This is an excellent post.
i’ve been thinking,
and for once this is a good thing, ha.
i struggle to find a black culture like the one in the usa. we have different histories but we are connected in part through how we came here and became established. i watched the documentary about priceville this morning and it got me thinking -
what is it that has us rolling, holding our sides, crying laughing over something we do as black folk? what gets us deep into discussions of blackness?
i was telling someone one day. there isn’t really a name for us here. black-canadian. black-african canadian. african-caribbean canadian. afro-canadian. african-canadian. it’s something we don’t necessarily agree on. for the most part, people are cool with being called black. they are black. they say such things. but i wonder if there is a culture, something, some kind of fabric that we have.
i think because of the way histories have unfolded, but especially the covert way in which we have been treated as less than, there isn’t one. i don’t think i’m calling it by its right name.
what we bond over is the similarities between and across diasporas and cultures.
in canada, your heritage doesn’t go away. it gets mistaken. i have been called everything from jamaican (most popular) to haitian to senegalese to guyanese…to french. i am branded everywhere i go by these names and assumptions in addition to my blackness. i think that this is different from the usa where your blackness consumes everything else. i’m guessing and basing it off some posts i have read about those who can essentially “point to a map”.
jamaican is what i’m usually called. there is a dominance of jamaican cultures and west-indian cultures in general because that is the largest black population. naturally then, you are influenced by the lingo, by the food, by the people and by the stories. except for me, i didn’t really get the stories. i got everything else. i’d pick up some slang and bring it home to the dismay of my parents, because it was so radically different from how we speak. twi.
and i remember how i would talk with black folks. we would talk about our mothers and what they did. we would describe the same things, but they each had different names. i said beats and they said licks. i said planTAIN and they said PLANtain. i said heat and they said hot. and we always say
“that’s how we do over here!”
but we never meant it in blackness.
we’re all immigrant kids too. so we bonded over that. but there wasn’t something that we said made us all black. because we can’t separate that from where we come from. remember the dynamic of multiculturalism in this country, as well as hidden histories like how everyone and their mother “from elsewhere” help make this country what it is. so we don’t celebrate blackness. we celebrate our own black traditions in and out of home. we have an afro-fest. we have carnival. we have a street festival showcasing food that is from everywhere around the world. you always see someone in their traditional wear, no big deal (it actually isn’t this simple but for the purposes of explaining, let’s just say it is). you always hear at least five languages a day, no big deal. you always see a mix of people, no big deal. and we’re proud of that.
we hold onto that difference. and it actually divides us too sometimes. yet if you saw the categories on pieces of paper, we are always just ‘black’.
and some folks don’t want to be grouped together with other black people like that because it is erasure to them. some people don’t know where they fit in. because it’s not the canadian vs immigrant thing only,
it’s that we have to try and understand black american culture too. try to live it. because according to the black folk on TV, we had nothing to do with anything.
and that’s all we get here. we are proud of black american successes. we have black history month and celebrate the same black canadian individuals…and then go to black american histories and start jumping. it’s like, we actually don’t see ourselves on TV, at all. we don’t see ourselves on blogs, at all. because even though we’re seeing black women and men everywhere,
they aren’t really like us. and we can’t really relate to what they’re saying and how they’re saying it. because it’s one thing.
i’m looking for the jamaican, ghanaian, nigerian, panamanian, dominican, trini black characters. not the ‘black’ characters. everyday characters. i wonder if people remember barack obama is kenyan but that’s probably another story. i find it difficult to see myself in a canadian context because like i hammer home all day, some things just can’t apply here. and we get erased in that respect and in the respect of talking about western type shit. like, when you hear “the west”? canada doesn’t come up. it’s france, uk and us. that’s it. and i see a black woman on tv right? but i don’t see myself sometimes.
i’m not mad at the differences. i’m hashing out thoughts here because i read a lot about issues with regard to beauty, intersectionalities, blackness, erasure, sex and the like. but something always seems to be missing, i guess.
