Black Writers Matter

by Whitney French

  Jupiter and Venus Farmer taught me to fight for freedom for myself and others, to keep faith for a brighter day even when it seems that all the odds are against you, and to have hope and move with that hope, even when you are stripped of your humanity. I am their seventh generation.

  Indigenous peoples of Turtle Island have taught me so much about governance, ancestry, truth, beauty, and spirituality. I am grateful to have learned from Indigenous folks since youth, about the interconnectedness of nature and us, about living with the land, and most importantly, about acting in a way that is considerate and compassionate to at least seven future generations. I am grateful for every opportunity to share in and act on my affinity and love for water with Indigenous folks—they define how we all need to relate to water, the elixir of life. Water is life, Mni Wiconi.

  So, brothers and sisters, what must we do—RIGHT NOW, forever and always—to give our Afrofuture children, and their Afrofuture children, the foundation for freedom in all ways, shapes, forms, and means, and ends?

  Can you hear me? Do you overstand?

  I hope. I pray. I know. I do not know. It is written. El Mektoub.

  Giving thanks as the sojourn continues…

  Righteousness is not that you turn your faces toward the east or the west, but [true] righteousness is [in] one who believes in Allah, the Last Day, the angels, the Book, and the prophets and gives wealth, in spite of love for it, to relatives, orphans, the needy, the traveler, those who ask [for help], and for freeing slaves; [and who] establishes prayer and gives zakah; [those who] fulfill their promise when they promise; and [those who] are patient in poverty and hardship and during battle. Those are the ones who have been true, and it is those who are the righteous.

  —Al-Qur’an al-Kareem [The Noble Qur’an],

  Surah Al-Baqarah, 2:177

  On Haunted Places

  Encountering Slavery in Quebec

  — Délice Mugabo —

  State terror against Black communities in Canada and elsewhere is fairly well documented—in fact, we can even see how debates about systemic racism still don’t take into account white citizenry terror. Yet, white Québecois—some as members of an organized white supremacist group, but most not—inflicted a particular kind of violence on Black women, men, and children through the 1990s, the period that I studied during my graduate research. Stories of white citizen terror also reveal how, despite the general lack of knowledge about the history of slavery here, white Québec society is still able to mobilize an associated set of knowledge that animates routine manifestations of white supremacy and anti-blackness. In other words, not knowing the details of slavery and its systematic dehumanization of Black peoples has not hampered the ability to register Blackness in terms of fungibility and submission to white domination. So, even if Black people living in Québec today are not necessarily descended from those who were enslaved here, since the history of slavery ties Africa to the ‘Old’ and ‘New’ Worlds in violent ways, we arrive in Québec already being part of this society that slavery created.

  I explore here—through the works of Saidiya Hartman and other Black feminist scholars—the many ways in which Black people in Montreal continue to be haunted by the specific forms of captivity that have marked Black bodies across the Atlantic. To do so, I offer a reading of the story of Botche Kafe—a former Black teacher in various East-End Montreal high schools for twenty years until the mid-1990s. Kafe’s story blatantly exposes the blurred line that exists between enslavement and enslaveability. To be clear, my goal is not to claim the lives of the Black women, men, and children who were enslaved in Québec as our own, but to reveal how their lives and our lives are linked today. Québec society, as we live it today, is part of the world that slavery created.

  For the Dead, the Dying, and Those Longing for Life

  New France is a former slave-holding, white, settler colony that was first used for resource extraction (mainly fish and fur). As its role moved from extraction to settlement, successive colonial administrators lobbied the French crown to allow them to import African slaves (Viger and Lafontaine 1859, 2). Although a great majority of slaves under the French regime were Indigenous peoples from the western borderlands in present-day Wisconsin, Illinois, or Ohio, historians number enslaved Black people to over a quarter of the enslaved population, or over one thousand. While enslaved Black people were usually brought in from the Caribbean, others were brought to New France as bounties of various wars waged in the United States, and newer records allude to ships arriving in New France directly from Africa carrying enslaved Black people (Gay 2004, 82). In her work on slavery in Québec, Charmaine Nelson explains that most enslaved Black people in New France arrived here through several crossings, at least two, if not more.

