Indigenous Black: An Irreconcilable Identity?

hello everyone and welcome thank you for that hushed pause my name is Sarah beam Borg I'm the senior exhibitions manager here at the avocado mousse iam and it gives me sincere pleasure to welcome you on this cloudy sunny day the Agra con Newseum opened three years ago in September 2014 and during this time we've presented fifteen exhibitions highlighting everything from exquisite mughal miniature paintings and the marvelous creatures found in medieval art from places all along the maritime and overland silk routes to contemporary arab artists exploring the shape-shifting politics and culture of the Middle East and North Africa as well as ancient masterpieces and modern creations from the living history of Syria among many others with here locating contemporary Canadian artists we welcome our first showcase of Canadian art this exhibition connects with the overall mission of the museum which is dedicated to advancing the values of pluralism by connecting cultures through the universally accessible language of art the 21 artists featured in here come from diverse backgrounds with many places influences and experiences adding to their identity as Canadian while the backgrounds of the artists are diverse what connects all of them and their art practice is that they explore and question the complex identities and layered histories of people places and objects it's fitting that we open this exhibition in a city as multicultural as Toronto and in an institution as devoted to pluralism as the Agathon Museum before I introduce our speaker I would like to acknowledge this land on which the AG economy see'em sits known as tacker Anto I'd lay also like to honor the stewardship past present and future of the here on when debt the Iroquois had no shiney the Anishinabe and most recently the Mississauga's of the new credit this acknowledgment is especially important to us today because here is the Agha Khan museums way of marking the one hundred and fiftieth year of Canada's formation as a nation with all our many identities we acknowledge the people who first welcome newcomers to Turtle Island it's my great pleasure to introduce today's speaker and one of the artists featured in the exhibition George Eliot Clarke the fourth poet laureate of Toronto and the seventh parliamentary poet laureate George is a revered wordsmith he's a noted artist in song drama fiction screenplays essays and poetry he's now teaching African Canadian literature at the University of Toronto Clarke has also taught at Duke McGill the University of British Columbia and Harvard he holds eight honorary doctorates plus appointments to the order of Nova Scotia and the Order of Canada his recognitions include the Pierre Elliot Trudeau fellows prize the Governor General's Award for poetry the national magazine gold award for poetry the primule poesis from Romania the Dartmouth Book Award for fiction the Eric Hoffer Book Award for poetry in the US and the dr. Martin Luther King jr. achievement award Clark's work is the subject of africaís daeun Atlantic essays on George Elliot Clark edited by Joseph Pavano may I take a brief second to be a tiny bit self-indulgent but I discovered through this exhibition that George and I share a lovely common thread my late father was one of George's undergraduate professors at the University of Waterloo and we recently were able to share happy memories of my dad in what felt like the most sincere and friendly Canadian way for two strangers to connect by email man now reminds you to turn your cell phone to silent and that there is no photography or video during my lecture and will you please join me in warmly welcoming George to the stage [Applause] good afternoon everyone I want to thank Sarah for a wonderful welcome here to the AG economy see'em and I want to congratulate the museum on on holding this exhibit which is our saging this exhibit which recognizes connections amongst the indigenous peoples of Canada and other cultures and and I'm very pleased to have a poem and that is part of the exhibit and a poem that speaks about my own mixed heritage which may not be absolutely visible to you and and I wouldn't blame you if you don't want it to perceive me as representing a whole series of different potential ethnicities it's okay because I can tell you that whenever I travel across this country and internationally I'm often stopped and questioned about exactly who I am and exactly where I was born because my particular complexion and hear and accent seem to suggest lots of possibilities to lots of border guards and and lots of of airport security folks as well who are often surprised that I don't happen to know Arabic or are surprised that I was born in Canada and are surprised that I don't have a Jamaican accent or a surprise that I don't speak Spanish and so on so I have I've had lots of experience trying to explain my presence on this planet and my particular mix of DNA to lots of folks over the years and so as I edge into speaking about reconciling First Nations and and afro matey identity I'll just share with you a number of the identities I have been accorded I've been thought to be Chinese I have been described as being Malaysian I've been described as Turkish I've been of course thought to be Cuban African American except that my accent isn't quite correct for the African American identity and and I and yeah so there's been a whole range of these identities I've been given what I'm almost never never identified as being his first nations I'm almost never identified as being thought of as being part native or as matey and in fact the first time in my life that I was ever told that I was in fact native or had some native characteristics or as part indigenous and so forth was when I was 39 years old back way back 1999 a native woman a meaty woman in British Columbia took one look at me and say you are part Native I was so floored I was so amazed and she gave me a package of sweet grass and and