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Title: Pivot to Spanish Author: Anonymous Date: 2021 Language: en Topics: language, Montreal, Canada, nationalism, anti-nationalism, quebec, organizing, book fairs, Montreal Anarchist Bookfair
What follows is a very inflated argument for the first of three
proposals[1] I had for the development of âlanguage policyâ with respect
to the Montreal Anarchist Bookfair. When I started writing, the intended
audience was no larger than the other people who make the book fair
happen, i.e. members of the Montreal Anarchist Bookfair Collective
(MABC) and a slightly larger circle of volunteers and friends. I began
writing in the spring of 2020, before the 21^(st) iteration of the book
fair on May 17 of that year, although I had drafted shorter texts on
much the same theme in earlier years, also for a readership within the
collective and the next innermost circle of collaborators. Most of the
writing was done over the summer of 2020, after the 2020 book fair was
over and, more importantly, after I decided that I wanted to leave the
collective, which was at some point in early June.
In all previous iterations of this text, which I have lost at this
point, the core proposal with respect to language policy was always the
same as the one elaborated in this text, namely that there should be a
pivot to Spanish[2] on the part of the MABCâand, by consequence, at
least somewhat away from French, which has been the sole beneficiary, up
to now, of deliberate efforts to shape the book fairâs outward face.
I am kind of a language nerd (which probably comes through in this
text), and going trilingual had been a sort of priority for me from
shortly after I first joined the MABC in late 2016. My reasoning for
this idiosyncratic, even somewhat eccentric idea is elaborated in the
pages that follow.
Suffice it to say, however, that what I have written doesnât only
pertain to the very limited subject of the Montreal Anarchist Bookfair,
which might not even happen in 2021 (and I donât say this because I have
some insider knowledge on the matter, but because absolutely anything is
possible). I have written about what I know, but other anarchists in my
region are dealing with many of the same issues as those I have written
about in this text, albeit from different standpoints, i.e. they are
involved in different kinds of projects, their language competencies may
be different than mine, etc. The big issues are the linguistic
demographics of our region (and thus, the social movements that exist in
this region) and various political ideas that different anarchists have
on linguistic topics. Some of these ideas donât make a lot of sense; I
tend to think they are informed by various simplifications and
misunderstandings (about history, the nature of oppression, language
itself, and other things), as is often the case with bad ideas. For this
reason, I have endeavoured to provide a lot of context about how I have
arrived at my own ideas on these mattersânot because my own conclusions
are necessarily correct (and letâs be real: very few people would care
either way, as they arenât nearly as interested as I am in the subject
of the Montreal Anarchist Bookfairâs language policies), but so that the
general quality of discussion about linguistic issues among anarchists
in the TiohtiĂ :ke region,[3] not to mention across North America[4] and
beyond, can be improved.
In this case, context means lots of footnotes. Some of these will
probably be redundant for some readers, the vast majority of whom I
expect to be at least somewhat familiar with local history, but I want
this text to be as widely accessible as possible. Occasionally, too, I
guess I just want to share something else that I know, which I might not
ever have a good reason to bring up in any other context.
A lot of this text is comprised of sweeping summary of historical
events, which speaks to my interests a little bit. But I like to think
that people will be able to relate better to the lines in the text that
come directly from experience of being an anarchist in this regionâthat
is, to the project of organizing a big event, to the experience of
talking to people in crowded rooms of strangers, to other sorts of
fleeting encounters and ephemeral conversations that have happened in
this place up to now.
This text, like any other, was the product of many folksâ efforts. It
wouldnât have been possible without the help of Char, Talus, Soybean,
Cedar, some current and former members of the MABC, and several others
who read my drafts and offered feedback at several points over the last
few months. I also want to specifically thank the designer for making
the laid-out version of this text, folks involved with the Tower for all
their help with the print edition of this text, as well as KaronhĂ:io
Delaronde and Jordan Engel for their work on the map
âKanonshionniâonwĂš:ke tsi ionhwĂ©ntsareâ (available on The Decolonial
Atlas under the header âHaudenosaunee Country in Mohawkâ).
