Managing Diversity in Caribbean-Canadian Women's

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2019-01-04 Transnational Cultural Capital: Managing Diversity in Caribbean-Canadian Women’s Performance of Multiculturalism

Wall, Natalie

Wall, N. (2019). Transnational Cultural Capital: Managing Diversity in Caribbean-Canadian Women’s Performance of Multiculturalism (Unpublished doctoral thesis). University of Calgary, Calgary, AB. http://hdl.handle.net/1880/109457 doctoral thesis

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Transnational Cultural Capital: Managing Diversity in Caribbean-Canadian Women’s

Performance of Multiculturalism

Natalie Wall

A THESIS

SUBMITTED TO THE FACULTY OF GRADUATE STUDIES

IN PARTIAL FULFILMENT OF THE REQUIREMENTS FOR THE

DEGREE OF DOCTOR OF PHILOSOPHY

GRADUATE PROGRAM IN ENGLISH

CALGARY, ALBERTA

JANUARY, 2019

This dissertation investigates the politics of officially sanctioned Canadian multiculturalism via

an exploration of the experiences of Caribbean-Canadian women. Using a combination of

performance theory, postcolonial and feminist theories, and the notion of hospitality as theorized

by Jacques Derrida, the dissertation argues that, while ostensibly benevolent, state-sanctioned

multiculturalism places onerous demands on racialized groups to perform their otherness. This, I

argue, is the “price of entry” for multiculturalism’s conditional hospitality. I suggest that this

price serves to radically limit the agency of the performer by simultaneously celebrating

otherness (through exoticizing displays that render it as a spectacle to be alternately desired and

feared) and containing it, limiting the capacity of those whose difference is celebrated to be

viewed through any other paradigm than that of their spectacular difference.

In making this argument I explore numerous specific sites of multicultural performance

in which Caribbean-Canadian women participate: the literary-critical industry (exemplified by the celebratory treatment of the authors Dionne Brand, M. NourbeSe Philip and Claire Harris);

Toronto’s Caribana festival (which I examine primarily in the context of visual representation

and the development of a mode of gaze I term “tourism at home”); dub poetry (with particular

reference to a matrilineal tradition that develops within Canadian dub poetry and renders it

distinct from the performance of dub in other locations); the feminist monodrama (Trey

Anthony’s ’Da Kink in My Hair and its TV adaptation); and finally, activism in response to

emergent events. Intertwined in all these explorations are questions of space (I begin by

exploring the extent to which “my” Canada is refracted through my experiences of my home city

of Toronto), of black female bodies, and of agency. This final question becomes particularly

salient as my project works towards a conclusion and asks what space is available to the

ii performers of multiculturalism to resist or reappropriate the demand that they perform their non-

Canadianness in order to be granted their Canadianness.

iii Acknowledgements

I would like to take this opportunity to acknowledge the contributions of several persons without whom this dissertation would never have been finished. First and foremost, let me acknowledge the patience, and if not sainthood then close, of my partner, Richard Brock who provided feedback, advice, childrearing, and cheerleading. My supervisor, Aruna Srivastava, is a rock.

Always willing to listen and offer thoughts, Aruna believed in me, and my work, even when I did not. I would also like to acknowledge the efforts of my supervisory committee members, Susan

Bennett and Rebecca Sullivan, and their invaluable feedback throughout the project. As well, I will acknowledge friends that I have coerced into reading chapters and have given me both advice and encouragement when I needed it most: thank you Akile Ahmet and Nicky Lambert, you inspiring activist scholars, you. Finally, I could not have managed this dissertation without the funding I received from the Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council.

iv Dedication

This dissertation is dedicated to my father Michael Wall. A man who wanted me to love Trinidad and its culture as much as he did and died six years ago.

v Table of Contents

Abstract ...... ii Preface...... Error! Bookmark not defined. Acknowledgements ...... iv Dedication ...... v Table of Contents ...... vi List of Tables ...... Error! Bookmark not defined. List of Figures and Illustrations ...... viii List of Plates ...... Error! Bookmark not defined. List of Symbols, Abbreviations and Nomenclature ...... Error! Bookmark not defined. Epigraph ...... ix

FOREWORD: SKIN THAT SPEAKS ...... 1

INTRODUCTION ...... 6 Theoretical Framework ...... 6 Four Modes of Representation ...... 15 Auto-Ethnographic Moments ...... 19 Performing Black Feminism and Anti-Racism ...... 22 Project Intentions: Where is Here?: Nation Building in the Margins ...... 26 Multiculturalism and the Nation-Building Project ...... 28 Multiculturalism and Containment ...... 35 Performing the Caribbean Canadian Woman ...... 37

MY TORONTO: GROWING UP BLACK IN RONCESVALLES VILLAGE ...... 41 Black Culture, Black Poverty, Black Erasure ...... 43 Thinking about Being Black in Toronto ...... 46 My Toronto: Between Nova Scotia and the Caribbean ...... 50

CITIZENSHIP, COMMODIFICATION, AND CONTAINMENT OF TRANSNATIONAL MINORITY LITERATURE IN CANADA...... 57 Hospitality and Extra-National Success: Containing the Minority Author ...... 58 Cultural Capital and the Performance of Multiculturalism ...... 62 Brand, Philip, and Harris: Ambassadors of the State ...... 67 Diasporic vs. Minority Writers in Canada: Capitalized Worth ...... 71 Authenticity and the Voice of the Immigrant Canadian Writer ...... 75 Reading the Authentic: Situating the Caribbean ...... 78 The Lived Experience: Deauthorizing the Nation-State ...... 83 Unhoming Hospitality: Unmanageability in Contained Spaces ...... 86

PHOTOGRAPHING CARIBANA: MANAGING MULTICULTURALISM THROUGH THE TOURISTIC GAZE ...... 92 Colonial Residuals: Caribana as a Black Event ...... 99 Photographic Disempowerment and the Power of the Voyeur ...... 102 Transforming Toronto into a Tourist Haven ...... 107 The Economy of Caribana’s Sexualization ...... 109

vi Connotation and Denotation: Reading Popular Media ...... 113 Alienation at Home: Exoticized by the Camera ...... 115 Returning the Gaze ...... 119 Financial Management and Economical Containment ...... 120 Containing the Violence: Policing the Crowds at Caribana ...... 124 Performing Citizenship ...... 130

WHITE CIVILITY AND DUB POETRY: CATCHING BULLETS, SO WHAT? ...... 134 Disruption and Dub: Writing Black in Toronto ...... 140 The Problem with Multiculturalism ...... 144 “’forget yu troubles and dance’”: Rhythm, Reason, and Regent Park ...... 149 Dub as Matrilineal: Creolized English ...... 154 Dub as Matrilineal: What are Women Made of? ...... 160 Nanny Maroon: Appropriating the Body ...... 165 Nanny Maroon: Appropriation as Civility ...... 168

“WHERE I’M FROM”: LANGUAGE, RITUAL, AND SPACE IN BLACK, CARIBBEAN CANADIAN FEMINIST WORK AND PLAY ...... 177 Monodrama in ‘Da Kink ...... 178 Hair, the Body, and the Intrinsic Audience ...... 180 Antanaclasis as Representative of Interstitial Space ...... 182 The Material Work ...... 185 Ritual and the In-Between Space of the Caribbean Canadian Woman ...... 187 Playfulness and Performance ...... 188 Moments of Interculturalism ...... 190 Missing the Subjunctive in Jamaican Creole ...... 193 Finding the Subjunctive in Dance ...... 196 Performing the Unhomely in the Jamaican Canadian Diaspora ...... 198 Inhospitality and Performing the Foreign ...... 200 Wearing Black: Occupying Language, Ritual, and Space ...... 204

ANTI-RACISM AND EMERGENT EVENTS: DO #BLACKLIVESMATTER IN CANADA? ...... 206 Journey into the Heart of Africa: Ironic Contemplations and Re/Activism ...... 211 Writing Thru Race: Coalitions and Contestations ...... 218 Performing Praxis: Re/Activism in the Arts ...... 225 Emergent Events: Performing Poetics ...... 227 Performance in Intercultural Toronto Theatre ...... 233 Anti-Racism/Activism as Performance: #blacklivesmatter ...... 237 Transnational Intracultural Performance as Emergent Event ...... 241

BECOMING FOREIGN: WHO AM I? ...... 243

REFERENCES ...... ERROR! BOOKMARK NOT DEFINED.

vii List of Figures and Illustrations

Still from Black Panther ...... 1

Tweet by Canadian Prime Minister Justin Trudeau dated January 28th, 2017 ...... 6

Typographical layout of Zong! #4 by M. NourbeSe Philip ...... 88

Typographical layout of “Ebora”, from Zong! by M. NourbeSe Philip ...... 89

Imagine accompanying The Globe and Mail’s headline about Caribana, August 7th, 1967 ...... 96

Image of Nancy Campbell accompanying The Globe and Mail’s report on Caribana, August 7th, 1967...... 97

Screengrabs of the first page of image search results for the Twitter hashtags #caribana2016 and #caribana2017 ...... 102

Images grouped under the Instagram tag caribana2018...... 103

Photograph of anonymous Caribana participant by Aaron Harris, The Star, May 25, 2011 ...... 109

Photograph of Caribana’s “eye-catching delights” illustrating a Globe and Mail article published in August 7th, 1970 ...... 115

Digital Journal photograph of Conservative Toronto mayor Rob Ford with two female Caribana participants ...... 121

Photograph illustrating Toronto Sun report on policing Caribana, 2012 ...... 126

Photograph accompanying Globe and Mail article on tensions between Caribana attendees and Toronto police, July 2016 ...... 128

viii Epigraph

The epigraph is an optional section, where you can include a motto or quotation that sets forth a theme.

FOREWORD: SKIN THAT SPEAKS

Still from Black Panther https://screenrant.com/black-panther-movie-dora-milaje-comic-origin/

Like most everyone else, I saw the movie Black Panther earlier this year.

It was a revelation.

The movie was not unproblematic; I am leery of the premise that Africa is only enviable when gifted with magical metal and a culture that emulates a colonial attitude towards technology. The orientation towards African Americans as the central point of blackness in a movie that took place in Africa seems dismissive of difference and the heterogeneity of the black diasporic experience. However, let us put those concerns aside and think about what is revelatory about Black Panther.

Black bodies. So many black bodies. Wonderful and beautiful and overpowering in their presence. As I will argue later in this dissertation, masses of black bodies are rarely celebrated in

contemporary media. The celebration of the presence of these black bodies on screen is

powerful. I am in awe.

Black women. The more nuanced and intriguing characters in Black Panther are women.

Adored by fans for her quirky sense of humour and intelligence, Shuri (T’Challa’s sister) is

probably the breakout fan favourite of the movie. General of the elite all female group of

bodyguards (the Dora Milaje), as well as head of Wakanda’s armed forced, Okoye is second only

to Shuri for fan popularity. The bald warrior woman has captured the hearts of the Black Panther

audience with her steadfast loyalty and amazing skills. Finally, there is Nakia, T’Challa’s love

interest and conscience. While Nakia is the least interesting of the women in the movie due to

her acting as moral compass to the lead, she is, arguably, the most powerful figure in the film.

When asked what I think about Black Panther, I always answer “there’s a dark skinned black woman as the leading lady; when do you ever see that?” It is 2018 and this is ground-breaking. I am still astounded.

Spears. When Okoye calls the guns the Americans use “barbaric,” and pulls out her spear it is a none-to-subtle nod to the geography of racism that permeates the black diaspora and Black

Panther tells us to own it.

In my second year of undergraduate studies, I read Frantz Fanon for the first time. It was a revelation. My experiences of blackness, at that point, all related to growing up in Toronto. I understood the geopolitical relationship between Africa and me, but I was constructed out of that hilariously euphemistic term, “urban.” I understood that the white men making monkey noises at me as I walked past were racist, and that that racism hurt, but I could not construct the relationship between that animality and blackness, outside of an uncritical thought that my black

features were offensive in some way. Fanon helped to orient me to the perceived animality of my own black skin:

My body was given back to me sprawled out, distorted, recolored, clad in mourning in

that white winter day. The Negro is an animal, the Negro is bad, the Negro is mean, the

Negro is ugly; look, a nigger, it’s cold, the nigger is shivering, the nigger is shivering

because he is cold, the little boy is trembling because he is afraid of the nigger, the nigger

is shivering with cold, that cold that goes through your bones, the handsome little boy is

trembling because he thinks that the nigger is quivering with rage, the little white boy

throws himself into his mother’s arms: Mama, the nigger’s going to eat me up. (86)

My black skin made me hungry; my black skin would cannibalize small children in order to satiate its animal cravings. Marrying this construction of perceived animality with the cage of urban living enabled me to (re)construct myself1 in relation to a history of prejudice, racism,

slavery, and abduction.

However, my blackness is not Fanon’s blackness. I have no way to relate to the statement

that “[a]s long as the black man is among his own, he will have no occasion, except in minor

internal conflicts, to experience his being through others” (82), as my skin has never made me

feel unexceptional. My light black skin offers me privileges that I must acknowledge; however,

my skin never disappears. I am black, but even surrounded by black people I recognize that I am

different. Even so, I am black.

1 At the same time I watched Spike Lee’s Bamboozled, which also had a similar effect. The ending montage of that movie still hurts my soul. 3

The black diaspora is located. There is a story to black skin that begins in Africa and

moves in many directions to create a vibrant and diverse way of seeing that blackness. Indeed,

there is a larger story at play than the one I choose in this dissertation, “[t]he history of black

subjects in the diaspora is a geographic story that is, at least in part, a story of material and

conceptual placements and displacements, segregations and integrations, margins and centers,

and migrations and settlements” (McKittrick 15). Movement, forced and desired, is at the center

of what it means to be black. In this dissertation, I happen to follow along with my own genetic

and cultural journey of location, moving between the Caribbean and Canada, Trinidad and

Toronto. However, implicit in this journey is the journey of blackness that is written across my

skin. The journey that makes Black Panther a revelation in its embrace of stereotypes (African

tribalism, spears, ritual, etc.) and the way it turns those stereotypes into constructive moments of

empowerment. It is when Okoye looks at the American guns and names them “barbaric” that my animalistic skin is ripped asunder. I am one of many. I am black.

More than that, I am a black woman. I live in a country where there are 25 black women professors out of 18,950 (Advance HE) total professors, where the first black female vice- chancellor was appointed in 2015, as compared to the first female vice-chancellor who was appointed in 1948 (Equality Challenge Unit) . The story of my skin is also the story of my gender:

the black Atlantic Ocean differently contribute to mapping out the real and imaginative

geographies of black women; they are understood here as social processes that make

geography a racial-sexual terrain. Hence, black women’s lives and experiences become

especially visible through these concepts and moments because they clarify that

blackness is integral to the production of space. (15)

My black skin is always constructed through space I am allowed to occupy. Where my skin is

sanctioned, I am allowed to perform blackness as is proscribed by the geopolitical environment that has always predetermined me.

As you read this dissertation, I want you to acknowledge that skin speaks. I want you to read with the knowledge that my skin speaks differently to yours. This is not to say that “you” are white (or that you not white); another black woman’s skin will speak differently than my

own. We are all distorted (and distorting) through this lens called skin. In all cases, your skin

speaks differently to mine. This difference can be a burden. This difference can also be

revelatory, and that is the tension inherent in this project: that pleasure and pain, of text, of

culture, of performance, should always inform each other.

INTRODUCTION

Tweet by Canadian Prime Minister Justin Trudeau dated January 28th, 2017 This is a project interested in national hospitality. I started writing this dissertation under

the Harper government, at a time when the Conservative government was taking liberties with its

population’s human rights2 and making Canada a less tolerant environment than it has

traditionally painted itself. I have finished it up under a Justin Trudeau government, a Liberal

Canada expressing itself through its proclaimed feminist and hospitable Prime Minister.

Trudeau’s likeability and international popularity are reflective of a system of government that

always works best when portrayed as idealistic and inclusive. In this dissertation I argue that the

pluralist and tolerant Canada on the international stage is not my Canada. It is a Canada that

benefits in real, marketable, ways from its reputation as a multicultural utopia that operates to oppress and manage non-white bodies by using them as objects to parade before other, international and white, audiences.

Theoretical Framework

In his book The Postcolonial Exotic, Graham Huggan looks critically at the complicity of the field of postcolonial studies in practices of cultural commodification, as it capitalizes on the

2 See Human Rights Watch’s “World Report 2016” where among other concerns are the refusal to conduct an inquiry into missing and murdered Indigenous women and the Anti-Terror Act of 2015, “law that imperils constitutionally enshrined human rights, including the freedoms of expression and association” (160). 6

very “exoticist production of otherness” (13) that it seeks to deconstruct. Using the space between critical engagement and consumer voyeurism to destabilize the “global commodification of cultural difference” (vii), Huggan suggests that postcolonialism falls prey to its own cautioning against the branding of exoticism and cultural difference. My research project moves Huggan’s theories of the “postcolonial exotic” into the realm of performance, considering how the Caribbean Canadian woman works as cultural signifier for the Canadian consumer, as well as a racialized and sexualized embodiment of the exotic.

I use the term “performance” to illustrate Canada’s cultural constructions of multiculturalism and immigrant women. My conception of performance is based on that of

James Loxley in his book Performativity, which argues that “[p]erformance studies is to some degree an extension of theatre studies, a recognition that the genres of performance worthy of academic attention are neither limited to what we usually call drama nor constrained within the space of the stage” (139). Alongside Loxley’s definition of performance studies, I would suggest

Richard Schechner’s breakdown of performance as a working definition for reading this dissertation. Schechner defines performance as “[t]he whole constellation of events, most of them passing unnoticed, that take place in/among both performers and audience from the time the first spectator enters the field of the performance” (71); Schechner’s definition of performance relies on seeing it as encompassing the smaller domains of “theatre,” “script,” and, finally, “drama,” though Schechner is careful to note the relationship between performance and everyday life as “shifting and arbitrary” (70). And, in addition to these definitions of performance studies and performance, I would add Judith Butler’s definition of performativity from Gender Trouble, where, firstly, “performativity of gender revolves around […] the way in which the anticipation of a gendered essence produces that which it posits as outside itself.

Secondly, performativity is not a singular act, but a repetition and a ritual, which achieves its

effects through its naturalization in the context of a body” (xv). Butler is careful to note though,

and I will echo, that gender performativity does not map consistently onto racial performativity

(xvi) and this dissertation always keeps in mind the ways that intersectional identities change the

way that theory works.

Traditionally, in Canada, theatre and dub performance act as political spaces for the

expression of “woman-centered Afro-Caribbean diasporic performance aesthetics rooted in

island traditions but grounded in Canadian realities” (Knowles, “To be Dub” 80), while also

acting counter to the traditionally masculinist, heteronormative theatrical spaces of the

Caribbean. I make use of what Joseph Roach calls “genealogies of performance,” which

“document the historical transmission and dissemination of cultural practices through collective

representations” (126), to explore the ways in which Canada benefits economically by treating

multiculturalism as a commodity. Roach’s paradigm allows me to analyze the spatial and

temporal locations of performance within Canadian multiculturalism.

In reading the performances and texts of this dissertation, I am relying on Knowles’

identification of the potential of intercultural theatre and performance “to be a site for the

continuing renegotiation of cultural values and the reconstitution of individual and community

identities and subject positions “ (Theatre & Interculturalism 4-5). Theatre and performance thus participate in what Knowles, via Julie Holledge, identifies as an interculturalism that relies on two or more cultural traditions coming together on stage (Theatre & Interculturalism 4). This definition of interculturalism enables me to engage with the performance of the everyday in

multicultural Canada, which, in turn, allows me to consider Roach’s restored behaviours as a

valuable framework for thinking about performance of Caribbean Canadian women. Where

Roach looks at performance as having three definitions, “that it carries out purposes thoroughly, that it actualizes a potential, or that it restores a behavior” and these three definitions “commonly assume that performance offers a substitute for something else that preexists it” (3). In this construction of performance, I am particularly interested in the element of “restored behaviors,” as Roach keeps coming back to that behavior which must be reinvented or revised (3). For

Roach, these restored behaviours link to the production of cultural memory (73), again linking the relationship between performance and everyday life.

Collectively, these theories enable me to illuminate the problematic relationship between representation and audience and examine the nature of Canadian multiculturalism by examining specific sites of cultural performance by black Caribbean Canadian women. Specifically, I intend to examine the ways in which race has an impact on interpretations of cultural authenticity and why configurations of national and ethnic descriptors influence the marketability of Canadian identities that symbolize an ideal, diasporic Canada. Officially sanctioned expectations of a multicultural performance, specifically of those of Caribbean background, form the foundation of my dissertation, as I explore an industry of postcolonial performance that requires diasporic citizens to make spectacles of themselves. With the aid of these insights, I seek to draw a connection between various sites of cultural performance, using them to explore what it means to be foreign and citizen at the same time.

As might be inferred from my opening this section with Graham Huggan’s notion of postcolonial exoticism, framework I employ in this project is heavily indebted to postcolonial theory. I am most influenced by the strands of postcolonial theory that draw from poststructuralist and deconstructionist methodologies, as developed by Edward Said; Ashcroft, Griffiths, and

Tiffin; Robert Young; Anne McClintock; and perhaps most especially Homi Bhabha. While I

acknowledge the validity of the criticisms of this field by theorists who advocate a less conciliatory

approach to the legacy of imperialism deriving from Marxism rather than poststructuralism (see

especially Parry, Ahmad), my project is situated at the same intersection Huggan identifies in

postcolonial theory when he observes that

while “the postcolonial” is unthinkable outside of the academic debates surrounding the

other “posts,” poststructuralism and postmodernism, nor can it be divorced from the more

immediate material contexts in which representations of cultural difference are circulated

within the global economy - and consumed. (243)

This understanding of postcolonial theory offers two insights that are key to my project.

Firstly, it articulates the most important way in which postcolonial theory builds on the radical but purely textual foundations of poststructuralism and deconstruction to identify sites of ambivalence and conflict as sites of cultural and political agency, so that “the event of theory becomes the negotiation of contradictory and antagonistic instances that open up hybrid sites and objectives of struggle, and destroy those negative polarities between knowledge and its objects, and between theory and practical-political reason” (Bhabha 37-38). These “hybrid sites” include, for example, the “sly civility” of the colonized that continually discloses the failure of colonial governance to

“maintain [its] civil authority once the colonial supplementarity, or excess of their address is revealed” (Bhabha 136-37).

Daniel Coleman develops Bhabha’s insights into the role of civility in modern nation- building when he defines “[t]he ambivalence or contradiction of civility” as

a central paradox of liberal modernity, for the civil sphere or stage of advancement in

which all participants are guaranteed liberty and equality must be protected from those

belated or primitive elements or identities, within and without, which may threaten,

intentionally or not, that freedom of equality. As a result, the borders of civility must be

policed[.] (13)

Coleman co-opts and extends “sly civility” in advocating a contemporary Canadian theoretical

position he calls “wry civility,” which is

“civil” in the sense [of] the contradictory or ambivalent project that purports to provide a

public space of equality and liberty for all at the same time as it attempts to protect this

freedom and equality from threats within and without - and “wry” in the sense of being

critically self-conscious of this very ambivalence and the contradictions it involves. (43)

For Coleman, Canadian civility is peculiarly paradoxical in that the “civil sphere” that

“guarantee[s] liberty and equality” is explicitly - and institutionally - pluralistic and multicultural,

but is modelled on a Eurocentric “isonchronous idea of progress” (Coleman 12) that views this

very pluralism as a source of the “belated or primitive elements or identities” that threaten it.

The violence implicit in the “protection” of Canadian civility from undefined threats

“within and without” is critical to my examinations of multicultural performance throughout this

project: the disparate artists, writers and performers with whose work I engage are united by a

shared experience of being con(s)t(r)ained by this violence even as they disrupt and resist it, or

render it uncomfortably visible. It is this visibility that offers a palimpsest of moments.

The trajectory of postcolonial thought, from deconstructive analysis to the identification of

sites of contestation and moments of cultural agency, informs each of the readings I undertake in

this project. This trajectory underpins, for example, my investigation of the critical industry

surrounding Claire Harris, Dionne Brand, and M. NourbeSe Philip, and the ways in which it defines and circumscribes a set of defining criteria for multicultural literature in Canada that allow such literature to be subsumed into the master narrative of Canadian national civility. It is central

to my examination of the mediation of Toronto's Caribana festival through a touristic gaze, and of my exploration of dub poetry as a form that is both sanctioned by and disruptive of the institutions of literary civility.

The second of Huggan's key insights for my project relates to his insistence that the situated poststructuralist analysis of texts need not (and, indeed, should not) stop with the writing and reading of texts but should extend to the text’s material and economic circulation, given that “the postcolonial field of production has developed at a time of renewed interest in the cultural other, and at a moment when cultural difference has become a valuable consumer item” (Huggan 243).

It is important to note that I do not consider this focus on material contexts and the power relations inherent within them to be in conflict with my use of deconstructive reading practices to identify the sites of cultural contestation this project explores. Throughout this project I assume that it is possible to agree with a fundamental definition of textuality as “[nothing] but supplements, substitutive significations which could only come forth in a chain of differential references, the

‘real’ supervening, and being added only while taking on meaning from a trace and from an invocation of the supplement” (Derrida, Of Grammatology 159) but to insist that the “supplement” does not arise solely from the act of reading (as described by Derrida). I argue in each of my chapters for the power of consumption more generally (by a reader/viewer/audience certainly, but also by “civil”/ civic institutions including publishers, universities, government and the media) as textual supplement, with the ability to radically shape both the ways in which a text signifies and the manner in which these significations circulate and proliferate.

As I explore in various ways throughout the chapters in this dissertation, cultural performance by Caribbean women is supplemented by all of these contexts of reception, by the ever-present requirement to perform certain roles and by performative resistance to this

requirement. In pulling these readings together I borrow a further set of insights from Derrida, on

the concept of hospitality. My use of this aspect of Derrida’s work is unmediated by postcolonial

theory, but I draw out the ways in which it shares a similar set of concerns to postcolonial theory's

preoccupation with dualistic constructions like civility. Derrida's work on hospitality theorizes an

abstract or “just” form of “absolute hospitality” in which the other or the “foreigner” is given an

unconditional welcome and complete freedom within the host's home, but suggests that this

idealized form is always compromised by the violence, conditionality and restriction. Some of this

violence arises inevitably in the effort to put abstract principle into practice, while the remainder

is a result of the failure to accept the foreigner without suspicion, and a desire to tightly

circumscribe the movements of an other who is incompletely known or understood:

[A] cultural or linguistic community, a family or nation, cannot fail at the very least to

suspend if not betray this principle of absolute hospitality: so as to protect a “home,”

presumably, by guaranteeing property and “one’s own” against the unrestricted arrival of

the other; but also so as to try to make the reception real, determined, and concrete — to

put it into practice. Hence the “conditions” that transform gift into contract, openness into

legal pact; hence rights and duties; frontiers, passports and ports; hence laws about an

immigration of which we say that we have to “control the flow.” (Derrida, “Principle of

Hospitality” 66)

Derrida’s construction of hospitality offers a powerful way of thinking about the relationship between the civility of the dominant (white, Anglo) Canadian culture and official multiculturalism, with its sanctioned spaces for cultural otherness and its demands for (certain kinds of) ethnic performance. In particular, in Canada’s institutionalized multiculturalism just as in Derrida's hospitality, it is difficult if not impossible to distinguish between those compromises

to “absolute hospitality” that arise from genuinely benevolent motives and those that arise from

self-interested suspicion of and desire to restrict and contain the other. And, ultimately, this matters

little: this project acknowledges the (often, but not always) noble intent behind Canadian

multiculturalism while focusing on the lived reality of the constraints it imposes and the cultural

artifacts produced within, and in defiance of, these constraints.

Since I started to theorize the relationship between Canadian multiculturalism policy and

Derridean hospitality, the advent of the Trump era has led to their becoming far more closely and

explicitly intertwined in the Canadian public imaginary, and (more importantly) in the packaged

self-image Canada broadcasts to the world. As I have discussed in brief, and as I expand upon in

each of the chapters that follow, multiculturalism has long been a key “selling point” for Canada

in constructing its benevolent global image. But in the wake of Donald Trump’s “Muslim ban” so

forcefully rejected by Trudeau, and the increasing hostility to Syrian refugees in many Western

nations, the guarantee of a hospitable welcome for those in need has become a key differentiator

in Canada's global pitch.

I want to begin to suggest here, and will continue to argue throughout, that while the

Canada presented in this sales pitch – open, welcoming, benevolent – is a deeply appealing

narrative, it is not my Canada. The hospitality it extends so ostentatiously toward the other conceals

violent impulses to contain and manage that other. This argument is not in and of itself new: as I

shall discuss there is a well-established body of literature highlighting the ways in which the

ostensibly pluralist narrative of Canadian multiculturalism serves both to contain otherness and to

co-opt it into the narrative of a nation that, however tolerant of difference, is still dominated by a white and Eurocentric worldview. What my project offers to this field is the theoretical framework

I develop for viewing the mechanisms by which this narrative is constructed. By focusing on one

particular cultural context through the lenses of performance and postcolonial theories, I am able

to elucidate the ways in which members of Canada’s non-white, minority, and immigrant

communities are interpellated as both ambassadors for their ancestral culture and as performers of

their difference. The price of entry to this ostensibly benevolent and hospitable nation, I argue, is

a very particular kind of performance – not of an inclusive, pluralistic Canadianness but of a

sanctioned, circumscribed un-Canadianness, the very consumption of which allows the dominant

culture to perpetuate the narrative of its own inclusiveness.

I argue, then, that the sites and occasions of these performances are sites of circumscription

and containment, but they are also – in the mold theorized by postcolonialists such as Bhabha –

sites of negotiation, contestation, and (limited) agency. As I hope to show through the chapters

that follow, a genealogy of the performances of black Caribbean Canadian women unveils a

palimpsest of moments in which can be seen both the history of Canadian multiculturalism’s

hidden discursive and imaginative acts of violence, but also of resistance to these acts of violence

through selective appropriations and instances of what I call re/activism.

Four Modes of Representation

In this project I use a blend of postcolonial, performance, and transnational theories to

examine the nature of Canadian multiculturalism by considering a palimpsest of moments over

the course of forty years3. I will focus on the performative aspects of four modes of

3 While I nominally direct my intention to the mid-seventies through the mid-teens, I do not limit myself comprehensively to the constraints of this time period. Like the containment of multiculturalism itself, it is useful to outline limits, but less useful to adhere to them past the point of relevance. Where authors or performers are obviously engaged with each other, or I feel that they have something significant to add to my discussion, I have brought them forward, even they exist outside of this time period. It is also useful to note that my choice of this time period largely reflects my own time of engagement in anti-racist activism in Canada, and I tend, in this dissertation, to feel most confident in that moment between late-eighties and late-nineties where I participated most in anti-racist activities in Toronto. 15

representation. Each of these modes of representation contributes to the construction of black

Canadian Caribbean women as cultural commodities, revealing the direct economy between official Canadian policy and the marketing of multiculturalism.

(1) Literature: In the introduction to Making a Difference: Canadian Multicultural

Literatures in English, Smaro Kamboureli argues that

The marketability of racialized authors may render the construct of minority

writing obsolete, but it also reveals the instrumentality attributed to it. A symptom

of CanLit’s belatedness, the impetus that drives the marketability of indigenous

and diasporic writing comes from the need to recognize those Canada had

forgotten, an exercise in remembering that feeds Canadian liberal ideology and

responds to the demands of global economies. (xiv)

In my effort to destabilize notions of ethnic authenticity, I consider the privileging of

certain racial backgrounds as sites of representation at the expense of others. Why, for

example, are women of black Caribbean backgrounds, such as the Canadian Caribbean

authors Claire Harris, Dionne Brand, and M. NourbeSe Philip, so representative of

Canadian literary culture? In exploring this question, I will examine uses of performance

in a variety of literary works, including Brand’s poetry collection No Language is

Neutral, Philip’s experimental poem cycle Zong!, Claire Harris’ long poem Drawing

Down a Daughter, and dub poet Lillian Allen’s collection Women Do this Everyday.

(2) Criticism: Targeting “irrelevant” scholarly discussions of the Harris, Brand, and Philip

“trio,” George Elliot Clarke argues that their popularity in critical circles relies more on

the creativity of the critic than an accurate reading of the text. He suggests that “one’s

own thrusting of theory […], may render mute the screams, laughter, and shouts of that

supposedly beloved Other, that darling community with which the critic-as-missionary

conducts intercourse” (253). While arguing that Clarke’s ideal relationship with the Other

is impossible – given that it assumes the possibility of a pure interpretation, without

cultural construction on the part of the critic – I nevertheless pursue his valuable idea of

the critical imagination and examine where critics write themselves onto text or ignore

the text in a quest for the ideal performance of the multicultural.

(3) Spectacle: I consider the function Toronto’s Caribana festival has served for the city’s

diverse population and ask what the escalation of violent outbreaks at the festival means

in the context of an official multicultural policy. I also look at film and television as

emergent spaces for the exhibition of Canadian Caribbean culture, notably How She

Move, a film about a woman competing in step-dancing contests in a Jamaican

neighbourhood in Toronto, and Da Kink in my Hair (originally a stage production written

by Trey Anthony, subsequently adapted into a television programme and then a musical),

which takes place in a Jamaican hair salon in Toronto. Spectacle allows me to consider

the relationship between performer and audience in a way that locates “tourism at home,”

the treatment of multiculturalism by non-racialized Canadians as the opportunity to

experience the “foreign” without moving across borders.

(4) Activism: Finally, I synthesize the constructions of performance inherent in the previous

three modes of representation in my last two chapters by analyzing the function of dub

poetry and activism in black Caribbean Canadian communities in Toronto. These

concluding chapters serve both to synthesize and complicate the previous chapters, in

part by foregrounding the question of queerness. What does the repeated queerness and

blackness of Caribbean Canadian female representation mean for the representation of

the non-queer and/or non-black woman? In particular, what does it mean that the most

influential Canadian dub poets “have either womanized or queered the dub form itself, in

reaction to its mainly masculinist roots” (Knowles 84-5)? Also, I examine what it means

to engage in re/activism: activist activities that occur in relation to single observable

events.

It is important to note that the first three of these performative modes – even the style of criticism that Clarke critiques – are united by their ability to induce and/or sustain an experience of pleasure in the consumption of multiculturalism. I use the term “pleasure” both in its everyday sense – to denote the sensory, artistic, and intellectual enjoyment of multicultural performance – and in the critical sense in which poststructuralist theorists employ it, in association with a kind of uncritical passivity, in the face either of power structures (Foucault) or textual complexity

(Barthes). Foucault suggests that power persists precisely because it is not felt as negative and coercive but “it traverses and produces things, it induces pleasure, forms of knowledge, produces discourses” (Power/Knowledge 119). Barthes, meanwhile, distinguishes between the text of pleasure, which “contents, fills, grants euphoria; […] comes from culture and does not break with it, is linked to a comfortable practice of reading” (14) and the text of bliss, which “imposes

a state of loss, […] discomforts (perhaps to the point of a certain boredom), unsettles the reader's

historical, cultural, psychological assumptions, the consistency of his tastes, values, memories,

brings to a crisis his relation with language” (14). In this dissertation, I am always writing with

an understanding of the pleasure of these texts, alongside the pleasure of multiculturalism.

In my concluding chapters on dub and activism, I read works of dub poetry and academic activism as (in Barthes’ terms) texts of “bliss,” but it is my argument throughout this dissertation that the performative texts of multiculturalism – and even the text of Canadian multiculturalism

as a whole – sustains the dominant narrative of nationhood by eliciting a “comfortable practice of reading” through its mobilization of pleasure. The aim of this project as a whole, then, is continually to throw textual pleasure into crisis, and to move from a textuality of pleasure to a textuality of bliss. In doing so I do not seek to absolve myself of complicity in the pleasurable consumption of the texts of Canadian multiculturalism: some of my most treasured (and pleasurable) memories are intertwined with the critical analyses I perform here, and one of the central tensions in this project lies in my negotiating of the relationship between the pleasure I find in reading and consuming texts that are a part of me and the detached critical voice I use to place this pleasure in crisis.

Auto-Ethnographic Moments

As I have begun to allude to, parts of this dissertation touch on my own experiences as a black woman of semi first generation Caribbean immigrant background, growing up and participating in anti-racist events and collectives in black Caribbean communities in Toronto in the 1990s. However, my experiences are those of an activist interested in impoverished and marginalized communities and the realities of being young and black in Toronto in the late twentieth century, and therefore, only touch lightly on the performances of the women that I use as case studies of sanctioned and authorized minority spaces. Where my experiences coincide with my analysis, and this generally happens in use of and function of Torontonian spaces, I occasionally deploy what might be termed an autoethnographic voice. This autoethnographic voice conveys an experiential familiarity that I feel is imperative to convey the emotive construction of text and space necessary to understand the analysis of those texts and spaces.

These slippages between different modes of engagement and voices reflect “the turn toward blurred genres of writing, a heightened self-reflexivity in ethnographic research, an increased

focus on emotion in the social sciences, and the postmodern scepticism regarding generalization

of knowledge claims” (Anderson 373), characteristic of autoethnographic writing. In particular,

my voice in these moments seeks to emulate modes of “ethnographic work in which the

researcher is (1) a full member in the research group or setting, (2) visible as such a member in

the researcher’s published texts, and (3) committed to an analytic research agenda focused on

improving theoretical understandings of broader social phenomena” (Anderson 375).

My use of the term “autoethnography” relies on Heewon Chang’s definition, which

suggests that it signifies a combination of “cultural analysis and interpretation with narrative

details” and “follows the anthropological and social scientific inquiry approach rather than

descriptive or performative storytelling” (46). For Chang, the key expectation of

autoethnographers is that they “treat their autobiographical data with critical, analytical, and

interpretive eyes to detect cultural undertones of what is recalled, observed, and told” (49). By

strategically deploying an autoethnographic voice, I aim to engage critically in this vein with the

space between experience and research in the effort to put forward a dissertation that engages with knowledge, understanding that knowledge is all the ways that we construct something that we might argue to be true.

My voice thus – partly by accident and partly by design – slips from time to time between the conventionally detached, authoritative and pseudo-objective style typical of academic critical writing and a more explicitly subjective, emotive and personally engaged style that makes no such pretence to detachment. In doing so, my voice emerges into the interstitial space of recognition and belonging, breaking down the boundaries between the critical and the personal, the analytical and the reflective. While writing this dissertation I have learned to become comfortable with the slippages between these modes, and to recognize the power inherent in any

disorienting effect they may have on either writer or reader. In short, to attempt to conceal this

slippage would be to depersonalize the project when the critical animus of my project lies in its

movement between modes. I thus view my movement between these voices as a feminist

counter-story to the hierarchizing of discourse, which exploits the spaces in between these hierarchies to disrupt their authority and seeming self-evidence (Baxter 62).

Therefore, while the reflective and personal are by no means the dominant mode of

writing in this project, my occasional deployment of these voices reflects a belief in the power of

“autoethnographic writing as a means of resistance” (Griffin 139), and a means of interweaving

my scholarly investigations into the mechanisms and power structures of multicultural

performance with my personal investment in, experience of – and even collusion with – these

structures. My writing is therefore underscored throughout by the recognition that I am not an

objective and distanced scholar with no opinions or emotional responses to the topics I am

discussing. I am a black Canadian woman who is a first generation Caribbean immigrant on one

side and of Scottish settler descent on the other. I have therefore “always been the ‘too Black to

be White’ and ‘too White to be Black’ girl in school. The Oreo. The Zebra. The Mutt” (Griffin

141). I have always been the insider/outsider, raised by my white mother with my blackness

interwoven with my search for my identity, which was heavily influenced by Caribbean culture.

Like Collins, I consider that “[t]his ‘outsider within’ status has provided a special standpoint on

self, family, and society for Afro-American [Canadian] women” (103) and I employ a black

feminist autoethnographic voice as it “offers a narrative means for Black women to highlight

struggles common to Black womanhood without erasing the diversity among Black women”

(Griffin 143). Thus, my thoughts and experiences offer something to expand an understanding of

the project itself, as well as of the structural understanding of the heterogeneous and complex

community that is black Caribbean Canadian women. This black feminist autoethnographic voice does not come easily to me; in fact, it is a difficult thing for me to recognize the validity of my own experiences and voice:

Not only have Black women been taught and told via dominant discourses that our lived

experiences are insignificant but we have also learned hard lessons around the

consequences of speaking our truths to power. Furthermore, many Black female scholars

struggle to achieve ‘‘real’’ scholar status as academics whose work is widely published,

read, respected, and celebrated. (Griffin 144)

So, I offer this voice as a gift to myself. I am of value. I also offer this voice in the expectation that this disruption of tone, the movement back and forth between objective and subjective, reminds the reader that there is no objective, homogenous method with which to read the black

Caribbean Canadian woman’s experience.

Performing Black Feminism and Anti-Racism

This is a black feminist anti-racist project. Like Sean P. Hier and B. Singh Bolaria, I see this dissertation “guided by the general principles of anti-racist feminism” as “[a]nti-racist feminist/scholars generally adopt some form of intersectional approach to assess how social systems are structured by racism and sexism” (171). While I spend more time theorizing performance than I do feminism, this is, undeniably, a feminist project. However, while that feminism is informed by larger theoretical frameworks, I focus my intention on those theorists whose experiences and articulations are already shaped by Canadian black feminist thought, as

“[w]ithin Canada, critical race feminism, that is, a Canadian feminist anti-racism, has been inextricably linked to debates within the women’s movement and feminist scholarship” (Razack,

Smith, and Thobani 9). Where I undoubtedly owe some of the framework of the project to the

work of Judith Butler, Sandra Harding, bell hooks, Chandra Talpade Mohanty, Uma Narayan,

Gloria Anzaldua, Patricia Hill Collins, and Gayatri Spivak4, I often deal more closely with critics

who specifically theorise the Canadian context within these broader themes.

The understanding of race that informs the project is taken largely from the Critical Race

Theory paradigm that views race as a social rather than biological construction – one that has

“has been historically defined in terms of physical or genetic characteristics” but has “no real

biological referent” (Satzewich and Liodakis 10) – but recognizes that the lack of a biological

referent does not diminish the historical importance of biological pseudo-science in formulating

the social reality of race that continues to radically shape the experiences of racialized groups in

contemporary society. Thus, while races are “not biological groupings, but social constructions”,

race remains obvious. Walking down the street, our minds consistently rely on pervasive

social mythologies to assign races to the other pedestrians. The absence of any physical

basis to race does not entail the conclusion that race is wholly an hallucination. Race has

its genesis and maintains its vigorous strength in the realm of social beliefs. (Haney-

López 61)

It is important to note, however, that while physical and biological characteristics might not form

the basis for a stable, scientific definition, race is most definitely both physical and visible – a

determinant of experience across all spheres based on the arbitrary relative value assigned to a

set of visual cues based on stereotypical assumptions that persist from the era of “biological”

4 Butler’s constructions of gender performance, Harding’s examination of feminist philosophy of science, hooks’ seminal works on black feminism, Mohanty and Narayan’s conceptions of Third World Feminism, Anzaldua’s work on borders and community, Collins who laid bare what being a black woman in American means, and Spivak who I investigate further below. While this project does not cite, or even reference, all of these women, they have shaped my engagement with feminism, postcolonialism, and blackness, and are paramount for understanding the foundations of this project. 23

racism. The pervasive notion of race as an immutable and innate set of characteristics – and the

social implications of this notion – thus underpin the discussions of racialization throughout this

project, but are in turn refracted through an understanding that contemporary formulations of

culture displace much of this sense of immutability onto “culture” too, giving rise to

a [new] racism whose dominant theme is not biological heredity but the

insurmountability of cultural differences, a racism which, at first sight, does not postulate the

superiority of certain groups or peoples in relation to others but “only” the harmfulness of

abolishing frontiers, the incompatibility of life-styles and traditions. (Balibar 21) This project is

informed by a longing for home and runs in parallel with bell hooks’ thoughts on belonging, and

her suggestion that “[w]e are born and have our being in a place of memory. We chart our lives

by everything we remember from the mundane moment to the majestic. We know ourselves

through the art and act of remembering. Memories offer us a world where there is no death,

where we are sustained by rituals of regard and recollection” (5). The importance of hooks’

“place of memory” to this project, and its centrality to various forms of being “at home”, cannot

be overstated. This is most obvious in my explorations of Caribana, where I advance an idea of

“tourism at home” to analyze the various spatial transformations of Toronto during the festival,

and their facilitation of an act of nation-building predicated on the juxtaposition of home space with an exotic, sexualized other. But it permeates the rest of the project too, from the incursion of

Jamaican folk hero Nanny Maroon into Toronto’s dub poetry scene to the negotiation by Harris,

Brand and Philip of both their Caribbean heritage and the tendency of Canadian literary scholars to offer critical hospitality on the condition that these writers continue to speak of another

“home”. This dissertation is an act of remembering and locating moments in Canada’s history and present that demonstrate the constraining apparatus of multiculturalism alongside the

opportunities that black women have made of these moments that create something revolutionary and beautiful.

I understand that writing the margins always happens in relation to the centre and that theory, as well as criticism, are crucial for analyzing “Third World Women.” Following Spivak’s example, I seek to orient this project within the larger frameworks of postcolonial and feminist theories, but also to recognize where those ideologies originate, in opposition to the centre:

In the matter of race-sensitive analyses, the chief problem of American feminist criticism

is its identification of racism as such with the constitution of racism in America. Thus,

today I see the object of investigation to be not only the history of “Third World Women”

or their testimony but also the production, through the great European theories, often by

way of literature, of the colonial object. As long as that scorns “theory” and therefore

remains ignorant of its own, the ‘Third World’ as its object of study will remain

constituted by those hegemonic First World intellectual practices. (109)

According to this definition, this is a Third World project, operating not only between England,

America, and Canada, but also where Caribbean identities fit into that axis, always thinking about the ways that being a black woman within the hyphenated identity of Caribbean Canadian means to the everyday reality of living in Canada. This black, feminist, anti-racist project is also a Canadian one, and thus the underlying critical and theoretical strands are also black, feminist, anti-racist, and Canadian.

One concern that I have, in the writing of this thesis, is that my method of using case studies to examine moments of black Caribbean Canadian women’s performance, and the subsequent close reading of those events, creates a somewhat homogenized construction of the black experience in Canada. This is not the intention of this project; however, I cannot, in one

piece of work, possibly convey the depth and variety of the black Canadian experience. What I

am presenting here is a work examining the danger of seeing black women’s experiences as

homogenous, while also understanding that those performing the identity of black Caribbean

Canadian woman is more likely to see critical success if she adheres to stereotype and audience

expectation. I am arguing here for the tension between the critical reception of difference that is

articulated very familiarly and the reality of lived experience, where recognising the diversity of

the black experience is not always understood outside of that community, and nor is it lucrative

in terms of creative production valued outside of that community.

Project Intentions: Where is Here?: Nation Building in the Margins

In 1965, Northrop Frye asked Canadians to consider themselves as a nation in a larger

global culture, positioned somewhere between England, its colonial progenitor, and America, as

the omnipresent cultural giant to the south. To this day, the question Frye poses in his invitation

remains under discussion by social theorists generally, and literary studies scholars specifically.

What, Frye asks, are we to make of an obsession with a national identity that cannot be

articulated except by what it is not?

There is an ongoing desire in Canada to construct a Canadian identity that distinguishes the nation from those others that continually embed their own cultural constructs into the fabric of the Canadian imagination. Frye tells us that unity and identity are often collapsed in Canadian attempts of nationality, but that, in fact, “[i]dentity is local and regional, rooted in the

imagination and in works of culture; unity is national in reference, international in perspective,

and rooted in a political feeling” (xxii). Thus, Frye asserts that attempting to find a literary

imagination that encapsulates what it is to be “Canadian” must happen regionally. It is thus an

ambivalent experiment at best, requiring a unified national identity that incorporates a sense of

regional difference, and naturally resulting in a disparate and indefinable sense of national self.

Eva Mackey’s 1999 book The House of Difference provides a bridge between Frye’s

model of nationhood defined by negation and the questions of a multicultural national identity

that preoccupy my project. Mackey looks to the invention of Canadian identity in terms of

culture and definable demarcations between us and them, observing that “official and vernacular

constructions of identity in Canada often take it for granted that a nation, to be strong, must have

a bounded and definable national ‘culture’ and identity” (11) and that “[t]he state-sanctioned proliferation of cultural difference (albeit limited to specific forms of allowable difference) seems to be the defining characteristic of Canada” (8). In the Frye mould, these formulations articulate a pervasive tendency in Canadian identity-building: to use comparison to define culture, to define that which is by virtue of what it is not. Mackey suggests that this tendency to seek national identity in the other is a product of Canada’s unique inheritance, one which is defined by negation: we are here because we are not there. It is my argument, and the underlying position of this dissertation, that these articulations of the Canadian self in negation happen both within and without. In particular, I aim to present the argument that the methods used in identity- building happen through juxtaposition of white, normative, Canadian nationality against the transnational5 identities inside of Canada. I use the notion of transnationalism as both “a mode of

cultural reproduction” and “an avenue of capital” (Satzewich and Liodakis 215) – a mode,

5 See Basch et al.’s definition of “transnationalism” in Nations Unbound: Transnational Projects, Postcolonial Predicaments, and Deterritorialized Nation-States. 27

therefore, that uses Canada’s own racial and cultural minorities as the means of distinguishing

them from Canada’s white identity.