sent shivers down my spine and sent shivers down my spine today to be recognized as having a partial indigenous identity so I want to talk about that a little bit more than maybe in the in the question period I can sure some of my scariest border-crossing anecdotes with you and so on well maybe I'll do that right away just just to get it out of just to get rid of the weigh in and give you something to smile at or perhaps shake your heads at and so forth this goes back to 2014 and and I was in Scandinavia I happened to have been in Finland I was on my way back to the United States to Boston where I was at that point teaching at Harvard as a visiting professor and so I had a flight itinerary that went from sinky to Stockholm and then direct flight from Stockholm to Boston and and when I was changing aircraft in in Stockholm getting ready to leave one flight in Borg and an American Airlines flight to get to Boston I had to pass through security in the metal detector and so forth and of course as someone who travels a lot I know what to pack and what not to pack so no alarms were set off but that didn't matter to security guards still approached me and asked for my ID my passport which I produced for them then they started to basically kind of massage the passport and tried and riffling the pages and tugging at the pages to see if it might come apart but you know it's an it's an official Government of Canada passport so it's not completely tacky and and and they continue to fiddle with it just to see if there might be something wrong with it in some way shape or form and they kept asking me over and over you were born in Canada yes I was born in Kansas what the passport says are you sure you weren't born someplace else my mum did not tell me I was born anywhere else but in Canada and and so on and so finally because they were not satisfied with either of a passport or my truthful answers to their questions they asked me if I had any other piece of ID that could establish for sure than I was actually Canadian and I happened to have completely by accident my Ontario driver's license so thank you province of Ontario you saved the day but that's still even that was not quite good enough for them because then they wanted to know if I knew how to make a bond they wanted to know if I was carrying a bomb they wanted to know if I could identify a bomb if I happen to be carrying one and and luckily I was able to say no to these questions except I did say that I've seen people with bombs and movies so yeah maybe I could identify a bomb in that way given my exposure to them in popular culture and I've completely forgot luckily for me I completely forgot that a long time ago 1975 from my grade 9 science project I designed an atomic bomb it's good thing I didn't remember that at that particular woman anyway they were finally they had to give up essentially they were still kind of unsure about my identity but they eventually had to give me back my my passport and let me proceed but before I left their purview they asked me was this too much did you really find this to be too much to deal with I said yes you know it really was and and you should get used to the fact that there are people who are brown and complexion who are also Canadian I'm not going to be the last one that you ever encountered so get used to that folks in Stockholm anyway sorry for that little anecdote but here we go identity I begin with the poem being pure song matey my charisma is ambiguous like dark wine that's rose' and my tongue sports obscene mutterings cusses squats and swegles ripples and raps clear and superficial as ink trenchant as prayer the kernel ungodly poet that's me acid bathe not sugar-coated an ecstatic monster a jabbering chimp should I be as colorless but bloody as whitehall the white house Versailles and la tour mm and other slave that capitals I lark with crows make Camelot a hell I'm rooted in the Sargasso my smile backstabs I hurl Bibles at you like stones in order 1978 I was 18 attending a youth multiculturalism conference in Halifax when I first heard the term indigenous used to refer to the historical black settler population of Nova Scotia and that's where I'm from on my mother's side if we leave out indigenous connections I'm seventh generation Canadian as a result of black Americans who fled to Nova Scotia during the war of 1812 and I'm in fact mine my maternal african-american ancestors arrived in Nova Scotia in 1813 so I just want to pause to say that for all the many people who ask me every now and then where are you from where are you really from if they happen to be Canadian I can probably tell them I've been Canadian longer than they have and longer than their grandparents were and so on and so forth but in any event this is my first heard this term indigenous and if memory serves it was my then mentor the brilliant actor gifted poet and playwright and polemical journalist Walter Borden who employed the term to distinguish those of us of long residency in Nova Scotia in Canada for more recent black arrivals most from the Caribbean and a smattering from the United States and from Africa I probably first began to use the phrase myself indigenous black fry as I was beginning to voyage beyond Nova Scotia as a university student I began to encounter brother and sister blacks from other parts of the African Diaspora who would wonder like many white folks just who the hell was I anyway and what strange black culture did I possess when bagpipes could make me weep almost as sentimentally as any Motown Curtain song in identifying myself as an indigenous black Nova Scotian I meant no disrespect to the real indigenous people the makhmour like Nova Scotia nor was I out to erase their claim to original presence to an absolute in the Jenaya t what I was trying to do like Borden and like the africaís daeun activist rocky Burnley Jones was demarcate this small forgotten band of African more or less Americans from other newer black Canadians because we were in