Content area
Full Text
Historically, Marie Joseph Angelique was a slave who, in 1734, set fire to her mistress's home in Montreal to avenge her impending sale, and cover her escape with her white lover. The conflagration destroyed a substantial portion of the city and she was subsequently captured, tried and hanged.
To me and other black Canadians, however, Marie Joseph Angelique is more than just an interesting tidbit in Canadian history. Everyone who has heard her name has felt compelled to recover her.
Why? Her absence and her silence speaks untold volumes of our diasporic history. Her acts of rebellion symbolize the resistance of a de-colonized mind to the social, political and psychological remnants of slavery which still demand our complicity today. Her simple being, which pre-dates the Underground Railroad by at least a century, reminds Canadians that our black presence is neither a post-colonial nor a post-modern phenomena.
Angelique invites Canadians to confront the past: an ugly, painful, scary, "it's better left forgotten" past; an unspoken past which sours black/white communication with mistrust, guilt, shame, ignorance and fear -for slavery is our unfinished business. Through Angelique's eyes we see that we have only to fear from the past, what we repeat in the present. And if all we learn from her experience is that slavery was a demeaning and inhuman chapter in the history of mankind, then we walk away with the knowledge that we went through it - black and white, slave and master - together in Canada. Slavery is not black history; it is Canada's history.
In recovering Marie Joseph Angelique, I recover myself-a fourth generation, black Canadian of African, South Asian, Native Indian and unknown Guinean descent, who never knew where to go when she was told to go back where she came from. I recover my white husband who, though blameless, felt outrage, remorse and guilt each time I cried about a country I can't seem to find a place in; who gave me love and gold to smooth away the pain. I recover our son, for whom at three years of age, black and white are simply two colours in a colourful world; and I ensure his pride in his nationality and all his ancestries.
In the years I have spent...