It is important to understand that this dissertation is not comprehensive: I am not looking

at the totality of Canadian multiculturalism, Canadian Literature, performance theory, feminist

theory, postcolonial theory, or black women’s experiences, but weaving together insights derived

from a series of moments where these perspectives and theories intersect. My intention is to

contribute to an ongoing conversation about nationhood and multiculturalism by focusing on the

performative nature of multiculturalism, and structuring my theorizing of this set of performative

moments in part around my unique experiences. This dissertation thus comprises a selective

rather than exhaustive set of snapshots of Caribbean Canadian women’s history and cultural

production, which I nevertheless claim are sufficiently representative to enable broader

conclusions to be drawn around my underlying themes.

Multiculturalism and the Nation-Building Project

Multiculturalism, both official and idealized, works to help define the culture of Canada,

by offering a gesture to diversity that has become synonymous with Canadian identity, but also

offering a mirror against which Canadian identity can articulate itself. My use of the notion of

multiculturalism in this project is in keeping with Satzewich and Liodakis’s multifaceted

definition, according to which “[m]ulticulturalism usually has four interrelated meanings. It is a

demographic reality; it is part of pluralist ideology; it is a form of struggle among groups for

access to economic and political resources; and it is a set of government policies and

accompanying programs” (123). The trope of multiculturalism in Canada works to define culture

in two ways: policy that has become a part of the fabric of Canadian self-construction and the persistent differentiation of citizens so that there are real Canadians and the others that help to

demarcate the relationship between real and marginalized. Given that “power and dominance function through […] liberal, inclusionary, pluralistic, multiple and fragmented formulations and practices concerning culture and difference” (Mackey 5) within the figure of Canadian multiculturalism, I examine the ways in which policy can work simultaneously to include and exclude, for the purpose of identity-building in a nation seeking a cultural identity.

The definition of multiculturalism I use in this project is primarily shaped by its prevailing use in Canadian politics – as a state-sanctioned ideal that represents a liberal national aspiration to openness, inclusivity, and celebration of the other (however problematic and restrictive I argue this official form of multiculturalism frequently tends to be in practice).

Multiculturalism, in this project, is both text and context, the discursive matter of performance and the material and legal reality of its reception. It is beyond the scope of this dissertation to engage in detail with debates about multiculturalism in political philosophy, though these debates have also shaped my thinking on the topic. 6

This dissertation looks at moments of “identity building” in Canada in the last forty years, using the performances of Caribbean Canadian women as case studies7, representative of

6 Will Kymlicka, for instance, in his seminal work Multicultural Citizenship, discusses multiculturalism primarily in terms of the challenges it poses to liberal political philosophy and in terms of conflicting sets of rights – between, for example, the right to associate with peers of one’s own cultural group and to maintain strong ties to one’s cultural origins and identity on the one hand and cultural practices that might be considered restrictive and illiberal by liberal politicians and lawmakers on the other. Meanwhile, British author Ann Phillips, in Multiculturalism without Culture, mounts an apparently paradoxical defence of multiculturalism against its detractors by insisting that, while multiculturalism is essential to a healthy, modern, pluralist society, the notion of culture – at least as an immutable and deterministic force behind the actions and worldviews of individuals – must be dispensed with almost entirely. Phillips’s point about this reified view of “culture” at the heart of multiculturalism is especially resonant for my own work in that I am interested in the consumption of “culture” as a saleable artifact as well as a deterministic construct, and I see an unavoidable slippage between the two at work in Canadian discourses on multiculturalism. 7 These case studies are reflective of both the larger critical understanding of what makes up the black Caribbean Canadian woman’s experience and what speaks to me, personally, as a critic. My choices here reflect who I have become in the writing of this dissertation and my journey to get here.

the means by which multiculturalism in Canada acts dually to both exhibit and demarcate

difference in Canada for the purpose of delineating between us and them, where they are controlled and managed by the mechanism of multiculturalism, and, therefore, the state.

Specifically, I look to what I call moments of “culture making,” that is, where nationalist identity is established against the performance of minority artists, in this case Caribbean Canadian women in Toronto8 between 1975 and 2015. These case studies on Caribbean Canadian

women’s performance reflect larger issues of gender essentialisms (working for and against

racial essentialisms), colonizing as a masculine process9, and multiculturalism as a paternalistic

act10, and articulate Canada against the other – in this case Caribbean Canadian women. I am

interested, therefore, in the process Bannerji describes, whereby “[the] inscription of whiteness

underwrites whatever may be called Englishness, Frenchness, and finally Europeanness. These

national characteristics become moral ones and they spin off or spill over into each other. Thus

whiteness extends into moral qualities of masculinity, possessive individualism and an ideology

of capital and market” (107). However, I also want to think about what that masculine imperative

to colonize means in terms of denying agency through containment. I would suggest that this is a

pattern, one that repeats in most marginalized and minority artistic expressions that have been

sanctioned by the Canadian nation-building machine, proving tolerance and diversity in

8 Like my chosen time period, there will be moments in this dissertation when the limits of focusing strictly on Toronto are not useful, and so I will move beyond that framing to see what discussions exist outside of those constraints as is needed. 9 See Anne McClintock’s Imperial Leather: Race, Gender, and Sexuality in the Colonial Conquest where she describes “the world [as] feminized and spatially spread for male exploration, then reassembled and deployed in the interests of massive imperial power” for one example of how the colonizing process is gendered male and used as sexual metaphor for rape. 10 See Grace-Edward Galabuzi’s “Hegemonies, Continuities, and Discontinuities of Multiculturalism and the Anglo- Franco Conformity Order” for more on these paternalistic practice.

juxtaposition with others. I finish this dissertation with an argument that anti-racism is about

taking back culture – moments of questioning the nation building process that marginalizes and

makes black issues peripheral in Canada, and the world.

Canada was the first country in the world to integrate idealized constructions of

multiculturalism into official policy11. Multiculturalism is intrinsic to Canada’s understanding of

citizenship: the Government of Canada’s website proudly asserts that “Canadian

multiculturalism is fundamental to our belief that all citizens are equal. Multiculturalism ensures

that all citizens can keep their identities, can take pride in their ancestry and have a sense of

belonging” (Canada). However, we also understand that “countries do not admit immigrants out

of a sense of altruism or obligation to help people in difficult social and economic circumstances

in their countries of origin. Instead, national immigration policies are seen as mechanisms to

supply workers for various industries” (Satzewich and Liodakis 62). As state policy, that is to

say, multiculturalism can never be purely without benefit to the host state. In fact, “immigrants

have been – and are – part of Canada’s wider nation-building project, where the hope and

expectation is that they will eventually become ‘Canadians’, however ambiguous the term”

11 Multiculturalism in Canada was introduced in three phases: the Incipient Stage (pre-1971), the Formative Period (1971-1981), and Institutionalization (1982 to present). Before the Canadian Citizenship Act was passed in 1947, Canadians were still considered British subjects. The period between World War II and 1969 saw a “wider variety of ethnic origin categories, social classes, and occupations […] included” and in “1962, nearly 42 per cent of the residents of Toronto and one-third of the residents of the Toronto metropolitan area were not born in Canada” (Dunton 29). By the time John Porter publishes his seminal work on Canadian immigration and social and ethnic class in 1969, the same year the Canadian flag was officially launched, we begin to see Canada differentiate itself from the American ‘melting pot’ with the precursor to Trudeau’s multiculturalism. The Vertical Mosaic “paved the way for the multicultural ideology that followed a mere six years after his book” (Cameron) and the term “mosaic” took on new meaning to the average Canadian, a way of describing ethnic difference, living together, but distinct and respectful of that difference. When Porter says that “it might be said that the idea of an ethnic mosaic, as opposed to the idea of the melting pot, impedes the processes of social mobility” (70), he is articulating the inherent contradiction in the term, and that contradiction is reflected in the multicultural policy that is the progeny of that mosaic. 31

(Satzewich and Liodakis 66). Immigration is part of a nation-building project, and state- sanctioned multiculturalism is both reliant upon that immigration and one of the means by which the nation ensures the obedience of its subjects. Immigrants are permitted their cultural identity so long as it is subsumed under their identities as productive Canadian citizens. By the late twentieth century, “Canada [had] somehow transformed itself from a British colony that aspired to reproduce (and improve on) its British antecedents to one that applauds pluralism of race, religion, and culture – a rapid transformation without revolution or civil war” (Cameron xvi).

The success of Canada’s multiculturalism policy is rooted in its marriage of ideology and policy into the very fabric of how Canadians understand what it means to be and act Canadian.

When Pierre Trudeau stood in front of the House of Commons on October 8th, 1971, he announced his plans to introduce a federal policy of multiculturalism in response to the Report of the Royal Commission on Bilingualism and Biculturalism, “Book IV: The Cultural Contribution of Other Ethnic Groups.” In his address on the need for an official multicultural policy, Trudeau told the House that

National unity if it is to mean anything in the deeply personal sense, must be founded on

confidence in one’s own individual identity; out of this can grow respect for that of others

and a willingness to share ideas, attitudes and assumptions. A vigorous policy of

multiculturalism will help create this initial confidence. It can form the base of a society

which is based on fair play for all. (8545)

This is the world’s first clear statement on multiculturalism (Cameron xvii) and a definitive moment in Canadian cultural history. In Trudeau’s declaration, the notion of the mosaic is made manifest; even though Canada will not see the institution of multiculturalism fully enacted until

The Multiculturalism Act is passed in 1988 (Satzewich and Liodakis 125), the moment marks a definitive shift in the public narrative of what it means to be Canadian.

Before and after Trudeau’s speech to the House of Commons, there were changes happening in the Canadian immigration system. Running parallel to the idealization of the nation’s pluralism and appeals for national unity is the shift from racial and ethnic classifications in the

Canadian immigration system to a focus on skills-based immigration corresponding to labour market needs: the “point system introduced in 1967 reflected this and focused on the education, profession, occupation, language, and skill levels of prospective immigrants” (Thobani 97). While the articulation of the points system performed a type of call to equality, the reality was far more discriminatory than advertised. For example, in the Skilled Workers class, immigration officers evaluating applicant’s suitability could award discretionary points based on their own subjective opinion in what was called “personal suitability” (Satzewich and Liodakis 71) and critics of the system have argued that this, in fact, made Canadian immigration more racist, more discriminatory. Anderson and Frideres, Kallen, and Henry and Tator all see these discretionary points as problematic and claim that these points disadvantage non-white applicants due to the biases of these immigration officers. So while on the one hand “[t]hese liberalized immigration policies, the source of considerable national pride, have come to sustain contemporary exaltations of Canadian nationality as the most generous and humane in the world” (Thobani 97), these policies also represent more subjectivity and, by extension, more opportunity to insert bias into a federal system. Hence, “[t]he liberalization of immigration policy and the adoption of official multiculturalism facilitated both a material inclusion of increased numbers of immigrants with the population and their simultaneous exclusion from the nation, primarily through their reification as cultural outsiders” (Thobani 147).

In the wake of Canada’s reconstruction of its identity as a welcoming and multicultural

nation there have been a myriad of responses12. From Charles Taylor’s “The Politics of

Recognition,” which argues for multiculturalism as the answer to the need for recognition, to

Daniel Stoffman’s “The Illusion of Multiculturalism,” which looks at the misunderstanding of multiculturalism by its proponents and the dangers of essentializing difference at the national level, we see many different opinions on the benefits and/or disadvantages of multiculturalism in

Canada. Keller, for example, asserts that “while the myth of the mosaic flourished in the rhetoric

of public life, public policy in Canada continued to be governed by the concept of Anglo-

conformity” (51), and Bannerji demonstrates the difference between ideology and lived experience

when she recalls how “[w]hen I immigrated to Montreal, I stepped out of my romantic construction

of Canada and into a distinctly political-ideological one – one which impressed me as being both negative and aggressive” (289). It is important to note that, alongside the dominant narrative of multiculturalism as ideology and policy, there develops a parallel counter-narrative in which two

prevailing strands can be observed. On the one hand, multiculturalism is held to be superficial and

structurally ineffective (Bolaria and Li, Moodley, and Stasiulis), focusing too much on festival and

performance and not enough on examining the lived reality that racial and ethnic class-based

hierarchy has on non-white Canadians. On the other, multiculturalism is considered too effective

(Fleras and Elliott and Bissoondath), leading to the stereotyping of cultural groups and further

essentializing difference from the white, hegemonic norm of everyday Canada. In the dominant

narrative, “[r]espect for diversity and cultural pluralism became emblematic of the Canadian

12 Phil Ryan calls these multiply and contradictory criticisms of multiculturalism multicultiphobia, “[t]hat is, many critiques of multiculturalism express, not a well-reasoned argument, nor even a precise, easily identified fear of some particular phenomenon, but a diffuse anxiety” (4), but I would argue that this is a simplification and over- theorization of a phenomenon that has real life consequences for non-white Canadians. 34

national character with the adoption of multiculturalism as state policy during the tenure of the

flamboyant and immensely popular prime minister Pierre Elliott Trudeau” (Thobani 143-4). The

reality, however, has often been one in which, “[b]y constantly signifying the White population as

‘Canadians’ and immigrants of color as ‘others,’ by constantly stereotyping Third World

immigrants of color as criminals, terrorists, and fundamentalists, the state manages to both

manipulate and cancel its alleged dedication to multiculturalism” (Bannerji 295).

Multiculturalism and Containment

For my purposes, I focus on criticism that sees both ideology and policy as tools for

managing the non-white, racialized, Canadian population by containing their difference within the

larger scheme of multiculturalism. I am influenced by observations such as those of Bakht, that

“[p]rocesses of social exclusion coupled with the growth in the size of the racialized population

reinforce the structural tendencies in a new-liberal economy towards maintaining and reproducing the existing order” and “[w]hile multiculturalism encourages cultural diversity, it correspondingly seeks to contain it” (176). The notion that the containment of otherness is enabled by state- sanctioned multiculturalism is particularly trenchant, and it is through this lens that I will examine the performance of black Caribbean Canadian womanhood in Canada.

In this project, I look at several moments of containment, where multiculturalism has worked to manage the Black Caribbean Canadian woman’s experience, body, or activism. I have been tracing the complex, often conflicting and paradoxical relationships between the dominant culture’s pleasure in the text of multiculturalism (realized through spectacle, performance, and the accessible consumption of otherness) and the management, containment, restriction and curtailment of the bodies, words, and lives of those whom the dominant culture consumes as exotic others. A key question that runs through these analyses is the extent to which resistance to the

alternating forces of celebration and containment is possible. Because of multiculturalism’s overt

celebration of difference, and the way in which it associates itself both with diversity and joy, it

poses a unique difficulty for those who would resist, positioning them as killjoys who are

ungrateful for the bounty bestowed upon them by the benevolent state, and who in the very act of

resistance “re-other” themselves.

This is a process examined by Sara Ahmed in her essay “The Politics of Good Feeling”,

which explores the link between the notion of happiness and hegemonic discourses of diversity

and multiculturalism, and suggests that these discourses automatically assign the source of any

disruptions or tensions in the overarching narrative of harmony to the non-normative bodies that

diversity “includes” (as distinct from the white, normative bodies who are “included” by default):

It is not just that feelings are “in tension”, but that the tension is located somewhere: in

being felt by some bodies, it is attributed as caused by another body, who thus comes to

be felt as apart from the group, as getting in the way of its organic enjoyment and

solidarity. The [non-white] body is attributed as the cause of becoming tense, which is

also the loss of a shared atmosphere. (7)

To speak out against this injustice “is then to confirm your position as the cause of tension (Ahmed

7). The apparently generous and open narrative of diversity thus places a disproportionate demand

on the non-normative, non-white body to perform contentment and harmony and avoid dissent in order to avoid being “seen as causing discomfort for others, as the origin of bad feeling” (Ahmed

7). The texts and moments I explore in this project are situated both within and against the demand for non-normative bodies to perform the narrative of multicultural happiness. They are texts that rail against this demand even while they are consumed in a context that is shaped by it. They frequently draw attention to this demand, refusing to allow it to remain invisible and appear

benevolent. They explore both the politics of containment and the limits of resistance. They are thus indispensable sites of examination in what they say both about the acts of containment inherent in state-sanctioned multiculturalism and about how black women in Canada are reacting to and resisting these acts of containment.

Performing the Caribbean Canadian Woman

Chapter two, “My Toronto: Growing Up Black in Roncesvalles Village” is my assertion of self in this dissertation. Here, I articulate what this project means to me and how I situate myself in the writing of it. In this completely autoethnographic chapter, I think about what I term my Canada and how my construction of myself as Torontonian fits into that version of Canada.

The purpose of the chapter is to give you, as the reader, a sense of where this project stems from, and to give me, as the writer, a chance to reflect on what multiculturalism means to me in its complicated mix of pain and pleasure.

Chapter three, “Citizenship, Commodification, and Containment of Transnational

Minority Literature in Canada,” is my analysis of the position that Harris, Brand, Philip, and

Allen have had in the Canadian imagination. Using Derrida’s theory of hospitality as a framework, I look at what it means to be a Caribbean Canadian woman writer in multicultural

Canada and this is a point of speculation that continues throughout the rest of the dissertation. In my examination of these black Caribbean Canadian women, and their contribution to a system that performs tolerance in the negotiation of space within Canada, but also in terms of international reputation, I rely heavily on Gillian Roberts, who claims that

A national habitus rests on what we might consider national capital, rather than the

economic, cultural, and academic capitals that are integral to class habitus: a national

habitus uses the nation as its currency, emphasizing the value of national cultural

products precisely because of their nationality, and attempting to forge a national taste – a

taste for the nation and its culture, whether considered “cosmopolitan” in aesthetic terms

or not. (14)

Alongside Roberts, I begin to thread Derrida’s Of Hospitality heavily through the dissertation at this point in my attempt to articulate the relationship between the citizen and the foreign, the

Canadian and the immigrant.

Chapter four, “Photographing Caribana: Managing Multiculturalism through the

Touristic Gaze,” is my exploration of Toronto’s Caribana parade as a space through which race and sex act to contain the power of the transnational citizen in Canada. I do this through a survey of photographs of the event and an analysis of the content of these depictions. The majority of these photographs are from the Globe and Mail, found in the Globe and Mail (1844-2009):

ProQuest Historical Newspapers archival database. This chapter is the first to a examine a site of multicultural containment because it concretely represents the methods with which Canadian multiculturalism uses pluralism to rewrite cultural identification, simplifying it as to make it easier to understand and easier to contain. Containment here works to demarcate the non-white, immigrant body from the white, Canadian body in the pursuit of a national identity.

Chapter five, “White Civility and Dub Poetry: Catching Bullets, So What?”, is my analysis of the erasure of black people in contemporary Canadian Studies and the methods by which dub poetry inhabits a space of rebellion and revolt in which the black voice can be reclaimed from the white “civilizing” process. Black Caribbean Canadian women have inherited a matrilineal mode of performance that acts counter to the patrilineal operations of state multiculturalism (and the act of colonizing itself). I argue that there is a Jamaican appropriation of civilization that is replicated and rephrased in the Caribbean Canadian diaspora. Dub poetry’s

adoption of Nanny Maroon’s mythology works to rewrite the construction of the doubly marginalized Maroon people, and the result itself is ambiguous, both celebratory, as well as re- enacting colonial decentering mechanisms of state.

Chapter six, “Where I’m from”: Language, Ritual, and Space in Black, Caribbean

Canadian Feminist Work and Play” is my analyses of Canadian television series ‘da Kink in My

Hair and movie How She Move, both featuring Jamaican Canadian communities in Toronto through the lens of a female protagonist. This chapter works to bridge several theoretical points of my dissertation through the examples of these commodified cultural performances. Here, I also continue to dissect the creative use of Caribbean Creole or nation language by black

Caribbean Canadian women, as a means both of expressing their own identity/difference and of articulating relationships between subjects, objects, and agency that is impossible in traditional

Canadian English.

Chapter seven, “Anti-Racism and Emergent Events: Do #blacklivesmatter in Canada?” looks at activism in black Caribbean Canadian communities from the 1980s through current events. Here, I bring forth a theory of re/activism, whereby the black Canadian public find voice in reaction to concrete events; however, this re/activism relies on reactionism and rarely brings about any lasting change, or even discussion. Rather, I argue, there needs to be sustained examination of these moments of black activism in Canada to create a palimpsest of experiences that support a foundation of informed and practical activism that reflects the interstitial nature of the diasporic citizen. Activism, I suggest, is not momentary and isolated, but something that spans the globe and acts to bring transnational constructions of activism together.

Finally, in my conclusion I synthesize the diverse range of topics discussed in the dissertation and recap on the threads between chapters. Here, I discuss my parallel journeys,

through texts about “home” and performance in multiple genres and forms, and from starting out as a PhD student in Calgary to finishing the project as an “unhomed” Canadian at the centre of

Empire – something I had not foreseen when I began. Through its focus on performance, memory, and home space, my project reflects on the place of culture as commodity in a twenty- first century capitalist society. It has been my intention to avoid the trap of complicity in the exoticization of the postcolonial, by focusing on conceptions of Canadian multiculturalism whose basis in an idealization of immigration is undercut by material reality.

My own re/activism

As I have proceeded, I have become aware of the extent to which this project functions as a form of the kind of re/activism I theorize in my final body chapter. This project is a response to a series of textual moments or case studies: a series of interventions chosen with the goal of illustrating and even disrupting certain broad trends around the racial, sexual, and cultural discourses of multiculturalism but inevitably influenced by the prerogative of authorial selection and chance encounters with these particular texts and moments. It is therefore necessarily messy and disjunctive, provisional and shifting even as it strives to maintain the through lines of a single scholarly “argument”. I invite my readers to embrace the project’s heterogeneity and eclecticism as a demonstration of the possibilities but also limitations of re/activist engagements with the hegemonic narratives of Canadian multiculturalism.

MY TORONTO: GROWING UP BLACK IN RONCESVALLES VILLAGE

When I was in elementary school, around age twelve I think, Spike Lee came to Toronto to speak at Oakwood Collegiate Institute. This would have been before he released Malcolm X but after Jungle Fever, two movies that informed my childhood understandings of race in

America, growing up as I was in what might have been the whitest area of Toronto. And because my Toronto was so white, American blackness was my means to understanding my own blackness. So there it was. The amazing Spike Lee came to visit, but I had class. I was only twelve; I hadn’t learned to skip school yet. However, my friend Heather had. Her big sister went to Oakwood, the only collegiate with a significant black population in West Toronto. So my friends and I sent Heather as our representative. When she came back from her experience, we sat her down and told her to tell us everything. Largely, the information was as expected: stay in school, black America has it hard, go see my next film. But, we wanted more. We wanted to know what the great Spike Lee saw in our future. What did he think of us black

Torontonians/Canadians? Did he see how we were the same? Did he understand the propinquity of blackness in the same way that we did? Heather said that he was asked one question about

Toronto: “Are you worried about getting shot while you’re here?” He answered quickly and immediately: “Shot? In Torawna? I don’t think so.” We were devastated.

We were dismissed. We were heartbroken. Spike Lee didn’t understand; he didn’t understand us at all. He didn’t see Canadian blackness as American blackness; he didn’t see that we relied on American blackness to tell us who we were at twelve years old. Already, we understood that violence and blackness went hand in hand in the media, and if we couldn’t scare one filmmaker then what could we do? Like the acting and directing in Lee’s films, blackness was largely performative for us.

From the outset, the animus for this project has been the disjunct between the multicultural, pluralistic vision of itself that Canada projects internationally and my Canada, where the onerous performative demands made of Canada's multicultural others ensure their continued marginalization even as their experiences are appropriated by the dominant national narrative. However, it was only after producing drafts of all the chapters in the project that I became aware of the centrality of my home city of Toronto. Though I have now lived more of my life outside of Toronto than I have inside of it, I have found that my identity as a Torontonian is still central to how I understand myself and the world around me, and, subsequently, how I write about multiculturalism in Canada.

As I attempt to do in this dissertation, Shana Almeida explores the link between the outward performance of diversity and multiculturalism in Toronto along with the administrative reality that “the City has consistently excluded racialized communities from its political decision-making processes” (Almeida 98). She concludes that “the term ‘diversity’ in the City of

Toronto […] vacillate[s] between presence and absence, inclusion and exclusion, mobilization and repression of racialized communities” (98), while “any tensions between the ‘inclusion’ of bodies and the ‘management’ of bodies dissolve to a point where they appear in a natural, even symbiotic relationship” (98). Key to Toronto’s representation of itself as a diverse, inclusive city,

Almeida argues, is the way in which it appropriates lived experiences of racism and exclusion by creating a discursive space in which “racialized Others and their experiences of racism become recognizable, and […] they become subjects in the City, only in their consumed, decontextualized, and re-branded forms” (Almeida 108). According to Almeida, this process means that even demonstrable instances of racism and exclusion can – by appropriating them to an overall narrative in which the city engages and consults with racial minorities in order to address

such occurrences – be co-opted into the narrative of a progressive, racially inclusive city that

celebrates diversity.

Black Culture, Black Poverty, Black Erasure

If we think of Toronto as a unique space in Canada, and black Toronto as a further

significant space, it becomes crucial to understand how literature, and the arts in general, think

about the positioning of Toronto in the larger shape of Canadian culture. In his article “’You

Might Understand Toronto’: Tracing the Histories of Writing on Toronto Writing,” Will Smith

looks at the concept of urban literature in Canada, alongside the classification of TorLit as

representative of Toronto’s publishing/writing culture, in an examination of the ways that critics

have typically seen or not seen Toronto’s literary history. In his criticism of the term TorLit,

Smith argues that

While the dense Toronto-centric infrastructure of Canadian publishing and media cannot

be denied, using Toronto or TorLit as bywords for inequality encourages an

understanding of texts associated with Toronto to be always-already compromised, and

so simultaneously suppresses the multiple experiences of this large and diverse city.

(156)

While Smith is looking at literature in Toronto from a non-racialized perspective13, I am seeing

the relationships between different black cultural groups as they shape something together that

we call black Canadian literature. While I am suggesting that there is a real and complex

relationship with black Toronto operating in this dissertation, I would also like to suggest that

13 That is not to say a white perspective. Smith’s construction of literature in Toronto includes Dionne Brand and an amorphous idea of ‘multiculturalism’ having some input into the genre. 43

there is something complicated happening within and without that relationship in the larger construction of black literature within Canadian culture.

In his chapter “’Who is She and What is She to You?’: Mary Ann Shadd Cary and the

(Im)Possibility of Black/Canadian Studies,” Rinaldo Walcott discusses the positioning of Black

Studies within Canadian Studies, as a whole. Walcott tells us that “Blackness in Canada is fashioned by and constituted via the in-between positions, utterances and desires of multiple identifications” (33). According to Walcott, representations of blackness (in this case, Walcott examines Mary Ann Shadd Cary as multiply located) are never exact, never grounded in the lived experiences of non-racialized Canadians, but, instead, are transmuted through a diverse diaspora, the interminable construction of blackness to the immediate south, and the insistence on an inaccurate hyphenated identity that formally removes the black population from the unnamed and unraced around it. African-Canadian, Afro-Canadian, Afro-Caribbean, and

Caribbean Canadian are all hybrid identities that cannot capture the concatenation of national origins that the word “black” symbolizes. None of these hyphenations acknowledge black Nova

Scotians, largely Loyalist and Maroon in origin, who are responsible for the origins of black theatre and culture in Canada. Neither can these hyphenated identities functionally capture the lived experience of second, third, fourth, etc. generation immigrants, who no longer have the same cultural understanding that new immigrants have of the same place. These hyphenations are inadequate to the task of representing a diverse population that vanishes and reappears at the whim of the larger Canadian culture.

When thinking of black literature in Canada, it is impossible to ignore black Nova Scotia, as it exists as a site of significant cultural history or as the producer of significant cultural producers. I completed my first degree in English literature at Dalhousie University, and in that

program black Canadian literature is George Elliot Clarke14. During my time there, he popped up in every survey class that I took that had a vaguely modern component. He was an old friend by the end of my degree. I was both happy and enraged to see him every time we had a new encounter because I could probably quote Whylah Falls in my sleep and because, as a

Torontonian, I felt that black Canada had more to offer. That said, I probably learned quite a bit about being black in Nova Scotia from attending poetry slams and working at the local hip hop store.

My reminisces of my undergraduate degree aside, the history and marginalization of black Nova Scotians, along with their cultural elision in the face of Caribbean immigration, make the Maritimes a site rife for analysis, but that is not the job of this dissertation. I look to Nova

Scotia only insomuch as it informs a general understanding of blackness in Canada and my own positionality as half Nova Scotian and having lived my late teens and early twenties in that environment.

If the marginalization of black Nova Scotia to some extent mirrors the marginal status of the Maritime provinces within constructions of Canadian national literature and culture, black

Torontonian culture has a rather different problem: articulating its distinctness without being subsumed into the hegemonic narrative that makes Toronto the imaginative cultural centre for all

Canadians. As Ric Knowles reminds us, Toronto is Canada’s global city and the epicentre of the narrative of multicultural pluralism at the heart of modern Canadian nationhood:

14 For more thoughts on what it means to be black at Dalhousie University, please see Anthony Stewart’s “Ignoring the Pool: De-Mystifying Race in Canada through Practice.” I did take an African-American literature course with Stewart during my undergraduate studies, but this only highlighted to me the dearth of black Canadian literature courses available, at the time. 45

In the promotional discourses of the city of Toronto there have typically been two key

claims: to be the world’s most multicultural city (the sheer number of cultures and

languages represented on its streets and streetcars lends the claim weight), and to be the

third most active theatre center in the English-speaking world (after London and New

York). It is also the largest city in the first country in the world to legislate, however

problematically, a policy of official multiculturalism. On all these fronts it is a resonant

case study with significant implications for other global cultural crucibles. (Intercultural

City 2)

However, while it functions as a cipher for Canadian multiculturalism in general, Toronto is also a space of particular importance for the specific cultural groups – including black Canadians – whose counter-cultural energies find expression there, frequently in tension with the hegemonic narrative that continually threatens to subsume them. Toronto is not only the centre of the easily assimilated national narrative of multicultural pluralism, but “also a place where the traditional hegemony of whiteness on the city’s stages is actively being challenged ‘from below’ by an informal coalition of artists of color working in solidarity across difference to create a theater scene that increasingly reflects and challenges the cultural makeup of the city” (Knowles,

Intercultural City 2). As I will argue throughout this dissertation, it is this work “from below” that makes art something revolutionary.

Thinking about Being Black in Toronto

In order to understand the work of this “art from below”, it is necessary first to refocus our attention on Toronto outside of the arts, in order to examine how black people are culturally and physically located in Canada, both historically and contemporarily. After World War I,

Toronto’s black population was chiefly made up of people from the West Indies, with a clear

“presence in Toronto […] by 1919” (Henry 15). However, this black population was still not homogenous. There were “severe ethnic divisions in this small population” and “[b]y World War

II, the population broke down into four discernible social blocs. They were the old Torontonians

(including Ontario migrants) and the first-generation migrant streams from the Caribbean, the

United States and Nova Scotia” (Henry 16). Toronto’s black population has thus been divided almost from the start, even within subgroups. Afro-Caribbeans distinguish themselves as

Jamaican, Trinidadian, Guyanese, etc., emphatically holding onto old nationalities alongside old prejudices, as

The West Indian community was itself no monolith. By the late 1960s, it had been

swollen enough by recent immigration to assert itself. The departure of Jamaicans, who

possess the most emphatic of these nationalisms, from the annual Caribana festival after

1968 was only the most public of many signs of this development. (Henry 17)

These historical fragments demonstrate how Toronto has always been central to the ways in which black Canada has subdivided, finding more difference than similarity of experience in itself, even as it has continued to be perceived by white Canada as a homogenous group. The disjunct between that white understanding of black Canadians and the lived reality of those black lives continued to widen as the immigration of black people to Canada increased.

This construction of a homogenous group of black immigrants led to an increase in those black Caribbean groups in Toronto for almost thirty years: “since the early 1960s, Canadian immigration policies have been fairly favourable to Blacks and other visible minorities” (Mensah

77). However, this increase was only temporary: since the 1990s, numbers have curtailed, as a result both of immigration changes reminiscent of earlier more racist machinations and of economic advantages found elsewhere, outside of Canada (Mensah 75-8). It is important to note

that while immigration is inconstant and inconsistent, the impression in the white Canadian’s

mind is still of a wave of non-white bodies crossing the border en masse. And these bodies, most

especially these black bodies, are angry. Beginning in the early twentieth century,

The reputation of West Indians as an insurgent element in the Toronto black community

rapidly became an accepted part of local political lore. The virtual institutionalization,

right after World War I, of the dominant West Indian and native approaches of the day in

the self-supporting UNIA and the subsidized social work agency, the Home Service

Association, did much to dramatize and exaggerate this generally tenable assumption.

(Henry 21)

In fact, Toronto has long been a particularly poor location for black revolution. Canada’s

immigration system attempted to subvert the problem of resistance by managing its immigrants

as they were recruited, since “the Caribbean migrants to Toronto […] were a relatively

conservative group. Many of these young men, as a first consideration, came to Toronto after

special recruitment in the Caribbean” (Henry 24). Recruitment ensured a complacent population,

happy to have been chosen, and wary of change. In this way, the racialized Canadian is content,

neither demanding nor acknowledging the disparity between themselves and the white Canadian.

The 2006 census showed that Canada’s overall poverty rate was 11%. However, for racialized persons it was 22%, as compared to 9% for white people. Of that 22%, black

Canadians made up 18%, third after Chinese and South Asian Canadians. In Toronto, racialized persons made up 62% of the total of Torontonians living in poverty. Black Torontonians are largely grouped in lower income neighbourhoods (through a combination of black choice and white exclusion), and

While the spatial concentration of Blacks in poor urban neighbourhoods may provide

some social capital for the settlement and integration of new Black immigrants, these

same neighbourhoods inadvertently feed into the marginalization, pauperization, and

eventual ghettoization of Blacks in Canadian cities. Counter-intuitively, such rundown

neighbourhoods are not cheap to live in. Indeed, residents of these areas tend to pay fairly

similar prices for their housing as do ‘their affluent neighbors, a few streets over.’

(Mensah 91)

Thus, Mensah concludes, black Torontonians desire the sense of community that black neighbourhoods offer, but suffer (rather acceptingly) consequences of poverty, as a result of this self-marginalization, for though housing prices are equal between close neighbourhoods, there

are increases in car and home insurance, as well as more expensive groceries and services, as

operating businesses in these neighbourhoods is itself as or more expensive as white

neighbourhoods without the lucrative client base that a white neighbourhood might offer

(Mensah 91).

As white Torontonians move outwards from the downtown core, towards cleaner and safer suburbs, the ghettoization of black Torontonians becomes more and more commonplace, unquestioning though questionable15. Immigrants follow the pattern, wanting something familiar

in a new place, but find themselves following the pattern of poverty that seems to have a hold on

black Canadians,

15 The debate around how and why this ghettoization takes place is ongoing; for more information, see Lucia Lo’s chapter “DiverCity Toronto: Canada’s Premier Gateway City,” Amy Cole et al.’s chapter “A City that Works: An Urban Analysis of the City of Toronto,” Myer Siemiatycki et al.’s chapter “Integrating Community Diversity in Toronto: On Whose Terms?” and Daniel Hierbert’s report “Exploring Minority Enclave, Areas in Montreal, Toronto, and Vancouver.” 49

As the number of Blacks in specific urban neighbourhoods increases, the available

resources and amenities dwindle through the suburbanization of Whites and the Black

middle-cum-upper class. This, in turn, feeds into the depletion of the Black

neighbourhood’s tax base for education, health care, recreation, and other social services.

Over time, the neighbourhood becomes economically depressed and crime-ridden, with

minuscule employment opportunities, if any at all. (Mensah 91)

Consequently, we see the desire for community lead to the impoverishment of a racial group.

Where multiculturalism demands distinction between groups and the ostensible celebration of cultural difference, the reality of creating physically distinct neighbourhoods is poverty and the stratification of privilege along race lines, with the racialized positioned along the bottom and the non-racialized enjoying the performance from the top. That is the inheritance that the black immigrant accepts when immigrating to Canada: the choice between acceptance and community in poverty or the privilege of comfort in isolation.

My Toronto: Between Nova Scotia and the Caribbean

My father immigrated from Trinidad to Cape Breton, Nova Scotia in 1971 and moved to

Toronto in 1976. He used to tell me stories of being a new immigrant, what it was like to look different and speak differently from everyone else. I remember him being particularly vulnerable when thinking about socks. Apparently, when he moved over from Trinidad, my dad wore these knee-high socks and all of his co-workers mocked him for them. I was always puzzled by my dad’s worry over these socks. I have spent most of my school holidays in Cape Breton and have always been much more concerned about the colour of my skin and my very liberal opinions than I have been about my socks. But, for my father, the socks were representative of a difference that can be accommodated. I can’t imagine what other prejudices he encountered

because he only ever really spoke of socks and other inconsequential matters. However, I do know that he moved to Toronto five years after arriving in Cape Breton.

Like my father, I have immigrated to a new country in adulthood. My circumstances are certainly different; I have moved from one Western/developed/first-world country to another.

However, I have cultural tics, misunderstandings, and a different accent, all of which make me foreign. But my foreign is not my father’s foreign. In a United Kingdom that voted for Brexit, I am a “good immigrant,” and how strange is that? My American-sounding accent, education, and obviously middle-class standing mean that my brown body is less racialized in London than anywhere I have lived in Canada.

You might argue that London is not England and you would be right. In London, I have discovered truths about the Caribbean diaspora that I had never suspected before. The language and gestures that I typically associated with Toronto, and more specifically being black in

Toronto, are all at play in London. When a friend here in London uses the term “feisty,” pronounced “face-ty,” it takes me back to my teenage years in Toronto. When I watch North

London YouTube sensation the Chicken Connoisseur speak in his black London/Westernized

Caribbean accent, the slang and gestures feel so familiar. When London podcaster and tweeter

@tweetsbybilal comments lovingly on the foibles of Caribbean takeaway and the Notting Hill

Festival, it all feels so familiar. I am finding that being foreign and black are two completely

different things. That black is something else. What? I’m not sure yet. However, for me it all

begins in Toronto.

1. Synchronicity and Simcoe: Where am I?

Toronto was purchased in 1787 for the amount of £1,700 plus cloth and axes. To put this

into perspective, the houses built on that site in 1803 cost £1,065, though the price of building

was steep as a result of the lack of supplies (Arthur 10). While Toronto was purchased by Sir

Guy Carleton’s (Lord Dorchester), Toronto was built as a result of one man’s idle dream to create a town site; Colonel John Graves Simcoe was looking to establish the capital city of Upper

Canada and Niagara, being too close to the French established Fort Rouillé. In 1791, Simcoe proposed “that the Site of the Colony should be in that Great Peninsula between the Lakes

Huron, Erie, and Ontario, a Spot destined by Nature sooner or later, to govern the interior World.

I mean to establish a Capital in the very heart of the Country” (qtd. in Arthur 15). Simcoe thus articulates Toronto in terms of metaphor: the heart of Canada, as well as its destiny. This is no small reflection of the purge of anything French, or, indeed, not explicitly English, in Toronto in the years to come. The name itself representing shifts in loyalty and favour, Toronto becoming

York in 1793 and reverting in 1834, as a result of the duke of York’s loss of heroic status.

Toronto’s city plans were similarly reflective of metaphors and trends, dreamed up by men wanting to impose the civility and orderliness of Britain on its colonies. Captain Gother

Mann was the military engineer that dreamed up the first plan for Toronto, one that required level land and the absence of ravines. In Toronto: No Mean City, architectural researcher Eric

Arthur (with revision for the third edition completed by Stephen A. Otto) offers a history of

Toronto’s design and expansion. He writes critically of Mann’s plans:

The idea of public buildings in a neat British square separated in perpetuity from the

residential area by a green common with shade trees and sheep quietly grazing is quite

delightful, but fantastic and unrealistic when one considers the rising terrain and the

deeply penetrating ravines. These topographical problems would hardly be appreciated in

London, where Mann’s plan of ‘Torento’ was forwarded with the colonial

correspondence in 1790. (11)

Like Simcoe, Mann attempts to imprint British ideals on an uncooperative environment. In 1793, surveyor Alexander Aitkin began to implement his own city plans, and thus supplanted Mann as the key progenitor of Toronto. It is Aitkin’s plan with “which we have had to cope for almost two hundred years and with which posterity will have to deal till the end of time” (Arthur 16).

For Arthur, these plans relied too heavily on synchronicity, with little thought to time and expansion.

According to Michel de Certeau in The Practice of Everyday Life, “[t]he ‘city’ founded by utopian and urbanistic discourse is defined by the possibility of a threefold operation,” involving “[t]he production of its own space” (a degree of self-involvement that allows for no social contagion), “the substitution of a nowhen, or of a synchronic system,” and “the creation of a universal and anonymous subject which is the city itself” (94). The city must possess itself; it must have an understandable perspective and personality that operates outside of those that design or in habit it. If Toronto easily functions within the last two criteria of de Certeau’s definition of a city “founded by utopian and urbanistic discourse,” it is Toronto’s own rebellious personality that allows for the first. While Simcoe thought and rethought politics and remonstrations, Toronto was making its own desires known. During early visits to York, many often complained of an ague, later attributed to the miasma rising from a swamp located at the mouth of the Don River, where the settlers had set themselves up. Thus, for the sake of health,

York was resettled west of Yonge Street.

Alongside Aitkin’s poor planning, Toronto’s “personality” dictated construction in whimsical and chaotic ways:

A grave weakness in Aitkin’s plan was that it lacked focus. Had there been provision for

a school, a church, or, more particularly, village green, the plan of Toronto today would

have been different. It lacked direction, so that when expansion became inevitable, the

town grew merely by adding more squares, a practice we have followed ever since except

in the labyrinth of Rosedale. (Arthur 33)

Thus, Toronto’s “civilization” was rebellious and uncertain. This city was certainly urbanized

and settled, but under its own conditions and with the very irregularity of its streets, Toronto

reminds us of its irresponsible origins, making it a fertile site for resistance and revolt. As de

Certeau reminds us,

the functionalist organization, by privileging progress (i.e., time), causes the condition of

its own possibility – time itself – to be forgotten; space thus becomes the blind spot in a

scientific and political technology. This is the way in which the Concept-city functions; a

place of transformations and appropriations, the object of various kinds of interference

but also a subject that is constantly enriched by new attributes, it is simultaneously the

machinery and the hero of modernity. (95)

Contemporary Toronto is marked by this constant tension – between the imposition of planning and order from above and the radical creative uncertainty of rebellion and cultural movements from below – and by the continual attempts of the former to reappropriate the latter.

While Simcoe, Mann, and Aitkin have contributed to the Toronto I know, theirs is not my

Toronto. Similarly, the Toronto of my childhood is not the Toronto of today. As I sit here listening to Apple Music’s “The New Toronto” Hip-Hop playlist from my home in London,

England, I feel so disconnected from the teenager I was who raged because the only place to hear

hip hop on the radio was at midnight on AM 640 (or some of York University’s radio programs –

but that was a little too indie for my tastes at the time). Because of the dearth of these types of

programming, I either interviewed or was interviewed by most of the black DJs operating in

radio in Toronto in the 90s. Because to be black and an activist in Toronto at the time was to be a

community; we all knew each other and we all fought for each other. This is Toronto pre-Drake.

This is Toronto pre-Africentric Alternative School. This is Toronto pre-#blacklivesmatter.

In 2016, the CBC reported that “[t]he majority of people living in Toronto identify themselves as visible minorities, newly-released data from Canada's 2016 census shows”

(Whalen). Since this “discovery,” Toronto has embarked on a campaign, both internal and external, that advertises its diversity to any and all that will listen, read, or absorb in any fashion

(Knowles, Performing 2). Toronto is not shying away from becoming something other because the state knows that diversity is the hallmark of multiculturalism and that multiculturalism is good. It is good for managing difference. It is good for business. It is good for white Canadians.

Before I finish off this chapter, let me tell you about my best memories of Toronto: the yearly Caribana parade. My parents divorced when I was three. My mother moved us to

Roncesvalles Village, otherwise known as Little Ukraine for it was predominantly a Ukrainian neighbourhood. This meant that I was one of few black bodies living in that neighbourhood and similarly in any school I attended. Caribana was the one time of year that I knew I would be with other people that looked like me and experience that Caribbean culture that I felt so excluded from in my little Ukrainian neighbourhood.

I should mention that although my dad took me to Caribana, my mother was never excluded and while my father and I sat back and watched, my mother was always in the parade.

Her white body a flash among all the brown ones. I never participated in the parade. My cousins were in it and my aunts and uncles were in it. But I was never in it. My dad and I always sat back and watched from afar. My father passed away in 2013 and I still remember the two of us, at once a part of and apart from the joyous and colourful world around us.

However, before I move on to Caribana and all that that space means to me, let us take a look at what managing multiculturalism through black women’s literary work means in Canada.

As any work looking at performance, this dissertation is concerned with audience. In order to understand the relationship between audience and multiculturalism, I am first interested in that space of intellectualism. How are Caribbean Canadian women studied? How do they fit into the literary canon. If my nostalgic remembrances of Caribana is what situate this dissertation as mine then it is the next chapter that helps to orient the origins of this project, situated, as it is, in literature as a discipline, but slipping in and out of that discipline into the world around it.

CITIZENSHIP, COMMODIFICATION, AND CONTAINMENT OF TRANSNATIONAL

MINORITY LITERATURE IN CANADA

By the early 1990s, the work of Philip, Harris, Allen, and Brand was appearing on

Canadian university course reading lists, which is where I encountered it. It became clear that they had enormous thematic, linguistic, and political commonalities. Only some of these are shared with Caribbean women poets who reside in the West Indies, with contemporary black male Canadian writers such as George Elliott Clarke and Austin Clarke, or with black Canadian women writers who began to publish later. Thus, in broad terms, these four writers constitute a movement in Canadian literature.

(Maria Casas Multimodality)

As I have been arguing, Canadian literature exists transnationally; that is to say, Canadian literature operates with an eye to the outside world while simultaneously incorporating that world into its own ethos. In this way, borders become both malleable and absolute, as Canada establishes itself as culturally distinct through a conscious reconstruction of those who are not

Canadian. Rather than thinking about Canadian literature as solely a concern of cultural construction, then, it becomes more productive to reformulate our understanding of the borders of Canadian literature in terms of the nation-state – since we “need to pay as much attention to the state as we have to nation” (Brydon 2) – and in terms of authorized citizenship. Canadian writers of immigrant backgrounds are a fundamental part of the mosaic that make up the canon of Canadian literature; in fact, it is impossible to imagine a Canadian literature survey course that did not incorporate elements of marginalized or minoritized writing. These minority authors represent not just a comprehensive view of literature in Canada, but a legitimate mirroring of the ways in which the nation represents itself as multicultural to the wider world. In this state of

mirroring, Canada as nation moves not only to enable its own self-aggrandizement, but also to

limit the inherent potential of the writers themselves, as “[t]he challenge to the integrity of

Canadian literature posed by minority literatures, the threat of its fragmentation, increases the

pressure to institutionalize and therefore contain them” (Cho 97). And it is this containment

which works most insidiously to manage16 the intrusion of the foreign citizen by making that

citizen its own. The nation-state moves to segregate while it incorporates, making citizens by establishing difference and thereby assuring a metaphorical bordering of minority writers in a transnational literary world.

Hospitality and Extra-National Success: Containing the Minority Author

In her book Prizing Literature: The Celebration and Circulation of National Culture, an examination of the dual states of immigrant Canadian authors, existing as both representative of the harmonious state and as fragments of exoticism, Gillian Roberts looks to Michael Ondaatje,

Carol Shields, Rohinton Mistry, and Yann Martel. In the introduction to her book, Roberts says that

The complicated relationship between Canadian literature as circulated within Canada

and Canadian literature as an international commodity depends upon the external

validation of Canadian cultural products and the writers who produce them. Extranational

authorities preside over Canadian culture, and their aesthetic sanctioning of Canadian

texts becomes translated into national success for Canada. For immigrant writers to win

these external prizes is to increase the currency of Canadian literature outside the

16 I will get back to this notion of management, as well as containment, of black women’s bodies through multiculturalism more explicitly in the next chapter. 58

Canadian nation-state and to heighten the visibility and validity of Canadian literature

within Canada; in taking on a representative status for the nation, such writers undergo a

reworking of their national identity and previous guest status. (5)

Roberts is especially interested in the relationship between Canadian literature and its value as

international commodity through a system that values authors as a type of capital, one worth

more on the foreign stage than at home. Roberts goes on to say that “[t]exts welcomed into a

national culture, and celebrated as part of that culture (particularly through national literary

awards), can confer the status of host upon immigrant writers previously considered as guests”

(7), meaning that acceptance as citizen of the nation-state relies on a representation of Canada

internationally that is folded in upon the author as foreign object and simultaneously symbolic of

the nation’s multicultural ideal.

