Black Like Who?: Writing Black Canada

BLACK LIKE WHO?

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BLACK LIKE WHO? Writing • Black « Canada Second Revised Edition

By Rinaldo Walcott

5NSOMNIAC

PRESS

Copyright © 2003 by Rinaldo Walcott All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system or transmitted, in any form or by any means, without the prior written permission of the publisher or, in case of photocopying or other reprographic copying, a license from Access Copyright, 1 Yonge Street, Suite 1900, Toronto, Ontario, Canada, M5E 1E5. Edited by Richard Almonte Copy edited by Adrienne Weiss Cover designed by Mike O'Connor Interior designed by Marijke Friesen National Library of Canada Cataloguing in Publication Data Walcott, Rinaldo, 1965Black Like who? : writing Black Canada / by Rinaldo Walcott. — 2nd rev. ed. Includes bibliographical references and index. ISBN 1-894663-40-3 1. Black Canadians. 2. Blacks—Canada—Race identity. I. Title. FC106.B6W34 2003 F1035.N3W34 2003

305.896'071

C2003-900710-3

The publisher is grateful for permision to reprint, in revised format, essays that originally appeared in: CineAction 39 (1995); Pictures of a Generation on Hold: Selected Papers, M. Pomerance and J. Sakeris, eds, Toronto: Media Studies Working Group, 1996; Westcoast Line 22 (31/1: Spring-Summer 1997); Floating the Borders: New Contexts in Canadian Criticism, N. Aziz, ed. Toronto: TSAR, 1999; Small Axe: A Caribbean Journal of Criticism 9 (2001). The publisher gratefully acknowledges the support of the Canada Council, the Ontario Arts Council and the Department of Canadian Heritage through the Book Publishing Industry Development Program. We acknowledge the support of the Government of Ontario through the Ontario Media Development Corporation's Ontario Book Initiative. Printed and bound in Canada Insomniac Press 192 Spadina Avenue, Suite 403 Toronto, Ontario, Canada, M5T 2C2 www.insomniacpress.com

For Kasia and Kass, Your insistence is grace and

For Ryan Campbell

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A note on the cover photograph The photograph was taken in 1905 at the first Niagara Movement meeting (it eventually became a part of the National Association for the Advancement of Coloured People [NAACP]) held in Niagara Falls, Ontario. The American side of the Falls was painted into the background of the photo. The 1905 meeting could not find the time nor space to enter into dialogue and conversation with black Canadians. Yet Canada was the only place these African-American radicals could find overnight shelter. The photo represents many of the ironies, exchanges and absences which characterize black histories and contemporary life. One obvious and glaring example is the absence of women in the picture, despite their presence and participation at the meeting. This book is both a homage to those moments of black diasporic relations and a reminder that we must not romanticize those moments but critically reflect upon and engage with them instead. I would like to gratefully acknowledge The Schomburg Center for Research in Black Studies at the New York Public Library for allowing us to reproduce the cover photograph.

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Contents Introduction to the Second Edition: Still Writing Blackness

11

Introduction to the First Edition: Writing Blackness After...

25

1. "Going to the North" The Limit of Black Diasporic Discourse(s)

31

2. "A Tough Geography" Towards a Poetics of Black Space(s) in Canada

43

3. Desiring to Belong? The Politics of Texts and Their Politics of Nation

57

4. "No Language is Neutral" The Politics of Performativity in M. Nourbese Philip's and Dionne Brand's Poetry

73

5. The Politics of Third Cinema in Canada Reading the Narrative of Clement Virgo's Rude

89

6. Black Subjectivities Ethnicity, Race and the Politics of Film in Canada

101

7. "Keep on Movin'" 113 Rap, Black Atlantic Identities and the Problem of Nation 8. After Origins Black Pop Culture in Canada; Or, The Impossibility of Belonging to the Nation

131

9. Scattered Speculations on Canadian Blackness; Or, Grammar for Black

145

Notes

157

Bibliography/Discography/Filmography

171

Index

183

Acknowledgements

189

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Introduction to the Second Edition Still Writing Blackness

How can I embrace Africa after thirty-seven years in Canada? How can I be more Barbadian than Canadian when I have spent two thirds of my life in Toronto? How do I resist the dermatology of Canadian culture imbued in me over these years, and have the racial forwardness to regard myself as African? And why should I? Merely to give my protest a sharper context? Or more bluntly, to evade the wounding of being called "nigger," "Negro," "blasted Jamaican" or "West Indian"? Do I look more African than Canadian? If I permit this reasoning, then I am saying Canadians are white and Africans are black. And if one is black, one cannot have been born here, one cannot be Canadian. —Austin Clarke Writing blackness is still difficult work. I write this new introduction amidst debates concerning racial profiling by Toronto's police force and black communities' responses to that profiling; Austin Clarke's Giller Prize win and what appears to be a growing acknowledgement of his integral place in Canadian letters; and a spate of murders of black men allegedly by other black men in Toronto and black communities' call for taking responsibility for these murders and for an action plan to prevent further deaths. In the Canadian public sphere each of these events frames and positions blackness in ways that might be read as racist and subordinate to something else—whiteness. The denial of racial profiling by the police and by politicians in Toronto points to the illegitimacy of black claims for social justice in the

12 — Rinaldo Wakott city. While black communities have long made claims that pointed to racial profiling, such claims and the evidence that pointed to those claims were often denied by those in authority as lacking validity. This time the claims are being taken somewhat seriously. The Toronto Star reports that included evidence of widespread racial profiling of black and some Asian people, have made creditable the claims that many black people: have consistently been making for years. By and large, in both the city and the nation, black appeals for social justice remain unheard by those in authority, and this is largely due to the continuing ambivalent place of black peoples in the national imagination. Do we belong or do we not belong? And if we belong, when does the nation begin to acknowledge black arrivals—recently or going back to before Confederation? To paraphrase W.E.B. DuBois, blackness and black people remain a "problem" in Canada. The numerous media comments about the language of dialect in Clarke's The Polished Hoe, the novel for which he won the Giller, point to an inability to recognize what a truly multicultural place might sound like. Clearly, in a multicultural society we all don't sound alike. Furthermore, despite media suggestions, why must Clarke's great Canadian novel be set in Canada? My question is meant to indicate the assumptions that place a limit on what being Canadian is imagined to be. Similarly, when the Globe and Mail frames what might be an epidemic of black murders by other blacks as "Jamaican crime" it perpetrates a particular kind of ethnic blame which attempts to position blackness outside the nation. Chief of Police Julian Fantino's well-publicized trips to Jamaica to investigate whether gang wars there have spread to Toronto reinforces such attitudes. But Jamaican crime, a non-starter in the first place, is as silly a category as Canadian crime. None of this is new. It is the continuing story of the difficult terrain that blackness and black people in Canada must occupy. And occupy it they do. Since Black Like Who? was first published in 1997 the cultural landscape of Canada has changed in some rather significant ways. It remains to be seen whether these changes are for the better. Will black Canadian cultural producers find space to work within a redefined cultural landscape of less public funding for the arts; the disappearance of small presses devoted to black writing from the publishing industry; the acquisition of black writers by large publishing houses; and the disappearance from public debate of what we now nostalgically call the multicultural wars of the 1980s and 1990s? When read superficially, these changes suggest that

Black Like Who? — 13 the nation's official culture has accorded a bigger space and place to black cultural production than in previous decades. The sustainability of such a claim is yet to be adequately tested since these changes are in their infancy. Big businesses has, for example, remade the book publishing industry, and like anyone else, black authors are being published by the big publishers too. Even in the realm of popular music black artists have been making important breakthroughs in terms of the larger record companies. We must now confront the ascendancy of Canadian hip hop embodied in Kardinal, the Rascalz, YLOOK, Choclair, Saukrates and a host of others from what is called the Urban Music scene (which also includes Jully Black, The Baby Blue Sound Crew, Glen Lewis, Carlos Morgan, Motion). But the story does not end there. These new cultural shifts have to be read in light of and beside the earlier events I have recounted above. Failure to see the Toronto police's practice of racial profiling; the inability of journalists and critics to read Clarke's novel as Canadian; and the dismissing of a potential epidemic of black men killing each other as Jamaican crime as naked attempts to place blackness outside the boundaries of what is imaginatively Canadian, is dangerous. Such attempts do not accord with the lived realities of black people across the country, who insistently make Canada home even with all its difficulties. These same folks are quite aware of the limits of nation-states and thus refuse to place all their hopes and dreams in the nation. It was this simple point that I set out to make in 1997, as well as suggesting ways to read or interpret forms of black Canadian expressive culture based on such an acknowledgement.

The Critics In Black Like Who? I did not set out to write a comprehensive study of black Canadian culture, nor to offer a comprehensive historical overview or discussion of black Canadian culture. However, I did set out to put into public space some conditions for making sense of the grand claims of anyone attempting such a huge project. Let me be clear: trying to write total stories of any cultural group is an impossibility and in the case of black Canadian cultures this impossibility presents itself from the first instance. Thus my project in Black Like Who? was and is a rather modest one. It was and remains an attempt to provide some grammars for thinking blackness in Canada. By doing so I hoped that discussions of blackness in Canada might proceed to account for the many blacknesses in Canada. While many of the essays in Black Like Who? spoke directly to Caribbean

14 — Rinaldo Wakott or migrant forms of blackness, I made a special attempt to formulate some conceptual ground for thinking about the relationship between preConfederation black peoples and more recent arrivals. In particular, I suggested that the politics and sensibility of diaspora could work well to invent traditions that brought these two groups into conversation. It is crucial that recent black migrants not imagine themselves situated in a discourse that denies a longer existence of blackness in this country. Such a position is an ethical one whereby the recent black migrant must refuse the seductiveness of a multicultural discourse, which strategically denies a longer black presence in this country. In Black Like Who? I tried, and try, to gesture to these concerns in the last chapter. The critics who reviewed the book recognized its modesty. They rightly called its inadequacies into question and generally pointed to where the book did not go, and in some places could not go. By and large, the reviews of the book were generous in their interpretations of what was attempted. For example, Ted Whittaker in Books in Canada recognizes that my "point of view is unremittingly political, and on the Left" but quarrels with much of my analysis. Yet he reads the work as pioneering despite his dislike of my academic language. Both non-academic and academic critics have criticized the language of the essays. I sometimes see their point. However, it is important to point out that most of the essays were written at a time when debates in the universities concerning language and its difficulties were being heatedly contested. In relationship to Black Studies what was called "the race for theory" was in its last stages. Black Like Who? bears the scars of those debates. Can postmodern and post-structural language be applied to the black subject, black art, black events? Such questions informed the essays as each was written. I was and I remain decidedly influenced by a Left postmodern and post-structural theoretical discourse, often evident in my writing. It is these conceptual influences that open up the place for thinking about the taken-for- granted of blackness. In this sense I was attempting to start a conversation. Many people responded in all sorts of ways. The most vociferous response came from the poet and academic George Elliott Clarke.

Black Melancholia If Black Like Who? angered one critic especially it would have to be George Elliott Clarke. Clarke reviewed the book many times, recycling and reworking his reaction in both academic journals and the popular press. From my reading, each of his reviews becomes more and more

Black Like Who? — 15 caustic. Recently, Clarke published his collected essays, Odysseys Home, and while some of the essays offer insight into aspects of black Canadian culture, the book offers little by way of theoretical and conceptual frames for making sense of blackness in Canada. Clarke is a remarkably adept chronicler. Black Like Who? spoke into a place of theoretical and conceptual absence and therefore its own failure lies in its inattentiveness to cataloguing evidence and anecdotes. Herein lies one source of friction between my position and Clarke's position. To attempt to conceptualize blackness in Canada is extremely difficult work because the many black cultures that one can draw on to do that work mean that the only real result when one turns to cataloguing is a fiction. (Who makes it in to the catalogue and why, and who remains out and why?) Thus, writing blackness in Canada is by definition a strategic practice. What makes Clarke's collected essays a failure in terms of offering frames for thinking about blackness in Canada is that the essays are unwilling to self-consciously recognize that they can only be strategic interventions in the massiveness (to borrow a Jamaican-Canadian term) that is black Canada. I want to spend some time discussing Clarke's "critical" writings because I believe that his scholarship is the best argument for why my strategy for writing blackness has been to pay attention to diaspora networks and connectedness as opposed to an explicit national address. In spite of a desire to belong to a particular or specific nation, I have been interested in a deterritorialized strategy that is consciously aware of the ground of the nation from which it speaks. In 1997 in the now defunct Border/lines Magazine, Clarke published an essay entitled, "Honouring African-Canadian Geography." The essay attempts to render an African-Canadian geographic presence in Canada, and in particular a presence that exceeds what Clarke calls elsewhere in the essay "recent and urban" black presences.^ His argument is in part a response to gestures of space, place and geography in Black Like Who?. While it is correct that Black Like Who? is decidedly and unashamedly urban in its context and content, it is not an accurate assessment that I only focus on "the recent." We might generously read Clarke's essay as an attempt to render another political position—a Red Tory position—from which blackness in Canada might be conceived. I want to make some claims concerning what might be at stake in such a political position. I suggest that Clarke's Red Tory position fails to account for, or in many cases reduces all black Canadian politics to his own Red Tory desires.^ And I diagnose Clarke's cataloguing strategies as melancholic. His

16 — Rinaldo Walcott compulsive cataloguing or list-making of places and names (and elsewhere books and authors) is ironically important and not important. I make the claim for Clarke's various lists as melancholic because what sits behind them is an impossible desire to belong to the nation. A nation that forms him, but a nation that cannot imagine him within its own formative narratives. In "Honouring African-Canadian Geography," Clarke attempts to map a black Canadian geography that is longer and older than the post19505 black migrations from die Caribbean and more recently continental Africa. This attempt to name a longer presence is not one whose basic impulse I disagree with.^ In fact, I have strongly supported the invention of tradition and connections between old and new black peoples. Spear Magazine, now defunct as well, did precisely this through diasporic discourses of nation and beyond—what we would have then called panAfricanism. However, Clarke's mapping supposes an authentic older and rural black Canada set against an inauthentic newer and urban black Canada, as if the two have not always and cannot live side by side. In fact, his essay contradicts its own claims when it demonstrates how there has been a small and steady, but continuous stream of Caribbean migration to Canada since the 1800s. "In 1800," Clarke writes, "the Maroons, detesting the hostile whites and the hostile climate, demanded to be removed from Nova Scotia." (37) I am much mor e interested in Clarke's claims about rural black Nova Scotians: The central communal institution was the church, generally African Baptist (the African United Baptist Association of Nova Scotia was fcmnded in 1854). Their favourite music was (as it still is) country and western, though they also liked gospel and rhythm and blues. (Academics like York University's Rinaldo Walcott need to spend some time in the countrified Black spaces of this nation: Maestro Fresh Wes and the Dream Warriors do not represent the full spectrum of Black Canadian musical expression!) They were apt to say things like, "Hand me the thingamajig, thingabob," to talk about hotcombs and "good" hair, to grow potatoes and raise chickens, to enjoy step dancing, fiddle music, molasses and some condiment called "green tomato chow-chow" and to make their own—very dangerous—beer and dandelion wine. (37)

Black Like Who? — 11 Clarke attempts to stake out an authentic rural or countrified blackness that is counter to the recent and urban represented by Fresh Wes and the Dream Warriors. What is interesting about the internal contradictions of Clarke's argument is that in his recounting of the rural, the urban lives beside it, if not inside of it. Rhythm and blues—definitely an urban sound—is right beside country and western. This is just one instance of Clarke's contradictory utterances. Clarke's regressive localism, as Kobena Mercer would call it, fails to account for diaspora connectedness, exchanges and circulation of cultural forms and artifacts as at least one avenue through which people live their lives whether in rural or urban areas. It is those moments of cultural circulation I am mainly interested in. These diaspora moments populate Clarke's essay—unwittingly so? What is important is that throughout the essay Clarke is unable to hold on to the tension of the older and more authentic against the newer and less authentic. Old and new keep slipping into each other in his examples. This tension in Clarke's essay is a primary attribute of what I identify as the melancholia of Clarke's criticism. For example, mired in a romantic and rhapsodic cataloguing of black Canadian geography, Clarke can do no more for Marie-Joseph Angelique, a black slave woman reputed to have set fire to her master's house, burning down early (dare we call it urban) Montreal, than proclaim in parentheses: "(Where is her rue in the city?)." (35) This statement that might otherwise be read as a rhetorical device in a polemic, is actually a symptom of black melancholia exhibited in Clarke's essay. Clarke's call for a Rue Angelique, very much located in a feeling of being abandoned by the nation, is just as strong a desire for the nation's recognition. Behind his call is a hope that the "older" blackness of Canada might finally be acknowledged. Clarke's call is legitimate but tainted, because he poses it in contradistinction to what he perceives as a more recent and vocal black noise. His call reveals what I have generously called Clarke's Red Tory politics. It is a politics characterized by a particular kind of nativism that understands the more recent and urban as not constitutive of Canadianness. And yet, to achieve his catalogue of authentic Canadian geographic places and spaces Clarke relies on a plethora of historic migrations to make his case: "My paternal grandfather whose name may have been Morris Clarke and who came to Halifax in the mid-193 Os from either Barbados or Jamaica, worked aboard one of the Canadian National Railways-owned "Lady" ships that plied the waters between Halifax and

18 — Rinaldo Walcott the West Indies." (3 5) Much might be made of the hint at the lost or unknown father figure. I shall save that for another time, except to ask how does Clarke count his generations? And from which site of geography does he count them? And why? What is really at stake here is Clarke's inability or unwillingness to point to moments of conjuncture and or disjunction within a history of black migrations to Canada and their meaningful impact on the Canadian landscape. Instead, Clarke becomes melancholic about the fictional importance of blackness in Toronto. He writes, "To turn to the future, I think we need to map—and to understand—the African odyssey in Canada. It didn't start and it doesn't stop in Toronto." (39) Ironically, for Clarke to position Toronto in such terms runs counter to his argument of cataloguing black Canadian presences, for does not Toronto represent one of the longest such presences? Clarke knows Toronto is home to a long and unbroken black presence, so why does he make such claims? I want to strongly suggest that what underpins Clarke's argument is nativism. Toronto is Canada's most densely populated black space/place with both recent and older migratory communities dating back to before Confederation. Clarke's Red Tory desire to belong to a Canada propagated on a particular narrative of black invisibility is troubling and a conceptual bund spot. The unnamed mass of recent immigrants in Clarke's formulations appears to have no relation to longer and older black communities in Toronto, which is the furthest thing from the truth/ Instead Clarke reads them as representing the flip side to a longer and potentially now lost narrative of an older and more authentic black Canadian presence that exists outside of Toronto, and which Torontonian blacks try to make invisible. It is unfortunate that Clarke fails to direct his critique at the more appropriate target, like nation-state policies that render newness and recentness more valuable to the national narrative of multicultural theology than having to account for black people right down to Confederation and before. Clarke's analysis is rife with the rhetoric of blaming the immigrant. Under any other context its proper name would be prejudice or ethnocentrism or xenophobia. Reading "Honouring African-Canadian Geography" against another of Clarke's essays, "White Like Canada," the melancholia of his cataloguing is again revealed. In "White Like Canada" Clarke attempts to chart the constitutive whiteness of Canada by listing a series of events, socio-political claims, places and other sorts of ephemera as evidence of why it is that Canada understands, sees, projects and is understood as a

Black Like Who? — 19 white nation. His eatalogue-as-critique of white Canada carries with it a deep-seated lament. In particular, it is a lament for the lost place of blackness in Canada, in the representations of normative Canadian-ness. While Clarke attempts to unearth how Canada makes itself white, it is to black Canada that he continually returns for the punctuation of his argument. Clarke attempts to argue that the absence of blackness in discourses and representations of Canada is symptomatic of the larger identity crisis of Canadian-ness, and such a claim is partially valid. Clarke attempts to position blackness not as a potential challenge to normative narratives of the nation, but rather as sutured into the normative narrative. And yet, blackness continues to return to that normative narrative not as something that can be easily incorporated, but as a disruptive quality. Clarke contradictorily concludes the essay with the controversy surrounding the Somalia Inquiry and the beating to death of Shidane Arone by Canadian peacekeeping officers in Somalia. Existing literally outside the geographic boundaries of the nation, Arone's murder represents the ways in which the need for excising of blackness from the Canadian nation travels through whiteness to other places and spaces and conditions relations there. In this instance black/white relations were conditioned through death. Arone's death can be read symptomatically as yet another moment when blackness in Canada must be disappeared. Clarke's attempt to read the whiteness of Canada does not unsettle it but rather points to where blackness or other "coloureds" show up and accords them their due, even if it is a subordinated due within the contexts of a violent institution of the nation, to gloss Gayatri Spivak.^ This desire to both find and place within a normative discourse of nation the contradictions that make modern nations the vicious things that they are, especially for black peoples and other peoples of colour, is the reverse of the attempt to excise those very things from the nation so that a sutured purity might be had.9 Clarke's neologism "Africadian"—his often-quoted attempt to suture a particular formation of black Canadians to the normative nation—is yet another symptom of the melancholic nature of his response to finding his black space in Canada. Unlike Austin Clarke in the epigraph to this introduction, Clarke appears secure in claiming rather simple and uncomplicated origins. Bounded by the desire for a physical geography that can secure his need to belong, Clarke finds that geography shifting with each successive black immigrant wave. His response is not to confront the discursive strategies of the nation that render a black Canadian

20 — Rinaldo Wakott continuity absent, but rather to turn his gaze to what he terms "the recent" as the problem for thought. Assuming that by installing the relevant knowledge and facts about a longer black history is a corrective, Clarke fails to realize that nations are not only made different through a politics of recognition, but that they are made different by the various ways in which the multiple ethico-political conditions of belonging are given room for expression. ^ Following Jean Luc Nancy, we might suggest that blackness unworks the community of the pure nation revealing its sutures and violently instituted forms and norms and therefore that every appearance of blackness must be rendered suspect and often violently made to disappear.11 I understand Clarke's response as melancholic because it cannot exceed the modern category of the nation as a place to which one is born and naturally belongs. His criticism remains locked in a discourse of heritage and genealogy which it believes once revealed will both install and correct a lack of knowledge. It acts from the rhetorical place of "Did you know?" with the underlying desire that "If you only knew" then your conduct might be different. Unfortunately, the conduct that fashions nations and the ways in which we live them does not operate from the paradigm of "Did you know?" Such a demand always unravels the violent imperatives that have sustained the normative myths of the nation. To insist on the "If you only knew" is to reside in and inhabit the place of the melancholic, repeatedly listing facts and compulsively requesting admission. This compulsion to repeat has no end, but comes in various different guises, all of which mask the deep-seated despair of not belonging. Are there not other ways to belong to a nation that seeks to render you not there? I would strongly suggest that self-conscious diasporic affiliations offer a way out of the mess that modern nation-states represent for black peoples. So why this turn to melancholia to make sense of Clarke's cultural critique? In "Mourning and Melancholia" Sigmund Freud makes a distinction between mourning and melancholia, both classified as two states of pain. While there are a number of correspondences between mourning and melancholia there are some substantive differences. Both mourning and melancholia are about one's relation to a lost object. Freud tells us that in melancholia the object has not actually died but has been lost as an object of love. It is precisely Clarke's knowledge that Canada might not be capable of finding in him an object of love, as well as his need to be loved by the nation that make his criticism a symptom of melancholia. I would suggest that the diaspora sensibility I have been writing about is

Black Like Who? — 21 akin to a politics of mourning, whereas Clarke's analysis always resides in a state of melancholia. Freud goes on to tell us that one of the symptoms of melancholia is the patient's need "to establish an identification of the ego with the abandoned object" and that "a strong fixation to the loved object must have been present" (258) if a melancholic response develops. Clarke's fixation on finding his correct place in Canada goes hand in hand with his melancholic reading of any work that appears to reject Canada. His response in these cases is more than merely defensive, it appears to call for a diagnosis. His responses fall into a pattern of hysterical identifications with a nation or love object that continually purge him from its normative narratives. But Clarke is not so simply analyzed, for his ambivalence about the nation is also etched into his writing. "In spite of the conflict with the loved person," Freud writes, "the love-relation need not be given up," (258) and this is exactly the place from which Clarke launches his critique of anyone perceived to be giving up the nation. Clarke has decidedly not given up on the nation. Freud claims that ambivalence is one of the signal characteristics in cases of melancholia. This ambivalence might be read in Clarke's work when he attempts to call out Canada's racism at the same time as finding a place for black people in a Canadian narrative that refuses to both accommodate and find space for them because of racism. Clarke wants the nation's love and yet he must hate it for its past crimes of racialized violence. He is ambivalent about his love for the nation because his correctives are often not taken up in any re-narrating of the nation that finds a place for him within it. This has lead Clarke to mark out others for critique as he struggles with being jilted by the normative nation and with a fear that the critique of others will make him lose the nation's love forever.12 Thus, in "Treason of the Black Intellectuals" Clarke suggests that a range of black Canadians, many of them from the Caribbean or of Caribbean descent, should be variously punished for their critiques of Canada. In that essay he attempts to mete out punishment to the critics with whom he disagrees. Clarke orders shootings and hangings— Canadian style as he puts it. His writing in the essay borders on the bizarre: Perversely, by stooping to an unexamined, tres facile black nationalism and Pan-Africanism, to support his reading of certain

22 — Rinaldo Walcott African-Canadian writers into or out of an African (or black) aesthetic, which is, treacherously (if not simply lazily), never defined, Walcott is a capital candidate for the charge of treason. (2002, 188) Clarke's unconscious is populated with all the slights and the actual hurts and pain that the nation has inflicted on black bodies—his included. But what Clarke is unable to do is to move beyond the inhibitions that melancholia instantiates and find again the object of his love—the nation. In this regard Clarke lacks a diasporic sensibility: his love is not so much for black people as it is for the nation. And it is especially discourses that challenge the nation, but which do not reject it outright—requiring instead an ethical accounting of the nation, an accounting in which the nation might be lived differently—that Clarke finds particularly troubling and fearsome. This trouble is exacerbated by the "stuckness" of his melancholic inhibitions and an obvious inability to move beyond nation into questions of responsibility and ethics.

Conclusion: Diaspora Sensibilities Moving beyond the regressive localism of Clarke's melancholic cataloguing we can instead conceive of black Canadian geography that requires us to think contxapuntally within and against the nation. The terms of belonging within a context of diaspora sensibilities are fluid; they continually make and remake themselves within the contexts of specific nations. Diaspora sensibilities resurrect all that communities and nations destroy, foreclose and prohibit in their dominating narratives of collective belonging. Diaspora sensibilities are methods for overcoming the problem of locating oneself solely within national boundaries. Diaspora conditions work to produce black peoples in the contradictory space of belonging and not. Clarke seems capable of only tolerating generations now gone, not to return them to life but to list and index them for his conservative, nativist politics. But Clarke's historical corrective offers no consolation because it only goes missing again, much like the text of his Governor General's award- winning Execution Poems, which should have engendered a conversation about the history of black bodies and state violence in this nation, but failed to do so. His win went almost unnoticed in the wake of September 11, 2001. Clarke's regressive localism, deeply inflected with a Red Tory lament for ones' proper place in Canada—his cry for a Rue Angeliq[ue echoes here—does not make for consolation because the

Black Like Who? — 23 wound is far deeper than a missing street. The place of the nation is as much psychically lived as manifested materially in street names and so on, and Clarke fails to adequately conceptualize this condition. Even as nations give way to various forms of citizenship influenced by the latest trends in globalization, black people in Canada continue to exist in precarious relation to older versions of citizenship and older versions of belonging. Clarke is still desiring and struggling to fit the older version. And yet black people are also fully aware of the fluidity of citizenship. We, more than any others, are written out and written into our nations conditionally, as the epigraph from Austin Clarke suggests. Diaspora sensibilities do something to that writing that is active and resistant. Diaspora sensibilities use the nation to make ethical claims and demands for social justice. Diaspora sensibilities speak to nations' limitations and demands nations be remade in a constant and restless ethical search for home. Home, in the diasporic framework, is an ethical place, not a narrative of containment. To give the last word to Paul Gilroy, diaspora is: An alternative to the metaphysics of "race," nation and bounded culture coded into the body, diaspora is a concept that problematizes the cultural and historical mechanics of belonging. It disrupts the fundamental power of territory to determine identity by breaking the simple sequence of explanatory links between place, location and consciousness. It destroys the naive invocation of common memory as the basis of particularity in a similar fashion by drawing attention to die contingent political dynamics of commemoration. (2000, 123)

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Introduction to the First Edition Writing Blackness After...

Writing blackness is difficult work. The sliding signifier of blackness intends to continue to slide and remain out of bounds. And that is a good thing. Yet to read blackness as merely playful is to fall into a willful denial of what it means to live black. In the chapters that follow I attempt to pay attention to what is at stake in thinking about blackness and its cultural, political and social performativity both in Canada and beyond its borders. The ideas here are neither unique nor new; instead, they insist upon bringing a careful eye to what happens here. Black Canadian culture would do well to have its critics grow up right along with it. Peering into the works of black Canadian artists allows for a confrontation with the complexities of black life and identifications, while still being aware of black imitative and derivative practices. However, it seems to be the critic's job to tease out what is imitation or copy and what is (re)invention. My discussion of mimesis and alterity in the poetic works of Dionne Brand and M. Nourbese Philip, therefore, is an attempt to question and figure out the difference between the original, the copy and the new. I suggest that the appearance of sameness or mimetic practices in their poetic works actually announces their alterity, their difference and possibly their newness. Furthermore, I suggest that it is useful to read black Canadian works within the context of black diasporic discourses. Those who are descendants of Africans (New World Blacks) dispersed by TransAtlantic slavery continue to engage in a complex process of cultural exchange, invention and (re)invention, and the result is cultural creolization. In most of the chapters that follow questions of diasporic aesthetics, borrowing and sharing are discussed. These issues are explored not in a romantic fashion,

26 — Rinaldo Wakott but as both a necessity of life and, sometimes, a limitation on politics. In particular my critique of Stephen Williams's and Clement Virgo's feature films raises the question of borrowing without the process for (re)irivention. My critique of the derivative nature and limitations of both films is, therefore, an indication of where a too-easy diasporic gesture fails. If I suggest anything in the following pages, it is that black diasporic cultures are most engaging and critically affirmative when the practices of (re)in ention are highlighted and displayed in a complex fashion. In some of the essays I suggest that music and other imaginative works best demonstrate the processes of black diasporic invention and (re)invention. I argue that these works often offer complex analyses of black performativity and therefore of black political identifications. Additionally, I suggest that these works are not merely national products, but that they occupy the space of the in-between, vacillating between national borders and diasporic desires, ambitions and disappointments. These works suggest the possibilities of the new, but in many cases cannot leave various kinds of old behind. The chapters in this book initially were all written as separate essays, and continue to bear the marks of their individuality. Yet these essays speak to the problem of writing blackness in Canada as they simultaneously represent the problem. The chapters concentrate mainly, but not exclusively, on black cultures in Ontario, and therefore cannot adequately account for black cultures in other parts of Canada. Yet I would argue that it is not so much local culture that is my focus, but rather the expansive questions that are posed. Therefore, we might think of the method used as one where local cultures beget expansive questions. Any omissions are therefore not considered as unworthy of study but rather represent my preoccupations at a particular time and place. Here's my disclaimer: Do not read this book as a treatise on blackness in Canada. Instead, read the essays as an attempt to articulate some grammars for thinking Canadian blackness. Writing blackness after the civil-rights era, second wave feminism, black cultural nationalism, gay and lesbian liberation, the Clarence Thomas/Anita Hill spectacle, the Rodney King beating and L.A. riots, the Yonge Street Riots, and the O.J. Simpson trials, is difficult work. Yet, writing blackness remains important work. Black postmodernity insists upon being chronicled as it makes fun of and spoofs the very notion of writing blackness. A certain kind of upheaval of blacknesses exists which

Black Like Who? — 27 makes apparent the senselessness of writing blackness even as we are compelled and forced to write it. In a Canadian context, writing blackness is a scary scenario: we are an absented presence always under erasure. Located between the U.S. and the Caribbean, Canadian blackness is a bubbling brew of desires for elsewhere, disappointments in the nation and the pleasures of exile— even for those who have resided here for many generations. The project of articulating Canadian blackness is difficult not because of the small number of us trying to take the tentative steps towards writing it, but rather because of the ways in which so many of us are nearly always preoccupied with elsewhere and seldom with here. It seems then that a tempered arrogance might be a necessary element of any grammar that is used to construct a language for writing blackness in Canada. A shift in gaze can be an important moment. The writing of blackness in Canada, then, might begin with a belief that something important happens here. If we accept this, finally, then critics can move beyond mere celebration into the sustaining work that critique is. A belief that something important happens here would mean that celebration could become the site for investigating ourselves in critical ways. We can begin to refuse the seductions of firstness and engage in critique, dialogue and debate, which are always much more sustaining than celebrations of originality. The essays in this book attempt to engage the project of recognizing that something important does happen here. Finally, I would like to end this introduction with a note on language. Throughout the essays I use the terms blackness and black Canadian. I do not use the term African-Canadian, because I think of it as a borrowing from the African-American context, one that needs to be better thought through. African-Canadian and African-American carry with them a particular connotation which is very much related to distancing oneself from the black urban poor and working class. Forms of naming based on ethnicity are often deployed in an attempt to deny the complexity of what might and might not constitute blackness. Similarly, when I use the term blackness, I mean to signal blackness as a sign, one that carries with it particular histories of resistance and domination. But blackness is also a sign which is never closed and always under contestation. Blackness for me, like black Canadian, allows for a certain kind of malleability and open-endedness which means that questions of blackness far exceed the categories of the biological and the

28 — Rinaldo Walcott ethnic. I deploy blackness as a discourse, but that discourse is embedded in a history or a set of histories which are messy and contested. The essays that follow demonstrate how various kinds of blackness are always in progress, always in the process of becoming...

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1 • "Going to the North" The Limit of Black Diasporic Discourse(s)

We are all jogging, Jog, jog, jogging, And we're all jogging We are going to the North —Martin Delany This is a meditation on the place of black Canadas* in contemporary discourses of black diaspora(s) and the black Atlantic. I do not seek to promulgate a simple notion of inclusion for this is no longer necessary, sufficient nor required—black Canadas exist and will continue to do so. Instead I mean to attend to the spaces or gaps through which our current thinking on diaspora might receive continued invigoration if a detour is taken through Canada. Such a detour has been well-established for African-Americans by conversations which make the Underground Railroad central to questions of freedom. My detours are historical and contemporary, literary and musical, popular and not. I use detour as a method for thinking through the circuitous routes of black diasporic cultures, their connectedness and differences. Detours are the (un)acknowledged routes and roots of black expressive cultures and gesture directly to their rhizomatic nature. The detour is both an improvisatory and an in-between space which black diasporic cultures occupy. Detours, both planned and accidental, are an important aspect of black diasporic cultures. The first detour might be considered Columbus's; it set the groundwork for discussions of blackness in the Americas. I take my cue from the way Paul Gilroy traverses the black Atlantic. His insistence on reading and adding Europe and black Britain into the

32 — Rinaldo Walcott texture of arguments and debates concerning intellectual property and ethnic absolutism in the diaspora is of importance to my project. Given this, I am also interested in entering into dialogue with Gilroy's assertion that other travels need to be mapped and charted. If the ship is Gilroy's metaphor for the black Atlantic, the vehicle in which he travels and docks at the doorstep of African-Americans, then for overland travel, jogging might be the metaphor that best characterizes the back and forth movement of black Canada and its offerings to the discourse of diaspora. When a group of African-Americans met in 1905 in Fort Erie, Ontario under the banner of the Niagara Movement, with W.E.B. DuBois as their main organizer and leader, the location of the meeting was not occasioned by choice, but by the inability to find lodgings on the American side of the border, where they were residents. The Niagara Movement, which eventually became the NAACP, did not invite black Canadians to be a part of its meetings. Despite this exclusion, blacks in Canada attempted to enter into dialogue with the organizers of the inaugural meeting. The fact that many of the Canadian blacks who would have gladly participated in the inaugural meeting were born in America, or were immediate descendants of African-American slaves who had escaped to Canada, makes this exclusion interesting. A refusal to acknowledge black Canadians in this first instance might be construed as the historical limit of the current discourse of diaspora, as it is being formulated and reformulated, in the two contexts that I am interested in— black studies and black cultural studies. This moment of exclusion should not be taken lightly in terms of historical interpretations of how porous the Canada-United States border remains for diasporic blacks and what kinds of political identifications and relationships are possible. That Canada existed as an ambivalent place of freedom for African-Americans is just one of the ideas which needs to be considered in light of current debates. The creation of the League for the Advancement of Coloured People by black Canadians is an important moment of cross-border political identification. Such identifications are suggestive of the relations of diasporic communicative acts and outer-national practices and desires. Nonetheless, the ethnic particularity of African-Americans might be questioned in terms of political organization for its oversight in refusing to dialogue with black folks within the host borders of the first NAACP meeting. The significance of this cannot be overlooked given the current contestations over theories of diaspora, the black Atlantic and black studies and black cultural studies.

