MONTREAL 2025 IN REVIEW
Cover photo: From the Indigenous Voices of Today: Knowledge, Trauma, Resilience permanent exhibit at the McCord Stewart Museum in Montreal, Canada.
BONJOUR!
We’ve been back from Montreal almost two months now. And though it was a great experience, I’ve found writing this post-trip review to be difficult. As I’ve gotten older, and more knowledgeable about certain topics, my descriptions and explanations increasingly resemble a multi-layered web. Perhaps this is because I know that there is always more to a story, and so proper context and sidebars are often needed. In order to curtail myself, I’ve decided to break down this review into three parts: (1) what I loved; (2) what disappointed; and (3) where I want to go deeper. Please take into consideration, this was only my second trip to Montreal; the first took place over 20 years ago! What’s below is just my experience of the city after what can be considered a fleeting interaction. Take everything with a grain of salt.
WHAT I LOVED
The taxi/rideshare drivers. During my travels in recent years, I have truly come to appreciate taxi and rideshare drivers. Even in China, I had memorable conversations in a mix of bad Chinese AND bad English with those strangers who shuttled me from one part of the city to the next. In Montreal, a bilingual (and arguably multilingual) city where French is the official language, and English is widely spoken, the language capabilities of our drivers were all different. Some spoke French and English, in addition to a number of other languages. Others spoke little French or no English. In our group, I was the least capable in French! Nonetheless, we managed to have some interesting conversations with most of our drivers. Each conversation was like a piece of a jigsaw puzzle. Over time, a picture of the city began to emerge.
Montreal stood out as a very diverse and cosmopolitan city. Noticeably, there was a larger than expected East Asian and Arab population, the latter of which we were told had been steadily increasing. In Montreal, it seemed like folks from different backgrounds generally got along, and people of different ethnicities and races interacted in a fairly genuine way. The city felt racially and ethnically integrated in a way I’ve never experienced in the U.S., not even in a major and diverse city like New York.[1] Now, with that said, a visit to the McCord Stewart Museum to see an exhibit on Little Burgundy - a historically Black neighborhood in Montreal – indicated that racism was alive and well in the city. Perhaps Montreal was not all puppies and rainbows?
The fashion. What can I say? I found the people of Montreal to have a sophisticated fashion sense. Whereas I feel people in the U.S. don’t dress up as much as we used to, it seemed like people in Montreal still dressed up to go out for a casual meal.[2] I am by no means a fashionista, but I did like and appreciate what appeared to be a sense of pride in the way people dressed.
WHAT DISAPPOINTED
The Montreal bagel. Ugh. I hate to say it, but their bagel is not better than a New York bagel, as much as our food tour guide tried to convince us otherwise! Montreal bagels may have maintained the same recipe from the “Old Country,” but we definitely improved it! (Btw, I’m not just saying that because I’m from New York. The Montreal bagel was not bad, but I was really looking forward to tasting a bagel better than ours. Unfortunately, a better bagel theirs was not.)
The Little Burgundy Exhibit at the McCord Stewart Museum did not hit the right chord for me, although some in the group found it to be moving. Though now gentrified, Little Burgundy was once a historically Black neighborhood in Montreal. It was only during the planning stages that I realized that the legendary jazz pianist, Oscar Peterson, was from this same neighborhood.[3] Unfortunately, scheduling would not allow us to do a tour of the neighborhood with the only guide licensed to do tours there. (I later learned that Montreal has very strict licensing requirements for tour guide operators). But we were fortunate to catch the final weeks of this exhibit showcasing the neighborhood.
The exhibit was part of the Evolving Montreal series initiated by the McCord Stewart Museum to “support documentary photography projects that capture the transformation of neighborhoods from unique points of view.”[4] Artist Andrew Jackson was commissioned to document this third installation in the series.
For his commission, Jackson chose to document the changes occurring in Little Burgundy, considered the cradle of Montreal’s Black anglophone community. Over a period of about two years, the photographer recorded some of the key sites and individuals that compose Little Burgundy’s Black community today…This exhibition is to be read as a carefully composed artistic installation that, through images, films and objects, conveys the photographer’s vision of Little Burgundy’s past and present.[5]
The exhibit highlighted the struggles of those living in the community, especially due to racism. In fact, in contrast to the feeling of integration that we observed in Old Montreal and downtown, the exhibit demonstrated a harsh reality for Black folks living in this neighborhood. Unfortunately, many of their experiences – police brutality, gun violence, and poverty – are not unlike those experienced by Black people in the U.S.
My main problem with the exhibit is something that the artist himself addresses in a video where he discusses the project – the lack of context. He mentions that this is one of the frequent critiques of photo documentary work, especially coming from people working in fields like mine. As I looked at the photos, short films, and objects that comprised the exhibit[6], I could hear the voice of one of my old college professors.
“So what?” she’d say.