Questions of citizenship, and the authority to bestow or deny it, lead us to ponder the

relationship between the state and hospitality, as Roberts reminds us that “[t]he welcoming of

celebrated immigrant and ethnic-minority writers into the Canadian cultural host position must

therefore coincide with a hospitality of reading and reception” (7). This hospitality is

complicated by the fact that that it is offered on condition of extra-national performance by the host, rather than as an act of acceptance within the borders of the nation-state. In this way, hospitality relies on the structured success of the foreigner, the easy containment of the marketability of the guest, rather than on the host’s own benevolence, though the host reaps the benefit of seemingly to possess both of these aspects of acceptance. As Derrida reminds us,

“absolute hospitality requires that I open up my home and that I give not only to the foreigner

[…], but to the absolute, unknown, anonymous other, and that I give place to them, that I let them come, that I let them arrive, and take place in the place I offer them, without asking of them

either reciprocity (entering into a pact) or even their names” (25). However, as Derrida points

out, hospitality is always an act of some hypocrisy, as it insists on reciprocity even as it promises

benevolence. Canadian literature, and the hospitality it offers to the immigrant author, works

similarly in that the marginalized author is granted citizenship gladly, but only on condition of

international success; the foreigner Canadian is allowed hospitality only insofar as they allow

themselves to be contained by that hospitality, as “[h]ospitality functions here simultaneously in

relation to national identity and through the vocabulary used to articulate responses to reading: to

observe how a book has been received is to discuss the text as an object of hospitality, to assess

the extent to which readers are hospitable to the work” (Roberts 7). For Derrida, the exercise of

hospitality requires that we demand the name of the foreigner: “this foreigner, then, is someone

with whom, to receive him, you begin by asking his name; you enjoin him to state and to

guarantee his identity, as you would a witness before a court. This is someone to whom you put a

question and address a demand, the first demand” (27). The process of literary hospitality in

Canada requires the Canadian immigrant author to submit proof of national worth, of potential

capital to a nation that measures such worth in terms of international reputation and individual

malleability, strictly on the basis of the value that foreignness offers.

While Roberts is particularly interested in the cases of citizenship involving Ondaatje,

Shields, Mistry, and Martel, I am interested in pursuing the more localized and often grouped trio

of Dionne Brand, M. NourbeSe Philip, and Claire Harris. While Brand has taken a more

prominent role recently – she was Toronto’s Poet Laureate from 2009 to 2012 and was admitted

to the Order of Canada in 2017 – it is unarguable that her roots lie in this relationship with other

black Caribbean women. I would like to locate Canadian literature’s relationship to Caribbean

Canadian women’s writing within a history that includes this triumvirate that launched a type of

thinking about marginalized literature in the 1990s that marked off what was Canadian and what

was multicultural Canada. As women of similar backgrounds (all immigrating from Trinidad and

Tobago to Canada) and writers of both poetry and prose, Brand, Philip, and Harris make sense as

a subject group; however, I would also interrogate the assumption that these authors had

naturally belonged in the same grouping17. The citizenship bestowed upon these three women

required that they be constructed as similar, writing in a similar vein and asking similar

questions. International success has only reemphasized their foreignness: as Roberts argues, in

the case of Dionne Brand, a celebrated Canadian author of original Trinidadian birth, “Brand’s

Governor General’s Award may well lend political capital to the prize itself, perhaps operating

like the Writers’ Union and PEN in Brand’s critique, as evidence that exonerates the prize or

organization of racism. At the same time, by virtue of Brand’s winning the prize, she has been,

through that act, interpolated as Canadian” (Roberts 27).

In my examination of these three women, I intend to demonstrate that grouping these

women as similar shifts them from the space of the Canadian author to a containable space of difference. It is this difference, through similarity to each other, which marks these minoritized authors as the exotic foreigners who have been granted hospitality by the state. I will add one more author to this interrogation, one who is also often elided in a larger interpretation of

17 I am not suggesting that these women are always examined as a group, but I am claiming that they are incongruously situated with each other more often than you might expect. For more recent examples of this, see Paul Barrett’s Blackening Canada where he looks at the work of Dionne Brand, but introduces her writing as “on par with the works of Nourbese Philip (1989), Makeda Silvera (2003), Claire Harris (1992), and Lillian Allen (1993)” (22), Sarah Wylie Krotz’s article “Place and Memory: Rethinking the Literary Map of Canada” where she claims a shift in Canadian literature “since the days when Brand, along with fellow Trinidadian-Canadian poets Claire Harris and Marlene Nourbese Philip, ‘had some of her writing rejected by Canadian publishers’” (147), and Pilar Cuder Dominguez’s article “In Search of a ‘Grammar for Black’: Africa and Africans in Lawrence Hill’s Works” where she names both Brand and Philip in the second paragraph as a background gloss on black Canadian literature. 61

Caribbean Canadian female authors: Lillian Allen. Allen, though less easily interpolated into the grouping that is Brand, Philip, and Harris, due to the fact that she is Jamaican by birth, has been often cited as similar in style or subject to these other women. This assumption of similarity allows the critic to make further assumptions of intent and message, which is why it is not only these authors who are contained, but also the writing that these women produce becomes managed by those around them. It is through the performance of hospitality that these authors are granted a limited citizenship; however, it is only through the simultaneous performance of the exotic that these women are offered that hospitality.

Cultural Capital and the Performance of Multiculturalism

As I suggested in my introduction, the notion of performance provides a powerful means of investigating the cultural constructedness of Canadian representations of multiculturalism and immigrant women. What Joseph Roach calls “genealogies of performance” are especially useful here. Performance, for Roach, represents a complex fusion of cultural memory and artistic expression in the form of “restored behaviour,” meaning “that which can be repeated, rehearsed, and above all recreated” (125). Understanding performance in this way

highlights a distinction between social memory and history as different forms of cultural

transmission across time: memory requires collective participation, whether at theatrical

events, shamanic rituals, or Olympic opening ceremonies; history entails the critical (and

apparently solitary) interpretation of written records. (Roach 125)

Here, social memory and history have distinctly different origins and cultural relevance, often juxtaposing one against the other. This creates a binary of cultural assumptions, where participation prioritizes one type of memory over the other. “Genealogies of performance,” as

conceived by Roach, offer a means of examining how cultural memory is transmitted, and to explore the disjuncts between personal and collective experience. Thus,

Genealogies of performance approach literature as a repository of the restored behaviours

of the past. They excavate the image of restored behaviours still at least partially visible

in contemporary culture, in effect “writing the history of the present.” But they intensify

when they treat performances of cultural self-declaration in the face of encounter and

exchange – the performance of culture in the moment of its most acute reflexivity, when

it attempts to explain and to justify itself to others. (Roach 126)

The performative aspects of Canadian multiculturalism, whether expressed through literary text, cultural festival or stage play, are particularly appropriate locations for the construction of genealogies of performance: multiculturalism as performance is always a process of “encounter and exchange,” and of seeking to explain oneself – and one’s cultural heritage – to others. In a manner reminiscent of Derrida’s paradoxical hospitality, multiculturalism requires both the benevolence of the state and the interrogation of the new citizen; there is always the demand for the name, the demand to explain oneself and one’s background. At the same time, multiculturalism is also a location of disjunction, between the collective, performative act of cultural display, and the private, lived experience of immigrant and diasporic life in Canada. In the context of Canadian multiculturalism, performance is first and foremost a method of highlighting disjuncture, between harmless acts of multiculturalism (food, dancing, etc.) and the immigrant’s inability to access the power of the dominant group (politics, job markets, etc.), despite Canada’s claim to be a pluralistic society. Equally important is the role that performance has in the work of Caribbean Canadian authors like Brand, Philip, Harris, and Allen. As Philip notices in the introduction to her play Coups and Calypsos, it is interesting “how central drama

and performance are to Caribbean life” she observes and then goes on to say, “[b]eginning with

demotic or vernacular words that flow like fast-moving rivers through the of-the-people, for-the- people, by-the-people language, expressing the linguistic genius and pulse of a people who, once bereft of language, now with linguistic verve and panache, perform the ‘trivial round, the common task’” (8). Philip is commenting on the ways that performance works in the everyday in the Caribbean, the manner in which performance operates intrinsically with both storytelling and community in order to enable citizenship, rather than creating a falsity of hospitable benevolence, as performance often works in Canada.

While performance is well established as a theoretical concept in certain fields, such as feminist theory, for instance, it has not yet found as much of a niche in postcolonial studies, where it tends to be applied in a more literal sense. The phrase “postcolonial performance” is quite likely to signify an exotic theatrical performance (for example, Nigerian stage plays), without significant emphasis on the postcolonial, other than the fact that the performance takes place outside of the West. As the use of performance within the field of the postcolonial currently stands, it falls prey to Huggan’s view (discussed in detail in my Introduction) of postcolonial complicity, seeking only to highlight the exotic for the benefit of academia. It is necessary to employ postcolonial theory in conjunction with performance studies to understand the constructedness of Canadian multiculturalism, treating it as a set of “genealogies” rather than merely continuing to consume “exotic” performances uncritically.

Within a postcolonial framework, and especially within a context of cultural exchange, the notion of hybridity is a central concept. Using postcolonial theory in tandem with performance theory entails opening up the concept of hybridity to include both cultural identity and artistic form in the effort to understand the relationship between representation and audience

within a context of multicultural performance. In the discussion that follows, I will explore the

relationship between Canadian audiences and hybrid national identifications. I am especially

interested in the ways that race changes interpretation of cultural authenticity and legitimacy;

why concatenations of national and ethnic descriptors influence popularity and marketability of

Canadian identities that symbolize an ideal diasporic Canada. I want to theorize the

consequences of Canadian multiculturalism, as it performs policy and reflects the expectations of

a nation. These expectations of a multicultural performance, specifically of those of Caribbean background, generate an industry of postcolonial performance in Canada, which requires diasporic citizens to make spectacles of themselves.

Canadian multiculturalism works simultaneously to contain the threat of difference inside

Canada’s borders while ultimately “selling” Canadian diversity outside. The creation of an

“exoticism at home” works to not only maintain a reputation of tolerance internationally, but also helps to differentiate Canada’s Others from those of the Third World. As Sunera Thobani argues

in her book Exalted Subjects: Studies in the Making of Race and Nation in Canada, “[t]he

adoption of multiculturalism enabled the nation’s self-presentation on the global stage as urbane,

cosmopolitan, and at the cutting edge of promoting racial and ethnic tolerance among western

nations” (144). Multiculturalism as a national policy works to promote a diverse and friendly

Canada, a nation that sells its own reputation of open-mindedness, yet manages to remain both

bicultural and bilingual always. While it is not the main concern of this chapter or this project, it

is important to note the ramifications that an official policy of multiculturalism has for the

indigenous populations of Canada. For, while the nation celebrates diversity as something new, it

requires that the old always remain the stable duality of two founding nations: English and

French. The notion of the exotic at home is based on a paternalistic logic of multiculturalism as a

benevolent opening of “us” – the established – to “them” – the newcomers – that cannot extend to the presence of cultures who inhabited this space long before the establishment of English or

French Canada. Thus, it is inevitably the case that while official multiculturalism limits the spaces of cultural expression for those it supposedly embraces, it offers no space at all for aboriginal peoples’ cultural experiences within a nation founded on their dispossession.

As a national policy interested in reinvesting its own creation myths, multiculturalism always works in a dichotomy of us/them. Whether it be home and abroad, white and non-white,

Canada and the US, multiculturalism, while claiming an interest in a multiply identified diversity of nation, multiculturalism relies on the creation of binaries in order to reinforce differences and, as Thobani says, “[w]hile it certainly cannot be disputed that Canada has reaped immense benefits from presenting itself internationally as distinct from the (more aggressive) United

States, it should be emphasized that, rather than simply managing difference, official multiculturalism functioned as a mode of constituting difference” (145).

Even in their hopeful treatise on the ideological function of multiculturalism as it allows an “opening up ourselves to different possibilities, and of Canadians becoming a type of people that in a real sense – or shall we say authentically – are ethnically and racially indeterminate”

(301), Cecil Foster cannot fully ignore the devastating effects that multiculturalism has had for black Canada where “[b]lacks were essentially excluded from the collective and dominant imagination of who or what was Canada and Canadian” (303). Naming various examples of the media constructing black Canadians as violent and unCanadian, Foster looks at what it means to be authentically Canadian, and how this authenticity is incompatible with being black. To be black is to be different, authentically different even. So even in the most idealistic argument for

the contemporary relevance of multiculturalism, we see multiculturalism performing two opposing roles:

But multiculturalism, as a child of modernity – and because it is dialectical and dialogic –

has two faces. One is the despair and exclusion. The other face of this moment of

modernity is that of hope – this is where we have faith and strong beliefs in values

without trying to impose them on anyone and where national life has many meanings and

particular identities and even may cultures. (316)

So, we are left to think about what is authentically Canadian and how black Canadians fit into that construction. For, if we are not Canadian, then what are we? Where do we find ourselves?

Brand, Philip, and Harris: Ambassadors of the State

The question of the dominant culture’s expectations of racial minorities is taken up by

George Elliott Clarke in Odysseys Home: Mapping African-Canadian Literature. In his book,

Clarke talks about the marginalization of blackness as a specifically Canadian experience. He complains that many of the best-known scholars of African diasporic experience, including the likes of Paul Gilroy, write out the Canadian black experience by subordinating it either to

European or American black diaspora. In these works, Canada simply appears as a hybrid of

American and European experience, without a separate black identity of its own. Clarke recalls that, as a child and as a young man, performing blackness required adhering to these prescribed spaces, cultivating “Black American cultural influences” from music, TV, and cinema, and growing up “‘Black (American) Nova Scotian,’ really” (5).

Clarke’s aim is to promote the understanding “that blackness possesses a Canadian dimension that is recognized by engaging with black cultural works located here or that address black existence here” (10). The current spaces permitted for the expression of blackness in

Canada make this a considerable challenge, however. Clarke complains that responses to black literature in Canada fall into one of two categories: dismissal or exoticization:

I am weary of black people [in Canada] always being a subject only for sociologists,

criminologists, and morticians, their scalpel eyes slicing into us, their shrapnel voices

exploding our dreams, their heavy metal hands ripping into us – with a crabby

penmanship that dates back to the Dark Ages. In their minds, we are supposedly too poor

to even have history. [...] Or they classify us as “exotica,” as symbols of liberal progress,

of white paternalism, of black suffering, of feminist rage. (6)

Note that Clarke does not identify a space for black cultural expression beyond the affirmation of white attitudes and values – either the dismissal of black culture as violent and degraded, or its inclusion as a celebration of white, liberal progressiveness and “tolerance.” In either case, the performative spaces for black Canadian culture are radically limited, exposing the enormous disjunct between the collective memory of black cultural experience in Canada, and an official history which continually serves to marginalize this experience.

Clarke argues that the black authors who have been most widely celebrated in Canada are celebrated less for their depiction of blackness as a Canadian experience than for the “exotic” associations of their Caribbean backgrounds. Claire Harris, Dionne Brand, and M. Nourbese

Philip all immigrated to Canada from Trinidad (Philip was born in Tobago, but grew up in

Trinidad), and together account for a large amount of scholarship on black diasporic writing in

Canada, often appearing together in comparative studies. Clarke is sharply critical of the exoticist tendencies of criticism, which groups these women together, and privileges their experiences over those of other black Canadians. He says that

[w]hile they may be claimed as “Afro-Caribbean writers in exile” – the tag applied to

them by African-Canadian academic Myriam J.A. Chancey – they may also be

considered as primarily Canadian writers, for all three began publishing after emigrating

to Canada. In this materialist cum realist sense, their voices have always been Canadian –

though their audiences have seldom cared to consider this fact. (254)

Clarke argues that the critical treatments of Harris, Brand, and Philip have at times been guilty of

“Machiavellian abuses” in the strategic formation of a privileged canon of Caribbean authors as idealized examples of Canadian multiculturalism, and cites them as examples of how “one’s own thrusting of theory, of notions of interpretation, upon the Other (that obscure object of desire) may render mute the screams, laughter, and shouts of that supposedly beloved Other, that darling community with which the critic-as-missionary conducts intercourse” (253).

Clarke persuasively argues that Caribbean is a privileged signifier within the construction of blackness in Canada, and one that imposes performative conditions on black communities relating to an exoticized multicultural ideal. However, his exclusive focus on black experience means that Clarke only tells part of the story. If Caribbean is a metonym for black experience in

Canada, black is also arguably a metonym for the Caribbean diaspora. It is equally important to ask why, given the Canadian reading public’s consumption of black Caribbean authors, a similarly privileged status does not seem to be given to Caribbean authors of non-African ancestry. Also, what is it about the experiences and works of black Caribbean women that captures the exotic imagination in a way that male authors of a similar background fail to do?

In consideration of the Caribbean Canadian woman’s role in mainstream Canadian society, as well as within the general practices of women’s studies programmes in Canada, D.

Alissa Trotz finds that there is a reluctance to acknowledge the codependent relationship that

Canada has had with the Caribbean over the course of several centuries. This ahistorical approach to reading Caribbean Canadian women allows “Caribbean peoples [to] continue to be represented as recent immigrants, as contingent members of the Canadian multicultural mosaic, notwithstanding their presence in Canada since the 17th century” (9). Thus, feminism within

Canada often elides this Caribbean presence even as it congratulates itself on its embracing of diversity, by vicariously partaking of the successes of writers like Harris, Brand, and Philip:

The contributions of Lillian Allen, Dionne Brand, Ramabai Espinet, Lorna Goodison,

Nalo Hopkinson, Tessa McWatt, Shani Mootoo, M. NourbeSe Philip, Djanet Sears, Olive

Senior, Makeda Silvera and D’bi Young, among others, foreground the multiple ways in

which women’s bodies are not only witness to histories of suffering that are transatlantic

and diasporic, but also emerge as key sites of resistant practices and memories that

cannot be contained or incarcerated by territorial borders. (Trotz 11)

For Trotz, however, it is not sufficient for Canadian feminism simply to embrace, in the name of diversity, the convergence of cultural and gender difference in the works of these authors.

Responsible criticism must also “examine the uncomfortable ways in which feminist activism meets or converges with neo-liberal strategies to produce the category of poor women in need of rescue” (13). Insufficient attention to the cultural specificity of works produced in Canada by writers of the Caribbean diaspora ends up simply reproducing the construction of the “exotic at home,” celebrating the successes of the Third World Woman who has relocated to the First

World, without reflecting critically on its construction of the Third World Woman who remains at home as perpetually oppressed and in need of “our” help. Where we see here that the limitations imposed by official Canadian multiculturalism’s expectations that immigrant and diasporic groups perform the role of the exotic at home, we also see those situations in which the

elisions and metonymies of multicultural performance require the use of performative genealogies to recover the components of lived experience written out of the approved narrative of Canadian nationhood.

Diasporic vs. Minority Writers in Canada: Capitalized Worth

Like Clarke, Neil Bissoondath thinks about the role of exoticization in the representation of Canadian authors of immigrant origins through the lens of the commodification of multiculturalism in his seminal work Selling Illusions: The Cult of Multiculturalism in Canada.

Here, Bissoondath is critical of the manner in which multiculturalism, as both an official policy and a Canadian ideal, works to undermine the similarities between citizens in favour of underscoring the ways in which difference separates individuals. As an author, Bissoondath is particularly invested in the ways in which multiculturalism hampers his own creative vision, arguing that “[o]ur approach to multiculturalism encourages the devaluation of that which it claims to wish to protect and promote. Culture becomes an object for display rather than the heart and soul of the individuals formed by it” (81). Bissoondath critiques the ways in which

Canadians simplify the term culture in order to create a more easily consumed version of multiculturalism, one which allows for a more manageable and malleable idea of difference.

Bissoondath’s critique is an instructive, if problematic, example. It is indispensable to a discussion of multiculturalism such as the present one less because of the merits or demerits of his argument but, ironically, because his thoughts on multiculturalism have themselves been appropriated by the processes of multicultural canonization. Critics of multiculturalism continually return to him as an authentic dissenting voice. As a creative writer of colour,

Bissoondath’s thoughts on multiculturalism have gained an almost cult status; he is the first named critic of multiculturalism on the “Multiculturalism in Canada” Wikipedia page and

occupies space in most texts on multiculturalism in Canada, either reprinted or as part of the discussion.

While Bissoondath’s construction of multiculturalism is a familiar one, one that articulates the inherent paradox coexistent with the hospitality that multiculturalism offers, we also have an argument that not only refutes the benefits of multiculturalism, but – by prioritizing the unimpeachable integrity of the creative over the contexts of its production – paradoxically forecloses on a more detailed and nuanced critical engagement with the very processes he summarily dismisses. In an examination of responses to his own work, Bissoondath draws on the commentary of both Brand and Philip, who, he believes, are overly critical and incapable of understanding his rights to creativity. Indeed, Bissoondath states that “[t]here is no doubt that to accept the tenets of cultural appropriation is to condemn me” (162) and that there is “[l]ittle wonder, then, that Ms. Brand, Ms. Philip and those who espouse their views see in me a right- wing racist dedicated to the preservation of imperialist colonialism” (162). In Bissoondath’s writing, criticism of the potential dangers of unthinking cultural and gender appropriation is vilified, as it impedes the creativity of the author – the only aspect of the artwork that matters.

We may agree with Brand and Philip that Bissoondath’s work operates under the old colonial structures that encourage a Canadian public to see marginalized persons as victims of culture until they land in the freedom that is Canada, or with Bissoondath that he has the right to invest his creative works with whomever he sees fit, reflecting the truth of his own experiences alongside an imagining of others. But what is rather more interesting about Bissoondath’s approach to Brand and Philip is that it is predicated on the very “multicultural” groupings he reviles: for Bissoondath, Brand and Philip are operating under the same critical and creative schema because of their similarity of backgrounds.

By simultaneously grouping these “writers of colour” while ultimately dismissing this

group as being too unspecific, Bissoondath also creates a blanket assumption under which he

accuses all writers of colour of self-imposed victimhood – a narrative he then uses to dismiss all

criticism of his own work as complicit in the same limiting essentialist constructions that

Bissoondath argues against in his description of multiculturalism in Canada. What hinders

Bissoondath’s argument is the lack of negotiation between diaspora and race in the

understanding of literature in Canada. As Lily Cho points out in her chapter “Diasporic

Citizenship: Contradictions and Possibilities for Canadian Literature,” “[n]ot all elsewheres are

equal. The differences cannot be collapsed between the multiple-passport carrying transnational subject and the diasporic subject whose agonized relationship to home engenders a perpetual sense of not quite having left and not quite having arrived” (99). In the examination of Canadian immigrant writing, it becomes of the utmost importance to both delineate between the differences that are intrinsically part of reading these authors’ work, while also understanding that Canadian literature itself relies on the exoticism at home that these authors provide.

Again, we see the paradoxical nature of Canada’s hospitality when minoritized authors are required to operate as native informants, native informants that have abdicated any rights to either home as they are always required to operate on the border between. This is part of an outwardly hospitable process by which “the national literary graciously make space for the kinds of critiques of Canada and Canadian literature that emerge in literatures explicitly marked as

Asian Canadian, Black Canadian, or Native Canadian. These explicit markings of difference call attention to a desire to be considered both within and without the nation” (Cho 93). In her examination of citizenship with relation to Canadian literature, Cho makes explicit that she sees minority, transnational, and diasporic literatures as necessarily differentiated labels that describe

different functions of citizenship, though these categories can certainly overlap. While minority

literature stresses the historical implications that racialization has had on for the work being

discussed, transnational writing is more celebratory, understanding place and the way that

change of place functions as a rewarding experience for both author and reader. Where Cho’s

argument becomes more complicated is in her use of the term diasporic writing, where she sees

the term as describing the problematic positioning inherent in the writer who attempts to

reconcile his/her location at the site of border spaces, belonging to neither home:

Diasporas function as a perpetual reminder of the losses that enable citizenship. Diasporic

citizenship is then not a new, shiny, improved version of citizenship that might be seen as

the underside of cosmopolitan citizenship. Nor can it address the failures of the nation-

state to safeguard against the violation of the right to be human. Nor is diasporic

citizenship a panacea for the contradiction inherent in the conception of modern

citizenship itself. (108)

In fact, Cho sees the terms diaspora and citizenship as being intrinsically irreconcilable. The paradox of hospitality once again rearing its head as the benevolence of citizenship functions to distinguish the foreigner from the citizen even as it insists upon the foreigners acquired citizenship.

So, where Bissoondath’s arguments regarding race require a collapsing of identities, so that he may construct a unified picture of intentions and opinions in “writers of colour,” Cho’s arguments against essentializing writers of broadly similar backgrounds constructs a more varied appreciation of difference, one that cannot misconstrue race where nationality or ethnicity is intended. While this does not eliminate the need for diasporic authors to straddle the border

between here and there, it, at least, calls attention to the need to examine this unique positioning, and,

In the context of celebrated immigrant and ethnic-minority writers, national habitus also

operates in relation to hospitality as “hyphenate” writers are “translated” into producers

of a national culture whose celebration encourages its consumption. Such writers

contribute, wittingly or not, to the Canadian public’s taste for Canadian culture while

they are promoted for their contribution to the host culture as Canadians. (Roberts 14)

As Roberts argues here, the diasporic writer occupies a curious double space, defined by the competing conventions of hospitality and capitalism as refracted through academic and state institutions. The immigrant writer is marketed simultaneously as a proudly “made-in-Canada” product and as an exotic import, with the hyphen serving as the index of the duality of the processes that make this marketing possible. In order to examine both how these processes work to contain authors and their works, and what strategies are open to the writer to subvert and complicate their own containment, I return now to the privileged, signifier of “Caribbean

Canadian,” and to some of its most canonized authors.

Authenticity and the Voice of the Immigrant Canadian Writer

In the chapter of Outsider Notes entitled “After Modernism: Alternative Voices in the

Writings of Dionne Brand, Claire Harris, and M. Nourbese Philip,” Lynette Hunter thinks about the relationship these three women writers have to the modernist tradition and the construction of an “authentic voice” (56). Using Brand, Harris, and Philip as examples of black women who are interested in language and audience and have similar patterns of migration, Hunter analyzes the ways that the modernist tradition can be reinvented to incorporate the internalization of the workings of race, gender, and class through a process of writing history in new ways, and

“balance the need clearly and immediately to tell and retell a history more appropriate to their memories than the one on offer from the culture in power, with the pressing demand to extend the processes of self-definition and authentic voice within current literary conventions” (56).

For Hunter, it is this imperative to present an “authentic voice” that moves these three women from a traditional modernism of alienation and introspection. Although Hunter is attentive to the different ways in which Harris, Brand, and Philip engage with the politics of race, gender and marginality in their work, this emphasis on authenticity as a defining movement of these three authors to some extent undermines this specificity, uniting them as writers whose common goal is to present “authentic” constructions of migrant experience to a normative audience, which measures their “authenticity” by forcing them – according to the rules of hospitality – to give account of their foreignness as a condition of entry. Hunter is one of the critics whom Clarke subjects to an excoriating critique in Odysseys Home, for making what he perceives as demands for authenticity and a particular mode of speaking of Black Caribbean Canadian subjectivity to a normative, white audience that is ignorant (and perhaps unthinkingly racist) but receptive:

“someone has to teach black history to unschooled (or oblivious) whites” (Clarke 258). Clarke numbers Hunter among a group of critics who, “in seeking to promote their own sermons against racism, sexism, imperialism, classism, and homophobia, […] either reduce the writers to writers to the status of sociologists or […] empty their work of aesthetic pursuits” (254).

For Clarke, such criticism is problematic because it situates Harris, Philip, and Brand’s literary worth in their capacity to serve as critical signifiers of a kind of interchangeable otherness, which not only impoverishes their individual aesthetic qualities but also elides their historical circumstance: since “all three began publishing after emigrating to Canada[,] […] their voices have always been Canadian – though their [critical] audiences have seldom cared to

consider this fact” (Clarke 254). Clarke makes a strong argument that a desire to find

“authenticity” and pre-defined political positions in the works of Harris, Philip and Brand does a

disservice to their particularities and to their Canadianness. Yet ethnically acquired

“authenticity” – or a lack of it – is one of the principal rhetorical bases for his dismissal of

Hunter and several other critics. If Clarke is right to suggest that “we do Harris, Philip, and

Brand a vacuous – but vicious – injustice […] by elevating this trio to triumvirate status without

bothering to ponder their actual politics” (266) it is disappointing that he makes this argument, in

part, by employing dismissive and often inaccurate ethnic labels to discredit the critics to whose

readings he objects. Hunter is introduced, prior to any discussion of her work, as “white British

academic Lynette Hunter” (254) (Hunter is a Canadian who has worked in the British and

American academies, who explicitly identifies herself as such, and theorizes her contributions to

Canadian literary criticism as “outsider notes” because of her subject position). Susan Rudy is

summarily dismissed as “Euro-Canadian” (264), and – perhaps most startlingly – Clarke’s

discussion of Victor Ramraj’s work on Claire Harris is prefaced with the label “South Asian-

Canadian academic” (265). While Clarke’s objection to the elevation of the Harris-Brand-Philip trio above other black Canadian writers who “lack the glittering penumbra of exoticism” initially appears to lie – like Huggan’s – in the subtle racism underlying constructions of authenticity and the exotic, he relies on a far more discriminatory and overtly racist framework of hospitality in deciding who has the right to speak about these authors.

Clarke’s exclusions tell us that it is not the politics of authenticity per se to which he objects; he simply wants to reappropriate Harris, Philip and Brand for a larger canon of African

Canadian literature, rather than as diasporic writers. In order to do so, he attempts to rewrite the conditions of entry to the critical discussion around these authors on explicitly racial grounds. It

is perhaps not surprising that white Canadian academics – whether or not they are misidentified as “foreigners” – fail to meet these entry requirements. But it is rather shocking that, through another act of racial (mis)labelling, Clarke wants to exclude Ramraj too. By using the ethnic label of “South Asian-Canadian” to distance Ramraj from Harris, Clarke implies that he

(Clarke), as a Canadian-born black Nova Scotian, has more in common with Harris, and therefore a more “authentic” perspective on her work, than Ramraj, a critic who, like Harris, was born in the Caribbean and subsequently immigrated not only to the same country but to the same city, of Calgary, Alberta. Clarke thus rejects a politics of authenticity based on a (perceived) shared history of birth country and migration – on which even the most reductive discussions of

Harris, Brand, and Philip rest – and replaces it with an even more essentialist measure of authenticity, based purely on skin colour.

Reading the Authentic: Situating the Caribbean

As Clarke’s discussion of Harris, Brand, and Philip (and their treatment by critics) shows, it is far easier to object to particular grounds for authenticity than it is to disavow the politics of authenticity altogether, particularly when they are implicitly laid out as entry requirements by a critical establishment that extends its hospitality on condition of otherness. Clearly, it is necessary to interrogate the seemingly benevolent but also violently reductive exclusionary hospitality that has allowed Brand, Philip and Harris to have been both elevated and contained as the epitome of diasporic writing in Canada, while excluding other figures like Lillian Allen. This requires us to pay close attention to the individual aesthetic characteristics of each writer’s work and to their relationship to histories both individual and shared. Doing so allows us to note the ways in which the writers themselves refute the politics of authenticity that have come to define them over time in critical circles. It is useful in this regard to begin with Hunter’s argument about

modernist forms, even while rejecting her desire for an “authentic” voice. In fact, I argue that

Harris and Brand, in particular, complicate the imposed conditions of hospitality and authenticity

through their reappropriation of modernist figures and forms to construct histories that are

dynamic, lived, and located.

Central to Hunter’s reading of these writers’ works is her assertion that, “[l]ike the reworking of modernist poetics typical of the work of many contemporary Canadian writers, each of these writers answers the alienation that results from modernism’s inappropriate history, with a particular poetics of her own” (60). She argues that, while these women are operating out of a modernist tradition, they accept and reappropriate that literary heritage in innovative ways, focusing on a lived history so that the restructuring of reality exists to locate it, rather than

relocate or dislocate it. The first poem found in the section “No Language is Neutral,” in Brand’s

book of poetry of the same title, foregrounds place, history, and selfhood in a narrative that is

located at Guayaguayare beach, in Trinidad. This book of poetry is Brand’s first publication

written in Trinidadian Creole/Nation Language (Halberstam 206), and its titular claim that

language is not neutral is reflected in the careful movement between the Englishes that Brand

uses.

Although Guayaguayare is located on the coast and is primarily a fishing village and hub

of various oil exploitation enterprises, which has led to the picturesque spot becoming polluted

over the years by off-shore oil rigs. In this poem, Brand uses the pet name, Guaya, to refer to this

beach, as it exists for her as a place of nostalgia, a site that evokes memories of companionship

as well as exploitation by various companies in the petroleum industry (mostly foreign-owned).

Brand asserts that “No language is neutral” (1), hinting at the layered quality to her reminiscing.

She recalls how “I used to haunt the beach at/Guaya, two rivers sentinel the country sand,

not/backra white but nigger brown sand, one river dead/and teeming from waste and alligators,

the other/tumbling to the ocean in a tumult” (1-5), the two rivers working to reflect the duality of the poem as it moves between now and then, here and there, idyllic and polluted, using language that both entices and repulses with its racially charged epithets. The sand is no longer white but brown, both signifying and erasing the impact of foreign powers in Trinidad. The “backra” both exist and do not exist at this site; the evidence of authority is left, but the place itself holds power for the people. The balanced aesthetic and political weight of her recollections is summed up by the par of lines “Here was beauty/and here was nowhere” (19), which capture the duality of the poem and the site, as it locates itself both historically and personally, so as to create a poem of lived experience for Brand.

The use of enjambment in the poem also create a sense of the lived experience, as the movement of the lines give a sense of continuity and motion, reminiscent of the waves on a beach, but also signalling an immediacy to the text. The poem demands itself read without pause, without stops, as a memory demands attention. Brand’s use of racially charged language to describe the beach is the only disruption in the text, a hint of her ambivalence, but reinforcing the immediacy of the text. The “backra” and “nigger” exist together, creations of each other; to coexist in Guayaguayare is both paradoxical and expected.

In Hunter’s discussion of Brand, Harris, and Philip as writers in the modernist tradition, she notes that complicating a simple, realist construction of history does not require rejecting its conventions entirely; rather, “the writer can also overwrite realism as if it were a palimpsest, can conflict with it, or connect glancingly with it” (60-61). This is a perceptive observation that can

be used to complicate Hunter’s notion of the “authentic voice,” and, if we are attentive, to

complicate Brand’s perceived relationship to her Canadian audience. In this poem, Brand

constructs an irresolvable dialectic between a modernist poetics of alienation and placelessness and a realist politics of locatedness and specificity. The realism of the poem insists on the hereness of home at Guayaguayare, but to “belong” here is to find oneself in constant negotiation with unbelonging and the inappropriate, which places the very notion of “home” in question.

Recalling Derrida’s insistence that hospitality, in the first instance, requires that the foreigner

“guarantee his identity” (Of Hospitality 27) allows us to appreciate the significance of this

Brand’s paradoxical modernist construction of home as it pertains to her critical positioning as diasporic author. In Derrida’s construction of hospitality, the “foreign other” is distinguished from the “absolute other” because the former’s adherence to the rules of hospitality is guaranteed by his or her belonging somewhere: the foreigner’s identity is “guaranteed” by the ability to locate his or her identity and origin through an identification of his or her lineage or home state.

Critical consensus “authenticates” Brand’s voice, as Clarke suggests, by eliding her

Canadianness and insisting that she is displaced from her “true” home of Trinidad; by

“unhoming” Trinidad Brand resists this process, insisting that authenticity is a myth: her putative

“home” is an unhomely, inappropriate place where there are only complicated histories, intertwined and complementarily ambivalent. The past and present are at war and at peace here;

“there was history” (Brand 13) at Guayaguayare beach, and it is this history that at once locates and dislocates Brand’s authorial voice from the place Canadian criticism has constructed as her home.

Like Brand, Claire Harris bases her constructions of lived history on a complex set of relationships between location and dislocation. In a mix of poetry and prose, Harris creates a sense of lived history through her depiction of motherhood in Drawing Down a Daughter.

Hunter sees this use of motherhood as a space of innovation, a site that is defamiliarized by

women such as Brand and Harris, so that “[w]hen a familiar common ground like mothers and daughters, which women might expect to remain stable or at least recognizable, is suddenly refracted through racial difference, the effect is often a radical impetus to extend discussion”

(58). The discussion that Harris extends is one of the lived reality of history and place, as she moves between poetry and prose, Canada and Trinidad, the past and present, as a woman talks to her unborn child while waiting for the baby’s father.

For Harris, as with Brand, it is language that locates all of the moments of dislocation.

Harris’s narrator addresses her unborn child with the cautionary apology/disclaimer that

Daughter there is no language

i can offer you no corner that is

yours unsullied

you inherit the intransitive

case Anglo-Saxon noun

she thinks of Africa. (24)

Here, the narrator articulates her position as a black Canadian woman of Caribbean origins. She exists in English, without being English, because of an historical moment of colonialism and slavery which has worked to construct her, as a person, and will work to construct the person her daughter becomes, as well. The fact that she has nothing to offer her daughter that is her own demonstrates an implicit relationship between her and the powers that define her. This duality is reinforced in the long spaces between words and the movement from “Anglo-Saxon” directly to

“Africa.” The daughter inherits the “intransitive case,” which is a grammatical marker that indicates the subject of an intransitive verb clause (and therefore implicitly denotes the absence

of an object). This inheritance signals the ambivalence the narrator feels for the history which makes up her selfhood: although she has no language to offer her daughter, the one that she inherited herself, through violence and oppression, has the potential for agency as well. The intransitive case creates a subjectivity for the mother and child, a possibility of being subjects with no objects, negating the commodification of historical processes, while reinforcing the reality of that history, powerfully invoked when the narrator asserts “[c]hild all i have to give/is

English which hates/fears your/black skin” (25). The lived reality of the mother and child is one that is complicated by this duality: being historically implicated and socialized by the system that has oppressed them and continues to do so. It is important to note that, while the narrator of

Drawing Down a Daughter sometimes finds living in Canada an alienating experience, her

“home” of Trinidad provides no solutions to the linguistic alienation with which she struggles as she anticipates the arrival of her daughter. As in Brand’s work, Trinidad is a site of historical rupture, a psychological space where the inappropriateness of English as a mother tongue is intensified rather than eased. Harris certainly articulates the sense of displacement prized by

Canadian critics in their “authentication” of diasporic literature; however, the linguistic focus she places on this displacement does not situate her “at home” in Trinidad either; her inheritance of the English language and its histories of slavery, transportation, and exile “unhomes” her just as thoroughly in Trinidad as in Canada.

The Lived Experience: Deauthorizing the Nation-State

If we were to follow the standard pattern of literary discussions of Caribbean Canadian diaspora, we would now move seamlessly from our discussion of Brand and Harris to an analysis of the third figure in this triumvirate, M. NourbeSe Philip. In a deliberate attempt to disrupt the

“naturalness” of this grouping, I choose instead to focus on a figure that is sometimes included,

sometimes excluded, by the critical discourses that have elevated the Harris-Brand-Philip trio to the status of “ideal” diasporic writers. By way of Allen, I will subsequently work back to Philip, suggesting that, while all four authors present challenges to the reductionist categories through which the Canadian critical establishment offers its hospitality, these challenges are posed in significantly different ways. If Brand and Harris focus on dismantling myths of origin associated with their authorial voices, Philip and Allen more radically interrogate critical categorization through performative challenges to the very concept of authorship.

Performance is central to Allen’s work: in the introduction to her collection of dub poems

Women do this Everyday, she explains the relationship between dub poetry and reggae music, as the former follows on the performative heels of the latter, moving music about politics, history, and rebellion into the realm of poetry, as “[w]ithout reggae, dub poetry could never have existed” (12). Allen sees dub poetry18 as connective, a lived experience between the performer

and his/her audience, a moment for the marginalized: “Dub poetry validates the lives and

aspirations of those ignored and excluded from the dominant culture” (20). This use of poetry, as

a form both oral and written, performative and reactive, becomes a site of innovation for Allen as

a black Canadian woman with roots in Jamaica.

In her poem “21 Footnotes,” Allen challenges the dichotomy between official knowledge

and lived knowledge by asking “If I take away your twenty-one footnotes/Can your ideas lean/pon dis ya dis ya hungry belly” (1-3). Footnotes exist in text as a mark of author/ity: they are a trace of the ownership that scholars, critics, and fictional authors take over lived experience

18 I will come back to dub poetry in Chapter Five where I spend more time on the tradition of dub, performance, and the inheritance of politics inherent in this tradition. 84

when they render it as text; they represent institutions that exercise authority and prescribe strict rules for formalized practice; they exist as part of a system that values the written over the oral, and Allen challenges that construction by demanding to know the function of that prioritization.

There is no stability in authority without the processes on which it relies; footnotes are afterthoughts, supporting evidence that exists outside the text and therefore undermines it. The footnotes cannot support the “hungry belly,” as they are too incompetent to provide for the lived experience of the woman. This is reinforced when Allen asks, “will it anchor the struggling soul/be a foothold to empower” (4-5), signalling the disempowering effect that systematized knowledge has on the marginalized, those who have cannot bridge the gap between the knowledge of the person and the official knowledge of the academy.

In her essay “Calling the Conscience: The Interplay of Situation, Sight, and Sound in

Lillian Allen’s Poetry,” Mildred Mickle sees Allen’s work as a “visual and oral call to conscience [that] stresses a continuing discursive praxis of simultaneous awareness and expression of self and diaspora” (254). It is Allen’s positioning between the written and the oral, the authorized and the lived, the “self and diaspora” which all work to innovate a form that builds on another rebellious form, making poetry that channels a dialogue between authority and lived experience.

This innovation works to disrupt the relationship between the authority that the Canadian literary tradition represents, and, instead, moves language and women’s literature into a new space of deauthorization. For Canadian women writers, history is lived rather than transcribed; it is dynamic, always affecting the lives of the women of the present. There are lost voices in history, the voices of the many and the disempowered, and these are the voices that must be lived each day.

Unhoming Hospitality: Unmanageability in Contained Spaces

M. NourbeSe Philip has engaged in both her creative and critical work with the

limitations imposed on poetry and its audience by the interlinked institutions of authorship and

criticism. In A Genealogy of Resistance, she thinks about the relationship between market,

audience, and community through an idea of performance:

One can have an audience and not have a market, but if one has a market one does

not necessarily need an audience. The audience which appears to have self-selected itself

for my work is one that is primarily feminist and womanist, comprised of white and

Black women from within and without the academy. I would very much like to reach a

broader cross-section of people, particularly Caribbean and Afrosporic people. That will

only happen, however, if and when my work moves into performance. Performance, I

believe, is very much a part of the African Caribbean aesthetic and while I do not “do”

performance poetry, performance, albeit unrealized, is very much a part of a work. [My]

poems […] have always suggested a sense of potentiality waiting to happen. In

performance. […] But what all of this means is that while there is an audience, there is

very little market for what I do to and with poetry[.] (130-31)

So, Philip sets up two types of artist-audience relationship in opposition to each other. The author is able to find an audience (if not a market) in the academy, but it is the performer who is able to connect with a community. Like Allen, Philip looks to move from authorship to performance in order to escape from, or at least complicate, appropriation and categorization by the literary marketplace under the dictates of hospitality.

Philip’s recent long poem Zong! performs a refusal to take on the role of “author,” to resist the kind of author/ity represented by Allen’s scholarly footnotes, and to focus on the

impossibility of recovering the lived experiences of those silenced by the authority of colonial

language. Zong! operates between two texts: one a document of a past atrocity, the other in the

process of being written. Zong! is an imagination of life onboard the slave ship Zong, where the

infamous Zong Massacre – the throwing overboard of slaves under the belief that insurers would

underwrite the loss of “cargo” – occurred in 1781.19 The resulting case, Gregson v. Gilbert, is the

text from which Philip draws her inspiration, and the first section of Zong! (almost solely) uses

the words of the appeal case to craft her poem.

Philip’s rewriting of Gregson v. Gilbert attempts to give voice to the voiceless. She has

tried to reconstruct this text so that the nameless slaves, who died as cargo, can articulate, not

just their pain, but also their selves and their journey. From this no-land of water and ship, these

people are given voice to speak in a new time and place:

19 The Zong was a slave ship, whose captain had not equipped with enough food and water for the duration of the voyage. When crew began to die, the captain decided to throw over one hundred and thirty of the slaves overboard, so that he could recoup his losses later from his insurers (as the throwing of cargo overboard in times of emergency was a perfectly legal action). In the first instance, the courts ruled in favour of the ship’s owners. However, the case was appealed with support from the first mate that the slaves were thrown overboard before the ship was in any desperation. 87

. (7)

Typographical layout of Zong! #4 by M. NourbeSe Philip “Zong! #4” is an articulating of presence and absence. Here, the verb “to be” operates in the infinitive, the present, and the past (and particularly in the singular in the case of the last two).

Philip, although writing about an event over two hundred years in the past, insists that “this is”

(1) and “not was” (2). She puts “not” between these conjugations of “to be” in order to voice an argument against this violent action, but ends with another “is” (12), which stands alone. The slaves were murdered, but they existed. The being of these people cannot be denied. Philip combines an echo the plea of the slaves, “should/not/be” (9-11) in response to the violence against them, with the repetition of “should be” (4). Outside of the source text, Philips adds names to the bottom of the page, in order to again assert the presence of the voiceless victims.

This, along with the repetition of the verb “to be” in the past, present, and in its bare infinitive, helps to create a sense of identity out of nothingness. Philip moves this narrative between time and place and into a duality of self that relies on its own inarticulation. The cry for home is a cry for identity, but history has left us only with the journey and the language of law.

As Zong! concludes, Philip takes us to a more metaphysical articulation of the voices of the slaves. The slaves have been thrown overboard and the spirits are watching. The last section of Zong!, titled “Ebora20,” is a confusion of voices and desires, an in-between space between life and death:

. (176)

Typographical layout of “Ebora”, from Zong! by M. NourbeSe Philip The text becomes faint as it simultaneously moves further away from its source (Gregson v.

Gilbert) and the voices of the text die. Languages start to merge and words begin writing over each other. If this is a text of imagining, then Philip’s own divination is with her when the text reads “ifa21 ifa ifa iwith she” and then she begins to lose grasp as the history moves where she

20 Which means “underwater spirits” in Yoruba, according to Philip’s glossary. 21 “Divination” in Yoruba. 89

cannot follow: “fa fa fa” is the stilted remnants of that stretch across time and space. The history cannot be forgotten, the words still reach though they grow fainter. The cry “video/video/video” suggests that someone still watches. In reconstructing the story of Zong, Philip never attempts to assume the voice of the silenced slaves, but instead rewrites the original document in a manner which strives to demonstrate the impossibility of this task. She says that “in [her] fragmenting the text and re-writing it through Zong!, or rather over it, thereby essentially erasing it, the original text becomes a fugal palimpsest through which Zong! is allowed to heal the original text of its fugal amnesia” (204). In referencing two types of “fugue” – the contrapuntal musical form and the experience of memory loss – Philip underlines the importance of a text whose power derives from its inability to be reduced to a single authorial voice, but rather in its representation of a historical paradox: the many voices of the drowning slaves are simultaneously voiceless, their selfhood lost to a history that refused to recognize them as legal subjects. To a literary establishment that desires to regulate contain her voice according to rules of hospitality that define her as Derrida’s “foreign other,” Philip offers the riposte of a history in which her own ancestors were denied both subjectivity (for the foreigner must be a legal subject) and voice. It is only by reading Zong! through Philip’s own description of her work as “unrealized” performance that we can fully understand its power: it is in the text’s infinite deferral of voice, its determination to remain unrealized, and its refusal to assume author/ity, that it speaks to the communities shaped by its loss, without speaking for those communities to an audience that would appropriate and assimilate their historical trauma in the name of multicultural nationhood.

