"This life, this tour that I'm doing, is radically unsustainable," ANOHNI tells me over Zoom from her hotel in Toronto, where she's just touched down the night before. "It's part of the problem. It'll be looked back on by future iterations of us and could be seen as a crime! Just me taking a plane to Toronto to do a concert knowing the cost of that flight."
The following evening, ANOHNI will perform at Massey Hall, and for those in attendance, the cost of that flight, its belching and air-thickening cruelty, will feel like pocket change. Cutting, sumptuous, funny and devastating, ANOHNI's performance — her band all in white, a flock of angels circling her looming shadow — was unlike anything I'd ever seen or felt, a paean to all the fags and queens and animals in the trees, dropping from their perches.
Singing songs from across her catalogue, her voice bent itself against the thundering electronics of 2016's HOPELESSNESS and wrapped itself in the silk of this year's My Back Was a Bridge for You to Cross, collecting decades of song in her gloved arms. She was purple New York City smog, a circle of bright white light, a mouthy queen, a eulogist, a diva and a child. In her own words, she's a "worker among workers."
"Everyone has a job. You're a journalist, I'm a singer — it's a job. Not in a cruel way," she says gently. "I'm not really into exceptionalism, you know? Everyone in the room at a concert has a job as important as my job."
Her job at the moment, as she tells it, is to be present and hold herself accountable, to perform these "burning rituals" across North America for the first time in 15 years and face head-on the destruction they leave in their wake. Our job is to face it alongside her, to attempt a collective coalescence, to participate and not look away.
"Trying to Pollyanna it, or deny it, are our survival strategies," she says. "And they might be useful survival strategies in terms of getting from day to day, but the road through this is just the road through any kind of death — part of it entails grief."
She continues, "That's what we're being challenged with. The problem for us, as Western consumers especially, is our causal complicity in facilitating this death. And that's the material as artists and as sentient creatures that we're being asked to work with in this iteration of life. And I say step up, try and let more than one thing be true. You can go into your garden and probably find something very, very beautiful living, unfurling, like small animals, small insects — life is still going on, life is still transpiring. Even in its depleted state, nature is still full of expressions of abundance, and that calls me back to the present."
For Tuesday night's penultimate performance of "Drone Bomb Me," ANOHNI returned from behind the curtain under a glittering black veil, the grieving widow of a world besieged by bombs and fire from all sides. The funereal presentation would feel garish were it not so appropriate — for all her otherworldly beauty and transcendental power, ANOHNI deals in realities; she is saying goodbye, and she is dressing for the job.
"There are aspects of funeral happening right now — that's not a projection, that's a reality. Things are dying right now, biodiversity is collapsing around us. A huge number of species are disappearing. They say that the Great Barrier Reef and most coral systems will be functionally extinct by 2030, so that's five years," she says, her voice rising in pitch and pace. "That's basically like saying the forest systems of the ocean will be dead in five years. So what does that really mean for the forest systems of the land? You couldn't overstate the unprecedented-ness of this crisis. You couldn't overstate the import of it. So the feelings that you're having are real. They're appropriate, you know? And I think that's part of this, is to affirm that it's appropriate to be feeling grief."
She continues, "It's terrifying what's happening right now; it's unprecedented, and it's utterly terrifying. There's nothing in place to help us at this point to work through this. That's why I keep saying, 'Where are the ceremonies fit for purpose?' We don't have ceremonies, except for apocalyptic texts. Patriarchal, apocalyptic texts are our only context for understanding what's going on here. And that's not enough, you know? That doesn't begin to address our needs right now, or prescribe a path forward."
The path forward requires one eye trained on the past, as it always has. ANOHNI's performance featured archival interruptions from the likes of Vito Russo and Marsha P. Johnson, radical spirits extinguished by the world's disregard; whole people whose legacies have been twisted into new shapes by time's forge, aspects burned away forever and others set in immovable glass. Forgetting, as ANOHNI tells me, is a weapon of capitalism, a violence that extinguishes stories as readily as it does entire species.
"I remember, like, 10 years ago, in The Guardian, some scientists were talking about this concept of the shifting baseline, in terms of what people expected of nature," she says. "That our grandmother saw 100 birds on the line, our parents saw 50, our generation saw 10, our nieces and nephews are seeing three, and each generation believes that's the normal amount of birds. And that's how we become acclimatized to this kind of loss."
She continues, "One of the most important components of colonialism is the erasure of memory. In order that extraction can prevail, one must forget the value of things and the value that things had. But that's a very surface forgetting, because we've been here a long, long time. We've been here since the beginning of creation. We're part of a line of creation that echoes back to the beginning of everything. So our bodies remember, our genomes remember, all of the different iterations of this experience of living. And if you're feeling a certain way, and it feels incongruous with what's being told to you in the media, it's because your body has a strong, strong memory of knowledge and understanding and intuition of what's really happening."
She recalls a recent experience on Canada's West Coast, where a walk through the forest revealed the Douglas fir and cedar trees browning in a collective death. Rather than turn away to a future free of them, where the memory of their towering shadows and greenness would eventually fade, ANOHNI stood with the trees and died alongside them.
"I feel a lot of pain and sadness when I'm in nature. Yes, I do. And I try to stay with her," she says. "I try to stay with her as much as I possibly can, because that's my mother. And also, it's like I'm made of her body. It's not like it's separate from me — if you're seeing those cedar trees, there's a dying happening within them. There's also a dying happening within me. My body, our bodies, are all mirrors of the environment. We're porous creatures; we're filled with all this stuff. We're filled with the aching of all of the animals that we keep in stress positions, in torture chambers, all around the country. We're filled with their body fluids and eggs and milks, and we're filled with the cruelty of the extractive labour that's embedded in all of the products that we take into our own bodies."
"I'm gonna miss the trees / I'm gonna miss the sound / I'll miss the animals / I'm gonna miss you all," she sang to Massey Hall during "Another World," her band dressing this live rendition in shimmering guitar and lush rhythm. This ceremony of goodbye and reckoning isn't resignation — as ANOHNI tells it, the title of 2016's HOPELESSNESS was less a declaration than an invitation.
"My idea about hopelessness is that it's a feeling. Feelings are things that we have to move through. Grief is a feeling we have to move through," she says. "My currency is feeling, and I try to model the courage to move through feeling, to embody it, and move through it. But it's not a prescription. It's not a prophecy — the name of the record wasn't a prophecy, it was just a feeling. Feelings have very little to do with what's empirically happening at the end of the day. I mean, they have something to do with it, but they don't define what's going to happen. What defines what's happening is our actions from moment to moment."
She goes on, "There's some part of this feelingful process that's going to be important, or that might be important, in forging a new way forward, you know, a more feminine way forward, a shift in the paradigm. It's painful work and important work that everyone, individually, I believe, has to do. And we have to come together collectively around it if we want to keep moving. We have a choice. We still have choices."