  Christina Sharpe’s (2016) masterful new book, In the Wake, begins by having us sit with the fact that the Black women, men, and children who did not survive these crossings—whether because of suicide or murder—still have a physical presence. Sharpe helps us understand the “time of slavery” (Hartman 2002) not just metaphorically but also materially. The idea that the time of slavery has not passed may be difficult for some; however, it becomes more difficult to refute when we are confronted with the fact that traces of enslaved Black bodies are still in the ocean. Sharpe recounts the story of the Zong, a slave ship that brought captives from Africa to Jamaica, 130 of whom were thrown overboard along the way. Sharpe reflects on what happened to their bodies in the ocean and carefully attends to how these men and women are actually still present. It is worth quoting her at length:

  It is likely, then, that those Africans, thrown overboard, would have floated just a short while, and only because of the shapes of their bodies. It is likely, too, that they would have sunk relatively quickly and drowned relatively quickly as well. And then there were the sharks that always traveled in the wake of slave ships. There have been studies done on whales that have died and have sunk to the seafloor.

  These studies show that within a few days the whales’ bodies are picked almost clean by benthic organisms—those organisms that live on the seafloor.…What happened to the bodies? By which I mean, what happened to the components of their bodies in salt water? Anne Gardulski tells me that because nutrients cycle through the ocean…the atoms of those people who were thrown overboard are out there in the ocean even today.…The amount of time it takes for a substance to enter the ocean and then leave the ocean is called residence time. Human blood is salty, and sodium, Gardulski tells me, has a residence time of 260 million years. And what happens to the energy that is produced in the waters? It continues cycling like atoms in residence time. We, Black people, exist in the residence time of the wake, a time in which everything is now. It is all now. (Sharpe 2016, 40–41)

  By invoking the Black lives that remain in the sea, Sharpe encourages us to consider how the residence time of enslaved Black women and men who died at sea can be paralleled to the anti-blackness that marks the wake of slavery. Sharpe’s book reads like a prayer, a prayer for Black people, the dead, the dying, and those longing for life. Tying her own family loss to the reality of premature Black death—from the earthquake in Haiti, to police killings in the United States, to Black migrants dying in the Mediterranean Sea—Sharpe writes about anti-blackness as the fact of living in the wake of slavery. Let us return to that temporal marker—the “long time” of slavery — in a moment.

  Dionne Brand is another Black feminist thinker whose work challenges us to centre slavery in our understandings of contemporary Black life. Her writings are particularly salient for the ways that they often place Black Canadian lives at the centre of the intricate geographies of the Black diaspora. In her novel At the Full and Change of the Moon, Brand (1999) demonstrates how the historical memory of slavery resurfaces as/because of the recurring forms of violence that Black people in Canada experience. In the novel she tells the story of Marie Ursule, an enslaved Black woman in Trinidad
who foresees leaving the memory of her life in the bones of her great-grandchildren who migrate to Canada in exile nearly a century after her death. Their great-grandmother’s memories manifest themselves differently in each of their lives. Bola, for example, experiences her great-grandmother’s trauma “not only [as] a psychological concept,” but as “a culturally-transmitted marker of communal history and experience” (Johnson 2004, 2). For Brand, trauma results from a silenced collective history, including through individual stories stricken from archival records. ‘Unforgetting’ is what Brand calls the process of recovering these experiences. As she explains, it is “an endeavor of collective, interpersonal memory,” a matter of “permitting history to arise where immediate understanding may not” (Johnson 2004, 3).

  Having also interrogated the topic of collective memory, Toni Morrison explains that social memory is not just about history, but also about haunting (Gordon 2008). This is a theme that she explores in her 1987 novel, Beloved.

