Do you ever think about what you can do?
I do.
I can tie my own two shoes with my own two hands.
If I can tie my own two shoes I have my own two feet too.
I can buy my own shoes and clothes via my father’s wallet.
I buy my own shoes and clothes via my father’s wallet because I can invest all my time and energy into a full course load of university education without the need to pay off student loans.
I can walk into a job interview and not have the colour of my skin be a marker for the need to prove myself.
Wait.
I can get a job interview in the first place.
I can leave the grounds of my home country for merely leisure purposes without a worry of how and if and when I will ever come back.
I can come back.
I can pull out my passport and show it to a foreign boarder crossing police officer and promptly get it stamped and handed right back to me. No questions asked.
I can take a Gender Studies course and be taught the daunting truth about my all of my I Can’s.
Each one of my I Can’s is an I Can’t for someone else.
Rationale/Artist Statement: The Poem of I Can’s is a poem that I wrote to capture a few of the many things that I can do because of my skin colour and social position. In our class, we continuously discussed the countless barriers that migrants face when all they are trying to do it build a safer life for themselves and their families. When I learned about all of the physical, social, and political barriers that migrant’s must confront along their journey (not only barriers to leave and cross, but also barriers when they finally arrive), I thought about how radically different my reality is from someone else’s across the world. Creating this poem, I was seeking to navigate some of the privileges I have and to illustrate that I have those privileges at the expense at another person’s disadvantage. Therefore, I created this poem is to represent the oppressive system that grants people like myself “I Can’s,” while in turn giving others “I Cant’s.”
Keywords: I Can, I Can’t, privilege, disadvantage, oppression
Author: Kim Kardashian
First and foremost, I would like to commend you for creating this poem as it is beautifully written and conveys a powerful message. This poem truly struck me as I realized that I rarely think of my I Can’s and how some (or plenty) of them may be an I Can’t for someone else. I am an able bodied, white, cisgendered, heterosexual, middle-class male; none of these identities are marginalized, thus neither am I in my everyday life. Many things that come naturally to me and that I do or experience in a day may be inaccessible or downright impossible for other individuals who have been oppressed by our white supremacist patriarchal society that values certain identities over others. Wit…