Choosing Exile: Extract from Panel Presentation at National Black Writers' Conference 1996
By Stephanie Martin
| Posted: January 01, 2006
I am a publisher of Black women’s writing and I live in Canada. Over the past twenty-seven years, I have hammered out an uneasy truce with the country I refer to as “where I live,” but seldom as home. I’m a Jamaican-born painter and I got into publishing over ten years ago because I was vexed. I was vexed because I love literature and I could not find books that spoke to me of experiences that I as familiar with. As a woman of colour living in the north of Metropole, anything that I did dig up I really had to scrunt for.
I was vexed because no-one, not even the so-called feminist or progressive publishers, was interested in publishing women of colour. We did not speak right, we did not write good, and some of us dared to write in the Creole dialect we spoke, or a fusion of Standard English and Creole. And so our language did not conform to literary standards. Also at that time, issues around race and class were being sidestepped by White folks. It was a non-issue.
In Canada, we talk about ourselves as a multicultural society. This all started in the 70s when an Act was introduced to make Canada officially bilingual, reflecting its French and English population. But many Canadians started to recognize that other cultures had to be validated, and so there was established a Federal multicultural policy to enable communities across Canada whose heritage was neither English nor French to be recognized. True, multiculturalism would have meant that doors would have had to be opened. Like, for example, the doors to publishing companies. True, multiculturalism would have meant folks like us getting jobs in certain sectors. Like, for example, the publishing industry. True, multiculturalism would have meant change and the relinquishing of white privilege. But that did not happen, and it is not surprising that in Canada today multiculturalism has come down to song, dance and food. So it is not surprising that multiculturalism opened no doors for Black women’s voices to be published.
......Back in the 60s and 70s, the actual voices of contemporary Black women writers were missing. In 1984, there were four Black women who had authored books published in Canada, and a token scattering in a few collections. Back in the 60s and 70s there was a silent resistance on the part of publishers to take any chances with the work of Black women. Black women did not have a place in Canadian Literature. In 1985 in Canada, I co-founded with Makeda Silvera, Sister Vision Black Women and Women of Colour Press, flying in the face of the apparent universe with a mandate to publish women of colour. It was the first, and still is the only publishing house dedicated to publishing the work of women of colour. Jamaican born ahdri zhina mandiela, the first woman we published, says in her introduction to "dark diaspora in ….dub:
...then the 80s and a different ilk of speaking out – the Black woman’s voice, heard only before in spaces
‘for coloured girls’…..shange’s ‘mistresspiece’ had set the tone, newly opened ears were forced back to hear Black women’s voices decrying our shameless struggles and celebrating our near triumphs.
Who are these women we publish? Where are they from? Where do they live?
.....The writers we publish deal with the immediacy of their lives in the chosen Metropole. And the place they have chosen is rife with discrimination and racism. When they write about “home” the stories are not so much about nostalgia as they are about recording, the recording of different times and relationships, personal, familial, community-based and those that deal with the society. This excerpt is from Jamaican-born Makeda Silvera who came to Canada as a child:
“Miss Thorne, yuh don’t know what ah just hear not too long, dat Miss Morris and her husband adopt Deanne, dat Deanne not dem own.”
We crept from around the dining table and moved closer to the window to get a good view of out grandmother and Miss Grant. Miss grant’s eyes were wide open, waiting for a shocked response from our grandmother.
“Where yuh hear dat from?” Our grandmother asked.
“From across the street dis morning.”
“Well ah guess Deanne belong to dem now. If dem adopt her, dat mean that they is her rightful mother and father. “Our grandmother said, putting an end to the conversation.
She turned around unexpectedly and her eyes made six with ours as we rushed back to the porridge
“Hold it right dere! she said.
She came close to the window, he face hard, and between closed teeth she said, “If ah ever hear out of you two bout dis, de police will have to come and tek me out of dis yard.”
I selected this because it says a lot about the different relationships we leave behind, the “yard” culture, our grandmothers and certain values. Stories like this are absolutely necessary for the exiled. In the tradition of oral history, many of these societies are rich in anecdote and lore that deal with issues of race, class, gender and sexuality in non-didactic terms. They reassure us of our place in the world. They console and reaffirm us of our human-ness, of our wholeness, when the society we have “chosen” to live in bombards us constantly with our “Otherness” our un-human-ness, our blackness, our badness. They make us laugh, they make us cry. They validate us and, hopefully, they can help us in the struggle to validate our daughters and sons as they bob and weave through the school systems and around the cops. They warn us of Babylon.
....Choosing exile. There are those who choose to leave their “home” for the large and more anonymous shores of the Metropole for political reasons or for reasons of intolerance around sexual choices. We published "Pieces of my Heart" the first lesbian of colour anthology on the North American continent. Half of the fifty contributors were from the U.S. I can say unequivocally that the book could not have been published (for example, in Jamaica) and that the contributors safely use their names. Interestingly enough for the same reason that certain Black writers left the United States in the fifties and sixties for Europe, writers today leave their homes in the so-called Third World and seek a more “tolerant’ home in the U.S. and Canada. An American distributor mentioned to me the other day that Sister Vision Press was ahead of its time when we published "Pieces of My Heart" in 1991, and I think he was right.
...In closing, I can only affirm the integrity of the small press. We work with the writer to break the silences, to develop the voices, and to make sense of our reality in Babylon. To write about it, to share it with others and to build and international community of our work. Sister Vision Press, situated in the place of exile, lives and breathes the lives of our writers.
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