fact different despite our allegiance to the rhetoric of pan-africanism and before I go any further I got to mention the fact that today is Louie Riel day which is a day that's very important for anyone claiming any degree of maytee Allegiance or connection and so forth and as I'm sure everyone here knows louis riel was the radical seditious against the state a radical rebel leader of maytee and indigenous people on the Great Plains Saskatchewan and and of course Manitoba also is one of the fathers of Confederation but as you know because he rebelled against Johnny MacDonald who of course has been receiving lots of critique these days for having been a bit of a racist maybe being very much a racist to be really clear and precise about that but because he rebelled and and committed treason against the federal government he was eventually hanged and today it's the anniversary of his execution actually so I want to represent or mention him but our differences black Nova Scotians was in fact native I use that word deliberately of a small end unlike the newer black Canadians we could not look back only one generation to some other native land where we were either the majority or could wield significant power nor could we appeal to any foreign embassy to intervene with the governments of Canada and Nova Scotia to address our concerns we were not only renters in cities we held land in impossible to farm districts that were practically reserves from which we filed warnings to work as cheap labor in white homes and in white controlled cities and towns you may not know this but I will share with you this fact when blacks arrived in Nova Scotia in numbers between 1760 and 1815 we our ancestors were settled outside mainly white towns and villages and of course and a part of Halifax that became known as Africa in other words from the very beginning of black settlement in Nova Scotia we were segregated our communities were strictly segregated to the extent that in some places we were not allowed to own land our ancestors not allowed to own land in some of the white town and white villages in Nova Scotia at the same time if they happen to work in a town a white town they might be expected to leave that town by sundown that was actually a law in the town of Digby Nova Scotia that was on the books until 1967 the centennial year of Canada if you were black and you lived in and and you worked in Digby you had to be out of town by sundown this is not the south this is not Dixie this is Nova Scotia Canada and is not that long ago I'm 57 so this is only 50 years ago that that law was still on the books and the town and the town of Digby so some of these Caucasian settlements as I just mentioned he had the sunset laws that said she had to go to town by sundown the effect of these provisions the segregated communities the fact that you couldn't you couldn't live in the white communities in some cases the effect of these laws of surrender African Nova Scotians or to use my word Africans a virtual squatter class dependent on low-wage employment from racialist white bosses to survive on their hardscrabble lots about a sustaining nutritionally and economically as cemetery plots and is important to understand that this racially motivated economic marginalization was a product of official colonial Nova Scotian policy carried on into post Confederation Nova Scotia and well into the 20th century into the 1960s so africaís dee ins got landed I mean accorded land given land which no matter how barren or stony or swampy allowed for a sense of community and of home ownership even if it also meant that kinship ties and emotional ties to the land plus dependence on nearby white employment plus a lack of access to effective schooling meant that one wasn't going to probably want to leave or venture very far from the hood in stark contrast to first-generation West Indian immigrants for the 1950s especially Africa ins were considerably poor proverbially illiterate with few valued skills little class mobility except to jump on a train or bus and go to Mario or Toronto hog town I should say maybe I should say the six maybe I should say the big crabapple as opposed to the Big Apple is the big crabapple Toronto Boston or New York so except for relatively isolated Preston which still has the largest all-black community in Canada I want you to think about that for a moment the largest all-black community in Canada not segregated but all-black five thousand people that's just 10 miles or so outside of the capital city of Halifax still there they got their own volunteer fire department black fire department for crying out loud and and of course their own church and and so on and very strong community ties and that's a community that goes all the way back to the 18th century Preston North Preston and there's also East Preston and so on so except for relatively isolated Preston and its environs the historical black Nova Scotian community was essentially colored with a capital C especially in the Annapolis Valley on the south shore in the Northeast and even in Halifax itself our blackness is really matey our blackness in Nova Scotia is generally mixed it's generally a whole bunch of colors and so on and I want to describe them brown and tan in copper and gold and yellow and indigo and ivory and blue and even white no matter how much we align ourselves black Nova Scotians culturally and politically with the larger African diaspora and even with our kissing cousins in America are kissing cousins in America we were and we remain a community apart scholars even recognize the existence of African Nova Scotian vernacular English a version of African American vernacular English that is as distinct as the variants spoken in Liberia and in Sierra Leone because I felt as a writer and a scholar that black Nova Scotian or African Nova Scotian are even indigenous black did not and do not answer to our specificity as a broken-off branch of African America landed and abandoned in coastal british