Black Like Who? — 33 I address an amalgam of practices which speak to both the possibilities and limits of theorizing diaspora as a way to pose the question of what is at stake in this postmodern, transglobal world, when some aspects of the nation-state remain firmly in place for the unruly, resistant citizens located on the inside/outside axis of a given nation. My intentions are to attend to a number of conversations which deploy and make use of diaspora, black studies and black cultural studies as a way of conceiving a conversation that exceeds national boundaries. I am particularly concerned about what Paul Gilroy has termed "ethnic absolutism." Now it is clear that any conversation about blackness that attempts to bring a discussion of Canada to the table is hampered by two primary problems: the proximity to and influence on Canada of America, one of the most powerful capitalist and imperialist nations; and the dominance and impact of American cultural production on Canada. I am suggesting that the effect is not only Americanization, as Canadian nationalists would have it. These two factors actually create something that is not merely a politics of exclusion; rather they can foster a retreat to discourses of nationalism which become short-sighted in terms of the transnational political identifications that might be crucially necessary in our times. In the case of black folks, a diasporic connectedness and intimacy is at stake. Given this, I want to take another detour deeper into the historical records. In The Condition, Elevation, Emigration and Destiny of the Coloured People of the United States (1852), Martin Robinson Delany revealed his fear and fascination with the potentialities of Canada, and argued that it was one of the best places for black people to escape to, until a national homeland was possible. Delany's ambivalence towards Canada was articulated through what he believed to be not only Canada's possible annexation by the United States, but also what was seen by him as "a manifest tendency on the part of Canadians generally, to Americanism." (174) Delany's ambivalence is astutely couched in his observations of Canadian subservience to Americans. It was on this basis that he was convinced and "satisfied that the Canadas are no place of safety for the coloured people of the United States; otherwise we should have no objection to them." (176) However, Delany continued to advocate and promote Canada as an interim or provisional place where freedom might be had until the possibility of something somewhere else arose. He suggested that, "[fjreedom, always; liberty any place and ever—before slavery. Continue to fly to the Canadas, and swell the number of the twenty-five thousand already

34 — Rinaldo Wakott there." (177) Now to think of Delany's suggestion here as merely immigrationist is to not fully consider Delany's own "exile" in Chatham, Ontario.^ Some attention to the role that place and the potentialities of "freedom" in Canada might have had on Delany is useful. By no means do I want to suggest that freedom was had in Canada. Rather, the conditions for procuring freedom were much more evident (t)here. Chatham was a hotbed of anti-slavery activity, populated with fugitive slaves from the U.S., ex-slaves who had migrated from the Caribbean and ex-slaves from Canada. Martin Delany was involved in raising funds to establish the town as a viable settlement owned and operated by its black residents. He reportedly travelled to England to help raise funds for black families to buy property in the area. Delany's involvement in Chatham and the possibility of a black township should be highlighted in readings of his work which seek to account for his pan-national black politics. A consideration of the politics of Chatham might shed some light on his philosophical treatise of black nationalism. I want to suggest that the role place played was a fundamental part of Delany's articulation of a black nationalist project. Chatham, and Delany's involvement in the community there, surely had some impact on what he imagined freed black people could accomplish. The struggle for land, schools, churches and the building of other civil organizations in Chatham, might also be read as a part of the sojourn that is so crucially a part of the Exodus narrative which populates black nationalist articulations. And interestingly, Delany's circumscription of the roles of women in black nationalist discourse might have been influenced by what he knew of Chatham. What I am suggesting is that Delany's crossover into Canada might have given him the opportunity to see his project partially in operation. Maty Ann Shadd's work as an anti-slavery activist and newspaper editor is yet another part of the unfolding terrain of the criss-crossing of the Canadian-American border. The absence of these discussions from current conversations about the diaspora is crucial to theorizing and politicizing the (re)invigt>ration of black studies and the development of black cultural studies. It is crucial because the Chatham project was significantly organized and influenced by black women with public roles in community politics.5 As Robert Reid-Pharr suggests in a discussion of Delany and bourgeois sado-masochism, Delany's nationalist project meant "the domestication of many parts of Afro-America and the out and out excision of others." (87) Thus Delany's insistence on circumscribing the role of

Black Like Who? — 35 women to motherhood would have had much to do with what he knew of women's political work in Chatham." Looking at the black Canadian context can also provide more evidence for the important public political roles of nineteenth-century black women. However, I think that the representation of Canada is best achieved in Delany's novel Blake; Or the Huts of America, which was written in Canada. Crossings to Canada represent an ambivalence for any Canadian who must simultaneously grapple with the absented presence of slavery in official national discourses and the popular narratives which argue that Canada's only relation to slavery was as a sanctuary for escaping AfricanAmericans—via the Underground Railroad. This dilemma is important because the crossing has been appropriated by the nation as the source of its denial of an almost five-hundred-year black presence. Joy Mannette, who argues for the necessity of acknowledging an historical black presence in Canada, has referred to the agreements made by British soldiers in the fields with those African-Americans who forsook their masters and fought against the republic as "treaties."'' Her claim that these initial, unofficial agreements were treaties is crucial for how blacks in Canada might make claims on their localities. The use of the word treaty is discursively, textually and juridically important because it challenges and speaks to early Canadian state formation and the place of black people in it. Mannette's assertion places blackness as central to early nation-state formation and therefore grounds the genealogy of black people and blackness in Canada as inextricably bound to contemporary debates concerning the nation. George Elliott Clarke, the African-Canadian poet and scholar, states "[a]nother African-American, Delaney (sic) is, I think, the first AfricanCanadian novelist." (1996, 7) Clarke's argument is based upon an extension of Henry Louis Gates's argument for an African-American literary canon. In many ways, Clarke is also troping on Gates and gesturing, as well, to the porousness of the Canadian-American border. What is of interest to me is the evidence in Blake which suggests that Canada represented a space of possible liberation, and what this might mean for black diasporic conversations which have almost nothing to say about Canada. I want to insist that the rhizomatic black cultures of Canada have much to teach us, especially about national policies like multiculturalism, which support identity politics and limit political imaginings and possibilities. Black diasporic utterances are cluttered with references to how their histories relate to other histories of black people elsewhere.

36 — Rinaldo Walcott In Blake, Andy, one of the slaves escaping to Canada, provides Delany with the opportunity to enter into dialogue with the forces of racism and segregation that black people faced in Canada. Through Andy, Delany articulates an ambivalence to Canada, one grounded in the regulatory and disciplinary state practices enforced on black people. These practices gave rise to the construction of discourses of blackness in Canada—it was a place of sanctuary, but not necessarily a place where black people would actively participate in the public sphere. Delany's ambivalence in Blake give us some insight into the continued outer-national political identification of black Canadians with black peoples elsewhere: He knew not that some of high intelligence and educational attainments of his race residing in many parts of the Provinces, were really excluded from and practically denied their rights, and that there was no authority known to the colony to give redress and make restitution—It had never entered the poor Andy, that in going to Canada in search of freedom, he was then in a country where privileges were denied him which are common to the slave in every Southern state—the right of going into the gallery of a public building...that a few of the most respectable coloured ladies of the town in Kent County...taking seats in the gallery of the court house assigned to females and other visitors, were ruthlessly taken hold of and shown down the stairway...An emotion of unutterable indignation would swell the heart of the determined slave, and almost compel him to curse the country of his adoption...But Andy was free... .(1970, 153) Delany's ambivalence to Canada as a promised land has its contemporary trajectory in Ismael Reed's Flight to Canada. Reed satirically rewrites the slave narrative, the desire to escape from slavery on the Underground Railroad, as a plane flight to Canada. His collapsing of past into present and vice versa signals the continuing importance of Canada as an ambivalent place in African-American historiography. Also revealed in this passage from Blake are some important insights concerning the political activism of black Canadians (or should we say ex-African-Americans) who were quite involved in seeing their brothers liberated from slavery, while at the same time challenging local conditions of racism and segregation, and making demands for full citizenship. That it is a group of women who are led out of the gallery should not be

Black Like Who? — 31 interpreted as merely symbolic on Delany's part. As I suggested earlier, women played active and public roles in black Ontario communities, particularly in Chatham, where Delany lived. The most notable of those women was Mary Ann Shadd, whose activism led to her founding The Provincial Freeman to better disseminate her political views. In Blake, Delany has Henry "invest a portion of the old people's money by the purchase of fifty acres of land with improvements suitable, and provide for the schooling of the children until he should otherwise order." (155) Those two issues, land ownership and schooling, led women to play active roles in the public sphere and challenge both anti-black racism and black patriarchy simultaneously. The kind of positions that Delany advocates in the conclusion of Condition cannot be separated from what he might or might not have known about women's public political work in Canada and the United States, and his desire to have that role played only by men. These kinds of positions have important consequences for black studies and black cultural studies as debates unfold over how to make sense of both paradigms. So now let's take a detour through recent history. When black Canadians demonstrated against the staging of the musical Showboat at a publicly funded theatre (The North York Centre for the Performing Arts; renamed the Ford Centre for the Performing Arts), their concerns and claims were dismissed by appeals to an African-American authenticity and an argument that stressed that a planned staging of the musical in 8 New York did not spark the same kind of response.8 Henry Louis Gates Jr. was allegedly hired by Showboat's production company (Livent) to produce educational materials on how to read the musical historically and make use of the musical in the contemporary era. What was most troubling about the entire episode was that the specific local concerns of black Canadians were rendered suspect by a public lecture in which Gates entirely evacuated the notion of historical difference, in the process collapsing the two nations." Gates' use of a particular homogenizing practice of black studies and African-American authenticity to attempt to invalidate local black concerns has implications for how we conceive diasporic relations. What became obvious was that when we theorize diaspora or black Atlantic exchanges, dialogues, conversations and differences, we need to pay attention to national and other forms of institutional power. Those who make diasporic claims of understanding and intimacy need to pay attention to the specific concerns of various groups within a given nation while making their

38 — Rinaldo Walcott transnational argument. Still, the question remains: can AfricanAmericans represent the locality of black Canadian political concerns? The answer, it seems to me, is no. I want to suggest that the use of Gates's body, knowledge and institutional accoutrements drew upon both the idea of diaspora and the institution of black studies. And both were used to render the specific and localized concerns of black Canadians null and void. What is at issue, then, is how to theorize diaspora and account for its crucial transnational and outer-national political identifications, when those very practices can be used against specific black communities to render them powerless.^ It might be that in thinking about the politics of diaspora and its ensuing offshoots—black studies and black cultural studies—that we have to address the question of imperialism. And that is a difficult thing to do in the context of identifiable groups who still remain inside/outside of their specific nations. My readings of the Niagara Movement, Delany, Mary Ann Shadd, Gates's involvement in the Showboat debates and the place of Canada in African-American crossings, then, are not intended to place the uninteresting question of black Canadian exclusion on the table, but to arrive via that circuitous route at two more important points. Of central concern to me is the question: wh might black studies not bear to hear? Or, what might black cultural studies allow us to hear? And in the name of what political project will that hearing be accomplished?11 These questions sit at the centre of what I believe to be the cultural politics of theorizing black diaspora and the black Atlantic while avoiding the rancidness of new wine in old skins. In their recent essays, Wahneema Lubiano and Mae Henderson articulate what we might call a fear that black cultural studies has usurped the space of black studies and in so doing has not recognized the importance of locating black cultural studies as the trajectory of black studies. Henderson in particular is concerned that "the emergent project of black cultural studies be situated in the context of Black Studies." (Henderson, 1996, 64) Undoubtedly, black studies mapped the terrain that has made present configurations of black cultural studies possible. As someone who came to black cultural studies via the routes of both black studies and cultural studies, I find this discussion both heartening, politically important and unsettling. Henderson's concern is that "black cultural studies threatens to remarginalize a field of study [black studies] that became central during the

Black Like Who? — 39 Black Studies movement." (63) She writes: "I am less concerned about the displacement of African-American hegemony in black diasporic studies than I am by the erasure of a historical genealogy for black cultural studies that extends back for at least a century to the African-American critique of politics and culture formally inaugurated by W.E.B. DuBois in his landmark Souls of Black Folk, and later elaborated in his many studies, monographs, and autobiographies." (63) I agree with this genealogy, but differ with Henderson on the issue of what is at stake in the move to black cultural studies.12 What is at stake, I believe, is the (impossibility of black studies to live up to what Henderson identifies as its necessary reclamation "as a multidisciplinary, cross-cultural, and comparative model of study which places into juxtaposition the history, culture and politics of blacks in the U.S., Caribbean and Africa." (65) This vision of black studies is troubling because it does not attend to the cross-cutting constitution of black cultures and instead appeals to some geographic space of certainty. This is particularly the case when different permutations of all the mentioned groups exist with, and in, each other's locales. The dispersal of black people gestures to the limitation that Henderson places on black studies and might thus occasion the move away from it. Black studies's continued dependence on ontology might not offer the room that black cultural studies offers for exploring difference, blackness as a sign and locus of ideas and the contradiction and tensions of a diasporic connectedness, among other issues. If I might appropriate the metaphor of movement/motion, which I believe is crucial not only to diasporic principles but also to black cultural studies, then what arises for me is the appearance or desire for a particular stasis (there has been, if I'm reading correctly, too much jogging going on). Now if one ties this to the reception of British blacks in the American academy a curious situation conies to the foreground. The acceptance and celebration of the black British might be understood in relation to an American desire to supplement what they lack due to their abbreviated colonial past. Paul Gilroy gestures to this when he writes: "[i]n these circumstances it is hard not to wonder how much of the recent international enthusiasm for cultural studies is generated by its profound associations with England and Englishness." (1992, 5) Black British cultural studies, however, could not and cannot escape its integral relation to the peoples of, and from, the Caribbean (for example, C.L.R. James) and African-American public intellectuals (for example, June Jordan).

40 — Rinaldo Walcott Questions of creolization and hybridity find their way into the discourse of black British cultural studies through the route of Caribbean migration to England. What is interesting is the ways in which Caribbean theorists, with a few exceptions, have gone missing in contemporary black diasporic debates, and how black Britain has become the privileged site of engagement. I want to suggest that black Canadas are a matrix for the contestations that are currently taking place in black diasporic studies. •* As a location for post-emancipation and post-national independence for Caribbean migrants, and more recently for continental African migrants, and as a sanctuary for escaping enslaved African-Americans and their descendants, the multiplicities of blackness in Canada collide in ways that are instructive for current diasporic theorizing.^ Furthermore, the official sanctioning of identity politics supported by the state, through its legislated multicultural policy, places issues of difference and connectedness in a different relation and configuration. Nation-state influence can (re)direct the potential political possibilities of meaningful diasporic conversations. Black studies' (re)marginalization is occurring for many reasons, but chief among them is the various ways in which black particularities have been disavowed in many of the current discussions. Since the 1996 Olympics are still fresh in our minds, the particularities of black difference and nation-state discourse(s) might appear clearer in a brief detour to that spectacle of nationalist frenzy. The disbelief of both white and black Americans that, not only did they not win the one hundred metres, but that their relay team was defeated by the black Canadian team, was more than evident.15 The insistence by Michael Johnson and the American media that he is the fastest man in the world, despite that title usually going to the winner of the one hundred metre event, attenuates the limits of diasporic discourses. As Donovan Bailey recently stated, K[t]he claim is from Michael Johnson, and he's not even the fastest man in Texas."^ Now, this might appear trivial in the scheme of things, but it goes to the heart of what black studies might not bear to hear. Bailey's comments gesture to his training in Texas and are just another example of the criss-crossing of black Canadians. Many fugitive slaves returned to the United States after emancipation (t)here and this practice has continued to mark black North American border-crossing. In the 1960s there were two types of crossings: one type was occasioned by conscientious objectors to the Vietnam war, while at the same time, some

Black Like Who? — 41 black Nova Scotians were leaving Canada and moving down the eastern seaboard after the razing of Africville. That these crossings go missing in the discourses of black studies demonstrates how we cannot understand black studies outside of structures of imperialism. Black cultural studies, with its attention to locality in the context of globality, might be read as offering some space to explore the tensions of black studies. Black Canadian identification with the incidents in Los Angeles in 1992, and the eruption of a small riot in Toronto, is yet another indication of transnational political identification that needs to be addressed. For example, the dedordement music of rapper Devon is a case in point. Repetition, reference, citation, circularity—all the characteristics of black diasporic cultures—are used by Devon in his sonic appeals for justice. Devon raps: No, no, no, LAPD; ease up RCMP; ease up Orange County; ease up No OPP; ease up 52; ease up Peel Region; ease up Don't shoot the youth [.] The intertextual and intermusical resonances of "Mr. Metro" ("And another one gone and another one gone/ And another one bites the dust") place blackness outside of national boundaries and requires us to theorize blackness as an interstitial space. Devon's signifying and testifying calls up a broader notion of blackness than state narratives would allow, for Devon refuses to reference only one nation in the sonic blackness he constructs. And while he does not lose a sense of locality and historicity, his political and artistic identifications exceed national boundaries. The contested terrain of hip-hop is just one example that attests to the possibilities and the limits of diasporic theorizing. The insistence on reading rap and hip-hop only within nation-state parameters and an American context, has impeded and limited what kinds of discussions and what kinds of histories of hip-hop are possible.^ This has consequences for the kinds of relations that are created and imagined by those of us involved in the production of knowledge in the university. Shifts from black studies to black cultural studies might be constituted through long and enduring dis-satisfactions with black studies. It seems to me that discourses of diaspora require that black studies seriously considers diasporic exchanges, dialogues and differences. A

42 — Rinaldo Walcott brief look at border-crossing on the part of another Canadian might shed some light on what I am trying to say. The release of Maestro FreshWes's last album in New York raises a number of questions. Among those questions is Canada's difficulty in locating a black presence within. After two fairly successful albums (Symphony in Effect and The Black Tie Affair), Fresh-Wes argued that he had to leave Canada because the Canadian recording industry and other media, in particular radio, did not demonstrate support for rap artists. Fresh-Wes decided to run for the border, as the Taco Bell ads suggest (Taco Bell actually suggests a border that Delany favoured over the Canadian one—Latin and South America) and found himself in New York City. The album he released is titled Naaah, Dis Kid Can't Be From Canada?!!!—and it clearly doubles and signifies in its naming. The persistent refusal of mainstream Canadian stations to play rap music places musical blackness outside national narratives. Fresh-Wes's title both gestures to this, and targets the narrative of rap and hip-hop as an African-American invention. Through his title, Fresh-Wes suggests that the dopest rhymes can come from elsewhere, disturbing the foundations of the home of rap. At the same time, he worried geographic, cultural and national borders by releasing the album in the United States. He used his black Canadian alterity to disturb what appears to be a mimetic identification when he ran for the border packing his desires for hip-hop commercial success. Whether home is the nation-state, black studies, black cultural studies or all three, in the words of black Canadian poet Dionne Brand, "home is an uneasy place," (1998, 67) and diasporic experiences attest to that unending restlessness.

2 • "A Tough Geography" Towards a Poetics of Black Space(s) in Canada1

We say that a national literature emerges when a community whose collective existence is called into question tries to put together the reasons for its existence. —Edouard Glissant The word must be mastered. But such a mastery will be insignificant unless it is an integral part of a resolute collective act—a political act. —Edouard Glissant So we're not going any place, and we're not melting or keeping quiet in Bathurst Subway or on Bathurst Street or on any other street we take over—Eglinton, Vaughan, Marlee. If our style bothers you, deal with it. That's just life happening, that's just us making our way home. —Dionne Brand

Walking Negro Creek Road Settler colonies can be characterized by their struggles over race and space. Canada is no exception. The first phase of black demands on the Canadian nation-state must be considered in light of Africadian demands that land grants promised to them be honoured. When some of those grants were indeed honoured, the quality of the land was suitable for little more than housing plots. This originary struggle over space, constituted through a particularized Canadian racial discourse, is what we might call the racial geography of Canada.^ National historical narratives render these racial geographies invisible, and many people continue to believe that any black presence in Canada is a recent and urban one spawned by black Caribbean, and now continental African, migration.

44 — Rinaldo Wakott In 1967 Africville was permanently razed. It continues to exist only in the memories of its former inhabitants and their descendants. Now, the desire to render black peoples and blackness an absented presence in Canada has been made literally and symbolically clear. More recently in Ontario, the offensively stupid claim of Holland Township Council that using the word Negro in the 1990s was uncomfortable, led that council to change the name of Negro Creek Road to Moggie Road. Renaming the road after George Moggie, a white settler, was yet another paragraph in the continuing story of the ways in which 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 the invisible to the hyper-visible. While contemporary poets, activists, oral documenters and archivists such as George Elliott Clarke, Delvina Bernard, Maxine Tynes, Syliva Hamilton (who is also a filmmaker), the singer/songwriter Faith Nolan and numerous others, have attempted to counter the writing of black people out of the Canadian nation, the process continues to unfold. It appears that the collecting and documenting of evidence of a black presence that is underway in Nova Scotia is not occurring in Ontario, Quebec, British Columbia and other provinces.^ The importance of the Nova Scotian achievement is that it gives us the ability to create a language of blackness in Canada: one that is at once mindful of black migrant cultures, but also recognizes and acknowledges the true genealogy of black existence in Canada. Canada is a land troubled by questions of race and space, whether we are speaking of First Nations land claims, Quebec nationalism or the absented presence of Canada's others. In 1993 the eruption of what was characterized as a "mini-riot" at a condominium complex on Dixon Road in Etobicoke, involving the Somali community, crystallized the issues of race and space in this nation. Accusations against Somali youths attempted to place their cultural practices firmly outside the nation, even when the accusations were ridiculous. A consequence of the "troubles" was that a move was made to criminalize Somali youth through the use of stringent enforcement of trespassing laws. Somalis were made hyper-visible in an effort to mark and confine their movements and bodies in space and to a particular place. Nineteen ninety-three signalled the incorporation of the Somali community into the dominant discourses of race and blackness

Black Like Who? — 45

structured by North American white supremacy. That racialized discourse, fostered by and emanating out of slavery, is continually fashioned through an ideology that suggests that black bodies can and must be abused, misused, regulated, disciplined and over-policed. These practices of regulation and discipline occur in the effort to make belonging, as Dionne Brand puts it, "an uneasy place" (1998, 67). Yet black people in North America continue to make both space and place theirs. This, however, is not accomplished by understanding their experiences as isolated and disconnected from other places and spaces. The political identifications of black peoples are crucial and essential to resistance. Making outer-national identifications with other black peoples is important to the kinds of struggles that might be waged within national boundaries. By working across different genres (poetry, short stories, oral history, historical and sociological essays, polemical writing, filmmaking and now the novel), Dionne Brand has used her immigrant/citizen status to bring a new cartography to the question of race and space in the Canadian context. She redraws and remaps the Canadian urban landscape in order to announce and articulate a black presence that signals defiance, survival and renewal. Brand's work, located in the urban spaces of migrant existences, refigures the actual, literary and figurative landscapes of Canada, and so redraws boundaries of knowing, experience and belonging. But what is characteristically complex about Brand's work is that it offers no orthodoxies on blackness. Instead her Marxist, feminist, lesbian voice and political insights are the bases from which she articulates critiques of patriarchal and essentialist notions of blackness, as well as critiques of racism, patriarchy and class exploitation in Canada. After The Nostalgia of Immigrant Writing Nostalgia is dead. Dionne Brand's In Another Place, Not Here, a complexly woven tale of space, language, identity and place, is uncharacteristic in terms of recent (Caribbean?) black Canadian literature. Brand's refusal to construct a narrative of the easy nostalgia that has come to mark much immigrant writing is notable. In Another Place puts an end to, or at least signals the demise of such cultural representations and (literary) politics. Comparatively, Cecil Foster's focus (in his two novels on the ways in which migration to Canada has affected individuals) is still, in large measure, concerned with the politics of dislocation constituted through nostalgia for home. It seems that one of the challenges facing contemporary black Canadian art is to move beyond the discourse of nostalgia for an

46 — Rinaldo Walcott elsewhere and toward addressing the politics of its present location. Foster's characters, in particular Suzanne in Sleep On Beloved, must deal with their inability to put home behind them. I am by no means suggesting that one's move to an elsewhere can only be made successful by jettisoning the past. Memory often will not allow that anyway. What I am trying to suggest is that "immigrant writing," and in this case "Caribbean (black) immigrant writing," is often shrouded in a nostalgic longing for a past that is neglectful of the politics of the present location. Interestingly, one might read Claire Harris's poetic collections, particularly her recent Dipped in Shadows, as another step in the (re)ordering of black writers' concerns with the cultural politics of home—that is, Canada. But in making these claims, Brand and Harris should be considered with another group of black Canadian writers who have made the question of space a concern in their artistic endeavours. George Elliott Clarke, Maxine Tynes, Carol Talbot and a number of others have continually emphasized place and space in their work—in particular the places and spaces which, for lack of a better term, I would designate "indigenous black Canadian space." This particular group of indigenous black Canadians has not garnered as much attention nationally as it should because its presence—the places and spaces it occupies—makes a lie of too many national myths (or raises too many questions) concerning the Canadian nation-state. Thus, in a perverse way, it is around Canadian blacks of Caribbean descent that definitions of blackness in Canada are clustered. The hyper-visibility of Caribbean blackness makes indigenous black Canadians invisible. With Brand, I want to interrogate and speculate about what the category black Canadian might mean in the context of this historical moment. Brand's last three works concern themselves in no small detail with mapping a black Canadian poetics of space—"a tough geography" (40) as she puts it in No Language is Neutral. These efforts are important because the historians and sociologists have not been able to furnish black Canada with a discourse that recognizes an almost five-hundredyear past, and it is up to those of us engaged in other aspects of cultural work to articulate what that means. While I am in no way trying to position literature and its critics as the vanguard of cultural knowing, it appears to me that imaginative works often render much more complex and interesting constructions of our multiple historical experiences than other cultural forms. I think that in the case of black Canada this is particularly so.

Black Like Who? — 47 George Elliott Clarke, in the important essay "A Primer of AfricanCanadian Literature," offers a genealogy of African-Canadian literature in which he makes some important claims concerning black writers in Canada. While Clarke is paying attention to the active and political deployment of a constellation of African-Canadian works in an attempt to combat "uninformed commentaries" (7) which reduce black Canadian literature to "West Indian Writers," (7) he also offers an interesting project for internal black dialogues, critiques and conversations. His essay suggests a paradigm for discussing not just black literatures in Canada, but also, I would argue, black cultures. Clarke suggests that "exiles and refugees" (7) are the primary source for black Canadian literature. He writes: "AfricanCanadian literature has been, from its origins, the work of political exiles and native dissidents." (7) This makes complex and fluid the very constitution of those who might and might not be defined as black Canadian. Clarke's observation holds great promise for formulating a black Canadian discourse conscious of both the locality of national boundaries and the limitations of nation. It is in the context of exiles and refugees that I shall engage a discussion of Brand's In Another Place.

Exiles and Refugees In Another Place, Not Here is the story of two migrant black women, Verlia and Elizete. Verlia's migration is legally accomplished; Elizete's migration is not sanctioned by state authorities. What these two women's stories allow us to see is the ways in which their existence redraws the boundaries of Toronto, Ontario and Canada. Those boundaries are redrawn in the way they resist brutality. Brand uses her characters' experiences to write a text that exists at/on the in-between space; in fact, the very language of the novel occupies the space of the in-between. Brand constructs sentences that bring Canada and Caribbean together in ways that remap both: for example, "She decided to get away from the mall and the Gladstone and began to walk the maze of streets trying to get to the sea." (56) Brand's seemingly strange sentences refigure Canada as we know it, implanting the experiences of black peoples, in this case black women, in the very crevices of the nation. Brand's accomplishment is what the black British cultural theorist Paul Gilroy calls "[c]ritical space/time cartography of the diaspora...the dynamics of dispersal and local autonomy can be shown alongside the unforseen detours and circuits which mark the new journeys and new arrivals that, in turn, release new political and cultural possibilities." (86)

48 — Rinaldo Walcott In Another Place makes demands upon space and place couched in the demarcations of an in-between. For black Canadians, living the in-between is conditioned by their inside/outside status in the nation-state; whether indigenous black or otherwise, in-betweenness in Canada is conditioned by a plethora of national narratives, from the idea of "two founding peoples," to multicultural policies, to immigration policies, to provincial and municipal policing practices, and so on. 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-betweenness is, however, not only produced by the state: it is also something black folks have chosen through their multiple diasporic and outer-national political identifications. It is in both of the above senses that Elizete and Verlia make demands of the place(s) they find themselves in, whether they're Caribbean or Canadian. Elizete's flight from the Caribbean and Verlia's flight from Sudbury are not entirely differently conditioned: both exist in the in-between. Both women live an outernational existence characterized by migratory movement and particular political commitments and practices. In No Language Is Neutral Brand writes, "walk Bathurst Street until it come like home," (30) insisting and asserting a presence of blackness in Canada, or more bluntly, staking out territory. Her insistence is posed in the context of a national narrative which seeks to render her "the thin/mixture of just come don't exist." (29) The utterance of "just come" is one of the ways in which the life of the in-between is lived out. The idea of "just come" is crucial to the nation-state's construction both of black invisibility and hyper-visibility. Ludicrous excuses—like discomfort with the word Negro—are used to deny the evidence and existence of an early black historical presence which troubles and worries the national myth of two founding peoples. Such practices make sense in the context of a sociological discourse of black anti-racism, emanating mainly from Toronto, which has constructed blackness in Canada in ways that ignore or pay only lip service to any black antecedent prior to the 1960s. The discomfort of Holland Township's politicians reveals the traces of the ways in which language has been used to denigrate and render black people less than human. Language is only one of the things that is at issue when folks who have been colonized talk back and resist. However, remaking language is the way to come to terms with the past in

Black Like Who? — 49 the present, as recent black post-colonial assertions insist. Thus, those who marched on Negro Creek Road to retain its name were not just marching so that the visible and tangible evidence of the past would not disappear, they were also marching because reclaiming Negro is as important a part of black historical memory and experience as any other artifact or document. Brand's use of language is essential to her re-ordering of Canadian literary realities because she brings new sounds and tonality to what may be considered Canadian. Her use of language signals the unsettled restlessness of the exile and refugee who must rechart, remap and regroup so that both self and collectivity are made evident and present. Black diasporic practices of language continually revise and reveal its constructedness, and also its importance in both domination and resistance. The potential of language to disclose the discredited histories of black peoples is evident in these practices of revision and reversal. In this sense, reclaiming and insisting upon the name Negro Creek Road is of immense importance. For it is the name, or what the language conveys, that denotes the history of black peoples in the province of Ontario.

Staking Out Territory Dumbfounded I walk as if these sidewalks are a place I'm visiting. Like a holy ghost I package the smell of zinnias and lady of the night, I horde the taste Ignoring my own money thrown on the counter, the race conscious landlords and their jim crow flats, oh yes! here! the work nobody wants to do...it's good work I'm not complaining! but they make it taste bad, bitter like peas... Our nostalgia was a lie and the passage on the six hour flight to ourselves is wide and like another world... —Dionne Brand, No Language Is Neutral, 31-33 If Negro Creek Road disappears from Ontario and thus Canadian maps, memory and remembering will be the ghosts that haunt Holland Township and Canada. Canada's continued forgetfulness concerning slavery here, and the nation-state's attempts to record only Canada's role as a

50 — Rinaldo Wakott place of sanctuary for escaping African-Americans, is a part of the story of absenting blackness from its history. Erasing all evidence of any other presence (First Nations and black) is crucial if the myth of two founding peoples is to hold the crumbling nation of Canada together in the face of Quebec's ever-impeding separation and declaration of nation status. Many "Negro Creek Roads" exist; they are yet to be found and documented. It is particularly the symbolization of "Negro Creek Roads" that I want to explore because their existence announces the refiguration of the social, political and cultural landscape of Canada. And it is not a barren one. If we want to turn to recent history for a remapping of the Canadian urban landscape, Toronto's Bathurst Street might best stand in as a ritualistic locus for migrant Caribbean peoples. The people who live in the in-between, neither here nor elsewhere, redraw and rechart the places/spaces that they occupy. It is living in an in-between space that Brand, M. Nourbese Philip, Austin Clarke, Cecil Foster, Andrew Moodie and a host of other writers, thinkers, dramatists and choreographers articulate; in doing this they take a political and ethical stance which refuses the boundaries of national discourses. To be black and at home in Canada is to both belong and not belong. The Dream Warriors celebrate black diasporic connectedness and passion in their song "Ludi" by calling out and naming black home spaces in Canada and the Caribbean. This naming is a practice of the inbetween. For nation-centred discourse can only prohibit black folks from sharing what Freud calls "common feeling," (1961, 43) especially when common actions seem to present themselves, time and again, in and across different spaces/places/nations. In Brand's collection of essays Bread Out of Stone, "Bathurst" stands out as a statement about reconfigured space. When Brand reads the essay, its poetic qualities infuse a black diasporic orality into the polemic and (re)tune the sound of Canada. However, "Bathurst" is important for more than its tonal qualities. It chronicles the existence of the vibrant black, mainly Caribbean, community that existed on Bathurst Street in the 1970s. The essay is about space, time, culture and how black peoples' activism refashions Canada. Brand recharts urban identity and populates the literary sphere with black Canadians who recognize that "home is an uneasy place." (1998, 67) "Bathurst" is important for a number of reasons, chief among them being the assertion and insertion of a black presence in Toronto, one that refuses to be silenced, to be made invisible and to exist solely on the

Black Like Who? — 51 margins of North American society. It is the refusal of marginalization in all of Brand's work that transfigures the space/place of domination. Bathurst is the space of self-assertion and political engagement that Verlia seeks: She finds a room in a house on a street off Bathurst. She chooses the street because of the barber shops on Bathurst. It is Sunday but she knows that on Monday this is where she will meet the sisters and brothers in the Movement. This is where she will cut her perm and this is where she will begin. (1996, 155) There is an ambivalence in Brand's (re)creation of Verlia's search for, and eventual discovery of, the Movement in Toronto. This ambivalence is the novelist's rendering, in her (re)tellmg, of the problems of nationalist discourse. It should not be overlooked that Verlia, who grows to become a feminist and lesbian, is always off—Brand does not put Verlia at the centre of nationalist movement. The reasons for this are obvious. Living in a room off Bathurst, where black male spaces—barber shops—dominate, means that Verlia's lived experience must be elsewhere. Brand is not creating a sentimental remembering of the Movement of the 1970s; instead she offers a reassessment of what might have been possible had all aspects of blackness been considered—especially questioning die masculinist tones of the Movement. In this regard she ushers new tropes into Canadian literature. The importance of black and migrant urban space is revealed as Elizete evades immigration officers, changes names repeatedly to conceal an already invisible existence, and struggles to survive in the context of a hostile land. Verlia, on the other hand, flees Sudbury because it's the site of black suffocation. In effect, the notions of exile and refugee status refigure contemporary Canada as a space where blacks do not belong. In addition, Brand's critique of patriarchal black nationalism brings black internal dialogues to the texture of Canadian cultures. In Another Place is Brand's lyrical portrayal of the ways in which identity, place, belonging and the politics of self and collectivity are lived out and actualized in language. I want to focus on the remaking of the racialized, gendered and sexualized (literary) landscape of Canada, as another one of the important ways that Brand's novel disrupts Canadian literary practices. Moving beyond the discourse and literary tropes of "roughing it in the bush" and "survival" in a barren landscape (national

52 — Rinaldo Walcott tropes which deny a First Nations presence), Brand moves through an urban landscape populated with the usual suspects of Canadian migrant cultures. She brings to the Canadian literary landscape the bittersweet taste and metaphor of the tamarind—bittersweet because of its sensuality, its shape and its hard core. Staking claim through naming is crucial to the project of redrawing the urban landscape of Canada. Brand names and traverses Toronto in an attempt to make it the home of Verlia and Elizete. In doing so she charts many of the home spaces of migrant Caribbean peoples in Canada. In Another Place is literally and symbolically a historical and contemporary map to (black) Toronto. Bathurst, St. Clair Avenue, Vaughan Road, Christie, Bloor, Harbord, College Street, Oakwood, Danforth, Regent Park, Avenue Road, Yorkville, Yonge Street—these names exist alongside names of places and spaces in the Caribbean. The Gladstone Hotel, Van Dong Restaurant, Canadian National, factories, rooming houses, barber shops, parks and dance halls (The Paramount) are signifiers which locate place; are names that refigure and claim, and make one's presence felt. Through Verlia's and Elizete's eyes, voices and experiences we get a new cultural, political and economic map of Canada. Brand's recharting of the Canadian landscape is not in any way romantic. In No Language Is Neutral she warns that "nostalgia is lie" (32) and in In Another Place Elizete's and Verlia's elsewhere, while remembered, is not romantically yearned for. The tales of activism that organize Verlia's life in the novel lead both to her feminist awakening and a critique of black patriarchal nationalism and heteronormative politics. Verlia demands more of black nationalism. Brand, in creating a character who not only challenges white supremacy but also calls into question and challenges the patriarchal and heteronormative politics of black nationalism, is surely redrawing the boundaries of blackness. In fact, she implodes those boundaries. By mentioning Fanon in the novel, Brand acknowledges his important insight: that to understand black experiences only within the context of singularity (i.e. nation) is to render oneself continually vulnerable to the forces of oppression. Verlia and Elizete attempt to occupy the space between self and collective desires and expressions; this might be called a post-national black lesbian feminist space/place. When Verlia returns to the Caribbean—not in a romantic search for roots (no nostalgia is evident), but rather as an activist—she announces the possibility of change and makes demands on place and space. The latter is the imperative of black

Black Like Who? — 53 diasporic political identifications which seek both to refigure black experiences and to demand justice.

The Space of Pain The space of pain is what gives teeth to the issues that Brand confronts in In Another Place. By this I mean that Brand's insistence on refusing to render the displacements and reconciliations of mothers with daughters as simple and uncomplicated is important. ^ These women, our mothers, a whole generation of them, left us. They went to England or America or Canada or some big city as fast as their wit could get them there because they were women and all they had to live on was wit since nobody considered them whole people. (230) Pain is often the trace that binds women together in Brand's work, but in the novel pain is also the necessary evil that must be worked through if reconciliation of any sort is possible. Indeed, she maps a number of pains that occupy the unspoken spaces of blackness in Canada: They sent for us, sent for us their daughters, then washed our faces in their self-hatred. Self-hatred they had learned from the white people whose toilets they had cleaned, whose asses they had wiped, whose kitchens they had scrubbed, whose hatred they had swallowed.. .they saw their hands swollen with water, muscular with lifting and pulling, they saw their souls assaulted and irrecoverable, wounded from insult and the sheer nastiness of white words... They made us pay for what they had suffered— They did not feel redeemed by it but they themselves had been so twisted from walking in shame that they twisted our bodies to suit their stride. (231) While Brand as novelist must rethink the context and contours of racist Canada, she also unsentimentally conveys the wretched impact of racism as it is played out in mother/daughter relations. Echoes of Jamaica Kincaid's rendering of daughters' relationships with mothers are evident in her work. The estrangement of daughters from mothers, as Brand writes it, sits at the heart of the question of community, and parallels the question of black nationalist rhetoric and its failures to fully address black multiplicity.

