Caribbean Matters: A politician and a poet are just two of the nearly 1 million Caribbean Canadians

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When we in the United States discuss the Caribbean diaspora—including the nearly 13 million U.S. citizens of Caribbean ancestry—rarely do we think of Canada. Our neighbor to the north has a Caribbean immigrant and ancestored population of about 1 million people, and they have faced struggles for civil rights as what Canada dubs “visible minorities,” a term coined by Black Canadian activist Kay Livingston in 1975. 

Today, let’s meet two amazing Black Caribbean Canadian women: a politician and a dub poet.

Caribbean Matters is a weekly series from Daily Kos. If you are unfamiliar with the region, check out Caribbean Matters: Getting to know the countries of the Caribbean.

While searching for Caribbean news items for this series, I came across a video promoting the documentary Steadfast: The Messenger and the Message. I admit that I knew zero about the subject of the film, the Hon. Jean Augustine, P.C., C.M., O.Ont., C.B.E., as she’s styled in Canada; while I was aware that Canada celebrates Black History Month, I didn’t know Augustine, 84, was the person behind that legislation. 

Here’s the Steadfast theatrical trailer.

Some background on the Hon. Augustine.

Augustine is one of a large number of Caribbean immigrants who came to Canada in the years following World War II. She was born on September 9, 1937, in Grenada, an island nation in the southeastern Caribbean Sea that was then still part of the British colonial empire. She grew up in a village called Happy Hill near Grenada’s capital of St. George’s. Her father, Ossie Simon, was a sugarcane-plantation worker, but he died before she was a year old after a deadly bout with tetanus, which he contracted during a visit to the dentist.

Augustine’s mother, Olive, was already expecting a second child when her husband died, and the entire family was adopted by an older woman in the village, whom they called “Granny.” Granny had no children of her own, but owned some property and was moderately well-off. Such communal and charitable arrangements were more commonplace in West Indian society during Augustine’s youth. Granny’s was a household in which Augustine was encouraged to excel in school, and she did. She won a scholarship to a local Roman Catholic school, where she earned top grades. During her high-school years, she founded an all-girl band and also hosted her own youth program on a local radio station before graduating a year early.

Augustine’s first job was as a schoolteacher in Grenada, but her pay was less than $10 a month. On Sundays she would write letters for other Grenadians who had never learned to read or write, but wanted to keep in touch with relatives living overseas. This experience exposed Augustine to people who had left the West Indies in search of better economic opportunities, and at the age of 22 she herself moved to Toronto, Ontario, Canada, to take a job as a nanny. She arrived on a special visa the Canadian government gave out to citizens of other nations inside the British colonial realm, which required her to work one year as a domestic servant. After that period was finished, she would then be free to stay in Canada permanently if she wished.

Augustine would go on to make history in Canada in 1993 when she was elected to the House of Commons; nine years later, she would become the first Black woman to serve as a cabinet minister.

But Augustine has impacted generations. Unilearnal’s Anne Moreau is the co-creator of the YouTube series 28 Moments of Black Canadian History. In the 2020 episode below, Moreau talks about life as a Black woman in Canada, as well as the impact of learning about and then meeting Hon. Jean Augustine.

Moving on to the other star of today’s story, April 5 marks the 70th birthday of Lillian Allen, one of the founders of the dub poetry movement in Canada.  

Krista L. Roberts wrote Allen’s bio for the Canadian Encyclopedia. 

Lillian Allen was born the fifth of ten children. She was raised and grew up in Spanish Town, a historic city about 17 kilometres west of Kingston, Jamaica. Allen’s father was a civil servant and a leader at the local church; her mother was also an active community member who played a large role in educating her children. In 1969, at the age of 17, Allen left Spanish Town to attend the University of Waterloo in Kitchener, Ontario. That same year, she moved to New York City, where she landed a job working at the Caribbean Daily. It was in the pages of this paper that she first  published, “I Fight Back,” a dub poem that gained a considerable amount of recognition. While living in New York, she also studied communications and Black studies at City College of New York, as well as creative writing at New York University. During  this time, she became heavily involved in the dub poetry scene.

Allen moved back to Jamaica in 1973, and the next year she returned to Canada and settled in Toronto, where she enrolled in the newly formed English and Creative Writing Program at York University. She was one of the first students to graduate from the program, with a BA, in 1978. While in school, Allen served as a community legal worker in Regent Park, a public housing estate in Toronto with a large population of Afro-Caribbean immigrants. She also worked as an education coordinator for the Immi-Can youth project,and contributed research and lyrics for the reggae band Truths and Rights […]

In 1989, Allen’s poem “Unnatural Causes” was the subject of a National Film Board film. The short film features images of politicians basking in luxury and comfort interspersed with images of homeless women and archival footage of Canadian protest movements. In 1993, Allen co-produced and co-directed the documentary Blak Wi Blakk, about the life and work of the dub poet Mutabaruka. In 1999, she released her third album, Freedom and Dance. She was a driving force in the 2003 founding of the Dub Poets Collective, alongside Afua Cooper, Klyde Broox, Chet Singh, Clifton Joseph, di’b young and Sankofa Juba, and in 2004 she hosted Wordbeat, a CBC Radio program on poetry and spoken word.

Give a listen to “Unnatural Causes”:

As Kerstin Knopf writes in Views of Canadian Cultures:

The piece “Unnatural causes” contextualizes the clash between Canada’s postcard image as the perfect multicultural nation and the various images of (immigrant) poverty and homelessness that are likely to be ignored in national discourses. In the poem’s idealized city and country “a curtained metropolitan glare/ grins a diamond sparkle sunset.” The picture postcard of Toronto that is sent home transports false illusions into the world. Canada’s postcard images construct it as an immigrant “fairy land,/ where everything is so clean/ a place where everyone is happy/ and well taken care of” as the voice of the receiver of the postcard reflects. But the postcard glosses over society’s unpleasant spots and does not reveal that in the “silvered city/ hunger rails beneath the flesh,” people make their homes in streetcars and bus stops and stay thirsty “at the banks of plenty.” To affirm this ‘unpostcardlike’ side of Canadian society, Allen introduces the character of Caroline Bungle, a homeless woman, who “tugs her load […] on the front steps of abundance” and whose life is a “dungle of terror/ of lost hope/ abandonment.”

Here’s a video tribute to Allen.

In 2021, Allen published Make the World New: The Poetry of Lillian Allen. In her review of the book for The Walrus, Kaie Kellough writes this of Allen’s lasting impact—and those who tried to thwart it:

The arrow-like precision of Allen’s voice helped fashion a new narrative of who a Canadian artist could be and what they might address. In 1984, Allen was part of a small group of dub poets who tried to join the League of Canadian Poets, a national organization that, for many years, was the face of English-language poetry in the country. Their application was rejected on the grounds that Allen and the others were performers and therefore failed to meet the league’s membership criteria at the time. The group countered that they write poems, but they also perform them, and performance is a form of publishing. They were eventually admitted. The instance of discrimination masquerading as formal artistic distinction marked Allen. The initial rejection suggested that a Black poet who maintains an oral practice cannot really be a poet. Instead of accepting that and practising their art form on the margins of the literary scene, Allen and her contemporaries demanded that the definition change.

Hope you enjoyed meeting these two phenomenal sisters, and that you will join me in the comments for more discussion and the weekly Caribbean news Twitter round-up.