â December 2020
The Montreal Anarchist Bookfair (the official style in English uses a
compound version of the term âbook fairâ and forgoes the diacritic in
âMontrĂ©alâ) is an annual event where people can buy or otherwise obtain
books about anarchism and related topics, as well as art, zines, bulk
supplies of leaflets, small stickers, cheap posters, clothes, CDs and
DVDs, and probably a number of other categories of item as well. Itâs
thus a sort of crowded bazaar or mall (depending on how you want to look
at it), where most vendors (and distributors, because some people arenât
there to sell anything) have some connection to the anarchist movement
writ large. But the event as a whole is larger than its bazaar function;
there are also events within the event, meaning presentations, panel
discussions, film screenings, caucus-style discussions, skill-building
workshops, and other things of this kind. Most of these constituent
events are denoted as taking place at a specific time in a specific
place on the programme that is distributed at the welcome table and
available for consultation through the website.
I presume most readers will be familiar with anarchist book fairs in
some fashion, whether big annual events like the one in Montréal or ones
that are smaller and/or more informally or irregularly organized. In
this text, I will only speak to the âofficialâ event that is organized
by the MABC, which is to say, I will address neither those public events
organized by other groups (such as the local branch of the Industrial
Workers of the World or the volunteers at DIRA, MontrĂ©alâs
longest-running anarchist library) nor those informal or clandestine
initiatives that also take place on or around the book fair weekend
(which is typically the third or fourth weekend in May). These other
events include bonfires, barbeques, punk shows, the Glamarchist Lookfair
dance party, various demonstrations and vandalism sprees, and more, all
of which are a part of what the Montreal Anarchist Bookfair means to
various people, but which the MABC has never been directly involved in
organizing. In the last decade or so, what the MABC has organized has
been delimited both temporally and geographically: it takes place during
daylight hours on Saturday and Sunday of the book fair weekendâoften
corresponding with the Victoria Day long weekend[5]âwithin the environs
of parc Vinet in the neighbourhood of Little Burgundy, adjacent to
downtown Montréal. There are some exceptions to all this, but none that
are very important.
An important thing to note is that the Montreal Anarchist Bookfair is an
institution, and to be clear, itâs an institution whether anyone
involved wants it to be or not. It started in 2000 and has taken place
annually, without fail, for twenty-one years, something that
distinguishes MontrĂ©alâs book fair from many other anarchist book fairs
with shorter and/or less prolific histories. Accomplishing the book fair
each year is a complicated project, and in the MABCâs efforts to make it
happen and make sure lessons get learned, it has made a whole coterie of
commitments for itself over the years, a number of which are formally
and publicly expressed as âpoliciesâ. And this, coupled with the
individual inclinations and priorities of whichever people happen to
comprise the MABC in a given year, is kind of what I mean whenever I
talk about âthe book fairâ.
Another distinctive feature of the Montréal Anarchist Bookfair is that
it takes place, not in Stockholm, Hong Kong, San Francisco, or Atlanta,
but here, in the TiohtiĂ :ke region, where we have to contend with a
certain history, certain debates about that history, and certain
arguments about what that history implies for both the present and the
future. For the purposes of this text, the most relevant part of this
rich terroir is the continuing fact of French in North Americaâor more
precisely, all the ideas in circulation in society, and in anarchist
scenes, that pertain to this fact.
This section may seem a bit bizarre for most of the people I expect to
read this text. To paraphrase one early reviewer, the notion that the
French language matters in a place where the majority of people use
French as their principal language might be considered obvious to the
point of banality.
And yet.
