page of mostly cutesy, gossipy items. The “People” editor, as part of the job’s mandate, had to contrive to feature a photo of a comely lady in revealing garments every week. I made sarcastic comments to my friends about what was euphemistically known as the “glamour shot” but hadn’t once made a real complaint about the demeaning nature of the whole exercise. It never occurred to me to do so. Just as it never occurred to me to believe I had influenced the editor-in-chief to change the cover.

From my current perspective, I realize Kevin’s attitudes should not have been such a surprise. But I also realize that the “surprise” wasn’t his attitude but the outing of it. I went from familiar, normal, unquestioned discomfort around a male authority figure to understanding that he was actually blind and indifferent to a reality lived by women. If anything has changed since 1989 — and I would argue that not much has even in the #metoo era, except, you know, the imminent demise of humanity due to patriarchy and capitalism — it’s that there is a lot more outing.

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