I fell in love with Montreal when I was an undergraduate at Carleton University in Ottawa
The two cities were two hours but, in many ways, a world apart.
Ottawa was where my parents opted to live when we immigrated to Canada. I was fourteen. I went to high school there and to university.
I loved Carleton for many reasons, and I am proud to call it my alma mater.
But I hated Ottawa. I thought it was boring and soulless. Granted it was a pretty city, and it had museums and art galleries and the National Arts Centre and decent restaurants with a good range of international cuisine. A place, however, where sixty-five percent of the population worked for the federal government was a place, at least as I experienced it, that had very little creative energy and too much small-minded conservatism, both of which tapped my spirit to lengths that were sometimes unbearable. I took every opportunity I could to get out of there.
In the summers, I travelled abroad as much as my bank account permitted. During the academic year, I made frequent trips to to Montreal.
I decided to spend the summer after I graduated from university in Montreal because I wanted to know if it would work as a place where I could live happily, or at least more happily than I had in Ottawa. I had registered to do a one-year post-undergrad certificate in Teaching English as a Second Language at Carleton, which was my ticket to a job in South America, where I wanted to live for a couple of years: my immediate dream. That meant that I had to spend one more year in Ottawa, but after that, I never wanted to live there again.
And I never have.
In Montreal that summer, I worked at an Indian restaurant downtown and, rents being what they were before either place gentrified, earned enough to keep my small apartment in downtown Ottawa and rent another small one in the 'McGill Ghetto', the housing just off the McGill University campus.
Everything I had sensed about Montreal from my brief trips there turned out to be true when I lived there that summer. The energy was completely different from Ottawa. It was liberal and joyous. I met writers and painters and women who were bold and confident.
Although I was neither an artist nor a woman who was either bold or confident, I was energized by the possibility that I could be all three. I knew that there I could grow and, hopefully at least, find the courage to explore the limits of my personal potential.
In Ottawa I risked disappearing into a muck of mediocrity.
I decided I would move to Montreal after I came back from South America. Three years later, I did.
I ended up living there for ten years between the ages of twenty-five and thirty-five. I came into my own as an adult and as a woman there. It was there that I learned how to eat well and drink well and to understand that clothing could be a personal expression, not just a reflection of fashion trends or the cultural norms. I earned my living by teaching English as a Second Language in CEGEP's and in businesses, and I made my first forays into writing there as a freelance journalist and as an editor.
My eldest child was born there.
And while I continued to love it - and to this day I could never hate it - I slowly began to fear it.
Alongside the energy and the attitudes that had so engaged me, what I had not seen about Montreal until some time after I actually committed to living there, was that there was also a racism that was so insular it was shocking considering how non-insular Montreal was on every other front. It was a queer-safe place and one where common-law partnerships stood nose to nose numerically with formal marriages. Family law there is so progressive it's downright refreshing, and has been for decades.
It was a place that rallied from the core of its heart and its soul when fourteen female Engineering students were gunned down by Marc Lepine on December 6, 1989.
Seven months later, however, when the mayor of Oka, a town just north of Montreal, decided to extend the town's golf course into a pine forest sacred to the local First Nations group, the Mohawk, the city did not rally at all. The Mohawk from both Kanesatake, near Oka, and Kahnawake, near Montreal, both rose up in an coordinated and clearly articulated objection to the outrage by blocking bridges and highways. The conflict would go down in the history books as the first significant one between First Nations and the Government of Quebec.
While there was significant sympathy from the mainstream community, people from that same population demonstrated a hatred of First Nations that was shocking enough to include publicly burned effigies of Mohawks.
Why that difference exists in the Montreal's social conscience involves long conversations, of which I have had many. None, however, have cleared up the issue for me.
I began to notice more and more an indifference to race as a social issue inside the mainstream consciousness in Montreal. When, in the spring and summer of 1991 two unarmed black men were – on separate occasions - shot to death by police officers, many of those who called in to radio stations made reference to the issue that neither of those men were particularly upright citizens, as if that, if it were correct, justified their unjustifiable deaths. At some point during that same time period, a teachers' collective in Montreal began arguing that the children of immigrants needed to be educated in places separate from the rest of the school population.
As a single person, and even as someone in a relationship, I could live a meaningful life there that skirted all of that ignorance. The thing about Montreal is that people who are cool there are really cool, and I lived my personal and professional lives inside that particular space. I wrote feature pieces for newspapers on the topic of race in Montreal, and in my brief spell as the English editor for a French/English magazine, I was able to give forum to voices that elegantly articulated the topic of race in the city.
Then I had a child. And the thought of his interfacing with the mainstream through public institutions – like schools – freaked me out. He would be exposed to all that racism, I feared, and there would be no way for me to effectively protect him.
Partly because of that, though there were other reasons, my partner and I left Montreal for the United States before our kid was two years old. When I came back to Canada, I opted for Toronto over ontreal because I didn't fear Toronto in terms of the way it addresses race.
I still go back to Montreal as often as I can. I still love it. Some of my closest friends live there and every time I go there, I have a great time. The history I have with that city and the way I spend time with my friends there engage pieces of my being that are engaged nowhere else.
I was there for five days recently - in early July 2011. I stayed with a friend who lives on the Plateau. The morning after I arrived, when I was out and about, I felt like a myself in a way I feel nowhere else on earth. By that afternoon, I was back to being a Montrealer, so much so that people asked me for directions on the street. Over the next few days, I shopped in the stores I liked to frequent and I had lunch at familiar haunts. Every evening, I had great meals and great conversations with my friends. Nothing about food or drink or conversation was ever mediocre in the Montreal.
I even began fantasizing about living there again.
Then on the fourth day, I walked by a bus shelter that had an advertisement for a brand of bottled water. It had four people of different skin colours. They had paint on their faces that was crudely stereotypical of First Nations war paint, and equally crude feather headdresses. They were postured in aggressive stances, with their teeth bared, depicting savagery. The poster was so racist, it took my breath away.
Immediately, I began noticing that so many of the brown people around me looked beat down. Later that day, as I walked up St. Laurent Boulevard from St. Catherine Street to de Maisonneuve Boulevard, I noticed that the Indian shops I remembered had fallen into even further disrepair than I last remembered them being. They were decrepit now and downright depressing.
By the fifth day, I was antsy to leave.
I love Montreal because there are people there whom I love dearly, and because I so much love the part of myself that comes out to play there.
But I'm not sure I could ever live there again.
*JG
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