I first felt compelled to write this section for the benefit (really,
the edification) of a minority of characters I have encountered over the
years, basically all of whom were either living, or had previously
lived, in Germany or Austria. I have often called these people
âanti-Germansâ, but thatâs probably not useful for at least two reasons:
first, quite a few of these people were neither born nor raised in
Germany (or Austria), and were not âethnicallyâ German by any
definition; and second, in two locales (Athens and Montréal
respectively), they wereâat the time that I met them, at leastâinvolved
in efforts to formulate anti-Greek and anti-Québécois positions through
the emulation of the cultural norms, the political praxis, and (most
importantly) the literary output of nominally anti-German scenes with
older roots (to the early 1990s at least) in both Germany and Austria.
Iâll forgo all the details of what has made anti-Germans infamous among
anarchists in most other countries[6] because, while I have occasionally
found myself in frustrating conversations with supposed anarchists and
other radicals about the Middle East, Zionism, Jewish identity, and
other stuff I only halfway know about, I have had even more
conversations with these people that concentrated on matters of
language. Even the people who more or less agreed with normative
left-wing and anarchist positions on the Palestinian-Zionist conflict,
for instance, seemed to think that English should be considered a sort
of progressive historical force, one that might usher in the end of
multivernacularityâwhich is to say, in mythic terms, the end of the era
that began when the ancients tried to construct the Tower of Babylon.
My interlocutors on this subject, whose first language was never
English, identified certain collective identities (above all, that of
the German) as the principal culprits for the worst events in history.
Furthermore, they identified linguistic distinctiveness, i.e. the fact
of self-perpetuating communities that speak and/or read particular
languages, as an important factor in producing and sustaining such
identities. It was not because of any especially worthy quality of
English that they determined it should be the best candidate for this
historic task (although those involved in radical queer scenes usually
made a positive note of its relative lack of gender markers when
compared to many other languages). Instead, they simply cited its
âsuccessâ, i.e. its present status as the worldâs most widely used and
understood language.
The similarity of these ideas and Kautskyâs notions about
âultraimperialismâ are striking, I think. Perhaps we could speak
succinctly of a linguistic Kautskyanism?
In any case, whatever the merit of these ideas when applied to any part
of Europe, they align with the suppositions of run-of-the-mill
anglophone chauvinism when applied to parts of Turtle Island where
substantial numbers of people learned French as their first language and
presently speak French as a day-to-day thingâand thatâs a problem! They
also align with an unhelpful and elitist attitude that Iâve encountered
among a minority of English-speaking francophone radicals, namely that
other francophones, if they canât speak English or if they simply fail
to show enough enthusiasm for speaking the language, can be dismissed as
xenophobic and/or âlazyâ for that reason alone.
With respect to a discussion about the MABC pivoting to Spanish, I worry
that these ideas could distort the intent of my proposalâtransforming it
from a practical proposal about a specific project into a moral proposal
that has larger implications. I disdain that possibility; I am certainly
not writing any of this so that people can use my words to bash the
QuĂ©bs. People can do that if they want (Iâm not the boss of anyone, and
I think the Québs will be just fine regardless), but I am concerned in
this text about language dynamics, and I am not interested in helping to
produce a historical metanarrative that politicians of one kind or
another might use to stir up emotions and mobilize populations towards
despicable political objectives.
In the following exposition, I have tried to avoid nationalizing
schemas, and to instead speak of groups of peopleâfrancophones,
anglophones, and others[7]âin a way that neither essentializes them nor
obscures the fact that these categories are only contingently
meaningful.
