“There is nothing poetic about falling for Montreal”
is a mixed-media series inspired by the poetry collection “a fine African head” by Faith Paré.
The project, combining poetry with visual art, seeks to develop a transdisciplinary approach to reflects on the political experiences of Afro-descendant and racialized Montrealers, paralleling the socio-historical issues of our time with those of the 1960s. The series is layed out in panels where the breakdown between frames retrace the period of Sir George Williams Computer Centre occupation in 1969. As a standpoint, the narration unfolds through the standpoint of a Black woman involved in the political and community life of Black Montrealers. The w explores themes of gentrification, student uprisings, transnational anti-colonial struggles, and violence through police brutality.
“a fine African head” charts the hauntings of colonial education in Canada and the Caribbean. At the center is my personal and inevitably one-sided connection with a young Black woman student activist from the Bahamas who lived in 1960s Montreal. CJH was among the 97 arrested for participating in the Sir George Williams Computer Centre Occupation in 1969, a historic two-week sit-in against racism at the university. At one time, the only public information on CJH was a claim that she had died following a head injury sustained from the violent police crackdown on the occupation.
My grief for this fellow Black woman, and the enclosure that her memory was relegated to in the official record, serves as the departure point for envisioning what her life might have been like in this understatedly critical city to Black Power struggle. The book unfolds as a temporal diptych between this period of upheaval and the 2020s, when the mental, physical, and historical burdens of institutional education on Black people still loom large, long after the student uprising in 1969.