David Divine, BSc. (Edin), MSc. (Aston), DipSW, MSc. (LSE)

Houston A. Baker describes "black critical memory "as a "memory which refuses to relinquish its racial roots. The clarity bestowed by black critical memory is painful. It is a terrible lucidity, casting dark light on a deeply troubling racial idea." He further states as far as the United States of America is concerned and I would argue Canada also, that "idea" is the right word here. "For race has always more to do…with a nest of images, fears, envies, fantasies, and anxieties than with the root life or everyday comings and goings of real people…Race is still the ruling idea that conjures and pronounces sentences of guilt or innocence, life or death, acceptance or denial on we who are black by choice… or due to inescapable circumstance." James Walker urges extreme caution in "approaching" African-Canadian history. The preferred approach he advocates is one which revolves around the agency of the subject of the historical investigation. By agency Walker means pride, independence, self-determination, and a sense of freedom. This is in contrast with a perception of the subject as a victim of existing circumstances, tossed at whim by any pre vailing current. Walker argues that a considerable body of historical writings about Black people in Canada are deeply flawed because of this. Walker argues that "people act according to the history they believe has happened … History as it is understood enters a political discourse, it becomes a participant in a power dialectic and it influences relationships … Approaching African-Canadian history is a political act, deliberate or not. How you approach it will determine the lessons you derive from it. You can even shape the future . "


As Black people and other people of colour, visible minorities, we are like models on a catwalk, observed, commented  upon, put upon from time to time, shaped and in part shaping, continuously on display, adapting to and contributing to changing the environment in which we are located. In that process of continuous, for the most part, unwanted display on the catwalk, we influence and are influenced, morphing as a result into something which is not quite "us", not quite the "real me", but becomes "me". We are part changed by that process of forced continuous display and the development of multiple ways of negotiating life’s traffic. George Elliott Clarke echoes the views of Walker in "Introducing a Distinct Genre of African Canadian Literature: The Church Narrative (2007), in that in such histories Clarke finds "a resistive historiography and radical theology." The writers of such stories about identified churches or religious associations were mainly disciples and often lay women recording for future generations, community genealogy folk theology, and oral history. Different messages arise from their writings in contrast to those written by more formally established academic authors who painted a picture of Black people having a negligible positive impact on the environments in which they lived. Memories of Black people therefore, voices echoing such memories, need to be highlighted, recorded and disseminated, such as the recent archival research initiatives of Library and Archives Canada, (LAC) in bringing Black community archives out of the background and into the foreground. Divine (2006) states that memory institutions in a digitalized age such as Library and Archives Canada, hold more information than can be  described. Take photographs for example. Over 9 million photographs belonging to newspapers are  held by Library and Archives Canada in Ottawa, some of which will be related to Black communities. However what belongs to which constituencies is not known. This leads to the necessity of creating innovative interactive packages, which involve dialogue, awareness, understanding, effective collaboration and engagement with a wider range of audience than hitherto. Access and engagement can only be successfully accomplished when the holders of collections become more like those who wish to gain access and such a pool may grow with greater and  more relevant and innovative marketing, instead of forcing the  potential enquirer to be more like the holder in order to acquire the ‘privilege’ of access. Collections should be mirrors of the Canadian Mosaic and this is the goal of Library and Archives in their recent Strategic Plan. Ian Wilson, Librarian and Archivist of Canada, in "The Gift from One Generation to Another" (2007), views Library and Archives Canada as " a knowledge institution for Canada." And with "its pan-Canadian network of partners including public libraries, archives and other cultural institutions, document Canadian heritage in all documentary forms, from works of art to newspapers, books and virtual exhibitions to official government records. Library and Archives Canada also has a mandate to preserve the Canadian web. Our    collections are designed to be comprehensive in order to reflect  diverse aspects of the Canadian community: they must also be broadly accessible. "One major initiative is titled" Under a Northern Star: The History of Black Communities web exhibit." Essentially this initiative is a welcome major addition to memorializing the Black Canadian experience through an exploration of the struggle for civil liberties in Canada by examining the fonds of the Library and Archives Canada. The website will present the writings, opinions, viewpoints ‘in the first person’ of the supporters and opponents in the debates leading to abolition of slavery in Canada. Using interactive technology, it is anticipated that visitors to the site will have the opportunity to give their voice and opinion on the debates.

The object must be to consign to the historical past, the experience of Yvonne Brown from the University of British Columbia, who, in reflecting on her academic and more private life in "A Journey to Multiple Sites of Memory to Find and Locate the Black Self in the New World African and British Diasporas " (2007), "likens herself to a ghost, a ‘duppy’. A duppy is the ‘restless spirit of an enslaved African dead, in Jamaica to be exact, who has not been properly buried. Only I am alive and like the real duppy, I roam the halls and classrooms of the academy where I reside, looking for the truth about my mother and her people and how they came to be forgotten. When I enter the room I suck the air out and disrupt the comfortable conversations of the enlightenment people… The truth is, I haunt and am haunted by painful memories."

Another new major initiative over five years has just been launched in late 2007, to further chronicle the thoughts, experiences, memories, contributions, challenges and triumphs of Black people who resided in South - Western Ontario with particular reference to the Chatham and Dawn settlements, between the mid-eighteenth century and the present. The title of the project is The Promised Land: The Freedom Experience of Blacks in Chatham and Dawn Settlements. University and community researchers are working as a team jointly on investigating the lost heritage of "escaped slaves "and "free people of colour". Settlement patterns of individuals of African descent are    being examined through land record and tax role documentation. Contributions to the community by Black people will be highlighted and how Black people interacted with differing racial and ethnic groups will be explored, as there is a strong argument that suggests this area could be described as a birthplace of civil rights in Canada providing a model of interaction pre-dating notions of "multiculturalism".

