Black Ink

Here’s a piece of Canadian history for you.  In 1734, an African slave by the name of Marie-Joseph Angelique set fire to her slave owner’s home in Montreal (yes, there was slavery in Canada) to avoid being sold, and to run away with her lover.  The fire not only burned down the slave owner’s house, but it destroyed most of the city of Montreal as well.  As a result, Angelique was accused, tortured and hanged shortly after the incident, which has been documented by several Black Canadian scholars within the last 20 years.  The latest publication about this tragic affair is The Hanging of Angélique: The Untold Story of Canadian Slavery and the Burning of Old Montreal written by Afua Cooper.  Cooper’s book is on Maclean’s magazine’s list of “recent, new and upcoming books”.  An interview with the author can be found in one of the January issues of The Hour:

The French wanted to make an example of Angélique. So Montreal Judge Pierre Raimbault found her guilty on circumstantial evidence and sentenced her to death.

On the morning of June 21, Raimbault went to the prison where Angélique was being held and told her she would die by public hanging that same day on a specially built gallows on rue St-Paul, right in front of the charred remains of the Francheville home. Afterwards Angélique's corpse would be burnt on a pyre…

… when Montreal's hangman and torturer Mathieu Léveillé - himself a black man from Martinique - crushed her bloodied legs and knees, Angélique confessed that she, and only she, had set the fire. Half satisfied, Raimbault sent Angélique to the gallows.

Angélique was barefoot, dressed in a knee-high white chemise with the word "incendiaire" embroidered on the front and back. Since she could not walk, she was piled into a rubbish cart in which she held a two-pound torch that symbolized her crime, arson.

Léveillé drove the horse-drawn rubbish cart surrounded by guards through the blackened streets of lower Old Montreal, where residents stood roadside jeering and spitting on Angélique. 

(via The Hour)

  She was funny, with a dark, dry, self-deprecating wit.

Ms. Butler, who never married, described herself this way in 1999: "I'm also uncomfortably asocial — a hermit in the middle of Seattle — a pessimist if I'm not careful, a feminist, a black, a former Baptist, an oil-and-water combination of ambition, laziness, insecurity, certainty and drive."

(via Seattle Times)

The first African-American woman to break barriers in the SF field continued to break the mold right till the end. Butler died this week at the age of 58 after she slipped and fell on the sidewalk near her house; news of the accident spread fast on SF networks, and tributes have been coming in from Greg Bear, Harlan Ellison: peers who were also fans. She had just published Fledgling, which promises to change the face of vampire fiction. The protagonist of Fledgling, Shori Matthews, is a 53-year-old vampire who looks like a 10-year-old black girl—probably the first time Dracula’s many literary descendants have included a black female among their numbers.

Butler came up with two fabulous twists on the vampire story. In her version, vampires are actually members of a matriarchal race that predates humanity: aside from needing human blood to survive, they are shy, peaceful people. And Shori’s skin colour is because of an experiment to see whether black-skinned vampires might be able to bypass the race’s legendary intolerance of sunlight.

(via Business Standard)

Just in case you missed it, CBC Arts has a four-part series called Hang the MC, which examines how hip-hop culture has become a scapegoat for violence: 

French rap has always sounded similar to American rap, particularly within its hardcore camp. The reason is environmental. Social conditions in the low-income banlieues (suburbs) that ring Paris and other French cities mirror those within U.S. ghettos, which are renowned for incubating hip hop. Vast immigrant populations live in communes, crumbling Lego stacks of public-housing developments. Poverty is rampant, unemployment is severe, illicit drugs abound. Dans la banlieue (les banlieues is grammatically correct; la banlieue is what the locals say), people of colour are made to feel marginalized from mainstream society, citizens in paperwork only.

My how people in the literary world love to tell torrid tales. This whole James Frey ordeal is really ridiculous. I’m still questioning where the editor and publisher were during this entire affair. And to add to the JT Leroy hoax, the real JT Leroy (aka Laura Albert) is taking up more space in the New York Times. Her partner and father of her son has now come forward and revealed that he just couldn't go on with the sham anymore:

Geoffrey Knoop, Ms. Albert's partner for the last 16 years, said in a telephone interview on Saturday evening that he had seen Ms. Albert write the books of JT Leroy in their San Francisco apartment. He added that for much of the last decade, he had been present when Ms. Albert conducted telephone conversations as JT Leroy with unwitting editors, writers and celebrities, using the voice of a young man with a West Virginia accent. Ms. Albert, 40, is originally from Brooklyn.

"The jig is up," said Mr. Knoop, 39, a rock musician. "I do want to apologize to people who were hurt," he added. "It got to a level I didn't expect."

Why do the liars turn themselves into the victims?

Some time in December you may remember I wrote about Revival, an anthology edited by Toronto literary critic Donna Bailey Nurse.  The anthology, which features the best in Black Canadian writing, is highlighted in the Toronto Sun by columnist Nicholas Davis.  It also happens to be on the programme for the Harbourfront’s Kuumba Festival in commemoration of Black History Month:  

"In my particular job I was getting a lot of black books sent to me," says Nurse, who is a critic for Book Television and a frequent book reviewer for various newspapers across the country. "And I had a great awareness of the excellent work that was out there. But I didn't think there was enough awareness from the general public of the quality and volume of work by black writers in this country. I put this book together to make sure the work got out there."

Of the 29 authors who contributed pieces to revival most of them -- like Suzette Mayr, David N. ODhiambo, H. Nigel Thomas and Esi Edugyan -- are unknown to mainstream Canadians. This was a conscious choice by Nurse.

"I was tired of seeing the same names again and again when there were so many other people doing excellent work who were not getting the same high-profile space."