north america i invented the term africaís daeun to describe us our essence and our being and i dubbed our communities our land-based Africa dia so Africa dia basically means a place of bounding and Africans it's based on a macmorrow word not everybody agrees with this not ready agrees with my thinking about black Nova Scotia in Africa dia and and and so on and one of the persons who disagrees with me is a scholar by name of Paula Madden who says that by trying to claim an African identity and identify black Nova Scotian or African communities I and making a claim against McMorrow she says and making a claim against the land and territory of Mik McKee so from her perspective folks who complain for instance about Africa all must be ignorant and insolent in terms of complaining about the obliteration of destruction of that community 1964 1970 because after all if there is no such thing as an African if there is no such thing as a historical black Nova Scotia if there is no such thing as as being able to claim a landed identity with communities and property and homes and schools and a volunteer fire department going back centuries if we cannot identify ourselves as being a unique special culture amongst the African Diaspora then why should we complain about the destruction of Africville because Africa was one of our communities how can we complain about it because Africa was sitting on McMullen so how can we complain about the destruction of Africville if we have no right to this identity that I am outlining for you right now so these questions about identity are never innocent they're never innocent there is always a political and economic and and and and often just put the two together of political economic attention around any groups claiming of a particular identity because someone else is going to feel that you're Horning in on their territory so to speak and another complaint I have with Madden's thesis from 2009 is that she argues that the collaborations between Africans and indigenous people or afro a bow I will say African Aboriginal afro a bow are very awkward and don't make much sense she charges that also that the phrase indigenous black means that black Nova Scotia's are denying our connection to the African Diaspora and denying African solidarity that we're separating ourselves from immigrant blacks like herself whose roots are not indigenous but nevertheless represent a presence a new presence her charges are significant and I do feel that I have to reply and and this gets into the heart of my of my talk because what she what Madeline refuses to recognize what Maddon drives me mad refusing to recognize is the fact that many Africans many African Nova Scotians like myself are matey we are afro matey we are afro indigenous we are mixed gloriously with indigenous people with Caucasians Europeans we are a community that is not pure that is not only one thing we are a glorious mixture of all kinds of folks who ended up calling Nova Scotia home or ending up in Nova Scotia oh who are in fact still indigenous to Nova Scotia but she ignores this fact and she has to ignore it because if she didn't ignore her whole argument would fall apart sorry I don't think it's always so but if we want to recognize this fact that African Nova Scotians many of us Africans are in fact t-that is the same mixed with First Nations people's then that means that we have a right to this identity in this very particular black identity Dorothy Proctor Mills published a memoir back in 2010 which is titled born-again Indian a story of self-discovery of a red black woman and her people Dorothy Proctor I think has done trailblazing pioneering work in looking at connections between black people and indigenous people especially in Nova Scotia and and she answers a question maybe she's wrong with her answer I'm not sure but I like her answer but the question that she addresses in her memoir is why is it that so many black and and an indigenous people read black people or black read people don't recognize do not recognize their indigenous heritage do not recognize that they are meaty why is it that so many of us do not claim indigeneity even though we have it do not claim our connection to indigenous peoples and she says that it's because of racism but in a very particular application of racism she says that whenever African and Aboriginal people got together because of just a different DNA involved the children of these unions came out looking lighter complexioned than the than either parent and so in order to pass the children off as being mulatto to use a horrible term B as being mixed-race as being part black part white well you can see already where I'm going with this a lot of parents having a lighter complected child a lighter looking child a white chair looking child even though the parents were African and indigenous African and Aboriginal pretended that in fact they had white ancestry pretended in fact that they were part white in order to put forward the children as being part way this was done in order to try to mitigate in the anti black and anti indigenous racism anti black and anti indigenous racism so what some parents did a long time ago 50 years ago 100 years ago 100 years ago 200 years ago what they did was say oh yeah yeah your your your part white that's your that's your ancestry and so on and and and so that might help you depending on how you look that might help you avoid the worst possibilities of anti black and anti-white racism and so forth it's a very interesting theory and I believe that there might be something to it so I'm happy to share that with you no one can tell how vast this camouflage was this conspiracy of camouflage of camouflaging origins no one can tell how vast it was but I can tell you that as a card-carrying member or well don't have my card with me it's at home oh I am a card-carrying member of the Eastern woodlands mighty nation Nova Scotia the Eastern woodlands matey nation Nova Scotia in order to get that card I