Yesterday coming home on the 24 bus from Sherbrooke metro, I removed my earbuds to hear the conversation of 3 teenage kids standing beside me. I couldn't quite figure out what language they were speaking. After a few minutes, I realized it was Creole. Haitian kids, then. A rarity on the 24 bus indeed. For the first time, I realized how strange it is that with such a large Haitian population in Montreal I live near none of them. When the earthquake hit, a radio announcer said everyone in Montreal knew someone who was affected. There's a secretary at my work who is from Haiti, so I am no exception. But that's my only point of contact with a huge subculture in my city.
Cultural mixité was on my mind today, therefore, when I visited an art gallery exhibit at Parisian Laundry, in the Saint-Henri hinterlands. Called Migrating Landscapes, it appears to be an illustration of the waves of immigration to Canada. The exhibit itself is not something that I will carry about as a provocative artistic treasure in my mind: blocks of multi-level wood stuck together, topped with elaborate strings of origami or little ceramic pots flowing into one another. I see how it visually describes the convoluted voyages people make to Canada, possibly even within Canada. There were some interactive features and videos of people reading short scripts about roots and identity, but these did not suffice to personalize or humanize the exhibit. It felt like a geological depiction of demographic migratory phenomenon. To me, migration is so intensely personal and wrenching it is almost a sin to emphasize the scientific aspects, especially in artistic productions. What is worse, the exhibit exuded the tired self-congratulatory "Canadian tapestry" tone. Unsurprisingly, it was part of the Canadian exhibit at the Venice Biennale. Yes, it's lovely that many contemporary Canadians originally sprouted all over the globe. To me, what is far more interesting and vital are the relationships and movements that occur once everyone gets here. I would much rather blocks depicting the ethno-cultural diaspora in Montreal, where and how communities mix, and when new communities form based on something other than country of origin. Of course, such an exhibit is not something we'd gladly send to the Venice Biennale. It is too painful to look at the pseudo-apartheid makeup of Regina, or the surprised looks on Plateau busgoers' faces when they hear Creole outside of a taxi rank.
Hi Athena - long-time reader, first-time commenter. In some notes of mine from summer 2004, aka my Summer of Knob-Headed Post-Colonialism, I just came across a few lines that rang a chord with what you're talking about here:
ReplyDelete"I spent the last month or more slogging through Orientalism, an important, thankless little book that I only found interesting in its silences ... It claims to be about knowledge and power, but underneath the drone it seems more like power and one man's pain. I went along underlining all the places where Said claimed no one had ever suffered more than the Arabs. What was seminal about the thing was that, by sheer force of tedium, he made space for that pain in thoughtful circles, and spawned the whole field of post-colonialism (The New Criterion derided him for what today would be seen as a candid admission of personal bias, telling him such a slip was unworthy of a grown-up man). Homi Bhabha eulogized him by saying he was big on poetics, if poor on theory - and it took me till reading Said on Homi Bhabha before I had any idea at all how Bhabha could associate the man with poetry. In an interview with a Middle Eastern paper, Said said guys like Bhabha were good on theory, but all the human element - the pain - got lost in the process. That’s poesis, then: process. The endless, painful process of life. A future Yale comp lit prof named Hans Saussy took sides in a speech last year: 'Comparative literature doesn’t need theory, it needs poetics.'"
I really ended up liking the idea that making any kind of hybrid identity is intrinsically painful. If Montreal's a city of hybrid people all perched between cultures, it's also a city of constant, teeming, creative pain. The scientific aspects of that hybridity sound like Bhabha's theory, which has its place - but its personal, wrenching aspects are Said's poesis, which a later-generation onlooker like Saussy argues is all that really matters anyway in a world where all the possible connections have grown as complex as ours.
Full disclosure: This is coming from a guy who just stopped lurking and just starting posting on blogs this week. This comment joins a couple on a blog about Vietnamese literature, and one on a blog about data charts. So you see what kind of guy you're dealing with.