Author: Feven Worede
Student at MacEwan University
Part of the Student Series on the “Brampton Renaissance”
About the Author
Michael Kramer is a 4th-year Psychology and English student at MacEwan University in Edmonton, AB, Canada. This blog post is the final project from his class, “The Brampton Renaissance,” taught by Dr. Sara Grewal, which covers Sikh artistic and cultural production coming out of Brampton, ON. Michael loves coffee more than is strictly advisable and never misses a chance to get to the mountains.
Home and Hateful Tides
Looking for the promised land and found false promises
We’re on the factory floors instead of offices
Couldn’t see it from my view even if we were opposites.
— Noyz, featuring B Magic
In “Common Thread,” Noyz exposes the Canadian discourse of multiculturalism and pluralism for what it is: a veneer for White supremacy. At the same time, Noyz’s highlighting of these flaws in Canadian multiculturalism also stands alongside his tribute to the incredible and brutal journey of immigrants coming from Punjab to Canada. By combining these two themes, the song directs listeners to consider the misconception that “over there” is desperate, dangerous, and “bad,” while here in Canada, it is safe, wholesome, and “good.”
Noyz highlights the struggles that drove migrants from Punjab and the conditions that they faced and still face here. These experiences are represented best in the lines above and in the middle of the song: “Here in the great north, the grind of survival is second nature / Profiled, seen as the child of a lesser maker / Stretching paper from a labour job when we came abroad / Either sway the odds or you let the pressure break you” (Noyz). As a white male born in Canada, these are feelings and experiences I will never have, can’t ever experience. I have never needed to grind for survival. I have never been profiled. I have never had to “stretch paper” between rent, food, and family overseas. I have never had to sway the odds, not in the way that the people to whom this song is a tribute have. This isn’t new, and it isn’t news; this divide is pervasive and systemic.
The trouble is that Canada’s reputation as pluralistic “suggest[s] that racism is not a Canadian problem,” and we use that as an excuse not to talk about it (Dennie). Examining racism in Canadian hockey, Martine Dennie says: “Canada’s multicultural policy recognizes and promotes ethnic and racial diversity, as well as equal participation of all communities in Canadian society, but it does so in ways that maintain white supremacy” (1) This dynamic is not dissimilar to the environment Sihk are subject to in India; there, the discrimination is perpetuated by the religious majority, whereas here, it is the white majority. In both cases, the environment is created by a colonial state that is only interested in equality so long as minorities are subject to the supremacy of the majority.
At the end of “Common Thread,” an eleven-line section describes the trauma experienced by Sikhs living under the false promise of Canadian multiculturalism. The section is spoken word poetry performed by Jasmin Kaur to the background of a slow thrumming beat:
A land where another oppressor, different but ultimately the same
shackled our tongues
Severed us from our bodies
Dressed us up in the orange jumpsuit of colonial conformity
Here, we struggle against hateful tides that rise up to our throats
And try to settle into our lungs
The way they settle everywhere else
— Noyz featuring Jasmin Kaur
Noyz’s choice of ocean motifs evokes both colonial expansion and early 20th-century propaganda opposing Sikh immigration by calling up the racist imagery of a “tide of turbans” that threatened to overwhelm Whiteness in Canada. (Figure 1). In saying, “Fuck Christopher Columbus and the colonizers,” he contrasts Sikhs who crossed the ocean “as an act of survival” and the original colonial forces which colonized North America (Noyz, featuring B Magic). This comparison functions on two levels: one, in juxtaposing the motivations behind the two journeys, and two, because it highlights White settler colonialism as the primary source of ongoing oppression in Canada. The survivors in Noyz’s song endured their ocean journey but continue to be battered by the tides even after landing. The song reverses the racist legacy of the “tide of turbans” by referring instead to the “hateful tides” that continue to threaten Sikh rights in Canada.
In an academic article analyzing Canada’s multicultural policies, with regard to Sikhs in particular, Verne Dusenbery writes: “immigrants are not only disadvantaged if they are not quickly familiarized… expectations of appropriate conduct but may actively marginalize themselves by believing themselves free to practice politics according to the conventions of other political cultures” (750). The deceptive nature of Canadian multicultural puts Sikhs arriving in Canada at a disadvantage and pressures them to only partake in cultural practices approved of by the White supremacist state.
I have listened to this song dozens of times now, and every time I do, it is the line “we struggle against hateful tides that rise up to our throats” (Noyz) that stands out to me. This line could mean many different things in isolation, but Noyz has placed it critically at nearly the song’s end. It comes after the Sikhs of Noyz’s song flee India and find their “way to a land… where another oppressor… dressed [them] up in the orange jumpsuits of colonial conformity” (Noyz). As Dusenbery and Dennie both note, Sikhs face this hatred today and have since before Canada was its own country.
For me, Canada has always felt like home. I mean that both because it felt like home when I was born and that it has remained like that my entire life. I have never felt a “hateful tide” — I have never had the place where I live demand that I abandon my identity. When I listen to “Common Thread,” the violence and displacement committed against the Sikhs in Punjab is horrendous to me but far off — a world away. And so, when Noyz’s lyrics follow that journey from a faraway place to the country I call home and then expose the darkness that lies just below the surface of Canadian multiculturalism, it shakes me.
This is not far away; this is not someone else’s culture; the oppressor that shackles tongues, severs bodies, and demands colonial conformity is the system in which I participate every day. In its four-minute and twenty-three-second runtime, “Common Thread” pulls back the smiling mask of this system and grants a glimpse at the damage wrought by these hateful tides. This needs to change, and the first step is to stop pretending we — and especially we who benefit from the unearned privileges of Whiteness — need to talk about need to talk about it.
Works Cited
Dennie, Martine. “Seeing Red: Colour-Blindness and the Performance of Whiteness in the Calgary Flames’ ‘c of Red.’” Canadian Ethnic Studies, vol. 53, no. 3, 2021, pp. 51–70.
Dusenbery, Verne A. “The Poetics and Politics of Recognition: Diasporan Sikhs in Pluralist Polities.” American Ethnologist, vol. 24, no. 4, Nov. 1997, pp. 738–62.
Noyz, B Magic, Jasmin Kaur. “Common Thread.” NOYZ Music, 2020. Spotify, open.spotify.com/track/3evg4Y1Qwhdq3awSszOGyA?si=28c29eb03e5f46e4.
“‘Tide of Turbans,’ June 1910.” Pioneeringpunjabis.ucdavis.edu, 9 Sept. 2016, pioneeringpunjabis.ucdavis.edu/gmedia/img002-jpg/.