had to establish my bloodlines my connections to injured in an indigent ante on my mother's side most definitely so I'm happy to say I'm not in any kind of Joseph Boyden crisis here I'm happy to tell you that sorry well with all due respect and props to brother Joseph props to brother Joseph I'm just happy to say that I don't have to go into any kind of explanation presentation and so forth my records are on file with the government in Nova Scotia for crying out loud and they must know what they're doing they must know what they're doing I'm gonna say that so I do believe that there are many Africans with Aboriginal and Armagnac ancestry who know nothing of their roots and who are a mystery both to themselves and to purebred natives Proctor Mills tells us to be sure there were black Indians in other parts of Canada but not as many as in Nova Scotia she also insists many red black people are quantitatively more Indian than black but because of their African features it is difficult for them to broach the subject it appears to be much easier to claim white blood than Indian blood indeed many African Nova Scotian communities and surnames are simultaneously essentially matey and Mi'kmaq and I can talk about communities like three-mile Plains where my mother's family is from and where I still own land in Nova Scotia mount dense intro lakeil and others and the surnames Croxon frances johnson robinson states these are surnames shared by indigenous people in Nova Scotia as well as those identify as being black so none of this information that I'm sharing with you is meant to challenge indigenous primordial tea in so-called Nova Scotia however the truth of black and Mi'kmaq massage complicates any too easy and to pat division between our two communities and also I think kills the simplistic notions regarding the political surrealism suppose it's surrealism of African land land claims the fact that matter is and I don't care who gets upset about it the uncomfortable fact is or maybe I should say the comfortable fact is African heritage peoples and the first peoples First Nations are intertwined prodigiously intertwined prodigiously in Nova Scotia even if both entities are ignorant of this reality and history and they have much in common beginning with DNA and extending the cultural assertion in my own family maitre lineal Aboriginal and African I see aunts uncles cousins who can pass not as white but as native when I look at First Nations representatives or meet our people in my travels I see folks who resemble many Africans yes I identify myself and I usually am identified by others as being black but I both surround my ears what older folks call Mi'kmaq curls and my home handsome gorgeous tint I'll call it I'll call it gold cinnamon just because cinnamon go Gold Center anyway it's common to those of us who have some Aboriginal admixture I take pride in uncles aunts and cousins who never gave up passed down knowledge of forestry work wilderness cultivation and survival herbal medicine and all the lore associated with these activities when I consider my inherited uncultivated 3/4 of an acre locked on highway 1 and free mall plains so utterly wild with spruce pine and crabapple trees blackberry bushes and ant hills I got a whole bunch of ant hills on my 3/4 of an acre I'm so very happy about it and don't anybody go and take my crab apples because they're my crab apples and they are very sour and very green and so forth and usually kind of wormy - so be very careful if you have a step on that land and I like my spruce and I like my pine tree and and my blackberry bushes which are kind of greatly but the fairies are kind of tasty they're about this big they're very very small but still kind of tasty but in any event I do feel romantically one with the land and my native cultures plural when I consider the late and esteemed Africa daeun basket weaver Edith Clayton I wondered just how much of her craft was indebted to West Africa and how much to Micmac II when I consider the late in heroic Micmac activist Donald Marshall jr. once wrongfully convicted and jailed for murdering an African team a crime actually committed by a white derelict I understand afresh just how similar have been Aboriginal and Africa team experiences of racism in New Scotland new valley costs Nova Scotia when I read the late and gifted Mi'kmaq poetry to Joe I feel that I am reading a sister with the only major distinction between us being her access to a truly indigenous tongue one that is remote to me when I read the african-american cultural critic bell hooks Gloria Watkins and her essay revolutionary renegades Native Americans African Americans and black Indians about the political bond between African Americans Native Americans I feel that she could have and should have added a paragraph on Africa dia occasionally mischievously I almost feel moved to redefine africaís daeun as denoting a matey who identifies with African American culture then again perhaps I should offer such a redefinition given that many of us culturally black Africans have also been formally accepted again into the Eastern woodlands matey nation Nova Scotia a fact that defines us legally as Aboriginal under Section 35 of the Canada Constitution Act 1982 I think that that if our understanding of matey if our understanding of ended of indigeneity may expand to include multicultural e those who are part indigenous no matter what their complexions may be we will move faster towards a position where we can truly talk about Canada being a just society where we can truly talk about everyone's roots and cultures being a respected as part of one of the world's better nations one of the world's better governed nations one of the world's greatest nations I want us to be one day in that vicinity of something called true justice when all of us are welcomed equally no matter what our complexion might be no matter what our origins might be no matter what or how much in the Genuity we can claim as being full Canadians