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Sean Mill’s latest book, A Place in the Sun, which was officially launched just last week here in Montreal, was also recently reviewed by the Montreal Gazette. The following is an excerpt from Ian McGillis’ piece “A Place in the Sun traces the Haitian face of Quebec”.
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.
Read the full review from the Montreal Gazette
Read more about A Place in the Sun
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