(pro)claiming Angélique’s story: framing Canada’s slave history
Yuan Stevens, Autumn 2016
In her book May ’68 and its Afterlives, Kristin Ross compellingly argues that our memory of May 1968 has become disfigured. Instead of being understood as an intergenerational, trans-class, sociopolitical, and at times violent movement for economic revolution, Ross states that the movement has instead become immortalized in its current official memory as a mellow, Parisian, sexual, and youthful month of peaceful rebellion. And just as Ross contends that there has been a “poverty” of research using such analyses on May ‘68,[1] so, too, has there been a poverty of research on the reality of Black slavery in Canada.
This is precisely why Afua Cooper’s book The Hanging of Angélique: The Untold Story of Canadian Slavery and the Burning of Old Montréal is so important. What we do with it matters just as much if not more. Cooper compellingly calls on all of us to reexamine our collective memory of the existence and significance of Black slavery in Canada. We must resist the simplification that has been fed to us. And doing so requires us — as people and as jurists — to consider the publishing of Cooper’s book and our analysis of it as particular events that help us to (pro)claim Angélique’s story as one critical frame that surrounds and reveals Canada’s slave history.
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I’ve recently been learning about the history of the internet thanks to a course I’m taking here at McGill on hackers.[2] (The course is fantastic.) The course had me read a chapter of the book Cached: Decoding the Internet in Global Popular Culture by Stephanie Ricker Schulte. Schulte’s first chapter is about the 1983 film WarGames, in which a high school student (Matthew Broderick) accidentally hacks into a military supercomputer and nearly begins World War III via nuclear bombs.
As both a vehicle and framework for America’s earliest discussion of the internet, Schulte writes that the film was a crucial part of the argument for the first internet policy, namely the still-existing Computer Fraud and Abuse Act of 1984. Shulte interestingly describes how WarGames didn’t directly cause policy change as it “did not itself hold power,” but instead, “discursive power flowed through it as it participated in the construction of knowledge about the internet.”[3]
Policymakers, she observes, looked to the film to substantiate their fear-mongering about control over cyberspace as necessary to prevent global destruction.[4] Equally, news media’s use of the film helped “frame” first national debates on real-world hacking activities all while portraying computer networking as a “teenaged, game-like activity.”[5] For Schulte, the power of frames is in their repetition. “A particular event that changes the frames surrounding a story, narrative or issue and then enables media to perpetuate those frames is the most powerful.”[6]
It is with these two frameworks in mind — recognition of the disfiguration of our memory of Canadian slavery and Angélique’s story as holding discursive power and one worth repeating — that I begin with the necessity of signaling incompleteness. In order to recognize that something is amiss, one needs to observe that something is not complete. Cooper signaled through her book the incompleteness of our official understanding of Black slavery in Canada. More often than not thus far, it seems that we as Canadians have grown up learning about North American slavery as a uniquely American phenomenon; as Canada’s role in Black slavery as one of innocent saviour.
Cooper destroys the possibility of this being true. Canada — a mercantile and trading economy serving imperial powers — was just one player in the story of slavery as a global institution; where it “might not have been a slave society … but it was [certainly] a society with slaves.”[7]
More specifically, Cooper exhibited the humility to signal the incompleteness in her own conjecture about aspects of Angélique’s life. Take, for example, Cooper’s usage of the word “perhaps” when describing Angélique’s execution[8] or her decision to use the term “I believe” when proposing that Angélique actually started a fire to a large portion of Montreal.[9] Though seemingly banal, such decisions hold tremendous power.
And I admit: until the very end of the book, I found it difficult to imagine why Cooper would not come to Angélique’s defence as innocent of such crimes. Instead, Cooper reminds us that the result of the “in love” thesis advanced by previous historians regarding Angélique’s motives to set the fire has “not only rob[bed] her of the agency that she exhibited in her quest for liberty, [but has also] diminish[ed] the violence inherent in [Canadian] slavery.[10] Beyond this, such framing has shaped modern-day race relations in Canada through its silencing.[11]
I myself have been forced to recognize the gravity of the incompleteness of my knowledge when it comes to explanations for the existence of Canadian slavery and its reality. Before reading this book, I would have hesitantly agreed that yes, slavery existed in Canada. But just as we have tended to understand May ’68 as a social rather than an economic or labour revolution, I have understood North American slavery too simplistically and only in light of colonial geographic expansion.