full citizens of all the rights and privileges appertaining and no questions and nobody tearing apart your passport I'm going to read a few poems that talk about again this this mixed identity and then I'll stop and ask you if you have any questions for me I hope you will and and I also have a couple more anecdotes I can share with you about crossing borders if you're interested and and and especially the most the the most horrifying and and the scariest incident I ever had crossing a border was in fact going from Ontario to Michigan back in 1993 and if we have time I will tell you about that because that was an incident where my life I'm not being dramatic my life was in jeopardy as a 33 year old graduate student doctoral candidate at Queen's University in Kingston Ontario at the time that incident was was life-threatening so we have time I'll tell you about that negation and before I read the poem I was just telling little bit about about the background of this of this book which is called execution poems and and execution poems deals with the true story I take liberties it's you know there's some fictitious stuff in this book but I had two cousins named George and Rufus Hamilton who were hanged for murder and robbery in New Brunswick in 1949 I knew nothing about these two young men they were aged 22 and 23 when they died in Fredericton New Brunswick July 1949 I didn't find out about them until I was 34 1994 my mother we were having toast and tea and my mother leaned over and said son did you know you had two cousins who were hanged typical Nova Scotian team and and so as soon as I heard about these guys I went out and found it found out as much as I could about them and I wrote this collection of poems about these two guys and what happened to them and the other important point is that they were part black and they were part Mi'kmaq they were part black and part mcnac just like me and but unfortunately for them they made all kinds of terrible decisions that cost another innocent person his life and also ended up costing them their lives this is the first poem in execution poems negation Lynnette grat negated meager saying a whiskey colored provincial uncouth mouth spitting lies vomit lyrics musty masticated scripture Her Majesty's nasty Nova Scotian Negro Eileen to go out shining instead of tarnished to take apart poetry like a heart my black face must preface murder for you download up a hangman this is a poem in the voice of one of the brothers George Hamilton after he's arrested and he's and he's being held in prison awaiting trial he of course is questioned and he gives this confession now or this statement and this trial actually and so I read through the trial transcripts fifteen hundred pages and and came up with this poem Ballad of a hangman and the voice of George Hamilton their drinks to buy drinks feels different Oh stomach a stammering teaspoon full but Roche laps up half the half bottle he slaps glass for glass with the best ice Idol and easy the taxi with a hammer harsh in my pocket see as a wet man I don't care if I wear a define overalls but I ain't gonna hear my child starve I had the intention to rock some money in my own heart I wanted to grate money because I was screwed in my own heart I took scared shaking inside of me i nose Fredericton report reporters can prove zoot suit vine style not my viciousness I was shaking all that evening my mind shaking but my child was hungered have you ever gone and your life going two days without eating and whenever you get money you're gonna eat and eat regards of all the passes in Fredericton was bust in the head skull Jimmy open this is what I'm sermonizing in English homemade brew dug up fresh taste like molasses we had some some good logic does not break down these things sir if I hadn't dropped the hammer laughing silver would be laughing now laughing so moon and snow dropped on the ground two pieces of bone driven two inches deep in his brain what's deeper still the bones of the skull were bashed into the brain blood rail out I was so mixed up my mind bent cook it Silver's nick face and hand bleached cold inside the sedan 19 black 49 solving Ford outside snow and ice smelling red stained I ain't dressed this story I am enough disgraced I swear to the truths I know all right what it's up hold my wife and child hang me and I'll not hold them again something for fun because of you know that's a kind of little bit serious poem so this is just for fun and this represents the multiculturalism of Canada the multiculturalism of Halifax and the poem is called Halligan Ian market crying and sometimes people think I'm not getting off on a tangent here I just want to say this I got to get this out sometimes people think multiculturalism was a new thing in Canada that Pierre Trudeau said multiculturalism in 1971 October 1971 in the House of Commons all of a sudden Canada was multicultural I think this is this is a falsehood and we should not allow that falsehood to be perpetrated I want to say to you that especially if we want to think about the indigenous occupy occupy errs original peoples of this land then we have to say given the multitude of First Nations we have to say that Canada always was multicultural when we call Canada now was always multicultural from time primordial time always multicultural you want to talk about the arrival of European settlers beginning especially in the in the 16th century and if we want to talk about the arrival of Africans as slaves and then as people escaping slavery in the 18th and 19th centuries we want to talk about the arrival of Chinese to Canada to help build the railway want to talk about their Russians arriving in British Columbia 150 years ago fleeing war and fleeing dictatorship in Czarist Russia wanting to have a pacifist community do cover community in British Columbia you want to talk about Japanese coming to Canada to be fishermen in the early part of our the last part of the 19th century early 20th century there's no way