54 — Rinaldo Walcott

(Re)newals The Globe and Mail's Joan Thomas suggests that Brand is too angry even when she is at her best. Thomas's backhanded praise of Brand is the kind of stuff of which black erasures in Canadian culture are made. The comparison of Brand's work with Toni Morrison's is simultaneously accurate and troubling, especially when Brand is criticized for not having Morrison's "largeness of spirit." (C20) Fallaciously inferring that there is no anger in Morrison's work denies the ways in which the redemptive and transfigurative moments in her texts are arrived at. What seems behind these readings is a tendency to read black women writers within what we might call "the mammy tradition"—black women, this school of criticism implies, should make all things right or at least smooth everything over. To arrive at the moment of transfiguration, or to even open up its possibility, the space of anger in black diasporic culture must be explored by black artists, critics and others. And it's just as important for us to question the idea that anger has no place in literature. Thomas' comment, that "memory is full of the sour taste of tamarinds" (C20), is her call for Brand as novelist, and black people generally, to forget a past and present of pain. In recognizing that memory has forgetting as its twin, Brand writes of "the skill of forgetfulness" (1996, 13) as something that's learned in the context of the dismissal of women, but important for recognizing how the concerns of those resisting are also dismissed and denied. Long-time readers of Brand's work have seen her continually redraw and remap the oppressive landscapes of Canada. In short stories like "Blossom, Priestess of Oya, Goddess of winds, storms and waterfalls," "At the Lisbon Plate" and more specifically "Train to Montreal" (all from Sans SOMCZ and Other Stories), Brand began the project of rewriting the racialized space of Canada. In Another Place, Not Here is a tour de force which recharts this project. The authorities who sanction the racialized space and place of Canada will continue to have to come to terms with the exiles and refugees in their midst. The struggle of diasporic blacks for space in Canada has a long genealogy, and a trajectory that will continue to cause reverberations across all aspects of the national body. I invoke the body, or rather, bodies, here because what is ultimately at stake is the space and place that bodies, both actual and symbolic, occupy in the nation's imagination. Black Canadian literature's unruly bodies will continue to insist

Black Like Who? — 55 upon a space where justice and freedom are possible, and, as Brand puts it, "it doesn't matter that it's Toronto or a country named Canada. Right now that is incidental, and this city and this country will have to fit themselves into her dream" (1996, 159).

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3 * Desiring to Belong? The Politics of Texts and their Politics of Nation

The Emergence of the Counter-novel and the Requirement of a Deciphering Practice The moment of what Sylvia Wynter calls the counter-novel has arrived for black literature in Canada. Novels by Dionne Brand, Cecil Foster, Lawrence Hill, Austin Clarke, M. Nourbese Philip, Suzette Mayr, Andre Alexis and a host of others have begun to rework the novel's form and its conceptual premises. These counter-novels are reshaping both the literary landscape of Canada and simultaneously helping to rewrite Canadian historiography. Wynter argues that the counter-novel must do more than the traditional definition of the novel suggests is possible. She sees the counternovel and minority discourse as "imperatively necessary, because [they are] linked to the motives of general human self-interest, rather than to the particular interests of specific groups." (1990, 459) Wynter belies the notion that minority discourse is too particularistic to speak to an assumed wider public. She further suggests that the counter-novel produces a "'counter-exertion', one that will entail the transformation of both literary scholarship and of our present organisation of knowledge." (459) In her formulation, minority discourse—despite its misnomer as a term, given the numeric evidence that those termed "minority" are actually the majority—offers us the possibility of thinking differently about what is at stake in refashioning what it means to be human. Following the philosophers of science and culture, Wynter sees minority discourses as being capable of creating "new forms of human life." (1992, 240) In relation to the humanities as a site of knowledge production, minority discourse allows for "the liberation of the literary humanities

58 — Rinaldo Walcott themselves from the secondary role to which they have been...relegated in our present episteme." (463) By "present episteme," Wynter signals both the discourse and the actual conditions to which the literary humanities have been relegated: the place of least importance in the world of institutional knowledge. She challenges such a relegation by insisting on reading practices that highlight the crucial importance of the literaiy humanities. The crucial importance of the literary humanities lies in the way questions of the imagination have important cultural, social and political impact and should never be assumed to be outside cultural and socio-political concerns and affairs. Wynter's insights are important to black literatures because almost by definition this literature creates universality through the gaze, words and subjectivity of those made subaltern. This universality can be liberating. However, in the case of some authors this universality partakes of and reproduces dominant authoritative discourses situated within the differential power arrangements that make a numeric global white minority appear and behave as if it were a majority. The power of words is at stake in how we formulate positions on the questions of universality, minority and majority discourses and their various contestations. In this chapter, I read and decipher the impact of three counter-novels that take Canada as a place and space of desire. I suggest that different forms and expressions of desire are central to the notion of the counternovel and its ability to effect and evoke new possibilities. I am particularly interested in the ways in which desire structures belonging. This is a chapter about the power of words to evoke the desire for national belonging or something else. Lawrence Hill's Any Known Blood, Cecil Foster's Slammin' Tar and Andre Alexis's Childhood are all border crossing texts set in Canada. Each text depends upon a different kind of black diaspora sensibility, one that is larger than national boundaries can contain. This border crossing sensibility enhances the narrative power of each text. .Yet, despite the common ground of border crossing, each text foregrounds a different set of political questions, concerns and implications for the nation. Border crossing in these texts signifies differently, with varying political and ethical concerns. Each author must be positioned differently in terms of the politics of his text, which I define as what the texts are intended to do. Politically, one might argue that these authors share little in common beyond being black. Still, it is crucial to consider the kinds of repressions each of these texts take up and why. Furthermore, what does the

Black Like Who? — 59 uncovering of repression in these texts allow readers to see differently? And how does desire as a condition of belonging work in these novels? These questions go to the different ways in which nation is understood and questioned or not questioned in contemporary black Canadian writing. The desire to concede to particular narratives of the nation is held up to scrutiny by each of these texts in different ways. Critics will necessarily read different implications for the nation in each of these texts. These implications can be tied to different real-world political utterances and stances. Sylvia Wynter suggests that, unlike "a critical practice which must seek for the "meanings" of the text in the text alone.. .a deciphering practice will seek to function correlatively at four levels." (1992, 267) These four levels are: the signifying practices of the text itself; the specific social environment or cultural dimension of the text as its performative complex of meanings produce a "'symbol-matter information system';" (267) a level that brings the results of the first two together so that the critic can consider what the performative and representational signifying practices of the text are "'intended to do—that is, what collective behaviours they are intended to induce and how precisely their practices of signification" (267-268) provide ways to shift, alter and retain the status quo of our habits; and the last level is the place from which we might begin a critique of present conceptions of the human and move towards constituting "new forms of human life." What Wynter offers in her complex argument for a deciphering practice is an "epistemological mutation" (1990, 365)—a challenge to think beyond current conceptions of the human and its order/containment/regulating premises. Since the imagination is central to all realms of human life it would be dishonest to place artists outside the realm of the socio-political. Such a claim does not reduce art and artists to a common denominator of the political but rather attempts to make sense of the complex forces that produce art and artists. Simultaneously, this claim recognizes that art has real-life impacts because works of art are not bound, closed texts, but as Edward Said puts it, they are "worldly. "^ It is in this regard that I read each of the three texts below: for what they might occasion us to do with knowledge, nation, citizenship and the potential for being human.

Childhood and the Myth of Belonging Andre Alexis' Childhood has been one of the most celebrated black texts in recent Canadian literary history. In 1999 Alexis won the Chapters/Books

60 — Rinaldo Walcott in Canada First Novel Award and shared the prestigious Ontario Trillium Award with Alice Munro. The novel has been nominated for numerous other literary awards. Its Canadian publisher, McClelland and Stewart, has sold international publishing rights in numerous countries. Recently, on the television book show Hot Type, Alexis was the only black Canadian writer mentioned as one to look out for in terms of future promise. Childhood has been promoted with little reference to Alexis as a black man. The promotion of the book on these terms has prompted critic Peter Hudson to write in a review that Alexis "came across as an Artiste: as a cool, erudite Negro whose commitment to pure aesthetic form transcends the vagaries of race." (35) Hudson's insight speaks back to a racist discourse that reads the concerns of black art as political rather than aesthetic. The promotion of the novel as being in excess of black art is as though a link to blackness in the text would in some way damage the sophistication of the art. It is precisely die repression of the text's blackness, Alexis's blackness and the Caribbean genealogy of that blackness that I want to address in my response to the narrative and artistry of Alexis's novel. There is no doubt that Alexis is a talented writer. His sentences are tight and he can turn words and keep one's attention on the most banal of details in a way few writers can. This is important to point out because Childhood is a text which on first glance can appear to be about almost nothing. It is the politics of his writing, and by extension his art, that might be questioned. Border crossing pervades Alexis's text both formally and in terms of its plot. Yet the reception of his book has failed to address this border crossing sensibility. Reviews have focused on the language and style, failing to address what the language and style of Childhood attempt to keep under wraps. While the focus of my comments is on the narrative, I feel it necessary to say that the novel's formal border crossing— a certain kind of forced postmodern aesthetic that attempts to disrupt reading practices—does not succeed aesthetically, serving only to highlight the repression of "real" border crossing moments in the narrative. Childhood is the story of a man in his thirties who looks back on his life. Memory and its reliability are at stake in Thomas MacMillan's look back. By looking back MacMillan crosses a number of interesting borders. The narrative plays with the magic of memory in an attempt to convey the ordinary things about life which make it liveable. In this trip down memory lane the narrative reveals a number of interesting thematic issues. In particular there is the question of just what is a Canadian

Black Like Who? — 61 experience. The characters in Childhood could well be Trinidadian—and in fact a number of them are. Yet this major detail has not been addressed in the reception of the text. As well, this major detail has been missing in the publisher's promotion of the text. A certain kind of repression is being enacted in the cultural milieu surrounding the book. The themes and langauge of Childhood must be deciphered to uncover what is buried behind the surface of Childhood's thin membrane of remembering and memory. According to Wynter, to decipher a text is to "identify not what texts and their signifying practices can be interpreted to mean but what they can be deciphered to do." (1992, 266) This injunction of Wynter's demands that we move beyond an analytical model that attempts to read texts for potential meanings. Instead, we must decipher what the texts allow us to do within the contexts of larger questions of cultural and political mobilization. Michel Foucault's call for "interpretive decipherment" (1992, 11) resonates in Childhood, a text in which the polished aesthetic of the language masks other aspects of the novel that might have much to say about what it is possible to do in a political and socio-cultural environment. In recounting his childhood, Thomas MacMillan reveals to us that he lived with his grandmother until the age of ten when she died. Shortly after her death his mother Katarina appears with her boyfriend (Mr. Mataf) to take him to Montreal. Along the way mother, son and boyfriend engage in petty shoplifting of food and sleep in their car or a tent. Katarina's relationship falls apart on the trip and Mr. Mataf leaves mother and child stranded on the road. Thomas and his mother make their way to Ottawa, where she pays a visit to a Mr. Henry Wing. The remainder of the adult Thomas's remembering unfolds at the house he inherits on Cooper Street after Wing's death. In moving from Petrolia to Ottawa a number of borders are crossed. Through his characters Alexis invokes the tropes of Canadian landscape and geography to effectively demonstrate his qualifications for belonging. A certain kind of anxiety to belong is displayed through the most symbolic border crossing in the text, language. Thomas, Mr. Mataf and his mother intermittently speak French. The text thereby enacts a central dynamic of the myth of belonging to Canada. The bilingualism of Alexis's text works to preempt discussions of his blackness and to secure his affiliation with this normative Canada. I am not suggesting that other black writers in Canada do not use French or write in French. What I am asserting is that Alexis's use of bilingualism is a strategic border crossing

62 — Rinaldo Walcott deployed to make his place in the nation appear secure and correlatively less black. By reading below the surface of his text we can prove this assertion by discussing for example the representation of the domestic, Mrs. Williams, in Henry Wing's house in Ottawa. Also of importance is the text's formal border discourse, the ways in which pages are divided with footnotes and other devices like lists and figures or diagrams. Thomas MacMillan's way of bringing order to the everyday details of his life and his memory is through a compulsion to make lists. These formal border-crossing postmodern practices of Thomas MacMillan are crucial to Alexis's display of belonging to a particular construction of the (postmodern nation-state of Canada. As I assert above, Alexis' postmodern textual performance is somewhat forced and this undermines his otherwise smart and witty observations. The issue of how a certain kind of postmodern aesthetic—one that I am in no way hostile to—plays itself out textually and extra-textually in Alexis's work is crucial to my argument. Following Hal Foster, we might say that Alexis represents a conservative postmodernism.2 In both Childhood and Alexis's earlier collection of stories Despair he balances hints of Caribbean exoticism which he uses to spice up his greater interest in contemporary French literary postmodernist-influenced aesthetic imitations, translations and revisions. I am reading for the repression of the Caribbean spice in Alexis's work in order to theorize what that symbolic repression might mean within the context of desiring to belong to the nation. In Childhood one of the first tense encounters between the domestic Mrs. Williams and Katarina concerns itself with a scotch bonnet pepper used to bring some heat/spice to Caribbean cooking. I am fully aware of reducing imaginative works to sociology and I resist the impulse to do so. However, what is at stake here is what literature is intended to do. The Canadian postcolonial critic Diana Brydon reminds us that when we consider contemporary literatures we should also recognize that "social-policy and political implications as well as specifically disciplinary repercussions within the university" (12) accrue from how we read and interpret the words we engage. In reading Childhood as an earnest assumption and assertion of belonging, and its border notes and bilingualism as deeply implicated in a kind of repression, I want to spend some time discussing the representation of the domestic in the text. Almost immediately after Thomas and Katarina arrive in Ottawa a tension appears between her and Mrs. Williams, the domestic. This tension plays itself out in small ways: like Katarina's insistence that

Black Like Who? — 63 peppers not be used in the cooking. Henry Wing's love for Kata, as he calls her, overrules Mrs. Williams' insistence on the use of the peppers, making clear exactly who the lady of the house is. The tension comes to a head when Mrs. Williams is accused of stealing by Katarina and eventually fired by Henry Wing. The accusation is untrue, but is supported by Thomas who is asked to do so in advance by his mother. Mrs. William's representation in the text and her eventual dismissal speaks to a larger history of domestic labour in Canada and the gross exploitation of domestics. In Alexis's text there is no hint of irony, nor a critical questioning surrounding the portrait of Mrs. Williams. She wears a yellow head rag and is quite reminiscent of the stereotype of the historic Aunt Jemima. In fact, Alexis pulls out all the old and tired tropes of the mammy stereotype: the kid who falls deeply for the domestic help, the domestic as wonderful story-teller who comes to see the child as almost her own and the eventual betrayal. Thomas is torn between his love for Mrs. Williams and carrying out his mother's request, to lie to Henry Wing about her having stole his mother's shoes. What is behind Alexis's representation of the domestic—a representation and memory which appears twice in the text? I find this doubling interesting and important. At stake is a particular kind of positioning which is an attempt to put distance between those who belong and those who might not. The Caribbean domestic is deeply embedded in contemporary Canadian history and literature. Alexis's assumption of belonging to the nation on terms which do not articulate any critical response in terms of this representation reads as a desire to place distance between domestics and the "real" citizens of Canada. However, the "symbol-matter" of Alexis's story is so dependent on the stories that his immigrant parents and others must have told, that in this particular textual repression those narratives refuse to disappear. Instead, these repressed tales recur in the repeated preoccupations with Caribbean food. These are foods the narrator has not had for a long time. In fact, since Mrs. Williams left (Thomas remembers her departure as a leaving at one point in the text) he has had no Caribbean food because he cannot prepare it himself. As we all know, food is one of the central markers of outsider multicultural status in Canada. It is difficult not to recognize in the representation of Mrs. Williams a certain kind of "Canadian" disdain for those whose labour is needed but whose citizenship, whose belonging is not wanted. Alexis's text falls apart for me here because it refuses to engage the historicity of representations of Black

64 — Rinaldo Walcott women, who were forced to labour in the privacy of other people's homes.3 These representations are markedly different from those of the domestics we might meet in Austin Clarke's Toronto Trilogy. But more to the point these representations seem to eschew over twenty-five years of solid critique and public debate concerning domestic workers in Canada. Alexis's representation is definitely different from those women we meet in the non-fiction, oral narrative of Makeda Silvera's Silence. The crossing of the border from Trinidad to Canada is repressed in the novel. I am not one to argue for some kind of valorization of the place in which we were born—as though birthplace is inherently meaningful— but in Alexis's case the relation to birthplace is meaningful as Trinidad plays a crucially important, shadowy role in his fiction. While symbolically and otherwise his work is forcefully Canadian, Trinidad keeps echoing in his texts. Yet, it is only through a reading practice of interpretive deciphering that Trinidad can be surfaced and placed within the discussion of Alexis's work. But I might add that for this to happen it requires that critics not position themselves as only being capable of speaking for specific nations as though those nations are discreet, stable entities. Childhood is a text which teaches that one of the requirements of becoming a full citizen in a nation like Canada is to learn to forget. The forgetting required is the kind that supports the notion that to linger on the past is to refuse national belonging.^ This assumption is conservative in its manifestations because it suggests a narrow definition of the nation and what it might and might not be capable of including. ^ Despite itself, Childhood is a counter-novel. The ways in which a Caribbean past haunts the characters places much of the novel's intentions in deep contrast with an idealized multicultural Canadian nation. Thus Alexis's novel forces readers to ask questions concerning identity, nation and belonging which are counterposed to some of his own writerly strategies for submerging those concerns.

Slammin' Tar and the Desire to Belong The problem of the nation as discreet entity is immediately evident in Cecil Foster's novel Slammin' Tar. In Foster's third counter-novel, the question of border crossing is approached from a political position that has different implications for the nation. Foster's text is about a desire to belong which always seems to come up short for those wanting to belong. Roundly critiqued for its lack of proper editing, the story Foster attempts

Black Like Who? — 65 to tell has almost gone missing. When the local CBC News at Six recently did an in-depth story on the farm workers program in Canada, and in Ontario specifically, the story was followed by an interview with Foster concerning Slammin' Tar. The convergence of the human interest story and the Foster interview is one kind of evidence for the relevance of the counter-novel. Despite the editorial problems of Foster's text it has provoked a conversation concerning questions of the human. In this case, it has provoked a conversation concerning the ways in which those who play a major role in getting food to Ontario's tables are not given the opportunity to become full citizens. Slammin' Tar is Barbadian demotic for walking really fast or running. Foster's use of the term also embodies a critique of the Canadian governmental policy towards farm workers which says to farm workers "keep on movin'," because achieving citizen status here is unattainable. In Alexis's Childhood Mrs. Williams has the patriarchal signifier "Mrs." to mark her marital status, but no husband is evident. This is one of the fallouts of domestic labour programs. Domestics could not migrate with their families. Foster's text is in interesting conversation with Alexis's because the latter gives us the other side of the story of migratory work relations. Foster's text is within the tradition of social realism—a tradition which has been important to black diaspora writing from its inception. In his representation of the male farm workers, men who have also been forced to leave their families behind as they are strictly monitored in a controlled chain of capitalist exploitation, questions of nation, belonging, patriarchy, sexuality and citizenship are central to understanding the dilemma of belonging. Slammin' Tar recounts the story of migrant farm workers from Barbados who have been travelling to Edgecliff, a farm outside of Toronto for many years. The text centres on what might be their final trip because of the farmer's growing debt and the aging and death of some of the workers, as well as other capitalist relations. Foster attempts to look at one slice of current capitalist relations and by doing so to grapple with the multiple contradictions of contemporary global capitalism. Among those difficulties is the difficulty of farming as an industry and the injustice whereby men who live most of their lives in Canada are unable to easily move out of the program and become full-fledged immigrants and citizens. There is also the death of two workers—one in Barbados just before the trip and the suicide of another while on the farm. Both men are afflicted with a disease which Foster refuses to name.

66 — Rinaldo Wakott The inability to speak what appears to be HIV/AIDS is an interesting and useful silence. The spectre of death haunts Slammiri' Tar, More than the farm workers program is at stake in the text. The question of race, sex and illness as these become implicated in national and governmental policies like retirement plans, health benefits and so on are also at stake. At die heart of Foster's text is thus the question of community. The philosopher William Haver has written that "[an] absolute exigency, [which] is given to us to think when it is AIDS we are attempting to think, concerns the question of community." (23) Haver's thinking concerning representations of AIDS is useful when reading Foster. Haver is clear that disgust, fascination and revulsion constitute some of the terms by which AIDS can be represented and that a particular form of refusal to identify AIDS might in and of itself be a form of identification of AIDS. The unspeakability of the word HIV/AIDS in Foster's text relates to the ways in which desires to belong might limit what we think it is possible to say. But if HIV/AIDS is the unspeakable in Foster's text, it works similarly to the repression of Trinidad in Alexis's text. That is, both repressions continue to return and with these returns are much more virulent questions concerning the desire to belong and the assumption of belonging. Again the question arises of what must be contained and what contaminants must be thrown out to suture the myths of the nation. To say that Foster's text is patriarchal is too easy. Foster's narrator is consumed with tradition and he unabashedly revels in it. Therefore, he is conservative and conservationist on many fronts. This is partly why naming HIV/AIDS is almost an impossible utterance. While the silence or inability to name HIV/AIDS might be the condition of its utterance, what is even more apparent is the un-nameabilty of homosexuality. The spectre of homosexuality that HIV/AIDS continues to signal in contemporary culture haunts Slammin' Tar. But there is a long tradition of naming homosexuality without naming it—the thing that dares not speak its name. These men are consumed with questions concerning sexuality— whether it is discussions concerning prostitutes or condoms or health—a sexual anxiety pervades the text and articulates its conservative stance. Foster's text is one in which deciphering is urgently necessary. On the one hand the politics of the text seem apparent. That is, the story concerning the injustices farm workers face is clear. However, Foster's choice to have Brer Anancy appear as an unambiguous male figure, the role of illness and death, the representation of women, cross-racial desire and a host of other issues require that we further decipher what his text intends

Black Like Who? — 67 to do. One thing is evident, the text speaks clearly, if not always coherently, of a desire to belong. It attempts to articulate the desires of those whom Wynter terms "subjectfs] of the jobless archipelagoes." (1992, 272). While the work is fiction, it attempts to articulate an intended real-world project. Slammin' Tar is a text that ushers in at least one aspect of the counter-novel. It utters a different and contested history of Canadian labour relations and it speaks back to (and this I think is important for Foster) black men's contributions to Canada. Any Known Blood: Or, Just Who Belongs and Where? The centrality of black men to a rewriting of Canadian history is most evident in Lawrence Hill's text Any Known Blood. The novel can be described as the story of five generations of Langston Cane men, all of whom share the same name. These Langston Canes take their name from two African-Americans associated with the Harlem Renaissance—the first name from poet and playwright Langston Hughes and the surname from the title of Jean Toomer's 1923 polyvocal novel Cane. This intertextual dialogue between contemporary black Canadian literature and history and African-American literature and history is crucial to black literatures of the North. Immediately a cross-border identification is made in a lovingly (un)antagonistic fashion. Naming in the text is one of the most obvious instances of Hill's border crossing sensibilities. Writing against a nationalist culture that assumes a reading of Canada as distinct from the U.S., Hill's text seems to suggest that it is impossible to make sense of some aspects of black Canadian history without a serious and sustained consideration of the place of the U.S. in that history. Langston Cane V, the novel's protagonist, takes us on a border crossing investigative tour to the U.S., which eventually stops in Baltimore. The tour reveals as much about Canada, more specifically Oakville, Ontario, as staying at home would have allowed. Before we consider the cross-nation movements of Hill's text, it might be useful to consider the ways in which his entire project is concerned with questioning discreet and separate boundaries. The text opens with Langston Cane V telling readers, "I have the rare distinction.. .of not appearing to belong to any particular race, but of seeming like a contender for many." (1) After providing some instances of how his racial identity is misread and how he takes advantage of these racial misreadings, it becomes clear that Hill is concerned to unsettle the ground of any too-easy claims concerning nation, race, ethnicity and belonging. Any Known Blood ruptures and breaches assumptions concerning

68 — Rinaldo Walcott race, community, nation. But it is also a text concerned with memory and remembering and the political implications thereof. Cane Vs return to Baltimore and his recovery of a family history is a template for the ways in which we might make sense of black peoples historical relations to both nations as fraught with border crossings of various sorts. In fact, from the beginning of the family genealogy we must contend with the ways in which the Cane family symbolizes black North American border crossing in terms of its inter-raciality. This symbolizing practice forces the reader to attend intricately to the ways in which metaphors of race and nation work and are unmade in the text. Hill's text is different from both Foster's and Alexis's because it refuses the idea of a stable nation that one might join. Any Known Blood is the cannibalized story of Hill's actual family, but it is based on other historical details as well. Yet, it would be misguided to read the text as real, for Hill writes with such irreverence that it might almost be necessary to disregard the ways in which he works with factual evidence. Hill's text is good evidence of how, following Wynter, we might read fiction both as social realism and simultaneously resist reducing literature to only its social manifestations. Hill clearly challenges the genres of literature, autobiography and history as discourses and forms, calling into question certainties ostensibly guaranteed in each genre. Any Known Blood rewrites Canada's history, opening up the possibility to make claims of belonging that are different from both Alexis's and Foster's claims. In this regard Hill's work sits in relation to the work of other black diaspora counter-novelists—Caryl Phillips, Toni Morrison, Sherley Anne Williams, Erna Brodber, Ishmael Reed and Paule Marshall—whose works fill in what Morrison calls "the blank spaces" of historical writing, making these texts "critical fictions" and counter-novels.6 In Any Known Blood remembering is not merely nostalgic as official multiculturalism would have it be. Remembering is the active process of making present the gaps and silences in official histories of the nation. Most importantly, remembering forces a series of ethical questions about how the national narrative is imagined, conceived and deployed; who belongs to it, who does not and why; and what the implications of this might be. Any Known Blood is a serious recounting of black Canadian history that has been largely absent from imaginative writing by black Canadians. It is a text of many twists and turns (for example kidnapping) and it is witty and hilarious in many places. It cross-references Hill's earlier novel Some Great Thing and it sheds much needed light on the

Black Like Who? — 69 ways in which reading histories as discreet and singular might be one of the greatest fallacies of contemporary thinking. By the latter claim I mean to signal the ways in which Hill's novel refuses a discreet U.S. history, a discreet Canadian national history, as well as discreet histories of race, and its making and impact in contemporary life. Any Known Blood uncovers the lies of the Canadian nation as a white-only space and asks its readers to move beyond such a conception of the nation. Any Known Blood contentiously points to the limitations of Childhood's conception of nation; one can venture to say that by comparison the latter novel charts a too narrow notion of national desire. The counter-novel necessarily does more than tell what appears to be a seamless narrative. It engages in refashioning the novel as a form— which historically speaking was said to be beyond the capacities of black people—and it engages any number of issues that might not find space in other forms of writing or expression. Childhood makes tangential and exotic any trace that might reconstitute the myth of Canada. In Childhood there is a dilemma which presumes that to belong entails forgetting or repression of elsewhere. The idea of forgetting is held up to scrutiny in Any Known Blood, and remembering is posited instead as the active resistance available for rethinking the nation. Despite my earlier promotion of Any Known Blood as the story of five generations of Cane men, I would now like to suggest that the text might be more profitably read as Milicent Cane's story. Milicent is central to the unfolding of the narrative because it is through her that Cane V is able to complete his investigation. Milicent is the sister of Cane V's father. She is involved in a long-term dispute with her brother, who married a white woman (Cane V's mother). Milicent cannot tolerate the relationship and she refuses to engage her brother in a familial friendship. Milicent's rejection of her brother's choice of spouse is not a knee-jerk black nationalist rejection, but is firmly grounded in her experience and interpretations of history. In particular Milicent cannot put behind her the experience of Aberdeen, a family friend and her childhood protector, who was threatened then attacked by the Klu Klux Klan in Oakville when his intention to marry a white woman was made known. Thus Milicent's response to her bother's marriage is founded in a traumatic experience which she will eventually work through and recover from. It is also partly because of this experience that Milicent has lived most of her life in exile in the U.S. In many ways "Aunt Mill" is the holder of the family's story despite Cane V's assertions of his father's ability to tell a good tale. The novel is

70 — Rinaldo Walcott structured on the tension between orality and the scribal tradition. The relation between Mill's remembering and archival research is crucial to Hill's critique of official forms of history writing. His father is never prepared to risk the details of the family history. But when Milicent decides it is time to cross borders she does so with full gusto. Not only does she share her personal records with Cane V, but she also dedicates her time, energy and money to aiding in the recovery of the family's story and by extension the story of the back and forth crossings of blacks across the Canada/U.S. border. By the end of the novel Milicent returns to Oakville to make reparation with her brother and his wife and to spend her last days with her childhood protector Aberdeen. Milicent's return is interesting for many reasons. As she crosses the border she takes authority of what it means to be a citizen in a way that provides for the easy passage of Yoyo (an African journalist and satirist) who is entering Canada somewhat like a fugitive slave of the postmodern moment. She does so by asserting family status—in this instance her unquestioned belonging to the nation as well as her relation to the two men in the car. She is also able to pull this off due to her age. Here Alexis's Mrs. Williams and Foster's farm workers are present too, because Hill is mapping the contours of black movement as those movements reshape history, nation and citizenship. Mill's concern with border crossing begins with the arrival of the first generation of Canes. The first Cane is a fugitive slave. The Canes and their story move back and forth across the border. Various Cane men try to secure a decent living for their families wherever it might be possible— in Canada or the U.S. Cane V's father comes to Canada as an ex-GI shortly after W.W.II, escaping to Canada not unlike a fugitive slave. These escapes link the histories of black Canadians. But importantly the practices and experiences of five generations of Cane men also link the histories of black people in North America to white history. Hill demonstrates that this linking is not always easy but that its denial might be much more dangerous for our future. Thus, we come to understand his insistence on unsettling racial categories and assumptions of community that discourses of racial sameness suggest are crucial to the politics of his text.

Just What Might Be Intended: Genealogies of Place, Space and Desire These three texts take up space in a Canadian literary landscape with different implications. What is lovely about the space these texts occupy is

Black Like Who? — 71 the plurality of the conversation concerning blackness. The silence on blackness in Childhood is its very utterance and in that utterance, is an unintended expansion of the nation. Hill and Foster offer works that are much more far reaching in terms of fundamental rethinkings of the nation. The genealogies present in each text bear a trace to something beyond the nation, disturbing its boundaries and requiring that when we think about these texts we think beyond the notion of singularity? If community is at stake in these texts it is a community which requires the active working out of the very category. Notions of the national community are breached by these texts and readers are required to think within and beyond the desire for community to confront the difficulties of the ethical What I have been arguing about these texts is that the politics of each has different implications for how we might understand blackness in the nation. I am also suggesting that we must do more than interpret them— we must also decipher their politics. By deciphering their politics I mean that embedded in the meanings of these texts are important political and social implications for fashioning all kinds of behaviour which exist beyond .the bounded text. Texts are worldly. Aware of reducing literature to sociological evidence, I am suggesting that literature nonetheless has much to offer conversations about how one's citizenship might be imagined. And this is in part the power of words: to ascribe way beyond our imagined selves moments of immense meaningfulness. If such a project does not fit with some conceptions of art then we must rethink what art can, must and does do. Hill's project does not assume belonging, but calls into question the very terms of belonging. Even more radically, it articulates an ambiguous and ambivalent relation to nation. Yoyo, the African immigrant who must be smuggled into Canada from across the border, is one way in which Hill comments on four hundred years of black presence in Canada. Yoyo comes full circle from Mattieu de Costa, allegedly the first black person to appear on what is now Canadian soil. 9 Foster's project articulates the desire to belong which is merely one episode in the larger history that Hill reconstructs. Yet, the importance of Foster's limited project should not go unnoticed because of serious editorial problems in his text. Alexis assumes what is required to belong and then merely performs the myth of belonging, yet it is still possible to do a subversive deciphering of his text. Such a reading deciphers what other cultural elements make his art possible, returning the repressed elements and querying them. As Alexis reproduces "the economy of

72 — Rinaldo Wakott stereotype"*" he leaves behind the traces of a past which can never be completely repressed. Hill and Foster can be read as troubling stable notions of what the nation means; it is only through the generosity of an interpretative decipherment that one might read Alexis alongside them. If we insist that art speaks for some kind of politics, then we are confronted with the question of what kinds of politics we engage in as pedagogues when we choose what we will introduce our students to in certain works of art. All three of the texts discussed here will find their way into university classrooms. How will we react to what these texts tell us about the conditions of citizenship for black people in Canada? How will we decipher the different politics of these texts and the impact of those politics in the actual world? Finally, will we read these texts and reduce them to one tiny place of resistance or subversion of either the nation or blackness without understanding what kinds of desires motivated the creative process? I conclude with these questions because it is questions like these that should animate the university in the struggle for a genuine multicultural citizenry in Canada, a struggle in which the university can play an important role.

4 • "No Language is Neutral" The Politics of Performativity in M. Nourbese Philip's and Dionne Brand's Poetry

The work has no hereditary soil. It is nomadic. Writing cannot forget the misfortune from which its necessity springs; nor can it count on tacit, rich and fostering "evidences" that can provide for an agrarian speaker his intimacy with a mother tongue. Writing begins with exodus. —Michel de Certeau For the word has the potency to revive and make us free, it has the power to blind, imprison and destroy...The essence of the word is its ambivalence, and in fiction it is never so effective and revealing as when it mirrors both good and bad, as when it blows both hot and cold in the same breath. Thus it is unfortunate for the Negro that the most powerful formulations of modern American fictional words have been slanted against him; that when he approaches for a glimpse of himself he discovers an image drained of humanity. —Ralph Ellison English is my mother tongue. A mother tongue is not not a foreign Ian Ian Ian language I/anguish anguish -a foreign anguish —M. Nourbese Philip

14 — Rinaldo Wakott I remember then, and it's hard to remember waiting so long to live...anyway it's fiction what I remember, only mornings took a long time to come, I became more secretive, language seemed to split in two, one branch fell silent, the other argued hotly for going home —Dionne Brand

"Tongues Untied" Understanding exodus as central to the writing of the black diaspora might be one way of addressing the shifts, disjunctures, displacements and interruptions of writing (in) the diaspora. In writing the black diaspora, exodus is performed as an incitement to dialogue because the writing concerns itself with mimesis and alterity. The tensions of the copy or sameness, and difference or otherness, are mapped into diasporic works as the very basis of their logic. I specifically use M. Nourbese Philip's She Tries Her Tongue, Her Silence Softly Breaks and Dionne Brand's No Language is Neutral to address the performativity of black diasporic writing and speech acts because they utter a politics of difference that open up new kinds of possibilities. These possibilities are made evident by the contingent meanings in both texts, an engagement with questions of verbing* and an articulation of what is meant by performance and performativity. Philip's and Brand's (re)writings are part of a black feminist diasporic remapping of sexist and racist accusations launched against black peoples' language and speech: accusations which suggest that black language and speech are inarticulate, that blacks lack the ability and capacity for artistic expression.^ Words are the surgical tools that Ellison says bleed blackness of its humanity. Yet both Philip and Brand use the ambivalence of words to announce personhood and utter new possibilities. As well, both Philip and Brand move beyond the reclamation of language to push Ellison's insight, that "fictional words have been slanted against him...when he approaches for a glimpse of himself he discovers an image drained of humanity" (1995, 25) to its limits. Since Philip and Brand are cognizant of the slant Ellison describes, they construct new sites for locating the self and making meaning in the world. Writing from in-between spaces, they manoeuvre across territory that places them

Black Like Who? — 75 on the frontiers of post-colonial and postmodern expressivity, Their poetiy flows between the interstices of mimesis and alterity and their actions constitute a redrawing of the image of self. They offer a new gaze that is a second look because they drag along the traces of a historical past. Theirs is no mere rewriting; it's a challenge to continually foster the grounds for a possibility of the new.

