A rich history of Haitians in Quebec
A Place in the Sun digs deep into the history of Haitian Montreal
Understanding history is more than just knowing where to look. It’s knowing how to look.
Dany Laferrière’s 1985 novel Comment faire l’amour avec un Nègre sans se fatiguer is a work whose influence can’t be underestimated. Laferrière wasn’t the first Haitian writer in Quebec — Emile Ollivier was notable among his predecessors — but he was the first to make an impact on pop culture. His novel landed like a bomb in the literary scene of the day. An early edition of the book bore a cover showing the shoeless author on an urban park bench, a typewriter in his lap, absorbed in his writing. Even if you’re not aware that the picture was taken in an especially significant place, it’s an image loaded with import.
“It’s affirming the idea that black migrants are full of creative and fascinating thoughts,” said author and academic Sean Mills, talking about that cover. “It’s a direct challenge to marginalization. And it’s in Carré St- Louis, which was the heart of the francophone Quebec opposition in the 1960s and ’ 70s and a symbolic centre of the counterculture and the idea of Québécois blackness. By placing himself in that park, Laferrière was effectively inserting himself in the centre of Quebec’s literary and intellectual life. He was announcing a change.” So, you’ll probably never look at that cover in quite the same away again, and Mills’s new book, A Place In The Sun: Haiti, Haitians and the Remaking of Quebec ( McGill- Queen’s University Press, 297 pp, 29.95), is full of such revealing moments.
Toronto- based Mills, who won the Quebec Writer’s Federation’s non- fiction prize for his first book, The Empire Within: Postcolonial Thought and Political Activism in Sixties Montreal, has cast his view wider this time, charting the Quebec- Haiti relationship from the 1930s and providing an enlightening perspective on the origins and growth of a community that is now 100,000- strong in Montreal. “I’m interested in the subject of migration from the global south, and in the case of Haitians coming to Quebec it was important to understand the roots,” Mills said. The shared language was the obvious attraction of Montreal over, say, New York, but far from the only factor — just as important, Mills writes, were shifting immigration regulations.
For decades before that migration began in earnest, the main point of contact between Quebec and Haiti was Catholic missionaries, who were largely prone to the standard prejudices and stereotypes of the era; Haitians, writes Mills, were condescended to on all levels — their sexuality assumed to be deviant, their Vodou beliefs dismissed as superstition.
“In the 1940s and 1950s, there’s no doubt there was a great deal of paternalism toward Haitians,” Mills said. “I use the metaphor of the family — that Haiti was seen as part of the greater ‘ family’ of the French empire — but a family that wasn’t always based on equality. There was also a kind of dual discourse going on, where French Canadian intellectuals saw the French- speaking elite in Haiti in a very different way than how they saw the broader Creolespeaking population.”
When those attitudes began to break down, it was partly due to the ferment of the times, and partly to progressive elements within the church. “In the 1960s many missionaries themselves began calling into question some of those earlier forms of thought, and we begin to see an opening up. Many forms of international solidarity that converged later actually came out of that.”
It was through the 1960s and ’ 70s, as the number of Haitians in Quebec grew, that the real change came. “When Haitians here began contributing to the greater debate — arguing, for example, that the ongoing presence of Quebec missionaries in Haiti was advantageous to the Duvalier dictatorship — that was crucial,” he said.
In the second half of the book, as Mills shifts his focus from the migration to what happened next, two watershed Montreal events emerge. One is “the crisis of the 1,500” in 1974, when the threatened mass deportation of undocumented migrants galvanized multiple groups in shared opposition. “Rather than quietly accepting their fate,” Mills writes, “Haitian migrants brought their story to the larger public through protest and interventions in the mainstream media.” Haitians were able to “position themselves as ideal francophone immigrants for modern Quebec.” Nine years later, local Haitian taxi drivers, many of them possessors of qualifications unrecognized in Canada, banded together to protest their harsh economic conditions and the racism to which they were subjected. It’s hard not to see a certain irony given the current Uber- fuelled crisis the industry now faces.
Running parallel to such events was the complex relationship between Haitians and the Quebec independence movement. Many of the new arrivals looked at French Canadians and, differences aside, recognized a fellow minority seeking selfdetermination. “Haitians were actively involved in the debates around sovereignty — forming close ties with francophone intellectuals and avant- garde poets and showing a degree of sympathy toward the ( Parti Québécois) in 1976 and after,” Mills said. “But I wouldn’t want to exaggerate this. For many Haitian intellectuals, it was more that the sovereignty movement in the 1970s was seen to be a movement pushing for broader social democracy.”
A reflection of just how far things have come is seen when Mills gathers testimonials from first- wave Haitians who arrived in Quebec in the 1960s thinking of themselves not as settlers, but as exiles.
“People in that initial wave often spoke of hoping to go back and play a role,” Mills said. “But that began to shift with the arrival of larger numbers of poorer people. In 1986, when the Duvalier dictatorship fell, there was in fact a movement to return, but it wasn’t a mass one. Very few people ended up doing it. The community was implanted here by then. It was integral and vital.”