anybody can lie about Canada only becoming multicultural in the last 50 years the last 40 years the last 30 years the last 20 years the last 10 years that's a lie Canada always was multicultural always was from the very beginning it is simply more multicultural now and folks should get used to it caligo nian market cry so this poem is based on the voices of the hellofax marketplace ah I got hallelujah water melons virgin old piers virtuous corn Munich hey I'll tear a winkin luscious fattest watermelon plump piers big butt corn the gusta esta Hardeen comment getting hot to trot lust fresh cucumbers water melons go to church and get redeemed watermelons oppa Kotori in veritas good God cucumbers righteous peers golden Baptist corn they really stop that I'm like took off I got watermelons sinful cucumbers jailbait piers plaintiff I beat melt Chaucer and picked by sugar Shakespeare I've got a read one more poem which is part of the exhibit and then I'll ask you if you have any questions and please don't be shy and this this poem I wrote when I was seventeen I'm really really very pleased it's part of this exhibit so now seventeen that's forty years ago nineteen seventy seven for crying out loud and I was visiting my grandparents home in three-mile Plains which I already explained is a mixed white black native community going back 200 years we're again I still own some ant hills so very nice I have now seen as my response as a teenager thinking about my mixed heritage and what this place means for me and the poem is part of the exhibit I have now seen nestled twixt Warped ties of rusted train tracks snow aged dingy gray and black frosting loose brown dirt and jumbled gravel while a stream hisses nice thin dull ice and look out over fields flecked with patches of greasy grass the tint of putty and wind subdued gasps intimations of winter seasonal assassinations under ledges of runaway clouds my love hunting eyes view stark oat houses the dirty snow frames under a Dust Bowl Sun the pothole pop dirt road sprawls toward the pine serrated horizon where dirt where rough-edged hills lined with chicken wire fences sagging brian's and derelict farms unfurl also I see ragtag scarecrows murdered by lightning winds bleeding straw in the snow snuffed fields among broken wagon wheels the last monuments to rid dust Cowboys who once planed moon June Silver Spoon Tunes to hayride Madonna's on rickety House steps bordered by violently ruddy roses and dead conscious holding the oceans roar this is the now and then the future and the past the hollow corpse of a 57 Chevy lays half and turn in a rambling drift half smothered by the ivory quicksand suddenly the shrieking Banshee Horn of a rushing steel juggernaut boxcar hauler resounds and detonates across these hilly plains where fir trees evergreen point directly to stars visible or not that pinpoint were Aquarius strides with his medicine water of galaxies gleaming pouring silver against indigo velvet an ancestral African rocks his wooden rocker and a clapboard cabin heated by an iron black wood stove that percolates sense of cornbread and rabbit stew a still life our home sweet home and yet presenting a weeping folk guitar and white smoke lifting from a neural mahogany pipe add a disordered woodpile a dead orange tractor and evacuated dreams I have this old man Zulu spear actually a Mi'kmaq King I have this old man's Zulu spear no actually it's a Mi'kmaq King and I perforate snowbanks with the crooked wooden point from now on if I must cry let the tears signal joy 3-mile plains Nova Scotia 19th of February 1977 so here's the story about the Michigan border crossing so I'm a PhD candidate in English at Queen's University and I'm invited to speak at the University of southwestern Michigan in Kalamazoo Michigan and to get from Kingston Ontario to Kalamazoo Michigan the most sensible way to go was by train and and so I jumped on the train on a Tuesday via rail and then of course in Toronto switched you over to Amtrak and and then at Sarnia I crossed the border along with all the other Canadians of course and and everybody else on the train all across the border from Sarnia to Port Huron Michigan and the train is stopped and the border police a US border police immigration naturalization service folks not homeland security yet at this point 1993 board the train began to ask us for our ID and to question our reasons for visiting the States and so on the officer who approached me had had really badgered a fellow sitting behind me demanding to see how much money he had on him eternal he had $100 u.s. and so he was allowed to continue unmolested on his on his journey so I thought oh my god you know they're giving this fella hard time what's gonna happen to me I hadn't really been in the u.s. very much at that point in my life up to that age I think I crossed the border five or six times in my entire life at that point so I was a little bit nervous about the whole thing even though it's only only the US border I was still kind of nervous about it but anyway the officer finished up with a fellow sitting behind me and he came to me and asked for my passport and asked for my train ticket and he asked me what am I going to do what it was i planning to do in the united states i said i'm going to give a talk on poetry absolute truth i was giving a talk on canadian poetry at the university of southwestern Michigan so he says really you're giving a talk on portrait yep and he said okay so when are you returning I said well you have my ticket it shows I'm returning on Thursday this is Tuesday so day after tomorrow he said you're coming back by train I say yep he got my train ticket no coming back by train on Thursday at this time as it indicates on the ticket he said great flying carry-on and that was that so I went to the university gave my talk Thursday I'm back on the train returning to Canada and we get the port here on they stopped the train and I thought that's really odd why should they stop the train here they should