In 1642, the colonial settlement of Ville-Marie (which became Montréal)
was established on a shore of Kaniatarowanénhne[8] by francophone
Europeans loyal to the Bourbon court in Paris, France. Then, in the
middle part of the 18^(th) century, the Bourbon court lost a war for
global supremacyâthe so-called Seven Yearsâ War (1754-â63)âwith the
competing imperial power based in Westminster, England. One of the
lasting results is that the larger colony of âCanadaâ, as Bourbon agents
had called it, was given over to administration and economic
exploitation by anglophone Europeans. Once in power, these anglophones
reconstituted Canada as a new colonial polity and renamed it âQuebecâ
(without the diacritic)[9] because the capital and the most important
settlement of the colony, up to that point, had been Québec.[10]
In the immediate aftermath of this historic âConquest of Canadaâ by
Westminster agentsâphysically accomplished in 1760 and confirmed by
treaty in 1763âit probably wasnât clear to anyone what the future would
hold for the Canadians, i.e. those people descended from the almost
wholly Catholic francophones and ânear francophonesâ (most of them
native speakers of Basque, Breton, or other regional languages of
France, as well as some people who had previously immigrated to France
from other countries, or who had been brought to France or any of its
overseas colonies as slaves, who may have spoken any number of other
languages) who were living within the watershed of Kaniatarowanénhne at
that time, had no homes to return to elsewhere else, or who otherwise
may have found themselves unable to return home for any number of
reasons.[11]
Over the course of the next two centuries, many anglophones and ânear
anglophonesâ (native speakers of Irish, Welsh, and other Celtic
languages who lived in other lands subjected to Westminsterâs rule, and
the occasional native speaker of Dutch, German, or something else who
already spoke English quite well) took up residence in different parts
of the vast and vaguely delimited territory of Canada/Québec.[12]
English became the principal language of urban economies all across this
territory, just as it already was in places like Boston, New York, and
Charleston on the Atlantic coast. In Montréal specifically, which was
the most populous city in Canada/Québec until about 1970, the industrial
proletariat of canal diggers, bridge builders, factory workers, train
operators, domestic helpers, and janitorial staff was largely composed
of people born and raised in Ireland, England, and Scotland during the
1800s, and otherwise people with ancestry or lived history, as settlers
or as slaves, in the territory of the âThirteen Coloniesâ to the south
that seceded from Westminsterâs rule between 1775 and 1781. The
Canadians largely lived outside of cities and towns at the time of the
Conquest, and they were largely excluded from urban centresâ post-1760
population growth. In Montréal, which had been the second-largest
Canadian settlement at the time of the Conquest, anglophones eventually
outnumbered francophones; this state of affairs lasted from about 1820
to about 1880. Most Canadians were subsistence labourers initially, and
they mingled sparingly (and without much love) with poor working
anglophones (who comprised a comparably transient and urban population)
as well as with the new ruling class of Westminster-loyal administrators
and principally Scottish industrialists.
It took some time before a significant number of francophones started to
seek jobs in construction sites, textile mills, mines, and other
enterprises of the kind. When they did start taking those jobs, it was
as a direct consequence of the âRevenge of the Cradlesâ[13]âa markedly
greater birth rate among the francophone population in areas of the
former French colony, in comparison to anglophones, throughout the
19^(th) century. With a larger population, newer generations had to
divide their inheritances, leaving each person with less; and so they
were, if not always forced, then certainly compelled to move to nearby
cities and towns where there was a constant shortage of labour (or
otherwise, to participate in expanding the frontier of âthe nationâ into
as-yet unconquered territory).
In Lower Canada in particular (that is, in the southern part of
modern-day provincial territory of Québec), the pre-1760 Canadian
population had been larger and more established than regions further
west. This was precisely why this territory had been separated from
Upper Canada in the first place; it was to be made a sort of bastion of
âFrench-styleâ governance within the British Empire, as a concession
against Canadian discontent. Over time, Lower Canadian towns and cities
like Drummondville, Trois-RiviĂšres (previously known in English as
âThree Riversâ), and QuĂ©bec City itself, whose populations had been
substantially, or even majority, anglophone in the early part of the
19^(th) centuryâall thanks to the post-1760 influx of new, mostly
anglophone immigrants (both Westminster loyalists from the south and
metropolitan newcomers from across the ocean)âinexorably became the
overwhelmingly francophone places that they are today. The Eastern
Townships, near the U.S. border and largely settled by Crown loyalists
relocating from the south after 1781, still has more English-speaking
institutions and anglophone residents than most other parts of southern
Québec these days, but there too, francophones have made up a decisive
majority in cities and towns for a very long time.
