The Artistic Breathing Space Of Montréal
I came to Montreal in 1992 as a sort of internal cultural refugee. I felt that the pursuit of the muse outside of the academy was at best, a dying art in The Rest of Canada ... bohemianism, laziness, giddy idealism and anything ‘arty’ was generally frowned upon by the dour inheritors of Protestant Canadian Values. There only seemed to be two options open to me. I could clean myself up, get a suit, get a degree, keep my nose clean and learn to like the classroom. Or I could follow the road of excess, not to the palace of wisdom, but rather, directly and precipitously to the grave.
Moving to Montreal was my ‘third way.’ I was somewhat familiar with the city from previous sojourns in 1984-85 and 1987-88; I knew it was a tough city, but at the same time, I knew that it had a street culture with a vitality and warmth I hadn’t encountered elsewhere in Canada. This culture began on the simple level of acceptance – Montrealers were far less judgmental, and generally more curious and much less afraid of ‘the new’ than people in other cities. Even the poorest of the poor, buoyed in the early nineties by a reformed welfare system, could have a rich social life. In the summer of 1992, the city’s 350th anniversary celebrations included free concerts on Berri Square by a broad range of performers, from the Mahmoud Guinia’s Moroccan oud ensemble to punk diva Nina Hagen. Every weekend featured the freeform conviviality of the Tam-Tams at the great (and much graffitied) Monument George-Étienne Cartier. Rent was incredibly cheap, and thanks to a moratorium on condominium development on the Plateau, apartments were plentiful.
Anyone in the arts knows that time is at least as precious a commodity as money; and in the Montreal of the early nineties, time was plentiful. There was a fairly relaxed attitude on the part of ‘regular folks’ toward artists of all stripes in those days ... I remember ‘coming out’ as a writer to my dentist (my first visit to a dentist in years, courtesy of the Quebec welfare system) – an act that might seem laughable, but it was actually quite difficult to call yourself a writer or an artist in other cities in Canada in those days, unless you were actually famous. In Quebec, being an artist of any sort – marginal or not – was seen as a plus, as a good thing. That is the quintessence of the difference I found between what really must qualify as my own milieu – English-speaking Canada – and Quebec’s culture. Being an artist didn’t mean you weren’t part of society. Being an artist on welfare was also acceptable – it was understood that resources were criminally lacking, and if a creative soul chose the life of poverty afforded by welfare or employment insurance, in order to gain that most precious commodity, time ... what was the crime in that?
For the gift of a little artistic breathing space, Quebec, I am eternally grateful.
Not surprisingly, my ‘productivity’ as a writer increased exponentially. In short order, a bunch of short stories found publication, I became active (even hyper-active) in Montreal’s nascent spoken word scene, I became an active member of Articule, a parallel artist-run gallery, published a book, travelled, got some freelancing gigs, and so on and so forth. My approach to language as a writer and as a poet got looser, and deeper, perhaps in response to this city’s rich linguistic stew.
Stepping back from the personal perspective, the reader can extrapolate from my own modest gains the general health and dynamism of Quebec’s cultural industry in general. Quebec is by far the most generous province when it comes to funding the arts – perhaps because it doesn’t think of itself as a province, it considers itself a nation, and therefore it takes the ‘business’ of culture-making seriously. Innumerable people find careers here in the film industry, in galleries, as entertainers, circus performers, on television, radio ... quite the opposite of the current insanity of the Gordon Campbell ‘Liberals’ in B.C., who seem to think slashing funding to the arts by 98 per cent, while dumping a billion into security for three weeks of Winter Olympics is ‘responsible fiscal management’. This highlights the stark difference in the cultural philosophy of those elites in the English-speaking provinces of Canada, who seem to consider their patrimony as no more than an adjunct to American mass culture, and Quebec’s nationalist ideology, which produces a robust culture as a side-effect.
As to the health of the anglophone arts community in Quebec, I’d always felt that it gets lost somewhere between the indifference of a Quebec cultural sector that overwhelmingly favours francophone artistic production (no surprise there) and a federal cultural policy that sometimes seems to follow a similar logic (i.e., since the majority culture of Quebec is francophone, the main focus of funding should be francophone artistic production). Recent alterations to the funding formula of the Canada Council recognizing the existence and vitality of anglophone culture in Quebec have changed this scenario somewhat, as has the birth of an advocacy entity, the ELAN network.