Concluding this chapter with Philip’s radical de-authorization of text demonstrates both the possibility of resistance to multiculturalism’s demands that Caribbean Canadian authors perform their authenticity, speaking on behalf of the cultures they are supposed to represent, and

the difficulty of sustaining such resistance in the face of the totalizing tendencies of such demands. It is, Zong! suggests, by simultaneously focusing on the pain, loss, and specificity of

Caribbean history and refusing to speak for the voices irretrievably lost to it, that a Caribbean

Canadian author might successfully prevent that history from being appropriated into a narrative of multicultural benevolence. Yet, this is accomplished only by a radical textual strategy that places reading and voice itself into crisis, and – recalling Barthes’ terms – defiantly refuses to allow any conventional pleasure in reading. The necessity of such a strategy is itself an indication of the dominance of the discourse of multiculturalism and its success in inhabiting and appropriating textual aesthetics and authorship for its own purposes. Where we conclude this chapter thinking about the performance of authenticity inherent in multiculturalism as it appropriates text, the next chapter thinks about the power of multiculturalism to contain and manage black bodies through the relationship of text and image.

PHOTOGRAPHING CARIBANA: MANAGING MULTICULTURALISM THROUGH

THE TOURISTIC GAZE

The island was a haven for girl-watchers yesterday. Nancy Campbell, a Torontonian formerly of Jamaica, was attending Caribana.

The Globe and Mail, 1967

This quote from The Globe and Mail depicts Toronto’s Caribana festival via a scene that is metonymic of the festival’s function in the Canadian imagination: as an outwardly positive symbol of multiculturalism that – in a manner typical of sanctioned multicultural displays – serves to contain, manage, and homogenize diversity, rendering it pleasurably tantalizing and exotic but ultimately safe for the dominant culture. It is printed alongside a photograph that, as I argue in this article, forms part of a visual vocabulary that reinforces this process of containment by establishing a way of viewing Caribana that is at once proprietorial and distancing. In what follows I trace a narrative through a series of photographic snapshots of Caribana in order to develop a theory of gaze that I call “tourism at home”: a transposition of a set of exoticizing, othering ways of looking more commonly associated with tourism to a temporarily transformed home space. I explore the ways in which this gaze has worked in tandem with Caribana’s homogenizing association of Caribbean culture with “black” culture – even as the festival’s progenitors in the Caribbean have begun to contest this association – both to celebrate the spectacle of racial and cultural otherness and to defend against the imagined threats this otherness poses. The touristic gaze at home, I argue, performs a dualistic, distancing function that contains a variety of constructions of the transformed home space – from wholly pleasurable

(a “haven” that exists solely for the pleasure of voyeurs) to threatening (a space of chaos,

lawlessness, and violence) – and that is intertwined with the economics of consumption of

Caribana and of Canadian multicultural spectacle more broadly.

The notion of tourism at home underpins each of the images I analyze in this article. In

line with Christopher Pinney’s assertion that “photography’s mimetic doubling becomes a prism

through which to consider questions of cultural and self-identity, historical consciousness, and the nature of photographic affirmation and revelation” (3), I focus on the mimetic representation of the event through photographs, rather than the event itself. I do so in order to offer an illustration of the ways in the touristic gaze contributes to multiculturalism’s management of marginalized identities within a larger national framework, making the non-white other by definition, but contained through the spectacle 22of black bodies, as “the markings and iterations

of blackness are manifested through a deliberate performance of visibility that begs us to

consider the constructed nature of visibility” (Fleetword 20). Using a methodology based on

theories of visual culture and text-image relationships, I examine the construction of these black

bodies in mainstream Canadian media: the sexualisation of women operating in the background

and the implied violence of men operating in the foreground. These images become sites of their

own deconstruction, as “the singularity of the image, the complexity of black lived experience

22 The festival is spectacle because it is other. This spectacularization is evident in Carnivals across the globe, acting as moments of subversion for marginalized groups and acts of containment by those in power. Because of this race and Carnival are interwoven, as “Carnival is thus both a real event and a putative social aesthetic distilled by theory and applicable to societies with or without carnival, and figures both as a conduit for subversion and as a lubricant for hierarchical control” (Armstrong 448). Carnival is about empowering those without power: “carnival is perceived as including those who are socially excluded the rest of the year” (Sztainbok 596). Carnival is also about sexuality, as “there is a history of black women engaging with their sexuali-zation through performance. Studies of both carnival and overtly sexual black women performers have been concerned with whether these cultural practices reify or contest the hierarchical order” (Sztainbok 596). It is the construction of this empowerment and sexualisation that make Carnival ambiguous, not easily comprehendible because it is, in fact, other (even to the other because it is the event that turns everything on its head). In this chapter, I am looking at how that otherness is transposed to photograph and how the inherently white, Canadian audience reshapes those moments of empowerment and sexuality. 93

and discourses of race are effaced. The image functions as abstraction, as decontextualized evidence of a historical narrative that is constrained by normative public discourse” (Fleetwood

10) and the women of Caribana operate solely, within the construction of the photographs, for the visual pleasure of others. Tourism at home relies on the objectification of non-white bodies through spectacle in order to allow the passive speculation of white subjects, which, in turn, enables the demarcation between us and them, black and white, that which needs containing and those who observe the contained.

The formulation that I call “tourism at home” plays on the deeply ambiguous significations the space of Toronto, and the black bodies that inhabit and traverse it during the festival, acquire during the city’s temporary transformation into a quasi-Caribbean location.

These black bodies, I argue, simultaneously signify the “hereness” of multicultural Canada and of North America and the “thereness” of the Caribbean islands, overlaying two distinct but intersecting traditions of representing blackness that have historically been mediated by a white gaze. The first of these traditions is identifiably North American and has drawn renewed attention in the #blacklivesmatter era. It is a mode of imagining blackness that links Toronto to the American cities to the south where racial tensions frequently operate more overtly – and without the counter-narratives of diversity and state-sanctioned multiculturalism to offset them – than in Canada. This is the long history of “how white gazes have attempted to define Black bodies as problem bodies, dangerous and unwanted bodies, desired and hyper-sexualized bodies, strange bodies, curious bodies, always already touchable bodies, violable bodies, freakish bodies, nigger bodies, and dark and mysterious bodies” (Yancy xiv). As I argue throughout this chapter, the deeply dualistic yet mutually reinforcing construction of black bodies as violent, dangerous, and simultaneously desirable, hyper-sexualized, and troublingly “always already touchable” is

the foundation of the continuum on which media responses to Caribana – from the lascivious and objectifying to the fearful and paranoid – are to be found.

The second tradition – which, fittingly, given the preoccupation of this chapter, is deeply intertwined with both photography and spatial transformation – is specific to the Caribbean, and especially to the long-established tourism industry in the area. In her book An Eye for the

Tropics: Tourism, Photography, and Framing the Caribbean Picturesque, Krista A. Thompson analyzes a process called “tropicalization” – a process that is heavily influenced by visual representation but is not confined to signification alone. For Thompson tropicalization is a process in which landscape architecture and visual media (especially photography) work symbiotically to transform the material reality of a space according to an ideal shaped by an external, touristic gaze. In this process, space is remade in the image of itself: a photographic image, “itself likely based on past representations” forms the basis of a spatial transformation undertaken “in order to elicit the interest of tourists, who would then, in turn, render [it] into yet another photographic image” (3). Tropicalization, Thompson argues, inverted the presumed mimetic order of photography: rather than photographs providing an approximation of the

Caribbean’s living spaces, these spaces have instead been promoted as a promise of three- dimensional still-lives, by tourism promoters who “marketed [the Caribbean’s] landscapes and inhabitants as picturesque, more specifically, as ‘like photographs’” (Thompson 8).

During Caribana, Toronto undergoes a similar process of (albeit temporary)

“tropicalization” via the same kind of mutually reinforcing chain of significations: the desire for the “picturesque” informs the spatial transformation of the city, which shapes the photographic constructions of the event that in turn reshape the subsequent transformations of Toronto into quasi-Caribbean space. Yet the dual heritage of conceptions of blackness in and around the

festival mean that, for Toronto, it is not only paradisiacal images that shape the city space and its subsequent photographic rendering (though they certainly play a part), but also the darker intertwining of violence and sexuality at the heart of contemporary North American constructions of blackness from without. I do suggest, however, that the continuing influence of the association between the Caribbean and “picturesque” touristic images makes this a formal as well as a discursive fissure: while there is clearly slippage between the poles of sex and violence around which the exoticizing gaze of “tourism at home” operates, it is sexuality and (often voyeuristic) pleasure that dominate visual representations of Caribana, while violence tends to play a more dominant role in narrative constructions.

Image accompanying The Globe and Mail’s headline about Caribana, August 7th, 1967 The Globe and Mail’s headline, on page 19 of the August 7th, 1967 edition, reads

“Caribana 67: Sun, sand, steel bands.” It is Canada’s centenary and the Centennial Commission has challenged the country’s immigrants to make a pledge for nationalism by celebrating their

transnational identities. Toronto’s Trinidadian community responds to this call by recreating its famous Carnival in a new island space, that of Toronto Island. Taking place at the end of July, rather than in the traditional February, this cultural celebration manages to mimic not only place, but also climate; underneath The Globe and Mail’s headline is a picture of sunbathing bodies on the Toronto islands, demonstrating both the heat of the day and the languor of the visitors. As evidenced by The Globe and Mail’s first article covering the annual parade, from the moment of the festival’s inception the “tropicalizing”, touristic gaze of Torontonian and national media prioritizes the construction of the exotic space of the Caribbean over the cultural contribution of this West Indian community; “sun” and “sand” come first, with “steel bands” bringing up the rear of this tripartite description.

Image of Nancy Campbell accompanying The Globe and Mail’s report on Caribana, August 7th, 1967 97

To the left of the island’s sunbathers is the picture of smiling Nancy Campbell, a black

woman attending the first ever Caribana: Toronto’s annual Caribbean parade.23 Campbell is

described as “a Torontonian formerly of Jamaica” (The Globe and Mail, 7 August 1967, B2),

highlighting her transnational identity as an immigrant to Canada naming her Canadian

citizenship first and her country of origin second, and thus metonymically representing, within

this brief description, the principles of the parade itself, as a national celebration that relies on

extra-national allegiances. However, this construction of Campbell as a transnational citizen

comes only second to her objectification, as only one of the beautiful women on display at the

first Caribana parade. The Globe and Mail does not even refer to Campbell specifically when it

writes that “[t]he island was a haven for girl-watchers” (1967: B2), instead obfuscating

Campbell’s identity and lumping her together with the rest of the women subject to the touristic

gaze of the watching public. Campbell’s accompanying picture shows her smiling face and her

upper torso, including her breasts but nothing further. Campbell’s low-cut light-coloured shirt

contrasts brilliantly with her dark skin in the black and white photograph. Campbell exists as an

object of retrieval, a moment captured by the camera that reminds us 24(as audience or readers of

the image) of the exotic and sexualized spectacle of Caribana. By constructing the space itself as

23 In recent years, the festival has been rebranded as the Scotiabank Toronto Caribbean Carnival. For the purposes of this chapter, however, I will continue to refer to the festival as “Caribana.” This is the name used throughout most of the festival’s existence and is still in colloquial use for those discussing it. 24 Who is us? By us, I am referring both to the non-racialized (white), non-gendered (male) audience that is implied by the modes of representation I discuss in this chapter, and to the range of possible subject positions that are encouraged to view themselves as non-racialized and non-gendered and become complicit in the voyeurism inherent to these modes. Here, I am thinking of the interpellation between colonizer and colonized; identities are discursive, never only working one-way. As Pratibha Parmar says, “[h]istorically, photographic images of black people all over the world have been captured by intrepid white photographers looking for the ‘exotic’, the ‘different’, the ‘anthropological native types’ for ‘local colour’” (115) and thus the “deeply ideological nature of imagery determines not only how other people think about us but how we think about ourselves” (116). The shaping of the other is also the shaping of ourselves, whereby we exist in tension with the other. 98

subject with no object to act upon (“[t]he island was a haven”), this brief description of

Caribana’s attraction to the average Canadian allows for a non-invasive and non-threatening

collapse of women with scenery so that Nancy Campbell becomes more (or much less) than a

transnational citizen; she becomes merged with the space around her, space that has already been

constructed to merge Canadian nationalism with Caribbean exoticism. The preposition “for” in

this sentence denotes the intended audience of the parade as the “girl-watchers” rather than the

girls themselves, who can only act as vehicles for observation of the exotic and spectacular.

Caribana exists as a safe space, a “haven,” for these voyeurs, but not for the women who are

being watched.

Colonial Residuals: Caribana as a Black Event

In this chapter, I follow the prevailing critical trend of viewing Caribana as an event that

is constructed overwhelmingly as “black” – participating in “a Pan-African discourse that

achieved what Caribana founder Charles Roach described […] as an agenda of ‘ethno-centric

economics’” (Phillip 116-7) – and thereby problematically perpetuating a stereotype of the

Caribbean as racially homogenous.25 This is in contrast to the demographic realities of countries

such as Trinidad and Guyana – where one sees the progenitors to Caribana in the local annual

carnivals – which contain large groups of Indo-Caribbeans (originating from India and migrating to the Caribbean as indentured labourers for the British) and Afro-Caribbeans (largely arriving in

the Caribbean as slaves under English colonial rule), among other ethnic groups (such as

25 This is similar to the effect described in the previous chapter where George Elliot Clarke sees the Caribbean as a specialized space acting metonymically to signifying blackness in Canada even as he misinterprets what it is to be Caribbean in Canada. 99

Chinese-Caribbean, white-British Caribbean, Indigenous Caribbean, etc.) that make up the

population of the Caribbean.

In his article “Diaspora and its Discontents: A Caribbean Fragment in Toronto in Quest

of Cultural Recognition and Political Empowerment,” Ralph Premdas examines the represented

Trans-Caribbean identity as it exists in the Canadian imagination. Looking at the period of time

where Caribbean migration to Canada became more common and the Caribbean population of

Toronto, especially, began to build itself an identity, Premdas says that “[i]n Guyana and

Trinidad, Indians were caught up in open rivalry with their African-descended compatriots for

power and control of the state” (549) after the political empowerment of the Afro-Caribbean communities at the expense of their Indo-Caribbean neighbours. However, the move to Canada did not provide the autonomy that the Indo-Caribbean population desired and, in fact, relegated this group to the fringe of marginalization, existing as either a subordinate construction to the black Caribbean or South Asian communities. Hence, “[m]any Indo-Caribbean peoples have chaffed against having their own identity over-shadowed and denied by the Afrocentric images of the Caribbean that had gained popular ground in Toronto and by their South Asian-East Indian categorization” (Premdas 555). In 1987, the OSSICC (Ontario Society for Studies in Indo-

Caribbean Culture) was registered, but “[p]rior to this, Indo-Caribbean persons found themselves in a twilight zone of being neither a meaningful part of a wider Caribbean community to which they were publicly assigned nor a part of the South-Asian [sic] community to which they were phenotypically associated” (Premdas 552). Events like Caribana that are often misconstrued as strictly “black,” contribute to an underestimation in Canada of ethnic diversity in the Caribbean more generally. This construction of the Caribbean (and Caribana) in Canada as ethnically homogenous relies on the relationships established in the home countries, where the Afro- and

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Indo-Caribbean residents have found themselves in contestation for a national identity, after the

confusion and intimidation of colonial rule.

So, the cultural diversity and multicultural ideals heralded by Caribana’s supporters

comes at the expense of non-black Caribbean groups, investing Caribana with a “black” identity

despite obvious contradictions to this representation of the Caribbean. Again, working

metonymically to demonstrate the nation’s own limited view on diversity and multiculturalism,

which works best when that diversity is simplified and thus contained26; Caribana presents an image of the Caribbean that is racially digestible by the average Canadian. Looking at this dynamic, David Trotman says that “this Afro-focused definition of nationalism is now being strenuously challenged and the Trinidad Carnival, the accepted progenitor of Caribana, is one of the major sites of contestation,” and that “immigrants to Canada traveled with this problematic and contested sense of identity and injected it into the debates over Caribana” (183) in his article

“Transforming Caribbean and Canadian Identity: Contesting Claims for Toronto’s Caribana.”

This article looks at Caribana as a site of cultural confusion, where Caribbean Canadians must reorient their ethnic identities against the conceptualization of a multicultural national identity.

Trotman goes on to say that “there has been no end to the number of those who use Caribana to make claims for a Caribbean community, a Black community, or even sometimes and Afro-

Canadian community and the identities that are constructed and performed for those imagined communities” (178), showing that the internal politics of Caribana, reflective of those of the home countries, help to shape the construction of the Caribbean Canadian identity, both within

26 I borrow from critics, such as Bakht, when he says “[p]rocesses of social exclusion coupled with the growth in the size of the racialized population reinforce the structural tendencies in a new-liberal economy towards maintaining and reproducing the existing order” and that “[w]hile multiculturalism encourages cultural diversity, it correspondingly seeks to contain it” (176). 101

the group and for the larger nation. Caribana, in the end, exists as a window from which to view the inner workings of the Caribbean community in Toronto (and Canada), which means that the representations of this event are potentially more relevant than the event itself. Because of this, I will be examining Caribana as a “black event,” despite the obvious racial diversity of the

Caribbean population in Toronto.

Photographic Disempowerment and the Power of the Voyeur

Screengrabs of the first page of image search results for the Twitter hashtags #caribana2016 and #caribana2017

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Images grouped under the Instagram tag caribana2018

Photographs of Caribana contribute significantly to the way that this celebration is perceived in Toronto’s cultural imagination. Any Google image search will currently show photographs of colourful costumes, black bodies, and highly sexualized women. A quick Twitter search of #Caribana2016 and #Caribana2017 and an Instagram search for Caribana2018 will do the same. Above, I show the first photo page of each search with the results overwhelmingly being hypersexualized images of women that reflect the popular constructions of Caribana as a hypersexualized event, though I see a difference in how women construct their own sexuality and how a photographer constructs that sexuality for the audience. This “hypervisibility,” meaning the ways that the black body can be simultaneously visible and rendered invisible through that exposure, “has particular resonance in contemporary popular culture and mass entertainment where the black body as commodity fetish has a heightened salience” (Fleetwood

111). This act of using the black body as commodity fetish “masks power relations and historical

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contexts that produce systems of inequality and the consumption of difference” (Fleetwood 111).

I argue here that this exoticization and sexualization of black women is a construction of

Caribana that has existed since its inception and that this is in direct opposition to the more

textually oriented positioning of Caribana as a space of violence. Between these two poles (that

of sex and that of violence), Caribana is managed by its viewing audience, and this management

operates from the safe distance of either printed word or photographic lens. The articles I analyze

come from a variety of sources: The Globe and Mail, as an example of national coverage, and

Toronto magazines, as examples of local coverage. My reading of the festival will span from

1967 to the present day in order to demonstrate the ways in which this homage to Canadian

cross-national identities works to further exclude a population that is both divided internally and marginalized by the larger majority. In either constructing the parade as sexualized or violent, both acts require a demarcation between us and them, which relies on Caribana being a black

event, holding to larger national realities of multiculturalism whereby minorities are othered in

order to be managed, and thus, in turn, treated as commodities of the state.

In reading these photographs, I look to Susan Sontag’s On Photography, where she

argues that modern-day photography is intrinsically linked to acts of voyeurism and that the

analysis of photography requires a strict understanding of the assumptions of photography and

photography’s underlying code, which entails looking at the object of the picture as well as

seeing ourselves engage with that object. Sontag writes that “[i]n teaching us a new visual code,

photographs alter and enlarge our notions of what is worth looking at and what we have a right to

observe. They are a grammar and, even more importantly, an ethics of seeing” (3), creating an

understanding of photography that not only relies on this code, but also emphasizing the value of

ethics within the process. Where photography encourages the uncritical gaze, always seeing

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outward, Sontag argues for the productive tension of consciously interpreting the relationship between the desire for voyeurism and the object of the photograph. It then becomes important to interrogate what that desire says about the person(s) constructing the picture, the “us” who is acting as the audience to that picture, and the aesthetics of the picture itself.

Photographs have an alluring presence, validating the desire to watch someone/something else while remaining unobserved, and thus offering the viewer/voyeur unlimited control over the object(s) of the photograph; “[t]o photograph is to appropriate the thing photographed. It means putting oneself into a certain relation to the world that feels like knowledge – and, therefore, like power” (Sontag 4). When positioning this empowerment within the context of race relations, the allure of the objectified subject of the photograph becomes doubly problematic, as the racialized

Other now becomes the disempowered object who acts only as referent for the gaze of the normalized majority. Sontag draws attention to the parallels between voyeurism in the space of the familiar and the gazing outwards at the different and foreign through acts of nostalgia when she asserts that “[a]s photographs give people an imaginary possession of a past that is unreal, they also help people to take possession of space in which they are insecure. Thus, photography develops in tandem with one of the most characteristic of modern activities: tourism” (Sontag 9).

This collapse of voyeurism and tourism, both occupying the same rhetorical space within photography, is paramount in understanding the way that I am reading images of Caribana. This is a festival that takes place in Canada, but, through the manipulation of language and nationality, is metaphorically situated in the Caribbean, allowing for the voyeuristic gaze to collude with the touristic gaze, which, in turn, dispossesses the Caribbean subject of their transnational identity and, instead, relegates this persona to the impotent realm of the photographic object.

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This act of disempowerment through appropriation of cultural identity is metonymic of

the nation’s treatment of black Canadians as objects that exist somewhere between that which is

seen and that which is unseen. As Rinaldo Walcott says in his chapter “’A Tough Geography’:

Towards a Poetics of Black Space(s) in Canada,” when discussing the Canadian tradition of

rewriting uncomfortable racial moments of the past by erasing the presence of the black victims

within those events or moments, the “Canadian state institutions and official narratives attempt to

render blackness outside of those same narratives, and simultaneously attempt to contain

blackness through discourses of Canadian benevolence. Thus, blackness in Canada is situated on

a continuum that runs from invisible to the hyper-visible” (278). Like the disposal of Africville

in 1967 and the changing of “Negro Creek Road,” which are reflective of historical

demographics and attitudes, to “Moggie Road” in honour of white settler George Moggie in

Holland Township, Ontario in 1995, Canadian nostalgia relies on focusing on a national ideal

that elides the presence of black Canadians from history, a process of nostalgia so pervasive it

can lead a group of people to invalidate themselves as national subjects:

The impossibility of imagining blackness as Canadian is continually evident even as

nation-state policies like multiculturalism seek to signal otherwise. The simultaneity of

being here and not being here is, in effect, an in-between position. The prospect of in-

between-ness is, however, not only produced by the state: it’s also something black folks

have chosen through their multiple diasporic and outer-national political identifications.

(Walcott 281)

The voyeuristic, touristic gaze that I explore in the following sections illuminates both Sontag’s conception of photography as an appropriative process and Walcott’s assertions about the difficulty of imagining blackness in Canada. It is at once distancing and proprietorial,

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simultaneously insisting on the otherness of black space and spectacle and appropriating an exotic, recreational vision of blackness for the narrative of multicultural Canadian nationhood.

Transforming Toronto into a Tourist Haven

During the two weeks of Caribana, which culminate in a parade that is the most well- known aspect of the festival, Toronto becomes transformed. This spectacle of Caribbean

Canadian interaction allows for a reinterpretation of Canadian space, so that the immigrant’s desire for home and the Canadian-born’s desire for the exotic meet in a transformed Toronto;

Toronto becomes a space performing its own variation on Caribbean-ness. In her article,

“Masquerading Toronto Through Caribana: Transnational Carnival Meets the Sign ‘Music Ends

Here,’” Jenny Burman analyzes this transformation of space through the lens of what she calls

“cultural remittance,” which is a call to someplace else as well as a pushing towards an ideologically constructed interpretation of the here and now. Burman describes the ways in which “[c]ultural remittances play out in, and transform, diasporic locales (as Caribana does

Toronto), and argues that they are often addressed to both the elsewhere and the mainstream context. Remittance calls on a tension between nostalgia and yearning” (277). Here, Burman uses the term remittance to identify that push/pull of locating the exotic of home at home. The cultural remittance of Caribana is that its claim to authenticity only reinforces its inability to meet the desires of nostalgia, in that the festival itself exists as a representation of the Canadian desire for the exotic at home. The transformation of Toronto into a Caribbean space is itself only a reinforcement of the ideals that the city (and the country) holds for itself:

Caribana’s determination to take over the streets and the city (as Manning himself put it,

to Caribbeanize the urban landscape) is yearnful, bespeaking a desire to occupy and

change Toronto. However, the shape that ephemeral transformation takes and the sharp

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distinction drawn by many participants between Caribana time and Toronto time, props

up Toronto as monolithic and Anglocentric; thus, veering back into nostalgia. (Burman

278)

The city fails at its attempts at transformation due to the nostalgic confusion between the ideal and real, but that does not mean that the desire for exoticization is frustrated. The voyeuristic gaze still exists, so that although the lived space falls short of its ideals, the framed space captured by the camera always allows for the distance needed to construct the Caribana space as something else and contain it. Therefore, although Burman might argue that “[t]he issue of mode of address follows from the claim that such diasporic cultural events are guided by an ethic of opacity rather than transparency, and that masquerade challenges the conventional dynamic between spectacle and spectator” (278), I would suggest that this reliance on the physical and metaphysical mask to challenge this voyeuristic gaze is naïve and underestimates the reality of the spectacle; this is a reformation of Torontonian space that is constructed not by the performance of the festival itself but by the recirculation of images of the festival. Through framed productions of Caribana, not only does the spectator gain all power in the relationship, but the photographer becomes author of that dynamic between those being looked at and those performing the looking.

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The Economy of Caribana’s Sexualization

Photograph of anonymous Caribana participant by Aaron Harris, The Star, May 25, 2011 A smiling black woman stands in the center of the frame. She has her knees bent and thrust sideways, her arms are bent at the elbows and she appears to be mid-movement (dancing).

The woman is dressed all in red, with reddish-orange fringe falling between her legs and a red top that exposes her back and chest, inlaid with the gold that decorates her breasts. The parade itself is mostly framed between the woman’s legs, where another woman’s legs and spectators of the parade can be seen.

This image, photographed by Aaron Harris, was republished by local Toronto newspaper,

The Star, on May 25th, 2011, though the photograph was taken in 2008. The title of the article is

“Former Caribana now called Scotiabank Caribbean Carnival Toronto” (Stancu). Forty-one years after Nancy Campbell’s photograph in The Globe and Mail, Cyrese King is similarly immortalized as a participant in this cultural event. Both women exist as a frame through which to view the event (King more literally) and that frame is highly sexualized with or without the

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intentions of the women themselves, but certainly with the intentions of the photographers and

the articles’ authors. The angle of Harris’s photograph demands an interrogation of perspective.

To appreciate the violence inherent in this scene, it is useful to think of the composition

of this photograph in the light of Victor Burgin’s observations on photographic suture. “Suture”

refers in general to the “movement of construction/incorporation of the subject in the discourse

in question; a set of effects in which the subject recognises the discourse as its own” (53), but in

the particular context of photography it “takes the form of an identification of the subject with

the camera position. […] [T]he look from this position will shift between the poles of voyeurism

and narcissism: in the former instance subjecting the other-as-object to an inquisitive and controlling surveillance in which seeing is disassociated from being-seen, and in the latter effecting a dual identification with both the camera and the individual depicted” (53). Burgin explores this further with a reading of a pornographic image, but his reading of the relationship between the male viewer and female object of this image are strikingly applicable to the case of the image of Cyrese King: she is at once “the object of […] voyeurism but she may also, simultaneously, become the locus of a narcissistic identification in which the man’s enjoyment of his own body becomes conflated in phantasy with the previously quite distinct jouissance of the woman” (54).

In the photograph of Cyrese King we see that the moment of photographic suture allows the (implied male) viewer of this sexualized scene to participate in the dual pleasures of spectatorship – at once a voyeur and a bodily participant – and the extraordinary act of framing makes the duality of this pleasure explicit: sexuality and voyeurism become quite literally the frame through which spectatorial identification with the festival as a whole is achieved. In this particular instance, however, the dualistic moment of suture is also the moment that makes the

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scopophilic violence of the shot explicit and suspends the pleasures of identification. The

“identification with the camera position” places us as viewers in a crouching or lying position on

the ground, thrusting our gaze upward in parallel with the camera lens towards Cyrese King’s

groin and sexualized body. The extreme, out-of-focus close-up of a woman’s leg in the left foreground suggests the photographer’s disruptive presence in the centre of the scene he depicts ostensibly as a non-participating observer but, even if the photographer’s bodily presence is not as awkward an intrusion as it appears to be (if, for example, the shot was composed blindly by the photographer momentarily lowering the camera to the ground from a standing position), the moment of suture nevertheless renders places us bodily on the ground in order that our viewing eye/I can merge with the camera lens. Through this bodily incursion at the point of seeing rather than of erotic identification, the violence entailed in a gaze that is both voyeuristic and narcissistic is made momentarily apparent by the viewing subject’s visibility: the viewer becomes spectacle rather than simply consuming it, for an instant the suture becomes rupture. Forcing ourselves to inhabit this moment of suture critically – and thus to rupture it, enacts what Yancy, terms a practice of un-suturing. In the specific context of the suturing processes that naturalize the normativity of the white gaze upon black bodies, Yancy argues that “it is precisely in being un-sutured, exposed, vulnerable, open to be wounded that there is a profound element of the beautiful, the ecstatic, to be experienced and engaged – where the body trembles in its contingency, responsibility, and restlessness […], where the perceptual and the sensorial are shaken, unhinged” (255). The critical energies of such an un-suturing process are, I suggest, vital to disrupting the normativized white gaze on which tourism-at-home is predicated.

The moment of photographic suture – or, more specifically, the un-suturing we have inserted into this moment – provides a glimpse into what would otherwise remain invisible: the

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violence inherent in the construction of this photo, and our complicity as viewers in that violent

act. We become voyeurs to King’s intended sexualization (and, due to framing, the sexualization

of the parade), and, although the semiotics of the suture make it momentarily visible, the

prevailing popular assumptions surrounding photography condition us to immediately forget the

spectacle that we are making of ourselves, thrust, as we are, onto the ground in the midst of the

scene, our gaze fixed between Cyrese King’s legs. In the act of conditioned forgetting we re-

enter the realm of “pure denotation,” which W. J. T. Mitchell describes as the assumption of

photography’s “freedom from ‘values’” (285): we enjoy the spectacle for itself, willfully

oblivious to the pose that Harris requires from us to view the scene from his perspective.

Given everything that we have observed about Harris’s photograph, it is striking that the

article it accompanies barely engages with the performative or aesthetic qualities of Caribana,

focusing instead on prosaic matters of sponsorship and financing.27 The content holds very little

relevance to the picture of Cyrese King’s splayed legs and decorated breasts. I argue that this

pairing of a hyper-sexualized Caribana and economically advantageous Caribana is held as

closely related, not through explicit textual reference, but through the widespread assumption of

pure denotation while the photographs themselves always exist somewhere between what is seen

and what is understood.

27 .” The author, Henry Stancu, cites the financial challenges faced by CAG (Caribana Arts Group) amidst several claims to the economic benefits to the annual festival. Highlighting the financial benefits that Caribana produces for Toronto and Ontario, Stancu writes that “[i]n 2009, the festival attracted 1.2 million people, including 300,000 from outside the country, and helped to fill 85 per cent of Toronto’s hotel rooms. That year, it generated $483 million for the provincial economy”. (Stancu has, however, misread this figure. According to the Ipsos Reid Economic Impact Study, Caribana generated $438 million for the province in 2009.) Stancu goes on to say that “last year, an expected $600,000 in federal and provincial grants didn’t come through. The festival’s budget decreased from $2.6 million to $1.8 million,” showing that despite the claim that Caribana has been mismanaged by CAG and the assertion that the festival does not bring in comparable revenue streams to other, similar, events in Toronto, there are economic benefits that Caribana brings to the province that are unarguable. 112

Connotation and Denotation: Reading Popular Media

The idea (and ultimately fiction) of the photograph as a space of “pure denotation” is developed by Mitchell in his book Picture Theory, where he explores the paradoxical nature of

“reading” photography. He claims that in a world where pictures are everywhere, it is simultaneously important to attempt an analysis of photography and impossible to understand everything pictures connote. Mitchell attempts to reconcile the confusion between what pictures are and how they are understood by examining the relationship between “connotation” and “pure denotation” in his analysis of reading photographs. Mitchell argues that understanding photography relies on understanding the inherent “resistances” that these readings confront; that is to say, similar to Sontag’s uncritical gaze, Mitchell is also interested in photography as engagement between author and audience:

The “value” of photography resides precisely in its freedom from “values,” just as, in

cognitive terms, its principal connotation or “coded” implication is that it is pure

denotation, without a code. The persistence of these paradoxes suggests that the “mode of

imbrication” or overlapping between photography and language is best understood, not as

a structural matter of “levels” or as a fluid exchange, but (to use Barthes’ term) as a site

of “resistance” (285).

So, because photography exists without a strict code of understanding (or reading), it is allowed, first, to deny its own values and, second, to be read in conjunction with these resistances to these values. That is to say, Cyrese King exists both as a representation of Caribana that allows the reader of Stancu’s article to better visualize the experience he is broadly describing as well as symbolizing the hypersexuality that permeates the attentions of the media in the photographing of Caribana. It is the construction of King’s photo as pure denotation that allows The Star’s

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reading audience to see an article on finances and read it as an implicit comparison of the commodification of the event with the festival’s inherently sexualized nature without engaging with the connotation apparent in this reading. Photographs of Caribana always implicitly represent an idea of the carnival, the exotic and disinhibiting nature of a broader idea of festival than simply that of this one particular event. The photographs convey this by focusing on smiling faces, bodies in movement, colourful costumes, and black bodies, which manage in the most efficient way to position these photographs as other.

Though its popularity has declined significantly in recent years, with the more broadly appealing and diverse publications such as Share and Dawn surpassing in distribution, the black

Torontonian publication Contrast exists as a poignant piece of black Canadian history. The article reprinted in 1970 is titled “Just What Was Said: $75 Million in Spending is Real Black

Power” (The Globe and Mail 7) and summarizes the economic value that the black community represents to the larger majority (white) population with reference to the specific examples of

Caribbean immigrants in Toronto. The article operates from the position of defending the black community from claims of unemployment and impoverishment, citing various fiscal figures on black spending to reinforce the argument that “[t]he contribution of these people to the national economy is significant” (7). The Globe and Mail recirculates Contrast’s conservative attitude that “this is black power… black pocket-book power!” The article ends with a conclusive statement on the economic contributions of the black community by citing the annual Caribana festival: “[w]hen blacks take part in the annual festival of Caribana this week, they are not just masqueraders… they are an integral part of Canada, a people who matter” (7). The nature of

Caribana to both relocate Toronto into an exoticized space of otherness and reaffirm all of the national constructions of Canada as multicultural and diverse are articulated here in this article.

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Accompanying the article is, of course, a photograph of the festival with the caption “[a]mong

the eye-catching delights in the Caribana festival celebrations,” (7) which I examine below.

Alienation at Home: Exoticized by the Camera

Photograph of Caribana’s “eye-catching delights” illustrating a Globe and Mail article published on August 7th, 1970 In the August 7th, 1970 edition of The Globe and Mail, there is a reprint of an article first published in the black Caribbean newspaper Contrast. Contrast boasts a reputation of being the oldest newspaper in Canada dedicated to reporting on black and Caribbean issues in the nation at large, and Toronto more specifically. The unnamed woman stands center in the frame, grinning towards the camera. She is in costume, with a light coloured dress that shows up well in the contrast of black and white film. She is alone in the frame, with only the busy additions of her

Caribana costume trailing behind her. This unnamed woman is given no context other than her description as being one of many “eye-catching delights.” Unlike Campbell and King, this unnamed woman looks directly into the camera, returning its gaze. Potentially, this looking-back

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has the power to retrieve the voyeur from his invisibility, and, in fact, we are told that she has the power to “catch” our “eye.” However, the short description of the woman relies on an emphasis on those who look, rather than that which is looked upon. It is our eyes which are being caught, the action and agency always residing with the viewer. The unnamed woman simply exists as an object deserving of our gaze because of her status as exoticized and sexualized by the camera.

The fact that the photo of this “delight” accompanies an article on “real black power” becomes uncomfortable when the inherent relation is examined. That black power relies on the objectified black woman is not the intended reading of this image; rather, the denotation of the photograph is an idea of festivity and pleasure. However, the connotation that is inevitable in an analysis of this picture is the unfortunate alliance between black economic power in Canada and the

“delight” of watching black female bodies that exist for our consumption. The implication of this connotation is that black power is strictly a male phenomenon, as the “delight” has no power other than that which is granted by a masculine and heterosexual gaze: while black economic contributions to the nation are equated with black female bodies, the resultant power that these economic investments represent always belong to the black men of Canada.

The complex layers of denotation and connotation in this image requires us to analyze it in the context of what Mitchell terms “the pictorial turn,” which entails “the realization that spectatorship […] may be as deep a problem as various forms of reading […] and that visual experience or ‘visual literacy’ might not be fully explicable on the model of textuality” (16).

Like Sontag, Mitchell prioritizes the audience over the object in his analysis of the ways in which we can attempt reading a photograph, in that the spectatorship informs so much of the reading practice as to be inseparable from it. The reading of images is more complicated than the reading of text because these images have a multitude of meanings that largely go unexamined.

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In being “delighted” by a photograph, we are also being distracted by its pleasurability. Like most photographs of Caribana, which can be most generally sorted into beautiful women, innocent children, and large crowds, the unnamed “delight” exists as a point of pleasurable reference for an idea of celebration.

As Burman notes, “[t]he media coverage of Caribana by the mainstream press tends to express enchantment with the city’s transformation through the language of travel journalism or celebrations of diversity,” (281) meaning that the voyeuristic gaze is supplanted by the touristic gaze in looking towards objects of photographic interest. This tourism at home is an implicit desire of the Caribana festival, mirroring the national desire of having a managed and contained diversity that underpins the Canadian ideal of multiculturalism. In her book Citizenship from

Below: Erotic Agency and Caribbean Freedom, Mimi Sheller writes of the complicated relationship that the Caribbean has with tourism. She analyzes it from an historical standpoint of colonial tourism and moves towards a more modern understanding of how that tourism works with regards to sexualization. She argues that “[t]ourism can be understood as a form of embodied encounter between foreign travelers and local people that involves corporeal relations of unequal power” (210) and that “[t]he way tourists and local people face each other, look at each other, hear each other, smell each other, or touch each other are all part of the power relations by which forms of gender and racial inequality are brought into being along with national boundaries of belonging and exclusion” (211). Sheller sees tourists as the holders of a specialized citizenship, feeling perfectly at home in a foreign place while making the locals of that place feel alienated and uncomfortable. This is somewhat contrary to the workings of

Caribana as an exoticized and touristic space, as those participants of the festival expect to have their pictures taken and, indeed, participate most fully with the photographers at the event.

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However, this does not undermine the ways in which this touristic space operates similarly to

that created by Sheller’s travel writers, as the objects of the photographs are treated much the

same, despite their participation.

The voyeuristic/touristic gaze is a controlling gaze. The reduction of the photographic

subject into a sexualized object ensures that not only does the frame itself operate as a source of

containment, but that the event becomes reframed so as to contain its own participants. Similarly,

the celebrants framed between Cyrese King’s legs, the black bodies of Caribana, become

managed by their participation in this hyper-sexualized event as King herself is contained by her

own complicity in the reframing of the parade as a sexualized spectacle of race. The sexualized

space is a containing space: “[s]imply put, blacks can be processed and controlled when they are

turned into ethnoerotic objects. They are visualized as objects that are simultaneously attractive

and repulsive, different from established cultural norms but at the same time belonging to the

human family” (Sheller 220). Though Sheller is describing the mechanisms at work in

nineteenth-century travel writing, the operation works much the same in analyzing the designs of photographic representation of the Caribana festival and parade. The touristic gaze of the non- participant, the gazer of photographs, the non-raced and thereby “Canadian” body, acts as a lens of differentiation; the reader of newspapers, the consumer of images uses his gaze to distinguish the space of Caribana as a foreign space, one of hyper-sexualized black bodies, from his own

safe “Canadian” space of observance. The teeming mass of bodies situated between Cyrese

King’s legs are powerless, their violence contained. While the sexuality of the spectacle is

attractive from the remote (and sanctioned) space of the voyeur, that sexuality holds the potential

for repulsion.

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Returning the Gaze

Inherited from the nineteenth-century is the use of photography to focus this relationship

between sex and race through the framing of the camera lens: “[c]ollecting images and being

able to make such racial comparisons authoritatively became the central purposes of Anglo-

American travel through the West Indies” (Sheller 222). The photographing of Caribbean bodies has an historically situated association with the containment and classification of othered bodies.

As Sheller points out, these black and brown bodies were used to define each other, with no overt discussion of the non-raced (but white) bodies of the travel writer. The Indo-Caribbean body was always used as a means of articulating the superiority of the white body by naming particular racial features as superior to the Afro-Caribbean body; that is to say, straighter hair, thinner lips, and narrower noses were all signs of civilization in the Caribbean body. The Indo-

Caribbean woman also showed her superiority through demure glances and the refusal to look back at the camera. Sheller is quick to point out that the white bodies behind the cameras (often enough women themselves) are never judged as impolite or intrusive for initiating the gaze, though the Afro-Caribbean women are criticized often for having the audacity to return that gaze. Sheller sees that return of the touristic gaze to be a site of potential empowerment to those framed within the contained space of the photograph: “gazing on another requires a certain degree of proximity, which puts the gazer at risk: Embodied encounters leave a space for contesting the gaze, deflecting the gaze, returning the gaze, appropriating the gaze, and destabilizing the power of the gaze” (212). This looking back works against the inherent containing force of the photographic frame and manages to briefly build a bridge between

Mitchell’s pure denotation and the denotation of his connotation. By refusing to act as valueless object, the Caribbean subject attempts to disrupt the photograph’s attempt to act as codeless. The

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return of the gaze requires a confrontation, and the confrontation between voyeur and object

requires a disruption of the frame’s construction as a lens that works only one way.

The return of the voyeuristic gaze presents an opportunity to confront the anonymity of

the camera. The photographic object becomes subject once more and insists on seeking out the

source of their objectification, thus rendering the voyeuristic gaze impotent in its inability to

remain invisible. The constructedness of the photograph is obvious and the pure denotation of

the picture becomes harder to maintain in the face of this looking back. However, although this

act of recovery works as a potential method of insubordination to the desires of the nineteenth-

century tourist, the “pictorial turn” of the twenty-first century requires more than a simple

“returning the gaze” to deconstruct the levels of denotation existent in most photographs, never mind the intentional management of race and culture evident in media images of Caribana.

Therefore, while returning the gaze of the voyeur is the first step in empowering the hyper- sexualized black bodies of Caribana, they cannot break free from Toronto’s containment of the event without confronting the other methods with which the city (and nation) manages the people and the event.

Financial Management and Economical Containment

From its inception, Caribana has been exploited by politicians as a means of negotiating the cultural missteps of the past year by publicly supporting “diversity” for a couple of weeks of summer. While municipal financial support of Caribana has always been intermittent, politicians have nonetheless always taken the opportunity to use Caribana to further their own public image by associating themselves with the professed ideals of Canada, that is to say the construction of the nation as a place of diversity and acceptance. As Suzanna Reiss states in her chapter

“Immigration, Race and the Crisis of National Identity in Canada,” “Caribana was also an

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opportunity for political performance by Canadian and local government officials, and by the

revellers alike” (67). During the first Caribana celebration in 1967, then mayor William

Dennison used his introductory speech about the positive relationship between Canada and the

West Indies as an “opportunity to make ‘amends’ with the West Indian community by correcting

his mispronunciation of Guyana which a few weeks earlier had ‘cost him unfavourable publicity’ when greeting the Guyanese Prime Minister” (Reiss 67). More recently, Digital Journal posted

several pictures of Toronto’s then mayor, Rob Ford, standing amidst several costumed women

who “drew the eyes of photographers, public officials and bystanders” at the 2012 Caribana

festival.

Digital Journal photograph of Conservative Toronto mayor Rob Ford with two female Caribana participants The late, controversial conservative figure Rob Ford, who died in 2016, was no stranger to media

debacles, having been in the news for allegedly smoking crack cocaine in a video, a rumour that

received international media attention, as well as for groping former mayoral candidate Sarah

Thompson. At the 2012 Caribana celebration, Ford took the opportunity to make a speech

celebrating all of the tenets of Canadian multiculturalism: “[t]he Scotiabank Caribbean Carnival

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Toronto is an expression of the Caribbean culture and reflects on our city’s multiculturalism and the diversity among people of the Caribbean origin.” Digital Journal also posted several pictures of Rob Ford standing center in between two scantily-clad participants of Caribana in brightly coloured costumes. Ford grins at the women in one of the photographs, while his arms encircle their waists proprietarily. The women act as frame in this photograph, the formally dressed Ford standing against a backdrop of exoticism and colour. The women signify Ford’s embracing of diversity, as he grabs their bare skin while they stand turned slightly inwards towards him, arms either tucked behind or nervously pulled towards the body. While Ford grins towards them, they do not look at him; instead, they either turn towards the camera or look slightly aside. The towering buildings of Toronto act as backdrop to the scene, so that the women are positioned doubly out of place: by Ford’s sombre suit as well as the landscape of urban North America. The women do not bring the Caribbean to Toronto, despite the claims of the article, but instead only represent their own otherness. This is one day before Ford suggests that the resolution to

Toronto’s gun crimes is to use immigration laws to exile undesirables. The inherent prejudice behind this controversial plan, that those charged with gun crimes are, naturally, immigrants to

Canada, was immediately taken up and criticized by both local and national media (though strangely supported by Immigration Minister Jason Kenney on Twitter), and Ford largely failed to explain how it might work in practice. However, these two episodes demonstrate Ford’s capacity to celebrate a unifying idea of multiculturalism and diversity while seizing an opportunity to denounce the city’s immigrants, seemingly without reflection on the paradox of holding these two positions simultaneously. Reiss reminds us that this is not a new tactic and, in fact, could be seen as a Canadian tradition, of sorts: “[t]his entertainment-based diplomacy –

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indicative of the direction and meaning of a nascent Canadian ‘multiculturalism’ – unfolded in

the midst of competing expressions of nationalism evident among the diverse crowd” (67).

Caribana has always existed in this hybrid space of political manoeuvring and economic

uncertainty. In looking back to the very first Caribana in 1967, Reiss reminds us that the year

immediately following the centennial celebrations “began a perpetual struggle for economic

viability and acceptance” (77). Where Caribana is often cited as a major economic contributor to

Toronto’s tourism industry, a festival that “creates thousands of jobs, draws tourists to Toronto

and adds hundreds of millions of dollars to the economy every year” (Ipsos Reid, quoted in

CNW), the federal and provincial support for Caribana is inconsistent at best. With control of the

festival (and its finances) being wrested away from CAG and then given over to the FMC

(Festival Management Committee) in 2006, Caribana has found a new focus on financial profit

through corporate sponsorship, media sponsors, and by collaborating events with established

tourist locations (such as the ROM and the Ontario Science Centre). While these changes are

largely celebrated by local media, there are still some critics who believe that the lack of serious

funding (when compared to less lucrative celebrations like the Calgary Stampede28, for instance)

for Caribana is a sign of the “perception of Caribana as a cultural outsider – the multicultural

‘Other’” (Nangwaya). Yet, these arguments all rely on the construction of Caribana as an

economic event, another way that the event is contained and controlled by outside powers. By

seeing Caribana’s success only in terms of financial reward for the city, province, and nation, the

media is privileging economic impact over cultural. While this can be seen as a reality of cultural

28 In 2009, Caribana brought in $438 million to Ontario, while the much more provincially supported Calgary Stampede typically brings in $340 million to Alberta (Menzies). 123

contribution in Canada, it becomes problematic when we remember that this representation of

Caribana also largely relies on the sexualization of the event. It becomes obvious, through an interrogation of photographic coverage of this event alongside an analysis of the relevance of financial reward to the city that Caribana’s exchange of sex for money is at the heart of this cultural event. Like the black bodies of Sheller’s colonial tourists who exist to position the photographer invisibly, the represented black bodies of Caribana work toward demarcating a difference which protects the voyeur, all the while granting relevance to cultural difference only so long as it is profitable. The over-reliance on establishing Caribana’s worth through the language of economics, in fact, undermines the ideals of the celebration; instead, we are left with the black bodies of Caribana ever increasingly contained within a prison of economic disparity.

Containing the Violence: Policing the Crowds at Caribana

So far, I have discussed the construction of “tourism at home” as a largely pleasurable way of looking – a distancing mechanism that facilitates the pleasures of voyeurism while also keeping the black bodies it consumes reassuringly contained. If the primary trope of this gaze is that of the tourist sampling the pleasures of an island paradise, however, tourism at home also contains a second, less pleasurable travel trope: that of the tourist out of their depth in a suddenly threateningly foreign space. This trope still maintains a link to pleasure – the thrill of a distant, ill-defined danger that adds both authenticity and excitement to the tourist experience – but, whereas the more overt pleasures of voyeurism emphasize the proprietorial aspect of tourism at home, the construction of Caribana as inherently violent emphasizes the importance of distancing and containment as a means of maintaining the tourist’s comfort amid the festival’s chaotic otherness.