This process of demographic transformation in the cities and towns of
Lower Canada/present-day southern Québec, from roughly 1800 or earlier
to roughly 1900 or later, took place in the TiohtiĂ :ke region as well.
It is still happening, actually. Canadians in the Montréal area, like
other urban white North Americans, have been enthusiastic participants
in âwhite flightâ to the suburbs for many decades now; they comprise the
near totality of the population in many suburban subdivisions and
neighbourhoods around here. Thus I can say that, while a variety of
historical factors have kept Montréal and its environs significantly
more cosmopolitan than any other part of the former Lower Canada, it is
also important to keep in mind that the greater part of the regionâs
population has been of principally Canadian descent for most of the past
300 years or so. That remains true today, whether we are talking about
people who prefer to speak French at home or not. The number of people
who have at least a few Canadians of the classic type (i.e. white,
French-speaking QuĂ©becers) somewhere in their immediate familyâwho might
have spoken French only occasionally, but still regularly, as they were
growing upâis huge.
The linguistic shift in the region over the course of the 19^(th)
century is not without parallel. For instance, the same thing was
happening, at the very same time in fact, in the Hapsburg empire of
central Europe (which would rebrand as the âDual Monarchyâ of
âAustria-Hungaryâ in 1867). Speakers of Slavic languages and of
Hungarian were moving from the countryside into cities and market towns
where the language of the presiding imperial state, German, had long
predominated. Similar processes were at play in other parts of Europe.
The Industrial Revolution led to urbanization everywhere it took off,
and in any situation where all the folks marching into the mills from
the countryside spoke a different language than the burghers had done,
the linguistic character of cities and towns was bound to change.
In the 20^(th) century, the history of the Canadians can be presented,
well enough for my purposes in this text, as demographic history and
political history colliding. Between 1880 and 1920, the size of the
francophone population in the urban (that is, industrially developed,
non-agricultural) area of Montréal emerged as an established,
irreversible fact, yet there was no reflection of this fact in the
configuration of political and economic powerâno âdemocracyâ by a
certain definition. As in all capitalist societies, there was class
conflict; and as in many capitalist societies, but not all of them, the
composition of ruling and working class largely cleaved to an âethnicâ
distinction. The ruling class was principally Protestant and anglophone,
while the workers were largely, although not overwhelmingly, both
Catholic and francophone.
Where there had been, at first, a sort of âLaurentian Catholicâ
quasi-nationalism, largely coextensive with the quasi-nationalism of the
Acadians (whose history is different from that of the Canadians in
various aspects, but who were in the 1800s also a basically Catholic,
basically francophone population of âFrench peopleâ that been cut off
from the old imperial metropolis by the vicissitudes of global war in
the 1700s), something started to emerge that was less defined by
religious confession and a particular way of life than it was by a
spatial and social imaginary: the shape of âQuĂ©becâ on a map; the idea
of âa countryâ for âa peopleâ. It is at whatever point that this started
to happen that we can begin to speak of Québécois nationalism emerging
among the Canadians, and specifically among those living within the
borders of the province of Québec.[14]
This nationalism, which would not have been imaginatively viable just a
few generations before, was both strategically exploited and
uncritically adopted (or supported) by partisans of all kinds of
ideologies, from all social classes, for all kinds of reasons. This
wasnât even limited to Canadians of the classic type or people living in
or near the KaniatarowanĂ©nhne river valley. In the 1960s, the â70s, and
even afterwards, it was fashionable among many Marxists and other
radicals to defend or even advocate Québécois nationalism as a political
project, even if they were anglophones (or near anglophones) living in
Vancouver, Toronto, or Halifax.