Black Language and Performativity Drama, theatre and film studies have long described particular traditions and notions of performance, performativity and performer as crucial elements of how identity is understood in relationship to a question of role(s). Only recently, however, has the discourse(s) of performance moved beyond theatre, drama and film studies in a concerted effort to address not only the fabrication of the role of the actor, but to think through the very politics of staging within the confines of role playing. Role playing and its relationship to other roles (social, cultural and economic) has taken on a renewed and contested nature. Performance might be understood as that which Mae Gwendolyn Henderson, when writing about Toni Morrison, argues is a practice that "historicizes fiction and fictionalizes history." (1991, 64) Moving beyond notions of acting and role playing in drama studies, performance and performativity have become crucial to thinking through the politics of language practices as representations of complex identifications. As critical engagements with African-Caribbean/Canadian women writers continue to emerge, the performative structures of their language play becomes an increasingly important area for those attempting to understand their interventions and (reconstructions. ^ Black people in the Americas have had an immediate relationship to identity and identification as twin acts which constitute performativity. This stems from the ways in which slavery produced spaces for particular forms of identity, identifications and disidentifications. Being forced to perform for the master in a number of different ways meant that a relationship to identity for diasporic black people manifested itself as something that could be invented, revised and discarded when no longer useful. We might think about identity as a performance or acting out which puts into operation, or responds to, a set of discourses that have been a conscious and unconscious part of black diasporic cultures. Without being exhaustive, these un/conscious gestures can be looked at in terms of black peoples' use of language and their (re)writing of

76 — Rinaldo Walcott English, Spanish, Dutch, French and Portuguese; their (re)appropriation of derogatory performances like minstrelsy; the importance of the photograph and cinema;^ the (re)invention of musical sound; and a plethora of other act(ion)s that make clear a notion of fashioning and invention of the self. It is this (re)invention of the self that makes the study of performance, performativity, and their relationship to both structures of identity and practices of identification, important avenues for thinking through the mimetic and alteric structures of feeling among black diasporic people. Musical cultures have long characterized black peoples' relations to basic notions of performance. In 1963, LeRoi Jones (now Amiri Baraka) published Blues People: The Negro Experience in White America and The Music that Developed from It, in which he outlined and historized the development of blues and jazz as only possible within the crucible of an idea/experiment called America. In particular, the chapter "Swing: From Verb to Noun" attempts to demonstrate how jazz was appropriated from black people and made into a white musical form with rigid rules—that is, jazz became a formulaic genre. Baraka attempts to explain the stasis of jazz by arguing that like the blues, it moved from verb (that is, doing) to noun (that is, stasis). His argument here is important because the fluidity of music, its susceptibility to change, is crucial for its political potential. Jazz as noun cannot possibily alter America; as a verb, possibilities exist. In a more recent essay, Nathaniel Mackey, while paying homage to Jones, signifies (in this instance an inversion) on him and titles his essay "Other: From Noun to Verb." Mackey is intent on demonstrating the performativity of black language and he argues that a continued verbing as resistance is practiced by engaged diasporic poets and musicians who continually (re)write and (re)invent form(s). I rehearse these partial retellings because inside them lies a trace from which we might quite usefully think through the politics of performance and performativity in relation to black cultural production. More specifically, the study of black performativity impacts on how we might understand and at least engage with blackness as something that is continually provisional and an act of doing—verbing. It is in the continuity of verbing (doing) wherein the "possibility of possibilities" lies. I believe that Philip's and Brand's poetic works continue the verbing of language, and in the process, of blackness. Andrew Parker and Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick write:

Black Like Who? — 77 But if a spatialized, postmodernist performative analysis like the present one can demonstrate any one thing, surely it is how contingent and how radically heterogeneous, as well as how contestable, must be the relations between any subject and any utterance. (1995, 14) They suggest the contingency of meaning as it moves across different spheres. To access that contingency and glean some of its meaning, it has to be understood that the performativity of various utterances cannot and does not guarantee the revelation of any one historicity. (Butler, 1993, 12-13) What performative utterances offer are the traces of various references, citations and repetitions that constitute what Butler calls "dramatic and contingent constructions of meaning." (1990, 139) But if these contingent meanings hold any importance to this project, it is in how they allow us to better address questions of community and freedom; or rather, questions of politicality. Philip's and Brand's poetic works perform the fluid movement between "hegemonic and ambiguously hegemonic discourse" (Henderson, 1989, 138) to utter black feminist and lesbian words that write/construct new black and white histories.^ Performativity in this project is meant to signal, and thus put into "public" space, crucial questions concerning both the limits and excesses of community. Because freedom is tied to the structures of community, whether real or imagined, it is an important consideration here. As Wilson Harris argued in an essay that was a response to thefatwa placed on Salman Rushdie: A love of Justice born of a voyage in space cannot be real until it gains cross-cultural resonance within a theatre of the creature where the ceremony of politics may perceive its obsessions undercut and transformed: a ceremony that so enacts, and re-enacts itself, that it sees within and through its own blind one-track logic and circumscription of history.... (11; emphasis in original) Harris posits that notions of community as sacred have become the grounds upon which freedom is impinged, and it is only through "crosscultural resonance(s)" that any hope might be possible at the twilight of the twentieth century.' Philip's and Brand's language desecrates communities in an effort to (re)build ethical and just places that might be called home. The recognition and highlighting of the act, the performance, the

78 — Rinaldo Walcott verbing of being, becomes increasingly the element that must be addressed. I say must at the expense of appearing rigid, because it signals my desire for acting/actions. This project, then, performs one tiny aspect of black cultural studies. My text acknowledges the possibility of working with difference not as the substance that must be dissolved but as the very thing that needs to be engaged and acted out. It is the engagement that moves this work from naming (nouning), to thinking about the possibility of ushering in much more (verbing). Actors take on roles that are anterior to them. In taking on these roles they are supposed to enact the specific and particular requirements that are either documented by the playwright or commanded by the director. Actors perform the discourses of others as an other. Blackness as a discourse, when called up, uttered and performed, places the question of doing as central to what meanings might be derived from a set of actions. The temporality and spatiality of meaning as applied to blackness requires an acknowledgement of black cross-cultural resonances (creolization/hybridity). Thus place, space and time are crucial to both black meanings and meanings of black. This migratory nature of "black meaning," of "black practices" that is, brings with it a specific historicity. Black positions that pay attention to gender and sexuality reveal that "no one is interested in telling the/truth" (1990, 26), as Brand puts it, and in the process articulate a new "truth" through a doubled gaze. That gaze is the cross-cultural resonance of being. What is at stake when black cultural studies addresses multiple singularities? What is at stake in coming to terms with what Mikhail Bakhtin calls "mutual liability to blame"? (1990, 1) These questions remain unanswerable if we retain the idea of "uni-cultural" performance—identity as a tidy package of originary inheritances which reveal a specific core of familial bonds. Space and time, however, always reveal other traces. Edward Kamau Brathwaite's notion of the tidal reveals that cultural practices, like waves, give, take and reshape, leaving new sediment behind in new forms. The arena of the political also suggests these complexities. I insist upon working with questions of creolization and hybridity in order to try to understand what might be hopeful in a time when apocalyptic narratives are constantly being advocated. In this sense, my use of the postmodern does not signal a death of the author or subject but rather a proliferation of formerly discredited and subjugated knowledges and 1 • . . . O subjectivities.0

Black Like Who? — 19 Sylvia Wynter, in "Beyond Miranda's Meanings: Un/silencing the 'Demonic Ground' of Caliban's 'Woman'" suggests that we need to "point towards the epochal threshold of a new postmodern and postWestern mode of cognitive enquiry; one which goes beyond the limits of our present 'human sciences,' to constitute itself as a new science of human 'forms of life.'" (356) Wynter argues that Western and humanist notions impose the social categories of sex, gender, race and sexuality as necessary for the present structures of power. Those structures, she argues, which prevent us from engaging with each other as human forms who cross-cut each other, are challenged in black feminist works. Wynter, in her readings of black women's texts, points us to the new possibilities: black feminist works occupy the in-between, they (re)theorize a universality that shifts us outside the discourse of ontology to dialogues concerning actions/practices and what those practices mean for the continuation of human life. It is no wonder that "mistaken identities" can become "the laws" for reading black women's work.^ Their actions continually gesture to something more in their un/making of the "nounization" of the world. Performing Language: The Performance of Language Language can be said to structure one's relationship to the world.10 It ordains the kinds of performances we are commanded to give in the context of our everyday lives. The use of language, therefore, is both a commonplace and a political act(ion). Words, Philip says, are not only actions; words act: the word that claims and maims and claims again (1989, 82) While I am by no means suggesting that language is the only path to agency, it is almost inconceivable to think of agency outside of thinking about, and through, language. This is where language moves beyond mere words to sound off performative acts. In fact, language is a key to understanding what Geneva Smitherman calls black "conditions of servitude, oppression" and black responses and resistance to those conditions.11

80 — Rinaldo Walcott Language for diasporic black people is part and parcel of their resistance and reinvention of the self in the Americas, and this is especially true when the performative qualities of diasporic language become evident. Resistance is clearly evident in the ways that black folks make language perform. Black language not only works to convey and communicate ideas, it also works against the structures of domination by subverting overt meaning in performance. ^ Black folks, then, do not only perform language, but their language is made to perform, to work in the service of revising and altering the wor(l)d. How is it that various cultural resonances are both inflected and reflected in black language practices? Is language merely another invocation of black double consciousness and creolized cultural practices and forms? How is language tied to black identities as performative? I am not only exploring the structures of language here; I am also suggesting that words constitute the performance of identities, communities and political acts. This is not only an exploration of the political act of black language, but also an exploration of how language impacts on politics and identity, as those elements are reflected in social and political culture. As Philip puts it in the introduction to She Tries Her Tongue, "language as we know it has to be dislocated and acted upon—even destroyed—so that it begins to serve our purposes." (19) She also argues that "[t]he havoc that the African wreaked upon English language is, in fact, the metaphorical equivalent of the havoc that coming to the New World represented for the African." (18) Clearly, it is at the interstices of dislocation, havoc and destruction that something new occurs. Manthia Diawara has tried to make sense of this "something new" in the context of black cultural studies. In his "Black Studies, Cultural Studies: Performative Acts," he calls for a theory of black cultural studies which address the performative qualities of black expressive cultures. Diawara writes: Black "performance studies" would mean study of the ways in which black people, through communicative action, created and continue to create themselves within the American experience. Such an approach would contain several interrelated notions, among them that "performance" involves an individual or group of people interpreting an existing tradition—reinventing themselves—in front of an audience, or public: and that black agency in the U.S. involves the redefinition of the tools of

Black Like Who? — 81 Americanness. Thus, the notion of "study" expands not only to include an appreciation of the importance of performative action historically, but also to include a performative aspect itself, a reenactment of a text or a style or a culturally specific response in a different medium. (25) Black language is particularly characteristic of the performative. It moves us far beyond notions of original, copy and imitation to recognize black realities and new origins. Black English speakers/users rewrite language and perform its deformation through an engagement with the practices of parody, deferral, bricolage, pastiche, collage, indirection, reversal and numerous other "postmodern practices" to articulate and (re)invent representations and "I-mages" that push the limits of meaning(s).1^ Philip borrows and shares i-mages as a word/sound with Rastafari, who in the Caribbean have waged a war on English, rewriting and subverting it so that the language can speak, write and (re)present their realities. Therefore, Philip's argument that subversion has already happened to the language is grounded in the practices of Caribbean realities. Possibilities, as well, lie in what the writer can do to, and with the language in die name of creating new and just representations or "i-mages." Parody is often one of the ways in which the creation of new representations is incubated. Judith Butler writes that parody can often call into question the very notion of the original. Black postmodern speech acts and language performance play with the notion of the original (if there is an original English at all), questioning origins while revealing the traces of residue from the original as important for the new invention. Butler further states that parody is not necessarily always subversive, but "what makes certain kinds of parodic repetitions effectively disruptive, truly troubling, [is that] repetitions become domesticated and rearticulated as instruments of cultural hegemony" (1990,139); and these are important considerations for the politics of parodic black language play. Repetition and parody are key to understanding black (re)writing of original signs and artifacts of the master's language and the laws of that language. Thus, the performative acts of black language are a "dramatic and contingent construction of meaning" (139) that refuse to be pinned down for long periods of time. As Smitherman has pointed out, when the dominant culture takes up the use of black word meanings, black folk quickly change them. These practices signal the importance of fluidity to diasporic cultural practices.

82 —- Rinaldo Walcott Thus, it is my contention that black word play is both reflective of black cultural politics and simultaneously an example of black cultural politics. The idea of the performative is a key to understanding both the limits and the excesses of black language performance and therefore its practices of resistance. The language's continual (re)invention and (re)writing of a black self is performative in the senses that I am outlining here. The continued revision of words is one element of the performative in black language use. Philip's "Meditations on the Declension of Beauty by the Girl with Flying Cheek-bones," for example, uses questioning to articulate black beauty: If not in yours In whose In whose language Ami If not in yours Beautiful (1989, 53) Philip does not redefine words by inverting them (bad meaning good) in the usual diasporic manner. Instead, the theory and practice of inversion is embedded in her rhetorical questions concerning black beauty. The performance of her lyricism produces and/or uncovers black beauty. She turns the language on itself, calibanizing it. ^ Lines like "[wjoman with die behind that drives men mad"...and "[i]s the man with the fullmoon lips/carrying the midnight of colour" (53) are political acts that recast racist tropes of black bodies. Put another way, Philip uses the language that makes black ugly not only to rescue black bodies, but also to re/make the black woman's and man's i-mage. Her crucial statement on i-mage is thus: historythe confusion of centuries that passes as the word kinks hair flattens noses thickens lips designs prognathous jaws shrinks the brain

Black Like Who? — S3 to unleash the promise in ugly the absent in image (78) Culture, as Diawara suggests in his formulation of performative studies, is a citational, referential and resignificatory act. The same can obviously be said about language as a key component of culture. Conversely, black language takes its performative power from being able to reference and cite, in its reversal and subversions, the historical position of black diasporic peoples through allusions to the dominant meanings embedded in other uses of the words. Philip's language draws on a historicity of black experiences and practices, but as Butler suggests, that historicity can never be fully disclosed. Thus, Philip makes language perform black historicity when she writes: insist upon it the evidence of newness is upon us without nigger slave coolie the wog of taint the word that in the beginning was -not his I decree is mine (71) Philip claims the word, that is English, as hers; fully gesturing to the context of black enslavement and Indian indentureship. This is a political act, for by claiming the word, Philip occupies an in-between space where her claims lead to something new.

The Repetitions of Language Practice Dionne Brand uses repetition to rewrite "hegemonic and ambiguously (non)hegemonic discourse." (Henderson, 1989, 30) Brand's articulations of sexuality, of women loving women, are voiced in the repetitions of "this is your first lover, you/will never want to leave her" (1990, 46, 48, 51) a series of words that reveal the cartography of a new sexual practice

84 — Rinaldo Wakott for the narrator. Butler alerts us to the fact that performativity is primarily a discourse that only becomes actual when put into practice: "Performativity is not a singular 'act,' for it is always a reiteration of the norm or set of norms, and to the extent that it requires an act-like status in the present, it conceals or dissimulates the conventions of which it is a repetition." (1993, 12) Brand's repetitions normalize lesbian sexuality in the context of a post-black nationalist feminist discourse. The citations and references that are the foundations of repetitions are what James Snead in "Repetition as a Figure of Black Culture" identifies as the sites that continually reproduce the circularity of black cultural expressions. Brand's use of repetition places her within the context of black cultural practices: she draws on aesthetic codes of presentation that signal an uneasy belonging. Her repetitions challenge any easy attempt to exclude black lesbians from postmodern blackness. Consequently, black language as a method or way of knowing sets up the possibility for black people to engage cultural politics from the position that Cornel West calls a "critical organic catalyst," (33) while simultaneously resisting any form of what Frantz Fanon calls "amputation." (1967, 140) Black language works as both a method of renewal and as a link to a historical past that binds diasporic people within fluid communities. By this I mean to suggest that both Fanon's and West's interventions allow us to acknowledge sameness and to simultaneously acknowledge difference within. Brand brings a lesbian sexuality and desire to the question of identity as a critical organic catalyst and as a resistance to amputation. Thus, thinking through the politics of black language can move us beyond what Diawara calls "oppression studies" (the study of racism and exclusion) to performative studies (the study of how black folk remake themselves and in the process remake entire societies). Clearly, one of the primary elements of performance studies is its polyphonic quality and black language is necessarily constituted as a polyphonic sounding.

Languishing Anguish: Living In-between The languishing of both Philip and Brand is populated with irony. In "No Language is Neutral" Brand writes: Dumbfounded I walk as if these sidewalks are a place I'm visiting. Like a holy ghost I package the smell of zinnias and lady of the night, I horde the taste of star apples and granadilla...

Black Like Who? — 85 Ignoring my own money thrown on the counter, the race conscious landlords and their jim crow flats, oh yes! here! the work nobody wants to do...it's good work I'm not complaining! but they make it taste bad, bitter like peas... Our nostalgia was a lie and the passage on the six hour flight to ourselves is wide and like another world... (31-33) Here she is performing the displacement of immigrantness and simultaneously addressing the complex issues of the in-between space alongside her own location in the national imagination. The narrator's memory makes her lie about her origins ("nostalgia was a lie"). At the same time, she's being told she doesn't belong by landlords who position her outside the nation, and forced to accept employment no one else will take. These types of incidents compound and represent the institutional practices of making blackness an absented presence; or, as Brand puts it, "You the thin/mixture of just come don't exist."1 ^ (29) Yet the narrator will "walk Bathurst Street until it come like home" (30) because she insists on her presence. Thus, crucial to reading Philip's and Brand's poetry is the ironic, or what Linda Hutcheon might call the splitting image of contemporary Canadian works. In black language use, English, the language of the dominator, is turned back on the master in recognition of anguish and then recouped, deformed and recast as resistance and renewal. In essence the laws are remade and the master disappears or is at least repositioned. Theirs is not a poetics of victimhood. Instead, Philip and Brand deform and (re)write the laws of the master; and in the process render law-making futile—because of the expressivity and performativity of blackness. In their words/language, blackness is construed as a fluid and tireless performance. Where Brand's and Philip's work, and my analysis, departs from Hutcheon's, is in her tendency to define all immigrants vis-a-vis anglophone and francophone Canada. Hutcheon does not question the ways in which national narratives locate and position different immigrants into the imagined community of Canada. Brand's poetry, for example, performs the histories of diasporic black peoples and their cross-border journeys to North America:

86 — Rinaldo Walcott saying i coming just for holiday to the immigration officer when me and the son-of-a-bitch know I have labourer mark all over my face. (29) Language here charts black community through the experience of colonialism, imperialism and migration. The words do not and can not reveal the entire historicity of black exploitation in Canada, yet they reveal the traces and contaminants of black slave labour and black migrant labour histories. Thus when Hutcheon reads Dionne Brand alongside European migrants, she produces an ahistorical interpretation of Brand's performative use of English to convey the complex and contradictory relations of black migrancy.^ Brand's words, indeed, call our attention to the question of the national imaginary. Both Brand and Philip make us perform, and in our performance acknowledge, that blackness cannot constitute Canadian-ness in contemporary nation-state narratives. What Brand's and Philip's poetry suggests to me is how the language used by diasporic black people references both their doubled existences, and also existences that refuse foundations. Or, as Edward Brathwaite has put it in another context, the language remains fluid or tidal as it utters self and community. ^ Brathwaite develops a notion of tidalectics as opposed to dialectics, with the intent of finding metaphors from the Caribbean environment, and empowering those metaphors with meanings for articulating Caribbean realities. The language performs its momentary specific historical context. Or as de Certeau puts it in regard to writing history: "[i]n organizing textual space, the structure establishes a contract and also orders social space. In this respect, the discourse does what it says. It is performative."(96) As a people in diaspora, migration/travel/exile is not an uncommon act or practice. It is, rather, the very way in which people live their lives and make their histories, everydays, futures and languages. Language can allow for a land of reconnective remembering of common experiences (i.e., resistance, pain) that conditions multiple forms of identification concerning the practices of domination and subordination of black people. ° Language practices are often the spoken identificatory relations of community produced in the form of repetition. James Snead writes that: "black culture highlights the observance of such repetition, often in homage to an original generative instance or act." (1990, 218) Snead is

Black Like Who? — 87

specifically writing about cultural practices that, through their repetition by black diasporic people, demonstrate a relatedness and connectedness across boundaries. Brand, in the opening poem "Hard Against the Soul," uses repetition both to signal the beginning of each stanza and to make the reader (specifically female readers) understand that the poem is both for and about them. In repetition as well, she gestures to how racism, sexism and heterosexism as cultural practices render black women's experiences, and thus the naming of self, a difficult task: this is you girl, something never waning or forgetting something hard against the soul this is where you make sense, that the sight becomes tender, the night air human, the dull silence full chattering, volcanoes cease, and to be awake is more lovely than dreams. (7) For as Sylvia Wynter points out, black women's writing has moved us beyond "all our present theoretical models in their 'pure' forms, based on their isolated 'isms', has enabled the move, however preliminary, on to the 'demonic' and now unsilencing trans-'isms' ground of Caliban's woman." (1990, 366) Brand's simultaneous grappling with racism, sexism and heteronormativity constitutes the preliminary unsilencing of "trans-isms." The performative qualities of language and, in this case, resisting subjects, are crucial to the political acts of Brand and Philip. They remake, or rather alter, language to make it perform the acts of their politics. Philip alters the notion of "bloodcloth" to reclaim it as a sign for mature womanhood and to articulate a black female self. Brand, on the other hand, reworks words like "guerillas" to make them perform the experience and interior life of the poem's narrator. She writes, "I saw your back arched against this city we inhabit like guerillas." (1990, 46) In this context, her riffing evokes the idea of guerillas as warriors for justice as well as racist notions of black people being genealogically linked to the ape family. As Michael Taussig would say, Philip and Brand occupy "a space permeated by the colonial tension of mimesis and alterity, in which it is far from easy to say who is the imitator and who is imitated, which is copy and which is original." (1993, 78) Their language performances are clearly an engagement with the historicity of black diasporic memory, remembering, and experience of colonialism and imperialism, and what it means to alter those incursions.

88 — Rinaldo Walcott

Altered Identities Black language usage might constitute what Freud called "common feeling" (1961, 43)—common feeling because the language is not a glue but a lubricant: the language practice insists on moving outside of stasis and in the direction of verbing. Common feeling signals the slip of mimesis that can lead to the alterability of post-colonial and postmodern blackness in intrablack and extrablack dialogues. Common feeling is part of the dispersed re-connection with the self, and black language brings into being the politics for reinventing the self and resisting domination simultaneously. Both Philip and Brand chart a racialized, gendered, sexualized history of the black diaspora that moves between the cartographies of "race," "gender," "sex" and "space" to reconfigure and (re)chart black diasporic political identifications at the dawn of the twenty-first century. The dialogue and conversation concerning post-colonial and postmodern blackness is one of fluidity, which does not negate the continuing practices of nation-state oppression, but instead riffs off of that oppression. These poetic: works, however, move beyond the discourses of victimhood to resist amputations and to plot and chart the coordinates for a new exodus, one that is embedded with the possibilities of freedom.

5 * The Politics of Third Cinema in Canada Reading the Narrative of Clement Virgo's Rude

Discussions concerning the black body have gone MIA in public debate. While debates in cultural studies rage around black cultural productions, attention to the black body, or rather, black bodies, has been minimal. I want to shift our gaze back to the black body and the ways in which Canadian Clement "Virgo's first feature film Rude maps it as a site for the writing of a contradictory socio-religious narrative of pain, threat and desire. The black body in Western discourse is a marked body—marked with the history of enslavement and disenfranchisement. To draw on an Ellisonian metaphor, the black body is both invisible and hyper-visible. Simultaneously, black bodies are unruly, resistant and the sites of various renewals. Black bodies are engaged in a performative struggle to produce their own markings. My use of the body follows Michel Foucault's: discourses of medicine have intervened in the historical production of particular and specific modes of thinking and talking about the body and sex. Foucault's microhistories demonstrate how the discourses of medicine have generated an operational schema of discipline and regulation, and this clearly has implications for thinking through representations of black bodies in various sites. Bodies as machines, docile bodies, bodies as controlled by others— these paradigms are just a sample of the ways in which slavery operationalized and marked black bodies as a blank canvas to be written on and inscribed with the desires of the master. As David Goldberg puts it: The rise of the racist expression and its accompanying violence of material deprivation was rendered theoretically possible only

90 — Rinaldo Walcott by a change in paradigm from the seventeenth century onward for viewing human subjects. The new philosophical assumption that bodies are but machines, opened the way to some extreme novel development in technologies of physical power and bodily discipline. These technologies of discipline and power were superimposed upon human subjects; they encouraged docility by reducing even social subjectivities, or at least some forms of social subjectivity, to physical dimensions and correlates. (53) Slavery has had an enormous unacknowledged impact on how we might think about bodies in the West. The operationalization of power on bodies to mark, discipline and control can be understood as enacted through the very enslavement of bodies. Thus the discourse(s) and realities of slavery have come to mark how we see and think about bodies, especially black bodies, and blackness. The actual evidence of the breeder and the stud in slavery stands out as an example of the forms of domination, regulation and discipline of the body as machine. Ideas which tie black bodies to nature, labour and savagery pervade our imagistic landscapes. * How do these images/representations relate to the enslavement of black bodies? How have black bodies resisted^ reversed and undermined the discourses that attempt to mark their bodies? How have black people produced their own discourses about their bodies? What are the various ways in which black people mark their bodies as sites for the expression of joy, pleasure, pain, lack and desire? In terms of cultural production, black people have offered various meditations on these questions that are crucial for moving beyond the moment that Stuart Hall has called "the end of the innocence of the black subject or the end of the innocent notion of an essential black subject." (1992B, 32)

Third Cinema in Canada? Third cinema has been one of the places where an exploration of the end of black innocence has taken place, but evidence of third cinema in Canada is slim. Characterized by its political savvy, a poetics of critical, leftist theory and aesthetics, and its ability to unsentimentally challenge political and cultural orthodoxies of all kinds, third cinema has really not emerged in the Canadian cinematic scene. Thus, the third cinema that I am referring to emanates mainly out of Britain (in particular black Britain); various parts of die formerly colonized world, for example the Caribbean and Africa; and in independent films from the U.S.A. Third

Black Like Who? — 91 cinema is characterized by the works of filmmakers like the Sankofa Collective, Black Audio and Film Collective, Isaac Julien, John Akomfrah, Reece Auguiste, Avril Johnson (England), Ousmane Sembene, Felix de Rooy, Haile Germina, Charles Burnett, Zienbu Davis, Julie Dash and Euzhan Palcy to name only the best-known. The work of these filmmakers, from the late 1970s to the mid-1980s, challenged the ways in which we have come to understand and imagistically represent black communities. Recently two feature films directed and written by black Canadians signalled the possibility of a late-blooming third cinema in Canada. Despite the example of ten to fifteen years of third cinema, these two black Canadian entries both fail in terms of content, narrative and aesthetics, to be as politically conscious as their black British and "third world" counterparts. The celebrations that followed the release of Clement Virgo's Rude and Stephen Williams's Soul Survivor have failed to adequately address their truncated politics. The films might be set in Canada, but one might want to ask: What makes them black Canadian films? Some of the central tenets of third cinema can be located in the ability of filmmakers like Isaac Julien, John Akomfrah and Julie Dash to recast debates concerning place, space, history and belonging into the very crevices of their films in order to disrupt normative notions of nation and belonging. This has produced interesting and new aesthetic features in the work of third cinema filmmakers, ones that speak to complex manifestations of communities in the making. Thus, third cinema does not merely announce itself by claiming to be the black representative, but rather it questions and brings a critique to the very practice of naming/representing—as an incitement to dialogue and conversation. Clement Virgo's Rude is aesthetically playful and populated with a host of features meant to signal the blackness of blackness. Music plays the most obvious role in the attempt to bring a black aesthetic pitch to Rude. Reggae and gospel stand out as framing devices which play speaking roles in the film, punctuating speechless characters' actions. In fact, it's music—reggae and gospel and sometimes rock—that might be generously read as the film's creolizing or hybrid base. The three musics act as a surface upon which are written various kinds of distress, yet the way they are specifically used in particular scenes unravels any attempt at reading them as truly creolizing forces. For example, gospel is often the background music accompanying the scenes in which Maxine (Rachael Crawford), a

92 — Rinaldo Wakott character who has had an abortion, appears. In the end, the socio-religious use of music often tends to act as a moralizing force. The place of home, a site that is usually complicated by the hybrid practices of third cinema, is not at all in question in Rude. The film is set in one of Toronto's urban ghettos; and while stylized shots of the cityline are etched into the filmic text, place is clearly not an issue. The narration by the pirate DJ Rude (Sharon Lewis) includes statements like "the land of the Zulu Nation and the Mohawk nation meet...while the rest of Babylon gets to ponder its immigration policy" suggesting that issues of place might be important, but this is never explored in any sustained manner. Instead, the insidious discourse of heritage makes a clear demarcation circumventing the archipelagic migrant cultures of the Caribbean in Toronto to produce a direct link and lineage to a Jamaican heritage and a film populated with derivatives of African-American culture. The possibilities of working with the imagined realities of blackness in Canada are clearly not broached by the filmmaker.

In Spite of: The Realism of Rude To merely signal Rude as the typical hood film would not do justice to the director's pyrotechnical talents. Virgo plays skillfully with both a nonlinear narrative and assorted camera shots, angles and double takes—whether it is a character repeatedly falling down, running but not advancing across the screen, or an action repeated twice—his talent for aestheticizing film is undeniable. The aesthetic practice employed is mainly one of repetition, and this, of course, is a fundamental element of black diasporic cultural practice: one which can be seen in any number of black cultural representational strategies. Despite these strategies, Rude cannot evade its influences. Both the film's narrative practices and the story that takes centre stage are structured by the usual suspects of the hood film genre: the police, familial breakdown or tension, jail, drugs and criminal activity. Manthia Diawara, outlining some of the elements of the hood film or what he has called "the new black realism," identifies rites of passage, moments of crisis, black male responsibility for community, the existent violent realities of black urban living, characters who change with the unfolding story line and characters who move to a "higher understanding" of the world as fundamental to the genre.3 These elements, while in some broad sense being concerned with the black body, do not and cannot account for the need to critically assess various forms of black resistance

Black Like Who? — 93 where black people insist on marking their bodies as more than masculinized victims. Rude is steeped in the hood film genre. Issues of crime, familial dysfunction, and violence pervade the imagined world of the film as the central issue becomes the (re)gaining of black manhood for General (Dean Wint). The narrative of Rude consists of three tales which are kept together by the lubricating vocal twists of a female pirate DJ named Rude. Here Virgo's narrative choice echoes Isaac Julien's Young Soul Rebels, which makes important use of pirate radio DJs, and Spike Lee's Do the Right Thing, which constitutes the community through radio. The fundamental difference between Julien's and Virgo's use of pirate radio is the fluidity of the way in which Julien's pirate DJs move across place, space and time. Rude, the DJ in Virgo's narrative, is stationary— she moves neither metaphorically nor literally—and this limitation is in itself a small example of the ways in which Virgo's narrative creates a static conception of blackness. In Rude, three stories unfold over an Easter weekend: each consciously gestures to issues of life, death and resurrection. In fact, these issues propel the three narrative tales of the film. I would point out, however, that the overburdened socio-religious narrative structure of Rude fails to produce a politically transfigurative moment. Discourses concerning blackness have clearly shifted since the 1950s and the turbulent 60s and 70s. The collapse of grand narratives of black nationalism in the 60s and 70s paved the way for black postmodern practices, articulations/utterances and aesthetics. For me, black postmodernity is an unsentimental approach to addressing the complex and varied histories of diasporic black peoples. A quick comparison of the television sitcom Good Times (1970s) and In Living Color (1980s/90s) bares this point out. Both shows attempted to represent something called blackness but the former was cast in a particular mould to represent and validate blackness and thus black people as legitimate in the context of Euro-American politics and culture. On the other hand, In Living Color's irreverence toward all aspects of American culture presented and parodied various "sacred" American cultural texts, both black and white, in a conscious effort to unwrite any notion of a homogenized American/black subject. It is this kind of unsentimentality about blackness which will allow us to focus on the actual politics of bodily production and engagement. Political actions are doubly important when a homogenized black subject becomes merely another fiction to which some black subjects

94 — Rinaldo Walcott refuse to acsribe. Thus we see, in the three narratives of Rude, an overlapping narrative construction which produces a homogenized black subject obsessed with the properties of producing and explicating a correct black masculinity.

Tale 1 General returns home, after spending time in jail, to a wife who is a police officer; he is unemployed and has no money, but must put up with increasing demands from a growing son who wants various kinds of commodities (running shoes, ice cream, etc.) General's dilemma is essentially moral: should he return to the drug trade so that he can be a father and "real" man to his son.? General's self-image clearly depends on his ability to provide financially for his son; failure to do so makes him a failure and threatens to strip him of his manhood. His dilemma is resolved by his refusal to return to the drug trade, but this decision leads to a confrontation between him and Yankee (the white drug lord), and his wife has to shoot Yankee to protect General and their son. This narrative partakes heavily in the conventions of the hood film and follows the kind of realist narrative that has become the fiction through which black (male?) urban life is now conceived. Such narratives invent, centre and stereotype black masculinity, arguing that it has become impaired or flawed because it lacks the necessary resources to produce good patriarchs. The repetition of these narratives has come to occupy a sacred place in contemporary black popular culture, foreclosing the possibility for much more interesting imaginative works.

Tale 2 Maxine is a woman in distress, dumped by a boyfriend, Andre (Andrew Moodie), who disapproves of her decision to abort an unwanted pregnancy. She hardly speaks in the film. The camera pans to shots of Maxine's aborted love child, returned as a ghost, at about the age of six or seven, dancing, while Maxine tries to renegotiate the terms of her new single life and the evidence of her past life with Andre. Maxine's life is communicated to viewers via both an answering machine and the emotional outbursts that result in her smashing the tools of her trade (the mannequins she uses as a window dresser). By the end of the film Maxine has apparently seen her love child walk away from her, and this suggests that she has somehow come to terms both with the abortion and the end of her relationship with Andre.

Black Like Who? — 95 Virgo's direction and camera work are quite smart in this narrative. Not only does he cite and play with current debates about technology and hardware as sites for exploring identity, but he gives it back to the audience in a haunting, cinematic language. It is also through this narrative that he is able to cite other black diasporic cultural workers and theorists in his film. In particular, we can note the intertextual conversations between Toni Morrison's Beloved, where a dead daughter returns from the grave to help her mother come to terms with the past. But even more immediate to cinematic concerns is the citing and riffing off of Julie Dash's Daughters of the Dust, a film in which the narrative is revealed to the audience through the voice of an unborn female. Virgo's cinematic virtuosity is clearly playful, and sometimes reveals a diasporic sensibility.

Tale 3 Jordan (Richard Chevolleau) is a boxer who is emotionally tormented because he's participated in a gay bashing (called a "lynching" in the film). Jordan must deal with his own homoerotic tendencies, and as the film unfolds he begins the process of both coming to terms and coming out. He is finally liberated when the man he helped beat up retaliates, slapping Jordan in the face several times. It's a scene that demonstrates the filmmaker's artistry. This incident takes place with Jordan sitting on the same bench the marked gay man used to cruise from. Jordan must endure this beating as both repentance and resurrection. The over-earnest attempt to link black heterosexism and homophobia to a black past of white racial terror by using the word lynching, however, makes this narrative too simple and contrite. Bodies are at stake in all three tales: bodies in trouble. Yet the narratives, cast in a socio-religious mode, are unable to adequately demonstrate the trouble that these bodies are actually in. Instead, they become the canvas upon which a moral tale of love and loss is inscribed.

The Queer Body of Rude'? The three tales are not only tied together by Rude's verbal commands (which direct viewers to look out for particular actions), but they are also linked by the exploration of masculinity. I want to focus here mainly on the last tale (of my narrative) because the filmmaker has pinpointed this story as the tale which will teach the audience something. In an interview with Marc Glassman, Clement Virgo has said:

96 — Rinaldo Walcott What I saw and heard in black music: a lot of homophobia in the music and a lot of homophobia in the culture. I wanted to talk about this; I wanted to write a character that had this duality. When we think of young black men, we think that they are the ultimate symbols of machismo, of masculinity. I wanted to explore the idea of a young black man who is strong and a boxer, but the duality is that he is also gay. (20) Any effort to unravel the numerous assumptions behind Virgo's attempt to bring a critical discussion of sexuality to black Canadian cinematic representations is mangled by these comments. The black/queer body is asked to stand in as the site upon which the inscription of violent heteronormative desires are lived out. The filmmaker, however, is not able to be pedagogical about the ethical relations of race, sexuality and community in a way that does not necessarily produce a victim. This particular writing of the black body sits counter to the ways in which third cinema's best work has inscribed bodies in cinematic texts. In Julien's Young Soul Rebels the centrality of queer bodies to the ethicality of community is not only marked by the imagined and real violence of gay bashing, but also, in a much more radical way, by a love scene questioning not only heteronormative positions concerning sexuality but also positions on questions of border-crossing racial lines (a black man and white man make love). Julien's political incitement means that he does not shy away from the difficult politics of representation. It also means that he is clear about the importance of critical encounters in terms of the ways in which images are used to make a political case. His work, then, is about what Britzman might call the unleashing of unpopular things as a way to engage in dialogue and conversation concerning important issues. It is this difficult knowledge that the representation of the queer bodies in Rude does not accomplish. Central to the narratives of both Young Soul Rebels and Rude are music and musical cultures, and by extension the cultural practices of black youth are implicated. More specifically, hip-hop culture has come to mark some of the contestation that surrounds how we might understand any discussion of black bodies. The counter-poetics of hip-hop cuts across a number of political positions: from radical to nationalist, espousing conservative and progressive political positions. These cultural practices are representative of a moment characterized by the withering of post-emancipation/post civil rights narratives of liberation. Thus some

Black Like Who? — 97 of the importance of black postmodernity rests in the complex and torturous terrain of recognizing the contradictory moments of black youth cultures. Virgo's assertion that the motive for a tale about homophobia was conditioned by the homophobia in the music and culture, is simultaneously both hopeful and a trap. It is a trap because it fails to acknowledge black difference or name, in specific terms, where, when, and how this homophobia is articulated. Engagement in the politics of representation means that writers/directors take responsibility for their work and words. To critique a generalized black culture is no longer enough. Culturally, black youth have demonstrated a real concern with the body and its performance. Their use of the body echoes the various ways in which black cultural practices have always treated bodies as a canvas upon which historical and contemporary social relations may be signified, inscribed and rewritten. The body, therefore, is not only used as a biological mechanism, it also works as a site for the contestation of social relations as those relations relate to acts and actions of power on and through the body. In Kingston, Jamaica, some gay men refer to themselves as "sports," naming themselves as different in the context of a culture that can sometimes be hyper-masculine and punishingly heteronormative. The sporting body of the boxer in Rude can be read through a gaze which fixes that body in relation to the popularized heteronormative and hyper-masculine narratives of black male youth. But to do this through boxing and a masculine assertion of self in violence is a refusal to see the scope of queer sensibilities. This might be the fundamental difference between Virgo's Rude and the work of someone like Isaac Julien. In the essay "Bodies and their Plots," Hayden White offers a reading of the history of writing the body—or rather histories of writing bodies— via Freud's essay "Instincts and their Vicissitudes." In White's complementary re-reading of Freud he demonstrates how certain bodies are asked to inhabit specific histories. Rude's narrative asks the queer body to inhabit only the place of victim. One can say that such a tale is wellknown and easy to tap into. Why not ask the queer body to inhabit the site of pleasure, of joy, or the site that constitutes the only normal position in the film? By having Jordan engage in a gay bashing incident before he begins to come to terms with his homoerotic desires is to inscribe upon the queer body the very hatred that the writer/director hopes to dismantle with the tale. Hayden White puts it this way:

98 — Rinaldo Walcott ...a drive may be disengaged from its original object of gratification and turned back onto its subject, so that what started out as, say, hatred of another ends up being expressed as hatred of oneself. This produces the masochistic body, the body that consists of little more than the sum total of pain it has inflicted upon itself. (2 3 0) Furthermore, White states: The history of the body—or, indeed, the history of bodies and, beyond that, the histories of bodies—presumes the possibility of identifying a normal body, in which or on which changes and transformations can be traced across different parameters of time and space. Moreover, a history—any history, any kind of history— in order to locate and identify the body whose "story" it would tell, must postulate if only implicitly some kind of anti-body, an anomalous or pseudo-body. This anti-body marks the limit or horizon that the normative body, in the process of its development, evolution or change may not cross without ceasing to be a body proper and falling or degenerating into a condition of bodilessness. (232) What is at stake in Rude are bodies and their histories. In many cases those histories are mangled by a socio-religious narrative that gestures towards a moralizing conservative politic. This might appear to be a harsh criticism for a film with a gay plot. What this postmodern moment of lost innocence can be instructive about are the various ways in which heteronormative positions can be postulated. The story or plot does not, in and of itself, guarantee a transfigurative moment. Because bodies, actual and imagined, are at stake, it is imperative that we make representations matter beyond the discourse of merely seeing ourselves. Representational strategies have to account for something, and the politicality of any given representation can never be read as innocent or apolitical. Thus across the three tales of Virgo's Rude a number of images come together which speak to the troubling, lopsided politics of the film. In one scene Yankee is portrayed as a devious and sinister drug baron who is willing to inject potentially HIV-tainted blood into a desperate, down-and-out drug addict. When this scene is read alongside the tale of Maxine's distress and the bashing that Jordan, in his denial of self, both participates in and is a victim of, the moralizing tones of Rude betray

Black Like Who? — 99 the imposture of a radical politics because the writer/director fails to see how these images and narrative representations leak into each other. If reading bodies can be pedagogical about anything today, the reality of HIV/AIDS and the various ways in which it cross-cuts communities has to be taken into account in our political commentary on the body. That die film Rude cannot produce a conscious narrative about the rhizomatic nature of how bodies relate and even collide in space is unfortunate because the fact is, unprotected sex can result in an unwanted pregnancy and abortion and this needs to be addressed. Similarly, the realities of drug use and unsafe sexual practices, combined with the ways in which queer communities have been politically active in terms of HIV/AIDS and the real consequences the virus has for bodies, needs to be accounted for. The film's structure does not allow for the possibility of its tales cross-cutting (characters from one tale do not show up in another). The writer/director did not envision an audience whose reading practices might just bring them together. This is tragic because, as we know, and as the film itself partially demonstrates through the sinister exchange of blood from one character to another, bodies leak into each other. They are not merely the separate entities that we think them to be—discrete and infinitely individual— bodies connect and come together at various moments, and the resultant leaks can have dire consequences. Narratives, as well, leak into each other and have consequences. Thus, if Virgo really imagines his audience to be homophobic ["Because I assume the audience is homophobic and I have to take them along to the point where they discover that I love this character who's gay and they have to say to themselves 'Hmmm, wait a minute, I've got to think about this'" (Glassman, 20)] as he has said, then what he fails to acknowledge is that readers do not have to read or experience his narratives as separate. And in this war of representation that surrounds the politics of HIV/AIDS, even when intravenous drugs are a part of the story, the underlying subtext remains one of a queer culpability. Virgo's rescue mission of a gay subject in his film is unwritten by the leaks or traces of one narrative tale to another. There must be another way to teach folks about love. Postmodern blackness can be articulated as having its lineage in the discourse and movement histories of emancipation, civil rights, black cultural nationalism and the technological and industrial re-organization of the post-World War II capitalist world. These moments have been characterized by the emergence of a strong and large black middle class

100 — Rinaldo Walcott (in America and in some parts of the third world) since 1970, and the decline into stricter confines of poverty for black working classes. Simultaneously, feminism and gay liberation have disrupted any easy assumption concerning black community and sameness. The tensions inherent in the mimetic and alteric faculties in black communities have not been clearer; and these are the beginnings of the elements necessary for what I call black postmodernity. The relations between history and the body remain clear. It is in black urban areas that bodies are consumed by drugs, high rates of infant mortality, AIDS and early violent deaths. It is those same places, and the bodies which inhabit them, that provide the basis for much black cultural production today. It is those bodies that are at stake in what we do, when we do it, as folks engaged in the project of cultural work—whether as filmmakers or critics. So, in the final analysis, art necessarily speaks for some kind of politics. Rude, locked within a socio-religious narrative steeped in the politics of conversion, however, fails to register the kind of politics of transfiguration that allows folks to think what they have not before thought. When they encounter Virgo's cinematic representations they're not incited to trouble the body.