Personally, I can’t complain about Quebec’s funding (or lack of funding) for anglophone artists, since I (along with my co-author Victoria Stanton) received a generous grant from CALQ in 1999 for the research and creation of Impure, our book on the Montreal spoken word scene. As it stands, this is the only creation grant I have ever received for a personal project from any arts funding body. (Although an event I co-organized, Ultrazone.01, did received a Canada Council inter-arts grant through Articule gallery in 2001.) As far as I’m concerned, my lack of success at garnering grants from Quebec since 1999 is for the same reason as my lack of success at garnering grants on the federal level: it is due to my essential social marginality, my unfashionable artistic and political perspectives, rather than due to any antipathy toward me for my ‘anglo’-ness.
Impure did touch on several thorny questions vis-à-vis the divide between anglophone and francophone culture. For instance, during the editing process we had proposed incorporating French content alongside English content without translation, as a reflection of Montreal’s vivid, casually bilingual culture. Our (English-language) publisher told us that, due to Canada Council funding guidelines, it was impossible to produce an actually bilingual book. I mention this as an example of how the linguistic divide is bureaucratically embedded even in the more progressive sectors of anglo-Canadian culture.
In the process of researching the book and conducting innumerable interviews, we found strong divergences in the understanding of what this ‘spoken word scene’ actually was. There were divisions of definition, certainly – performance art versus theatre versus literature, for example; and divisions of style – dub poetry, slam poetry versus sound poetry and poetic theatre. But one of the main divisions that ran through the Montreal scene was the invisible wall dividing the cultural production of francophone Quebeckers, and anglophone Quebeckers.
I didn’t realize at the time (as a relative outsider) how brave and audacious was Mitsiko Miller’s spoken word cabaret, La Vache enragée (1996-1999), simply because she mixed English-speaking and French-speaking performers as if there were no difference. Her moxy extended to the point of having anglophone performers take part in a special edition of Michel Garneau’s CBF program Décrocheurs Des Étoiles. A more recent example of this hands-across-the-yawning-gulf attitude is the spoken word (and more broadly performative) festival Voix d’Ameriques, which celebrates its tenth anniversary this coming February. The festival’s main organizer, D.Kimm, has always worked to maintain the festival’s bilingual (and sometimes multilingual) nature, despite receiving flack from Quebec nationalists. Blue Metropolis is another major arts event that consistently embraces artists across the linguistic divide, and Endre Farkas and Carolyn Marie Souaid have always curated The Circus of Words as a bilingual event.
For artists in Montreal, the inherent difficulty in breeching the linguistic divide is exacerbated by Quebec’s official language policies. By nationalist fiat, Montreal is a francophone city, a designation which erases much of its historically bilingual history. Such official cultural policy paves the way for events and institutions which completely ignore the existence of anglophone artists; it requires a conscious effort on the part of organizers on both sides of the divide to bring these communities together.
Conditions have changed considerably in Montreal since I moved here in 1992. Since Mayor Bourque eliminated the condominium moratorium on the Plateau, the vacancy rate has plunged and rents have skyrocketed. The high rents and lack of available apartments has driven the poor (including most artists) out of the Plateau, into more remote neighbourhoods (Hochelaga-Maisonneuve, St-Henri, Point St-Charles, Little Italy, Rosemont, Parc Extension) ... thereby diffusing the on-the-ground neighbourhood dynamic of the Plateau that had driven the explosion of grass roots artistic endeavours in the mid-to-late 1990s. Slowly but surely, Montrealers are being forced into the same rat race as The Rest of Canada – working madly to pay the rent. Welfare has been tightened, and employment insurance is much more difficult to access. Artists and would-be artists aren’t finding the free leisure time in which to produce creative work.
It’s the neoliberal disease, one that’s already done so much damage in The Rest of Canada. Setting up artificial barriers, narrowing opportunities and pushing a profit-driven agenda in the arts will only serve to kill the goose that lays golden eggs. Quebec’s strong cultural sector should be applauded, and strengthened. It should serve as a model to other Canadian provinces. It’s an example of that rare and exotic thing, a Peacetime Industry.
2010 has been a year of milestones for Quebec.
It has been:
50 years since the Quiet Revolution
40 years since the October Crisis
30 years since the first referendum on Quebec sovereignty
20 years since the failed Meech Lake Accord
15 years since the second referendum on Quebec sovereignty
Poetry Quebec would like to know whether the social, political and/or cultural changes that have impacted on Quebec over the past few decades have been advantageous or detrimental to your practice as an English language poet in the province. Has it fuelled your work? Has it fuelled your ire? Have the changes created a divisive atmosphere among the English and French language poets in the province? Are you comfortable/satisfied/disappointed with the grant and festival opportunities for English language poets here? Do you believe there is equity for English and French language poets in Quebec? What are your views on the importance of developing a collaborative writing (or professional) relationship with our French language counterparts?
Poetry Quebec welcomes your personal experiences, reflections, observations, rants and/or opinions about working as a minority within the larger francophone majority.