A wholly comprehensive summary of QuĂ©bĂ©cois nationalismâs genealogy and
its relationship to larger historical events is beyond the scope of this
text. As a go-to on the phenomenon of nationalism in general, and how
exactly it arises in any situation, I recommend Imagined Communities by
Benedict Anderson (1983) or his shorter follow-up âWestern Nationalism
and Eastern Nationalism: Is there a difference that matters?â (2001). My
essential point is that it is the perhaps unlikely continuation of the
French fact in the British administrative territory of Lower Canada,
later to become the Canadian province of Québec, that presents itself as
the single most important reasonâthough by no means the only reasonâfor
Québécois nationalism to have become widely viable in the first place
and for it to remain viable anywhere today.
None of the various historical episodesâthe 1837-â38 rebellions, the
âGreat Darknessâ, the âQuiet Revolutionâ, the two referenda, etc.âare
individually very important to the story I am telling. Only the
continuation of a self-sustaining French-speaking society in a large
region otherwise dominated by the English language, e.g. North America,
can explain why Québécois nationalism, specifically, exists. The fact of
North American French, made manifest in the quotidian interactions,
cultural productions, and wide-ranging conversations of a living society
of millions of people âin QuĂ©becâ is the substrate out of which the
mushroom of the national idea grew. It marks a simple, self-evident, and
audible difference between groups of people.
Looking at the issue historically, too, North American French has often
seemed to face an existential threat in the form of the English
language. In some parts of North America (e.g. Louisiana, Newfoundland),
it has indeed nearly vanished completely, and in other partsâsometimes
said to include MontrĂ©alâthe futurity of French is uncertain. If one
assumes that North American French is valuable in some way, then these
sorts of facts and assertions can become potent arguments in favour of
nationalism, or something akin to it.[15]
As a rule, anarchists are categorically opposed to Québécois
nationalism, obviously. Qualification is possibleâthere are
disagreements and debates among anarchists about historiography and all
sorts of ânational questionsâ, this case being no differentâbut itâs not
particularly necessary in this case. Any anarchist who actually knows
enough about the history of this land and any halfway valid school of
anarchist thought will eventually determine on their own power that,
even in relatively benign or rebellious manifestations, there is no
longer anything useful for partisans of anarchist visions to salvage
from the shallow idea of being âfor QuĂ©becâ, if there ever was in the
first place.
And this is probably about as reasonable and measured a position on the
local nationalists as you are likely to hear from anarchists (without
slipping into an anarchism-in-name that subordinates itself before
purportedly revolutionary nationalisms, but that is a different topic).
Most of the time, anarchistsâ rhetoric with regard to the nationalists
(and even partisans of âoppressed nationalitiesâ) with whom they are
actually familiar, as a consequence of living in the same neighbourhood
or hearing all the talking points when participating in family
gatheringsâGreek nationalists for anarchists in Greece, Chinese
nationalists for anarchists who are Chinese themselves (by one
definition or another), Québécois nationalists for anarchists living in
this territory, and so onâis anywhere between sarcastic and furiously
hostile. This is the right tone to strike in many circumstances!
I want to criticize, however, an excess of anti-nationalist critique
which is in fact indicative of a failure on these same anarchistsâ part
to break free of a more primordial problem, national ideation, i.e. the
continuous rethinking and reification of the relevant phantasmal
categories.
For instance, in the present day, Québécois nationalist activists and
political representatives often present themselves as âdefending the
French languageâ in the region of MontrĂ©al. This rhetoric is obviously
useful for them. Some anarchists, though, play a perfect foil to that
on-its-face absurd statement by believing that the French language
itself is problematic, on the list of things to abolish and/or destroy,
etc., and for precisely the same reasons that the nationalists believe
it is something worthwhile and in need of protection.