  Inspired by the story of Margaret Garner, a Black woman who escaped slavery and kills her infant daughter in order to avert her child’s re-enslavement by slave catchers who capture them. The book tells the story of how that daughter, Beloved, returns to Margaret several years later in the form of a ghost. By setting the story in 1873, ten years after emancipation, Morrison draws attention to how slavery had ended in name only. What we learn from Beloved is that “haunting is one way in which abusive systems of power make themselves known and their impacts felt in everyday life, especially when they are supposedly over and done with or when their oppressive nature is denied” (Gordon 2008, xvi).

  Finally, Saidiya Hartman is another thinker whose work challenges our sense of historical memory. Hartman (2002) develops the concept of the “time of slavery” to refer to the dispossession that is an inheritance from slavery. In her argument Hartman clarifies that she does not mean that racism is unchanging. Rather, anti-blackness is intransigent and “one’s condition is still defined largely by one’s membership in the subject group” (2002, 776).

  Similarly, Hartman also uses the concept of the “afterlife of slavery” to describe the ways in which “Black lives are still imperiled and devalued by a racial calculus and a political arithmetic that were entrenched centuries ago” (2007, 6). In sum, Hartman writes, “racial subjection, incarceration, impoverishment and second-class citizenship: this is the legacy of slavery that still haunts us” (2002, 766).

  Taken together, Sharpe, Brand, Morrison, and Hartman allow us to reflect on the memory of slavery, how it is embodied and how it is carried. We learn that “anti-Black violence and stolen life define the very foundation of the settler state” (Hartman 2016, 210), and they tell us to “beware forgetting the enslavement or domination that persists and that often masquerades as emancipation or freedom” (Gordon 2008, 184).

  This conceptual material helps us make sense of the various forms of anti-black violence that continue to mark Black life in Québec, and Botche Kafe gives us a snapshot of 1990s Montreal.

  Mr. Kafe’s Class: Anti-black Violence in Québec’s High Schools

  As with Dionne Brand, for whom the process of unforgetting is an integral part of creating and preserving a collective memory, Avery Gordon (2008) argues that the sociality of a place contains its own memories that linger over time. In this sense, it is very possible to arrive in a place and “bump into a rememory that belongs to somebody else” (Gordon 2008, 166). I would argue that Québec has its own memories of slavery that, together with other histories of slavery in the Atlantic world, merge to constitute part of the global history of anti-black violence and Black resistance. Botche Kafe’s story is one where the experience of captivity in Ghana meets its contemporary equivalent in Québec.

  Botche Kafe is a Ghanaian-born educator who taught at almost all of the high schools in the Laurentides region, just north of Montreal (Gagnon 1993). Having endured fifteen years of racial attacks from students at the Deux-Montagnes School Board, the fifty-four-year-old teacher submitted a complaint to the Québec Human Rights Commission in 1992, as the situation had caused “depression and anxiety so severe that it incapacitated him from working” (Ruggles and Rovinescu 1996, 94). Kafe kept several letters from his students and he presented them at the Human Rights Tribunal. “My mother is a racist,” wrote one student, “here is her phone number. She’s going to tell you all about racism. She’s going to sock you.” Another added, “You’re supposed to be my slave not my teacher, haven’t you see Roots?” (Ruggles 1993, 6). He testified that over the years students brought their excrement to throw at him (Ruggles and Rovinescu 1996) and had kicked him around in the classroom shouting: “If the nigger dies what does it matter?” and, “Nigger crisis…the niggers are everywhere” (Knowles 1996, 300). Students at the high school in Oka mocked Kafe “by doing African-style dances, feigning [drums] playing on their desks, and repeatedly telling him to go back to Africa” (Picard 1993, A5).