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Along with containment through sex and economy, Caribana’s black bodies find

themselves managed through the popular acceptance of the festival’s inherent violence via the

association of any black crime during the two weeks of Caribana with Caribana itself. Images of

Caribana most often involve the women of Caribana, dressed in costume that expose much of

their bodies and posed in ways that highlight the sexuality of the event. Often photographs will

also feature children, innocence paired with an idea of sexual experience to create an idea of a

carnival, the pleasure of abandon.

However, a large number of the Caribana photographs captured and published by local and

national media show large crowds of featureless black bodies29, a trend which began with the

first parade: “Caribana 67 and the sunny weather attracted a record crowd to Toronto Islands

yesterday – 32,000 people. Children pushed one another out of trees, swimmers trampled on

29 This mirrors the work of tourism photography in the Caribbean, where “the very process of representing and deeming parts of the landscape and inhabitants as picturesque marked their incorporation into a disciplinary society. That the islands and their native populations were fit to be photographed offered an additional degree of assurance to travellers that ‘the natives’ and the landscape were tamed” (Thompson 17). Photographs of Caribana work similarly by emphasizing the uncontrolled and feverish nature of the event, and, thus, the necessity of the police presence and physical containment. 125

each other beneath the waves. Six extra policemen helped the island regulars watch 14 hours of delightful chaos” (“Caribana 67”). This trend continues in the present day, with media reporting in 2012 that “[f]ans at this year's Caribbean Carnival parade on Aug. 4 will be subject to a search for weapons, alcohol and drugs, organizers said” (Robertson). Accompanying the first quote is a black and white photo of the first Caribana, featuring a mass of black bodies, indistinguishable one from another, crowding each other and the event. The second quote, from a 2012 article in

The Toronto Sun, is illustrated by a photograph of a teeming mass of black bodies with a host of different Caribbean national flags waving and groups of people riding large trucks through the crowd. The trucks are dwarfed by the crowd itself, showing both the immensity and the power of the bodies present.

Photograph illustrating Toronto Sun report on policing Caribana, 2012 Off to the right, almost lost in the crowd itself, is a small sign that reads “Pedestrian Crossing,” signalling that the normally ordered streets of Toronto have been temporarily overcome by chaos. This chaos is one of the foremost ways in which Caribana has been constructed by the media, and subsequently features heavily in the way that Caribana is understood by the general public.

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From its beginnings, Caribana has included a police presence that other, similarly sized

and attended Torontonian events have not and, indeed, “[t]ensions between the metro police and

the Black and Caribbean communities clearly make up part of Caribana’s context” (Burman

285). The construction of Caribana as overcrowded and overcome by black bodies exists side-

by-side with the understanding that Caribana is a space that needs policing (and management by that police presence). The unfortunate death of Rueshad Grant, struck down by a parade truck in

2013, reinforced this understanding as it presented “new questions about the safety of the popular event” (Moore), despite the fact that his death was a result of one truck that refused to stop, rather than the crowd that surrounded that truck. So even though “critics maintain that the parade is over-policed, especially since the 1992 shooting incident” (Burman 281), measures

increase every year in the effort to control the parade and the crowds that the parade generates;

measures include, but are not limited to, the continual increase of security guards and police

presence, the building of progressively higher fencing between the parade and the crowd

attending30, the searching of bags during the parade, and the attempt to organize attendees into

stadium seating (as opposed to standing crowds). Though Stephen Weir, the spokesman for the

Scotiabank Caribbean Carnival, claims that the instigation of bag searches (new as of 2012) has

nothing to do with gun violence among black people in Toronto, both The Toronto Sun and The

Globe and Mail have claimed otherwise. In fact, The Globe and Mail repeat Weir’s opinion that

the searches and the recent shootings in Scarborough (which led to Rob Ford’s blunder about

immigration laws) are unrelated in the article “In Wake of Toronto Gun Violence, Caribana

30 The interaction between masqueraders and the attendees is a long-standing tradition dating back to the originating Caribbean carnivals. The growing restriction of participants joining the parade has its own contentions and political tensions. 127

Plans to Search Guests.” By using a title which suggests disbelief of Weir’s statement, the publication sensationalizes these events rather than reporting them. Ignoring that past violent events at Caribana have involved the police themselves (such as the shooting of bystanders during an incident at the 2011 parade), both the organizers of Caribana and the city continually move to increase the police presence at the parade. The policing of Caribana is a reminder that this is a black event, one markedly different from other cultural events in the city. Policing works, if not to explicitly control the event, then to prompt the public’s desire to see Caribana contained and managed by the authority in some way.

Photograph accompanying Globe and Mail article on tensions between Caribana attendees and Toronto police, July 2016 In a Globe and Mail article titled “Toronto Caribbean Carnival Revellers Frustrated by Mass

Police Presence,” published in July 2016 but updated in May 2018, Alex Migdal suggests that these issues are still very much alive in the construction of Caribana’s police presence. The article is accompanied by a photograph of a mass of bodies, colourful and joyous, but also uncontained and chaotic, taken by Giordano Ciampini. Migdal opens the article by describing the mass of bodies as “a kaleidoscopic spectacle of feathered headpieces and glittering bustiers.”

Despite the articles aims of examining the disproportionately large police presence at Caribana in light of Black Lives Matter and the relationship between the parade and the police as historically

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contentious (though there are efforts to ameliorate the public’s understanding of that

relationship31), the pairing of an article about (imagined) violence and a photograph of mass of

black bodies undermines any intention to criticize the over-policing of Caribana. Indeed, even

Migdal’s language, describing Caribana as “the street teeming with young locals, tourists spilling out of hotels,” reinforces the need to contain the festival.

As a representation of the methods by which Canadian diversity can be contained through the expediency of multiculturalism, Caribana itself needs to be contained. The ideals of multiculturalism rely on this containment of the Other and the management of difference:

“Toronto’s Caribana” interrupts the desired masquerading of Toronto expressed by many

celebrants, its rules and politics a constant reminder of the limits of the fantasy ideal. The

heavy police presence is part of that reminder as well as mainstream media coverage

portraying the event as a potential threat reporting on the success of the barricades, and

police predictions about “unruly behaviour.” (Burman 285)

The physical barricades of Caribana thus have a secondary, metaphorical function. These barricades represent the attempt to contain the uncontrollable, to manage the unmanageable. Like the crowds pushing at the physical barricades, the reality of the chaotic cultural diversity of the nation will always break free from the attempts to simplify through stereotype and marginalization. The ideal of the multicultural nation, to possess a passive hybrid population of hyphenated Canadians, who symbolize diversity without reflecting it in their actions, is an

31 In 2017, the festival kicked off at the Toronto Police headquarters with a dance-off between Mayor John Tory and Police Chief Mark Saunders. The police have also now instituted a tradition of not only having a float in the parade, but launching their float first. 129

impossible dream. Like Caribana, the proscriptions of multiculturalism will always be

challenged by the realities of political and personal difference.

Performing Citizenship

I have suggested that the construction of Caribana between two poles of sex and violence,

through the recirculation of images and their connotations, serves the function of containing and

managing Caribbean Canadian agency and assimilating it into the multicultural narrative of the

majority. In this concluding section, however, I would like to think about the possibilities within

Caribana for recuperating agency through the carnival’s inherent power of transgression32. In his book Cities of the Dead: Circum-Atlantic Performance, Joseph Roach investigates the role that carnival has in maintaining order by embracing disorder. Though Roach is specifically referring to Mardi Gras, I would like to expand his theories to include other carnivals that coordinate so intrinsically with the city in which they are staged, such as Toronto’s Caribana. Roach says that

“the law has deliberately created in its interstices a space for easily overlooked transgression, which heightens the fleeting pleasures of apparent escape from its reach, if only because enforcement, in the absence of a wronged and privileged constituency, is unrewarding” (243), showing that management of transgression is a natural and inevitable component of carnival.

Roach goes on to say that “[c]arnival and law conspire together to craft a contingent margin of

32 While this chapter is dedicated to the photographing of black bodies by those situated culturally outside of the idealized and represented Caribbean Carnival, it is important to note the power of transgression in the movement and dance of Caribana. In his article “Carnival Time Versus Modern Social Life: a False Distinction,” Gerard Aching looks at the ways that sexualized dancing potentially acts as space for the agency of black women within the Carnival space, specifically the act of winin’ (the rotating of the hips to the beat – a very common dance in Trinidad). Aching says, “Today, the desire for abandon during carnival, particularly in the form of provocative winin’ and/or marathon dance performances, functions for many local and expatriate Trinidadians and Tobagonians as the expression and performance of an attitude toward a cultural and/or national identity” (417). I will take up the relationship between winin’ and nationality in the sixth chapter when I look at ‘da Kink in My Hair. 130

behaviour that remains easily within the laws’ reach, if need be, but hovers provisionally outside

their grasp” (252), which is to say that Caribana’s violent construction is as valuable in

understanding the nature of the spectacle as is its marketing by the media as a hypersexual and

financially lucrative endeavour, both the violence and sexualization working to maintain order

because they are transgressions that have been authored and authorized.

It is the hybrid citizenship of Caribana’s participants which allows for a construction of

Caribana as a multicultural, and therefore Canadian, event. This hybridity renders Toronto

during Caribana one of Roach’s interstitial spaces of “easily overlooked transgression”, a status that in turn allows the supposed violence and danger of the mass of black bodies safe and readily assimilable to the national narrative: while the participants celebrate their difference, this inevitably leads to the construction of that difference from the perspective of the majority group and, thus, the marginalization of the minority. This interstitial space works doubly to contain the minoritized subject through an authoring of ethnic identity and to create the possibility for reauthoring by embracing the masquerade. As the personal space of identity becomes assimilated to the national desire for a manageable plurality, the hybrid citizen becomes metonymically representative of the nation’s attempt to contain the very diversity that it has created and publicized as beneficial to Canada. However, it is the anonymity of the masquerade that creates the opportunity to “return the gaze,” as it not only robs the photograph of its identified subject, but also positions the photographic object in the position of writing the text him or herself. The facelessness of the Caribana crowds then becomes frightening, not only because of the overwhelming presence of these black bodies, but also because of their transgression, their ability to see without being seen.

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So, while the construction of the parade allows for a hypervisibility of the black body, it is the bodies themselves that “return the gaze” or “[refract] the gaze back on itself” (Fleetwood

112) through an act of excess, for “[t]o enact excess flesh is to signal historical attempts to regulate black female bodies, to acknowledge black women’s resistance of the persistence of visibility, and to challenge debates among black activists and critics about what constitutes positive or productive representation of blackness” (Fleetwood 112). This excess flesh is at the heart of Caribana, it is the way that the parade identifies itself and it is the way that others identify the parade. However, the understanding and interpretation of what that excess flesh signifies requires more than a passing glance, it requires an investment in the history and culture of the Caribbean and the systems that have worked historically against black people in Canada.

Caribana operates between two political intentions to demarcate along ethnic divides: the construction of the festival as a black event and the containment of the celebration, differentiating black bodies from those of the majority population. Between these two divisions exists a polarized Caribana, one that does not acknowledge a reality of hybrid citizenship and, instead, perpetrates a misperception of what it means to be Caribbean Canadian. The importance of the media-constructed photograph cannot be underestimated with regards to the performance of citizenship, as the photograph inhabits the public imagination in ways that text cannot. The photograph connotes an embodiment that is crucial to the understanding of hybrid citizenship and “the very performativity of citizenship is one of the crucial ways in which political subjectivity translates into differentiated embodiments” (Sheller 21). That is to say, the black bodies of Caribana are always political and never simply a “delight” and it is through the creation of a “haven” for these cultural voyeurs that Caribana loses its ability to “return the gaze”; transgression is no longer possible when all avenues of escape are managed and fenced in.

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Furthermore, it is the containment of Caribana that limits the possibilities of the event and, instead, channels the festival into a reiteration of the already marginalizing and exoticizing construction of the Caribbean Canadian community in Canada. It is only through challenging these limitations, and the photographs which enact this containment, that Caribana can realize its potential to transgress. That is to say, through an acceptance of the realities of a hybrid citizenship, rather than a re-enactment of the nation’s stereotypes, Caribana will become uncontainable, as these limitations require the management of chaos in order to function reliably.

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WHITE CIVILITY AND DUB POETRY: CATCHING BULLETS, SO WHAT?

It is now 500 years since the Caribbean first disclosed itself to Columbus and submitted its indigenous peoples and cultures fatally to European misjudgement. An emptiness of population followed.

(Richard Allsopp, Dictionary of Caribbean English Usage)

This chapter looks at Canadian women’s dub poetry in the context of white civility in

1980s and 1990s Toronto in an examination of the ways in which dub poetry manages to disrupt this civility while also being managed by it, as dub poetry is subsumed within the larger institution of Canadian art. In his book White Civility: The Literary Project of English Canada,

Daniel Coleman examines the function of civility, as both process and ideology, in English

Canada. English Canada has, according to Coleman, inherited and improved upon the isochronous construction of colonial British civility, as an operation working on a singular trajectory in time interspersed regularly with events required for civilization operating as a type of spectrum with European national heritage at the end and non-white ethnicities struggling at the beginning. Civility works within a framework that allows for a construction of ‘fictive ethnicities” and promises that all nationalities and races can achieve what English Canada has: a rewriting of history that presents a benevolent colonizing process working to create a nation of pluralities.

In theorizing white civility in Canada, Coleman draws on Etienne Balibar’s notion of

“fictive ethnicity” as a means of imagining national community. Balibar describes the process of associating nationhood with an imagined ethnicity:

No nation possesses an ethnic base naturally, but as social formations are nationalized,

the populations included within them, divided up among them or dominated by them are

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ethnicized - that is, represented in the past or in the future as if they formed a natural

community, possessing of itself an identity of origins, culture and interests which

transcends individuals and social conditions. (Balibar 96)

According to Coleman, civility – via its colonial inheritance from English national discourses – is at once inherently bound up with whiteness and with the fictive ethnicity of the

Canadian nation, meaning that, even though Canada positions itself through the notion of civility as an inclusive, pluralistic space, the binary of white/civil versus non-white/uncivil is nevertheless structurally central to the national imaginary and the institutions built upon it.

Coleman builds on a tradition of interrogating the notion of civility within postcolonial theory, and in particular the subtle interplay between mimicry and subversion that underlines formulations such as Homi Bhabha’s “sly civility”. However, what makes Coleman uniquely valuable for my purposes is the way in which he stages the slippage between the civil and the civic – exploring the ways in which a particular European set of behaviours associated with politeness and decorum is encoded as a norm within the civic institutions of Canada, imposing upon everything from the workings of government to education to arts and culture a teleological structure in which non-white, non-European peoples must always aspire to a deeply encoded

European norm. Thus Coleman argues that civility, an apparently positive value, is in fact structurally ambivalent: while civility and its processes have practical and real world applications that work to enhance the lives of people in the place in which it is put to work, there are inevitable consequences in creating divisions between us and them, and the civil naturally produces the uncivil. This is, of course, not only a deeply problematic construction but one that is highly convenient for maintaining the hegemonic position of European social norms: resistance to the prevailing notion of the “civil” (encoded within the civic) can be pre-emptively dismissed

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as uncivil/ized – as barbaric, as simply impolite or indecent, or both at once. Conversely – and as

I argue has happened to an extent with dub poetry in Canada – the imposition of civil/ized status

on an artform or mode of resistance can serve partly to neutralize its subversive or counter-

discursive intent by absorbing it into the institutions, and hence the teleological narrative, of

civility.

Throughout this chapter, I inhabit the binary between “civil” and “uncivil33” in order to disrupt it34 – as I argue throughout that dub poetry does (or attempts to do). I view civility as a

deeply problematic construction, and the process of “civilizing” as wrapped up in the civic

institutions of Canadian art, literature, and academia. It is not sufficient to dismantle or simply

dismiss this this binary from the start since – as I argued in my introduction – it is deep-rooted in

the institutional ascriptions of worth to individuals, communities, and texts. And, as I seek to

demonstrate here, dub poetry is intimately linked to the discourse of civility both in the ways that

it challenges and disrupts civility and in the ways that it is privileged in institutional and

intellectual spheres – its disruptive force partially blunted by appropriation into pluralist

discourse.

Dub poet Lillian Allen explores the relationship between civility and her lived life as a

black woman in her poem “So What (Perspective Poem)” in her collection: Women Do This

Every Day. Allen begins by asking, “So what so what so what” (127), repetition lending a

33 Understand that when I speak of the civil it is short-hand for the operations that make white civility possible. 34 This is not to say that I am replicating the dubious binaries of work like Peter Wilson’s Crab Antics: The Social Anthropology of the English-Speaking Negro Societies of the Caribbean, where you see the dichotomy between “respectability” and “reputation” used to simplify Caribbean culture to the point of making it unrecognizable. Instead, I am using the inherent movement of the term “civility” (and its deep intertwinement with Canadian civic institutions) to investigate one moment of Caribbean Canadian culture in the hopes that this movement allows for a more nuanced understanding of the artificial binaries that non Caribbean scholars and audiences often attribute (falsely) to Caribbean culture. 136

melodically sardonic quality to the narrator’s voice, an angst caught between irreverence and demand. The familiar phrase works ritually, creating ambivalence in its fraught twinning of care and uncaring. Allen proceeds in a direct address, asking “So your years of schooled craft/have created fine poems,” articulating the relationship between poetry and civility, education and expectation in the creation of literature. The “you” implied in “your” clearly drawing the line between us and them, the uncivil and civil. She immediately begins enumerating the alleged positive impacts of the civilizing impact of colonial Canada/Britain, ironically and hyperbolically: “so it ended pollution/so it stopped wars/so it fed starving children/so it brought peace to the dying.” Here, Allen explores the anxiety of desiring both civility and uncivility. On the one hand, civility promises Derrida’s impossible hospitality and on the other hand dub offers

Allen the autonomy of inhabiting a space outside of the isochronous trajectory of Europeans’ civility. The anaphora of “so it,” works as a refrain that intimates knowledge widely spread, the fictive ethnicity that Canada has constructed for itself through strategic forgetting and constructive remembering.

Allen then shifts to reflect on her own relationship with poetry and form, metaphorically representing her role in the civilizing process, which is always ongoing: “so no one should imperil its form/so if you’re high up in a poetic fiefdom/so, so self assured and turgid/so what if I write a poem like a song” (127). Moving from the practical applications of civility, Allen proposes that the language of civility is constraining her own expression, and that holding a dichotomous standard between the civil and uncivil sets limitations that can only be breached by language that moves outside of that binary. Writing in 1993, Allen posits that dub poetry is one such language. Rather than rewriting the fictive ethnicity that Canada has created for itself, which exists somewhere between reality and fiction, Allen creates a liminal space where the

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binary between civil and uncivil is reimagined as a theoretical construction that does not define the methods that she uses to articulate the positions that she occupies, as a black Caribbean

Canadian woman. The revisitation to the “so what” of the opening in her last line reminds us that the ambivalence is still there. However, that ambivalence deserves articulation, as well. For

Allen, dub poetry is the methodology for exploring the space of ambiguity, as its origins and form mimic an undefinable in-between, being both song and poetry, for the fief of poetry is on loan, never owned, by either the colonizers or colonized.

In the introduction to her edited collection of female dub poets (seven of the eleven are

Canadian), Utterances and Incantations: Women, Poetry and Dub, Afua Cooper reaffirms that dub poetry possesses a mutability of both form and content, allowing for an exploration between boundaries and proscriptions. Cooper describes dub poetry as “both a poetic genre and a musical genre” and that this “underscores dub poetry’s open-endedness, flexibility, vast potential and possibilities” (1). By defying easy categorization within the civil/civic spaces that define and delimit the nature of particular artforms (categorizations that are not only generic but determine, for instance, the branches of governmental arts funding for which a particular artwork might be eligible), dub subverts the traditions of civility inherited through a colonial past by compromising between those traditions and that of the uncivil: creating a new space that works to incorporate a breach in all absolute constructions of genre, history, and tradition. Cooper reflects that

Perhaps, dub poetry’s greatest contribution to poetry and art is that through its

ambassadors, it has liberated poetry from the ivory towers, and fed it like fish and loaves,

to the people. Dub poets have taken their poetry around the world. They read in prisons,

cafes, parks, daycare centres, libraries, schools, universities, old folks’ homes, dance

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halls, night clubs, theatres, at music festivals, poetry festivals, rallies, marches,

demonstrations, and on international concert stages. Dub poetry has established itself as

poetic genre that has mass appeal and women have been in the vanguard of this poetry

revolution. (4)

Thus, dub poetry always operates in terms of rebellion, whether that is through form, expression,

or the reinvention of both. Dub is about the ambiguity between the civil and uncivil; it is call to

participate because of its inherent acknowledgement of those liminal spaces where civility and

uncivility meet.35

Coleman argues that “[t]he idea of civility as a (White) cultural practice not only made it

a mode of internal management and self-definition, because it distinguished the civil from the

uncivil, but it also made it a mode of external management, because it gave civil subjects a

mandate for managing the circumstances of those perceived as uncivil” (12-13); thus, the

colonial impulse is reinvested in itself tautologically, the construction of British (and then

Canadian) civility creates both the uncivil (as a group) and the need to civilize those who are

uncivilized. This imagining of the uncivil is a requirement for knowledge of one’s own civility,

as the norm always needs the other to know itself. This means that “Canadian civility is

contradictory and ambivalent, never consistent within itself. Because this very problematic

troubled quality makes it dynamic, it is a project that is able to organize a diverse population

around the standardizing ideals of whiteness, masculinity, and Britishness” (10) and, therefore,

civility is subversive in its construction of self and other. The motility of civility functions to

35 It is worth noting here that, while dub poetry in Canada is black and Caribbean, its audience was more mixed. The literary style and orality appealed to a varied group of people. However, this chapter is not examining the composition of dub poetry’s audience, but its performance and the agency of those performers. 139

continually allow it to reconstruct the boundaries of English Canada, in literature and life.

Because of its historical relevance, civility is enmeshed in the fabric of the nation’s fictive

ethnicity.

This chapter argues that, while the dub poetry movement works actively to disempower

that construction of civility in the dichotomy between us and them, the insidiousness of civility

has, historically, mitigated the power of this genre. This civility works to metonymically

represent the management of race and ethnicity in contemporary multicultural Canada.

Disruption and Dub: Writing Black in Toronto

Dub poetry in Canada had its origins in Toronto in the late 1970s and early 1980s. Dub

poetry is born out of dub, a musical style that originated in Jamaica, but saw great success as an

export to the U.S. and the U.K. However, dub poetry is black and it is Caribbean. It is a meeting

between music and literature, a meeting of genres, communities, nations, and genders. Where

dub has been a predominantly male phenomenon in its origins (from the dancehalls of Jamaica to

the clubs of the United Kingdom), dub poetry has been reinvented as a feminist mode of

discourse in Canada. As a genre, dub relies to an extent on the same essentialist codes of conduct

that inform Caribbean culture,36 inherited from British colonizers, and can thus “be viewed as at

the same time an extension of and deviation from Kingston’s deejay culture” (Sullivan 193). Dub

poetry thus represents a shift in culture and intention, as it moves from Jamaica to Canada, and

36 The Caribbean’s mimicry of the English’s gendered codes of conduct in the treatment of women is already well established and studied. Women in the Caribbean (like most places in the world) are still fighting for the rights that men have. Where art has contributed to these modes of resistance to the patriarchal culture of the Caribbean, it must be acknowledged the degree to which art has encouraged the mistreatment of women, traditionally. In fact, “[o]ver the last two decades, the de-legitimisation of violence against women, once thought to be a natural prerogative of men and canonized in a number of famous calypsos, has been one of the greatest achievements of the [feminist] movement” (Reddock 92), which is not to say that essentialism and mistreatment of women is no longer a concern in the Caribbean, but that space has been opened up to at least talk about it. 140

“[i]f the former is spontaneous, evolving from the urge to ‘nice up the dance’, the latter tends to

be pre-written and intellectual (often political), and is often performed outside the dance hall”

(Sullivan 193).

Oku Nagba Ozala Onuora, of Jamaica, coined the term “dub poetry” and defines it as “a poem that has a built-in reggae rhythm, hence, when the poem is read without any reggae rhythm

“backing” so to speak, one can distinctly hear the reggae rhythm coming out of the poem” (cited in Sullivan 193). Onuora only began writing dub poetry after serving time in prison for several botched bank robberies and a prison escape. Thus, dub poetry is born already articulating rebellion, subversion, and the ambiguous space between breaking the law and serving a lawful sentence. “Reflections in Red37,” which some call the first dub poetry song (Campbell) was released in 1978, one year after Onuora was released from prison, as result of lobbying and protests by activists and academics alike (Campbell). “Reflections in Red” underscores the political intentions inherent in dub poetry; throughout the work, Onuora repeats “No peace./no peace./Until there are equal rights and/JUSTICE…ICE…ICE” (rockersszzz) to the backing of a

reggae beat, demonstrating that dancehall music can work to entice and appeal to larger

principles of social justice. Looking back at his early work, Onuora claims that “Nuthin’ has

changed, ‘cause wi still seeing the same ‘sufferation’ and oppression” (cited in Campbell),

signalling the relevance of dub poetry as perpetually rebellious, a form that merges genre and

form to create work that represents the needs of the people.

37 “Reflections in Red” is Onuora’s first musical release and was first released in 1979 by Bob Marley’s record label 56 Hope Road. 141

In Canada, dub poetry has been organized using the same principles, but has focused more on the needs of a black population that has “a constant craving for recognition in the face of a continuous erasure” (Walcott 39). Being black in Canada has been, historically, an unsettling experience that is replicated in dub poetry’s occupation of the in-between. To be black in Canada is to occupy that space between there and not there:

This means, then, that black people in Canada are also presumed surprises because they

are “not here” and “here” simultaneously: they are, like blackness, unexpected, shocking,

concealed in a landscape of systemic blacklessness; and, they exist in a landscape of

blacklessness and have “astonishingly” rich lives, which contradict the essential black

subject. In Canada, blackness and black people are altogether deniable and evidence of

prior codes of representation that have identified blackness/difference as irrelevant. But

black existence is an actuality, which takes on several different forms that do not (much

to the surprise of some) always conform to the idea of Canada. (McKittrick 93)

So, while Canada has erased much of its black history38 in its efforts to forget a shameful past, black Canada demands to be seen.39 This demand is always rooted in community, and while it is important to understand that black Canada operates in and among many different diasporically located communities, Canadian dub poetry seeks to bridge some of those divides through politically engaged interaction, for, “[w]hile the formal practice of dub poetry took a little longer to arrive in Canada, the scene that formed around poets such as Lillian Allen, Clifton Joseph,

Ahdri Zhina Mandiela and Ishaka, among others, has proved ultimately to be more coherent and

38 See Rinaldo Walcott’s “’A Tough Geography:’ Towards a Poetics of Black Space(s) in Canada.” 39 See Paul Barrett’s Blackening Canada for more on this. 142

more extensive from a community perspective” (Sullivan 194). In fact, in 2003, Lillian Allen,

alongside Afua Cooper, was largely responsible for creating the Dub Poets Collective, “a

creative organization totally dedicated to promoting dub poetry as a vital cultural practice”

(Sullivan 196), focusing concretely on dub poetry as a community cultural effort.

In his article “To be Dub, Female, and Black: Towards a Womban-Centred Afro-

Caribbean Diasporic Performance Aesthetic in Toronto,” Ric Knowles traces the roots of dub poetry in Canada through the women who have shaped its origins. Knowles examines how these women have reimagined Toronto as a “transformative space” through the “largely masculinist ethos of much of Caribbean performance and the narrow chronopolitics of modernist colonial

‘development’” (78). Knowles is interested in the ways that these women have used dub poetry to reinhabit Toronto, in order to be seen, despite and because of the Canadian civility and

Caribbean masculinism that fetters their avenues of expression as black women. Knowles argues

that Vera Cudjoe and Rhoma Spencer, as representations of black theatre, and adhri zhina

mandiela and d’bi.young, as dub poets who have inherited the black aesthetics inscribed by

Cudjoe and Spencer, have used the ethos of multicultural Toronto to impress their own diasporic

identities on the city in the effort to replicate and recreate in it a space of transgression and

revolution that is initiated in their own works. Knowles tells us that Toronto and dub poetry are

wholly intermeshed in the dub project:

What these women have done to constitute Toronto, already one of the most culturally

diverse cities in the world, as heterotopic, transformative space within which they can

work at the intersection of nations, sexualities, and performance forms. That is, they have

constituted the city as a space that enables them at once to womanize and queer ‘the

revolushun,’ building on Caribbean performance practices such as carnival, ‘mas

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(masquerade), calypso, pantomime, satirical musical reviews, agit prop, and, crucially,

dub, to create expansive new performance forms and theatrical hybridities in diasporic

space. (80)

Thus, dub has, through the diasporic lens of the black Caribbean woman, reinvented sections of

Toronto and remade pieces of the city in its own image: a rebellious and political engagement

with the uncivil. Canadian civility is undermined by the constructs which constitute it, the

reinvention of literature and art work to erode the foundations upon which civility rests.

The Problem with Multiculturalism

This foundation of civility is shored up by multiculturalism itself. As discussed earlier,

multiculturalism in practice operates as a management system for black bodies, and “the terms

by which one can be ‘multicultural’ as outlined by government policy, obscure other ways by

which people deal with social difference in everyday routine ways” (Campbell 255). If dub

poetry is about revolution and resistance, hovering on the demarcation between civil and uncivil,

then multiculturalism acts as its inverse, reflecting an ideology that strides along the border

between civilizing and the creation of the uncivil. Dub poetry’s popularity and success in Canada

relies on the construction of Canada as a benevolent space committed to the freedom to articulate

cultural difference, even as it undermines this mythologizing process40. Dub poetry in Canada is

rebellion and will, ideally, attempt disruption in the face of inequality and injustice, even if that

means resisting the system that supports its distribution. However, if multiculturalism is

insidious, using celebration of difference to manage that difference while simultaneously

40 See Eva Mackey’s House of Difference and Himani Bannerji’s The Dark Side of the Nation for more on how multiculturalism works to undermine difference even as it celebrates it. 144

encouraging the disparity that the construction of the vertical mosaic necessitates, then Canadian dub poetry has learned to be equally duplicitous and itself manages multiculturalism through the twofold articulation of nationality and performance.

Derrida asks “[w]hat is a foreigner? What would a foreign woman be?” in the endeavour to interrogate the resident’s construction of the that which is not at home, though this construction always happens in the mind of the resident, leaving the foreigner unable to construct him or herself. Derrida responds to his own questions:

It is not only the man or woman who keeps abroad, on the outside of society, the family,

the city. It is not the other, the completely other who is relegated to an absolute outside,

savage, barbaric, precultural, and prejudicial, outside and prior to the family, the

community, the city, the nation, or the State. The relationship to the foreigner is regulated

by law, by the becoming-law of justice. (73)

Therefore, the foreigner is not Other, they are in a regulated relationship to the state, neither us nor them. If the foreigner is reliant on the law for hospitality, then that hospitality is “like the law, conditional, and thus conditioned in its dependence on the unconditionality that is the basis of the law” (73). The foreigner operates from the borders between lawful and lawless, largely because the law itself is mutable and pervertable (79) – the unconditionality of the imperative or call to hospitality is reconstructed through the conditional and imperfect laws of the state. Thus, ideology and its legal enactments work together, in so much as they can, though one be changeless and the other changeable. This changeability is both detrimental and required, as laws change to suit societal change, but those changes rely on human competency.

In his chapter “Hegemonies, Continuities, and Discontinuities of Multiculturalism and the

Anglo-Franco Conformity Order,” Grace-Edward Galabuzi claims that multiculturalism in

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Canada is a failed experiment that will imminently self-destruct. He bases this claim on his

construction of three facts: the “war on terror,” rejection of cultural “tolerance,” and the socio-

economic disparity between ethnic groups (59). The failure of multiculturalism in Canada, as

Galabuzi would have it, relies on multiculturalism operating “as a mechanism of hegemony

maintenance” whose purpose is “central to the complex role that official multiculturalism and its

related discourses and practices play in mediating the relationship between Canada’s racialized

peoples and its majority white population in the early twenty-first century” (58). Resultantly, the

failure of multiculturalism is facilitated by Canada’s failure to manage its non-white population

through cultural practice41s (both their own and Canadian pride of/for a multicultural state), and, instead, relies on the conditionality of law, the mutability of human opinion. The ideology of multiculturalism42, which is still alive and well, is bound inexorably for failure as a result of the

inability of the law to maintain these ideals43, as the Canadian government persists in stratifying

its citizens along lines of race, ethnicity, culture, and religion.

Since “hegemony-maintenance deploys both consent-making and coercive processes”

(73), a mutually reaffirming relationship between policy makers and citizens, Galabuzi argues

that there are two complementary narratives at work in the constitution and construction of

multiculturalism in Canada: top-down and bottom-up. The top-down approach allows that

multiculturalism is state sanctioned, a benevolent structuring of Canadian society, operating with

the approval and under the guidance of a government interested in plurality and the needs of its

racialized inhabitants. This leads to the conclusion that “official multiculturalism represent[s] a

41 See Bolaria and Li’s Race and Racism in 21st-Century Canada and Moodley’s Canadian Multiculturalism as Ideology for more. 42 Look at Satzewich and Liodakis’ Race and Ethnicity in Canada to see more on this point. 43 See Dua, Razack and Warner’s States of Race for further information. 146

vision of a more cosmopolitan Canada, one that did away with the central monopoly of the

conquering monocultures and emphasized the equal co-existence of groups with historical

cultural differences” (Galabuzi 67). The bottom-up narrative “suggests that popular demands forced the hand of the political elite and the Canadian state by demanding recognition of the diverse ethnic makeup of the population” (Galabuzi 68), allowing citizens, racialized or not, to believe that their needs and desires are represented in legislation of state, leading to the nationalistic pride with which most Canadians relate their opinions on multiculturalism. The ramifications of these two approaches is not that one holds precedence over the over, but that they work in tandem to construct a Canada that is paternalistic and empathetic, symbolizing a guiding hand in Canada’s multiculturalism that is reciprocating and directing the civility of its citizens. Thus, while Canadian laws reflect intentions of civility alongside the reality of a stratified racialized society,44 “this pervertibility is essential, irreducible, necessary too” and

“[t]he perfectibility of laws is at this cost” (Derrida 79). Indeed, “conditional laws would cease to

be laws of hospitality if they were not guided, given inspiration, given aspiration, required, even,

by the law of unconditional hospitality” (Derrida 79); that is, the ideal of multiculturalism,

resultant as it is on the colonial impulse of civilization, is the impetus for the failure of

multiculturalism to practically benefit racialized persons in Canada.

In her matrilineal poem “begging is a ting,” d’bi young anitafrika writes of the failure of

the system to account for the reality of poverty for racialized people in Canada. Originally

penned by her Jamaican mother Anita Stewart in 1985, the poem as reimagined by young revisits

the multiply located complacency that is the refusal to acknowledge suffering in the face a

44 See Thobani’s Exalted Subjects for more. 147

hegemonic system that requires a complete and blind nationalism to function. Young’s track opens with an address to her “mummy” (young), over the traditional reggae 4/4 tempo, acknowledging her dub heritage, her mother’s membership in Poets in Unity (and, thus, the relationship between dub poetry in Jamaica and Canada), and her own position as an inheritor of a genre of which her mother was a “pioneer.” Young then quickly moves into the piece, the keyboard, guitar, and bass quickly assuming dominance over the slow moving beat. A cowbell moves in discordance on the offbeat, creating a multiply layered backdrop to young’s vocals.

Where reggae most often has the guitar perform on the offbeat, here young has created a controlled cacophony, mimicking tradition, but also incorporating dancehall digital elements.

The result is music that seems defiant, while simultaneously suggesting that harmony is possible out of discord.

Young opens with the hook, “begging is a ting a carry di swing/inna disya time it cyaan be a crime” (young), which she repeats. The “swing” here is a playful melody that contrasts sharply with the politics of homelessness and poverty in Canada. She moves on to describe a city, somewhere between Jamaica and Canada: “walk down town one a dem days/had to stand up a while and tek a good gaze” which is “plagued” to the point that poverty has become commonplace. She then goes into four examples of poverty, examining emotions and reactions when the middle-class is faced with the underprivileged. Young suggests that beggars, rightly, turn to crime as society has “force dem fi tief” (young) or that institutions made to help poverty, in fact, have to access to the needy, as “beggar don’t guh church for di fear of di rod” (young); thus, the problem of poverty becomes elided under the guise of ‘someone’ helping, ultimately reinforcing the hegemonic maintenance of the status quo. Finally, young ends with an address to her audience: “you know when you walk around the streets you see a lot of people begging you

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know.” The “see” echoing the “gaze” from the opening, reminding us that looking and seeing are not the same thing. Young requires engagement in her revolushun, she requires that we acknowledge that which is right in front of us, no matter how unpleasant “a ting.”

“’forget yu troubles and dance’”: Rhythm, Reason, and Regent Park

In her poem “Rub A Dub Style Inna Regent Park,” originally released on the album

Revolutionary Tea Party in 1986 and later published in Women Do This Every Day in 1993,

Lillian Allen examines the lived reality of the vertical mosaic through her depiction of Toronto’s black ghetto Regent Park, located downtown, across the street from the iconic Eaton Centre, a site of poverty and crime that is hedged in by more affluent and touristic neighbourhoods. While

“[t]oday, giving recognition to specific neighbourhoods in Toronto with sizable Caribbean

Canadian populations, such as Jane and Finch, Scarborough, Malvern, or Regent Park, is almost a given in Toronto hip-hop” (Walker 164), “ ‘Rub A Dub Style’ represents an early example of reggae and reggae-related Black music forms of recognizing specific communities of African-

Canadians” (Walker 164). Allen’s text is thus reflective of larger cultural movements in its representation of black ghettos, not simply as sites of crime and violence, but also sites of community, a representation that leads to an ethnocentric pride, despite the bleak message of the dub poem. Allen’s work reflects the dangers and failures of Galabuzi’s multiculturalism: that a population can be managed by the hegemonic maintenance of a celebration of culture for only so long.

“Rub A Dub Style Inna Regent Park” is about the diasporic relationship between Jamaica and Canada, reggae and dub poetry. The title of Allen’s dub poem alludes to the musical shift in

Jamaica in the early 1980s from roots reggae, which was political and rebellious in nature, to

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dancehall reggae, a music that is heavily influenced by dub45 with either contentious and crude

(slackness dancehall) or socially investigative (cultural dancehall) lyrics that seek to interrogate

complacency by critiquing the audience, largely the “underprivileged underclass” (Francis-

Jackson 191). The shift from roots to dancehall is often attributed to the death of Bob Marley in

1981, but that relies on an outsider understanding of the reggae movement, as Marley was

always more significant to non-Jamaicans than he was to his home audience (Katz 299). Instead,

the birth of dancehall is tied to many changes in Jamaica in the late 1970s and early 1980s: peace

brokered in 1978 between the ruling People’s National Party (PNP) and the Jamaica Labour

Party (JLP), who had been the source of violence and death in Jamaica for almost forty years

now (Katz 294); the subsequent derailment of said peace after a shooting in 1979 (Katz 298); the

ousting of the PNP and installment of the JLP as the ruling party (Katz 298); and the introduction

of digital music into mainstream culture with the advent of the Casio keyboard (Katz 344).

Reggae as a genre has always been political, and, historically, it was often used despite the

desires of the authors to support either the PNP or JLP. Most famously, the PNP invited Bob

Marley to perform a few days before the 1976 election; thus, linking the two events in the minds

of the general populace. It is metonymic of the relationship between violence, reggae, and

politics that several gunmen attacked Marley and his party before the performance (Katz 236).

The resultant dancehall style is a response to this political violence. Sugar Minott, reggae artist

and producer in Jamaica in the 1970s and 1980s tries to articulate this desire: “’People just want

to hear songs that make them feel good in the long run. […] [M]ake them feel happy. It’s not

45 Dub music works inversely to dub poetry. Where dub poetry focuses minimalizes the music to shift focus on the words, dub music removes lyrics and focuses on the music, allowing a participative audience to sing instead. 150

every time you want to tell somebody, ‘They’re bombing up Belfast’ – that’s not music, that’s

politics’” (qtd. in Katz 347). Rub A Dub style is a type of dancehall reggae that emphasizes

heavy instrumentals (Francis-Jackson 194) and the celebration of “slackness” (Francis-Jackson

191).

The first line of “Rub A Dub Style Inna Regent Park” opens with “Monday morning broke” (81), “Monday” and “morning” both signifying beginnings and the “broke” hinting at poverty and a disruption of a person’s mental state. This is underscored in the lines following:

“news of a robbery/Pam mind went/couldn’t hold the load” (81). That Pam “couldn’t hold the load” demonstrates that her breakdown is a result of the accumulation of multiple breaks, as she begins from a broken position, living in the poverty and racialized isolation of her Regent Park ghetto. This dub poem begins with Pam, a mother who endures until the death of her son, and she can endure no longer. However, Allen quickly shifts perspective, moving away from Pam’s son to think about “a wey dis ya society do/to wi sons” (81), the second-person address demands that we make Pam’s struggles our own, that we think about the larger concerns of violence enacted upon black men’s bodies by “society,” meaning the colonial inheritances in English

Canada that cause the death of black men by others, as well as black men themselves. Allen then

interrogates the relationship that black violence has with cultural celebration and music. The

hook repeats “’forget yu troubles and dance’/forget yu bills them/an irie up yuself” (81)

throughout the poem, the opening line a quote from “Them Belly Full (But We Hungry),” a

reggae song articulating the power of music to incite revolution, by Bob Marley who Allen cites

as a “remarkable figure[e] of the twentieth century, [without whom] there would be no dub

poetry” (Allen 12). However, unlike Marley’s construction of dance as active and empowering,

Allen posits a dance that allows the dancer to “forget yu dreams gathering dusts” (81) as

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emblematic of a celebration of culture that does not enhance living conditions, but, instead,

reinforces stereotypes and maintains the hegemonic Canadian order. When Allen says that

“culture carry im past/an steady im mind” (82), she is articulating this dangerous duality in

cultural representation: that blackness needs to articulate itself performatively, but that

articulation is always already undermined by the operation of translation and management that is

multiculturalism.

In her performance of this poem at the 1988 World of Music, Arts and Dance (WOMAD) festival at Harbourfront in Toronto (YouTube), Allen opens without music, introducing Pam’s

“break” in Jamaican patois, spoken in a rhythmic, staccato style. After the first hook, Allen

stretches out the vowels of “Lawd” in her expletive/prayer before ending with a slow repetition

of “sons;” this stretching out of “Lawd” emotes frustration in/with Pam, Pam’s son, the police,

and society, while simultaneously acting as plea to the higher power of Canada and God, and the

repetition of “sons” bleeding into the sound of the bongo drums echoes this frustration, where it

then becomes overtaken by the sound the sound of the drums.

Allen performs with a traditional reggae band: a bass, a guitar, a keyboard, the drums,

and the bongos. Each part is fairly standard in terms of the makeup of reggae music; the only

notable stylistic choice being, perhaps, the bongos. While bongos can often be found in reggae

music, they are not essential and represent a choice to communicate the necessity of an earthier

beat (hand drumming) on an Afro-Cuban instrument suggesting history and placement in the

black diaspora. For Jamaicans, bongo drumming is “music created by the lower-class African-

Jamaicans, music yearning to make a connection with a repressed memory of Africa” (Walker

262). As the repetition of “sons” leads into the sound of drumming bongos, Allen is taking that

instinctive empathy of/for violence committed unto black bodies, and is renegotiating it, moving

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it inwards and outwards, towards the spirit of reggae, a memory of a global community of black people; a community of impoverished and underprivileged black people who hunger for revolution, even though “Them Belly Full.”

Allen’s meter is the traditional 4/4, with a guitar counter-measure. The music is steady and representative of the intentions of dub poetry, which are that the voice be the focal point.

However, she asserts the importance of the music through dance and deliberate pauses46, allowing the audience to enjoy the musicality of the experience. She also pauses her performance and spends time introducing the members of the band. The bass is at the forefront and Allen calls it “the soul, the heartbeat of reggae” (Allen) and “the resistant instrument,” which is what gives reggae its ponderous yet comforting musical tone, its power to convey rebellion through music.

Overall, the performance offers what the page cannot: a tangible musical experience that simultaneously heightens and detracts from the seriousness of the topic. The periodic exclamations (“oh,” “hey,” “ah!,” etc.) that Allen peppers throughout her performance not only add emphasis, but make her more accessible, conversational. As Allen moves towards the end of the performance, she adds the lines “we coming, we coming to fight down oppression” (Allen), which are not in the printed version, between introducing the bass and the guitar. If, as she has told us, the bass is the resistant instrument, then the guitar is the counter-discursive reading that we apply to the music, playing on the offbeat, always slightly out of step with the rest of the band. Allen disrupts the introduction of the counter-discursive instrument with a call to arms, so

46 Remember the importance of this embodiment for black Caribbean Canadian women’s performance from the when I begin my reading of ‘da Kink in My Hair in chapter six where you see the same pauses, but to different effect. Where Anthony wants to make her audience uncomfortable in order to remind them of the role of the performer, Allen is reminding her audience of the function of the music, the tradition of the reggae beat, in the effort to bring performance and audience together. 153

that the bass is not the only signifier of resistance. After their introduction, the band again repeats

“rub a dub style inna Regent Park” into the fade, resonating as they represent ideas of community and the power of action insofar as it happens together: a black nationality that moves through Jamaica to Canada to operate globally.

What “Rub A Dub Style Inna Regent Park” does not do is represent Rub a Dub dancehall music, as “[u]nlike reggae, dancehall style is not necessarily identified by its heavy repeated bassline. In fact, quite often the bassline does not exist at all, […] the tendency has been to move away from the ‘accented’ standard reggae bassline to a more up-tempo type rhythm” (Francis-

Jackson 192). The title of Allen’s poem works ironically to call attention to the shift from roots to dancehall, so as to critique the less revolutionary tendencies of the latter. This works to metonymically represent the function of multiculturalism in Canada: a tool of hegemonic maintenance that allows the underprivileged to “forget yu troubles and dance.”

Dub as Matrilineal: Creolized English

In an interview with Christian Habekost, author of the first book length manuscript on dub poetry Verbal Riddim: The Politics and Aesthetics of African-Caribbean Dub Poetry, Afua

Cooper thinks about the relationship between the men and women of dub poetry:

For me, as I see it, reggae is very male-oriented. I mean even as far as the instruments are

concerned. You see a man going on and ego trip with his guitar. [laughter] But, yes, it’s a

barrier that you just have to keep hitting. Because men who are so progressive – when it

comes to the woman question they become so reactionary like they’re living in the

medieval age. So it is a struggle. And it’s very frustrating when you’re fighting white

racism and – well, that might get me in trouble – black sexism. (qtd. in Habekost 201)

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Reggae itself was born out of a masculinist tradition,47 a truth that the female dub poet must always organize and operate against. Reggae does not only reflect these sexist constructions through form, but, much more obviously through lyrics. Thinking about the shift from roots to dancehall reggae, Afua Cooper muses on the male-centered nature of this genre of music:

It’s a man’s music. A lot of the words and phrases are very male. They are taken out of

male language. There is hardly any female language in reggae. If you listen to the lyrics,

they cuss women: ‘She’s dis, she’s dat, she can’t cook, she’s committing adultery.’ They

want a slim girl, they don’t want a fat girl. … A lot of the music that is coming out right

now is very anti-woman. (qtd. in Habekost 201)

In the wake of this male dominated music, the matrilineal tradition of dub poetry is inclusive of both men and women (like celebrated Canadian dub poet Clifton Joseph), so long as they incorporate this reaction to the masculinist aspects of Caribbean music into their work.

If reggae can find popularity in a rebellious voice that does not demand an acknowledgement of the implicit gendered oppressions of the musical genre, then dub poetry works inversely, representing resistance through the confrontation of the prejudices of the self, as

“[w]omen dub poets regard their battle against sexist discrimination as an integral part of the overall political struggle which is at the heart of dub expression” (Habekost 204). This inculcation of multiple voices in protest of multiple oppressions is the inheritance that dub poets generate, so that while dub poetry is born from reggae, dub poetry itself “bear[s] witness to a

47 As I have already outlined above, the musical traditions of the Caribbean operate along a male/female binary; this is not something I agree or disagree with, it is simply a fact. From the misogynist language of more traditionally “male” music to the men’s and women’s dances in the dancehall, there is a practicality in understanding how these systems work in order to disrupt or interrogate them. 155

determination among Caribbean women artists to force the male to become aware of the fact that

the system of oppression may be embedded in his own psyche” (Habekost 207).