The only thing that is different between the nationalists and the
anarchists, in this case, is what they valueânot their respective
understandings of linguistic issues. For both sides, French is more than
what it is. The French language consists of sounds, arrangements of
glyphs, the means by which an animal tries to convey a message to
another animal, weird games of grammar and syntax that people teach each
other to play and elaborate ideas togetherâbut viewed through an
ontological lens of nationalism/anti-nationalism, it becomes something
else, something cut from our fleshy, sonic, animal world.
If French is a symbol âfor QuĂ©becâ (which, through a particular kind of
historically reductive anti-colonial lens, can even be viewed as being
âfor Franceâ), of course it makes sense for anarchists to reject it. To
be for QuĂ©bec is to be for everything else evoked by the word âQuĂ©becâ,
be they mostly negative things (for us) or mostly positive things (for
the patriots, including some of our neighbours, coworkers, family
members, etc.).
But French is not the history that anyone ascribes to it. The very fact
that we call it âFrenchâ or âfrançaisâ when it is spoken on this
continent is probably part of the problem, since that name does evoke a
history that, in the living present of settler colonialism on Turtle
Island and its messy and ongoing reckoning, is reducible to a simple
narrative about history and/or morality. Yet I do not know what else to
call itâtherefore âFrenchâ it is.
In 2020, most of the people who speak French and who presently live on
this continent arenât meaningfully French in any other sense, i.e. they
were not born or raised in France, they would not be considered French
by most people who were born and/or raised in France (certainly
including most functionaries of the French state), they are not entitled
to a French passport, a monthly French welfare payment, etc.[16] And
even if they were? Well, the language itself (by which I do not mean
anything that the Académie française has ever been able to affect more
than marginally) is musical, it is animal, and for those who acquired
native competency in French as children, it is subcognitive. Certainly
the language has its faults, e.g. it is hella difficult to get gender
out of the ways one can refer to people in the third person, succinctly
translating useful terminology originating in English or other languages
will certainly prove difficult from time to time, etc. That being said,
its native speakers are no more or less capable than anyone else at
either identifying or overcoming the limitations on their own cognition
that their first language may produce. Philosophy, linguistics, and
learning other languages can help with that, too, and some francophones
have been A-grade philosophers, linguists, and polyglots.
I am personally not sure as to whether the local varieties of French
have inherent value, or whether we should treat them as though they do.
As a person who never understood why âheritageâ or âtraditionâ (without
further qualification) had âvalueâ (how is it valuable? to whom? why?),
I am just not sure I can even get where people are coming from on this
issueâand in this, I definitely differ from the nationalists, for whom
the local variety of French is one of the most potent markers of their
purported identity and/or their distinct essence as Québecers. A lot of
them seem to think of the language as a Platonic object that their
Descartean minds have managed to grasp, rather than something that is
continuous with other aspects of the human animal and its world.
In any case, most anarchist and grassroots activist projects in and
around Montréal, or possibly all of them, will either have to contend
with the French fact at some point, or otherwise contend with its
corollary fact, namely that there are, at any given time, tens of
thousands of people in the region (at a minimum) who are not generally
competent in French, and vastly more within a few hoursâ drive. Most
projects have to start with a proposal, for instance, and in the
TiohtiĂ :ke region, the first expression of that proposal will either be
in English or in French. So, will it be translated? If the answer is
yesâif itâs worth it to do soâwho is going to do that? When will they
have the time to do so? Will they feel that the job is worth it to them?
These are eminently practical questions, and while the âright answerâ
will obviously vary, itâs important that consideration of the question
be decoupled from whatever we think or feel about either the French
language or any associated topic: Canadians of the classic type (that
is, the Québs), white people in general (because the Québs are, for the
time being, still overwhelmingly white), the nightmare of the early
colonial era (i.e. before about 1800), the horror of racism and state
consolidation in the present day (i.e. from about 1800 on), how each of
these relates to the large historical phenomenon of Québécois
nationalism and the shadow it has cast, etc.