6 • Black Subjectivities Ethnicity, Race and the Politics of Film in Canada

So that my own aesthetic formulation for ourselves begins with rhythm: survival rhythm, emancipation rhythm, transfiguration rhythm; and how the one, the ego, comes to this, comes out of this, relates to this and us and others. —Edward Kamau Brathwaite The goal is not to replace bad old negative images with new good positive images. Work on stereotyping has outlined the danger in bringing evaluative criteria such as comparing characters in "real life" to discern the presence of stereotyping. The relation to "the real" or an "ideal" does not designate whether stereotyping is manifest. It is, however, as Steve Neale argues, repetition, repetition without difference, which underwrites the process. Racism is not located within the text, it is determined by the discourses which surround it, its context. Overly formulaic scripts, coupled with familiar cliches, effect determinist narratives. —Kass Banning In 1996 Toronto was treated to five days of relentless media coverage concerning a young black man. It was not because of a sporting event: no, Donovan Bailey had not broken yet another world sprint record. Instead, it was that other racial stew that the North American media loves so much—black and criminal. Adrian Mathias Kinkead's face graced every newspaper and television news program in the country. A black serial killer on the loose screamed some of the headlines. Stretching the definition of serial killer to fit Kinkead, accused of killing three people, had to be done in light of the boy-next-door atrocities of Paul Bernardo, a white

102 — Rinaldo Wakott "native son."1 Had that been the only reason that Kinkead made the news, my retelling of this narrative would be useless. Kinkead was not only named as black and criminal but as black, Jamaican and criminal. This designation holds important consequences in the public discourses of law and order and its Canadian twin, immigrantness. Jamaicans have been marked as the most violent and criminal among black immigrants in Canada, and a reverse migration (deportation) back home, after doing time for their crimes, has been inaugurated. Just as disturbing was another report in Canada's and Toronto's most notoriously racist tabloid which announced in a front page headline: "Jamaicans jeer Ranger out." Rohan Ranger, Adrian Kinkead's cousin, was linked to two of the murders; he took refuge in Jamaica either because of his guilt or to hide from the trigger-happy Toronto police. The fear of being shot is real. Over the last decade the police in Toronto have killed no fewer than nine black men and severely wounded one black woman, paralyzing her—and no one has been disciplined for these acts.2 All of the shootings took place within the context of highly suspect practices on the part of die police—both before and after the incidents. The tensions surrounding police violence have found their way into black Canadian artistic expression—film, theatre, literature, poetry and music in particular. Recent forays into feature filmmaking by two black filmmakers use the ousting tensions of criminal activity in black communities and police harassment to chart a cinematic language of blackness in Canada. I would suggest that this is a rather easy and slightly unimaginative place to begin to map blackness in the country and one that can only lead to a morass of realist cinema that elides the complexities of black communities.-* Using a formula that borrows heavily from African-American hood films, the narratives attempt to reproduce "the real" and posit a limited, masculinized, heterosexist narrative of blackness in Canada.^ The first two black Canadian feature films—Stephen Williams' Soul Survivor and Clement Virgo's Rude—are concerned primarily with the emasculating forces in black men's lives at the expense of the ways in which black people fashion individual and collective selves and communities in the context of various forms of domination within and against the nation tate of Canada. ^

Theorizing Black Canadian The complex realities of black community in Canada have not yet been mapped in any critical cinematic way. Selina Williams's Saar merely hinted

Black Like Who? — 103 at the complexity by gathering a diasporic black female community. Colina Philips's Making Change is another important film which takes an entirely different direction (see the discussion of this film in chapter nine). However, my desire for complexity makes me return to the Dream Warriors' musical announcement about their planned "voyage through the multiverse." The Dream Warriors have acknowledged the multiple positionalities of black diasporic peoples in their lyrics. And ultimately, I think that the metaphoric and symbolic moment of a multiverse is particularly significant not only for music, but also for die development of a black Canadian cinema. Such an argument calls for a contextualization of who the black Canadian might be. How do we understand who the black Canadian is? What is/are black Canadian community/ies and what constitutes black Canadian expressive cultures? Addressing these questions goes a long way in helping us make sense of what is required of a cinema that speaks the past, present and future of black Canadian identities and identifications. If definitions of black Canadian are centred around political practices/act(ion)s that signal a transgression of instituted forms and practices of domination, then black Canadian might be anyone who resists in concerted ways, with a vision of emancipation, all forms of domination. Black Canadian is a counter-narrative or utterance that calls into question the very conditions of nation-bound identity at the same time as national discourses attempt to render blackness outside the nation.^ My articulation of black Canadian will undoubtedly leave some feeling that the borders are open, an invitation to all. In many ways they are. What I am after is the attempt to articulate, and struggle to create, a space that acknowledges transgressing the usual and assumed as an important practice of the political. M.y questions are not meant to stifle creative and imaginative works of art. So to get at some sense of what those questions suggest, and require of us, I will look at Stephen Williams's Soul Survivor. To be clear, I want to theorize black Canadian as wholly outside the biological and the national. Black Canadian is for me syncretic, always in revision and in a process of becoming. It is constituted from multiple histories of uprootedness, migration, exchanges and political acts of defiance and self-(re)definition. I use the archaic and ancient term "black" as a way of framing the political discourse that I am constructing here. I am attempting to formulate an understanding of political acts that go beyond linear, narrow and rigid narratives of identity—narratives that are organized around origin as founded in Africa and thus constituting

104 — Rinaldo Wakott the cultural identity of black-skinned peoples. Such positions still carry great sway in contemporary discourse, but as Stuart Hall notes: "Cultural identities are the points of identification, the unstable points of identification or suture, which are made within the discourse of history and culture." (1992A, 224). The discourse of blackness allows for understanding identity as those practices of identification used to revise and creolize who we are. Soul Survivor lacks an historical, or rather, a temporal context for its narrative.

Listening To Film Williams's use of reggae in his soundtrack and narrative could be seen as a signal of black diasporic cultural identities if it was used as a locus for diasporic identification. A DJ opens Soul Survivor announcing the next tune/song to be played and this cinematic riff returns me to Paul Gilroy's injunction that music characterizes almost everything cultural about black life. Because music is immediately central to the film, Williams signals spaces for the introduction of specific identities and sites for multiple identifications. The fact that rooted identity quickly becomes the focal point of Soul Survivor is one of its weaknesses. Williams's use of reggae as a structuring device is important because he does not use music to open diasporic dialogue but rather as a marker for heritage. The only migration that reggae makes for Williams's narrative is to announce a black Jamaican difference in a hellish Canada. Reggae works; as a fetishized object and foundation for marking, maintaining and securing the protagonist's Canadian identity. It is the signal that names him Jamaican, but never, in this film, does it reference a sonic diaspora.

The Politics of Naming Two black men (Stephen Williams and Clement Virgo) make feature films, and the discourse of black Canadian as identity marker—and more importantly as mapping the complex processes of blackness in Canada— disappears from discussion of the films. In the "Festival" issue of Take One both Soul Survivor and Rude are discussed and named simultaneously as "Jamaican-Canadian" movies.' I find this curious. What does this return to ethnic particularity suggest about blackness and its semiotic chain of meanings here? What are we to understand by the term "black Canadian" and for whom is it reserved? As is often the case with films that seek to explore the complex politics of identity, Soul Survivor finds itself being more concerned with root and origin, rather than with what Gilroy notes

Black Like Who? — 105 as "seeing identity as a process of movement and meditation that is more appropriately approached via the homonym routes." (1993, 19) The assertion by film critics that we now have a "Jamaican-Canadian," as opposed to a black Canadian filmic identity, renders invisible the complex processes of how various moments and forms of blackness become and are becoming in Canada. To label these films "Jamaican-Canadian" draws on multicultural narratives of heritage which are concerned with origin and tend to occlude the complex creolized multicultural constitution of black Canadians. Yet a Canadian multicultural desire for simplicity and knowability is revealed in the naming. In Canada, black identities must be rooted elsewhere and that elsewhere is always outside Canada. Black subjects become knowable objects through a simple, uncomplicated story of origins. But the naming spells more than that, because it puts into place a semiotics of meanings. The naming triggers a chain of meanings that are associated with assumed actions and specific identities in Canada. It is the desire to pin down identity as knowable and explainable that makes the compound "Jamaican-Canadian" meaningful and common-sensical to critics. In recent interviews with both Williams and Virgo, therefore, biography has been of central importance. The prevalence of this information is important because their narratives' realism is supposed to offer an authentic peep into the world that might help us to understand, or at least get a handle on, the Kinkeads and Rangers who roam Canada's housing projects. Biographical curiosity points to how film critics and others use these films to pathologize immigrant Jamaicans and render them knowable and explainable. To an assumed white mainstream audience they are representative of the Canadian exotic, victim and underclass. If such a reading seems harsh, I only need to remind you that the Toronto Police Services Board intended in 1991 to use African-American John Singleton's Boyz 'N' the Hood as a training video for its officers. Canada's racialized immigrant mythology is dependent upon narratives that riff off of the nation's discourse of benevolence and goodness towards immigrants, but simultaneously places those immigrants within a crippling discourse of heritage that locates non-white others outside of the nation. Soul Survivor does not question the discourse of heritage; in fact Williams's earlier film, Variation On A Key 2 Life, is even more steeped in this discourse: the male protagonist is caught up in the claws of anxiety and alienation in Canada and can only escape with music (he is a saxophone player) and women.

106 — Rinaldo Wakott

Mapping the Identity of a Soul Survivor Jerry Gafio Watts writes of the "victim status syndrome," which he believes can be "a useful mechanism for inducing white guilt." (19) Victim status syndrome tends to dominate the narratives of "hood" films. In New jack City, Juice, Straight Out of Brooklyn, Boyz W the Hood, Menace II Society and so on, renderings of blackness as victim, criminal and masculinized have been privileged by both the white and black middle class as representative of the totality of blackness. The filmmakers all construct black patriarchal "heroic transcendence" (22) as the site or avenue to emancipation and/or survival for black people. That is, by the end of these films, the narratives suggest men are solely responsible for black community. In these narratives of blackness, black women, gays, lesbians and anyone who does not toe the line of narrowly defined blackness are considered unimportant. A counter to these films' narratives would be the black Canadian "soul survivors" who revise and creolize identity and identifications for continued survival as acts to emancipate the self. Soul Survivor does not engage the diasporic connectedness and rhizomatic character of blackness in the Canadian context (there are a few hints—an African immigrant family is one of the indebted families), but instead insists on an immigrant "underclass" representation which clouds Canadian complexities of blackness. The underclass representation points to the limits of the film's narrative for expressions of blackness in Canada. I would suggest that this representation fits into a transglobal semiotics of blackness as a sign of victimization, where blacks are victims of white racism, struggling to be free in the centre of a white hell. Of course, such renditions of blackness might signal a "truth" for some, but in the realm of cinematic representations this kind of narrative fits neatly within a paradigm of recent and current "hood" films that render blackness one-dimensionally as being involved in what C.L.R. James refers to as "the struggle for happiness." The struggle for happiness presented in these "hood" films constantly depicts blackness in relation to a dominating and controlling whiteness; and even though these films carry a strong sense of a black aesthetic, and aural practices that massage the senses, they do not construct black selves in the ways that jazz, blues, reggae and calypso historically have. That is, these films, despite overtures that suggest self-definition, do not render complex discussions of black life.

Black Like Who? — 107 So this is where I differ with Toronto film critics who have read these films, and in particular Soul Survivor, as significantly different from African-American "hood" films. Soul Survivor is the Canadian realist version of the currently commodified transglobal renderings of blackness as violent, criminal and underclass. While it is always possible to read these films as demonstrating the processes of racism in North American urban centres, and I believe that such readings are a crucial element of both the intent and narratives of the films, nonetheless the films also posit an economy of race that does not challenge current dominant symbolic orders of what sells as blackness cinematically.

Soul Survivor's Plot In Williams's Soul Survivor the main character Tyrone (Peter Williams), is tormented by his "struggle for happiness." Tyrone's struggle resides in his desire to own and operate a small restaurant that plays the latest reggae tunes. Music continually marks a nostalgia for a mythic home, but again, as Dionne Brand puts it in No Language is Neutral, "nostalgia was a lie." (3 3) Williams continually links music to his cinematic narrative of identity and displacement. Racism is the obstacle that prevents Tyrone from achieving his desires. It seems that the only possible way out is to become employed by Winston (George Harris), who runs a menacing semi-legal business, but even more importantly, represents the patriarchal black father figure. Looking up to Winston raises important ethical issues for Tyrone, since Winston represents both what Tyrone would like to be (wealthy) and what Tyrone does not want to be (criminal). Tyrone is caught at a dangerous crossroad. One foot rests on the dark doorstep of the criminal underworld, while his other foot guides him to the torturous avenue of Canadian racism which forced him into the situation with Winston in the first place. Tyrone is a victim: one we are supposed to both pity and identify with as a casualty of racism. Tyrone becomes Winston's debt collector, and he does the job all too well. A generous reading of the film might argue that Tyrone represents the African god Esu—with one foot in this world and one foot in the world of the gods.^ His miraculous escape from the white racist tenants whose money he takes for Winston, is a case in point. As well, the repeated shots of the small African mask hanging around his neck are an indication and invocation of the divine qualities that Tyrone possesses. He is a walking, talking version of DuBoisian doubleness. It is the limitations of that doubleness that I question.

108 — Rinaldo Wakott A black Canadian process of identification would instead centre black people in a temporal and spacial narrative that highlights both struggle and resistance, and demonstrates that (re)shaping both identity and Canada must be achieved through political actions and doings. Black Canadian, as name/metaphor for the rhythms of black migration, would disrupt the ethnic absolutist claim to blackness as sign of oppression, and recast blackness as performative.^ One of the important roles for Tyrone is to protect and shadow his cousin and friend, Rueben (David Smith)—and this is another example of his divine qualities. Rueben is portrayed as an irresponsible Rastafarian musician who owes Winston five thousand dollars and is reckless about repayment. Rueben often acts on impulse rather than reason, and is continually referred to as childish, crazy or mad. Only the impotent Papa (Ardori Bess) thinks he is smart. Rueben eventually organizes a retaliatory strike which is meant to bring Winston, the "Babylon Vampire," down. The strike leads to Rueben's murder and Tyrone's lapse into impotency.

Beyond the Soft Dick Syndrome It is my contention that "hood" films are premised on the idea that representations of blackness make sense in an economy of "underclass," black (immigrant) male impotency. Hood films riff off of the old paradigms of the Black Arts Movement. Their narratives are preoccupied with (re)gaining manhood for black men. Consequently, it is the regaining of black male potency that all these "hood" films explore and seek to (re)place and (re)settle as fundamental to the survival of both the self and black communities. The impotent black man in Soul Survivor is best represented by Papa. In every frame but one Papa is shown prone, dependent on Grandma (Leonie Forbes) for assistance of some kind. He is rendered impotent by the racism of Canadian labour practices. After having worked long hours at shit jobs, he is of no use to himself and his family, for as Winston says, "a man has to look after his family." In fact, Grandma now has the upper hand. This once strong man must now lovingly pay her for his rum, and matches to light his cigarettes. Tyrone must define himself vis-a-vis this impotent father figure who was once a trade unionist, a socialist in Jamaica and "defender of the small man." Winston, who tells us that money is everything, becomes the more appropriate stand-in, the father figure Tyrone must emulate and take advice from. Winston's role represents all that is bourgeois Canada, warning that you can only be on the inside when you have money:

Black Like Who? — 109 "You're nothing without money, you're not inside you're outside." This epitomizes the struggle for happiness. Williams's narrative partially represents a liberatory project for blackness. Soul Survivor renders black women mute, because they represent the lack against which black men must continually regain their potency in the midst of racism and exclusion from capitalist patriarchy. In particular, Tyrone's relationship with Annie (Judith Scott) maps the disenfranchisement of black women from liberatory narratives of blackness. The film hints that Tyrone's relationship with Annie went sour because he abused her. In one important scene following an example of police brutality, Annie asserts herself as Rueben's caseworker, and Tyrone says to her "You been away too long, forgot what it like." Tyrone does this in the midst of the two most debilitating threats to his manhood—-the police, and dominating, educated black women with jobs, like Annie. ^ She is implicitly accused of forgetting family connections (and indeed, in the film she has none) when Tyrone asserts that he has to look after Rueben. This is the recurring contemporary (urban) tale of black women's desertion of black men. The narrative of the film offers no information on Annie and how she became a caseworker, with all the trappings of middle-class success, but we get the indication that she might be a ball-breaker when she says to Tyrone, "You think you fly." Black women constitute a part of the emasculating apparatus of black men. Annie, however, must eventually come around, or, like the love interest in Variation, she will be replaced with another woman. After the Seduction of Some Black Aesthetic Practices What makes many of these "hood" films appear to be "authentic" representations of blackness are the ways in which black cultural practices are imported into them as occasions for evoking identification. From confrontations with police, to hairstyles, to proverbs, these films are packed with numerous elements of black everyday living. Soul Survivor makes use of language, vibrant colours, the playing of dominoes, styles of dress, posture and jewellery to etch a black aesthetic. Winston's hangout, "The Black Star Line," references Marcus Garvey and raises numerous issues too voluminous to discuss here. But one question remains: are they hanging out in a sinking black ship? Foundational identity claims are usually linked to death. The film's aesthetic practices are not a signal of diasporic connectedness, but rather they become a part of the continuing catalogue of rootedness that makes this film fit into the discourse of heritage and origin.

110 — Rinaldo Walcott Again, one of the challenging aesthetic features of Soul Survivor is how intrinsic music is to the narrative. Rastas and music, in particular reggae, are indelibly inscribed and linked. Not merely because Rueben is a musician, but also in the ways Williams uses music as voice-over to bring rhythm to the film and chart the theme of survival. Williams's rhythm, however, is not an emancipation rhythm or a transfiguration rhythm as Brathwaite would have it. Yes, Rueben's death announces what happens to one's culture in "a land of strangers," as Papa says. And ideas of immigrant culture dying and withering away in the midst of victimization are standard and easy narratives to tap into and use to define and name. But to acknowledge revisions and changes, to incorporate the dynamism of cultural practices, is much more challenging. Soul Survivor ends with Annie coming to Tyrone's side to sit with him on the step. Grandma continues to play the lottery despite Rueben's death and Papa remains impotent and prone in bed. A haunting and loud rendition of Bob Marley's "Redemption Song" plays. The filmic image is one of Annie's subjugation to both Tyrone's desire and his need to assert and fashion a manhood that looks after his family. For the first time Tyrone is not standing above everyone, but significantly too, his manhood is affirmed when Annie symbolically and literally comes down to his level. As a victim of racism and "brothers jacking other brothers," Tyrone's only response in this film is to survive. Marley's "Redemption Song" becomes a wail for the continued impotence and death of the black man. "How long shall they kill our prophets while we stand aside and look" makes history and identity an issue of life and death. Rueben's death signals the toll of victimhood in the film. Rueben, as artist/musician and Rastafari, potentially represents one of the most complex characters in the film. Yet the narrative fails him. Williams is unable to deliver on this potential because he does not make use of reggae and Rastafari culture as diasporic sites for identification, sharing and dialogue, but rather as markers of a Jamaican-ness that Canadian national discourses of multiculturalism insist specific groups claim. Rastas and reggae become the crown jewels of the heritage discourse. And thus the film's narrative leaves Rueben locked in displacement: he exists between ethnicity and nation, and this can only be crippling and eventually lead to his death. Rueben's character is antithetical to what occurs when Rastafari ideology migrates. Rastas everywhere, while paying homage to Jamaican Rastafarians, revise and rewrite Rastafari culture to make it applicable to

Black Like Who? — 111 their localities. Ras Rueben is cinematically locked in an archaizing discourse, and this leaves his character little room to manoeuvre. When I return to the Dream Warriors and the fluidity that they and their music represent and present, I find there is an un/conscious play with, and of, identity. Using naming and the types of music they sample (reggae, calypso, jazz, game show theme songs), the Dream Warriors create multiple sites for identification for their audiences. Black Canadian cinema might need to turn to music(ians) as a site for the exploration of a dialogue that might enhance the measure of the discourse concerning ethnicity, race and belonging in Canada. Sylvia Wynter, in arguing for new ways of thinking through the politics and practice of aesthetics in literary and film criticism, states: "The proposal here is that these processes of positive/negative marking which enact/inscribe the code of 'life' and 'death' are always initiated by the narratives of origin from which all such codes and, therefore, their 'paradigms of value and authority' are brought to 'birth'." (1990, 251, emphasis in original) Marley's "Redemption Song" works to make the narrative of black/immigrant victimization in Soul Survivor complete. By doing so, film critics can assert a naming of the film as Jamaican-Canadian because the "paradigms of value and authority," which give birth to narratives of immigrants and blacks as victims, fits within a paradigmatic transglobal frame for reading blackness. In this film, Marley, Rastas and Black Star Line do not reference the diasporic sharing that these symbols have come to represent. Instead, they are markers for origins: roots that eventually wither and die in a "stranger land."11 Black Canadian, as a name, would complicate the neat packaging of blackness that film critics need. Because when diasporic sharing, dialogue, exchange, connectedness and syncretism are not subsumed in a film's narrative, critics will be required to move beyond the too easy linear structures for locating rooted aesthetic practices as signposts for identity. The pedagogy of Soul Survivor, however, leaves us with a narrative that suggests all black men want to do is to look after their families. This might be read in the context of the opening voice-over where Tyrone asserts that, "In this life it's not about collecting other people's debts, it's about paying for your own." Rueben's death (because he cannot pay Winston and Tyrone) survives as the embodiment of a "heroic transcendent" black man continually suffering and surviving against all odds.

112—Rinaldo Walcott Tyrone's conservative voice-over, however, has other implications in the context of Canada's discourse of heritage. "Paying for your own" is echoed in nation-state policies concerning roots and origins so that the Kinkeads and Rangers of the north will signify, when they are deported to Jamaica, Canada's return of the repressed.

7 • "Keep on Movin'" Rap, Black Atlantic Identities and the Problem of Nation

History is always written from the sedentary point of view and in the name of a unitary State apparatus, at least a possible one, even when the topic is nomads. What is lacking is a Nomadology, the opposite of a history. —Gilles Deleuze and Felix Guattari

Collecting Dispersals Soul II Soul's signature song, "Keep on Movin'," asks its listeners to "keep on movin' don't stop." It's an injunction against stasis and an invitation to accept the fluidity of identity and cultural practices as an ever-present and upfront part of how we might understand the self and die world. The album, in both its idea and its organization, is representative of this fluidity. Jazzie B, the musical arranger, vocalist, rapper and founder of the ensemble Soul II Soul, for example, acts as the only reoccurring member. Jazzie B, or the "Funky Dread," is himself a hybrid of a British roots culture, characterized by its syncretic mixture of Jamaican Rastafarian stylings and African-American popular cultural practices—all of which are elements refashioned and shaped to fit the specificities of black Britain's music and dance scenes. Soul II Soul's music is a journey through contemporary forms of diasporic black music and popular culture. Soul II Soul symbolically and actually represents the fluidity of black diasporic relations and cultural expressions and exchanges. The emergence of the ensemble on the international music scene in 1989 signalled what might be characterized as the undeniable cultural exchanges and expressions that exist between diasporic black cultures. The announcement of those relations was made in both song/sound and

114 — Rinaldo Walcott image. The cultural references, while positioned in black Britain, cited the deeper structures of diasporic black cultures. Soul II Soul released three more albums, all of them international successes: these releases blend a number of black musical genres—rap, dance music, rhythm and blues, soul, reggae and jazz. As well, the creative founder of Soul II Soul, Jazzie B, has become involved with the Jamaican music industry and collaborated with a number of other artists. In this sense, Jazzie B aids in contemporary refigurations of the Middle Passage, a site which represents one of the primary psychic spaces that black people (both dispersed and continental) must continually address. The trauma of the Middle Passage is a cultural silence that only now is slowly being recognized as a constituent part of black diasporic memory. Langston Hughes lovingly reimagined Africa for "new world" blacks with negroes dreaming of the Nile; Zora Neal Hurston, in Moses, Man of the Mountain, rewrote the Exodus story, opening a space for discussions of leadership and community to take centre stage in relation to remembrance and possible futures; and the desire to reconnect with Africa has been expressed by works like Frantz Fanon's The Wretched of the Earth and Towards the African Revolution, M. Nourbese Philip's Looking for Livingstone, Toni Morrison's Beloved, Charles Johnson's Middle Passage and Edward Kamau Brathwaite's Middle Passages—all of which attempt to make the unspeakable spoken and thus place the discredited and subjugated knowledges of the dark diaspora on the agenda of contemporary politics by reconfiguring the history/memory of the Middle Passage for black Atlantic people. 1 These "literatures of reconnection"^ represent a significant change in how we might understand both the social and cultural formation of black diasporic communities and what those communities might share beyond phenotype. What I want to do is look at the ways in which the citational and referential practices of rap music disrupt the notion of the modernist nation-state. The referencing and citing of other songs/sounds or musicians in rap is not the only gesture towards a larger community. That rap musicians persist in making links between practices and events in their localities and practices and events beyond the boundaries of their locale is important in terms of demonstrating how various state authorities are understood as seeking to control blackness both locally and extra-locally. For example, narratives concerning relations with police exist in numerous rap songs from various places. Citing and referencing across borders, when coupled with the movement of actual black bodies across state lines,

Black Like Who? — 115 proves disruptive in profound and disturbing ways to the romantic, fictive narratives of the unified nation-state. This is particularly true when the songs suggest that similar practices (for example, the regulatory and disciplinary practices of police and immigration officers) are used to control blackness in different locales. The transmigration of the racial metaphor that "black equals criminal" works across space and time, and suggests that while locality is important, some practices spill their borders. It is this spillage that is recouped as a moment of diasporic black identification. Evidence of the collapse of the unified nation-state is everywhere today. Glaring examples exist in the former Yugoslavia, the conflicts in Somalia and Rwanda and the resolution of conflicts in Ethiopia and Eritrea. Even the recent peace treaties between Israel, Jordan and the Palestinians seem to suggest the emergence of a new Palestine—though it's not necessarily a nation in the modernist sense. In fact, the creation of Israel in 1947 could be read as a signal of the collapse of the modernist nation-state, even before the fall of the Berlin Wall. Israeli citizenship, for example, was not dependent upon the usual criteria of birth and so forth. "Jewishness"—which is much more malleable than birthright or language—was more important to the organization of the new Jewish/Israeli nation-state. What constitutes Jewishness, however, has been questioned. Some felt that the Ethiopian Falashas, for example, might only be tangentially Jewish, and that their religious practices might be too anachronistic. Russian emigres, who often have only one Jewish parent, have also posed problems. Recent reports of a group of people from the Indian sub-continent claiming Jewishness and seeking membership in the nation-state of Israel have also pushed the limits of Israel and called into question the very notion that the nation-state is founded on sameness.-' The histories, memories and experiences of dispersed peoples always act as a transgression of nation-state principles. If we look at the history of Canada with its ethnic mix of English, French, Ukrainians, Italians, Jews, Germans, Poles, Portuguese and other Europeans, as well as Japanese, Caribbean, Chinese, South Asian, continental African, black Canadian and Native peoples, we get a complex picture of who and what a Canadian might be. All of these groups (except for the Natives) migrated at different points in time, and have found themselves placed differently in the narratives of the nation, in ways that complicate the fiction that the modern nation-state is constituted from a "natural" sameness. While it is clear that many of the European groups have, through the mechanisms of

116 — Rinaldo Walcott white supremacy, become Canadian in ways that non-whites have not, it is also clear that each successive migrant group represents a rupture in the myth of the nation as constituted from sameness. What the European groups demonstrate, as well, is that sameness is constituted in the process of forgetfulness, coercion and various forms of privilege and subordination. It: is, however, the migration of non-whites that has continually disrupted the fictions of the nation-state because they show up attempts to both conceal and deny otherness within the nation and to produce racial sameness as the basis of the nation-state. Canadian fictions of sameness seek to make acceptable the massacre and continued disenfranchisement of Native groups and the continued oppression and resistance of formerly colonized people who have migrated to the satellite nations (Canada, America, Australia, New Zealand, etc.) of former colonial powers. It is these Others who have most clearly challenged the fictions of nationstate sameness as a racialized code that produces Canada as a "white nation." Consequently, the Somali refugee community in Canada has also aided in the continued transgression of nation-state fictions of unity and oneness. The emerging Somali community might represent the newest black migration to Canada, but as a whole it is quickly having to become "black" in ways that other black Canadians can identify with. What does rap music have to do with Somali refugees, and the construction of the Canadian nation-state? This question provokes what follows.

Theorizing the Nation-State Theorists of the nation-state have continually debated the terms that make the state intelligible to those who identify as members or citizens. Benedict Anderson pinpoints what he calls print-capitalism and its unification of language patterns and use as constituting the ways in which the nation-state became imaginable for large groups of people who shared a common language. Anderson locates three reasons for how the nation became an imagined community based upon print-capitalism. First, printed languages became unified fields which allowed the literate to communicate exclusively with each other and thereby create an imagined community of readers. Second, printed language gave the vernacular language a new fixity that produced codes and usages that only those who read could relate to. Third, these new standard languages created enclaves of power that benefited those who knew the codes and could thus decipher and trade in discussions concerning important questions of the day.

Black Like Who? —117 Anderson's schema is important for understanding how a nation might imagine itself in the moments of early state formation, and it's particularly salient for European nation-state formation. But his schema becomes much more murky when applied to nation-states founded after colonial encounters. For these places the politics of language use and its relation to state formation is often played out between the twin forces of internal strife and, more importantly, local class antagonism and neo-colonial or imperialistic practices (for example, countries where the official language is English but the everyday language is different. In Malta, English is the language of business but Maltese is the language of everyday use). Post-colonial nation-states raise a number of important issues that necessitate reconsiderations of Anderson's theory, and perhaps most important among them is the need to refigure the role that language plays in a national consciousness. On the other hand, Anderson's theory does help us to understand the ways in which the Janus-faced^ nature of the nation is achieved. The Janus-faced nature of the nation is its often two-sided, contradictory, conflictual and unclear articulation of what it means to be a citizen. Official multicultural policy in Canada is such an articulation. The policy textually inscribes those who are not French or English as Canadians, and yet at the same time it works to textually render a continued understanding of those people as from elsewhere and thus as tangential to the nation-state. It also characterizes these others as people with static cultural practices located both in a past and elsewhere. Homi Bhabha's Janus-face metaphor alerts us to the fact that the nation-state is always about more than at first seems apparent. Conceiving the nation in this way helps us to understand the textual practices of die nation-state as they work both to subordinate and produce inside/outside binaries, and also suggest other possible positions for cultural subjectivity. In a more recent elaboration and contemplation on die theory and politics of the nation-state, Partha Chatterjee, both supports Benedict Anderson and critiques him.^ What is important about Chatterjee's argument is his insistence on the need to develop a language of nationstate theory and politics that seriously accounts for community. Using India as his case study he argues that the models for nationalism were so determined by Euro-American notions of the state that the possibilities for post-coloniality were severely limited. Chatterjee suggests that such limitations have led to a separation of public/private notions of community which results in a normalization of the state as an ostensibly public entity. Chatterjee writes:

118 — Rinaldo Walcott The result is that autonomous forms of imagination of the community were, and continue to be, overwhelmed and swamped by die history of the post-colonial state. Here lies the root of our post-colonial misery: not in our inability to think out new forms of the modern community but in our surrender to the old forms of the modern state. If the nation is an imagined community and if nations must also take the form of states, then our theoretical language must allow us to talk about community and state at the same time. I do not think our present theoretical language allows this. (11) Chatterjee poses a fundamental question, one that forces us to confront whether building a community is possible. In Canada, the nation as imagined community is organized around a set of ideas innately based upon phenotype and language. Thus the Canadian nation-state has no way of making sense of communities founded across and upon difference. Official multicultural policy in Canada actually works to produce a definition of community that is about one's relationship to another nation-state. Because community is understood as the public qualities of language, culture and ethnicity, official multicultural policies at both the federal and provincial level support this idea through a discourse of heritage—in Canada heritage always means having hailed from somewhere else. Through a number of readings of black Atlantic cultural practices, we can demonstrate that an understanding of how community might be constituted outside the discourses of the modernist nation-state can be derived from diasporic cultures.

Narrating the Multicultural Nation The "textual accomplishment"^ of Canadian multicultural policy has been the main focus for addressing the ways in which the Other is imagined or not imagined in the Canadian nation-state. The multicultural narrative is constituted through a positioning of white Anglophone and Francophone Canadians as the founding peoples of the nation, with a "special" reference to Native Canadians. All Others constitute the Canadian ethnic mix or multicultural character. Thus, the colonizing English and French are left textually intact as "real" Canadians while legislation is needed to imagine other folks as Canadian. In everyday and commonsensical usage, multicultural means that all those who are not white (i.e., of European descent) represent the ethnic

Black Like Who? — 119 mix. The debates concerning Neil Bissoondath's Selling Illusions are an indication of this.' His arguments are mainly constructed in order to dismiss the claims that people of colour make concerning various forms of domination in Canada. All of the debates and discussions which took place in the mainstream media about his book were centred around the cultural practices of those who are not phenotypically white. The use of multicultural as a category of naming and administration closes down as many possibilities as it opens up because it can also be used to reference the white ethnics (Italian, Portuguese, Polish, Yugoslavian, etc.) who are often invoked on special occasions to demonstrate the economic promise Canada offers new immigrants. One recent example occurred on a news segment called "On The Street"; it showcased the success of a former Yugoslavian who now owns his own Pizza Pizza franchise after only fourteen years in Canada. ^ Primarily though, multicultural, as a category, is reserved for those who need to be imagined as adjunct to the nation. And they are usually people who are not "white." The other important issue that needs to be identified here is the way in which Canadian state multiculturalism locates specific cultural practices in an elsewhere that appears to be static. The various arts funding bodies— the Canada Council, Ontario Arts Council, Toronto Arts Council—not to mention theatre groups, artist-run spaces, museums and galleries, all continually produce the fiction of Canada as a place of whiteness.'1 Thus, die word heritage organizes the approach that the state takes towards the culture of the other. Some might argue that it is multiculturalism that is the main narrative structure of the intelligibility of the Canadian nationstate, but often such arguments do not take into account the important ways in which popular notions of muhiculturalism as meaning non-white are replayed in state narratives. So while the specific narrative of federal policy does not define multicultural as non-white, discussions of die questions of immigration and education, for example, often tend to engage in the popular notion of multiculturalism as referring to nonwhites. These appropriations of the term are rife with the recurring myth of Canada as a benevolent, caring and tolerant country that adapts to "strangers" so that strangers do not have to adapt to it. Canadian rap artists and dub poets (who are now being referred to as "spoken word artists") have continually challenged both the notion of benevolence and belonging and how these notions are constructed by and through the dominant discourses of the administrative categories of the nation-state. They have referenced and alluded to official forms of

120 — Rinaldo Walcott multiculturalism as textual attempts to hide the inequities of Canadian society. As well, they are at the forefront of challenging the various fictions of what Canada is, and their work is an attempt to produce new fictions of what Canada might be.