The construction of nation language is one of the ways that dub poets resist the self-

loathing and self-civilizing legacy of their colonial heritage, as “[d]ub poets regard the use of

Patois as an act of resistance to the European domination of Caribbean culture” (Habekost 63);

thus, enabling the very language of dub poetry to work transgressively. The treatment of

different Englishes in the Caribbean provokes a stratification of people along the lines of

education, class, and race. English was and always will be a tool of civility and, thus, resistance

requires the use of non-English English, nation language.

Dub poetry in Canada is part of a larger Caribbean womban’s tradition, a feminist genre

that is born out of the masculinist tradition of reggae and reimagined through the feminist

discourse of Miss Lou,48 as one of the first to use creole in literature, and Nanny Maroon49, an

historical figure who escaped slavery and helped establish a free community. These two women

are representative of Jamaican culture in that they helped shape and conscribe the way in which

Jamaicans could see themselves as distinct and empowered. These two women, in many ways,

are as much produced by Jamaican culture as they have contributed towards it and dub poetry is

one popular production among others that seeks to integrate the articulations of voice and

rebellion that these women represent.

48 Miss Lou is a named inspiration to the dub poetry movement in Jamaica and more largely abroad. For more information on Miss Lou’s contributions, see Jean ‘Binta’ Breeze’s essay “Can a Dub Poet Be a Woman?,” Linton Kwesi Johnson’s obituary celebrating Miss Lou “Louise Bennett: Voice of the People,” Ric Knowles’ “To Be Dub, Female and Black: Towards a Womban-Centred Afro-Caribbean Diasporic Performance Aesthetic in Toronto,” and Klive Walker’s book Dubwise, amongst other sources on the subject. 49 Nanny Maroon has been an inspiration for many dub poets including Miss Lou herself, Afua Cooper, Jean ‘Binta’ Breeze, and d.bi young, to name a few that felt moved enough by her stories to include her as a character in their work. 156

6.1 Dub as Matrilineal: Miss Lou’s Legacy

To understand Miss Lou and her relationship to dub poetry, it is also necessary to

understand the relationship between culture and language in the Caribbean. In his Dictionary of

Caribbean English Usage, retired linguistics professor Richard Allsopp produces a

comprehensive guide to understanding the complicated spectrum that is the Creoles of the

Caribbean islands50. Allsopp focuses his attention on the parts of speech derived first from

Standard British English and then the language remembered from sub-Saharan African. In

summarizing the difference between Standard English and Caribbean English (CE), Allsopp

claims that

there is a general sense in which a “West Indian accent” is distinguishable as such

anywhere in the world. Likely reasons for this are the general quality of CE vowels, the

sharp reduction in the number of diphthongal glides and, the most distinguishing feature

of all, the phrasal intonation in which the separation of syllabic pitch and stress in CE is a

major factor of difference from spoken Standard English. (xliv)

Perhaps inevitably given his cultural standpoint, Allsopp characterizes (a single, monolithic)

“Caribbean English” against a notion of “Standard English” that is itself difficult to define. In her

follow-up to Allsopp’s work, English in the Caribbean: Variation, Style and Standards in

Jamaica and Trinidad, linguist Dagmar Deuber thinks about the complexity of Standard English,

50 Allsopp focuses his attention on the parts of speech derived first from Standard British English and then the language remembered from sub-Saharan African. Allsopp admits to spending less time investigating words derived from Hindu or Muslim traditions, but it is in the integration of language from southern China that Allsopp admits himself to be “wholly unequipped” (xxxi), and we can expect that the contributions to Caribbean creole by this group are underrepresented in his work. However, while it is important to recognize that reggae has had significant contributions from Chinese Jamaicans and the language of the genre reflects that, Allsopp’s extensive focus on the contributions of Afro-Caribbean contributions provides an important resource for this chapter’s focus on black Caribbean Canadian women. 157

as she distinguishes between Standard British English and the many Standard Englishes that

make up the Caribbean, focusing on Jamaican Standard English and Trinidadian Standard

English. If, as Deuber suggests, Creole in the Caribbean operates on a spectrum, then these

standard Englishes are understood to be that which is spoken and written in educational settings

or formal public events, such as elections or trials. Deuber, like Allsopp, refers to the operation

of this spectrum as a creolized language. Within this spectrum, we have the terms acrolect that

signifies a creole that is closest to the Standard English of that location, basilect, which is that

most closely resembling creole proper, and mesolect, which exists as hypothetical median and cannot be proven, as Creolized English is a set of shifting patterns without a true center. Deuber gives the following as example, where the top is non-Creolized Standard English and moves downwards towards Creole:

ai tould [h]im

ai told [h]im

a told im

a tol im

a tel im

mi tel im

mi tel am. (6)

It must be understood that Creolized English is spoken by most Jamaicans, who regularly code- switch between modes on this acrolect-to-basilect spectrum in order to adapt according to the needs of formality. This process of adaptation is a part of the cultural fabric of Jamaica, “[t]hus, in dealing with spoken English in the Caribbean, one may in fact have to deal with the whole

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spectrum of forms and constructions that may be said to make up the Creole continuum, but one has to be aware of their stylistic connotations” (Deuber 6).

Dub poetry reflects the code-switching of Creolized Jamaican English, moving back and forth between Creole and decreolized phrasing, and, as dub poetry moves to Canada, this code- switching becomes doubly important. As Habekost says of dub poetry in general, the genre

“embraces the whole spectrum of linguistic expression, from the ‘basilect’ of broad or deep

Patois, the ‘language of the people,’ to the standard level of the ‘Queen’s English.’” (Habekost

69). However, this tension is thrown into still-sharper relief in the context of a nation in which a form of standardized English (standard Canadian English, rather than the “Queen’s English” that occupies an equivalent prestige level in Britain) dominates to a very high degree. Where reggae, especially roots reggae, always focuses on the basilect, its inheritor, dub poetry, moves consciously between the two farthest points of the spectrum, “dislocating, acting upon, destroying, and (re)creating language so that the Word can unfold its power and the verbally forged resistance gathers momentum” (Habekost 69). For, if reggae is the father of dub poetry, its grandmother is Louise Bennett, a woman who dedicated her literary career to advocating for a

Jamaican language that reflected a Jamaican people.

Known as Miss Lou, Bennett began her work in the 1940s and was excluded from the traditional world of literary publishing because of her unorthodox use of language, but “[d]espite exclusion, Louise Bennett took her words – through the medium of performance – directly to the

Jamaican people” (Allen 13). Miss Lou is a vital progenitor of contemporary Canadian dub poetry, a part of the womban tradition of Canadian dub poets. In her work, “Louise Bennett not only undermined the notion of creole as ‘dutty language’ but, in doing so, gave the oral nature of popular Jamaican culture a new dignity” (Habekost 70) and it is this innovation, this ability for

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rebirth that produces this legacy of matrilineage, as “dub poets have remodelled the component of the oral tradition, placing it within the context of a revolutionary struggle against cultural and physical oppression” (Habekost 71), remaking the inherently male reggae tradition into one that confronts even the self. However, it is the ability to move fluently between the acrolect and basilect that makes the language of that rebellion digestible and appropriate within a multitude of audiences. Language, its flexibility and nuanced implications, is a fundamental part of dub poetry, and its reconstruction of nation languages, both Jamaican and Canadian, is one of the ways that dub poetry honours its matrilineal history and its literary progenitor in Miss Lou.

Dub as Matrilineal: What are Women Made of?

Ahdri zhina mandiela is an inheritor of and progenitor to the matrilineal dub poetry tradition. She is the founder of b current, the earliest of the black theatre companies still operating in Toronto today, and, with her theatrical piece dark diaspora… in dub!, “forged a new form, not out of carnival, ‘mas, or calypso, but out of her own political and poetic practice as a dub poet” (Knowles 83-4). Dark diaspora… in dub! had mandiela herself acting as “lead character and poet maestra” with six “dancers and ‘chanters’” (Cooper 444), though the stage directions are mutable and move from one woman acting as voice, three to five dancing as shape/sound, and three to five singing as voice/shape/sound to 15-50 women acting collectively as voice/shape/sound. The set is minimalist, the costumes “close to bareness” (mandiela x). In her introduction to the dub performance in testifyin’, Afua Cooper claims that dark diaspora… in dub! “offers a stunning discourse on Black woman’s creativity, Black womanhood, Black feminism, and presents a solution for Black female emancipation” (441) and Knowles tells us that “in bringing dub to the stage through women’s bodies, the play also womanized a Caribbean form that, grounded in competition and virtuosic display, had been overwhelmingly masculinist”

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(86). In her introduction, mandiela cites ntozake shange, Nikki Giovanni, Sonia Sanchez, Audre

Lorde, and Alice Walker as inspirations in their black woman centered experiences articulated in

“familiar terms” (viii), letting us know that despite disparity of nationality, black women across the diaspora are a community with shared oppressions and celebrations, making dark diaspora… in dub! a dub performance working across demarcations of space to express the needs of black women in the womban tradition of dub poetry.

In “sugar & spice & parboiled rice,” a poem set before the poet maestra moves from

Jamaica to Canada, ahdri zhina mandiela moves back and forth in the spectrum of Creolized

English, even as the poem moves temporally between colonial and neo-colonial Jamaica. The title of the poem already hints at a matrilineal engagement with diaspora, the children’s song an innocent inquiry: what are little girls made of? The answer is the interrogation of an idealized femininity that cannot stand against the truth of domestic work in a place made foreign by neo-

colonial oppression. The sugar and spice, part of the original song, serve less as constructions of

a benign and sweet femininity and more as a reminder of the plantations that English colonizers

set up in Jamaica, introducing slave labour to keep up production. The rice is half cooked, and its

in-between state reflects that of the hyphenated national, always ready to work, always in a state

of flux. Found in most national dishes of the Caribbean,51 and, thus, a sign of interlocatedness in

a globalized world, parboiled rice operates as an efficient means of food preparation; however, it

is also important to note that rice is associated with many national dishes in Jamaica. Thus, we

move from the historical slave labour that introduced black bodies to Jamaica and end up in the

51 Rice is also a staple food of countries and continents that have diasporic ties to the Caribbean: Africa, Asia, and South America. 161

neo-colonial world of hard domestic labour that is the lived reality of most non-Western women’s experiences.

Mandiela continues her recipe,

sprinkle in

some sun-

dried blood or fish/preserved

in sweat, (9) articulating the narrator’s world. The language works like any recipe, it is easy to follow, working in an acrolect of Creolized English. Metrically, “some sun-“ and “in sweat/” are paired, both working as the only lines of iambic monometer in the first stanza, operating as both acrolect, part of the lines before and after, and basilect, as sole components of a line made grammatical through the functional shift of Creolized English, where “words are converted, at all levels of CE, in part-of-speech and sense. This multiplies considerably the coverage of its vocabulary” (xlvii). In this way,

many adjectives function as adverbs (good, bad, safe, funny, careful, etc. for well,

badly, safely, carefully, etc.); nouns, adjectives, ideophones function as verbs (to rice

somebody, to sweet somebody, to vups past somebody, etc.); and the reverse also occurs,

verb or adjective functioning as noun (to like plenty eat, a real stupidy, etc.), verb or

noun as adjective (a big eat man, obeah people, etc.). This well-known linguistic feature

is such a strongly marked characteristic of CE. (xlvii)

So, by way of this functional shift, mandiela uses “sun” and “sweat” as both nouns and verbs.

Within the context of their sentences, the words operate as directions, signifying an agent in

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control of her own labour. As verbs, these words become actions committed upon the body of

our narrator. Heat and hard work characterize our narrator’s experience of life in Jamaica.

As we move to the end of the first stanza, mandiela starts to shift her use of language, so that it reflects a basilect usage of Creolized Jamaican. She also makes more heavy use of slash marks and colons, which is representative of her work in dark diaspora… in dub. In her article

“Snow on the Canefields/(the De-icing of a Canadian City): Jamaican Canadian Identity and

Kinetic Language in ahdri zhina mandiela’s dark diaspora …in dub: a dub theatre piece,”

Loretta Collins examines the function of these slash marks by saying that “[s]ometimes mandiela

simply uses the slash to replace the comma or period, creating an ongoing momentum and

kinetic energy in a line, omitting or creating breath pauses or full stops. Sometimes the slash

functions as a weapon, slicing up the line or individual words” and that “mandiela also uses the

slash to splice together pieces of discourse lifted from disparate circumstances, the way a rap

studio technician or deejay might splice together sound samples” (54); thus, the “one-/pot/creole slot/you put your right/foot in: blood gut” (9, bold slashes belong to mandiela and italicized slashes belong to me) is a cacophony of cultures, the colonizer’s Hokey Pokey asking us to partake while the Jamaican Creole understanding of the “put foot” telling us to “run away in panic” (“foot”). The slashes disrupt our reading of the recipe, the “one-pot” does not fit, though it is articulated by the nameless agents acting upon our narrator. While Western constructions of culture would have us believe that Jamaica can be constituted through a distilled lens of food, mandiela would have us understand differently. Attempting to appropriate Jamaican culture as a homogenous construction will only result in “blood gut” (9), the carnage of disease produced by the inability to manage overconsumption (“blood gut”).

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“Sugar & spice & parboiled rice” is the elocution of the disharmony that homogenous constructions of culture causes to the host culture both at home and abroad. Stereotypical representations of Jamaica do not help Jamaicans; no matter how many representations of “fun- in-the-sun” tourist boards choose to show, “some sun” is always paired with “in sweat” (9), as

Jamaicans, and especially Jamaican women, as always “covered/dust-to-dust: blood gut” (10).

Collins reminds us that

Creole culture and identity as viewed by the tourism industry, cultural critics, and

imperialist endeavors of military/industrial complexes are sardonically mocked by means

of exposing the disjuncture between discursive fields of representation and the historical

realities in the poem ‘sugar & spice & parboiled rice.’ Mandiela splices together

childhood rhymes, the ‘Hokey Pokey’ song, and a child’s prayer (‘thank you for the

world so bright’), to expose the cultural and economic imperialism impacting Caribbean

creole culture. (60)

This juxtaposition of childhood and oppression demonstrates the danger for Jamaica in perpetuating the patrilineal relationship between it and the West, the roots of which were planted during Jamaica’s colonization by Britain. This patrilineal relationship requires that Jamaica trust itself to the benevolence of colonial and neo-colonial powers, powers operating from a position of capitalist investiture, rather than that of the doting parent, despite claims to the contrary. In this way, mandiela calls outward to her audience to consider the passivity required in patrilineality, reflecting Canadian attitudes towards multiculturalism in her criticism of neo- colonial intentions towards Jamaica, while using a matrilineal tradition to articulate her contempt for cultural appropriation.

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Nanny Maroon: Appropriating the Body

Along with Miss Lou, dub poets in Canada have taken Nanny Maroon as their

metaphorical grandmother, inspiring works of art that take pride in the weight of history and find

redemption in this black, female figure who is traditionally used in Canadian dub poetry. Cooper

tells us that Nanny, as “An Akan Jamaican Maroon priestess leader, anti-slavery fighter, Black liberation warrior and strategist, and renowned sorceress, [..] often relied upon, and used words to beat down the British Babylonian slavery system that sought to destroy her and her people.

Women dub poets see Nanny as an inspiratory, and often invoke her in their poetic productions”

(4); thus, the writing of Nanny Maroon is the writing of an idealized history and, inevitably, the idealized self.

The Maroons are a culturally distinct ethnic group in Jamaica, traditionally living in

Moore Town, Charles Town, Scot’s Hall, and Accompong, which the Maroons own by right of colonial British treaties. In eighteenth century Jamaica, a group of enslaved Africans formed themselves into a set of small armies and launched several assaults against plantations and slaveholders. The Maroons then took land for themselves and fought against the British for the right to hold it. By the end of the 1730s, the Maroons had frustrated Britain’s efforts in Jamaica to the extent that the impossible happened: “they entered into diplomatic relations with people defined by their own laws a ‘commodities’ akin to livestock” (Bilby xiii). This negotiation for rights is historic, never in its dealings with black slaves before or after has Britain capitulated land. The treaties guaranteed the Maroons the right to live free and self-governing.

Grandy Nanny, as the Maroons name her, was a queen to the Maroons, an inheritor to the wisdom and knowledge, along with the spirit animals of the leaders, which was accomplished in the space between ceremony and Maroon magic, which they call Kromanti. Legends and

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histories intertwine where Nanny is concerned. She was capable of using Kromanti in pursuit of

her cause, and returns to visit the Maroons occasionally, using reincarnation. Nanny was integral

to the peace bartered with the British and, in fact, worked counter to many of the concerns held

by her fellow Maroons. Interviewed by Kenneth Bilby, author of True-Born Maroon, in 1991,

Johnny Minott is one of many who pass on the tale of Nanny’s signing of the treaties:

None of these four general, as I tell you, do not witness peace, do not see de peace,

because they did not want it. All four did not want it. You know, de day of peace, Mento

throw him jege pon Grandy [Nanny] and follow river. Nobody no know where him end

to. [Granfa] Welcome turn one big hog-nose wha’ ina dem river. Nobody know where

him went. [He] turn one fish, one hog-nose [type of mullet]. Yes. And de other two man

left at Stone Wall. Nobody know what happen to dem. No Maroon can’t tell. (qtd. in

Bilby 273)

So, while fighting the other Maroon leaders who contested peace, Nanny Maroon was responsible for securing safety for her people. Unfortunately, as a result of the infighting, Granfa

Puss’ Maroons disappeared and were never found again. Like the contesting Maroons, the

British read the signing of the peace treaty as submission, rewriting Nanny’s heroism as cowardice, “British documents relating to the treaties of 1739 tend to give the impression that, in coming to terms with the colonial rulers of the island, the Maroons were ‘submitting’ themselves to a greater authority” (Bilby 263).

This rewriting of the Maroon’s peacemaking is typical of the rewriting of Nanny that would shape her story up to and long past her being installed as the National Hero of Jamaica in

1970. Nanny is most well-known by those outside of the Maroon community for her cooking pot, which bubbled without fire and drowned British soldiers. However, her most controversial

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mythologizing comes from her known prowess as a warrior who could stop bullets with her posterior and then fire them back towards the enemy. In some versions, Nanny can even accomplish this task with her vagina and well as her buttocks, making use of that which the

British soldiers lack. Many Jamaican writers have taken up Nanny’s heroics in literature. Our own Miss Lou writes:

From Maroon Nanny teck her body

Bounce bullet back pon man….

Jamaica oman teck her time

Dah mount an meck de grade (qtd. in Bilby 203)

However, like many critics who valorize Nanny’s efforts against the British and celebrate her as a hero, Miss Lou shifts the focus towards Nanny’s body, rather than her buttocks, which many have found to be too vulgar to mythologize. Edward Kamau Brathwaite finds that he cannot swallow the vulgarity haunting Jamaica’s national hero, and suggests that, in fact, that Nanny caught bullets using her hands and it was the British who rewrote that act, in order to disparage

Nanny’s character (Bilby 204). The Maroons themselves, whose stories of Nanny are clear that she used her posterior to return bullets to the British, do not embrace Brathwaite’s version of events, as they do not feel that the British ever had that sort of power in their own oral tradition.

Paralleling Grandy Nanny’s stories is that of Tata Boni, a popular figure in Aluku oral tradition, known for defeating Dutch soldiers in French Guiana in the eighteenth century, using bodily orifices to return bullets (Bilby 206). The use of Nanny’s body is controversial to say the least, and even Miss Lou is loath to tackle the topic, saying that she “teck her body,” euphemistically using the whole to synecdochally represent the lewd part.

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Nanny Maroon: Appropriation as Civility

Though many have rewritten Nanny to suit a more prudish audience, “a number of

feminist writers have embraced it and reinterpreted it in their own terms” (Bilby 204). The

female body’s vulgarity as a site of potential empowerment is taken up by d’bi young in her dub monodrama blood.claat. The title of the dub piece is “a jamaican curse word. literally means bloodied cloth. menstrual cloth used by oomaan when they bleed” (young 16) and is a fairly commonly used word among Torontonian Jamaicans to signify disgust and revulsion.

Blood.claat has four locations in space and time: pre-colonial East Africa, Toronto Pearson

Airport three years before the present-day events of the play, Nanny Town (before and during its

destruction in 1734), and present day Kingston. Jamaican Patois is used throughout the

performance, the use of language complicating the relationship between the misogyny and

female agency, as is represented by the title, which uses a common expletive to engage with the

power of the female body. In the title, vulgarity is paired with agency to reinvent perceptions of

women that have traditionally relied on using the female body as an example or ineptitude or a

set of unfathomable lewd processes. Like the use of Patois, the use of the female body rewrites

what was once considered “dutty” (Habekost 70) and makes it revolutionary.

The performance opens with mama afrika engaging in a feminized ritual of blood and

magic, calling to the goddess oyo, the “gate keeper of the cemetery” (20) and then introduces the

supporting characters, all of whom are played by young52. Our main story then sees our

protagonist, mudgu, being criticized by her granny for starting her menses while sleeping, and,

52 It is worth thinking, again, of the role that the monodrama plays in negotiating space for the disruption that young wants to show, as well as the construction of black womanhood as nuanced and multiply layered (see the next chapter “’Where I’m from’: Language, Ritual, and Space in Black, Caribbean Canadian Feminist Work and Play.”). 168

thus, dirtying the bed, as granny says, “is shame she want to bring down inside my house” (21).

Within the performance, we are constantly moving back and forth between two types of blood.

The story is a set of reactions to mudgu menstruating, pairing the blood of (male) violence

(which is acceptable) with the blood of menstruation (which is unacceptable). This juxtaposition

of menstruation with violence is foreshadowed in the opening:

sorry. sorry. sorry... mi nevah know that it would come last night granny... mi

nevah mean to soil up the bed granny... granny no! (her grandmother hits her

repeatedly)… no... I going to wash everyting... no granny I don't want to be

nasty. I am going to wash everthing clean clean clean... I nevah soil di bed on

purpose granny... a sleep mi a sleep and it leak out a mi panty... next time i will

know better and do better... because cleanliness is next to godliness... yes

granny... cleanliness is next to godliness. (22)

Mudgu’s language in this passage changes to reflect the nuances of changing agency that “dirty” holds for both her and her grandmother. Mudgu uses the object position of “mi” to begin her entreaties to her grandmother, positioning her use of Jamaican Creole towards the basilect, as she attempts to objectify herself to appease her grandmother’s anger. When Mudgu uses the term “to soil up,” she is using the object verb “up” to reconstruct the verb “soil,” so that it is both verb and object, operating between Mudgu’s intentions and the bed. After her grandmother hits her,

Mudgu begins to use more acrolect in her creolized English, switching to the subjective pronoun

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“I” and eventually inserting the verb “to be53” and elongating “everyting” to “everything.” So, as

the violence committed against mudgu increases, so does her sense of self decrease.

The next act of violence occurs on mudgu’s bus ride to school when the bus driver takes

out a cutlass and attacks a man who refuses to pay his fare. The bus driver lets out a stream of

misogynist curses as he readies for his attack:

tttarblack bbbwoy a cccall me ssttamma. pussyhole mmmonkey a disrespect me. yuh

mmmoddahh a guh bawl ffffi yuh tonite.

(he gets a cutlass from the side of the bus and aims at the man) tttalk now nuh pussyhole.

tttalk now nuh. whe yyyyuh seh? bbblooodclaat. (29)

The bus driver’s misogynist use of Jamaican basilect Creole is contrasted with his stutter, the

criticism of his disability sending him into a fury where he attacks both verbally and physically.

The stammer produces a language that is and is not basilect, in that it is refigured through

disability. The stutter stretches out the consonants, rather than shifting vowels as an accent

would. Where the allusions to race, and even disability, cannot be said without stuttering, the

references to “pussyhole” are easily articulated. It is only when the bus driver reaches the end of

his diatribe and exclaims “bbblooodclaat” that he stammers while using a female-centered

expletive. This is also the only case where the bus driver’s stammer stretches out the interior of a

word, the “ooo” expressing his frustration and rage before he violently slices the man in front of

him. Here, the complication of the creolized Jamaican basilect with the stutter works to highlight

the potential vulgarity inherent in Jamaican Creole. The misogyny of the language is stretched

53 For more on the ways that the use and absence of “to be” work in feminist black Caribbean Canadian performance, again, see the next chapter. 170

out and made bare: the sexism, racism, and ableism are all shocking, which is carefully reflected in the violence of the bus driver’s actions.

After the attack, mudgu is covered in blood and cannot go to school, so she goes to her boyfriend njoni’s home. Here, while njoni is sympathetic to the violence that mudgu experienced on the bus, he is less tolerant of her breaking taboo by seeing him while menstruating. Mudgu reacts to the hypocrisy of accepting the blood of violence and rejecting the blood of menstruation:

(in anger and confusion she searches for the words) yuh going on as if is the first time

that catch pon yuh hands. so so so you can touch up mi soil up uniform but you can’t

touch me. and and and last month when you and steve get into dat fight it was all over

you. and which part you think you come from anyways? out of your moddah… mi nevah

seh anything bad bout yuh moddah. anyways did first time we do it you never did have a

problem with it being on you. (hisses her teeth) hypocrite. (36)

Here, mudgu’s hesitancy mimics the bus driver’s stutter, where mudgu repeats “so so so” and

“and and and” in her attempt to construct an argument that analyzes which type of blood is acceptable and which is not. Mudgu becomes clearer and more basilect as she becomes more eloquent, once more using “mi soil up,” but, instead of an object-verb construction, it is, here, an adjective used to describe the state of her uniform, which is, as Allsopp has told us, a “well- known linguistic feature [and] a strongly marked characteristic of CE” (xlvii). The symmetry between this scene and that of the bus driver, as well as the violence suggested in former and acted in the latter, foreshadows the fact that njoni will soon be shot, but it is where mudgu’s language simultaneously gains clarity and becomes more Jamaican that she diverges from the sexism, racism and ableism inherent in the bus driver’s speech. When mudgu brings up njoni’s

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mother, it is not to insult either her or him, but to articulate the beauty of a woman’s body, which

is capable of giving life only because of the menstruation cycle.

We learn throughout the performance that mudgu is a descendant of Nanny Maroon’s

sister, sekesu, who had a child named mudgu. When mudgu’s mother tells her “you are a direct

descendant. remember great granny. you have the guidance and protection of all the ancestors.

you come from strong line mudgu, and it can handle anything that comes” (47), she is

articulating the power of a matrilineal heritage. That is not to say that this heritage is easy or

uncomplicated. The coupling of violence and birth with images of blood allow young to address

the complicated relationship that black Caribbean women have had with their own mothers, as

mothers, and with their own bodies. To be in possession of one’s own body, the freedom to keep

one’s child, the right to feel unashamed: the black woman has not always had these most

fundamental of rights.

At the heart of it, blood.claat is a story of motherhood. Mudgu’s granny, and mudgu’s

mother, had children at the age of fifteen, and mudgu continues that cycle. However, where

granny sees this as a failure, young uses language and mythology to convey the sense of joy that

motherhood can bring. The performance ends with a “beginning” (50): the birth of mudgu’s

child, the pain of labour, but, also, the joy of motherhood. It is Nanny Maroon who ushers in this

delivery, the scene before the baby’s birth a re-enactment of the fall of Nanny Town. Nanny looks forward to the future in the midst of the violence that the British are perpetrating:

I know koromante it is a long time now we in dis new land fighting. but remember, if yuh

want good yuh nose haffi run. our ancestors before us sacrifice their blood for us. we are

di children of our foremoddahs and faadahs sacrificing our blood for our children. our

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children will sacrifice their blood. it is only by dis ritual koromante, our children children

children will be free. (49-50)

In this way, the dichotomy of acceptable male blood (violence) and unacceptable female blood

(birth) is replicated in the positioning of the unacceptable violence of British colonizers and the

acceptable violence of Maroon (Jamaican) rebellion, which is giving birth to generations of free

Jamaicans. Here, blood becomes sacrifice, and this sacrifice is caught up in the matrilineal

freedom that both dub poetry and Nanny offer. The repetition of “children children children”

echo the bus driver and mudgu; however, where the bus driver offered unreasonable violence

and mudgu moved hesitantly towards a clarity of thought, Nanny is using repetition, without

apostrophe, yet still possessive, to emulate the process of labour, giving birth to Jamaica itself.

Nanny uses a basilect of Jamaican creolization to articulate this appeal to the future,

symbolically tying herself to mudgu’s argument for her own agency. However, this empowering of Jamaican Creole comes at the expense of Maroon Creole, which young does not represent. In fact, the Maroons themselves only stand in as a representation of the spirit of Jamaican rebellion, which all Jamaicans have inherited. This use of the Maroons is traditional and not uncomplicated:

It is common knowledge that communities of Maroon descendants still exist in Jamaica.

But in the minds of many, both in Jamaica and elsewhere, the Maroons of the eighteenth

century are more present – more vividly real – than those of today. The vast majority of

writings on Jamaican Maroons dwell on the distant past. This epic past, this story of

effective resistance to one of the most dehumanizing social and economic systems ever

devised, continues to captivate readers and writers. (Bilby 24)

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So, young is re-enacting a tradition of her own in her use of Nanny Maroon in bloot.claat, that of using an idealized construction of the Maroons to present an argument of a rebellious and free matrilineal tradition in Jamaica. In fact, the Maroons do not consider themselves a part of

Jamaican society, they are unique and more accurately theorized using concepts of indigeneity.

Again, dub poetry stands between the civil and uncivil, enacting its own fictionalizing narrative that overwrites that of the indigenous Maroons.

Conclusion: What is Poetry?

The womban tradition of dub poetry in Canada has exploded out of many confluences of community, culture, and civility. By nature rebellious, that rebellion has been shaped in response to the impulse of civility in the Caribbean Canadian context. While dub poetry is revolutionary, its Canadian revolution is not the political violence of Jamaica. It is a Canadian revolution, one that is filled with theoretical considerations that must meet with the needs of public consumption.

Canadian dub poetry is beautiful, with plays on language and concatenations of sound, music and voice, that crash like waves upon the listener. However, the reality of the vertical mosaic is reinforced even as it is challenged by dub poetry in Canada. For dub poetry has established itself against the inhospitality of Canadian civility and, thus, the two are intertwined, for there could not be one without the other.

When asked “what is dub poetry?,” Lillian Allen tells us that “[b]ecause dub poetry is not strictly pagebound, and because institutions in our society do not account for our existence, we have gone directly to the public, recording, performing and self-publishing. We sidestepped the all-powerful ‘middleman’ who serves as the arbiter of culture” (21). In 2011, Allen articulates the problems inherent in dub poetry’s informal style: “[t]he problem now is that, uh, the publishing industry hasn’t really moved that much. It’s still, most established poets, if you talk to

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them about poetry, they talk about their books. They conflate poetry with books. Which might

be, unfortunately, I love books, um, might be, um, a little passing thing” (Different Knowings).

However, Allen still holds that the power of dub poetry lies in its freedom from the page, saying

that “you don’t need to have a book to be a poet. And that’s a product; that’s commodification. I

mean, poetry belongs to the people. It’s a service. It’s a ritual. It’s a spiritual communion kind of

thing. And more and more young people are realizing that” (Different Knowings). Therefore,

dub poetry rejects commodification and containment, but at the expense of legitimization and

canonization. In this way, dub poetry is positioned difficultly: simultaneously bowing to the

apparatus of civility and becoming erased through a nominal acceptance into the academy as

well as resisting legitimization, remaining unbound and free, and becoming erased as a result of

non-standard practice.

At the heart of it, it is not the duty of dub poetry to reinvent black Canada, but it cannot

be denied that dub poetry is a product and representation of this group. As Allen reminds us,

“[t]he work of the poets extends beyond merely creating art; we take our poetry and our

convictions into the community. We organize, we network, we participate, we protest, we

celebrate, we build community” (18). She asserts that “[d]ub poets have galvanized a movement

of Black culture, of Black writers and a progressive culture of resistance in Canada, and have set

a standard for political art unparalleled in this country” (21). It is this activism and community

engagement that makes dub poetry a revolutionary art form. Being black and being dub represent

responsibility for these artists, responsibilities that work both within and against the system of

oppression that keeps black, female bodies at the bottom.

D’bi young remembers her own, personal, matrilineal experience of dub poetry: “the first time I saw my mother perform I was five years old. she was doing dub. the next time I saw my

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mother perform I was six years old. she was doing a one womban show. I am my mother’s daughter. a dub poet. who resides in constant possibility of revolushun and storytelling” (7).

Reflecting the larger matrilineal tradition of dub poetry itself, young reminds us that

“revolushun” can an act of storytelling.

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“WHERE I’M FROM”: LANGUAGE, RITUAL, AND SPACE IN BLACK, CARIBBEAN

CANADIAN FEMINIST WORK AND PLAY

I believe if you’re not passionate about your work then you cannot expect other people to be passionate about it. As an artist, everything that I’ve written has saved my own life.

That’s how I work out stuff within myself, within family, within my relationships, within the social position I take in the world. I think that is why I’m passionate; it is because it gives me a voice where a lot of times I have felt voiceless.

(Trey Anthony qtd. in Spy Démommé-Welch, “Getting Kinky Inside and Outside: A

Conservation with Trey Anthony” 18)

In her chapter “Playing Solitaire: Spectatorship and Representation in Canadian

Women’s Monodrama,” Patricia Badir sees theatrical performance as a site of contestation between the feminist performer and the assumed white, male, heterosexual spectator, where the former is fighting to maintain her sense of subjecthood in spite of the latter’s intrusive expectations of essentialist representation. In the face of this contest of wills, Badir sees the monodrama as a means of foregrounding the mediated nature of this feminist theatrical space, constructing a place for the insertion of the “I” as a means to allow play within the relationship between feminist and audience. Thinking about the manner in which monodrama works as direct address, Badir says that it “is conceived with performance in mind. The presence of viewing spectators in the context of a live performance introduces a different set of both aesthetic and political questions as the issue of the representation of the private ‘I’ is brought to the forefront”

(51). It is this bringing forth of the “I” that becomes significant for Badir: “[a]s the locus of semiotic interpretation, the woman on stage is always already determined and the ‘I’ she defiantly speaks, thrown into question. When a woman playwright chooses monodrama as her

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medium, it is against these conditions of spectatorship and representation that she must contend”

(52). Thus, it is the choice to use monodrama that begins the process of bringing forth that ever important “I” and all that it entails.

In this chapter, I am looking at the function of the feminist “I” in theatre, film, and television as mediums which demonstrate the potential for black Caribbean Canadian women to participate within the constraints of multiculturalism while also making those constraints visible to a viewing audience. I am arguing that there the interstitial and hyphenated Caribbean

Canadian identity requires three tools to enable this confrontation of performative multiculturalism: language, ritual, and the negotiation of space.

Monodrama in ‘Da Kink

Trey Anthony’s 2001 play ‘da Kink in my hair is an amalgamation of women’s voices, where seven different women’s monologues work to integrate Anthony’s sense of a disparate self. The play is set in a Jamaican Canadian hairdressing salon and has a loose storyline, involving the day-to-day operations of the salon alongside the lives of the women who patronize it, which holds together the rather heterogeneous and didactic monologues that make up the heart of the play. In her notes, Anthony tells us that “[w]riting ‘da Kink in my hair, saved my life.

Each one of the characters has some small part of me and my life embedded in their Voice” (vii).

Anthony's characterization of the voices in the play demonstrates that, while it is not technically a monodrama, the play still shows its roots as a one woman play54. The monologues, and their

54 In her second introduction to ‘da Kink in my hair, Anthony gives a short history of her play, saying that it “was originally conceptualised as a one womyn show” (v). After she had finished her first draft, Anthony invited six friends (who happened to also be actors) to do an informal reading of it and they all decided that these monologues needed a public space, which resulted in a sold out reading. Anthony used the opportunity of the reading to survey her audience, who largely responded positively to the work, but felt that some of the subject material was quite

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integration into the larger whole of the play, work together to construct the multiple pressures

and pleasures that Anthony faces as black, Caribbean, woman, lesbian, person. The play weaves

together several monodramas to create a more nuanced and layered construction of Anthony’s

Voice, one which she could not manage performing as only herself.

The use of multiple characters to present a more complex person, a “fully rounded, layered Black woman on stage” (Anthony qtd in Dénommé 20), allows Anthony to use several points of view to challenge any assumptions of an essentialist characterization of a black woman’s experiences. This challenge is at the heart of the feminist monodrama, as it requires a shifting of perspective as well as an engagement between performer and audience. Badir reflects on the interaction between performer and audience as determined, a meeting place for those preconceptions of performative roles:

Theatre, the monodrama in particular, is the appropriate medium for the dislodgement of

the spectatorial gaze and the re-dressing of representation. When she speaks in the first

person singular, the solo speaker understands that ‘I’ is always already beyond her

control. It is that reality that she documents. From there, direct experience of the

heavy. Anthony addressed these concerns by adding more comedy to the piece by way of the creation of Novelette, the outrageous central character that brings all of the monologues together. At this point, Anthony “abandoned” (v) the one womyn show and invited the friends from that original reading to make up the cast of the play, ‘da Kink making its debut at the Toronto Fringe Festival in July 2001 where it sold out every night. After the success of the show, the Harbourfront Centre remounted it for its Black History, Kumba Festival, which also sold out. The show was, again, remounted in 2003 at Theatre Passe Muraille and sold out. In January 2005, ‘da Kink was selected by Mirvish Productions for a run that lasted until April 2005 (v). In 2005, the play had its award winning US premiere at the San Diego Repertory Theatre. In 2006, it began its run in the UK at the Hackney Empire Theatre, and in 2007, ‘da Kink premiered as a television series on Global TV. In the original run of the theatrical production, Anthony plays the character of Novelette, but takes on the role of Joy for TV, leaving the character of Novelette to be played by Ordena Stephens. Joy is a new character for the television adaption, adding even more comedic elements and allowing Novelette a more serious part herself. 179

monodrama feeds back to revise the spectator’s horizon of expectations and to challenge

the very conventions and meanings that that ‘I’ represents. (60)

The reality of the “I” is that it already belongs to convention, but in articulating that the “I” is lost, the performer hopes to shift her objecthood into subjecthood, and, thus, redefine the relationship between watcher and watched into something more approximating a negotiation of expectations. Anthony, while presenting a communal work which has its roots in conversation and interaction, retains a strong and arguably defining interest in the “I” of the monodrama. The play opens with a reinterpretation of the traditional Greek chorus, the Griots, who address “the

Goddess” (3) and then invite the community to dance and celebrate with them. After this introduction, the spotlight falls on the narrator/protagonist while she sits and puts on her makeup.

Hair, the Body, and the Intrinsic Audience

This powerful image of the everyday sets the tone for the entire production. Significantly, before she is “busy,” Novelette is constructing her own body in the stage directions: “Lights up on NOVELETTE, who sits in the hairdressing chair putting on her makeup” (3). The setting itself is political; black hair and black women are political. It is the ritual of hair care that

Novelette performs, which works to mirror the care that she shows for the black women who enter her shop. This care is based in the culture of black women’s hair and its performance in the world around it, as “[h]air is entirely public. People can hide it on occasion, but it is always there—a symbol that is open to interpretation by others about who they deem us to be. For Black women, hair clearly represents something about which they have, or have had issues, experiences, and journeys” (Prince 14). Prince continues, “The hair on a Black woman’s head is

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treated as if it is a separate entity from the rest of her body” (14), highlighting that public

awareness, that objectification, to which the black body is always subject55.

I want to note here the importance of black hair as site specific (the hair salon as a unique

space) and culturally explosive, as Prince reminds us that “[p]eople of all races in Toronto decide

how they are going to categorize Black women based on hairstyle” (57). It cannot be too plainly

said: black women’s hair is performative and watched, always participating in a complex

congruence of racial interactions that inflict themselves on the black woman. Black hair is a signifier; it tells the world where a woman sits politically (natural hair being associated with activism and feminist politics), whether she seeking to attract a man (long hair being the goal in that case), or if she needs to wear a wig for a few weeks because of the severe damage that straightening products have done to her hair (Prince 56-7). Most importantly, though, black hair

tells the world that you are black: “[o]ften when skin color has failed to function as an immediate

sign of racial difference hair has been used to determine this” (Grayson 13).

The stage directions tell us that there is “a tight coil, representing the hair” (3) at the

edge of the stage; this coil is the only other object outside of the empty hairdressing chair. These

two objects insist on the importance of the body within the text, and the community that the body

enables. The hairdressing salon being a space of camaraderie and trust; when hair means so

much and says so much, the person taking care of the hair is akin to a priestess. Then, when

Anthony introduces people in ‘da Kink, it is with a series of dances and non-verbal movements,

55As a woman that identifies personally and politically as both black and mixed race, I have become desensitized to the public obsession with my own hair (living in London, England also helps, as there is more diversity here than anywhere I have lived in Canada), but I am still shocked by the ownership others take of my sons’ hair. Both boys are mixed race, one with brown hair and one with blond, but both curly. There is no day where we encounter people that I am not questioned about their hair. Strangers touch them (though more so my son with dark hair). This is an incredibly personal issue to me, for my past experiences, as well as my present. 181

she is prioritising the body and all that it tells us. We know that the dance is “celebratory” (3) until the dancers touch the coil and react to the “sizzling, frying, pain, agony and torture that black hair is subjected too [sic]” (3). Anthony then moves us, quickly, to the bodily intimacy of hair and applying make-up (prioritizing her “I”), demonstrating the relationship between that public-facing body as it exists in (productive) tension with the construction of the salon as public, communal space. Novelette is a caretaker of the body, and in that, a director of the embodied performances her clients produce (whether they like it or not):

Misreading a person’s hair as a signifier can have repercussions that could be trivial in a

social situation but far-reaching in the worst-case scenario. For many Black women, hair

is just hair, and the choices they make are connected to convenience and ease— not to

their politics or sexual preference. Nonetheless, they can still be judged with a social or

political interpretation of who they are, based solely on their hairstyle. (Prince 16)

Thus, black hair operates as iconographic work of art, a product of the ritual of hairdressing, manipulated by the priestess/hairdresser to represent the black women’s occupation of space in the world around her.

Antanaclasis as Representative of Interstitial Space

Contingent on the moving back and forth between monologue, soliloquy, and apostrophe,

‘da Kink in my hair works to create an interactive, yet personal, space, operating like the monodrama as “a private and intimate endeavour, yet it stands as theatre for public consumption by an observer who, in most cases, has paid for the opportunity to view. The speaker’s subjectivity is found to be dependent upon the participation of spectators in an act of semiotic interpretation” (Badir 51). Anthony exposes much of herself in her play, but also works to reverse the gaze by directly addressing her audience and denying them the passivity on which

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theatrical performance often relies. Protagonist Novelette (and Anthony) begins the play with

both assertion of self and dismissal of audience: “[m]y work is never done! I’m always working,

working, working. You want me to talk to you, explain what’s going on in this play well forget

it! Pick up a program and read it or something because I have no time to talk to you today! I’m

busy busy career woman. No time for myself” (3). Using the possessive determiner “my,”

Novelette emphasizes the importance of the ownership of her own work, as symbolic of her

independence, while also making that work ambiguous, both noun and verb in her first two

sentences, signifying both her business and the labour required to run that business. This use of

antanaclasis56, as rhetorical device, means that repetition both emphasizes and confuses. The

repetition of the word “working” shapes that ambiguity into action and reinforces the importance

of labour before then placing the responsibility for action firmly on the audience of the play by

demanding that they work, physically, to understand the drama onstage. This reversal of

expectations relies on Novelette prioritizing her own labour over her performance, and, thereby,

shifting the subjective “I” of the monodrama into a material and possessive “my.” Novelette

reinforces the active nature of this labour by repeating the word “busy,” and, therefore, resisting

the spectator’s sense of their own significance within the performer/audience relationship, as the

passivity of spectatorship confronts the requirements of the performance. In fact, the last word of

the opening monologue is “busy” before Novelette is cut off by a customer bursting in and

56 See Jeanne Fahnestock’s book Rhetorical Style: The Uses of Language in Persuasion that looks at “antanaclasis, which repeats the same orthographic or phonological word but in different functional categories or with different or even contrary meanings.”

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ending the tableau and, therefore, creating clearer demarcations between the sedentary audience and the busy work onstage.

This refusal to work for the audience is followed by an apostrophe to a plant57, the plant acting as another object that takes priority over the expectations of the audience. Turning to her plant, Novelette refuses the audience her attention, as she says “Oh I need to water you. Can’t forget about you. Don’t worry Miss Lizzy. I’ll get you your water soon” (3). Novelette’s prioritizing enables her to both start the performance, while, also, refusing to start the play. This deferral of action intimates engagement without committing to the audience’s desired passivity.

Even Miss Lizzy must wait, though Novelette will eventually get her her water. Parallel to the action onstage, the audience will eventually be “watered,” Novelette will not forget them, but they must accept her absolute authority and wait.

The apostrophe has common cause in works by black Caribbean Canadian authors.

Where Anthony uses an apostrophe to an inanimate object to insinuate a relationship with the audience, Dowling sees NourbeSe Philip’s apostrophe in Zong! in reverse: “Zong! employs lyric modes such as apostrophe, seeking to reanimate the lost slaves and to endow them with some degree of lyric if not legal personhood by giving them names” (3). Where Anthony positions her audience as plants, Philip is engendering personhood by allowing her legal objects to speak and be spoken to. This transformation of slaves into people relies on the use of lyric modes, as

“[t]urning to lyric modes in order to demonstrate the differential distribution of legal personhood,

Zong! makes the relationship between the lyric "I" and the legal person a key question of its

57 In its most recent incarnation, as a musical, ‘da Kink in my Hair loses Miss Lizzy (to my dismay) and instead prioritizes the actions of the salon’s customers. My analysis is based on the version published in 2001, but it is worthwhile noting that the most current version of the play opens in a more exciting fashion. Please find a clip from the 2016 co-production between Theatre Calgary and the National Arts Centre here. 184

poetic form” (Dowling). This apostrophe works to reinforce the “I” in both texts, allowing for

play between the person as object in Zong! and the audience as object in ‘da Kink in my hair.

The apostrophe is followed quickly by Novelette picking up a broom and sweeping, the

action both signifying a dismissal of the plant’s needs and reinforcing Novelette’s busyness. She

affirms this by saying, “I’m telling you between doing my makeup, sweeping, and of course

doing hair, the work never stops!” (3), emphasizing the importance of the “I” once more by

prioritizing her makeup first, the play’s action second, and the women standing in tableau around

here third. Despite the fact that she has already directly addressed the audience and

acknowledged their needs, they do not make her list of priorities.

The Material Work

This focus on the “I” prioritizes the material work of production over the passive pleasure

of the audience. Novelette’s work in the shop is paired with Anthony’s work onstage58, which is

reflective of the material work that brings the production itself into being. That work is not

simply the work of learning stage directions and advertising, but the work of approaching

difficult and marginalized understandings of race, gender, and sexuality and presenting them for

any raced or unraced audience. The audience is then forced to work to understand the subjective

construction of the “I” that Anthony presents, and that presentation always positions the

production and characters first and the audience second.

58 As well as Anthony’s work offstage to produce what has become a touchstone in black Caribbean culture for articulating the underrepresented “work” of what it means to be a woman, black, immigrant, etc. Before writing ‘da Kink, Anthony worked as a counsellor for abused women, which informed her work on this production. There is some argument that the work of each successive version of the play detracted from that core message of black women’s work, as “the critical response became increasingly negative with each new, expanded version” (Young 56) and as more and more songs were added to the production, one critic claimed it was more like “The Lion Kink” than ‘da Kink (58). 185

This representation of the materialist work of the production, as it is reflected in the

Novelette’s work onstage, helps to illustrate what Ric Knowles calls the material theatre, which

“understands meaning to be produced in the theatre as a negotiation at the intersection of three shifting and mutually constitutive poles” (2): performance, conditions of production, and conditions of reception. Knowles sees the understanding of the work happening between and within these three poles as the mechanism by which the cultural production of the work can be understood. Certainly, “[t]he degree to which reception is (pre)determined by culturally dominant contexts and mechanisms of production, and the degree to which resistant meanings are available, depends upon the amount of productive tension and slippage within and among the corners” (19); Anthony’s didactic play relies on her understanding of the performance and the production of that performance in conjunction with how the audience understands the work to which they were put. Anthony thus attempts, in Novelette’s work as it is reflected by the work of the audience, to shape that relationship between performance, production, and reception to show that there is work happening.

When Knowles says that he sees “theatrical performances as cultural productions which serve specific cultural and theatrical communities as particular historical moments as sites for the negotiation, transmission, and transformation of cultural values, the products of their own place and time that are nevertheless productive of social and historical reification or change” (10), he is articulating the transformative capacity of work – on the part of those producing the performance, but also required of those who engage with it. This work is reflected in Novelette’s address to the audience and the production of the play itself, and also demands, implicitly, that we interrogate the function of the play itself. As the work works, the play plays.