  What later became disturbing to Black community members was that the school board had been trying to get rid of him since he began working for them. Kafe testified that “the board went out of its way to make his life unbearable—he was given an impossible course load in violation of the collective agreement; he was given students with behaviour problems and he never had the support of the administration” (Ruggles 1993, 6).

  In 1984, students at Sainte-Eustache High School were taking bets on how long it would take to get Kafe to leave. Kafe testified in great detail about the ordeal that he went through (Ruggles and Rovinescu 1996).

  The principal also supported a student who gave me blows all the way from the third floor to his own office on the ground floor. He also refused to punish the student who flooded my classroom with fire extinguishers shouting “Drown the nigger”…and held my tie and pulled me around like a dog.…The horrible barbaric things he [the principal of one of the schools] did to me are beyond description…like my whole self was destroyed by what was going on there. (Knowles 1996, 300)

  The racist attacks took their toll on Kafe’s mental health, and in 1990 he took a two-year sick leave. The school board then took measures to have him laid off. They appointed a psychiatrist who declared Kafe to be paranoid and suffering from delusions. Kafe was fired on that basis. It was then that he decided to submit a complaint to the Québec Human Rights Commission. In an interview a few years later, Kafe revealed that it was when students referred to him as a slave that he decided to fight back, for it invoked ancestral memories that he grew up with in Ghana.

  Through their oral traditions people in his village still recount the stories of the raids made by the slave traders. The family story told about his great-great-grandmother is that she, along with everyone else, fled when the slave traders came to their village. But remembering that she had forgotten her cotton—the work that kept women occupied—she returned to the village to retrieve it and was captured and taken into slavery (Knowles 1996, 301).

  Once, as an adult, Kafe visited a slave castle on the coast of Ghana where the enslaved were detained until they were taken away on the ships. One thing he still remembered from that visit was that “the last stop on African soil for slaves was the false floor of the castle which gave way so that the slaves fell onto the ships. Some would die at this point or fall on, and kill someone else” (Knowles 1996, 301). During his years living in the United States, Kafe visited important sites of slavery in the South, viewing from the other side of the Atlantic what he considered to be his own family history.

  Black people from the continent are often said to have no memory of or interest in the history of slavery and the fact that, generation after generation, the story of how Kafe’s great-great-grandmother was captured by slave traders should make us pause and reflect on why it was so important for his family to preserve that memory. I can’t help but see the parallels between Kafe’s great-great-grandmother and Dionne Brand’s Marie-Ursule, who planted her stories as an enslaved Bl
ack women into the memories of her grandchildren and beyond, anticipating that they will need them as they confront anti-black violence when they move to Canada. The story of Kafe and that of Marie-Ursule’s descendants in Canada bring us to consider how “the routing of traumatic memory through interconnected lives and the ghosts that haunt them serves to unforget traumatic history by revealing its constant resonance in the present” (Johnson 2004, 13). In other words, Black diasporic history manifests itself in particular ways when, through collective forms of memory, the past reveals itself to still be present. Kafe’s brutal experiences of anti-black violence—it must be noted, primarily at the hands of white children, therefore revealing how this kind of terror has no “age of innocence”—trigger a process of unforgetting, in Brand’s sense, that allows him to access a collective memory that not only exceeds Québec territory but also reveals how contemporary forms of anti-black violence within it are not confined in space or time.

  The students’ claims to this Black man’s enslaveability are not due to their ignorance, quite the opposite. They didn’t evoke the American tv show Roots simply to transpose American history to Québec, but, from the transcripts of the legal case and the media coverage, they seemed intent to make it clear to him either that slavery was as much a reality in Québec as it had been in the United States, or that if slavery hadn’t existed in Québec, then it should have! Either way, it’s clear that these Québécois children were convinced that white people anywhere could enslave Black people everywhere. So, whether these students even had basic knowledge about the history of slavery in Québec is irrelevant, because they were expressing a belief that slavery should persist and that Kafe was enslaveable whether or not his ancestors had been enslaved in Québec.