The Leaky Category of Black Clifton Joseph is one of Canada's leading dub poets. In his poem/song "Pimps" he ridicules not only state sponsored multiculturalism, but in a double-voicing, signifying mode he also locates those who are named community leaders by the media and government officials as "pimps." ^ They are the people who, he says, pedal-push the discourse and language of race relations "to get some money position or their kicks." What Joseph attempts to address in his poem/song is the relative complicity that those who are willing to be marked and marketed as representatives of ethnic communities find themselves in. Those inside/outside positions allow for proscribed access to the practices and discourses of dominant authorities. For Joseph these individuals are "multicultural pimps." On the album that features "Pimps" the relations of diasporic identifications are made evident. The hybrid jazz-funk of his song/poem "Chant for Monk 3," remembers Thelonius Monk. Using his voice as both instrument and instrumentation for the lyrics, Joseph brings Monk back to life in what can be identified as repetitions of black cultural practices which continually reproduce the circularity of black cultural expression.11 It is Joseph's repetitions that signal his disruption of the Canadian nationstate as we know it—for by not only chanting for Monk, but by engaging in the uncanny and intangible practices of black diasporic cultures, Joseph locates his sense of self beyond the boundaries of the nation-state. It is those musical transgressions that continually recur to disrupt the romance of the unified nation-state. Joseph's work unravels and makes it necessary to (re)contain blackness or attempt to render blackness absent from the nation. However, as Morrison has argued about the American situation, blackness remains an absented presence in the imagined community and landscape of Canada, and continues to work as a foil to whiteness.12 Blackness represents what Canada is not, and thus Joseph's identification with other black people, across space and time, resists the notion of the specificity of the nation-state as offering a unique experience or history. At the same time, his identification with other blacks insists on more from the Canadian nation-state.

Black Like Who? — 121 Like Joseph, Lillian Allen has also positioned an "elsewhere" that is both a reference to and a citation of the history of black diasporic experiences in her poems/songs.1^ These histories often diverge from the concepts and the practices of the modern nation-state. Allen sings/reads on the track "I Fight Back": ITT ALCAN KASIER Canadian Imperial Bank of Commerce these are privilege names in my country but I am illegal here I came to Canada found the doors of opportunity well guarded And constantly they ask "Oh beautiful tropical beach with coconut tree and rum why did you leave there why on earth did you come"

AND I SAY: For the same reasons your mothers came[.]^ Allen dismantles the notion that the nation-state is familial and protective. But even more important for my purposes is her construction of the nation-state as "something" that must be fled. Clearly, the poem's narrator had to leave an "elsewhere" to find herself in Canada. The migratory practices of the dispersed are plainly charted, and both colonialism and neo-colonialism are invoked in the process. From Allen's perspective post-coloniality simply does not deliver all the goods. Also just as important are the ways in which she deconstructs, or at least makes available the resources needed to deconstruct the myth of Canada as a benevolent, caring and tolerant nation. She is "illegal here," and those who imagine themselves "Canadian" position her as an outsider when they ask "why on earth did you come"? Allen's deconstruction is not some mere acquiesence to "outsiderism," however: she "fights back," calling up the history of European colonial expansion and even more recent

122 — Rinaldo Walcott European migratory crossings ("For the same reasons/your mothers came"). Her poem, in fact, might be read as a reinvention of universality from the underside. What Allen, Joseph, Dionne Brand, and rappers like Devon, Maestro Fresh-Wes and the Dream Warriors (whose work I will discuss later) suggest about black migratory politics/histories and experiences is a continual (re)negotiation and (re)articulation of what nation, home and family mean. All these artists produce work that can only be accurately described as ambivalent and ambiguous in its relation to the nation-state. They at once want to hold on to it (nation), as both something that is Canadian and a product of "elsewhere," and to reconstruct it as something much greater than the western modernist project of nation-building suggests. 1 -* Such practices often leave them embracing what can only be characterized as a diasporic understanding of nation, one that is constituted through history, experience and positionality. The more problematic versions of this are expressed as a romantic, pastoral, pre-colonial Africa of kings and queens and overdetermined notions of gender equality. Such versions are founded on what Wole Soyinka refers to as a "saline consciousness" because of the geographic centredness of the narrative.^ In a world where black diasporic experiences seem to converge and diverge in important ways, these artists force us to continually rethink and reassess what we mean by nation, home and community. Devon, who is the clearest link between dub poetry and rap music in Canada, and who toured with Lillian Allen and Clifton Joseph before moving more firmly into popular music, is also much more symbolically fluid in his work. It is evident that a nomadic aesthetic informs the work he has produced to date. I want to focus on one of his songs that continually engages in the citational and referential practices that I have suggested organize black diasporic cultural practices because it gives texture to the arguments that I am making here. On his first album, It's My Nature, Devon, like Soul II Soul, works with a large body of black musical genres—though rap and funk are central. The track "Mr. Aletro" illustrates the ways in which black diasporic identifications work. The song was first released as a single in 1989, and it served as an emotional call for an end to police violence against young blacks. It is the police and/or those who enforce law and order (i.e., immigration officers, security guards, teachers, etc.) that continually recur as the principle administrators through which we might continue to speak of diasporic political identifications that exceed the boundaries of the local. What those narratives often reference is how similar actors seem to be involved

Black Like IVho? — 123 in the regulation and discipline of black bodies—even across national boundaries. Police relations tend to be one of the most pressing issues for many diasporic black communities. Whether we are talking about the Rodney King incident, or police shootings in Canada, Jamaica, Barbados or Britain, the police seem to be the agents through whom the dominant culture enforces its position. Devon, whose band is called the Metro Squad (a signifying play on the Metropolitan Toronto Police force), raps: Metro's number one problem Is that no one really trust them Causing all this tension For something I wouldn't even mention Pick up the Star, pick up the Sun Headline "Metro gets another one" And another one gone and another one gone And another one bites the dust. His lyrics locate one of the many policing practices that situate blackness outside the nation as criminal, deviant other. At the same time, these policies work to contain blackness within the nation; because, as the argument goes, black bodies must be managed, policed and controlled. Arguments and policies that position black youth as pathologically criminal, that say strict action is needed to curtail deviant behaviour—for example, the Scarborough school board's Zero Tolerance initiative against school violence—evoke long-held beliefs about black people as criminals. Those policies suggest that black people need to be managed with a firm and strict hand. Zero Tolerance policies draw on historical practices of slavery that position the black body as uncivil: the social integration of the black body is possible only if it's firmly managed, policed and, from time to time, not-so gently reminded of who exactly is in charge. Devon's music aims to resist and rework narratives that, across time and space, seek to subjugate black bodies. His contribution to an album from which proceeds supported voter registration and education in the recent South African elections is just another example of diasporic ethics at work: community is clearly built across the boundaries between nations.

124 — Rinaldo Walcott

For the Love of "Nomadism" It is the subjugation of black bodies that is most evident in the debate around community and thus, nation. Dixon Road, in Etobicoke, Ontario, is home to about 3,000 of Canada's 70,000 Somali refugee claimants. ^ The district is also a conservative, white, middle-age, middle-class suburban neighbourhood, built in the 1970s when suburbia offered an escape from what was perceived as a rapidly growing city infused with immigrant workers and increasing crime. The area around Dixon Road was promoted as a place to raise a family on a stable middle-class salary and instill "good family values." This was the case until the 1980s, when die Somalis arrived. By the summer of 1993, the "problem" had firmly announced itself with a "mini-riot" in the parking lot of a Dixon Road condominium complex. One of the riots was sparked when security guards issued a parking ticket to a Somali resident on July 30, 1993. Since then, the area has been a hotbed of controversy, singling out all those who Lillian Allen names in one of her poem/songs as: "Immigrant, law-breaker, illegal, minimum wager/refugee." The white residents attempt to argue that the problems come from an "elsewhere"—and this defines the Somali community as outside what is allowably and imaginably Canadian. In 1992 the Conservative Minister of Immigration, Bernard Valcourt, refused to increase the quotas for Somali claimants wanting to come to Canada. He argued that they were nomadic and would not settle down. He was not using the term critically like Deleuze and Guattari but as an anthropologic put-down rife with ethnocentric clutter. Because of this prejudice, he could see no sense in increasing the number of Somali entry visas. They would only stay for a short period before they would roam off somewhere else. Following the federal immigration minister's comments, the provincial Liberal Party made it its policy to expose Somalis who were either unfairly collecting social assistance or engaged in some practice that might be construed as contravening their refugee status. Reports concerning everything from social assistance cheques being used to fund the war in Somalia, to illegal herbal practices, to genital mutilation or female circumcision (naming is important here depending upon one's stance on the issue) made headlines in the Canadian press. ^ Folks somewhere were working overtime to make sure that Somalis never became a part of the imagined community and landscape of Canada. While the reports attempted to place Somalis outside the Canadian imaginary, at the same time they were also concerned with how to manage blackness. Describing the Somalis as nomadic was an attempt to make

Black Like Who? — 125 them culturally unintelligible—in addition to the fact that they were being forced into the North American black criminal paradigm. The desire to regulate and discipline blackness was exposed when condominium owners hired security guards to patrol and contain The Somalis (blackness). The nomadism of blackness has caused a great amount of concern for the keepers of Canadian national identity—a Canadian identity that can hardly come to terms with its slave-holding past, let alone deal with the contemporary existence of black bodies in its midst. The first Somalis arrived in Etobicoke in 1989—the year Soul II Soul emerged internationally, commanding us to "keep on movin' don't stop," and the year that Devon released "Mr. Metro"—his plea to police to "ease up, Don't shoot the youth." They chose Dixon Road because it was near the airport, never imagining that such a choice would be used to position them as outsiders. Theirs was not a choice of privilege but one of pragmatic necessity. Living on Dixon Road made it easy to meet migrating relatives and friends at little expense (taxi fares); as well, the area provided relatively cheap housing. This is how the decisions of the world's migratory peoples are made: the need for cheap housing is the primary reason behind the blackening of the Somali population in Ontario. " By blackening I signal two important but related ideas. First, that nation-state administrators try to force what it means to be black on people through various mechanisms of domination and subordination. They are, in effect, telling you that you have little, if any, relation to the nation. This process often involves arguing that black people are primitive, backwards and not worthy of citizenship. Contemporary modifications of these myths are much more complex, and they're constantly shifting in late capitalist North America, where blackness is also a commodity (i.e., hip-hop cultural artifacts, music and clothing). On the other hand, blackening also signals the various inscriptions with which black people mark their bodies (T-shirts, jewellery, etc.) and the discourses and articulations that both contest and resist subordination and domination. The articulations of lifestyles that do not continually respond to a reflex of domination is important to this process. Blackening as a performance, then, is how, at any given point in time any particular person marked as black might act out a discourse of blackness from the multiple positions that are possible. This acting out, whether as subordination, resistance or something else, can often be forced. It depends upon the situation one finds one's self in. However, blackness is also a way of being and becoming in the world. Blackening, then, is the continual fluidity of the process.

126 — Rinaldo Walcott To white condominium owners, the everyday practices of the Somali community (especially their food odours and gatherings) were an affront to "Canadian ways of living." As Homi Bhabha writes: "The scraps, patches and rags of daily life must be repeatedly turned into the signs of a national culture, while the very act of the narrative performance interpolates a growing circle of national subjects." (1990, 297) It is these everyday differences, that refuse the subordinating discourses of the nation, which have led to the fascist imposition of condominium statutes of exacting and minute detail upon the Dixon Road housing complex. Complaints about food odours and cultural differences that some residents just can not understand, not to mention ludicrous accusations about everything from feces in elevators to apartment overcrowding, have surfaced in attempts to position Somali residents as unsuitable. For Somalis the "scraps, patches and rags of daily life" are not being recouped as a sign of national belonging and culture; instead, they are being used to position them as outsiders. The absentee landlords the Somalis rent from have been virtually silent about the alleged abuses that white condo owners have perpetrated, such as hiring mock police (security guards). They simply collect the rent to pay their mortgages and/or make profits. So how does the Somali community under siege in Etobicoke relate to rap music and black Atlantic cultures? The condominium statutes are being enforced to the letter by a security guard service patrolling the complex. What the guards actually do is police the Somali community. They've in effect been hired to enforce statutes designed to address accusations of Somali parking violations, vandalism and so on. Thus, the guard service is representative of the macro-political practice of policing black bodies at the micro-level. On the regional and national, or macro-level, the various metropolitan police forces manage blackness, while on the micro-level security guards with dogs do the trick/" Ultimately, it's the stringent policing of the Somali community that has led to the two specific incidents that the local press has labelled the Dixon Road "riots." Policing practices have clearly conditioned and fostered the recurring debates about the place/space of blackness in the Canadian imagination. When Devon raps: No, no, no, no, LAPD; ease up RCMP; ease up Orange County; ease up No OPP; ease up 52; ease up Peel Region, ease up Don't shoot the youth.

Black Like Who? — 127 he is signalling that the management of black bodies by various police forces organize a transnational blackness. While Devon's song is located in one Canadian locality, his metahistorical commentary suggests that approaches to blackness are somehow related across time and space. Thus, Devon's invocation of Orange County and the LAPD are not mere examples of naming but of naming with a point in mind, one that demonstrates the articulation of a border-crossing sensibility. His is a practice that strikes at the epistemological foundations of how black bodies are perceived and treated within the confines of the nation-state. Furthermore, his practice is one that reconfigures the nation-state by making links which produce more rich and textured histories/memories of black positionalities across space, time and nation. Devon's rapped plea of "Don't shoot the youth" resonates and reverberates loudly, especially when one considers that in the case of the Somalis it is the youth who have resisted and are being marked as troublemakers in a "troubled community, "^1 The processes of criminalization are underway. Trespass notices prevent youths from visiting friends in other buildings. Blackness has taken on a whole new meaning for Somalis, and this has led one community leader to remark that their troubles are "an education for their children, preparing them to lead the lives of blacks in a white land." The performativity of the category black here suggests that Somalis who probably did not expect to live with the North American discourse of race intervening in their daily existence, have to do so now—simply in order to survive.

"Keep On Movin'" In the summer of 1994, when Canada's financially successful rapper Maestro Fresh-Wes released his new album in New York, his new home, his intentions were clear. The CD was titled Naaah This Kid Can't Be From Canada!!! with the "Can't" underlined for emphasis. Fresh-Wes makes a signifying move that opens up a number of ways that we might think about a transnational or diasporic blackness. First, his insistence that the "kid can't be from Canada" is a disruption of the idea that the dopest rap songs can only be performed by African-Americans. Fresh-Wes takes a shot at ethnic absolutist notions which attempt to historicize rap as an African-American invention and thus write black Atlantic exchanges out of rap's historical narratives. As well, he makes it clear that his relationship to Canada was at best ambivalent (and possibly non-existent)—he

128 — Rinaldo Wakott left the nation. On the other hand, "Naaah this kid can't be from Canada" could be Fresh-Wes' response to the discourses of nation that continually positions his black body outside of Canada. Geneva Smitherman argues that the role of double negatives is important in black speech patterns as an indication of the affirmative, thus Fresh-Wes' "Naaah" and "Can't" represent an assertion of national identity: in this way he worries the category Canadian. The location of his new home is also important. While it might represent his desire to be marketed by the forces of American capital that could expose him globally in ways that Canadian capital cannot, he's located in a city of nomads, and, in particular, black migrant peoples. His movement symbolically suggests that black allegiances to nation are contingent upon the ethical practices of state administrators and narratives of the nation. This is neither a nomadic politics of play nor an example of the anthropological, colonialist idea of the exotic nomad, wandering and wild; but rather a disruption, contemplatively so, of the modernist nation-state. "Home is not where the heart is": it's where the self might be differently desired, imagined, lived and experienced. Fresh-Wes' flight south reconfigures yet another myth of Canada's racial past. Yes, slaves from the U.S. fled north to Canada, "land of the free." But Canada's racial forgetfumess has resulted in a Canadian articulation of blackness that can sometimes seek, and desire to work with, a form of racism that speaks its name differently in the south (the form of American racism that does not mask itself as benevolent). Ironically the work of Canadian literary critic Frank Davey, which announces the postnational state, still locates the discussion of nation within the confines of Canada's modernist growing pains—it's the kind of two solitudes analysis (the English/French dualities and tensions) that does not begin to get at the ways in which the work of Other Canadians, some of whom he reads, creates too much dissonance for talk of nation to be heard. As I suggested earlier, diasporic cultures can teach us much about the demise (or at the least the troubling of the category) of the nation-state. Like Davey, Canada's well-known postmodern theorist Linda Hutcheon, in an attempt to demonstrate how Other Canadians ironically split the image of what is Canadian, creates a number of readings that do not allow for the ways in which the Others of the Canadian imaginary find themselves both inside and outside the nation. Hutcheon reads the work of Dionne Brand, for instance, alongside Italian poets, positioning all of them as producers of homogenized ironic immigrant works that split the

Black Like Who? — 129 category Canadian. Yet one is left with no sense of how the histories of those unable to live out or perform the discourses of whiteness are differently incorporated into the nation and thus possess divergent immigrant histories. Even progressive critics like Davey and Hutcheon, who are willing to announce the collapse of the modernist nation as we know it, seem unable to read in complex and engaging ways the histories of those whom Paul Gilroy has termed the "counterculture of modernity," (1993, 36) or who I call the "pre-postmodern postmodern voyagers." The contemporary politics of race and nation in Canada, to echo M.G. Vassanji, represents "no new land." However, the promise remains: the fighting back of the Somalis and rap artists alike might reconfigure, remap and chart a notion of nation as a new land not concerned with narratives of geographic and textual boundaries but a nation that is constituted through the practices of justice, ethical politics and progressive race relations.

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8 • After Origins Black Pop Culture in Canada; Or, The Impossibility of Belonging to the Nation

Deborah Cox, one of the current divas of R&B music, is a black Canadian. Cox, whose parents are from Guyana, grew up in Canada listening to various African-American musics played at home. She spent her formative years working in the Toronto music scene and eventually had to give up on Canada to secure the kind of pop culture stardom that she currently enjoys. Recently hailed in Canada's leading newsmagazine, Maclean's, as "Canada's Queen of R&B,"1 Cox is also a model for one of Canada's leading clothing companies, Roots. Numerous entertainment programs have done segments on her career. The dynamics of Cox's move to the U.S. are deeply implicated in her newfound fame at home in Canada. This belonging and not belonging to Canada, lodged between Guyana and the U.S. is a symptomatic condition of Canadian blackness. Cox represents the networks of black diasporic realities and desires, and the circulation of black artifacts, which constitute a significant aspect of contemporary North American blackness. Cox's success in the U.S. might also be understood in relation to some significant tensions concerning Caribbean/black popular culture in Canada and the question of belonging to the nation.2 In effect, Cox's success raises difficult questions concerning the slippery language of popular culture and national belonging when questions of blackness enter the conversation. I argue that these questions become even more pointed when the terrain of popular culture is explored. Cox is more than a single figure crossing borders. She symbolically represents die black diasporic networks of back and forth crossings that characterize a diasporic sensibility. This crossing is different for black Canadian

132 — Rinaldo Walcott musicians than for white musicians even though the outcomes might be similar. Border crossing for the black Canadian musician is a constituent element of their art, whether they personally cross geographic borders or not. The Rascalz, Dream Warriors and now Kardinal have all experienced relative degrees of success in the U.S. and Europe without leaving Canada. In Stuart Hall's "What Is This 'Black' in Black Popular Culture?" he cautions against the installation of a singular notion of black popular culture. "By definition," Hall writes, "black popular culture is a contradictory space. It is a site of strategic contestation." (1992B, 470) Hall's comments are an apt description of popular culture in Canada for many reasons: the contradiction that Caribbean equals black in Canada; the fact that black popular culture in Canada is mainly a copy or version of African-American popular culture; and finally, the fact that Canada does not have a native popular culture. As a result of these contradictions, popular culture and what it signifies in the Canadian context always remains a site of strategic contestation. In this chapter I offer a reading of popular culture in Canada referencing its Caribbean/black genealogy, but I could just as effectively offer a reading which references its AfricanAmerican roots. To offer a reading that is exclusive to either trace is a problem that refuses to go away because it is fraught with inherent contradictions. Hall's insights are a useful caution once more. He writes that in black popular culture, strictly speaking, ethnographically speaking, there are no pure forms at all. Always these forms are the product of partial synchronization, of engagements across cultural boundaries, of the confluence of more than one cultural tradition, of the negotiations of dominant and subordinate positions, of the subterranean strategies of receding and transcoding, of critical signification, of signifying. Always these forms are impure, to some degree hybridized from a vernacular base. (471) The above comments speak quite accurately to Caribbean/black popular culture in Canada and I attempt to demonstrate below the pleasurable impurity of Caribbean/black popular culture in Canada. To think Caribbean popular culture in Canada is to simultaneously invoke the discourse of heritage and the discourse of the popular. It is often claimed that Canada does not have a popular culture. ^ While this

Black Like Who? — 133 view has been recently contested in the anthology Pop Can and in the earlier Mondo Canuck, such contestations are recent to discussions of popular culture in Canada. Given the skepticism which greets discussions of Canadian popular culture, we must be mindful of exactly what is meant by Caribbean/black popular culture in Canada and the problem of such a category. I want to make a radical proposal and argue that Caribbean/black popular culture in Canada can only be produced by those first and second generation descendents of the post-1960s Caribbean migrants to Canada. This is why Deborah Cox can emerge as a diaspora musical figure not unlike her numerous black British forerunners of the 1980s like Soul II Soul or Maxi Priest. These post-1960s children of migrants articulate a belonging to Canada that allows for a cultural expressvity both uniquely theirs and simultaneously in conversation with a wide array of cultural expressivity of the black diaspora. Caribbean popular culture in Canada is lodged between the continuing dynamic of Canadian proximity to the U.S., and simultaneously an imagined and real relation to the region of the Caribbean constituted through the memories, histories and desires of post-independent Caribbean migrants and their first and second generation offspring. The tension is that the Caribbean in Canada can be accessed as easily through New York or Miami as it is directly from Trinidad, Jamaica or Barbados. Any useful discussion of Caribbean popular culture in Canada is therefore fixed between the transmigration of cultural artifacts, practices and peoples between the U.S, Britain and the Anglo-Caribbean region (in Quebec the French Caribbean is of particular import) and other outposts of Caribbean circulation, recirculation and production. Therefore, to think Caribbean/black popular culture in contemporary Canada is to think what David Scott calls the problem-space of post-coloniality. By this he signals not a tangible materiality, but the much more malleable and crucially central problem of the discursive utterances which impact materiality, especially in the arena of politics. In Canada multicultural and heritage discourses shape this problem-space. In the Canadian context an interrogation and analysis of popular culture has a profound impact for the unmaking of the politics of nation building and citizenship as stemless processes. And it is the politics of nation building and citizenship to which I believe Caribbean/black popular culture in Canada most readily speaks. In the Canadian context the circulation of Caribbean and specifically African- American popular culture is modelled on local concerns and contexts, but still always leads somewhere else. This "elsewhereness" is

134—Rinaldo Walcott both conditioned by an imagined diasporic collective history and by the nation-state's demand for black people to belong elsewhere. In effect, I will be suggesting that Caribbean popular culture in Canada has to be read for its excesses as much as for its local inflections. Whether we are speaking of rap, calypso, reggae, dancehall, carnival, films or theatre (in particular Jamaican comedy), popular cultural forms are remade in Canada to fit the local (Toronto) and nationally-local (Canada) context. I suggest that Canadian nation-state policy, in particular official multiculturalism and its heritage discourse, informs how Caribbean/black popular culture is produced, circulated and utters its genealogies of relation within and against the nation. Moving away from the politics of Caribbean/black representation in Canada in terms of the inclusion/exclusion debate, I instead look to representations that allow for reading for the ways in which diasporic sensibilities might be etched into Caribbean/black Canadian popular cultural production. Caribbean/black popular culture in Canada might be generously read as situated between the difficult dynamics of nation-state regulation, discipline and governmentality and at the same time a diasporic deterritorialized desire. Caribbean/black popular cultural works in Canada are crucially and simultaneously engaged in a politics of how to belong to the nation-state as not-quite-citizens and how to desire beyond the too rigid confines of nation-state governmentality. This governmentality is reflected in official versions of multiculturalism that attempt to produce a linear discourse of heritage which always leads to outside the nation's borders for its Caribbean/black citizens.* Caribbean/black citizens are almost never imagined as inherently belonging to the national body. Such a condition has two consequences: it allows them to look elsewhere and simultaneously locates them elsewhere. This paradoxical condition does not exist for white immigrants. When the narratives of the nation-state lead one outside the borders of the nation, the tensions of belonging, of not-being-quite-citizen are significantly different from a diaspora sensibility producing an elsewhereness. The nation-state's heritage discourse, which is steeped in static, transparent discourses of cultural artifact, are simultaneously relevant to my argument and to why folks choose an elsewhere. A desire for elsewhere is conditioned by a partial refusal of nation-state ethnic governmentality. I am suggesting that popular cultural identifications and practices can be and often are political practices. It is in the realm of the political that a Caribbean/black popular culture might be said to exist in Canada. For

Black Like Who? — 135 example, in the 1980s the performances, recordings and publications by dub poets Clifton Joseph, Lillian Allen and Devon operated both as political commentary and as something more, sites of pleasure. I am not making a case for popular culture as inherently political, rather I am speaking to particular choices that gesture towards a possible politics. In light of the impossibility of Caribbean/black popular culture in Canada, Caribbean/black popular culture in Canada announces its possibility in the realm of the political. The Caribbean as an imagined space is mobilized in the service of a politics of belonging to Canada. This politics is no doubt a confrontational politics. For Caribbean/black migrants and their descendents the problem of belonging to Canada is a significant and confrontational one.

Discourse of Heritage In Canada the discourse of heritage is central to how those who are not the founding peoples of the nation mark their belonging to the nation. This discourse of heritage, which is under-theorized in critiques of Canadian multiculturalism, functions as one of the most important points of governmentality of Canadian national identities.-* Canadian multiculturalism frames exactly how one officially belongs to the nation. It is this belonging which is central to the im/possibility of Caribbean popular culture in Canada, for blackness in Canada is largely imagined as black and therefore belies longer black histories in Canada. In Canada then, "Caribbean" is really a pseudonym for blackness. The trope of the Caribbean in Canada denies the complexities of Caribbean-ness and therefore belies complex understandings of the place. Debates concerning Toronto's Caribana festival are a good example of this tension. In Canada some forces would have us believe that carnival is a purely African derived form, "creolized," but still the property of people of African descent. I prefer to shift the emphasis and argue for Caribana as a continuing creole form conditioned by everyday life in Canada, including the complex historical past of the multicultural Caribbean and Canadian governmental incursions into its financing and thus its public identity. In this sense while the festival has a strong Caribbean trace, it is uniquely Canadian. Its relation to Canadian multicultural discourses of heritage is undeniable and thus makes it a product of Canadian sensibility. Caribana is a good example of how blackness becomes Canadianized all the while pointing to outside the national boundaries—a diasporic cultural expression. Caribana is initially a gift to Canada by its Caribbean

136 — Rinaldo Wakott migrants, those who are the parents of the second generation who are articulating a different kind of belonging. The gift of Caribana is a doubled gift. As it brings Caribbean culture to Canada it simultaneously positions the Caribbean as outside Canada. This position of outside ultimately means that an understanding of the Canadian nation exists i which blackness is not present as a constituent element.1^ Rapper Maestro offers a compelling way of reading Canada. He asserts that Canada often represents itself like "certs wid out the retsin"— the coloured core is always missing. The long and now broken silence in St. Armand, Quebec concerning the slave cemetery almost ploughed over, which the locals call nigger rock; the destruction of Africville in Nova Scotia; the demolition of Hogan's Alley in Vancouver in the '60s;'

in Ontario the changing of the name of Negro Creek Road to Moggie Road in 1996; all suggest a willful attempt to make a black presence absent. These moments are complex ones because they occasion what we might term, after Jimmie Durham, the absented presence of blackness in Canada. I am interested in the relationship between these moments because they allow us to trouble the national discourse of "two founding peoples" and the role of official multiculturalism. I am interested in attending to the space between the official discourse of multiculturalism and its popular utterances. While scholars have been careful to point out that official multiculturalism is different from popular understandings of it, I believe that both official and popular forms leak into each other and rely upon each other for their constitution. When members of parliament agitate against funding multiculturalism their argument often has little to do with the inadequacies of official multiculturalism and more to do with an appeal to popular interpretations of multiculturalism, often read as immigrant services. A discursive formation exists that binds the two versions. Since black people are always imagined as being from elsewhere, they are implicated in the fictional financial costs of multiculturalism. Furthermore, I want to make apparent the ambivalence of citizenship that state-sponsored multicultural policy constructs for black people in the nation. Official multiculturalism both inaugurates the demolition of black evidences, such as the ones above, and simultaneously allows for imagining blackness in Canada as a recent phenomenon. The discourse of heritage is crucial to such a project. The Multiculturalism Act states that "multiculturalism is a fundamental characteristic of the Canadian heritage and identity." But embedded in the Act is a double move whereby the Official Languages Act places English and French Canada outside the

Black Like Who? —137 Multiculturalism Act. Thus English and French Canada's heritage begins and ends in Canada. The double moves of multicultural discourse and policy have much to do with how we understand the intersecting discourses of history, origins, descent, ancestors and genealogy. Thus, for me, multicultural ism in Canada attempts to make the origins of the nation pure, even if only for a fleeting fictive moment, since, according too Spivak, "the contingency of origins" (261) is always revealed. Part of the double move is always to acknowledge the contaminants within, but in proscribed ways. The idea of multiculturalism as caught up in a discourse of origins is not original, for the discourse of heritage is also a discourse of origins. I want to focus the discussion not on the origins of the invention of the Other in multicultural discourse, but rather on the concealments of multicultural discourse. For black peoples those concealment iolently cover up a much longer history of relation to the nation. s Toni Morrison puts it in another context, "the silence" becomes "an unbearable violence" (1992, 22-23) when blackness is considered in national origins as a concealment. Every concealment includes a disruptive return. It is vital then to question the twin discourses of origins and heritage in multiculturalism. The restrictive borders of the modern nation-state remain an impediment to individual and collective desires. In terms of black people, diasporic discourses remain an important avenue for making sense of the self beyond the confines of the nation. To make the link between the destruction of black evidences, such as Africville, which call into question the idea of two founding peoples and then to read that evidence as "the phenomena of rupture, of discontinuity" (Foucault, 4) of blackness in Canada, strikes at the heart of multicultural discourse. There exists in Canada at least three different black configurations of potential belonging: a long black presence dating back to the founding of the colony including slavery and escapes from slavery; a discontinuous and continuous Caribbean presence since the early 1800s; and recent continental African migrations. We are faced with the question of what origins the discourse and policies of multiculturalism conceals? I want to focus attention on the absented presence of black Canadians. Official stories of Canadian nation-building leave glaring absences that call attention to the mess of making the nation. Both Native and black absented presences loom large for instance in die nationalist handbook, George Grant's Lament for a Nation. While the obvious other in Grant's thesis is the U.S., his insistence on marking out and staking out "[t]he two original peoples" (40) is an incitement for thinking otherwise.

138 — Rinaldo Walcott In Lament Grant articulates a historical continuity of the Canadian nation that makes it different from the U.S. To do this he must render Canada homogenous and pure. Any notion of diaspora is immediately a pr blem in Grantian discourse. Delineating the origins of the nation are crucial to Grant's argument and all contaminants are removed so that the purity of the Canadian spirit and mind is made evident and different from that of the U.S. Locked in a contentious binarism, Grant is unable to address the messy elements of Canadian nationalism and can only seek to rescue the nation from a U.S.-dominated continentalism. Grant is useful for thinking about multiculturalism in Canada because his work seems to best exemplify how the fictitious origins of nations work to make invisible large numbers of its not-so-quite-citizens. This work of making the nation pure is only possible by tracing its genealogy backward to a clearly defined origin. But as Spivak informs us, "Euroamerican origins and foundations are also secured by the places where an "origin" is violently instituted." (262) In the case of Canada, and in fact all settler colonies, the work of constructing ancestry is always fraught with the denial of a much more messy history. Multiculturalism as nation-state narrative organizes a relation to belonging where belonging becomes an ethnic static performance so that "some remain outside [its] constantive/performative ruse" as Spivak puts it. (267) That is, English and French Canada continue to change while others fictitiously remain the same. For this to occur the nation must be constituted through what Elizabeth Young-Bruehl calls "the anatomy of prejudices." In Canada multiculturalism offers one important way that the anatomy of prejudices is legitimated. The use of the document or legislation as a way of imagining others in the nation is central to the multicultural discursive formation. The documentary effect of multiculturalism embedded in legislation is, as Michel Foucault states, the "collective consciousness that made use of material documents to refresh its memory." (7) In Canada this document produces an origin of the nation which is predicated upon the duality that Grant identifies as "French and Catholic, British and Protestant, united precariously in their desire not to be a part of the great Republic." (40) In this one phrase Grant grounds the national formation within the discourse of two founding peoples. The multicultural legislation legitimates this dual position of the founding of the nation. This fiction of the nation means that a kind of "interpretive decipherment" (Foucault, 11) is necessary to dislodge the documentation of the nation. By this I mean that all the material and discursive practices

Black Like Who? — 139 congeal around the repetition of a particular origin which can not admit to Others, Thus through The Multiculturalism Act and, in the case of Native peoples, The Indian Act, Others are made adjuncts to the nation, not-quite-citizens. Such a designation is dependant upon a "migrant ethnicity" (Spivak, 273) where national belonging is paradoxically placed outside the nation. The centrality of origins to multicultural discourse and to the double moves of national belonging is couched in the discourse of heritage. The seductive discourse of heritage sets up the criteria for thinking genealogy, for thinking ancestry and for mapping a relation to the nation which leads some of us outside of it. The discourse of heritage suggests the possibility of an origin of identity and with it a community. In order to achieve our belonging, our origins must be exposed, their transparency made apparent and evident. Multiculturalism as document must be deciphered as a project that reinstates the status quo ruling order of governance. Black popular culture plays with this doubleness to secure a number of tenuous relations beyond the reach of the nation. Multiculturalism's reliance on heritable differences is an attempt to make us all the same by making us different. For clearly these moments do not reference a recent "migrant ethnicity." Thus when the Act guarantees "the freedom of all members of Canadian society to preserve" and enhance their culture, another double move of the policy is revealed. The selective nature of which cultures are preserved and how can be understood in light of Negro Creek Road, Africville, Hogan's Alley and the current debate around nigger rock. Black popular culture circumvents the official notion of preservation discourses and practices by cutting and pasting, citing and referencing multiple points of origin. Culture is not something that can be preserved nor conserved. Multiculturalism offers two kinds of positions: reverence and conservation/preservation of culture. Such positions are deeply implicated in identity politics. Sacred temples of culture are fabricated and used to conceal our "cross-cultural resonance."° Us/Them positions are articulated and imagined communities made pure and uncontaminated by their heritable traits. Yet, cross-cultural resonances continually return to question how we deploy origins and heritage as foundations for identity claims. Black popular culture in Canada best reveals this problem of conservation and preservation though its multiple and shifting reference points.

140 — Rinaldo Walcott

The Problem of Belonging Central to the problem of heritage is the problem of belonging. Belonging is about how we live in the present and about how we make our presence felt at any time that can never match or copy exactly past times. Belonging is therefore about time and temporality. But belonging can and is often only understood belatedly, especially belonging to nation-state spaces. Belonging is really just an afterthought, sutured into narratives of blood, land, tribe and more multifarious discourses like generations and citizenship. Belonging is a taken-for-granted strategy of modern nationstates, intended to foreclose crucial and critical questions concerning national and state arrangements. Belonging is a site for the contestation of the ethical reordering of the nation-state, especially in instances where official multicultural policies attempt to cover over the mess of history. Consequently, for black Diaspora people (and other diasporas as well) belonging is also a project of ethical political positionality within nations. Following Homi Bhabha we might understand belonging, especially as it is related to the nation-states of North America, as "the historically and temporally disjunct positions that minorities occupy ambivalently within nation's space." (33) Bhabha is here concerned with the manner in which the nation-states which emerged in the postColumbus voyages positioned "racial minorities" on the margins of the national polity and eventually had to find ways to better accommodate them in the post-colonial era. Official multiculturalism is an outgrowth of this accommodation. The post-colonial period has brought with it the breakup of monolithic notions of the "racial minority." It is in part a crisis of heterogeneity that the post-colonial nation-states of both the North and the South must contend with. The "disjunct positions" of which Bhabha writes, reflect the antagonisms of history, genealogy, different political positions and expressions, and a host of other conditions, all of which produce the fissures that make blackness heterogeneous. This heterogeneity is elided by nation-state practices, but sometimes the nation state asserts heterogeneity in fleeting moments of crisis when it might be useful to stall or abort an attempt to rearrange national concerns. An example of this elision is war, when we are all somehow different but unified as Canadians, regardless of ethnicity, religion, place of birth, et cetera. The frustrating contradiction of (postmodern national arrangements is the state's ability to recoup both heterogeneity and its opposite in ways that reaffirm long-held practices of exclusion and marginalization. In fact, state policies like

Black Like Who? — 141 multiculturalism and immigration skillfully move between discourses of heterogeneity and homogeneity depending on the prevailing political climate. In North America one of the most coercive forms of state power is the rules upon which citizenship are based. This is especially true for racial, sexual and gendered minorities. In the specific case of racialized minorities their not-quite-citizenship places them in a situation which either forces acquiescence to state power or resistance to it. How that resistance or acquiescence is framed and understood is always up for "interpretative decipherment." In the moment of post-coloniality where the continuous return of the formerly colonized from the Caribbean to the colonial motherlands like Britain or their satellite white nations like Canada, New Zealand and Australia has been unceasing, these migrants have been framed in narrow ways within the (postmodern and postcolonial nation-states of what is heuristically called the North. The central framing for those who Ato Sekyi-Otu terms "the diaspora of the cosmopolis" (11) has been through the discourse of immigration and its attendant pathologies of dislocation and alienation. The mapping of the immigrant experience in Canada has been largely done through the lens of the social sciences. In the case of black peoples it has been overwhelmingly sociological and anthropological.^ My project is to modestly shift the discourse to questions of discursivity, textuality and the politics and relations of representations.

Pop Culture and Diaspora I turn to popular culture in order to think about black Canadian identities because it is at the level of the popular that these complex issues are more easily grasped. For example, one recent image of the rap group Dream Warriors, two men of African descent and one South Asian, immediately complicates through its creolization black pop culture in North America. The Dream Warriors represent Caribbean/black complexity and thus disrupt national-local fictions of monolithic Caribbean-ness/blackness in North America. Black popular culture is a site for probing a range of black ethnicities, but it can also be a site for probing modes of femininity and masculinity, sexual politics, class relations and a host of other social, cultural and political positions. At this time the black popular cultural scene in Canada is a fertile ground for assessing and analyzing the makings of a new and renewed black belonging to Canada.