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Ritual and the In-Between Space of the Caribbean Canadian Woman

In his chapter “Body, Brain, and Culture,” cultural anthropologist Victor Turner looks at the two hemispheres of the brain and asks his readers to consider the relationship between work and play in his definition of ritual and what it means to human culture. Turner claims that “ritual is associated with social transitions while ceremony is linked with social states. Performances of ritual are distinctive phases in the social process, whereby groups and individuals adjust to internal changes and adapt to their external environment” (158), meaning that ritual, for us, is that interstitial space personified by the Caribbean Canadian immigrant and those actions that represent that in-betweenness. It is not the act of being either at home in the Caribbean or Canada that inhabits the space of ritual, but the coming together of those two homes into something transformative, something in movement and between Novelette’s acts of work and the acts of play that the stage implies. Turner tells us that “play is a kind of dialectical dancing partner of ritual and ethologists give play behavior equal weight with ritualization” (167) and in thinking of the brain that “[t]he hemispheres clearly have their work to do, and the autonomic nervous system has its work to do. The one makes for social dramas, the other for social routines” (167); thus, work and play are not isolated one from the other, but, instead, in the context of ritual, moving and shifting back and forth. Novelette’s work and play are not distinct, but complementary; her play attracts the audience and negotiates the rituals she presents for their consumption, but her work reinforces her autonomy, her existence apart from their entertainment.

In 1986, Rita Shelton Deverell, Canadian broadcaster and one of the founders of Vision

TV, mused on the function of black performance in Canada in her essay “When the Performer is

Black” where she asserts that “when blacks engage in performance we engage in politics” (1).

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Between Deverell’s thoughts in 1986 and ‘da Kink’s first production in 2003, there is little shift

in the truth of this statement, as evidenced by Anthony’s use of the monodrama’s subjective “I”

to confront social expectation in a performance about race, gender, sexuality, and community.

We see the echoes of dead empires past in ‘da kink. The Griots function as traditional Greek

chorus reimagined; they are wise, but not necessarily old or male, emphasizing the need for

storytellers and oral traditions in contemporary performance. Simultaneously, we are also

reminded of the Western roots of contemporary theatre as British adoptions of classic traditions,

as the post-colonial artist has adopted the theatrical traditions of the colonizers. Deverell,

however, reminds us that the historical processes at work between these two events are distinct

and not to be conflated: “there is a phenomenon that we can label black performance results from

both the total (systemic) and partial (de facto) exclusion of blacks from white performance. The clear fact that black performance is defined by that from which it is excluded induces anger” (2).

Black theatre thus becomes itself in the absence of being included in the mainstream. This excluded and marginalized position means that black performance is already performing resistance, thereby allowing for a confrontation of traditional expectations of what theatre means to an audience. Anger becomes the foundation of the work and movement between the center and the margins becomes the play.

Playfulness and Performance

Similarly, in his essay “Cultural Performance, Authenticity, and Second Nature,” F.G.

Bailey discusses the multifunctionality of theatre in the context of cultural performance: both playful and played. Bailey tells us that “[a] play – what occurs in a theatre – is a form of playing: activity that is not real, not serious, not work. The two main senses of the word – a dramatic performance and playing a game – flow into one another” (3) and that “[p]erformance asserts a

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truth: something removed from the instability of time and the variation of particularity so as to

make it authoritative” (3). In the workings of black theatre, that is to say, there is always the sense of politics and authority, as constructed through a strict and serious playfulness. Anthony’s task, then, is to present didactic entertainment that resists expectations of both form and content.

Her work, and her expectation that her audience work, is contrasted with the playfulness of theatre, the “not work” of spectatorship. This juxtaposition of work and play is meant to clash, and, in the clashing, make the politics of the play poignant and memorable.

The politics of dramaturgy are always offset by the performance between spectator and stage, one that relies on passivity of the audience even while challenging it. The relationship between performer and audience is framed in such a way that both are possessed by the expectations of selfsame, as “[f]raming indicates that it would not be appropriate to react to what is going on, as if it were real” (Bailey 3). Thus, the passivity that the feminist monodramatist contests is the same passivity that allows that contestation to go unchallenged. Thus, as Bailey suggests, “[s]tage performances likewise disconnect normal critical faculties. One is secluded from the real world, rationality is suspended, and emotions given free play. When a performance or a work of art enfolds a social commentary (not all do), a selected version of the real world is admitted into the frame and there subjected, so to speak, to emotional irradiation” (4), which is the premise upon which the political black play always relies, as this irradiation is the means to any didactic ends. Bailey goes on: “it is the constructed and contrived quality of a performance that allows it to be persuasive; and if it is not persuasive, a performance will not have an impact off-stage” (5), highlighting the need to adhere to the expectations of the stage, even as one might attempt to flout them. When Novelette breaks from her opening address, saying “people rushing in here talking about oh Novelette, I want this style, this cut, this washed, this coloured, don’t

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they see I’m busy-” (3), she is immediately launched into a more traditional dramatic opening

when the stage directions read: “MILLY bursts through tableau and proceeds towards

NOVELETTE” (4). Milly’s intrusion not only breaks up the silent tableau, but instigates the

play’s action as “the store becomes alive. A busy hustle and bustle” (4) and Novelette’s busyness

is eclipsed by the (additionally busy) action onstage.

This eclipse reminds us that Anthony’s authorship (and authority) are not absolute; if the

audience chooses not to work, then they are absolved of Anthony’s demands and hold no more

responsibility to her politics than the plant which she also addresses. This is reflective of the

larger issues at work in black theatre “[s]ince there are no black countries where white people

have not arrived, the very existence of black performance is unique: it is performance within and

beyond a state of cultural uncertainty” (Deverell 3). This state of uncertainty produces work that

simultaneously reproduces the tropes and traditions of the mainstream, while always showing

something inherently new in the production of this mimicry. The performance is rife with

anxiety, as the marginalized culture seeks to find its identity by creating work that is

recognizable as both traditional theatre and that ephemeral quality that makes art “black.” In the

specific example of Caribbean Canadians, which is the population I focus on exclusively, there

are several tools to manage theatrical tradition and cultural identity: language, ritual, and the

navigation or negotiation of space. I argue that these three tools are the essential requirements necessary for the Caribbean Canadian playwright to manage art as intercultural theatre.

Moments of Interculturalism

I use the term intercultural to signify, not just the hyphenated relationship between one that is both Caribbean and Canadian, but also the requirements of the Caribbean Canadian individual to navigate a multicultural nation and a post-colonial world, with all of the European

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inheritances that being both Caribbean and Canadian entails. In his book, Theatre &

Interculturalism, Ric Knowles defines interculturalism as a term that “focus[es] on the

uncontested, unsettling, and often unequal spaces between cultures that can function in

performance as sites of negotiation” and goes on to say that it “evokes the possibility of

interaction across a multiplicity of cultural positionings, avoiding binary codings” (4). Despite

the hyphenated nature of my sample population, I would like to investigate the multiplicity of

cultural significations that are circumnavigated in Caribbean Canadian performance. Like

Knowles, I choose to see intercultural performance as “a site for the continuing renegotiation of

cultural values and the reconstitution of individual and community identities and subject

positions” (4-5). Knowles illustrates the nature of interculturalism as a method by which culture moves fluidly between the center and the margins, often with the center exoticizing or absorbing

the unique constructions of the margins. For the moment, I choose to focus on the manner in

which the margins are affected by the traditions and expectations of the center. The ways that

“mimicry of British formal properties” can also be “explicitly anti-colonialist in content”

(Knowles 10). What Knowles is suggesting, reminiscent of Homi Bhabha’s mimicry, is that

reflection and reproduction of theatrical motifs, tropes, or structure can itself be a type of

challenge. This mimicry of performance can position two groups interculturally (and, thereby,

always beyond that duality of culture) so that the marginalized group reflects itself and its own

identity in the adaptation of the majority’s performance. Like colonial mimicry, intercultural

mimicry “is the desire for the reformed, recognizable Other, as a subject of a difference that is

almost the same, but not quite” and so, again, the two types of mimicry meet in a shared

ambivalence because “in order to be effective, mimicry must continually produce its slippage, its

excess, its diffidence” (Bhabha 122).

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Returning to our triumvirate of tools used by the Caribbean Canadian to manage the

anxiety of cultural identification on an intercultural stage, we must recognize that language,

ritual, and space are all negotiated through mimicry. Equally important in analyzing these tools is

the understanding that colonial mimicry “is produced at the site of interdiction” (Bhabha 128), as

[t]he desire of mimicry – an interdictory desire – may not have an object, but it has strategic

objectives which [Bhabha] shall call the metonymy of presence” (128). This metonymy of

presence is the often confusing and contradictory constructions of difference that allow a

majority group to distinguish itself from the minority groups. The metonymy of presence is those

pejorative terms and stereotypes that marginalized groups both dismiss and take ownership of in

the attempt to assert themselves as more than the majority will always allow. When Novelette

tells her audience how much work she has and how busy she is, she is working against the

metonymy of presence that has permeated European-African exchanges since colonialism: that

of the lazy black wo/man. This is layered playfully against the cultural construction of the busy, hardworking Jamaican, which anyone belonging to the Caribbean diaspora would recognize59.

This works to further stress the difference between the audience and the performance. However,

even in her dismissal of the lazy black wo/man stereotype, Novelette is still acknowledging the

relevance of this perspective. When the scene shifts to the busy hair salon, we are given a

glimpse of gossiping women, hypersexualized Caribbean women, among other popular

misconceptions of women or black women. Because mimicry relies on this metonymy of

59 See Billroy Powell’s Settling in Canada: Jamaicans Have a Story to Tell for information here. However, it must be noted that much of what I understand about Jamaican immigrants and work comes from growing up first generation to a Caribbean Canadian immigrant father. 192

presence, it is necessary for the colonized playwright to reinterpret and reproduce these

stereotypes in excess or slippage. Anthony manages this through language, ritual and space.

Missing the Subjunctive in Jamaican Creole

‘da Kink in my hair is a Caribbean Canadian play that operates from a Jamaican perspective; meaning, the accents and culture represented in this play are not dynamic, but suggest a monochromic construction of the Caribbean. However, it is in this performance of

Jamaica that the audience is exposed to the language of the Caribbean Canadian hair salon, which is punctuated by different accents, slang, and metaphors. Unfamiliar language represents the anxiety of the black performer by reproducing that anxiety in the audience:

black performance that adheres to the perceived ‘natural’ accents of the performers is

considered non-threatening and entertaining. When the black performer is able to choose

and impersonate language in its variability, however, black performance becomes

threatening: it is the act of taking control of the performance language that is political.

Traditionally, black performers are allowed to play themselves and white performers are

allowed to act others. When blacks take control of the language of performance, the

balance of power is unsettled. (Deverell 5)

The Jamaican accent performs the intercultural colonial meeting of Africa and England, a mix of terms and vowel pronunciation that leaves the Canadian audience scrambling to keep up. By forcing language on the audience, Anthony offers another cue that she is unbending, unwilling to negotiate in what she has set up as her space. Language performs itself and “[t]his unconditionality, even before being due to some normative prescription (which it is as well, of course), could be shown to be deduced from simple, very simple analysis of speech, of a

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rhetorical, constative, descriptive exploration of the address to another, of its normativity or its

intrinsic performativity” (Derrida 67).

In her article, “Jamaican Creole: In the Process of Becoming,” Beverley Bryan examines

the history and future of the Jamaican language. Bryan explores the relationship between ethnic

identity and language in her analysis of the origins and contemporary functions of this creole.

Where Bryan uses the term creole in her article, it is alongside such other terms as nation

language and, simply, language, as is appropriate and reflective of the (then, 2004) current

scholarship in the area, which Bryan suggests is prejudiced, as it would not allow for Jamaican to

be its own language, in spite of having the linguistic right to be called such. The argument that

Bryan makes is that Jamaican (creole, nation/language) is fluid and transformative, always

changing to reflect a group of people that are, themselves, always changing, and “[t]he [creole]

languages can be seen as metaphors for the Caribbean diaspora: in one sense, sites of struggle for

dominance by varying conduits of forces and voices; in another sense, the reflections of our

conjoined histories” (Bryan 642). Thus, creole languages are metonymic of a complicated and

bloody past and present in the Caribbean60.

Jamaican creole has some specific syntactic features that I would like to examine more

closely:

the unmarked verb; absence of subject-verb concord, Pat sing; zero copula, mi sick ‘I am

sick; serial verbs, go see, come tell; and the same form being used for some adjectives

and verbs dem mad mi ‘They made me mad’, big-op ‘enlarge (lit.) extol/cheer’ small-op

60 I move quite quickly here thinking about the function of Jamaican Creole, but I this largely picks up from the previous chapter, “White Civility and Dub Poetry: Catching Bullets, So What?”, where I will investigated more fully what language means both inside and outside the Caribbean. 194

‘make small (lit.) compress’. Other noteworthy syntactical features are: pluralization

using the particle dem ‘them’ as di man dem for ‘the men’; the conflation of active and

passive voice di fuud sel aaf ‘The food that was being sold is finished’; and front-

focusing a taak wi a taak bout Jan/ It’s John we’re talking about/ ‘We are/were talking

about John’. (Bryan 643)

Now, while Anthony’s protagonist, Novelette, speaks with a Jamaican accent, she does not use

Jamaican Creole. It is the customers in her shop that speak Jamaican Creole as Bryan describes it: “Yeah gal, me and Jean Paul pun di speaker box! She gives an elaborate sexual dance move, the other women cheer” (Anthony 5). Here, Jamaican Creole is used to represent the sexualization of the Caribbean and works to actually shift the performance of Novelette’s work in her shop from the complicated reality of being Jamaican to the safe and easily understood stereotype of Jamaica.

The only soliloquy delivered in Jamaican Creole is that by Stacy-Anne61, a school girl

recently immigrated to Canada, who tells a disturbing story of her own sexual abuse by her step-

father with her grandmother’s implicit permission. Stacy-Anne says, “So Mr. Brown happy when

him inside mi it hurt… but mi don’t say nothing to mek him mad. (begins to beat her leg,

mimicking the rhythm of sex)” (Anthony 51) after describing how happy her sister is to have

moved to Canada. Here, creole helps Anthony to navigate the difficult topic of child abuse by

61 It is worth knowing that in most of ‘da Kink’s productions, the character of Stacy-Anne was play by d’bi.young who is also the only other attributed author within the play having written “in honour of belief,” a poem within Stacy-Anne’s section. If, as is likely, ‘da Kink is a play that came about through the contributions and work of several womyn, then young is the voice most layered into the character of Stacy-Anne, who I will spend a lot of this chapter interrogating. There is no comedy in Stacy-Anne’s soliloquy; her vulnerability as a dark skinned black girl, new to Canada and entirely trusting in the adults around her (even though the audience can see the bad choices they have made) makes her the most shocking and realistic character in the play, in my opinion. 195

making objects of both participants: “him” and “mi” are both acted upon and Stacy-Anne, who cannot reconcile the step-father who takes care of her with the man who rapes her. The absence of “subject-verb concord” means that Mr. Brown is further excused because he no longer acts; the verb “to be” is removed so that he “happy” and is shed of his responsibility in the act. The absence of “to be” and the turn from subject to object also runs together the act of happiness and hurting for Stacy-Anne. Rather than saying that “Mr. Brown is so happy when he is inside me and I/it hurt/s,” Stacy-Anne suggests that the happiness and hurt belong to both of them, either

Mr. Brown’s happiness is a result of his hurting Stacy-Anne or he is happy despite the hurt. In either case, he needs to recognize Stacey-Anne’s pain (while Stacey-Anne is forced to recognize his happiness). If, as Turner says, “play, like other liminal phenomena, is in the subjunctive mood” then what does it mean to speak a language where “to be” is often elided and prioritized by adjectives? The wishful state of the subjunctive is where the interstitial state of ritual exists, and thus, where the in-between state of being at home in both the Caribbean and Canada sits. So, where language fails, these women must find ritual through other means of communication. I would argue that this other method of communication finds its articulation in dance.

Finding the Subjunctive in Dance

The film How She Move, directed by Ian Iqbal Rashid uses dance alongside Jamaican

Creole as a tool for negotiating ethnic identity and marginality, and, as Bryan tells us that “[t]o speak in one tongue is an ‘act of identity’ a proclamation of the most profound kind of identification that could be described as a kind of ethnic positioning: asserting, affirming, inviting and bonding” (644-5) and, like ethnocentrism, which works to strengthen a group’s self- identification, also distinguishes groups from one another, as well as ostracizing individual’s from groups. How She Move is, in its most boring sense, a “coming of age story” (making of)

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that tells the story of Rayanna, a seventeen-year-old girl from the Jane-Finch ghetto in Toronto,

who wants to go to medical school, in spite of her race, poverty, and the recent death of her older

sister. She manages to bring together ethnic identity, community, and ambition through her love

of step dancing: a North American adaptation of African dancing, traditionally performed at the

college level in America and the high school level in Canada. Critics laud the amazing step

dancing of the movie and criticize it for its conventional and predictable plot. This is not really a

story about Rayanna, but the story of step in Toronto and the community of Jane/Finch, which is

locally infamous for being dangerous, poor, violent, and black. As the director himself describes

the film as a “gangster movie,” (“Making of”) despite not having any gangsters or gang violence in the actual movie (though it is implied in part), tells me that this is a film interested in place,

not plot.

Jane-Finch is a predominantly Jamaican-Canadian neighbourhood, and How She Moves

attempts to reflect that through the use of Jamaican Creole, which is primarily spoken by the

parents of the movie, telling us that this is an immigrant neighbourhood and that our protagonists

are mostly first-generation Canadian. Jamaican Creole has a second function, which is to

demonstrate community and the fluidity of ethnic identification. Often, characters slip into

Jamaican Creole when they seek to identify with the community (as does the one white character

in the film) or to ostracize those that do not wish to be a part of the group (in most cases, our

protagonist). Rayanna never uses Jamaican Creole, but only speaks Canadian English. When

confronted by Michelle, the film’s antagonist for the most part, for running away from the

neighbourhood, Rayanna retaliates that she did not want to do “nothing” and go “nowhere” with

her. Michelle then slips into Jamaican Creole and asks Rayanna, “[s]o what? You come back to

show us nothing nowhere people someting? Then come nuh! Come show me a likkle someting.”

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The conflation of Jamaican Creole with Rayanna’s Canadian English reinterprets Rayanna’s statement, changing “doing nothing” and “going nowhere” to “nothing nowhere,” contracting the two nouns and shifting them into something like adjectives that operate independently. Then,

Michelle issues the challenge: “come nuh.” The “nuh” functions as the imperative, both replacing “now” and operating as an interjection of speech, helping the antanaclasis that distinguishes the first “come” as challenge from the second “come” as plea, connecting the

“come” of both sentences as repetitions of desire. As Bryan reminds us, “the central position of language as the conduit for revealing ethnicity/identity, a dialectic role considering the function of ethnic affiliations in communities, to ensure language maintenance. Jamaican Creole, a language that has performed those bonding and affirming functions in diasporic communities, can exemplify this case” (5), which means that the fluidity of Michelle’s ethnic heritage is expressed in her use of Jamaican Creole, which, in turn, implies Rayanna’s inability to move between these languages is reflective of her inability to move between her Jane/Finch childhood and her medical school future.

Performing the Unhomely in the Jamaican Canadian Diaspora

Cynthia Sugars anthologizes critical moments of postcolonial dis-ease in Unhomely

States: Theorizing English-Canadian Postcolonialism. The unhomely, for Sugars, is a space of in-betweenness that mediates between numerous postcolonial narratives within Canada:

[T]here are more ways than one of experiencing the unhomeliness of the Canadian locale:

from early anti-colonial, yet nevertheless anglo-white, statements of the inherent paradox

of Canadian cultural and social space, to settler-invader figurations of the settler’s

ambivalent location in the New World, to aboriginal accounts of the dis-ease/disease that

was forced upon indigenous peoples as a result of European colonization, to diasporic

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accounts of various kinds of ‘in-betweenness,’ to immigrant experiences of disjunction

and alienation, to articulations of the racist elements of the Canadian state and national

imaginary. (xiii)

Rather than constructing unhomeliness in terms of Sugars’ particularly postcolonial context, I argue that the multiplicity of unhomeliness is found in very traditional regional and national settings, such as: settler narratives of the romantic tradition, immigrant spaces of early urbanization, international spaces of home, regionally marginalized spaces of nation, and

Canadian modernism. Applied to these broader contexts, unhomeliness not only encompasses the complexity of Canada’s many voices, but also signifies the space between isolation and home, and the movement from one to the other. A dialectic approach to home, unhomeliness, and mobility reveals a highly productive force within Canadian Caribbean performance.

At the opening of her monologue, Stacey-Anne opens with “[m]i excited mi come a foreign but lawd it cold!” (49). Stacey-Anne’s articulation of unhomeliness is filled with awe, her desire for a new home paralleled with the unpleasantness of that home. Stacey-Anne positions herself as object, but an object with agency, as the object replaces the subject, yet still holds power over the action of being excited. When Stacey-Anne says that she has “come a

foreign” she is describing both Canada and herself as other, Jamaican Creole allowing her to

claim her own foreignness and situate herself in the foreign. Like Derrida’s hospitality, which

requires the understanding of being and existing within the foreign, as he says “I were foreign,

you would accept with more tolerance that I don’t speak as you do, that I have my own idiom,

my way of speaking that is so far from being technical, so far from juridical, a way that is at once

more popular and more philosophical” (21), Stacey-Anne retains her patterns of speech, despite

her claim that “mi learn to talk properly” (50) and in this way articulates her own unhomeliness

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by being both foreign and living within the foreign. Immediately, Stacey-Anne describes her

little sister’s reticence to leave her grandmother in Jamaica to join her mother in Canada. When

her sister Carrie refuses to hug her mother, who left her in Jamaica as a baby and has not seen

her since, Stacey-Anne notes “Mr. Brown him did look like him a get mad. And him say to

Mommy mi hope sey you no bring na spoil pickney inna ei hope you no bringsey yu na badda

bring na spoil spoil pickney inna mi house you know” (50). Here, Mr. Brown uses the same

rhetorical techniques that Anthony uses to convince her audience of the more pedantic elements

of the play: repetition. Mr. Brown opens with the object “mi” reminding the women of who has

priority, he then repeats the word “bring” three times, reminding the women of their

responsibility to him, that he existed already and that they were brought. The repetition of the

words “spoil pickney” work to remind the girls of their foreignness as well as their

ungratefulness; however, “pickney” also reminds us of the transformative intentions of the play,

that black women’s hair is not to be despised, but treasured. Hence while Mr. Brown’s comments

work to shame Stacey-Anne and her sister, they push the audience to think again about the more

didactic elements of the play.

Inhospitality and Performing the Foreign

In the televised adaptation62 of Anthony’s ‘da Kink in my hair, somewhat alternatively

titled da Kink in my Hair, the outside, foreign, space is dually occupied by Canadian born

Starr63, who works in the salon, and Joy, fresh from Jamaica and played by Anthony in this

62 This adaptation came about after Anthony put together a pilot for VisionTV’s Cultural Diversity Drama Competition in 2004. 63 Starr is played by Ngozi Paul who is co-creator and co-writer of the adaptation along with Trey Anthony who no longer plays Novelette, but, instead, plays a new character: Novelette’s sister Joy. The television version of ‘da Kink premiered on GlobalTV in 2007 and ran for two seasons. It was celebrated both critically and in Caribbean- Canadian communities that finally saw themselves in a popular media representation. 200

version. Both Starr and Joy are additions to the television series that do not exist in the theatrical

version and function as invitations to the audience to participate despite potential alienation.

Starr is a black hairstylist who was adopted by white parents and knows nothing of black culture.

She functions as a way in for a non-Caribbean audience who knows a little but not much of

Jamaican Creole or the rituals that make up Caribbean culture. Joy is Novelette’s sister and, like

Stacy-Anne’s grandmother, has spent the last seven years raising Novelette’s son in Jamaica. Joy is played mostly for laughs, as she comically acclimates to living in Toronto, whether it is getting arrested for illegally selling chicken at Caribana or sexualizing herself while cleaning windows because she enjoys the attention. Starr and Joy are often played against one another, Starr speaking a very staid and formal Canadian English and Joy speaking in Jamaican Creole. In the space of the hair salon, which is diasporic, both women stand out as foreign.

In the fourth episode of the first season, titled “Chicken” (see clips from the episode here), we see a Toronto during Caribana, busy and colourful. Like the traditional portrayals of

Caribana that we explored in Chapter 2, Novelette’s shop is full to bursting with half dressed

women in colourful costumes.64 We are instantly reminded of Starr’s foreign origins when she

looks around and tells Letty (Novelette) that “Caribana isn’t exactly on the summer vacation

radar where I’m from.” Starr’s reminder of her own outsider status is alienating; she is from the

white, normalized Canada that these black women have no access to, and her wistful longing for

that to which she does not belong is disruptive to the spirit of community. This alienation is

exacerbated when the entire shop starts dancing to a popular soca song from the nineties. When

64 In fact, there are only a few men in this episode: Novelette’s son (who is arrested), the police (who do the arresting), and Nigel. Nigel is a co-worker who at one point in the episode propositions Starr while she is alone in the alley behind the shop, demanding that she kiss him in exchange for a day off. 201

Nigel, the only man that works at the salon, claims that he remembers the song, one patron

exclaims: “Stop lying Nigel; you’re too young to remember Dollar Wine.” To anyone who

attended Caribana in the nineties the song is familiar and the popular dance that goes along with

it is a nostalgic memory, like the macarena. When the entire shop begins to swing their hips to

“cent, five cent, ten cent, dollar,” Starr attempts to follow suit, comically neither knowing the

dance nor possessing the rhythm required to perform it. Starr’s ignorance is paired with her

inability to perform the ritual of community, a moment of solidarity in this Caribbean Canadian

community.

Among other shifts between the stage and television, the music and dance of the play are lost in translation to the small screen. Where dance is part of the way we understand Novelette’s world in the play65, as the Griots express inner turmoil and celebration through dance, in the

televised adaption dance works in negation, we understand where there is a lack of dance there is

missing culture and understanding. Dance, like language, operates as a demarcation between us

and them, I and you. Here, Starr is foreign in the most embarrassing and public way possible.

However, she also invites the audience, who may or may not know the song or the dance, to

laugh along at her expense. Where the play draws attention to Anthony’s “I” by making the

audience foreign, the television show spends much time making the audience feel at home. The

space of the hair salon is a safe one for Starr, but the streets outside are unknown. When

customers ask her where Caribana is located, she hesitates, as she does not know. In this way,

Starr is ignorant of the black community around her; she is unaware of where it physically exists

in space. Miss Marly, a customer advertising her Caribana party, interrupts Starr and locates

65 In its most recent incarnation, ‘da Kink in my hair has become a musical. 202

Caribana for the others. She then takes the opportunity to hand Starr an invitation to her party, saying “no make it miss you,” adding in language what we have already seen in dance: that Starr is the objectified other in this community by her own inaction. The “you” operates as object here, emphasizing the subjecthood of the “it,” which can represent the party, Caribana, or the community itself. The negation of the sentence refutes its implicit plea, it becomes imperative that Starr arrest her current behaviour, otherwise it will “miss” her, miss operating as an antanaclasis, implying both physical and emotive methods of missing someone.

Starr’s foil, Joy, meanwhile operates from a position of pseudo authenticity that leads to her own downfall. As a Jamaican, newly arrived to Toronto, Joy feels that Caribana is something that she understands. The music and the dance, it is all familiar to Joy and as she pulls up to the parade with a trunk-full of chicken to sell, we hear what could be Joy’s anthem playing: “I want a big bottom girl; I want a nice, sexy girl for me to wine up on” (Cadogan). Joy has no hesitancy, but neither does she have the knowledge that she thinks she does, despite her “authenticity.”

Because she does not understand that she needs a permit to sell food at Caribana, Joy ends up arrested, alongside her nephew Dre, and hauled away from the parade. In the world of ‘da Kink, authenticity is not island born, but found in the interstitial space between there and here, Jamaica and Canada. As the only one who can navigate that space competently, it is Novelette that needs to pick Joy and Dre up from the police station. Novelette works as Derrida sees the foreigner’s relationship to hospitality, “[t]his pact, this contract of hospitality that links to the foreigner and which reciprocally links the foreigner, it’s a question of knowing whether it counts beyond the individual and if it also extends to the family, to the generation, to the genealogy” (21). For

Novelette, there is a disjunctive understanding of culture and home between herself and her son.

When she finds Dre practicing North American speech in the mirror, he explains that “Nigel

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teaching me to speak American,” not understanding that Nigel is speaking Canadian English.

Novelette plainly replies that he is “not American,” understanding in her space between Jamaica

and Toronto that to be Caribbean Canadian is to not be American.

Wearing Black: Occupying Language, Ritual, and Space

The last line of the stage version of ‘da Kink ends with Nia’s monologue on what it

means to be too black in a world that hates her black skin. Nia describes an abusive relationship

with her mother, who believes that “[a]nything too black is never good. Anything too black is

never good” (55). Where Nia’s sister is praised because her baby can “easily pass for White”

(55), Nia is disparaged because her daughter has “dark fingers and even darker toes” (56). Like

Derrida’s understanding that to be foreign, despite the hospitality offered by the host, is to be a

progenitor of foreignness. Nia’s mother prioritizes white skin in the effort to destabilize that

construction of the foreign that adheres to the skin, but Nia understands that it is that space of

foreigner that allows her to be at peace with her unhomeliness, her nation’s hospitality that offers

tolerance, but not necessarily acceptance.

In preparing for her mother’s funeral, Nia cries out to the audience “[a]ll black. Mom,

I’m wearing all black! Mom could you just look at me! I’m wearing all black! Please will you

just look at me…? I’m wearing all black. (three beats) I’ve been wearing black all my life.” The

use of epistrophe here reinforces Nia’s blacknesss and allows it to shift from something pressed

upon her by her mother, her community, her nation to something that she owns because it is her choice. Nia’s skin becomes performative, but it is an empowering performance. After she finishes speaking, the dancers rush to the stage and celebrate her blackness and the performance of her blackness before Novelette joins and utters the last lines of the performance: “I’ve been wearing black all my life. Blessings” (57). This embracing, not just of blackness, but the

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performance that blackness entails is reminiscent of the intercultural theatre that Ric Knowles describes as “taking their full and proper places on the main stages of world cities, with formerly marginalised and colonised peoples in full control of their own representation and cultural negotiations and with their cultural integrity not static but intact” (80).

Wearing black is not a choice, but the performance of blackness is an opportunity to write that story as the author would have it. Intercultural theatre opens up the space for performer focused representation, rather than audience centric construction of the performance. Through language, ritual, and space, the black Caribbean Canadian woman finds herself on the stage, performing a dynamic representation of the self as it exists in a larger culture.

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ANTI-RACISM AND EMERGENT EVENTS: DO #BLACKLIVESMATTER IN

CANADA?

It coming right inside we house-this exile-along with “things for so” from America, pack up in a box that Tantee sending or a barrel that Cousin Pearl mailing, it coming smelling of

“she gone a foreign” and strange and new, of anything that not us. And you playing with it, touching it, feeling it, putting it on- a new pair of shorts, a dress- “look what a pretty white

dolly!”; it having a smell all it own- sharp, exciting, and smelling of America and it real real- this

exile. Except we not knowing that is exile we smelling when excited for so, we pressing we

noses against the new clothes; we not knowing that the literature and history, even the grammar

we learning in school is part of the contour map in we own geography of exile.

(M. Nourbese Philip, Frontiers: Essays and Writings on Racism and Culture)

Black Caribbean Canadian women’s artistic production in Canada has, traditionally, been

linked to anti-racism and activism. I would also argue that these anti-racist and activist acts stem

from and emerge as performances from the activists themselves, as well as the media capturing

and the institutions reacting to these moments. Beginning after the establishment of the black

Caribbean arts community in Canada, this chapter focuses on the events that most productively

shaped black Caribbean Canadian women’s activism in Toronto in the 1980s and 1990s, while

also thinking about today’s challenges of being black and female under the constraints of

Canadian multiculturalism. Starting with the controversial 1989 ROM exhibit, Into the Heart of

Africa66, I trace the relationship between racism and political engagement in the arts in Canada.

66 While I do not look at the event here, it is worth looking at NourbeSe Philip’s text Showing Grit: Showboating North of the 44th Parallel, where she examines racism and anti-black sentiment in the 1993 production of Showboat. 206

Moving on to an analysis of the Writing Thru Race conference in 1994, I use contradictory impressions of the success of the conference as a case study for how coalitions for women of colour in Canada may or may not effect change. Following that trajectory, I spend some time analyzing the modes of anti-racist activism that the preceding chapters’ authors have used to both

rebel against and find acceptance within a flawed system that constructs its racialized citizens as

wholly other, as spectacle to be enjoyed by a nation that desires a tourism at home that manages

the margins, always reinforcing the otherness of difference.

Philip’s “geography of exile” is not just physical, but the concatenation of historical, sociological, and psychological processes that colonial England set into motion over four hundred years ago; processes that have led to racial self-loathing and the establishment of a homogenous and unracialized norm that is unachievable for the majority of Caribbean

Canadians. However, it is within this “geography of exile” that there exists the possibility of revolution. It is in the implicit tension in the hyphenated categorization of being Caribbean

Canadian, the flux between national and exile, that the artist can become revolutionary. It is in this state of between, this movement back and forth between the home of now and the home of then, that black Caribbean Canadian women will find the harmony of consciousness and coalition that is required to effect change. I would argue that future anti-racist or anti-oppression initiatives will agitate away from the managed and hegemonically maintained Canada and move back towards the Caribbean. This will allow for a doubly exiled state where the artist can give up on the hopeless pursuit of authenticity and, instead, find a new mode of address in the rearticulation of self away from the containing and managing of multicultural Canada. In this way, tourism does not happen at home, but is critically confronted and examined as it is exists on

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a continuum of movement always already articulated in the act of being and belonging in the

doubly exiled state of going back home.

Moving forward for the moment, let us think about the state of black activism in the

twenty-first century. On November 24th, 2014, it was announced that the Grand Jury would not

be indicting Darren Wilson, the police officer who shot and killed Michael Brown because being

black in America is threat enough to prove intent to harm. The reactions to this event have been

widespread in both the U.S. and Canada. Trey Anthony reflects on black masculinity and safety

in North America in her article “Is Time Already Running Out for My Black, American Baby

Nephew?” published on December 1st, 2014 in the Huffington Post. In this article, Anthony

reflects on the reality of what it means to be black in America and it exhausts her: “the ever-

present black fatigue threatens to overtake me again; the bitterness I can no longer swallow”

(Anthony). The endless and essentially futile operation of considering where in North America

her baby nephew can grow safely to adulthood is too much. The below-the-line comments seem to support her fatigue, reflecting hatred and ignorance in the face of one woman’s concerns; commenter Steve Harrison sarcastically tells Anthony not to “let facts get in the way of your fears” after calling Brown a “thug” and asking Anthony if her nephew is “one of the 72% fatherless black children in America?” Richard Carr similarly offers the invaluable advice that

“[i]f you don't want the kid to get shot, then raise the kid correctly, and get out of gang riddled areas.” This is in spite of Anthony’s clear message: it is her nephew’s black body that will signify violence, not his level of education or socio-demographic status. Though the comments are not all negative and confrontational, these comments are a sharp contrast to the supportive and engaged comments that Anthony received upon her first publication of this article on her

Facebook page. The wider audience of HuffPost Living Canada, which exists beyond the black,

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feminist, or sympathetic-to-black-feminists audience of Facebook, feels no need to express

sympathy with Anthony. Instead, this non-racialized and problematic space of the Huffington

Post’s online comment’s section allows for (and, indeed, invites) judgement of the racialized.

This movement towards a more general (and non-sympathetic) audience mimics the diasporic

citizen’s movement between home and abroad; the more global and public space of HuffPost is

desirable despite its bigotry, and the safe, yet ineffective, home of Facebook is a transient non-

space for the content that does not really exist until it finds the legitimacy of real publication.

The complacency of multicultural Canada’s relationship with race relies on the silencing

of black people’s lived experience of the institutional and personal racism that permeates every

province and every city. The Ferguson case is constructive for black Canadians because it

happened outside of Canada, making the issue both accessible and readily assimilable for

mainstream Canada, where “[t]he currents of racism in Canadian society run deep, they run

smooth, lulling white Canadians into a complacency that will see racism anywhere else but in

Canada” (Philip 12). When TheRecord.com reports on Canadian reactions to the Ferguson case,

in a piece describing the honouring of three black women67 in Kitchener for their work in anti-

racism, it acknowledges that racism is “a problem that Canadians feel deeply, too;” however, it

suggests that Americans need to look north for non-violent solutions, for instance “[h]ere in

Canada, where things are gentler and not viewed as relentlessly through the prism of race”

(D’Amato). Similarly, CHCH reports on their website that demonstrations in Toronto

experienced “concern, controlled anger, in the loud, but peaceful crowd” despite the “clear

67 Marcia Smellie and Chloe Callender two retired teachers, and Lauris DaCosta, a retired nurse are the recipients of this honour. 209

message for Canadians and especially for residents of the GTA. That being — don’t believe for a

minute that it couldn’t happen here.” Between the two publications, we see a pattern, the

establishment of Canadian activism as “gentler” and “controlled,” existing in juxtaposition with

the angry and riotous reactions by black Americans, which is extreme and unmanaged. It is this

identification of Canada in opposition to the U.S. that makes anti-racist and feminist discourse difficult to articulate in Canada, as “[t]his is very symptomatic of the so-called Canadian identity

– to focus on what we are not as opposed to what we are. Who we are as Canadians then becomes a pressing issue when articulating a Canadian-based feminist theory” (Massaquoi 76).

For, when black Canadian feminists exist against the setting of black American feminists, it both inscribes and disempowers the traditional modes of anger and resistance inherent in public discourse and political engagement that occurs as a result of social injustice, which I will term re/activism.

In her book Dark Continent of Our Bodies: Black Feminism and the Politics of

Respectability, E. Frances White moves through the history of feminism and anti-racist movements in the U.S. in order to theorize the relationship between white and black feminists as symbiotic, as well as disruptive. Her understanding of the positioning of respectability for white and black women allows that while white respectability resides in silence, black respectability exists publicly, as

a politically active woman was consonant with a respectable black woman; it was her

duty to uplift the race. In contrast, respectable white women were urged to avoid the

public sphere. Thus, whereas white women’s lives were constrained by a cult of

domesticity, African-American women were expected to enter the public realm. The

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politics of black respectability included the expectation that black women would

represent the race by fighting for racial equality. (36)

This understanding of respectability becomes doubly important for black Canadian feminists

who operate against the background of American understandings of race and sex, while also

subject to the constructions of management inherent in Canadian demonstrations against

oppression. So that, along with acting in accordance with American respectability and the

expectation of social activism, black Canadian feminists are also required to do so in a “gentler”

and more “controlled” fashion.

In the crush between American respectability and Canadian civility, black Caribbean

Canadian feminists must further exile themselves from their Canadian selves and return to the

diasporic indeterminate state of neither one nor the other. Thus, the most historic moments of

black Caribbean Canadian feminist activism have, in fact, happened in reaction to racist and

oppressive events in Canada. This reactive spirit has served adequately as anti-racist expression, but, in the end, is not sufficient to resist being managed, as Canadian multiculturalism mitigates for difference, even as it celebrates it.

Journey into the Heart of Africa: Ironic Contemplations and Re/Activism

In November 1989, the Royal Ontario Museum (ROM) opened what would be end up being an extremely controversial exhibit made up of 375 cultural objects from Central and West

Africa, which had been sitting in storage at the museum for more than one hundred years (Tator,

Henry, and Winston 36). Into the Heart of Africa, originally titled Into the Heart of Darkness before meetings with focus groups, was intended to present a retrospective on Canada’s colonial past, reflecting on the acts and attitudes of (white) Canadians, historically, when confronted with the reality of African culture and African people. The exhibit was supposed to offer an

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interrogative perspective on the construction of Africa from the outside, the outside, in this case, being white Canada.

Ideally, the exhibit should have brought people together, as they reflected on a darker time from the lofty heights of a diverse and integrated contemporary Canada. However, the ideals of the exhibit were compromised by two mistakes in the understanding of audience. One, the very important fact that the African Canadian audience is African, yes, but also Canadian, and to imply that an exhibit offers a new viewpoint or perspective on being Canadian, by way of distinguishing African and Canadian historical relations, ignores this fact. Two, that the non- black audience may not have the tools to understand the nuances of African identity through a colonial lens without being guided through historical and contemporary understandings of race and culture. The reaction to the exhibit was impressive: “[p]rotest was minor and small-scale at first, but grew quickly. By spring, hundreds of protestors gathered daily outside the museum, holding signs that said things like ‘Racist Museum of Ontario’ [sic]” and “[t]he show haunts the museum still, as the ROM’s former vice president of gallery development Dan Rahimi puts it, as

‘a landmark example of how not to design an exhibition’” (Whyte). It would be an understatement to say that exhibit curator Jeanne Cannizzo failed in her attempt to explore the meaning of museum collections as “generated in the interaction between the curator, the object, and the visitor,” as well as conveying her broader opinion that as “negotiated realities, museums are crucial to understanding one’s cultural self as well as the ethnographic other” (12). It took the

ROM twenty-five years to confess to this monumental failure to, not just the black Canadian community, but to anyone who attended the exhibit. Twenty-five years where the media and the

ROM refused “to acknowledge the extent of the alienation [that] the show engendered.

Individuals lost their jobs, were put in jail, were blacklisted, left the city, even the country.

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People were physically injured, and a community was humiliated” (Crean). This exhibition still

has cultural impact on the way that black Canadian art is understood and curated in Canada.

Principally represented by the Coalition for the Truth about Africa, made up of sixteen

other black community groups, the reaction of the black community to the exhibit was largely

condemned by the media and non-racialized persons, as the intentions of the exhibit were clearly

articulated by the museum and curator and implied a criticism of the colonial actions of the past.

In fact, “[w]ith very few exceptions, all the media, print and electronic, have at one time or another echoed those opinions, and have portrayed African Canadians who challenged the ROM

exhibit as being irrational, emotional and unable to grasp the irony that very quickly became the

linchpin to a proper understanding of this exhibit” (Philip 103). Black Canadians were reacting

to the exhibit, but non-racialized Canadians were reacting to the reaction of those black

Canadians. As with most reactions to racist representations, the fault lay not with the curator, but with the inability of black Canadians to understand the irony at work.

Even in 2007, The National Post reiterates its opinion on the matter: “[a] heavy irony lay beneath this incident. Jeanne Cannizzo, the curator, set out to denounce colonialism and criticize white Canada's attitudes to Africa. But black protesters, looking at images of Africans humiliated by missionaries, saw the reverse. So, they did all they could to turn the museum into a symbol of uncaring, unrepentant white power” (Fulford). The National Post, like most other news outlets, seems under the impression that black Canada is incapable of understanding irony, claiming that understanding the exhibit properly would enable them to understand that their subsequent protests were irresponsible. Philip, however, sees irony in the fact that the exhibit recognizes its own culpability within its scope of exploring Canadian complacency:

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The greatest irony of all, however, is that through the words of its guest curator, Jeanne

Cannizzo, in the accompanying catalogue to the exhibit, the ROM had been uncannily

prescient in describing the issues this show would generate. Both the ROM and the media

missed this irony. The tragedy is that the ROM was unable to recognize the opportunity

presented to it to do exactly what it said the show was intended to do. (103)

So, while The National Post would have us believe that the real tragedy of the exhibit was that

“[n]o one had told [Cannizzo] that most museum visitors ignore wall texts -- they look at the objects and move on” (Fulford), in fact, it is the very ironic nature of the exhibit’s text that contributed most to the controversy.

In the chapter on the ROM debacle, in their book Challenging Racism in the Arts, Carol

Tator, Frances Henry, and Winston Mattis argue that “[o]ne of the fundamental problems identified with the exhibition was the heavy reliance on irony to deliver the message” (42), seeing the liberal use of quotation marks and racist language as inadequate for constructing a critical argument that engages ideas of subjectivity and implication with the historicity of colonialism in Africa. Tator, Henry, and Mattis go on to say that “[w]hat the curator and the

ROM failed to recognize was that the irony of the exhibition’s texts required a certain degree of shared knowledge between the curator and the observer” (42), resulting in comment cards thanking the ROM for the exploration of “primitive Africa” (42) and volunteer exhibit guides telling visitors that Canadian missionaries civilized African pagans and describing the Zulu as

“an extremely vicious tribe” (44). In fact, the misinformation being presented to students (as schools were specifically targeted by the ROM) was of particular concern and “[t]he school board representatives argued that relying on irony as a vehicle for implying criticism of cultural imperialism and racism was both ineffective and inappropriate” (44). Suffice it to say, the

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problem was not that visitors were ignoring the text beside the objects, but that the text was

being overly relied upon despite its obvious inability to convey the complexity of cultural

interactions at work in the exhibit.

Even after the exhibit closed, Into the Heart of Africa resonates for both the black

Canadian community, as well as the wider arts community of Canada. In 1993, in her poem “The

Power of Racism”, Afua Cooper tells us

the power of racism

the power of racism is such

that the ROM could mount an African exhibition

without consulting Black people. (73)

Here, Cooper reminds us that institutionalized racism is most dangerous when it is unacknowledged, repetition simulating perpetuation: of oppressions, of stereotypes, and of civility. This sentiment is underscored by then ROM director T. Cuyler Young’s statement in

1993 that “[t]he museum should have been much more aggressive in dealing with the media. We should have defended the exhibition more vigorously and probably we should have politely

‘attacked’ the coalition” (184). Here, the director’s language replicates that of the exhibit, his quotation marks managing to simulate colonial violence without the culpability were we to remove the quotation marks. The attack is, of course, polite, as Canadian colonial aggression always is, the civilizing intent one of ironic distance.

What we learn from this event is that irony does not excuse complicity, and rather than choosing to avoid self-interrogation by means of critical distancing, art and those disseminating art need to engage with a politics of representation. Monika Kin Gagnon articulates this in her

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book Other Conundrums: Race, Culture, and Canadian Art when she says that “a politics of

representation suggests an ideological dimension to images, texts, and discourses:

representations do not simply ‘communicate’ or ‘express’ ideas, but rather are also ‘constitutive,’

in the sense that they contribute to the formation of subjectivities” (23). The formation of

subjectivities cannot be conveyed through the use of quotation marks, but, instead, requires a

conversation between the historicity and cultural relevance of objects and how this relates to the

many different people who interpret them. In her book Contested Representation: Revisiting Into

the Heart of Africa, Shelley Ruth Butler asks “[w]hat is the lasting impact, for example, when

protestors demonstrate against the ROM and Into the Heart of Africa?” and answers that “[t]he

anthropology of performance stresses the productive of such an encounter, focusing on how the

protestors contested and redefined dominant symbols” (Butler 57). Here, Butler sees the act of

protest as itself revelatory, despite the miscommunications and dismissals; she concludes that “it

is fair to say that the ROM is no longer a revered ‘temple’” (98). In the end, that is the result of

the ROM protest. The museum has marginally less authority than it used to. On November 9th,

2016, twenty-seven years after the initial outcry, the ROM issued an official apology for its blunder. In a statement of regret, ROM deputy director of collections and research, Mark

Engstrom, says that the “ROM expresses its deep regret for having contributed to anti-African racism” (qtd. in Hong). Accompanying the apology is the news that the ROM will be putting on a major exhibit in 2018 that addresses the exclusion of black Canadians from mainstream history.

That exhibition, held at the ROM from January 27th to April 22nd, 2018, is titled Here We

Are Here: Black Canadian Contemporary Art and was seen as a step forward by black

Canadians and art critics alike. In his Toronto Star review, Murray Whyte sees the exhibit as a

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comment on the power of historical narrative and the selectivity of nostalgia, saying “Here We

Are Here contributes, and vitally, to the idea of history as a selective realm filled with favourable inclusions and exclusions.” The exhibit is described as “subversive” (Rattan) and “subtle”

(Pearson Clarke) and is, undoubtedly, an improvement on the “glorification of racism” (Crean)

inherent in the Into the Heart of Africa exhibition. However, the exhibit still relies on an idea of the white Canadian audience as distinct from the artists as cultural informants tasked with teaching white people that black people are not a “monolith” (Rattan).

In its description of the exhibition, the ROM issues the challenge to “think differently

about the deep-rooted histories and enduring presence of Black Canadians” (ROM), a challenge

that, in tandem with the ROM’s question “[w]hat is the Black Canadian presence and history in

our country?”, relies on an audience that is not black Canadian. The pairing of the black

Canadian presence and our country reminds the audience that there is a normative Canadian

culture and it is not black. The Montreal Museum of Fine Arts hosted the exhibition from May

12th to September 16th, 2018 and claims that it “challenges preconceived notions of Blackness in

Canada” and “[affirms] the longstanding relevance of Black people to the fabric of Canada,”

reminding us that this is an exhibition for Canadians by black Canadians.