As Walker (2007) states, "The founding characteristic of Black Canadian culture, the defining feature of Black Canadian identity, was a belief in their own equality and a determination to have it acknowledged. One consequence, recognizable at every stage of African Canadian history, has been an insistence on their respect as subjects and citizens." In the Promised Land initiative the stress will be on how, in the geographic areas to be explored, those Black people demonstrated this insistence. Why did they come to those settlements? What conditions fuelled their departure from their previous locations to the areas under investigation? What did they do when they arrived? What impact did they have on the existing populations on arrival and subsequently? How did they sustain themselves? What impact did they have on a more national and global scale and how did they do that?

At a historic gathering in Halifax, Nova Scotia, on October 26th October 28th 2005, over four hundred delegates discussed and debated over three days, what it means to be Black and Canadian. The event was titled Multiple Lenses: Voices of the diaspora Located in Canada. Through the lenses of history, law, literature, film, music, Black community organizations, media, sports, Black spirituality, party politics, labour markets, education, and lived experience, attempts were made to discover how Black people in Canada identify themselves and were identified by others, over a four hundred year period and what factors influenced that process. The conference was a milestone in the development of the emerging discipline of Black Canadian Studies. The thread running through the conference was one of belonging, having a sense of place, being acknowledged, rooted and possessing a growing sense of confidence. Walcott (2007) in his contribution to that conference titled, Towards a Methodology for reading Hip Hop in Canada, sees in Hip Hop, embraced by many Black youth, a political Canadian connectedness and confidence in feeling and demonstrating a sense of    belonging in Canada expressed by Black youth. In late 2007 a book, based on the conference, was published (Divine, D. 2007). The volume provides a flavour of the complexity, variety and regional variation, of Black experience in Canada over the more than four hundred years of uninterrupted black presence in Canada.

That presence is complex in that diversity exists in original family geographic origins, chronological historical presence in Canada, geographic locations in Canada, first language spoken, ethnic origins, religious affiliation, links and allegiances to other parts of the world outside Canada and future intentions in Canada.

Carving out memory and recording it, capturing voices in documents and oral history, is a necessity in making sense of our past and present and perhaps an aid in negotiating our ways in the future. Afua Cooper (2007), comments on state sanctioned historical silence when it comes to the history of Black people in Canada. I feel that this is changing slowly but most assuredly. There is a renaissance in Black Canadian Studies, a momentum triggered by increasing confidence, interest, partnerships, and the realization that as Canadian citizens and emerging Canadians, we owe it to ourselves and future generations, to capture the memories and voices of the past and present which revolve around trying to get  beyond survival in often extreme adverse conditions. One very exciting newly published study is that of Dorothy Williams (2007), in Black Print: Sankofa in Canada. The research involved a four year journey to recover long lost Black controlled serialized literature in Quebec’s largest urban area, the Montreal region, from 1934 to the present. One of the perhaps surprising findings was that the Black serials did not appear to specifically set out to contribute to a sense of "we" or "us" within the diverse Black communities in Montreal, but according to over fifty percent of the mission statements of the serials, aimed to "help people identify with the norms, values, and appropriate behaviours of their society. "Integration in Canadian society there forewas a major aim of the Black serial press during this period, specifically integration within the province of Quebec. Such serials reflect the diversity of the population which created and read them. Discovering and preserving such periodicals there fore grants an insight into the views, attitudes, perceptions, voices, and feelings of residents at that  time. Williams argues strongly that further research is needed as well as additional restorative work to preserve such invaluable records, as such material serves as priceless insights into the cultural diversity of the time.

Further west, in British Columbia, other voices are waiting to be discovered. Wayde Compton (2007), in Hogan’s Alley: Mapping Vancouver’s Lost Black Neighbourhood, is researching into what happened to a community of Black people who resided in Park Lane, a T-shaped alley in the Vancouver district of Strathcona. It  apparently acquired the title of Hogan’s Alley around the time of the first world war until half the area was demolished in 1970 to make way for a freeway. The Black community was forced to live and work together like other urban Black communities at the time, as a result of poverty and segregation. The particular importance of Hogan’s Alley was that after its destruction, Black people were effectively removed from Strathcona and lost any future recognizable central base in Vancouver. " Today the struggle for the memory of Hogan’s Alley feels like just that…a struggle, a fight. But perhaps more prevalent than this, there is also an enduring inability to see and recognize black presence in British Columbia … Since the first arrivals of 1858, blacks in BC have been resolutely integrationist in political tendency, and it seems our perceived invisibility is the arguably pyrrhic result of the thorough success of that strategy. "

Sylvia Hamilton, in Visualizing History and Memory in the African Nova Scotian Community (2007), states that her life is about telling stories through moving images: "In my film work and my writing, I have drawn upon oral story telling, archival documents, material objects, and geography, to tell stories. These rich, complex texts both inform and sometimes contradict each other. I have tried to capture and create images that have historical meaning, from my point of view, as one way of wrestling with and living with ‘history’ and as a buttress against ignorance."

A significant number of high school students attended the Multiple Lenses conference in Halifax. They closed the conference by stating how inspired and motivated they were as a result of listening and contributing to the event proceedings. Their  voices and memories need to be recorded and acknowledged too. Salman Rushdie in his wonderful book, Midnight’s Children, reminds us of "memory’s truth, because memory has its own special kind. It selects, eliminates, alters, exaggerates, minimizes, glorifies and vilifies also; but in the end it creates its own reality, its heterogeneous but usually coherent version of events; and no sane human being ever trusts someone else’s version more than (their) own... " One of the key responsibilities of the discipline of Black Canadian Studies is to preserve such truths .