It used to low-key drive me crazy when she would say that. But over time, I understood her purpose. It was an invitation to go deeper and really explain why what we are saying matters. Why should anyone care about what we have to say? As I moved through the exhibit, I couldn’t help but think “So what?” Along the wall of the museum, were carefully placed portraits of people from the neighborhood. The only descriptions provided were their names and the location where the pictures were taken. I couldn’t help but ask myself, “Why are we being shown these portraits? Who are these people? What are their stories?” Why am I watching these short films? If someone walks into the exhibit from off the street with no prior knowledge of this community, what do they walk away with?
I think perhaps the thought was that people might empathize with the plight of community members. Unfortunately, there are many people who see a Black face and do not see a human. So, for me, showing a portrait with just a name and location attached doesn’t necessarily produce empathy. And sadly, neither does a video about a Black mother crying over the death of her young son to violence. So many people have become desensitized to violence in general, and especially when it is perpetrated against certain groups of people. For so long, Black people have been dehumanized; we have been seen, but yet not seen. Besides longing for some context, I also wanted to see some aspect of the joy of Little Burgundy. The exhibit felt too one-sided, and skewed towards the negative. We know, just from the history of Black people, that where there is shadow, there is also light. Jackson himself stated that his aim was to “explore the duality of the conceptualized Black space and how it paradoxically exists simultaneously as a space of failure and as a space of shelter, belonging and intimacy.” For me, where he fell short was that his portrayals of the community as a space of “shelter, belonging, and intimacy” were almost solely tied to acts of violence.[7]
WHERE I’D LIKE TO GO DEEPER
Little Burgundy/Montreal’s Black community. Despite being somewhat disappointed with the exhibit, I would love to learn more about Little Burgundy, and the Black experience in Montreal. Was my analysis of the exhibit correct? Or was I making assumptions based on my own experience? In conjunction, I’d also like to learn more about interracial/inter-ethnic dynamics in the city. Is Montreal as integrated as it appears? And if so, what attributes of the culture allow the city to be so harmonious?
Language. The push to make French the dominant language of Montreal saw many English speakers (native and foreign) leave Montreal in the late 20th century. There still seems to be a subtle chill regarding that change. It’s a topic that I find intriguing and would like to learn more about.
Indigenous community. After looking at the Little Burgundy exhibit we only had a few minutes to peruse the McCord Stewart Museum’s permanent exhibit Indigenous Voices of Today: Knowledge, Trauma, Resilience. I found the exhibit to be interesting and wish we had more time to explore. A story told by one of our guides during our tour of Old Montreal still sits with me. She recalled a story told by an indigenous woman whose mother had been sent to a boarding school as a child. Her mother refused to speak the language of her colonizers, and after many attempts to get her to stop speaking her native language, this child’s tongue was cut. The story is etched into my mind as another reminder that man’s inhumanity to man is not new, nor are the ways that communities are systematically erased.
IN CONCLUSION
It feels like I’ve only touched the surface of our trip. I barely even mentioned the sites that we visited! While I very much appreciate visiting sites, what I most appreciate about traveling is the ability to meet and connect with people, and learn about other ways of being and existing in the world. For me, it’s never about photos for “the Gram” or just being able to say, “I’ve been there!” That’s all well in good. But I can still hear my professor saying, “So what?” So what if you’ve been there? What did you learn? Why does it matter? At the end of the day, I hope everyone who goes on our tours can answer that question.
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Notes:
[1] To be fair, the U.S. is a large country, and I have not been to every city. Perhaps there’s one that feels similar to Montreal.
[2] Now, this was mostly in the city center. It’s possible that the comparison doesn’t fit in other parts of the city.
[3] As an undergraduate at Trinity College, I spent countless hours in our music library listening to music, including one CD of Oscar Peterson’s music. I remember being fascinated and in awe of his brilliance. In hindsight, I wonder if my late mentor, Dr. Lise Waxer, had introduced me to his music. After all, she was Canadian.
[4] From the Evolving Montreal description at the exhibit entrance.
[5] From the artist, Andrew Jackson’s, description of the project posted inside of the exhibit.
[6] There were portraits of community members mounted on the wall of exhibit. There were no descriptions attached to the photographs, just numbers. A bit confused, I soon realized that in a bin located at the start of the photo exhibit were stacks of long boards that detailed the names of the subjects and the location where each photograph was taken. Also in the main room, was a large projector were a video was shown in two parts. In addition, encased in glass displays in the main room where items from the museum’s collection that showed how everyday objects were imbued with racism and reflected the times in which they circulated. In the same room, there was a small screen with headphones where one could experience the artist talking about his conceptualization and delivery of the project. Finally, off to the side, there was a small room where two people could sit and watch a video that highlighted the experience of a Little Burgundy mother who had lost her son to gun violence and the community that supported her during that time.
[7] I’m not certain as to the internal workings of this exhibit, that is, how it came to be. However, it seems to me that a more collaborative approach (i.e. Jackson working in conjunction with neighborhood representatives as well as a historian or sociologist) may have yielded a more fruitful exhibit. Especially since Jackson is not a local, and only recently moved to Canada from England, the exhibit would have benefited from additional perspectives. However, to give Jackson the benefit of the doubt, sometimes artists, limited by various constraints, are not given all of the tools needed to bring their vision to light as intended.