Into the Heart of Africa is an important moment in black Canadian activism and the thirty

years subsequent to the exhibition are demonstrative of how re/activism is capable of making

real, tangible change. I would argue, however, that these changes are managed by institutions

like the ROM, so that any success for black Canadian activism is always read as the success of

Canadian tolerance, so that re/activism becomes subsumed to the larger idea of Canadian civility.

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Writing Thru Race: Coalitions and Contestations

On June 8th, 1994 at 2:45 p.m., Jan Brown, Reform MP for Calgary Southeast (Alberta),

asked a question in the House of Commons regarding the upcoming Writing Thru Race

conference: “[t]he facts of this discriminatory conference are quite simple. Parts of the

conference exclude white writers from participating and the Canada Council has committed

$10,000 to support it. Now that the minister has the facts will he issue a ministerial directive to

the Canada Council to immediately withdraw its funding for this conference?” (Brown). Brown’s

question was representative of the controversy that reaction to the conference spurred both inside

and outside of the arts community. Just weeks before the actual conference, Minister of Canadian

Heritage Michel Dupuy decided to pull out Heritage Canadian’s funding, in the amount of

$22,500 (Kin Gagnon 68). Through intensive fundraising initiatives, the conference’s organizing

committee managed to recoup this loss and proceed as planned.

The lack of representation of writing by those of First Nations or other racialized groups

in The Writers’ Union of Canada (TWUC), highlighted and under discussion in the late 1980s,

along with “The Appropriate Voice,” a meeting between First Nations and other racialized

authors organized by the Racial Minority Writer’s Committee (RMWC) in 1992, paved the way

for Writing Thru Race: A Conference for First Nations Writers and Writers of Colour in 1994,

“sponsored by the Writers’ Union of Canada, conceived by the Racial Minority Writer’s

Committee […], and organized by a working committee of Vancouver-based writers” (Kin

Gagnon 66). Writing Thru Race gave these underrepresented groups a chance to focus on concerns that relate to that of racialized persons writing in Canada, finding similarities, despite a disparate set of backgrounds, in working conditions and the reception of writing written outside

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of European traditions. Kin Gagnon writes of the conference in detail in her effort to trace political anti-racism strategies in the late 1980s and early 1990s:

Writing Thru Race effectively created this milieu in which writers, editors,

theoreticians, and publishers networked and exchanged ideas. Implicit in the

conference policy was the fact that participants themselves could establish the

parameters of discussion without having to attend to the white guild, anger, and

defensiveness that have characterized and often dominated so many past

discussions of face not only within the Writers’ Union but in other cultural

contexts in which race politics have come to the fore. (67)

Where Brown and Dupuy saw discrimination against white Canadians, the conference itself upheld the notion that in order to produce a functional space for creativity and community discussion on the subject of racism and oppression, Writing Thru Race needed to segregate its authors, to protect them from the racializing gaze of non-racialized writers.

Thus, while the construction of the conference in the public mind adhered to the notion of racialized bodies excluding white bodies, and, thus, resituating whiteness at the fore of discussions in and around the conference, opinions about the functionality and success of the conference in the wake of these discourses was heterogeneous in the minds of the organizing body, TWUC and participants. The diversity of response ranges from congratulatory to the highly skeptical. In the former category of response, Pauline Butling claims that “this conference was a benchmark event, marking the culmination of more than a decade of literary/social activism aimed at redressing systemic racism and, for the first time, bringing together writers of colour and First Nations writers to talk about shared concerns” (26). Tator, Henry, and Mattis, meanwhile, assert that “[u]ltimately, however, the conference was an act of affirmation and

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recognition, and an act of defiance and protest” (107), in spite of the controversy that surrounded the event, and that “[t]he conference was also an act of defiance against Eurocentric ideologies and exclusionary practices. It was an act of resistance to the notions of liberalism and pluralism that perpetuate White power and privilege within the arts” (107).

Conference organizers are less congratulatory, lamenting that the issues of cultural specificity and the diversity of needs inherent within and without racial groups became background noise in the wake of public outcry and the positioning of whiteness as the only issue worthy of discussion. In her book Slanting I, Imagining We: Asian Canadian Literary

Production in the 1980s and 1990s, Larissa Lai68 says that “[a]s an organizer and participant in this conference, I experienced it as a devastating turning point in anti-racist cultural organizing in

Canada” (214). Lai’s disappointment echoes sentiments from fellow conference organizer Roy

Miki when he laments that

Race had threaded its way through the seams to restabilize the social and cultural model

of a white centre with groups of non-whites on the margins whose writers struggle to gain

entrance to the centre. The discourse of racial difference, of otherness, had covered over

the specificity of the conference itself and the contemporary manifestations of race that

had surfaced in reactions to it. (310)

The two organizers, reflecting on the intentions of the conference and the resultant refocusing of its attention on whiteness in the wake of the media backlash, offer less optimistic views on the success of the conference’s mission. Smaro Kamboureli attempts to reposition this perceived

68 For more from Lai on the details of what happened before, during, and after the conference, see her article “Other Democracies: Writing Thru Race at the 20 Year Crossroad.” 220

failure as a positive and claims that “one of the major accomplishments of Writing thru Race was that it showed white Canadians, including those of ethnic origins, that they are as racialized as black or aboriginal Canadians are” (91). Following this line of reasoning, the most important and lasting outcome of Writing Thru Race is that is mobilized the unintended centrality of whiteness to make overt whiteness’s raciality and, consequently, unracialized the racialized bodies of

Canada, a mass of invisible diversity, who became elided in their difference.

Kin Gagnon looks more closely at the internal functionality of the conference itself, removing it from its contentious construction by the media, focusing instead on artistic productivity alongside the internal disagreements of attendees and TWUC members and says that

“the conference did not automatically produce a homogenous politic with regards to self- identification, self-definition, or strategy. Contentions about ‘process’ during the last hour of the plenary further accentuated the conference’s ‘identity crisis,’ which had mostly gone unaddressed during the conference itself” (67-8). Here, Kin Gagnon articulates the ambivalence inherent in Writing Thru Race, which opened discussions on topics of appropriation and identification that needed addressing, but could not possibly come to any conclusions. Kin

Gagnon highlights the naïveté of the TWUC members at the conference’s end in suggesting that it would bring in new members by repeating Larissa Lai’s point that a good number of the participants in the conference do not publish traditionally, which bars them from membership.

According to Kin Gagnon, the conference was a productive confusion,

while participants brought over seventy recommendations forward, it became unclear

how and why the conference was identifying itself as a unified group in order to produce

such recommendations. And also, to whom were these recommendations being directed –

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to ourselves as representatives or our own communities? to the Writers’ Union? to

cultural institutions, such as funding bodies or publishers? (67)

Thus, while discussion managed to bring forth issues worthy of examination, there was no real

space for engaging with the results of these examinations. Instead, the existence of the

conference itself becomes the means to understanding its relevance; that such a thing could exist,

despite controversy, internal disagreement, and dissonant issues raised by a diverse group, is

itself remarkable and a hallmark of its time.

After 9/11, we no longer see such appeals to anti-racism and the discussion of racialization in Canada, and especially in Toronto. As Lai puts it,

The late 1990s, I think, were a moment of burnout, exhaustion, reflection, and going

underground for many of us who were active as critics, activists, and cultural organizers

earlier that decade. It does seem as though we are entering a moment where it again

becomes possible to act, though how and in what direction is not fully clear. Certain

things have shifted, not just what sits on the global stage, but its actual form, most

notably in the aftermath of 9/11 and the fall of the Twin Towers in New York. (216)

The War on Terror reshaped discussion of race in Canada. The focus on difference in Canadian activism became an interest in sameness, of ethnic groups or of non-white groups altogether.

Rather then, than the anti-racism of the 1980s and 1990s, we now had an appeal to diversity and culture.

Despite these changes in focus for anti-racism activists in Canada and the pessimism of both Lai and Miki in their theorizing of Writing Thru Race, both remain hopeful. Miki suggests that we take this opportunity to realize the work that reactions to this conference suggest is still needed:

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The hyperbolic reaction to “Writing thru Race,” along with the deathly silence from

academia, would suggest that the cultural transformation necessary to render obsolete the

technologies of race remains in the future tense. Under erasure, race has to be continually

brought to visibility as a construct that never stands still, or if it does stand still, then its

nets will continue to snare the body. Cultural praxis – in this “meantime” that becomes

“our” historical condition – becomes itself a performance of the political. (313)

Thus, for Miki the entire episode acts performatively, with all parties’ actors in the larger scheme

of racialization in Canada and the work that needs to be done to both make it visible and then

make it benign. The constant erasure of racialization in Canada, by means of irony or the

repositioning of margin and center, must be contested by moving through academia and into the

practical concerns on the world. This performance uses the reality of hegemonic maintenance

implicit in Canadian multiculturalism to illustrate injustice, and, therefore, disempower a

construct that relies on invisibility for its stability and continuance.

Lai also sees this complement between arts and activism as a possibility for improvement

of conditions:

In spite of the War on Terror and its attendant propaganda, torture, and abuse of human

rights, an in spite of massive economic shifts, human displacements, species extinctions,

and earth disruptions, I remain hopeful that there are other ways for imaginative and

progressive people to work together, against the forces of the prison-military-religion-

industrial complex (or sometimes through or around them) and with one another. (226-7)

The consequences of the rebranding of race and anti-racism in the 2000s due to reactions to perceived racial threats by the Canadian government, largely influenced by the actions of the

U.S. in the wake of 9/11, is that Canadian activism can no longer operate in the same space it has

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traditionally. However, Lai still sees hope; arguing for the power of art to transcend injustice and

function productively in exposing it.

Twenty years after the Writing Thru Race conference, we have the “Twenty Years of

Writing Thru ‘Race’: Then & Now,” a colloquium for discussing the relevance of the original

event through the intervening years. The colloquium opens with David Chariandy interviewing

Lee Maracle69 and Lillian Allen,David Chariandy interviewing Lee Maracle70 and Lillian Allen

(Kamboureli, “Twenty Years of Writing thru ‘Race’”), asking both “where are we now in the

representation of race?” Maracle tells the audience in no uncertain terms that we have not gone

far enough, that reconciliation has not happened and that literary Canada does not appreciate the

work of First Nations authors (especially women) in the same way that it celebrates its white

authors. Allen, in a more moderate tone, tells us that it has been a “slow evolution – not the

revolution we were hoping for.” Allen’s comment confirms what we already know: Canada does

not make quick strides when it comes to race. However, there has been change. There has been

movement; it is just a slow movement against the tide of management that multiculturalism

empowers.

In thinking about the Writing Thru Race conference, Allen remembers the camaraderie,

the empowerment that community allows, saying “when we get together, it’s not about politics,

it’s about who we are and it’s about our dimensionality,” a dimensionality that is not easily

69 I am focusing on Lillian Allen here because she is one the artists that I have focused on in previous chapters, but please click the link and listen to Lee Maracle in this clip. She is absolutely brilliant and speaking a very real truth about the construction of indigeneity in Canada and what it means to be non-white and female in multicultural Canada. 70 I am focusing on Lillian Allen here because she is one the artists that I have focused on in previous chapters, but please click the link and listen to Lee Maracle in this clip. She is absolutely brilliant and speaking a very real truth about the construction of indigeneity in Canada and what it means to be non-white and female in multicultural Canada. 224

recognized by white Canada. The use of “we” here exists in opposition to the media’s representation of anything black as “other,” as Allen reminds us that “we” can be racialized, it can be black, it can be something other than white. When reminiscing about this community of

1994, she remembers a moment where she refuses to consider publishing the poems she created because “this is just for us.” She continues, “we were enriching and feeding each other” and “the political duty to make the world a better place” would come later.

Performing Praxis: Re/Activism in the Arts

In her introduction to Shifting the Ground of Canadian Literary Studies, a collection of essays largely resulting from presentations at TransCanada Two: Literature, Institutions,

Citizenship in Guelph, Kamboureli examines the functions and limitations of what she calls emergent events in the interstices between Canadian literature and Canadian politics. In the vein of Journey into the Heart of Africa and Writing thru Race, emergent events are political in nature and result in engagement with an issue that has heretofore been relegated outside of mainstream discussion in Canada. The term “emergent” signifies both deauthorship and atemporality, making emergent events ongoing collective productions that only effect change slowly and subtly, as “emergence reflects [Kamboureli’s] perception of the process whereby the Canadian field-imaginary begins gradually but steadily to change its syntax” (9). The “field-imaginary” is

Donald E. Pease’s term describing a “disciplinary unconscious” (qtd. in Kamboureli 8), a space inhabited by the tacit assumptions and linguistic expectations of participants in any particular field. The definition of emergent events is elastic, incorporating events, artistic productions, and collaborations, political and personal.

I would like to posit emergent events in and around anti-racism in Canada as moments of re/activism, as “they constitute at once moments of crisis and of re-vision” (11). I mean to

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suggest that the field-imaginary is best disrupted in the face of coalition, and the power of

coalition is established in the face of contested events. Thus, emergent events are an inherent part

of re/activism, the event itself always happening as a result of contestation and leading to

contestation, as “[a]t once internal and external to the field, emergent events serve in part to

remind us of the relationship of the field-imaginary and of literature to the public sphere” (11).

The study of emergent events allows us to reflect on three positions: the initial event, the subsequent emergent event, and the fallout of the emergent event in the academic and non- academic worlds; “[e]mergent events, then, also help uncover the collusion that exists between the discursive formation of the nation-state and that of the field-imaginary, thus not only bringing forth changes about the kinds of things we study but also bringing into relief the ways and milieus within which we do so” (Kamboureli 13). It is the study of the processes connecting these three positions that make emergent events illustrative of the conditions of racialization and results of activism in Canada. They also help to make clear, in this collapse between arts, academia, and activism, how emergent events shape the field-imaginary in theoretical ways or have consequences in the real world:

Emergent moments can restructure the research landscape by redrawing the boundaries

that separate critical discourses from the material conditions that lie outside them;

moreover, they bring to our attention the need to rework the terms of what is interior or

exterior to critical discourses, in other words, to question what constitutes the proper

subject of the Canadian field-imaginary or what constitutes disciplinary propriety.

(Kamboureli 14)

Thus, emergent events help us to understand the mechanics at work in the in-between space of academia and activism in the arts.

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When Trey Antony writes about the inscription of violence on black mens’ bodies, when

Afua Cooper writes a poem about the ROM debacle, when non-white writers are lambasted in the media because of the need for a non-judgmental space, we are not just seeing media events with immediate repercussions, but emergent events with lasting theoretical and practical realities that will affect the field-imaginary, alongside the arts world, for years to come. However, these changes are not always predictable, as “the agitation emergent events cause in the field- imaginary may initiate a reshuffling of priorities in the discipline, but this does not as a matter of course translate into a paradigm shift” (Kamboureli 17). The result of this process, Kamboureli suggests, is “[a] field’s political unconscious can rescript its primal scene only via epistemic and methodological shifts” (17), which means, that while emergent events certainly have consequences, those consequences are less meaningful to the field-imaginary than one might hope. Where the events themselves seem to suggest a need for restructuring, we have to acknowledge that “[t]he high drama of sudden paradigm shifts does not appear to be a model in

Canadian literary studies” (17). Thus, while emergent events are productive sites for study, they are not obviously and inherently productive sites for paradigmatic change, as they do not always pass the two “litmus tests for [the success of] anti-racism work: meaningful change and critical mass” (Allen qtd. in Kin Gagnon 53).

Emergent Events: Performing Poetics

Anti-racism work in Canada is performative. It requires negotiating between the unfairness of the lived reality of racialization and the theorizing and reproduction of those theories for an audience that is ideologically, but never truly, unraced and unemotional. The juggling of these two positions requires the performance of rationality and justice in the face of irrational injustice, having a discussion that is “grounded in the specific materiality of Black

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women’s lives, while acknowledging uprooting, movement, and reconstitution, and interrogating

the dominant racialized and gendered discourse of the Canadian nation” (Massaquoi 7). The

lived reality of racism is a palimpsest to the work of anti-racism, continually erased in favour of

rearticulating in the syntax of the field-imaginary, but always present in the practice of the

everyday. This dual perception inherent in anti-racist work means that “[a]s Black women we need not spend time abstractly theorizing because our practice informs our theory. However, we need to spend/find time to reconceptualize alternative paradigms, ways of expressing empowerment collectively and independently as we strive to create accepting environments for our scholarship” (Massaquoi 5-6). The negotiation of life and theory requires a performance in both, managing a critical inwards gaze while directing an analytical engagement outwards towards the field-imaginary.

Philip articulates the peculiarities of this duality, this positioning between the reality of being racialized and theorizing anti-racism, when she ponders the work of Phillipe Rushton, well known for his contentious views on the relationship between race and intelligence and author of

Race, Evolution, and Behavior, published in 1995:

My heart then aches for my people and the centuries of unrelenting attacks upon our

persons and our humanity, my head buzzes with the effort of trying to think my way out

of the morass or racism. And somehow I must contain my gut revulsion for these theories

and for this man and his kind. I must bring to bear on what is, in my opinion, a carefully

orchestrated plan against African peoples, as carefully thought-out and as rigorously

articulated reasons why individuals such as he, and ideologies such as he espouses,

should be excoriated from any society of humans we wish to take pride in. (211-2)

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Here, Philip presents the complicated process by which racialized academics and artists work to reconfigure a “gut” reaction to racism into a reasonable and rational narrative that makes that reaction constructive. She then moves her discussion into the analysis of what I name an emergent event, The Women’s Press dispute in 1988, where a press that, nominally presenting itself as publishing the work of women, was called to account for the fact that it had not published a piece by a racialized writer in its first sixteen years of publication. Subsequent attempts at ameliorating that oversight led, unfortunately, to a focus on white writing and the notion of cultural appropriation, thus, reinscribing “the staggering erasures required by the invention of whiteness” (Roach 71).

In the introduction to his book Cities of the Dead: Circum-Atlantic Performance, Joseph

Roach tells us that “forgetting, like miscegenation, is an opportunistic tactic of whiteness” (6); in other words, The Women’s Press refocuses its agenda and misremembers the issues at hand, and ends up shifting its attention inwards, towards white writers, once again. This refocusing of agendas in the Canadian arts is pervasive and exists as both the cause and effect of the erasure of non-white writers in the field-imaginary. Roach discusses the function of surrogation as it enables internal cultural performance, by always positioning oneself in relation to another other.

Roach says that “[t]his process is unstoppable because candidates for surrogation must be tested at the margins of a culture to bolster the fiction that it has a core. That is why the surrogated double so often appears as alien to the culture that reproduces it and that it reproduces” (6), meaning that the performance is not only based on a fiction, but a fiction that is unrecognizable to the performers as themselves and “[t]hat is why the relentless search for the purity of origins is a voyage not of discovery but of erasure” (Roach 6). Also imperative to this process of surrogation is the act of forgetting, as “[t]he anxiety generated by the process of substitution

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justifies the complicity of memory and forgetting” where “the alien double may appear in memory to disappear” though “[t]hat disappearance does not diminish its contributions to cultural definition and preservation; rather, it enables them” (Roach 6). Erasure works to both elide the other as well as reinforce the misunderstanding of the other’s cultural performance, by both the center and the margins.

Dionne Brand’s Ossuaries, which won the Griffin Prize in 2011, is a reflection on erasure and remembrance, a contemplation of what gets left behind and what that means for those who find it. Centered on Yasmine, an activist in exile, Ossuaries is a memory box comprised of fifteen boxes of bones, operating from either first or third person around Yasmine, that investigate the process of erasure in its most malignant incarnations. Brand describes Ossuaries as “these bone cabinets or bone boxes if you will where I wanted to put all of the toxicity of our society so we could kind of look past them” (qtd. in “Dionne Brand Wins Griffin Poetry Prize”).

Written in a long string of tercets, Brand’s ossuaries “[unfurl] in one long stream of images and contemplations, pausing only in breathless commas, never coming to a full stop” (L’Abbé), the enjambments collapsing experience and memory into a cultural performance of assumed marginality and constant erasure of any inherent truths that may have ever existed.

In her chapter, “‘Rhetorical Metatarsals’: Bone Memory in Dionne Brand’s Ossuaries,”

Tanis MacDonald examines the function of memory and forgetting in Ossuaries and claims that

“Ossuaries is undeniably a book about memory, but it is also a book about the difficulty of locating memory, and about the cultural and historical fallout of living with such difficulty” (96).

MacDonald goes on to say that Brand is reimaging memory, “not memory as a grateful or reparative return, but memory as a living, physical, political pressure, made of equal parts nightmare and surging defiance” (MacDonald 96), so that memory and forgetting are violent and

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intentional acts, erasure becomes vicious, an act of doing, rather than not doing, and we are all called to account for the violence of our own memories.

Ossuaries opens with the lines “I lived and loved, some might say,/in momentous times,/looking back, my dreams were full of prisons” (9), the authoritative and subjective “I lived” undermined immediately by the conditional and mitigated “some might say,” both “some” and “might” suggesting the transience of authority and knowing. Brand then juxtaposes action with imprisonment, suggesting that memory allows Yasmine the benefit of understanding that activism is only as relevant as the state allows it to be. The state manages its citizens through a variety of apparatuses to maintain a hegemonic standard, and political activism is always already a part of that machine. Yasmine presses her point when she refers to “our narcotic slumbers,”

“our induced days,” and “our wingless days” (10), the omnipresent “our” reminding us that we are imprisoned along with Yasmine, a part of the same state managed machine that keeps us asleep and grounded. Yasmine then tells us about the violence of the everyday, as “some damage

I had expected, but no one/expects the violence of glances, of offices,/of walkways and train stations, of bathroom mirrors” (10), where the list of outside violences is reinforced by the self- hatred inherent in the last. Yasmine does not exempt herself in her condemnation of the state, as hegemonic maintenance requires the participation of citizens in order to function.

Yasmine’s observations about the world and herself are broken up by the voice of an unnamed narrator who tells us about Yasmine’s past, her criminal activities, and her own “bone boxes.” The two voices interweaving to remind us of the fallibility of memory, its motility, as the paths chosen are “composed irresolutely by you,/yet, only dimly recalled as consciously made by you” (56). These memories are mobile and inconsistent, and “the ‘bone cabinets’ of the poems do not serve as sites of memory so much as they function as rhetorical structures, which Brand

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uses to contain dialectics about the efficacy and uses of memory: the ways that memory can imprison as well as liberate, the ways that memory can enervate as well as enliven” (MacDonald

95). These rhetorical structures are malleable and insisting on memory as concrete leads to disruption and damage. Brand’s ambivalent relationship with the written language, the site for most assumptions of memory as concrete, reflects her ambivalence towards memory itself.

Brand’s grammar is desperate, her words existing in a haze of “aspirated syllables” (12),

“insentient adjectives” (14), “lost verbs” (14), and “violent syntax” (20); the confusion of words is underlined by Jasmine’s desire to “seduce the preposition” (22) while also knowing that

“prepositions are irrelevant” (26). Memory and words are simultaneously overworked and ready to break, both threaded with images of violence and ennui.

Brand’s last ossuary begins by addressing this ennui, this idea that the state’s hegemonic maintenance is exhausting for citizens, that not fighting injustice is itself exhausting: the first tercet stating “they ask sometimes, who could have lived,/each day,/who could have life each day knowing” (122) and the second tercet continuing “some massacre was underway, some repression,/why, anyone, anyone could live this way,/I do I do” (123). The ambiguous “they” reminds us of the motility of memory, “they” are unnamed, yet “they” condemn this tired life of

Yasmine’s, even as she states “I do.” The repetition in these two tercets creating an echo, of public opinion, of reinforcement of state ideals, of emphatic resistance, all at once. “Who could” is asked twice, a denunciation in itself, but Yasmine denies even this, and so, Brand does not leave us with any tidy answers to the questions that she has raised; she “does not capitulate to any pressures for a complete closure of the narrative” (MacDonald 106). Because memory is irreconcilable, so too is Ossuaries.

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Performance in Intercultural Toronto Theatre

If we see Ossuaries as an emergent event, a moment in time where Brand’s

philosophizing about memory and activism works itself into the mainstream imagination,

rippling the field imaginary just slightly, then I would like to suggest the site of Toronto’s theatre

culture as another emergent event, one where the performance is twofold, acted onstage and off,

to redefine what is remembered about the myth of multiculturalism, in the nation’s most

multicultural city, as “all cultural memory is performative” (Knowles, “Performing Intercultural

Memory” 167).

In his chapter “Performing Intercultural Memory in the Diasporic Present: The Case of

Toronto,” Ric Knowles examines the function of social memory and multiculturalism as

“something of a false friend to those grassroots theatre practitioners who want to challenge the hegemony of whiteness on the city’s ‘cultural heritage’” (167), insofar as “the policy problematically constructs memory in essentialist, static, and nostalgic terms in relation to dehistoricized ethnic ‘homelands’” (167) and, thus, protracts an already established cultural more in Canada that diversity is atemporal and culture is unchanging. This ahistoricity relies on essentializing groups and constructing generalizations based on surrogation, meaning that even within a group, culture begins to signify what those without the group suppose. Knowles focuses his attention on Toronto as his site of examination, as Toronto is advertised as particularly diverse and benefitting from multiculturalism. As well, Knowles believes that practitioners in theatre in Toronto are working to surmount the conditions of cultural ahistoricity imposed by contemporary multiculturalism in Canada.

If memory works generationally, as Knowles supposes, then “[i]n diaspora this transference crosses both generations and geographies, and it involves the intercultural

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transformation of the very performance practices it employs” (169), so that diasporic intercultural exchange becomes the space where memory is perpetuated, whether real or imaginary. Knowles goes on to say that “[t]here are various kinds of theatrical practice in

Toronto that use the performance forms of ‘home’ communities, invoking embodied cultural memories to (re-)constitute different kinds of diasporic community” (169), thinking about theatre companies that work to perform cultural memory, thus, creating culture and taking ownership of surrogation and the impact that it has cross-culturally. This ownership allows “the troublesome doubling of Roach’s surrogation [to become] a prosthetic suturing together of new, re-membered forms with the traditional performance forms that haunt them” (180) and shifts the stagnating nature of multicultural policy towards a productive engagement of diasporic and intracultural memory, creating new memories and replacing the old.

Knowles elaborates on Toronto’s productive possibilities in his chapter “Multicultural

Text, Intercultural Performance: The Performance Ecology of Contemporary Toronto,” by discussing the real-world implications of intercultural practice. Looking at funding practices in the late twentieth century, Knowles acknowledges that “multiculturalism as performed through arts funding practices kept othered cultures in their static, nostalgic, and deshistoricized ethnic place, allowing dominant cultural expression to flourish within an established Euro-American tradition” (123) and that more contemporarily, the “large ‘mainstream’ companies in Toronto, complying with the multicultural script, fill the ‘diversity slots’ in their seasons with ‘ethnic’ exotica without significantly shifting their audience base or comfort level” (123). Moving beyond these “mainstream” companies, Knowles articulates the possibilities inherent in smaller, more intraculturally or interculturally focused companies, like Carlos Bulosan Theatre Company,

AfriCan Theatre Ensemble, Theatre Archipelago, Rasik Arts, Obsidian Theatre, b-current, fu-

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GEN Asian Canadian Theatre, Red Sky Performance, Native Earth Performing Arts, Cahoots

Theatre Projects, Modern Times Stage Company, and Nightwood Theatre, to reestablish their own intracultural and extracultural authorship, one that contemporizes and temporalizes culture so that it reflects the growth and intercultural exchange that is a part of everyday life; as Roach says, “[t]hrough strategic solidarities across acknowledged difference and a kind of intercultural performative excess, they continually rewrite, reconfigure, and restage multiculturalism in ways that are cumulatively heterotopic, moving ‘the world’s most multicultural city’ from below towards an ever-evolving mode of alternate ordering” (131). In this way, Knowles articulates an emergent event that is multicultural Toronto theatre, which works dialectally through constructions of culture and intentional counter-reproductions of culture that shift the limitations of surrogation, so that culture is written and authored, not assigned and ahistoricized.

Reflective of this shift is d’bi young anitafrika, dub poet and monodramatist, whose work reinscribes contemporary politics on work based out of a matrilineal lineage. Daughter of dub poet Anita Stewart, young pulls from her roots as a Canadian, Jamaican, African woman and delivers performances that use tradition in their explorations of where that tradition has changed or needs to change. In her own efforts towards revolushun, anitafrika created the Watah Theatre, her “attempt at providing a sacred space for Black people to introspect, heal, and co-create lived experiences that nurture our loving humanity while challenging systemic oppression through the cultivation of wholistic performing arts” (27). In her article “Black Plays Matter: Watah Theatre,

Creating Safe Space for Black Artists in These Dangerous Times,” anitafrika is continuing the work of Writing Thru Race and all other black artists’ endeavours of taking the space that is necessary to make art happen. Anitafrika is enabling the creation of what she calls “Black artivists” (27), those “African-Canadian theatremakers, arts-educators, and mentors who are able

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to innovate future projects that further cultivate equity, justice, fairness, and accessibility in

Toronto and Canada’s arts and social service sectors” (28). The movement from safe community

space to artivism is reminiscent of Lillian Allen’s that views of art as “just for us” first and

“political” later (qtd. in Kamboureli, “Twenty Years of Writing through ‘Race’”). For, as

anitafrika tells us, “it is imperative that we do not place whiteness at the centre of the art we

create” (27).

In his chapter, “Bring Da Noise: The Poetics of Performance, chez d’bi young and Oni

Joseph,” George Elliott Clarke analyzes the ways that culturally inflected language can shape the

delivery and interpretation of art. Clarke looks at the divide between the possibility inherent in

the use of the vernacular in black Canadian poetry and the resistance in academic appreciation of

this form:

an excruciating chasm yawns in our reception of the Negro literatures, a cleavage opened

by race. The black poet who seeks to exploit the music of words as well as the drama of

his or her ministry, may be dismissed as a “performer,” I mean, as a minstrel, a harlequin.

In contrast, the black poet who adheres strictly to the grade school grammars and college-

approved styles of imperious educators, may be faulted by this lactic dialectic of dialect:

the more “standard” the speech, the “whiter” the speaker. (54)

Thinking about the implied authenticity of the written form versus the more complicated

audience focus of the oral form, Clarke argues that where the field imaginary sees performance

as a type of jocular tomfoolery, he sees the power that exists in poetry that resides in the

interstice between poet and audience. He distinguishes the need for oral expression in black

Canada by saying that “no black – or Afro-Caribbean – writer may presume the ability to write from a space as seemingly clear as the blank page, for history hovers over and shadows his or her

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inked being” (54). While the elision of black experiences has typically worked to ahistoricize black culture, Clarke suggests here that this history is implied in all words by black Canadians; however, it is not the end, nor really the beginning.

Looking to the impact on the field imaginary, in the potential shift from the written to the spoken, Clarke says that “[t]he rejection of performance poetry – or of black Spoken Word verse

– by the white aristocracy of Academia is nothing but a reactionary attack upon the possibility of a popular poetry that articulates the deepest feelings of its auditors” (70). Thus, if we see performance poetry as an emergent event in the Canadian studies field imaginary, Clarke argues that there is a push/pull happening in the space of legitimacy, where traditional academic reasoning sees the performer poet as less authentic, where Clarke argues that the authenticity is lost in the writing down of the cultural voice. While the field imaginary ripples again, as dub poetry loses and gains popularity, if not necessarily legitimacy, it is much unchanged by the debate, as of yet.

Anti-Racism/Activism as Performance: #blacklivesmatter

Leaving aside the stage, for the moment, let us return to the realm of protest and activism as emergent event. At the courthouse at University and College in Toronto on November 25th,

2014, organizers Lena Peters, Janaya Khan, and Rodney Diverlus oversaw a peaceful protest against police brutality towards black bodies everywhere, more specifically naming Mike Brown and Jermain Carby, victim of Brampton police shooting on September 24th, 2014, as victims of a worldwide epidemic of callousness and violence against black people. Sparked by the St. Louis

County grand jury’s decision not to indict Darren Wilson for his shooting of Mike Brown on

November 24th, 2014, the protestor’s chant of “[n]o justice, no peace” and “[b]eing black is not a crime” (Latheef) echoes the ideology of the black lesbian originated, but globally translated,

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#blacklivesmatter movement. The protest drew 3000 people and only a nominal few police officers, reflective of its peaceful nature. Linking events of police brutality in the U.S. to more local examples, Jermaine Carby’s cousin LaToya spoke at the event, reminding Toronto that

Ferguson is representative of violence against black people everywhere, not just in America.

Media coverage of the event is readily available, copious really for such a low-key event; descriptions in the aftermath describe the protest: “[j]ust a few police officers showed up at the demonstration, reflecting the peaceful nature of the protest, which an officer estimated drew some 3,000 people” (Latheef). The protestors are “holding candles” and “chanting” (Latheef), peacefully articulating the black community’s frustration with a system that not only ignores their plight, but actively violates the rights that every citizen nominally has to the due process of law. However, as we move away from a focus on the event itself (which is really just a copy and paste of Abdul Latheef’s report repeated by CBCnews, CityNews, 680 News, and more) we see news outlets much more interested in the pre-protest story whereby protest organizers, on the

Facebook page, ask white protestors to limit their visibility during the event.

Prior to the vigil, organizers asked non-black participants to “refrain from taking up space in all ways possible. Remember that you are there in support of black folks, so should never be at the centre of anything” (Peters) and to “refrain from speaking to the media. Black voices are crucial to this.” Response to this request was overwhelming, locally the headlines read

“Ferguson aftermath: Protests in Toronto, Ottawa spark debate” (CBCnews), “Canadian Pro-

Ferguson Rally Organizers Ask ‘Whites’ to Stay in Background” (The Globe and Mail), “Black voices at centre of Canadian pro-Ferguson rallies” (680 News), and, internationally, The Daily

Mail headline reads that “The controversial rules for white people who were told ‘not to take up space’ at Michael Brown vigil in Toronto,” reporting that “critics [are] accusing organizers of

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promoting segregation” and that “the peaceful protests were marred by a war of words on

Wednesday as the Facebook event created by Black Lives Matter: Toronto was flooded with

accusations of racism.” Thus, like other emergent events focused on creating lines of

communication about the lived differences in racialized and non-racialized lives in Canada, the

matter was easily refocused on the function of whiteness in the discussion. Where organizers

desired to see #blacklivesmatter reflected by black bodies speaking to media outlets about issues

that affect them directly, instead we get quotes from “Paige Jackson and Rebecca Macintyre,

who are both white” who say “[f]or us, it’s really important to come up and show our solidarity

and make sure black voices are leading this – that their feelings and opinions are front and centre

for everything happening here” (CBCnews). Like the Writing Thru Race conference twenty

years before this event, we are still seeing the erasure of black activism in the face of white priorities. Ironically, the call for black voices at the center of the event instead positioned white voices quite comfortably at the fore.

Paralleling this shift of black issues to white concerns in the mainstream media is the shift from the eloquent and meaningful #blacklivesmatter to the banal and obvious

#alllivesmatter. In her article “A Herstory of the #BlackLivesMatter Movement,” Alicia Garza writes that she named and created the movement as “an ideological and political intervention in a world where Black lives are systematically and intentionally targeted for demise. It is an affirmation of Black folks’ contributions to this society, our humanity, and our resilience in the face of deadly oppression.” Garza then goes on to list the number of groups imitating her slogan,

“all lives matter, brown lives matter, migrant lives matter, women’s lives matter,” and the subsequent appeal to inclusion inherent in “Our Lives Matter.” Garza, Special Projects Director for the National Domestic Workers Alliance, convincingly argues that the shift from

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#blacklivesmatter to #alllivesmatter is representative of a shift in conversation, the desire to

remove black lives from the equation. Where one hashtag represents a movement, a conversation

about equality and deprivation, the other is a facile attempt at annexation, and, in fact, reaffirms

that black lives do not matter.

Garza reminds us of the originating purpose of #blacklivesmatter:

When we say Black Lives Matter, we are talking about the ways in which Black people

are deprived of our basic human rights and dignity. It is an acknowledgement Black

poverty and genocide is state violence. It is an acknowledgement that 1 million Black

people are locked in cages in this country – one half of all people in prisons or jails – is

an act of state violence. It is an acknowledgement that Black women continue to bear the

burden of a relentless assault on our children and our families and that assault is an act of

state violence.

#blacklivesmatter needs to be articulated in those words because, more often than not, black lives do not matter enough in the state apparatus. The appeal to #blacklivesmatter is already inclusive,

according to Garza, because “when Black people cry out in defense of our lives, which are

uniquely, systematically, and savagely targeted by the state, we are asking you, our family, to

stand with us in affirming Black lives. Not just all lives. Black lives. Please do not change the

conversation by talking about how your life matters, too.” It is this shift in conversation that is,

historically, factually, deadly to issues involving black, or, even more simply non-white, rights

conversations. As seen in agitations surrounding Into the Heart of Africa, Writing Thru Race, and, more recently, #blacklivesmatter, once the focus in these emergent events is moved to white lives, black lives (and black issues) disappear completely.

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Transnational Intracultural Performance as Emergent Event

In 1993, NourbeSe Philip told us that “[r]acism is alive and well and kicking shit in

Toronto, in Ontario and all over Canada” (224) and that “[w]e ought to seize this opportunity; it

might not present itself in quite this way again” (231); and, as we find ourselves amidst the same

issues, making the same arguments, it must be asked: did “we” seize this opportunity? Or, do we

need to reinvent our methods of engagement, adapt the conversation so that it moves outwards,

intraculturally performing diasporically and internationally, unafraid of borders and national

lines when race is working the same way across these artificially constructed liminalities.

Notisha Massaquoi elaborates on the need for a black feminist theory in her chapter “An

Unsettled Feminist Discourse,” where she says that “[w]hile the Canadian state thrives on

globalization and positions itself as the beacon for cultural diversity, the racialized gap between

rich and poor expands, racialized social exclusion increases, and Canadians continue to latch on

to the concept of a white setter society” (77) and that “[i]nterrogating the relations between

transnational subjects, state, and the understanding of particular cultural dynamics is essential to

the black feminist analysis that I am proposing” (88), meaning that activism cannot operate in a

bubble, coalitions of black groups across national borders must always work alongside an

understanding of the desires of the home state’s apparatuses and inclinations. #blacklivesmatter

is an example of black people working together outside of national identities because race has

appropriated those identities and made them insubstantial within the global concerns of the

deprivation and denigration of black bodies.

In the introduction to What’s a Black Critic to Do II, Donna Bailey Nurse cites two emergent events as catalysts to the resurgence in popularity of black Canadian literature:

Calabash, an annual literature festival held in Jamaica, and Lawrence Hill’s Book of Negroes, as

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an unarguable international literary success. Leaving aside Book of Negroes, which is itself a feat of intracultural performance and evidenced racial borders alongside national ones, Calabash is a diasporic going home for many of the writers attending, even non-Caribbean author Michael

Ondaatje being hailed as “an island man” by Nurse. It is here, is this space of in-betweenness that black Canadian literature reshapes itself. Moving away from the physical location of Canada allows everyone to understand what it means to be Canadian, and allows those of Caribbean

Canadian background to reaffirm how Canadianness can be constructed and reconstructed from within the power of the literary imagination.

Moving this understanding of transnational imagination outwards, activism and anti- racism in Canada is moving outwards, past borders and national differences, in the understanding that racialized difference is more impactful to the everyday lived reality of most black people.

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BECOMING FOREIGN: WHO AM I?

Over the course of writing this dissertation, I have become foreign. However, I have never felt so Canadian as I have once I became foreign. My foreignness makes me nostalgic for a home that never was, a place to which I never really belonged. I am a black Canadian woman whose father was an immigrant who moved from Trinidad to Canada in the seventies and whose mother grew up on in a country house in rural Cape Breton. So, if (as I have argued) the

Caribbean Canadian immigrant exists in an interstitial space, where then does that leave me? As a teenager of the nineties, I belonged to a group of friends who all shared the common experience of being first generation Caribbean Canadian black women. We were antiracist activists living in West Toronto and attending Humberside Collegiate Institute, lauded as a stellar institution despite my memories of white supremacists handing out hate literature on site and girls being told that they should not speak out against the sexual harassment from faculty members. My antiracism and feminist sensibilities grew in this environment and were intrinsically linked to my self-identification as a black Caribbean Canadian woman.

But, I have become foreign.

As I have become foreign, so has the world around me.

I moved to London, England in 2015. I have never had any desire to move to England.

My mother’s family is very Scottish Canadian and the clan sometimes has family reunions in

Scotland, but my mother and I could never afford to go. I thought that one day, maybe, I might visit Scotland wearing my MacPherson tartan kilt and speaking my very limited Gaelic (as I said, my mother’s family is very invested in their Scottish roots). However, I never had any intention of visiting England, the very birthplace of the colonialism that murdered my indigenous

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Caribbean ancestors and enslaved my Black Caribbean ancestors. Then I married a Brit and it all

went to Hell. So here I am, living in the center of the world, where time starts71.

I am foreign in a place where 52% of the voting population72 despises hospitality. When

Derrida asks “[w]hat does it mean, this step too many, and transgression, if, for the invited guest

as much as for the visitor, the crossing of the threshold always remains a transgressive step?”

(75), he is speaking of a population that is swayed by Nigel Farage and Michael Gove, a

population that reacts, not with abhorrence, but with appreciation, to the same images

perpetuated by Hitler. When he speaks of the “aporia” of hospitality he is thinking about the

inherent contradiction in hospitality: that the welcomed is always that which is held at remove,

the welcome itself that demarcation between citizen and immigrant. The Brexit campaigners told

us that the British population needed to “take back control” from… who? Migrants? The EU?

Immigrants? It did not matter. Control was taken back. And where did Brexit campaigners find

inspiration for taking back that control? Canada and Australia were the most oft cited sites for

examples of countries with appropriate “controls.”

In this dissertation, I have taken a journey. From the Caribana of my youth, nostalgia

mixed with analysis, to rethinking what black activism looks like from a theoretical and critical

perspective. My fourth chapter is a gesture of love to a cultural performance that shaped me and made me feel part of a community to which I otherwise would have been alienated. Though my parents were divorced and my father lived in America, Brazil, and Japan during my childhood, he always came back for Caribana and my memories of the parade are really memories of him.

71 I stood on the Meridian line; it was not that exciting. 72 Fun fact: Canadians can vote in UK elections, but Brits cannot vote in Canadian elections. My first democratic act in the UK was a vote against the majority. 244

During the course of this dissertation my father passed away from cancer, which has made this

journey subjective in the most constructive of ways.

That journey of nostalgia and genealogy follows on from my third chapter, where my understanding of critical engagement is shaped by my life as a student, that moment where I realized that my antiracist and activist leanings of the nineties had room to grow in my academic pursuits and scholarship of the 2000s. I moved from Toronto to Halifax for my undergraduate studies and it took me years to understand what it meant to be black in that new space where black did not mean first generation Caribbean Canadian. George Elliott Clarke’s criticism of the privileging of Brand, Harris, and Philip is real to me in a lived way; operating between these perspectives is where I hope that I achieve some subjective critical methodologies. For me, this shift in thought is special, a physical movement of body reflected in the mind.

So, if Caribana is a moment from my childhood and Caribbean Canadian literature a construction of myself as student then ‘da Kink in my Hair is where I situate myself as teacher. It is a pedagogical think-piece, a discussion point that hints at an insider point of view while demarcating where the outsider always stands. ‘da Kink in my Hair is celebrated by the

Caribbean Canadian community, something (finally!) representative of this group that belongs so wholly to Canada. I taught this text in the first class that I designed myself. On the first day that we studied it, I asked the class to tell me what my hair tells them about me. One of my male students (I can’t remember his race) raised his hand and said “that you’re a busy person…

(beat)” and I paused, patted my hair and thought about booking myself into the hairdresser before teaching this text again, and looked for another hand. Thank God! My only black male student had his hand up: “That you are mixed race: most likely part Caribbean. I would guess that your father is black and that your mother is white.” I was saved. Yes. Indeed. That is what I

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was getting at. And he knew that. We were speaking the same language. He already knew that hair was political and he was also not worried about pointing out race in the ways that most of the class was. It was a wake-up for me to see how afraid a group of students could be when talking about race and it was so blatantly obvious through the text and my pointed questions that that was what I expected from them.

I grew up in Roncesvalles Village in West Toronto by High Park. The street I grew up on was filled with retirees for the most part and there were so few children for me to play with that I often felt isolated and ended up spending most of my time reading indoors. When I described this to a friend in high school, she was incredulous: “but, we were all just one street over. We were all playing in the roads; all you had to do was come over!” This is how I feel about dub poetry in Toronto, to a certain extent. While I was putting on multicultural dances and productions, holding antiracism seminars and discussions, running for city councillor to encourage more black voters, going to any and all black stage productions, jumping up at

Caribana, and working with various black community groups there was an incredible movement happening just around me that I was neither participating in nor benefitting from.

While this missed opportunity is largely the result of timing, as the dub poetry movement in Toronto began and hit its crescendo before I was old enough to take part, it is also the result of prioritization. My priorities in the nineties were practical. I wanted to live in a world where I could walk down the street without hearing white boys make monkey noises at me, I wanted to live in a world where I was not terrified to go to school because there were students there who wanted to “get rid” of all the non-whites, I wanted to live in a world where I could visit my friend without worrying about her boyfriend and his “nigger-beating bat.”

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You have to understand, also, that I have always known how privileged I am as a mixed- race woman. My black male friends were having their hands broken by police officers after being taken into custody because they had dreads, just as a suspect the officers were looking for had dreads. I lived in a nice (white) neighbourhood, and my friends and I challenged ourselves to walk through black neighbourhoods with bad reputations to prove our “blackness.” However, my privilege was an opportunity, for if you are not using your privilege to undermine the notion of privilege, what are you doing?

I argue in this dissertation that dub poetry is rebellious, an act of revolution, but I would also argue that it’s a grown-up revolution, one that I could not understand when the practicalities of racism, and the real physical and emotional harm it causes, was my priority. Another practicality might be that I was too young to easily access over nineteen clubs. However, that is a fairly petty concern, and not one which would have held me back in any real way. So, while I considered theatre to be one of my top priorities for cultural engagement, which might explain my academic interest in performance, dub poetry was not on my radar. And, where music and dance were my main mediums for performance, dub poetry again was too high level for me, too impractical to the person I was back then.

So, where I move from dub poetry to thinking about activism, there is a returning home for me. Dub poetry is a rebelliousness of the mind, a shift in thought that stirs emotions and thoughts, where activism is that space where action is at the heart of the movement. Where I posit re/activism as located in moments of activism with transient and ambiguous results, transnational intracultural performance then stands out as activism with the power to sustain movements internationally. Currently, we see nations uniting in protest over Donald Trump’s election as president of the United States of America. This is not a reaction to one event, as

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Trump is representative of a misogynist and racist impulse of American voters that is in turn a

protest of the “step too far” (75) that Derrida tells us is borne of the natural transgression of

hospitality. Suddenly, democracy is seen to be threatening, the president of the Free World is at

war with the Press, making unlawful laws, and mirroring a larger rise of fascism in the western

world (much like the British ennui with expertise) in a conflagration of post-truth and fake news.

In 2016 and 2017, law became the enemy, as Derrida tells us that “[w]e will always be threatened by this dilemma between, on the one hand, unconditional hospitality that dispenses with law, duty, or even politics, and, on the other, hospitality circumscribed by law and duty”

(135), so that 52% of the British voting public saw a break with the laws of the European Union as beneficial so long as it denied free movement to Europeans, and the American public elected a man who, upon his seventh day as president, enacted the controversial and unlawful Muslim Ban that has since been struck down by federal courts, revised that ban and attempted to enact the revised version, which was also subsequently struck down federally as unlawful. Laws set to protect the public now hinder persecution of the foreign public, so those laws must be changed

(in the case of Brexit) or ignored (as in Trump’s many atrocities). The “step too far” requires that we rethink whose steps. Who has gone too far?

Living in England, I am more Canadian than I ever was in Canada. I wonder what happened to that moniker of Caribbean Canadian that I used to wear/perform; it was always tangential, relying on the assumptions and/or approval of my audience, but it was always still mine to perform. Living in London, I am suddenly Canadian in a new way, foreign in a new way.

I feel more comfortable acting as the authentic insider as a Canadian than I ever did as a black woman living in Canada.

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This dissertation is reflective of my journey, in space both real and imagined, but it also follows in the wake of world-shaping events that will lead to an intracultural hospitality of activism. An activism that reflects the will of a world to co-exist, to reflectively and critically perform its own “tolerance”, whether that be the unconditional that Derrida suggests is impossible or the conditional and intrusive hospitality of a post-Brexit and post-Trump world.

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