In 2019, Liu Yifei, the actress who plays Mulan in the recently released remake, make a social media statement standing with Hong Kong police. The same police who are brutalizing and rounding up protesters outside of protocol, and who have received numerous complaints about arresting citizens without warrants or providing identification, and unnecessarily harming and endangering civilian lives.

When we think about justice, for better or for worse, we often think of a handful of people and spaces whose responsibility it is to provide that for us. We think of the police, the courts, the government, the infrastructure that builds up the thing we call the ‘justice system’. It’s in the name, we think, and therefore we’re expected to get that thing there. It doesn’t matter whether we don’t trust those people or spaces, or whether we have a complicated relationship with them, or even if we don’t have the same access as others. That’s where justice is, and we have to find our way there or, as the Trinis would say ‘crapeau smoke yuh pipe’.

The issue is, though, that for many people, that’s not at all where justice lives. And, even more importantly, it’s not the same place as where the people who need it live. And that’s a problem.

I want to open this blog with a question that I hope makes us all think a little about how we engage in debates about other people's lives;

Do you think having an opinion is enough to determine how someone else lives?

I struggled with the concept of my piece for the First Citizens National Poetry Slam finals this year. Not because I didn’t know what I wanted to say, but because I had no idea of how I wanted to say it. Even as I went on stage, I wasn’t entirely certain I had all the words.

I have a few more now.