Every Tuesday, The duty offers a space to the creators of a periodical. This week, we offer you a text published in the magazine Possible, flight. 47, no 2 (2023).
Create a file on black futurities in the pages of Possible, a journal founded in 1974 in Quebec by poets and sociologists — Roland Giguère, Gérald Godin, Gilles Hénault, Gaston Miron, Gabriel Gagnon and Marcel Rioux — can seem like a chiasm of thought. These intellectuals had nationalism as a project for Quebec. They felt the desire that this minority and French-speaking place would one day be autonomous from the rest of Canada, a project which, in 2024, seems more and more distant to us.
Our possibilities today differ, and so do the futures we wish to implement. In our opinion, if Quebec nationalism is less popular today, it is undoubtedly because it appears to us to have turned in on itself with a view to celebrating so-called “native” Quebecers rather than be with a real emancipatory aim for all Quebecers, regardless of their origin. And these national borders, in any case, at a time when fascism is skyrocketing, seem to us more than ever to be reconsidered.
In Quebec, we love racialized intellectuals especially when they agree to embrace the stereotype of immigrants happy to be content, celebrating without flinching the wonders of Quebec, from beautiful snowflakes to the delights of poutine. You must at all costs blend in and be grateful. No matter how many generations of black presence here, we are confined to a perpetual role of extras and newcomers.
In doing so, who has the right to criticize Quebec? Very often, when voices are raised among racialized minorities based in Quebec to criticize certain aspects, they are quickly accused of “Quebec bashing”, of being ungrateful. We are asked to return home if we are not happy to be here.
This double posture of Quebec, which perceives itself as “colonized” by English Canada, creates a willful blindness as to its role as “colonizer” towards other minoritized peoples, notably indigenous peoples. It is not insignificant to observe that the nationalist project of Quebec has often borrowed concepts, words and analyzes from black and Afro-descendant communities who themselves experienced several of the extreme forms of slavery and domination. The use of the “n-word” or even the term “colonized” to describe the socio-economic and political situation of French Canadians in North America and vis-à-vis English Canada is an example.
So we, Kharoll-Ann Souffrant and Chloé Savoie-Bernard, do not know how Miron and co would have welcomed us at their table if they had known our reservations. How would they have reacted knowing that the future of a sovereign Quebec was only the construction of a new nation-state where our fate, daughters of the diaspora, would always be as uncertain as in a non-sovereign Quebec? ? Where we would remain strangers. What future for us, Black people born in Quebec? What if the only future, in a province with endless debates around the “n-word” or around the inability to recognize systemic racism, was one in the form of a way out?
This survival of the self despite everything seems neuralgic to us […]. Thinking about black futurities thus appears to us as a way of embracing the derogatory strategies to adopt in order to stay alive, we whose bodies on American soil first existed only in the form of cargo. To think about the futures of black communities from a North American position would be to thwart the plans of the empire, to spit in the soup of Valladolid.
While university departments in Quebec oppose the creation of minors or programs devoted to black studies, fields of study which are developing in English Canada and which have existed for decades in the United States, it is also a whole section of thought which remains stagnant, and generations of students who are deprived of privileged access to certain founding texts of black studies, which are only translated sparsely into French.
Above all, we want to campaign for a tradition of black thought that is not only Canadian, but French-speaking, because this field and the solidarities that it can develop with other black diasporic thoughts seem to us to still be created, to reflect, to sow, to futures still to be dreamed of.