'142 — Rinaldo Walcott In Canada musical groups and musicians like Cox, Choclair, Dubmatique, Rascalz,, and others have produced a sound that situates them within a "sonic diaspora." (Akomfah, 1996) This sound has echoes and traces of "elsewhere" but remains inflected by the locality of Canadian contexts. For example, Maestro has continually cited Canadian rock musicians in his music and he continues his relation to Canadian rock with his sampling of the Guess Who's "These Eyes" on his recent track "Stick to Your Vision." On the other hand, on the most recent Rascalz album the band quotes, in an interlude, Jimmy Cliffs character in The Harder They Come. He says that he won't work for ten dollars all his life. In both instances Maestro and Rascalz are commenting on the relations of being a black Canadian. Rascalz makes use of Jimmie Cliff's words to launch a critique of the exploitative music industry. Maestro makes use of the Guess Who not only to insist on his staying power, but also on his Canadianness. The titles of both albums also echo larger transnational issues. Maestro's Built To Last restates the claim made earlier about his staying power and Rascalz Global Warning not only announces their intent to break out globally as musicians, but the entire album is positioned in relation to a range of global identifications. This tenuous play between the national and outernational is crucial to reading the emergent vernacular youth cultures of black Canada. Such tensions play themselves out in terms of musical tastes, styles and patterns. On any Canadian rap album it is not unusual for the performer to shift between recognizable African-American-derived musical styles and sounds and Caribbean-derived styles and sounds. This shift is not a facile shift, it is in fact one of the conditions of being in black Canada. It is a shift that speaks to the epistemology of Canadian black popular culture. This shift has a broader corollary for black Canadian identities, but the shift can also be instantiated as unique to black Canadian sensibilities. It is in fact the evidence of a black Canadian creole utterance. This is a shift that only first and second generation black Canadians can make—it is their sensibility. It is a complex reworking of heritage and ethnicity conditioned by nation-state governmentality and by diaspora associations. What this means for national belonging is that black Canadianness might not cite and repeat the normative and dominant narratives of the nation, but those narratives have little room for blackness. Rather, black Canadianness articulates a sense of self that requires a rethinking of national boundaries and citizenship. But this rethinking never leaves behind its local context. For example, Choclair's most recent album Ice

Black Like Who? -- 143 Cold makes explicit reference to Canada by remaking the stereotype of an ice cold country into a marker for a Canadian hip-hop that is red-hot, with deft rhymes. On the album cover, he lounges in an armchair carved from ice. These are the ways in which black popular culture in Canada is recasting the tropes and metaphors of the white nation. They are blackening in the wake of an emergent black vernacular culture. But these artists do not stop at simply remaking a white Canada. They are also remaking a black North America. The insistence on marking out Toronto's specificity in North America as "T-dot" is one more example of the ways in which blackness makes itself Canadian on its own terms. The rapper Kardinal OffishalFs track "Bakardi Slang" from his album Firestarter Vol. 1: Quest for Fire is a good example of the ways in which blackness cements itself oppositionally to the nation and still articulates its diaspora connectedness. The song is an articulation of T-dot slang, which is a composite of African- American and Caribbean words that when put together speak to the specificity of black Toronto. Kardinal suggests that black Torontonians don't say, "You know what I'm sayin'," they say, "Ya dun know." They don't say, "You get one chance," they say, "You better rip the show." These examples from Kardinal's song draw on the range of Caribbean identities in Toronto and African-American popular cultural influences. The song utters diaspora connectedness and still recognizes the ground from which it speaks. In this way what the music begins to articulate is a relation to the nation that refuses the static demands of a state-instituted multiculturalism. Zeen? See what I'm saying?

Conclusion In Canada now there is what is being referred to in some quarters as a renaissance in black Canadian culture. While such a claim might be overstated, the context within which black Canadian writers like Austin Clarke, Dionne Brand, Andre Alexis, Cecil Foster, M. Nourbese Philip, Claire Harris, Suzette Mayr, Wade Compton, Andrew Moodie, Djanet Sears and a host of others who are being published and produced is directly related to the ambitions of black popular culture in Canada. By this I mean that if one of the ways in which the literature of black Canada can be read is through a prism of redefining the nation, by situating blackness as central to it, then a similar terrain is being covered in the popular culture scene. In fact, I would suggest that popular culture is always an important element of any literary renaissance. It might even be argued that vernacular cultural practices always parallel the production of

144 — Rinaldo Wakott high culture, as is clear when looking at the relationship between jazz and literature during the Harlem Renaissance. As; many aspects of the modern nation give way to new constructions of citizenship and belonging, the only thing useful about nations might be the terms of residence. In the Caribbean the term "permanent residency" holds much meaning. It signals that one can live without being "alien" or "illegal" in the North Atlantic. But permanent residency does not only signal the legal apparatus through which migrants become quasi-citizens in the North Atlantic, it also signals migrant's desires to suture more ethically structured nations. Caribbean popular culture in Canada articulates a duel citizenship, but this is a deterritorialized citizenship—a sonic nation through which desire, disappointment, hope and possibility are experienced, wished for and uttered. But black popular culture in Canada does not facilely give up its local contexts. What it does is re-inflect and re-articulate local contexts in relation to the outernational, forcing the recognition of a different kind of Canadianness.

9 • Scattered Speculations on Canadian Blackness; Or, Grammar for Black

I The dearth of debate concerning ways of thinking blackness in Canada should not be surprising. My continual return to music as a major feature of black diasporic cultural expression and identity as one of its fundamental structuring devices might be cliched, yet music remains one of the most complex and significant expressive cultural forms of the black diaspora. Other imaginative works like literature and film have played an important and groundbreaking role in providing other avenues for representing the complexities of black life in the Americas. I return to music because it signals an important, shared and continually reinvented black diasporic expression. I believe that music in Canada provides an outlet that allows us to chart the ways in which black Canadian cultures can be understood and engaged. The Dream Warriors and Maestro Fresh-Wes best support my claims. These Canadian musicians have taken different diasporic paths and created different identifications as their careers have taken off, ebbed and flowed. The Dream Warriors have returned in their music to a much closer identification with the Caribbean, particularly Jamaica. FreshWes, on the other hand, has clearly identified with America; he has even moved to New York. The migratory practices suggest that avenues for thinking about blackness by black Canadians do not follow a single path. While I have paid attention to how the films of Stephen Williams and Clement Virgo draw on the African-American hood film genre, it is equally important, especially in the case of Virgo, to recognize and account for black British cinematic influences and references. These cross-border or outer-national identifications are what constitute the

146 — Rinaldo Walcott

complex nature of black identifications in Canada. The debate has, however, failed to acknowledge this. It seems imperative, then, that when we theorize black Canadas, diasporic exchanges, dialogues and renewals become a fundamental part of thinking what the politics of blackness might be. Once the processes of invention and reinvention are highlighted and dealt with, much more complex analyses can come into play. These analyses allow for, and result in, the pluralizing of blackness. Reading blackness both as a sign and as performative, through a method of nomadology, is a useful way of thinking about black cultures in Canada. Nomadology is the attempt to think about movement and exile in a fashion which makes those conditions a part of the way in which cultural work is understood and valued. II Consequently, it would be silly to be offended by Andre Alexis suggesting, in This Magazine, that blackness in Canada is borrowed. Blackness is always borrowed. What is really at stake is what is done with borrowed blackness. Alexis's claim, that not enough Canadian artists, choreographers, painters and thinkers writing from here write about our specificities, however, is suspect. He argues that black culture in Toronto is disproportionately influenced by African-American culture. But his logic would probably be unable to account for the Dream Warriors' return to the Caribbean or the influence of black British film in Clement Virgo's work. Instead, Alexis offers some cursory readings of African-American cultural criticism and theory: relying heavily on Cornel West, he suggests that black Canadian-ness is fashioned after African-American-ness. His reliance on West would suggest to those not conversant with the debates that there was no debate concerning West's ideas among AfricanAmericans. This is far from the truth. But if black Canadian loudness concerning matters of race is borrowed from an African-American model, it seems clear that black Canadians reinvent what they borrow for local purposes. For while it might be argued that in some limited sense Alexis has a point, his refusal to seriously engage the conditions of black diasporic identifications is puzzling. African-American history and experience is not archetypal nor exceptional from where I stand. Yet, it cannot be denied that the fate of the world's black peoples is somehow linked to the ways in which Americans export and practice their ideas of racial supremacy. What is crucially important is that we recognize that discourses of race are not

Black Like Who? — 147 merely nation-bound, but that they also cut across nations. Similarly, those who are oppressed understand their experiences both locally and extra-locally. Black people in Canada can and do identify with black people in the Caribbean, Brazil, South Africa, America and the rest of the world; and such identifications are valid. These identifications are the stuff of which the conditions for a nomadology of blackness are constituted. My insistence on border-crossing identifications is not just some postmodern collage, a construct that makes space and place loosely interchangeable; instead this is how black (post)modernity makes crucial links, across national space, to demonstrate some of the ways in which black people sometimes share pain, pleasure, disappointments and hope. Alexis's inability to access such understandings, to know why those identifications assert themselves as black commonalities, explains why he fails to acknowledge what it means to be at home in Canada. To be black and at home in Canada is both to belong and not belong. The Dream Warriors celebrate black diasporic connectedness and passion in their song "Ludi" by calling out and naming black home spaces in Canada and the Caribbean. The practice is a practice of the in-between. It is from a life at, or on, the in-between space that Dionne Brand, M. Nourbese Philip, Austin Clarke, Cecil Foster, George Elliott Clarke, Claire Harris, Frederick Ward, and a host of other writers, thinkers, dramatists, choreographers, musicians, filmmakers (and Alexis himself) articulate: a political and ethical stance which refuses the too-easy boundaries of national discourses. Calls for justice in their work are not ill-informed, naive rants, but rather they speak to "instilling pride in this place" (Alexis, 18; emphasis in original). Nation-centred discourse can only be a trap that prohibits black folks from sharing common feeling, especially when common actions and practices of domination seem to present themselves time and again in different spaces/places/nations. Alexis hints at the complex manifestations of blackness in Canada, but undermines the very argument he intends to make when he does not discuss how black cultures, especially Caribbean cultures, are overpoliced in this place. Yes, it is true that calypso, cricket and reggae have reshaped Toronto and Canada. But these kinds of things do so at the expense of rendering more invisible long-standing black communities in Ontario, Nova Scotia, Quebec, British Columbia and the Western provinces. Watching cricket in King City or at Ross Lord Park, black bodies and other bodies of colour actually and symbolically refigure Canadian space and make their presence felt beyond the confines and

148 — Rinaldo Walcott restrictions of immigration legislation, multicultural discourse and policies, and the local police. Resorting to what gets read as recent immigrant contributions to the Canadian cultural landscape in the popular imagination does not bring us any closer to articulating an indigenous black discourse around race, space, and nation—a discourse which will allow us to understand the ways in which blackness remakes the Canadian political, cultural and literary landscape. On the one hand, black folks here are told that any political and social identification with African-Americans is wrong-headed and overdetermined (Alexis); and on the other hand, forms of criticism uniquely located in Canadian contexts are undermined by dismissals of anger. Michael Coren's unwarranted and misguided attack on M. Nourbese Philip is a case in point. And yet, Alexis' fine collection of short stories, Despair, is itself evidence of an attempt to invent a Canadian blackness. His stories are representative of a black Canadian-ness constituted from various fragments of the nation, usually seen as outside blackness. The existence of Alexis's short stories both support and simultaneously deny his argument because they stand out as distinct from the usual fare, and exist as a voice of black Canadian difference and plurality. In the same way, George Elliott Clarke's poetic works should be noted for their Nova Scotian cadences, histories, utterances, and the ways in which the poems disturb a white Canadian normativity by placing blackness at the centre of their Canadian-ness. Incidentally, when African-American as a symbolic category of authenticity works in favour of the dominant discourse it is called on to discredit local articulations and concerns. The hiring and invitation of Henry Louis Gates Jr. by Garth Drabinsky's Livent Corporation to act as both consultant and spokesman for quelling the black resistance to mounting Showboat at a publicly funded arts space in 1993 is just one example. Middle-class African-American comfort and nostalgia with the staging of Showboat in New York was used to make black Canadian concerns seem ridiculous. In this case, the dominant discourse believed it was valid to make sense of blackness in Canada through African-American response and experience.^ Black Canadian assertions of commonality with African-Americans, however, were denied. Ill Significantly, Andrew Moodie's award-winning play Riot offers a complex range of black characters and black cultures. The play's insistence on

Black Like Who? — 149 clearly marking out black difference across history, gender, sex, class, sense of belonging, desire and ambition, though at times didactic, opens up a dialogue of the impossible: a singular blackness in Canada. Moodie's contribution to black Canadian theatre should usher in an era when uncritical black affirmative works (with few exceptions many short film and videos provide this kind of fare) are not the only ones which grace the stage. Because black differences are accentuated in Riot, the audience views a complex dynamic of cultures and the consequences and dynamics of life that allow for thinking blackness as multiple. The drama of the play makes evident the multi-accentuality of racism while simultaneously addressing the crossing of racism with other social and cultural forms of discrimination like homophobia. Riot then moves the expressive cultural production of black Canadas from works which desire a black sameness and singularity to a new and different place. In the aftermath of Riot we must ask: what conditions make a black community?

IV The song "My Definition" by the Dream Warriors does not offer a lyrical definition of blackness. In fact, the definition is offered in the method of the song. Not unlike Alexis's Despair, the Dream Warriors draw from fragments of the nation to make and invent Canadian blackness. By that I mean that the Dream Warriors' reappropriation of the game show Definition's theme song signals the way in which they understand themselves as embedded in the Canadian body politic, and what they can take from it. Their use of the song disrupts a white Canadian normativity and recasts it in its black history by effectively quoting its black composer, Quincy Jones. We are therefore faced with the question: What grammars of black exist in Canada for locating black people as central to the nation? How can we articulate a recent migratory history alongside a much longer black presence? How do we articulate the continuous and continuing post-World War II migrations (a continuous history of migration) alongside the pre-war migrations and the migrations of the periods of settlement (a discontinuous history of migration)? Thinking carefully about a Canadian grammar for black might help us to avoid the painful and disappointing moments of an essentialized blackness. A discourse and grammar for blackness in Canada can be located at the interstices of various histories of migration. The history of ex-slaves

150 — Rinaldo Walcott in what is now called Canada—black loyalists both enslaved and free; fugitive slaves from the U.S.; pre- and post-emancipation Caribbean migrants; late-nineteenth-century and early-twentieth-century migrants—constitutes a discontinuous history of black migration to Canada. The decendants of these early migrants are scattered across Canada but concentrations exist in Nova Scotia and Ontario. A continuous migration is characterized by post-World War II migration from the Caribbean, and more recent but dwindling migrations from the African continent and other black spaces. The most recent migrations have taken precedence in the popular imagination and therefore authorities tend to locate blackness as new to the nation. However, black people need to figure out how to produce the tensions and possibilities of these two migratory moments in a way that recognizes a long and enduring presence in Canada. If black Canadians can learn anything from African-Americans it is how to invent and continually reference a tradition. The process is important, not the content. George Elliott Clarke's Fire on the Water (Volume 1) presents some of the figures who might be used to invent and continually reference a malleable black Canadian tradition. David George, Carrie M. Best, Pearleen Oliver, and those who are not in the anthology (Mary Anne Shadd, Mary Bibb and a host of others), are important starting points in archiving black Canadian histories. The stories we tell, and the myths we create, produce an antidote to what Clarke terms "the struggle against erasure" in Eyeing the North Star. Therefore, a grammar for black must ground itself in a long black history. The almost five-hundred-year presence of black people in Canada should not merely be an item in the catalogue of blackness: it should be actively used to inform the ways in which we analyze the nation and our citizenship.

V In this regard, my thoughts on Colina Philips's Making Change might be seen as a reading of her film which both sets up the ground and inaugurates the possibility of thinking about the complexities of blackness in Canada. Making Change is an eighteen-minute cinematic "riffology" and "sound sculpture" (Troupe, 87) that was released the same year as Rude and Soul Survivor. Making Change is a marked departure for black Canadian film that has seen little discussion, even in the context of the minuscule attention that black film receives. Leslie Sanders's "Anti/Modern Spaces: African

Black Like Who?—151 Canadians in Nova Scotia" is the only essay which discusses the film and places its theme within the framework for thinking about modern Canadian spaces and the discourses of blackness. The film's cinematic textuality and texture exist somewhere between the modern and die postmodern as the filmmaker works both sites/cites to narrate a tale of the black Canadian "distilled history of memory." (Troupe, 90) Making Change is contradictorily a silent film, because an original jazz score accompanies it and works as the speaking voice of the actors. The opening scene of the film features a black woman sitting (presumably the filmmaker), her back to the viewing audience, typing the words "Making Change 1936 Donkin, Nova Scotia," on a laptop computer. This scene cuts to a man (Conrad Coates) walking on a rural road wearing overalls and carrying a lunch pail. The piano is dominant among the instruments and a plodding rhythm is being played. The rural surroundings are lush, bright and green, and the man picks wild flowers before disappearing from the frame. When he next reappears, along with a faint melody, he has entered a small house and is seen presenting the flowers to his wife (Kala Perrin). The flowers are then carefully arranged in a vase on the dining table. The scene is in black and white and so is the remainder of the film, except for the last two minutes which return to colour. These shifts between colour and black and white, silent movies, and the cinematic representation of jazz, is for me the filmmaker's attempt to calibanize the various ways in which representations of black people have been organized and regulated in the history of the cinematic text, especially cinematic texts that work with jazz. Philips's Making Change represents a new direction for black Canadian cinema because it skillfully and thoughtfully plays with the tensions of black Canadian representation while it simultaneously gestures to the interraciality of black Canadian historicity. The film is also a departure because it is not the kind of neo-realist narrative which seeks to document the realities of being black in a racist country. Despite seeming fictive, the film is autobiographical.-* In fact, the way in which it is positioned circumscribes any discussion of racism with the traces and absences that the filmmaker leaves us to ponder, and not by explicit commentary in the film. What is also important about the film is the way in which it is both historical and contemporary. Making Change is both a film about black Canadian discontinuous histories and simultaneously a rendition of what those histories mean for the present. Philips's use of diasporic aesthetics are both cinematically conversant with a catalogue

152 — Rinaldo Walcott and archive of diasporic and Hollywood filmmaking and intricately thought through in relation to her narrative. Involved in representing home and its troubles, Making Change is a film concerned with what Quincy Troupe would call the "music of geography & place," (98) where black Canadians are cemented to the nation. The man, we learn, is a miner; and immediately images of death in the belly of the earth come to mind, speaking to the centrality of belonging in profound ways. This revelation makes black Canadians central to both the material and psychic structures of the nation, in spite of, and despite, official national denial. But mining in the film also announces a plethora of issues, ones that have been relatively unexamined by black Canadian filmmakers. (Much of what I say here should be qualified by the work of black Canadian documentary filmmakers who have dedicated their time-to uncovering the hidden histories of pre-modern and modern black life in Canada.) The cinematic rendering of a black Canadian modernity is evident. The camera, for example, lingers over the evidence of electricity, indoor plumbing, a sewing machine, photographs, a piano and a clock. For the first time in recent memory, a cinematic black Canadian age of mechanical reproduction is authored. The last scenes of the film show the man playing his clarinet: he's looking out over a coastal cliff, blowing a happy melody.

VI The music of Making Change was composed by Michael Stuart (clarinet), Jonathan Goldsmith (piano) and David Nichol (guitar). They also play on the film's soundtrack. The man in the firm is a clarinet player and composer who clearly desires to be a full-time musician. Music is, therefore, a central component of Making Change. As Arthur Knight would put it, the "sight of music" (12) is everywhere. This visualizing of music that Philips takes on is important for a number of reasons. One might be her engagement with a cinematic re-presentation of jazz. Further, music remains one of the most complex manifestations of diasporic aesthetic practices and, contrary to Michelle Wallace's claims concerning the lack of the visual in black cultures, it is a highly visible component of black cultures.^ Finally, the way in which Philips renders the role that women played in the support of male jazz musicians is notable. Here she questions the "macho" narratives of jazz as being totally outside the realm of domesticity.

Black Like Who? — 153 Let me begin with the last reason first. Once the man is at home, most of his time is spent composing music and playing. Moving between the piano, notation sheets and the clarinet, the man tries to compose within the confines of the home. Immediately, Philips's place within the context of films concerning jazz becomes a signifying gesture. Jazz, like all art, is a studied practice, contrary to Theodore Adorno's ill-informed claims concerning the genre.' Jazz is not merely a spontaneous eruption from the black body. In fact, the man must negotiate the time and space needed for the act of creation between his small daughter's (Stephanie Brent) desire to play, and later his wife's sexual and sensual advances, which he gives into. In this section of the film the music is light, soft and mellow. Making Change makes a strong case for uncovering the roles that domestic life and the accoutrements of modernity, including what the discourse of the housewife and black participation in that discourse, meant for the development of jazz as an art. But the domesticity of the film also allows the audience to engage more closely with the man's desire to be a musician and to have some insight into his material and interior life. Shots of him running out of the house on more than one occasion, apparently late for work, contextualize his desire. In a dream the man has after being given a poster by another man (Christian Service) driving a 1938 Dodge Brothers, he imagines himself playing his music in a club. He is dressed in a white tuxedo: the audience loves his music and applauds him wildly. His dream is countered by his wife's, who, on seeing the poster imagines herself as a Lady Day (Billie Lloliday) lookalike complete with gardenia. In her dream there are no adoring crowds. Their dreams are important because they make interior desires evident. Her dream also pushes the ways in which Philips's diasporic aesthetics mark die film. Lady Day is clearly positioned as more than American—Lady Day becomes a diasporic icon recognizable and claimed by all who dare to do so. The absence of adoring crowds is therefore made ironic. In another dream, the man has a vision of a pickaxe crashing into his table. After this dream he trashes the room where he composes. This dream propels him to act, and to attempt to achieve his desire. Awaking on the table the next day, he carefully packs his music and clarinet, and takes them to work in the mine where he plays as his co-workers, mainly white men, look on. One white miner even dances a jig. This makes the interraciality of jazz explicit and at the same time gestures to the racism

154 — Rinaldo Walcott

of the Canadian mining industry. Miners were offered relatively well-paying jobs, but few went to blacks. The music at this point becomes much more upbeat and liberating. Towards the end of the film the suggestion seems to be that the man has given up working in the mine. He is shown strolling on a rural road, decked out in a hip urban style, with clarinet case, going somewhere. It looks like he is headed to a jam session. A melodious clarinet accompanies him. Here, the music and the man's actions are in harmony. The use of music as voice in the film raises the question of visuality. Michelle Wallace's claims concerning the privileging of music in black diasporic cultures vis-a-vis the visual are questioned by Making Change. The film clearly posits music as visual and the integration of music into the film as voice and subject matter alerts us to ways in which music brings with it a style, a language and a syntax that demand visuality. Making Change occupies a space that allows music to be one method for uncovering and opening up avenues for filling what Wallace calls "a visual void in black culture." (1992, 344) The sight of music in the film is both texture and textuality, which means the music is seen/scene. Lastly, Making Change is in dialogue with a body of jazz films from Cabin in the Sky (1944) to 1996's Kansas City (made after Making Change). Jazz films like Bird, Round Midnight, Mo' Better Blues and many others have, to varying degrees, represented jazz as an art without breaking with stereotypes concerning black cinematic representations and general stereotypes concerning black expressive cultures. In Making Change there are no tensions between the sacred and secular; there is no sense of jazz as being decadent; drugs and alcohol are not a part of the man's on-screen life; he is not abusive to his wife and children. In fact, in one scene accompanied by upbeat tempos, the man is seen flying a kite with his daughter and later rolling in the grass with her. Making Change engages with a history of cinematic representations of jazz and reworks those representations in a fashion that casts aside the mystery and intrigue usually attendant in these films. The most important reworking in the film is the way in which the clarinet represents what Krin Gabbard, writing on representations of the trumpet in jazz films, calls a "post-phallic" (106) moment. The man's clarinet is not an extension of his life, it's a part of his life. The film is therefore not only richly intertextual, it's also a riffology, because of its intertextuality. Frederick Gaber has pointed out that jazz "is not solely immediate because it also owns a richly textured intertextual life, a life

Black Like Who? — 255 that, by any definition, finds itself at every point immersed in history." (91-92) Gaber's comments are important because they point to the ways in which Making Change moves between various significations which leave numerous evidences for the audience to work with. The film's intertextuality and texture speak to the histories it reworks and works over. The film re-presents cinematic jazz history as it immerses itself in black Canadian history and diasporic desire, pleasures, memories and disappointments. All these things are accomplished with subtlety and nuance, by worrying and troubling the lines of the (postmodern nation. The film is a doubled look at cinematic histories and national stories of belonging, and it repositions those histories and stories in a fashion not consumed by positive images but rather in a fashion that seeks to tentatively arrive at a grammar for thinking blackness in Canada.

VII The last scene takes the filmmaker and audience into what Albert Murray might call the blues territory, because Philips has the man play an upbeat, joyous tempo while walking towards a mountaintop or cliff which clearly looks out to the ocean. Donkin, Nova Scotia, the locale for the film, is a rural mining town on the Cape Breton coast. The absence of water, a symbol that has come to mark much aesthetically challenging black diasporic cinematic work (i.e. Isaac Julien's Territories, Reece Auguiste's Twilight City) is reworked by Philips. She does not place water and its symbolic importance for diasporic blacks, however, on the screen—its importance is gestured to in other ways. There is an early frame of the man walking along the coast. The look or gaze out into the ocean is rather paradoxical because of the firmness with which the man is situated within the nation, on its soil. This native son's look or gaze outside is not representative of a desire to leave, like the maroons who were shipped to Africa via Nova Scotia, or the black Nova Scotians who returned to Africa, to settle in Sierra Leone. The gaze could well be a symbolic welcoming of all the black migrants who will arrive in future years. The gaze or look is a return of sorts to the past and at the same time a gesture to the present-future. It is a return in the form of the narrative of the film which documents a tiny aspect of black Canadian history. But this return is not stuck in the past. In fact, this return to the past is very much about the present-future. The opening shot, in colour, of a black woman writing "1936 Donkin Nova Scotia," coupled with the closing

156 — RmaldoW$lcott shot, also in colour, of the man joyously playing his clarinet, evokes a moment that speaks to the way in which the writer at the laptop is the (postmodern daughter who was once playful with her creative father as he attempted to compose music. Philips then is the symbolic and actual benefactor of the survival, resiliency and creativity of a grammar of blackness that is clearly aware of the past, the present-future and the tensions necessary for keeping them in play. Making Change, in its title and its cinematic site of music, its play with history and memory, and its locating of a black Canadian cinematic (post)modernity, requires us to make change in terms of how we construct cinematic representations of blackness in Canada. Philips's efforts take us down a long road that articulates a tentative and contingent grammar with its own Canadian syntaxes for black.

VIII The project for black Canadian artists and critics is to articulate a grammar of black that is located within Canada's various regions, both urban and rural. The invention of a grammar for black in Canada that is aware of historical narrative and plays with that narrative is crucial in the struggle against erasure. A grammar for black needs to occupy a number of different kinds of positions, social and cultural identities, and political utterances. The articulation of a grammar for black, and ensuing contestations over it, is what will continue to imbibe the vital cultures of black Canadians with a continued dynamism. Critique, dialogues and conversations can move beyond the discourse of celebration to begin to account for the vitality of artistic expression, national and outer-national desires and disappointments, and a critical culture that is both honest and enabling. A grammar for black will take black Canadian cultures beyond the narrow and dreary confines of an anti-racism discourse, and allow us to concentrate on the various black selves in a fashion which enhances lives lived far beyond the clutches of racism. A grammar for black will cement blackness to the nation and reconfigure the nation for the better.

Notes

Introduction to Second Edition: Still Writing Blackness 1 Ted Whittaker, "In-between Language," Books in Canada, September 1998. ^ Examples of Clarke's reviews include "We need this book but better" in the Globe and Mail and "African-Canadian authors hit and miss literary spot" in the Halifax Chronicle-Herald. * George Elliott Clarke, "Honouring African-Canadian Geography," Border/lines. 4 These desires are evident especially in "Treason of the Black Intellectuals," http://www.arts.mcgill.ca/programs/misc/clarke.htm; "Contesting a Model Blackness: A Meditation on African-Canadian African Americanism, or the Structures of African Canadianite," Essays on Canadian Writing; "Clarke vs. Clarke: Tory Elitism in Austin Clarke's Short Fiction," Westcoast Line; ""Harris, Philip and Brand: Three Authors in Search of Literate Criticism," Journal of Canadian Studies; "White Like Canada," Transition: An International Review. $ In particular see my discussion of early black Canadian culture in chapters one and nine. I believe these to be more than adequate attempts to think the old and the recent together and to invent conversations that bring them into relation. 6 Kobena Mercer, "Ethnicity and Internationality: New British Art and Diaspora-Based Blackness," Third Text. 7 Both Dionne Brand in the essay "Bathurst," in Bread Out of Stone: Recollections on Sex, Recognitions, Race, Dreaming and Politics and Althea Prince, in Being Black, provide ample evidence of the strong relationship between 1960s black Caribbean immigrants and the earlier black community they found upon arrival in Toronto.

158—Rinaldo Walcott ° See Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak, "Scattered Speculations on the Question of Culture Studies," Outside in the Teaching Machine. 9 For a critique of Canadian multiculturalism and attempts to incorporate blackness into it see chapter eight. 1° On this important distinction, see Charles Taylor and Himani Bannerji, The Dark Side of the Nation: Essays on Multiculturalism, Nationalism and Gender and Eva Mackey, The House of Difference: Cultural Politics and National Identity in Canada. 11 See Jean-Luc Nancy, The Inoperative Community. 12 In "Treason of the Black Intellectuals," Clarke marks out for critique Andre Alexis, Djanet Sears, Dionne Brand and Cecil Foster. Of these writers and their nationalist articulation concerning blackness, Clark writes: "This is treason, especially if we apply the severe standards, the exacting Platonist measure of Benda, to Philip, Brand, Foster and several other African-Canadian writers."

Chapter 1 "Going to the North" 1 By black Canadas I mean to signal the multiplicities of black peoples in the geographic area called Canada and to attend to the tensions of their differences. I assert the importance of this multiplicity fully aware of the ways in which nation-state policies attempt to render those differences invisible through a plethora of homogenizing practices. Yet this notion of Canadas points to the ability of people to continue to exert some measure of self-definition in the context of the nation-state. 2 Paul Gilroy has already been called to task for the masculinist metaphor of the ship by Robert Reid-Pharr, and by Norval Edwards for routes not taken. I agree with both Reid-Pharr and Edwards. Instead, I want to intervene in the cultural politics of ethnic absolutism or discreet social identities which are currently being used to reorganize the academy, especially when the talismanic word "diaspora" is appropriated and manipulated by the context of national desire. 3 For discussions of Delany's immigrationist tendencies, see the Miller introduction to Blake; also Gilroy, The Black Atlantic, chapter one. 4 Diawara in "Black Studies, Cultural Studies" and Baker in Black Studies, Rap and the Academy offer differing but complementary discussions of the relationship between black studies and black cultural studies. Their arguments could be construed as moving away from the centrality of

Black Like Who? —159 black studies to black cultural studies. -> On the role of black women in Chatham see Peggy Bristow, "'Whatever you raise in the ground you can sell it in Chatham': Black women in Buxton and Chatham, 1850-65" in We're Rooted Here and They Can't Pull Us Up'. 6 For more on Delany and women see Ripley, ed., The Black Abolitionist Papers, in particular Delany's letter to Mary Ann Shadd about help in raising funds to buy some people out of slavery. 7 See Mannette, Setting the Record Straight. 8 This facility is located in North York, which before its amalgamation into Toronto, was the city with Canada's largest black population. See Sanders, "American Script, Canadian Realities: Toronto's Showboat." For further discussions of blackness, the Canadian nation-state, public institutions and public space see Eva Mackey, "Postmodernism and Cultural Politics in a Multicultural Nation: Contests over Truth in the Into the Fleart of Africa Controversy" and Walcott, "Lament for a Nation: The Racial Geography of 'The OH! Canada Project.'" 9 The forces opposing the staging of Showboat brought in American John Henrik Clarke to counter die effects of the Gates lecture. I understand their practice as complicit with the notion that African-American commentary about the musical is the important and authentic position. I think the decision to bring in an American impeded the opposition's case as opposed to strengthening it or effectively countering Gates. This is one of those instances where the limits and dangers of outer-national and transnational political identifications and actions are made evident—the disciplinary powers of the nation-state still remain intact for "citizens" who must be discredited. 1° An example of rendering diaspora powerless occurred in Cudjoe's negative review of the work of M. Nourbese Philip. While I agree with some of his criticisms re: Philip's last two collections of essays, his attack remains suspect. Let me elaborate. What is at stake in Cudjoe's review? What might be possible if he could acknowledge, or at least recognize the efficacy of local politics, polemics and interventions? And finally, what might be useful about understanding what I shall call both the place and space of blackness in Canada? Would it help to make sense of Philip's local interventions? Cudjoe argues that Philip makes crude generalizations and correlations between art (the musical Showboat) and racism, which in turn is evidence of her inability to understand the dynamics of art and racism. What Cudjoe appears incapable of doing is addressing the

160 — Rinaldo Walcott specificities of localized black Canadian politics, because his knowledge of both art and racism in Canada seems rather shallow. Instead, he reads Philip's intervention through the lens of the United States. * 1 These questions are informed by Carby's Reconstructing Womanhood, in particular the tough questions she poses for (black) feminism. She writes: "What I want to advocate is that black feminist criticism be regarded critically as a problem, not a solution, as a sign that should be interrogated, a locus of contradictions" (15, emphasis added) I too believe that black studies and black diasporic theorizing need to be considered signs of, and a locus for, interrogation. 12 While I think that it is historically correct and politically astute to argue for The Souls of Black Folk as the founding text of black studies and black cultural studies, the conceptual question of genealogical positioning is never complete. How do we place Marcus Garvey's equally important insights into this debate (surely DuBois had to write against some of them)? C.L.R. James should also be accounted for, while Stokely Carmichael (Kwame Ture), and his involvement in the civil rights and black power era, points to the place of the Caribbean in the seminal battles of black studies. These issues are important because they illustrate the antinomies of diasporic theorizing. ^ See for example Stella Algoo-Baksh's biography of Austin Clarke, in particular the chapter "Into Academia," for the role that Clarke played in black studies programs and politics from the late 1960s to the 1970s at Yale, Brandeis, Duke and the University of Texas at Austin. This is just one peregrination that might open up other ways of thinking through black studies and the flight to black cultural studies by some scholars. 14 See for example Malcolm Gladwell, "Black Like Them," in die Blacks in America special issue of The New Yorker. Gladwell is a Canadian by birth. 15 It is important to note that the Canadian relay team all had roots/routes to many places, and Canada was only one among a number of others—the Caribbean played a prominent role in the team's biographies. Their own tangential relationship to the Canadian nation-state was made evident when a national debate ensued because Donovan Bailey was quoted as stating that little difference existed between the United States and Canada when it came to the practice of racism. 1° Bailey's comments were reported in the Globe and Mail, September 19, 1996. .Also see Leavy, "Blacks and The Biggest Olympics" in Ebony for a pictorial essay demonstrating the skillful burial of the black Canadian

Black Like Who? —161 presence and accomplishments. Bailey's photo comes near the end, while Johnson's photo opens the series; the Canadian relay team is not pictured at all. ^ See Tricia Rose, Black Noise: Rap Music and Black Culture in Contemporary America, in which she uses the talisman "Afrodiasporic" to signal the borrowing and exchanges of rap music but does not follow up the implications of diaspora in her discussion. Instead she reads rap entirely within the discourse of a nation—the United States. For a counter to Rose, see Juan Flores's "Puerto Rican and Proud, Boyee!: Rap Roots and Amnesia" where he argues for reading Puerto Rican contributions to hip-hop histories; and George Lipsitz in Dangerous Crossroads for a transnational and multicultural reading of rap and other dissident popular musical genres.

Chapter 2 "A Tough Geography" 1 This essay is an amalgam of ideas which I believe need to be given more attention in approaches to black Canadian literature. In many instances scholars writing on black Canadian literature have been reluctant to address what the literature means for "here" and instead read the works entirely within an outsider discourse. I wish to thank Leslie Sanders for her helpful suggestions. 2 See Walcott, "Lament for a Nation: The Racial Geography of'The Oh! Canada Project.'" 3 Since the publication of the first edition of this book, work by Almonte on Mary Shadd and Thomas Smallwood in Ontario, and Compton on early British Columbia black writing has addressed this imbalance. 4 Foster also tackles the issue of reunification and its not so pleasant side in Sleep On Beloved, but I believe that a fundamental difference exists in the way Brand covers this painful territory by extricating it from the realm of the individual to address questions of collective responsibility.

Chapter 3 Desiring to Belong? 1

See E. Said, The World, the Text and the Critic, especially page 34. 2 See H. Foster, "(Post)Modern Polemics," Recordings: Art Spectacle, Cultural Politics.

162 — Rinaldo Wakott * For a discussion of black women's labour in Canada see Silvera, Silence. 4 This idea is developed in Dionne Brand's introduction to No Burden to Carry. ^ The question of what the nation is capable of including is dealt with by Rukszto. 6 Morrison uses these phrases in "The Site of Memory." 7 I am indebted to Agamben for my understanding of singularity. ° This idea is developed by Nancy. 9 Yoyo and da Costa, both of African origin, embody the continuity of black migration to Canada, albeit under different circumstances. 10 This phrase is employed by Morrison in Playing in the Dark.