I now better understand that the perceived need for slavery was underpinned by economic concerns: that the “paternalistic nature of slavery in New France had much to do with the scarcity of labour in a growing economy.”[12] Also underpinning this perceived need was the liberal value that each “man” (that is, White European male) had the unwavering right to property and so much so that causing damage to another’s immovable property could give rise to capital punishment.
Understanding the paternalistic nature of slavery in Canada due to the country’s living conditions and economic industries also serves as a new frame through which we can understand that domestic Canadian slaves perhaps even had it worse than American slaves due to a lack of community, both constant surveillance and scrutiny, and thus an experience of subjugation to multiple kinds of abuse.[13]
Through Angélique’s story, we can and should grow deeper in our understanding of the complexity of the role of the law in Canadian slavery. The law in Canada — treaties, acts and agreements of slave labour — did not necessarily and solely have oppressive power over slaves. Rather, the law has been and can be a tool for individuals to enact state-led resistance against human servitude. We see this in the case of Graves Simcoe, who ultimately prosecuted a sadistic slaveholder with disturbing the peace, despite the man being able to dispose of his slave — Chloe Cooley — in whatever way he wished.[14]
Sometimes the law’s interaction with slavery gave rise to paradoxes. Simcoe’s legislation from 1793, which had the effect of maintaining servitude over then-slaves but prevented the introduction of new slaves to Canada, gave rise to a conundrum that I had never before even heard of: American slaves came to Upper Canada to be freed via the “underground railroad” yet Canadian slaves would head south for freedom in Michigan and New England.[15] Such facts, made clear through Cooper’s comprehensive telling of Angélique’s context, disrupt the rhetoric of Canada’s blemish-free relationship with slavery and instead allow us to resist the over-simplification with which we were once before satisfied.
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Where does this leave us now? Thanks to Cooper’s reframing of Angélique’s story of resistance, we are compelled to be honest about how we are telling history that is happening today.
Take Joel Debellefeuille’s story, for example. His story can be characterized as what has been labelled the “driving while Black” phenomenon. After having been stopped by police four times over the span of several days in 2009 because “his Quebecois name did not match his skin tone,” Debellefeuille won his case at Quebec’s municipal court; tickets he had received were dismissed and the officers in question were suspended for several days without pay.[16] Importantly, the judge — a white older man who also had a decidedly “Quebecois name” — framed the police officers’ shocking disbelief that a Black person could have the last name of “Debellefeuille” as showing “a flagrant lack of knowledge about Quebec society.”[17]
We must resist the simplification that has been fed to us. We must be critical of our collective memory of Black slavery in Canada and consider whom this silencing and forgetting has served and will serve. It is precisely for these purposes that we need a class at McGill’s law faculty on slavery and the law. This is the only class that has so far, for me, resulted in a pivotal event — reading books such as Cooper’s — which helps me (pro)claim the stories and histories of people such as Angélique as one of several frames that reveals Canada’s slave history.
→ References
[1] Kristin Ross, May ’68 and its Afterlives, (Chicago: The University of Chicago Press, 2002) at 5.
[2] I write with such an informal tone on purpose; to have a conversation with you as my reader(s).
[3] Stephanie Ricker Schulte, Cached: Decoding the Internet in Global Popular Culture, (New York: New York University Press, 2013) at 23.
[4] Ibid at 47.
[5] Ibid at 28.
[6] Ibid at 28.
[7] Afua Cooper, The Hanging of Angélique: The Untold Story of Canadian Slavery and the Burning of Old Montréal, (Toronto: Harper Perennial, 2006) at 68.
[8] Ibid at 284.
[9] Ibid at 287.
[10] Ibid at 289.
[11] Ibid.
[12] Ibid at 77.
[13] Ibid at 158-9.
[14] Ibid at 101.
[15] Ibid at 102-3.
[16] CBC News, News Release, “Longueuil man takes police racial profiling claim to human rights commission” (28 October 2015), online: CBC News, http://www.cbc.ca/news/canada/montreal/story/2012/12/10/joel-debellefeuille-officers-suspended.html.
[17] Ibid.