just stop the train in Sarnia once we cross the border and that the Canadian border police agency check us all out but no the train was stopped in in Port Huron just just inside the American side of the border and and and the announcement was made that all Canadians must D train we all had to get off the train so they're both dozen of us and so I joined roughly eleven others and and for the record I gotta mention that I was the only black male in this group of 12 or so and and so there we are were on the station platform and then out of nowhere and I'm not exaggerating a SWAT team appears with machine guns and the dark sunglasses and the flak jackets and and so on and and some dogs it was like a scene or the Midnight Express if I can refer back to that to that film jock early keeping in mind that it is also full of racial stereotypes so I don't mean to give any support to those stereotypes when I'm really trying to indicate here is that I felt I felt like I was in a police state at this particular moment and and so this squad of I want to say soldiers but I'll say police surround us on the on the platform and and then slowly but surely as their training would allow isolate me this group of guys heavily armed as far as I'm concerned they're all heavily armed and and and and also their dogs which of course are sniffing for drugs are now focused on me and they keep throwing something down by my feet and telling the dogs find it find it and the dogs are going crazy but they're not finding it whatever they're supposed to find they're not finding it running around over the place but they can't find what I know they thought I would be carrying drugs all right but no it was a fruitless search and so then one of the officers approached me and he had a really nervous frightened look on his face he was more nervous and frightened than I was and he said sir would you mind taking part in a demonstration and again Midnight Express came to my mind and I thought holy smokes I'd better not say I better not I can't say no I can't I can't say that that I don't want to be part of this demonstration who knows what will happen next with all these guys around and how do and how well are they trained till they all have itchy trigger fingers and and they might say well we thought he was for our weapon and then all of a sudden you know that gun a gun burps once and I'm dead or dying so I thought I don't really have much choice here I better say yes and so at that point keep in mind I'm not the most virtuous person on the planet but at that point in my life was the only time in my life I was ever given hard drugs and was given to me by its the police the police actually gave me crack cocaine to hold so they could test out to see whether the dogs would recognize that was holding this this contraband that they gave me to hold so this time the dogs jumped up and and their nose has touched my hand and are you that a couple times and then they were satisfied that the only drugs I had were the drugs that they gave me property of the United States government so the fellow who had approached me very nervously before now King approached me with a very sorry look like he had a disgusted look you know to say well that didn't work and and he was kind of upset with this whole sting operation that hadn't stung me so he of course took back his drugs and and everybody disappeared as fast as the SWAT team and had come out of rubber they were all gone disappeared okay and so we were all started to go back to the Train and I started to turn around on the platform to return to the Train and as I did as I turned around I realized that someone was standing immediately behind me immediately behind me right as I turned and and I came face to face with the guard who had questioned me two days before and he said he was a tall fellow and so I'm looking up at him looking down at me and I'm looking into his mirror sunglasses I'll never forget it and he said with a sneer and I cannot imitate his tone of voice I said I can tell you he was sneering and he said you came down here to talk about poetry and that's when I realized what this whole thing was about you know I could not possibly be black brown man giving a university lecture impossible impossible it had I had to be the world's worst drug trafficker to come up with an excuse like I'm doing a talk on poetry and I'm really coming down here to get all kinds of crack cocaine I mean I mean but on the other hand you got to think to yourself how puny a brain that officer had helped puny the brains of all of his colleagues and supervisors that they bought this idea that the eye was supposedly some kind of drug trafficker because of the truthful declaration I made about my reasons for going to the United States and their reaction was to put on this racist show of force and clowning it was it was military clowning that they were engaged in and I say that now with a with a degree of spite but I assure you at the time I was very cooperative very cooperative oh yeah I was cooperating left right and center and he's anyone anything they want to ask me no problem because I wanted to go to that situation with all my faculties and all my limbs and and breath in my lungs and and and all that so I get back to you Ottawa I call the US Embassy and I ask you know is this appropriate behavior is this appropriate behavior and they said no no great so we might did a very Canadian thing I wrote a letter asking for an apology as opposed to calling up the the biggest international law firm around and and suing for multi millions of dollars for the humiliation the racial profiling and endangering my life in the way that they in the way that they did but I was too naive I just thought well just asked for an apology and guess what they wrote back and said we're sorry [Laughter] [Applause] you

Channel: Aga Khan Museum

Views: 184,892

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Id: U3AA-5Ko2NE

Length: 59min 10sec (3550 seconds)

Published: Thu Dec 19 2019