Chapter 4 "No Language Is Neutral" * For a discussion of the process of verbing see N. Mackey, "Other: From Noun, to Verb." 2 These accusations are dismissed by Gates in "Introduction: Writing 'Race' and the Difference it Makes," and Walcott in "'Out of the Kumbla': Toni Morrison's Jazz and Pedagogical Answer ability." ' Examples of this type of work include Bannerji, "The Poetry of Dionne Brand"; Goddard, "Marlene Nourbese Philip's Hyphenated Tongue or Writing the Caribbean Demotic between Africa and Arctic"; Sarbadhikary, "Weaving a 'Multicoloured Quilt': Marlene Nourbese Philip's Vision of Change" and Case, "Poetic Discourse in Babylon: The Poetry of Dionne Brand." 4 In Singing the Master: The Emergence of African-American Culture in the Plantation South, Abrahams addresses the various ways in which slaves in the Americas invented identities and discarded them as forms of resistance and survival in plantation societies. -* In both Philip's and Brand's poetry photography is central to at least one poem. But what is even more interesting is how they use photography to jog the memory and how they read photographs as a woman's way of conveying information in tension with the writing of women's personal and collective histories. See the poems "The Catechist" by Philip and "Blues Spiritual for Mammy Prater" by Brand. 6 On new histories see Godard, "Marlene Nourbese Philip's Hyphenated Tongue or Writing the Caribbean Demotic between Africa and Arctic." ' See Nancy's The Inoperative Community for a discussion of "community

Black Like Who? — 163 as sacred." ^ Cooper, in '"Something Ancestral Recaptured': Spirit Possession as Trope in Selected Feminist Fictions of the African Diaspora" and Foucault, in Power/Knowledge: Selected Interviews 6" Other Writings 19721977, discuss formerly discredited and subjugated subjectivities. 9 In her catalogue essay, "Mistaken Identities," Solomon-Godeau argues that the strategies used by marginalized artists do not merely invert and reverse, they shift and alter the ways of knowing and making sense and in many cases unsettle presumptions concerning identities leading to mistaken identities. I think her ideas are useful for thinking about Philip's and Brand's poetic works. 10 Bakhtin posits this theor in Speech Genres & Other Late Essays. 11 See Smitherman, Talkin and Testifyin: The Language of Black America. In History of the Voice: The Development of Nation Language in Anglophone Caribbean Poetry, Brathwaite also discusses the relationship between language and oppression. 12 Good examples of this subversion exist in the recorded music/poetry and books of Lillian Allen, Ahdri Zhina Mandiela and Clifton Joseph. 13 In "Managing the Other" Fusco argues that these postmodern practices were the only way that black people could survive the atrocities of colonialism. Hybridity, in this sense, becomes a useful and important part of resistance. Contemporary valorization of these practices often pays little attention to colonized histories, the long and varied use of bricolage, indirection, reversal and so on, and thus many 'post-colonial' subjects remain skeptical of postmodernist discourse. 14 N. Mackey uses the term calibanization, drawing on Brathwaite's Mother Poem. 15 On blackness as absented presence, see Durham, "Cowboys and..." and Morrison, Playing in the Dark: Whiteness and the Literary Imagination. 1° In the Introduction to Black Women, Writing and Identity, Boyce-Davies plots the travels of her mother as a symbolic, actual and metaphorical indication of a travelling history/memory and fluid community. What Boyce-Davies uses her mother's travels to demonstrate is the ways in which crossing borders for black migratory subjects is always an act that invokes community through various moments of identification. 17 For a reading of Caribbean poetry that takes history and place into careful consideration, as well as language and the rewriting of dominant ways of knowing, see J.E. Chamberlin, Come Back to Me My Language: Poetry and the West Indies.

164 — Rinaldo Walcott 1° See Brathwaite's "The African Presence in Caribbean Literature" in Roots. Here Brathwaite provides a reading of Paule Marshall's Praisesong for the Widow, which he argues is a text of reconnection.

Chapter 5 The Politics of Third Cinema in Canada * This idea is the basis of Snead's White Screens, Black Images: Hollywood from the Dark Side. 2 I revisit this idea in chapter six. ' See Diawara, Black American Cinema.

Chapter 6 Black Subjectivities 1

See Philip, "How White is Your White?: On the Lack of Colour in the Bernardo/Homolka Affair." 2 Victims of police shootings include Sophia Cook (paralyzed), Michael Wade Lawson, Royan Bagnaut, Albert Johnson, Buddy Evans, Michael Sargeant, Raymond Lawrence, Johnathan Howell and Tommy Barnett. ^ A similar point about the American context has been made by Diawara in "Black American Cinema: The New Realism." 4 In "A Cinema of Duty: The Films of Jennifer Hodge De Silva," Bailey argues that black Canadian cinema is characterized by the documentary influences of the National Film Board and state funding. De Silva's films were all documentaries with some intent of rewriting stereotypes or representing the authentic black person in Canada. While Williams's and Virgo's films are not documentaries the underlying premises draw on a realist narrative of what it might mean to be black in Canada. 5 Williams made one other short film prior to his feature called Variation on a Key 2 Life (30 min.). Virgo made two short films, Small Dick Fleshy Ass Thing and Save My Lost Nigga' Soul. ° In '"Voyage Through the Multiverse': Contested Canadian Identities," I argue that multicultural policy in Canada works to simultaneously narrate how blackness might be imagined as Canadian and to render blackness outside the nation through the discourse of heritage. 7 Both Marc Glassman and Angela Baldassarre use this term in their Take One reviews.

Black Like Who? —165 ° For more on Esu see Gates Jr. The Signifying Monkey. " For Diawara, identity is produced performatively through complex and shifting identifications that are made though the complex process of how we respond individually and collectively to various discourses. 10 A similar theme exists in Variation when Cherry O'Baby decides to leave the protagonist Skill Blackstock. 11 See M. Nourbese Philip, "Introduction" and "The 'Multicultural' Whitewash: Racism in the Ontario Art Funding System" in Frontiers: Essays and Writings on Racism and Culture.

Chapter 7 "Keep on Movin'" * In "Cultural Studies and Ethnic Absolutism" Gilroy first used the term black as a way of making sense of black cultural and political exchanges and to resist ethnic absolutist claims concerning black intellectual contributions. In Black Atlantic: Modernity and Double Consciousness he conceptually and theoretically develops the black Atlantic as an expansive space that traverses time, history, memory and the workings of black, and in particular black metropolitan communities' cultural practices. I use the term after Gilroy to reference the importance of black diasporic cultures, practices of exchange and dialogues, and how those patterns might structure local politics and trans-national politics. I do not use black Atlantic as a way to essentialize blackness across space and time. 2 In "The African Presence in Caribbean Literature," Brathwaite demonstrates through a reading of Paule Marshall's Praisesong for the Widow that African elements in Caribbean literature are important moments of not only acknowledgement of an African past but of a desire and a practice of what he calls reconnection. I think that Brathwaite's insight can be usefully extended to other syncretic, artistic 'new world' black practices like film, fine art, dance and music. ^ Clearly, Palestinian claims to parts of Israeli territory complicate the question of Israel as a nation-state. However, without denying that important history, I am attempting to gesture to the fluidity of the origins of the Israeli nation-state and to address some of the contemporary problems that have accompanied claims to the nation-state outside of Palestinian demands. 4 I borrow this term from Bhabha. ^ See Chatterjee.

166 — Rinaldo Walcott " I borrow this term from Roxana Ng's "Multiculturalism as Ideology: A Textual Accomplishment." ' Neil Bisoondath's Selling Illusions: The Cult of Multiculturalism in Canada is the Canadian equivalent to the American conservative cultural agenda. While Bissoondath's critique of multiculturalism is generally warranted, he too is tied to notions of Canada and thus nation as fundamentally dualistic. He can perceive of no way beyond the dichotomous bind other than to suggest taking on either the "culture" of Quebec or Anglo Canadians. He believes the former has a more secure sense of self and is thus exemplary. His approach harkens back to the modernist nation-state narrative of one unified people when he argues that only Quebecers know their culture and thus they should be the model that is used to renew Canada as a viable nation-state. Such assertions seem to advocate a cultural imperialism of the worst kind, one which has been generally applauded by the mainstream media. ^ This segment aired on the local Toronto CBC Evening News in 1994. 9 For an extensive discussion of these institutions see M. Nourbese Philip, "The 'Multicultural' Whitewash: Racism in Ontario's Art Funding System," in Frontiers. 10 I use "signifying" here in the way that H.L. Gates Jr., in The Signifying Monkey, uses it: to denote the African-American practice or black diasporic practices of double-voicing, revision of dominant meanings, and other ways of inverting meaning so as to not only act as a form of resistance but also to pass on information that only those intimate with the culture or those who are subtle cultural readers might understand. 1 1 On the circularity of black cultural expression, see Snead, "Repetition as a Figure of Black Culture." 12 See Morrison, Playing in the Dark. 13 In Black Women, Writing and Identity: Migrations of the Subject, Boyce-Davies engages in a theoretical discussion of the "elsewhereness" of diasporic sensibilities as important to black women's writing and black cultural politics in general. 14 In the preface to her selected poems, Women Do This Everyday, Allen writes of having to "finalize" poems for the page, poems she had never thought of as final. The process of finalization evokes the tensions between the oral and the written and the performativity of both in her work. 15 This project of reconstruction is evident in Dionne Brand's numerous collections of poetry; in particular No Language is Neutral and Winter

Black Like Who? — 167 Epigrams 6" Epigrams To Ernesto Cardenal In Defence of Claudia. On Maestro Fresh-Wes's most recent album, his hypercommentary on Canada on the track titled "Certs Wid Out Da Retsyn," might be read as Canada's attempt to deny colour at its centre. On their first album, And Now the Legacy Begins, the Dream Warriors have a track tided "Ludi" in which they name almost every Caribbean island as well as Canadian localities as an indication of who and what they are. 1" Here I want to suggest that some articulations of Afrocentrism produce the pastoral romantic Africa or the Africa of kings and queens; some of the work that I am discussing is not immune from such discourses but I have focused on the fluid tracks as a way of demonstrating what I believe to be the undeniable relations of diasporic groups. ^ For background information on the Somalis in Toronto see Sharrif, "Highrise Divide" and "Somali dust-up with guards sparks riot." A documentary on the Dixon Road controversy aired on The Journal on the CBC. Some of my information is based on that documentary. 1° In "Somalia's Welfare Warlords," for example, Saenger is at great pains to point out how widespread welfare fraud is among Somalis but is only able to offer evidence of two convictions. Saenger then proceeds to implicate Nigerian immigrants in past welfare fraud but produces no evidence. Much of the article is concerned with locating exactly where Somalis are living in Canada, almost as if to suggest that they need not be here at all. 19 I use "blackening" here to point to a practice of racialization. Important, however, are the ways in which that process might be performed by those who are at once named as black and at the same time use it as the basis of their counterhegemonic discourse. In Bodies that Matter, Butler suggests that the way in which performativiry works is that it puts a discourse into practice. Thus blackness/black as categories only become intelligible when the discourses that constitute diem are acted out eitiier as relations of subordination or as practices of (re)fashioning die self. 20 The epistemology of racism runs deep in the battle. The introduction of dogs into the picture draws heavily on racialized imagery of black peoples' supposed fear of dogs. Islamic practices concerning dogs, and in particular dog bites, can cause great trauma for any "good" practicing Muslim, and this complicates things further. The owners insist on employing guards with dogs despite a task force report recommendation that suggested the guard force itself was unnecessary since no major crime problem exists. In fact, crime apparently decreased when the

168 — Rinaldo Walcott Somalis arrived. In the most recent battle, the underlying sexual stereotype of agressive black males has surfaced: white neighbours claim that they cannot send their daughters for groceries because "youth" (read black males) are hanging around outside the store. 2! In the CBC documentary mentioned in note 16 the camera idles for quite some time on the T-shirt of one outspoken youth. The significance of his T-shirt is that the words "Malcolm X" adorn the front.

Chapter o After Origins 1

Susan Oh, "Canada's Queen of R&B," Maclean's, July 19, 1999. 2 In this essay I move back and forth between the terms "black popular culture" and "Caribbean popular culture." While I am fully aware of the multicultural nature of the Caribbean region in Canada as I suggest later in this essay, black and Caribbean collapse into each other. While I am not supporting this conceptual problem I will nonetheles shift back and forth to highlight what I believe to be a major tension in thinking about how black/Caribbean people can belong to Canada. In this instance the naming here is not in accord with the nation-state's collapse of black/Caribbean but rather with my attempt to further unsettle exactly who die subject of black/Caribbean Canadian citizenry might be. 3 For example, by D.H. Flaherty and F.E. Manning, eds., in The Beaver Bites Back: American Popular Culture in Canada. 4 See David Scott, Refashioning Futures: Criticism after Postcolonidity. 5 See E. Mackey and Rukszto. 6 Such an understanding is evidenced in A. Gallauger, "Constructing Caribbean Culture in Toronto: The Representation of Caribana," in The Reordering of Culture: Latin America, The Caribbean and Canada, In the Hood; C. Foster and C. Schwarz, Caribana the Greatest Celebration; M. Nourbese Philip, "African Roots and Continuities: Race, Space and the Poetics of Moving," in A Genealogy of Resistance and Other Essays; and R. Espinet, "Caribana: A Diasporic Dub." 7 On Hogan's Alley see Peter Hudson, "Disappearing Histories of the Black Pacific: Contemporary Black Art in Vancouver." ° This phrase comes from Wilson Harris's essay "In the Name of Liberty." " I am thinking of the work of anthropologists and sociologists like Frances Henry, Agnes Calliste, George Dei, Carl James and Patrick

Black Like Who? — 169 Solomon, all of whom have undertaken projects that pinpoint the ways in which racism impacts the lives of Black Canadians. Despite my critique of such socio-logic, these projects are important projects. What is troubling is that socio-logic tends to find itself replayed in all manner of cultural analyses when it is sometimes quite inappropriate. Black life in Canada has mainly found itself in the academy through a social science lens, something which is quickly beginning to change.

Chapter 9 Scattered Speculations on Canadian Blackness 1

See Alexis, "Borrowed Blackness." 2 See Sanders, "American Script, Canadian Realities: Toronto's Showboat." ^ In "Anti/Modern Spaces: African Canadians in Nova Scotia," Sanders discusses the autobiographical aspects of Philips' film. 4 See Michelle Wallace, "Afterword: 'Why Are There No Great Black Artists?' The Problem of Visuality in African-American Culture" and "Modernism, Postmodernism and the Problem of the Visual in AfroAmerican Culture." 5 See Theodor Adorno, "Perrenial Fashion-Jazz." " This point is made by Elsa Barkley Brown in "Negotiating and Transforming the Public Sphere: African-American Political Life in the Transition from Slavery to Freedom."

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178 — Rinaldo Walcott Poetics of Place. London: Verso, 1994. Lubiano, W. "Mapping the Interstices Between Afro-American Cultural Discourse and Cultural Studies: A Prolegomenon." Callaloo, Vol.19, No.l (1996): 68-77. Mackey, E. "Postmodernism and Cultural Politics in a Multicultural Nation: Contests over Truth in the Into the Heart of Africa Controversy." Public Culture Vol.7, No.2 (Winter, 1995): 403-431. Mackey, N. "Other: From Noun to Verb." Jazz Among the Discourses. Ed. K. Gabbard. Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 1995. Mandiela, A. "Special Rikwes." Toronto: Sister Vision Press, 1985. Mannete, J. Setting The Record Straight: The Experiences of Black People in Nova Scotia, 1180-1900. Masters Thesis. Carleton University, 1983. McTair, R. ed. The Black Experience in the White Mind: Mediations on a Persistent Discourse. Toronto: PP, 1995. Mercer, K. "Ethnicity and Internationality: New British Art and Diaspora-Based Blackness." Third Text. 49, 51-62. Moodie, A. Riot. Winnipeg: Scirocco Drama, 1997. Morrison, T. Beloved. New York: Plume, 1988. . "The Site of Memory." Out There: Marginalization and Contemporary Cultures, R. Ferguson et al, eds. New York: New Museum of Contemporary Art and MIT Press, 1990, 299-305. ~. Playing in the Dark: Whiteness and the Literary Imagination. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1992. Murray, A. The Blue Devils ofNada. New York: Pantheon, 1996. Nancy, J. The Inoperative Community. Trans. P. Connor, L. Garbus, M. Holland and S. Sawhney. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1991. Nazareth, E. "Training Use of Eoyz." Now Magazine. August 15-21, 1994, 1. Ng, R. "Multiculturalism as Ideology: A Textual Accomplishment." Paper presented at the 91st Annual Meeting of the American Anthropological Association, San Francisco, CA, 1992. Parker, A. and E.K. Sedgwick, "Introduction: Performativity and Performance." Performativity and Performance. Ed. A. Parker and E.K. Sedgwick. New York: Routledge, 1995. Philip, M.N. She Tries Her Tongue, Her Silence Softly Breaks. Charlottetown, PE: Ragweed Press, 1989. . Frontiers: Essays and Writings on Racism and Culture. Stratford, ON: The Mercury Press, 1992. . "How White is Your White?: On The Lack of Colour in the

Black Like Who? — 179 Bernardo/Homolka Affair." Border/lines. 38/39, 6-13. -. A Genealog)' of Resistance. Toronto: The Mercury Press, 1997. Planter, N. "Martin R. Delany: Elitism and Black Nationalism." Black Leaders of the Nineteenth Century. Ed. L. Litwack and A. Meier. Urbana, IL: University of Illinois Press, 1988. Prince, A. Being Black. Toronto: Insomniac Press, 2001. Reed, I. Flight to Canada. New York: Athenuem, 1989. Reid-Pharr, R.F. "Engendering the Black Atlantic." Found Object, Issue 4, (Fall, 1994): 11-16. . "Violent Ambiguity: Martin Delany, Bourgeois Sadomasochism, and the Production of a Black National Masculinity." Representing Black Men. Ed. M. Blount and G.P. Cunningham. New York: Routledge, 1996. Ripley, P. Ed. The Black Abolitionist Papers, Vol.11, Canada, 1830-1865. Chapel Hill, NC: The University of North Carolina Press, 1986. Rose, T. Black Noise: Rap Music and Black Culture in Contemporary America. Hanover: Wesleyan University Press, 1994. Rukszto, K. "National Encounters: Narrating Canada and the Plurality of Difference." International Journal of Canadian Studies. 16, 149-162. Saenger, E. "Somalia's Welfare Warlords." Western Report, November 8, 1993. Said, E. The World, the Text and the Critic. Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1983. Sanders, L. "American Script, Canadian Realities: Toronto's Showboat." Diaspora, Vol.5, No.l (Spring, 1996): 99-118. . "Anti/Modern Spaces: African Canadians in Nova Scotia." Unpublished Manuscript. York University, Canada. Sarbadhikary, K. (1994). "Weaving a "Multicoloured Quilt": Maiiene Nourbese Philip's Vision of Change." International Journal of Canadian Studies 10, (Fall, 1994): 103-118. Sekyi-Otu, A. Fanon's Dialectic of Experience. Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1996. Shadd, M. A Plea For Emigration. Richard Almonte, ed. Toronto: The Mercury Press, 1998 [1852]. Sharrif, A. "Highrise Divide." Now Magazine (1993). . "Somali dust-up with guards sparks riot." Now Magazine (1994). Silvera, M. Silenced: Makeda Silvera Talks with Working Class West Indian Women About Their Lives and Struggles as Domestic Workers in Canada. Toronto: Sister Vision Press, 1989.

180 — Rinaldo Wakott Smallwood, Thomas. A Narrative of Thomas Smallwood. Richard Almonte, ed. Toronto: The Mercury Press, 2000 [1851]. Smitherman, G. Talkin and Testifyin: The Language of Black America. Detroit: Wayne State University, 1977. Snead, J. White Screens, Black Images: Hollywood from the Dark Side. New York: Routledge, 1994. . "Repetition as a Figure of Black Culture." Out There: Marginalization and Contemporary Cultures. R. Ferguson et al, eds. New York: New Museum of Contemporary Art and MIT Press, 1990, 213-230. Solomon-Godeau, A. "Mistaken Identities." Mistaken Identities Catalogue. Los Angeles: The Regents of the University of California, 1993. Solomon, P. Black Resistance in High School: Forging a Separatist Culture. Albany: State University of New York Press, 1992. Soyinka, W. "The African World and The Ethnocultural Debate." African Culture: The Rhythms of Unity. Ed. M.K. Asante and K.W. Asante. Trenton, NJ: Africa New World Press, 1990. Spivak, G. Outside in the Teaching Machine. New York: Routledge, 1993. Taussig, M. Mimesis and Alterity: A Particular History of the Senses. New York: Routledge, 1993. Taylor, C. and Bannerji, H. The Dark Side of the Nation: Essays on Multiculturalism, Nationalism and Gender. Toronto: Canadian Scholars Press, 2000. Thomas, J. "Poetry fires hot Brand novel." Globe and Mail, June 29 (1996): C20. Toomer, Jean. Cane. New York: Random House, 1994 [1923]. Toop, D. The Rap Attack: African Jive to New York Hip Hop. London: Pluto Press, 1984. Troupe, Q. Avalanche. Minneapolis: Coffee House Books, 1996. Vassanji, M.G. No New Land. Toronto: McClelland & Stewart, 1991. Walcott, R. '"Out of the Kumbla': Toni Morrison's Jazz and Pedagogical Answerability." Cultural Studies, Vol.9, No.2 (1995): 318-337. . '"Voyage Through the Multiverse': Contested Canadian Identities." Border/lines 36 (1995): 49-52. -. "Lament for a Nation: The Racial Geography of the Oh! Canada Project." Fuse Magazine, Vol.19, No.4, (1996): 15-23. Wallace, M. "Modernism, Postmodernism and the Problem of the Visual in Afro-American Culture." Out There: Marginalization and Contemporary Cultures. Ed. R. Ferguson, M. Gever, T. Minh-ha and

Black Like Who? — 181 C. West. New York: The New Museum of Contemporary Art and The MIT Press, 1990. . "Afterword: 'Why Are There No Great Black Artists?': The Problem of Visuality in African-American Culture." Black Popular Culture. Ed. G. Dent. Seattle: Bay Press, 1992. Watts, J. Heroism and the Black Intellectual: Ralph Ellison, Politics and AfroAmerican Intellectual Life. Chapel Hill, NC: The University of North Carolina Press, 1994. West, C. "The New Cultural Politics of Difference." Out There: Marginalization and Contemporary Cultures. R. Ferguson et al, eds. New York: New Museum of Contemporary Art and MIT Press. 1990, 19-36. White, H. "Bodies and Their Plots." Choreographing History. Ed. S. L. Foster. Bloomington, IN: Indiana University Press, 1995. Winks, R. The Blacks in Canada: A History. Montreal and New Haven: McGill University Press and Yale University Press, 1971. Wynter, S. "Beyond Miranda's Meanings: Un/Silencing the 'Demonic Ground' of Caliban's 'Woman'." Out of the Kumbla: Caribbean Women and Literature. Ed. C. Boyce-Davies and E.S. Fido. Trenton, NJ: Africa World Press, 1990. . "Rethinking 'Aesthetics': Notes Towards a Deciphering Practice." Ex-lies: Essays on Caribbean Cinema. Ed. M. Cham. Trenton, NJ: Africa World Press, Inc., 1992.

Discography Allen, L. Revolutionary Tea Party. Toronto: Verse to Vinyl Records, 1985. Choclair. Ice Cold. Virgin Music Canada/Priority Records, 2000. Cliff, Jimmy. The Harder They Come. Mango Records/Island Records, 1972. Devon. It's My Nature. Toronto: Capitol Records-EMI of Canada, 1992. Dream Warriors. And Now the Legacy Begins. Scarborough, ON: Island Records, 1991. Joseph, C. Oral/Trans/Missions. Toronto: Verse to Vinyl Records, 1989. Kardinal Offishall. Firestarter Vol.1: Quest for Fire. Universal Music Canada, 2001. Maestro Fresh-Wes. Naaah, Dis Kid Can't Be From Canada!!!, Toronto: Attic Records, 1994.

182 — Rinaldo Walcott

Rascalz. Global Warning. VIK/BMG, 1999. Soul II Soul. Keep On Movin', Toronto: Virgin Records Canada, 1989.

Filmography Julien, I. Young Soul Rebels. Miramax, 1991. Philips, C. Making Change. Golchonda Media Inc., 1995. Virgo, C. Save My Lost Nigga' Soul. Canadian Film Centre, 1994. . Rude. Cineplex Odeon, 1995. Williams, S. Saar. Moving Images, 1994. Williams, S. Variation on a Key 2 Life. Canadian Film Centre, 1993. . Soul Survivor. Norstar, 1995.

Inde:X

Ador o, Theodore, 153 Africville, 41, 44, 136-137, 139 AIDS, 66, 99-100 Akomfrah, John, 91 Alexis, Andre, 57-72, 143, 146 Allen, Lillian, 121-122, 124, 135 Anderson, Benedict, 116-117 Angelique, Marie-Joseph, 19 Arone, Shidane, 21 arts funding, 119 Auguiste, Reece, 91, 155 Aunt Jemima, 63

black Canadians of Caribbean descent, 46-47, 104-105 identification with America, 32-35,40-42 "indigenous", 46-47, 48 overlooked by NAACP organizers, 32 problems defining, 102-104 black cultural studies, vs. black studies, 38-40, 42 blackness, "borrowed", 146-148 black studies, marginalization of, 38-40, Baby Blue Sound Crew, 15 42 Black Tie Affair, The, 42 Bailey, Donovan, 40, 101 Blake, 35-37, 158 Bakhtin, Mikhail, 78 Baraka, Amiri, 76 Blues People, 76 border crossing, 58, 60-62, 64, 67-68, Bathurst Street, 43, 48, 50, 85 Beloved, 46, 95, 114 70, 132 Bernard, Delvina, 44 BoyzN the Hood, 105-106 Bernardo, Paul, 101 Brand, Dionne, 11, 26, 42-43, 45, 49, 57, 73-74, 83, 86, 107, 122, 129, 143, Bess, Ardon, 108 Best, Carrie M., 150 147 Brathwaite, Edward Kamau, 78, 101, 114 Bhabha, Homi, 117, 126, 140 Bread Out of Stone, 50, 157 Bird, 154 Brent, Stephanie, 153 Bissoondath, Neil, 119 Brydon, Diana, 62 Black Arts Movement, 108 Burnett, Charles, 91 Black Audio and Film Collective, 91 black bodies, 24, 45, 82, 89-90, 9l6, 114, Butler, Judith, 81 123-127,147

184—Rinaldo Wakott Cabin in the Sky, 154 Canada as sanctuary for African-Americans, 32-36, 40, 128-129 ethnic mix of, 115-116 racial geography of, 43-45 Canada Council, 8, 119 Caribana, 135-136 CBC, 65 Chatham, 34-35, 37 Chatterjee, Partha, 117 Chevolleau, Richard, 95 Choclair, 15, 142-143 Christian Service, 153 cinema, 11, 76, 89-92, 96, 102-103, 111,151 cinema black Canadian, 102-112, 145, 146, 150-155 role of music in, 91-92, 104, 107, 110-111, 152,155 third, 90-100 Clarke, Austin, 13, 21, 25, 50, 57, 64, 143, 147, 157, 160 Clarke, George Elliott, 16-17, 35, 44, 46-47, 147-148, 150, 157 Cliff, Jimmy, 142 Coates, Conrad, 151 Condition, Elevation, Emigration and Destiny of the Coloured People of the United States, 33 Coren, Michael, 148 Cox, Deborah, 131, 133

Despair, 22, 62, 148-149 Devon, 41, 122-123, 125-127, 135 Diawara, Manthia, 80, 92 Dipped in Shadows, 46, 175 Dixon Road, 44, 124-126 Donkin, 151, 155-156 Do the Right Thing, 93 doubleness, 107-108, 139 Drabinsky, Garth, 148 Dream Warriors, 18-19, 50, 103, 111, 122, 132, 141, 145-147, 149, 167 Dubmatique, 142 DuBois, W.E.B., 14, 32, 39, 107 dub poetry, 122

Dash, Julie, 91,95 Daughters of the Dust, 95 Davey, Frank, 128 Davis, Zienbu, 91 Definition, 17, 57-58, 64, 101, 103, 118, 132, 149, 155 Delany, Martin, 3.1, 34 de Rooy, Felix, 91

Gabbard, Krin, 154 Gaber, Frederick, 155 Garvey, Marcus, 109 Gates, Jr., Henry Louis, 37, 148 George, David, 150 Germina, Haile, 91 Gilroy, Paul, 25, 32-33, 39, 47, 104, 129 Goldberg, David, 89

Ellison, Ralph, 73 Esu, 107,165 Etobicoke, 124 Eyeing the North Star, 150 Fanon, Frantz, 84, 114 Fantino, Julian, 14 film. See cinema Fire on the Water (Volume 1), 150 Flight to Canada, 36 Forbes, Leonie, 108 Ford Centre for the Performing Arts, 37 Fort Erie, 32 Foster, Cecil, 45, 50, 57-58, 64, 143, 147, 158 Foster, Hal, 62 Foucault, Michel, 61, 89, 138 Freud, Sigmund, 22-23, 50, 88, 97

Black Like Who? — 185 Goldsmith, Jonathan, 152 Good Times, 93 gospel music, 91 Grant, George, 137 Guess Who, The, 142 Hall, Stuart, 90, 104, 132 Harlem Renaissance, 67, 144 Harris, Claire, 46, 143, 147 Harris, Wilson, 77, 168 Haver, William, 66 Henderson, Mae, 38 heritage, 8, 22, 92, 104-105, 110, 112, 118-119, 132-137, 139-140, 142. See also multicultural policy Hill, Lawrence, 57-58, 67 hip-hop, 41-42, 96, 125, 143 HIV, 66, 99 Holland Township, 44, 48-49 homophobia, 95-97, 149 homosexuality, 66 hood films, 102, 106-109 Hudson, Peter, 60, 168 Hughes, Langston, 67, 114 Hurston, Zora Neal, 114 Hutcheon, Linda, 85, 128 Immigration Minister (Canadian), 124125 imperialism, 38, 41, 86, 88 impotence, 110 In Another Place, Not Here, 44, 47, 54 in-between-ness, 47-48, 50, 147 India, 117 In Living Color, 93 irony, 63, 84 Israel, 115 It's My Nature, 122 James, C.L.R., 40, 106, 160 jazz, 76, 106, 111, 114, 144, 151-155 JazzieB., 113-114

Johnson, Avril, 91 Johnson, Charles, 114 Johnson, Michael, 40 Jones, LeRoi, 76 Jordan, June, 40 Joseph, Clifton, 120, 122, 135 Juice, 106 Julien, Isaac, 91, 93, 97, 155 Jully Black, 15 Kansas City, 154 Kardinal, 15, 132, 143 Kincaid, Jamaica, 53 King, Rodney, 27, 123 Kingston, 97 Kinkead, Adrian. 102 Knight, Arthur, 152 language performance of, 79-83 printed, 116-117 League for the Advancement of Coloured People, 32 Lee, Spike, 93 Lewis, Glen, 15 Lewis, Sharon, 92 literature, 43, 45-47, 51, 54, 57-58, 62-63, 67-68, 71, 102, 143-145 Livent Corporation, 148 Looking for Livingstone, 114 Lubiano, Wahneema, 38 Mackey, Nathaniel, 76 Maclean's, 131, 168 Maestro Fresh-Wes, 42, 122, 127, 145 Making Change, 103, 150-156 Malta, 117 Mannette, Joy, 3 5 Marley, Bob, 110 Marshall, Paule, 68 Mayr, Suzette, 57, 143 Menace II Society, 106

186 — Rinaldo Wakott Mercer, Kobena, 19 Metropolitan Toronto Police, 123 Middle Passage, 114 Middle Passage, 114 Middle Passages, 114 Mo'Better Blues, 154 Moggie, George, 44 Moggie Road, 44, 136 Mondo Canuck, 133 Moodie, Andrew, 50, 94, 143, 148 Morgan, Carlos, 15 Morriiion, Toni, 54, 68, 75, 95, 114, 137 Moses, Man of the Mountain, 114 Motion, 15, 39 multicultural policy, 40, 117-118, 136 Munro, Alice, 60 Murray, Albert, 155 music, 15, 19, 27, 41-42, 76, 91-92, 9597,102-104,106-107, 110-111, 113-114, 116, 122-123, 125-126, 131, 142-143, 145, 152-154, 156 Naaah, Dis Kid Can't Be From Canada?!.'!, 42 Nancy, Jean-Luc, 158 National Association for the Advancement of Coloured People (NAACP), 10, 32-33 nation-states, theorizing, 116-118 Negro Creek Road, 43-44, 49, 136, 139 New Jack City, 106 Niagara Movement, 10, 32, 38 Nichol, David, 1S2 Nolan, Faith, 44 No Language Is Neutral, 11, 46, 48-49, 52, 73-74, 84, 107 nomadism, 124-125 nomadology, 113, 146-147 North York Centre for the Performing Arts, 37 nostalgia, 45-46, 49, 52, 85, 107, 148 Nova Scotia, 18, 44, 136, 147, 150-151, 155-156

Oliver, Pearleen, 150 Ontario Arts Council, 8, 119 "Other: From Noun to Verb", 76 pain, space of, 53 Palcy, Euzhan, 91 Parker, Andrew, 76 parody, 81 performativity, 11, 26-27, 73-77, 84-85, 127 Perrin, Kala, 151 Philip, M. Nourbese, 11, 26, 50, 57, 7374,114,143,147-148 Philips, Colina, 103, 150 Phillips, Caryl, 68 "Pimps", 120 Pizza Pizza, 119, 188 police, 13-15, 92, 94, 102, 105, 109, 114-115, 122-123, 125-127, 148 relations with, 123 violence, 13, 102, 122 Pop Can, 133 postmodern blackness, 84, 88, 99 Priest, Maxi, 133 print-capitalism, 116 Ranger, Rohan, 102 rap music, 42, 114, 116, 122, 126 Rascalz,The, 15, 132 "Redemption Song", 110-111 Reed, Ismael, 36 reggae music, 91, 104, 106, 107, 110, 111, 114,134,147 Reid-Pharr, Robert, 35 repetition, 41, 81, 83-84, 87, 92, 94, 101, 139, 166 "Repetition as a Figure of Black Culture", 84 Riot, 41, 148-149 Round Midnight, 154 Rude, 11, 89, 91-93, 95-100, 102, 104, 150

Black Like Who? — 187 Rushdie, Salman, 77 Saar, 102

Sanders, Leslie, 151 Sankofa Collective, 91 Sans Struct and Other Stories, 54

Saukrates, 15 Scott, David, 133 Scott, Judith, 109 Sears, Djanet, 143 Sedgwick, Eve Kosofsky, 76 Sekyi-Otu, Ato, 141 Selling Illusions, 119

Sembene, Ousmane, 91 Shadd, Mary Ann, 34, 37-38 She Tries Her Tongue, Her Silence Softly Breaks, 74

Showboat, 37-38, 148 Silvera, Makeda, 64 Singleton, John, 105 Sleep On Beloved, 46, 161 Smith, David, 108 Smitherman, Geneva, 80, 128 Snead, James, 84, 87 soft-dick syndrome, 108-109 Somali refugees, 116 Soul II Soul, 113-114, 122, 125, 133 Soul Survivor, 91, 102-111, 150 Souls of Black Folk, 39, 160 Soyinka, Wole, 122 Spivak, Gayatri, 21, 137, 138 splitting image, 85 Straight Out of Brooklyn, 106 Stuart, Michael, 152 Symphony in Effect, 42

black Canadian This Magazine, 146 Thomas, Joan, 54 Toomer, Jean, 67 Toronto, 8, 47 Toronto Police Services Board, 105 Toronto Arts Council, 119 Towards the African Revolution, 114 Troupe, Quincy, 152 Twilight City, 155 Tynes, Maxine, 44, 46 Underground Railroad, 31, 35-36 Variation On a Key 2 Life, 105 Vassanji, M.G.,129 verbing, 76, 80, 88, 162 victimhood, 85, 89, 110 victim status syndrome, 106 Virgo, Clement, 27, 89-100, 102, 104, 105, 145, 147 Wallace, Michelle, 152, 154 Ward, Frederick, 147 Watts, Jerry Gafio, 106 West, Cornel, 84, 146 White, Hayden, 97 Whittaker, Ted, 16 Williams, Peter, 107 Williams, Selina, 102 Williams, Sherley Anne, 68 Williams, Stephen, 27, 91, 102-104, 145 Wint, Dean, 93 women, role of, 34-35, 37, 54 Wretched of the Earth, 114

Wynter, Sylvia, 57, 59, 79, 87 Take One, 104, 164

Talbot, Carol, 46 Taussig, Michael, 87

Ylook, 15 Young Soul Rebels, 93, 96

Territories, 155

theatre, black Canadian, 148-149 third cinema, 90-100. See also cinema,

zero tolerance policies, 123

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Acknowledgements to Second Edition Since the first edition of Black Like Who? I have had to come to terms with living among an amazing and fascinating group of cultural workers and academics. Colleagues in the U.S., Carole Boyce Davies, Margaret Bass, Linda Carty, Hazel Carby and Paul Gilroy have been more than generous; they all continue to both inspire me and to offer me models for scholarly emulation. In Canada, Diana Brydon and Percy Walton have been stalwart and principled questioners and propagators. I thank them tremendously. Arun Mukherjee, Barbara Godard, Joy Mannette, Doug Freake, Marlene Kadar and many colleagues at York University have been more than supportive. Conversations with black Canadian poets, novelists, visual artists, filmmakers, musicians and cultural critics have enriched and deepened my modest claims about black Canadian culture and encourage me to continue to write. I owe to too many to name a debt of enormous magnitude. Much respect. Without you I'm nothing. FUSE Magazine has been a great outlet for cultural practice, and students at York, both graduate and undergraduate have made doing this work extremely meaningful. Christopher Smith and Katherine McKittrick stand out as really important interlocutors on all things black Canadian. They are both stellar scholars. A York University faculty of Arts fellowship made the writing of the two new essays possible. An OISEAJT Connaught start-up grant provided resources to finish the last stages of this new edition. Finally a big and special thank you to Richard Almonte for his very friendly edit. Even I read the book with much more ease now.

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Acknowledgements to First Edition The essays collected here are representative of what it means to live the in-between and not to be troubled by the life of the in-between. I wish to thank many people who have contributed to the development of my thoughts about modes of address and the politics of blackness in Canada. First, despite, and in spite of, my dedication of this book to Kasia Rukszto and Kass Banning, I want to thank them both again for encouraging me to think and write about black Canadian "things." This book exists because of them. Over the last few years my life of the mind has been enriched by the friendship of Deborah Britzman, Daniel Yon, Warren Crichlow, Alice Pitt, Maryjo Nadeau, Gamal Abdel-Shehid, Robert Gill, Cynthia Wright and, last but not least, Leslie Sanders. Other people have played an important role in my thinking about blackness as both a category and a sign, its performativity: Honor Ford Smith, Winston Smith, Russell Chace and many others have provided me with reading materials and questions to consider. I also want to thank Michael Holmes for approaching me with this project and having faith in it from its tiniest beginning. Not many people are interested in black Canadian work and the imprint "a misFit book" clearly is appropriate. I want to thank Lynn Crosbie for introducing us. I also want to acknowledge and thank Mike O'Connor oflnsomniac Press for a rather pleasurable publishing experience. Finally, I thank my sister Aurelia Best, who was the first to teach me the things which might yet make a good thinker of me: the ability to question and to read, read, read—thank you. The flaws, weaknesses and follies are all mine.