This is the problem of national ideation. Itâs very big picture stuff,
when sometimes, itâs worth narrowing our focusâin this case, to the
still enormously complex area of language dynamics.
To my knowledge, the Montreal Anarchist Bookfair has been, since its
inception, an officially bilingual (that is, a simultaneously
French-language and English-language) event. I cannot speak directly to
what this bilingualism has looked like throughout the book fairâs entire
history, but when I became a member of the MABC in late 2016, there was,
at that time, a commitmentâenshrined as a âpolicyââthat at least half of
the events on the official programme ought to be in French rather than
English. The issue has rarely if ever been approached from the opposite
perspective, at least as far as I know; I believe that this is because
the possibility that there could be a drastic shortage of
English-language events has never loomed over the collective like the
possibility of too few French-language events.
At the time I joined up, one collective member was enthusiastic about
making the book fair a trilingual (that is, a simultaneously French-,
English-, and Spanish-language) event. From 2016 to 2018, the collective
had more proximity to Solidarity Across Borders (SAB), a network of
undocumented people and their supporters in the TiohtiĂ :ke region that,
among other things, appears to aim for this exact kind of
comprehensively trilingual exterior communication and service.[17] The
aforementioned enthusiast of Spanish was involved with SAB, as was the
one collective member who was generally competent in Spanish; there was
at least one more of us who regularly participated in SAB-related
activities.
The person who spoke Spanish (hello, if youâre reading this!) was, in
fact, trilingual and hispanophone.[18] The fairly convincing gestures
towards trilingualism on the part of the MABC in this period were almost
entirely the result of this one personâs presence on the
collectiveâwhich is to say, her contributions and only hers. When she
left the collective shortly after the 2017 book fair, these
contributions could not be reproduced.
Yet, heading into the 2018 book fair and in the years that followed, the
MABC nevertheless occasionally solicited volunteers to translate copy
towards Spanish, and the words âse habla españolâ remained attached to
the official Twitter account.[19] Simultaneous interpretation towards
Spanish was offered for at least some events during the 2018 and 2019
book fairs. Between book fairs, I personally spoke quite often about the
need for Spanish, both with other collective members and with people
outside of the collective. All of this is to say that Spanish remained a
concern of the MABCâbut there was no comprehensive strategy for putting
Spanish on an equitable footing with respect to French and English. The
word I would like to use for this ad hoc approach is
âpseudotrilingualismâ; I would characterize it further as insufficient
if not problematic, for reasons addressed in the pages that follow.
All members of the collective during the 2016-â17 pre-fair organizing
season were generally competent in both French and English; three
members of the collective at that time were generally more orientated
towards French than English (including the hispanophone) while four
members were the opposite. Only the hispanophone could be characterized
as generally competent in Spanish, although I believe the enthusiast had
basic competency; I never saw him use his Spanish, however. The
situation was different by 2020.
As of my last day on the collective this past June, there had been a
significant shift in terms of the MABCâs own combined language
competencies. On the day after the 2020 book fair, the members of the
MABC were, as a whole, markedly more orientated towards English than
towards any other language, and some members were lacking in even basic
French competency. As a result, the collectiveâs capacity to communicate
effectively (that is, both speedily and clearly) in French had been
significantly degraded during the 2019-â20 pre-fair organizing season.
How this happened, precisely, is a long storyâbut regardless, it is
probably more pressing to rebuild capacity in French for 2021, or other
future book fairs, than it is to develop new capacity in Spanish or any
other language.
And yet, I want to consider this problem differently, at least as a
thought experiment. I am even willing to entertain the thought that, for
the project of an anarchist book fair held in this region, French could
even be of markedly lesser importance than Spanish, at least by some
metrics.
As I was doing the last revision of this text [in 2020], before sending
it to the designer [of the first print edition], I became aware that the
Father Frost Against festival would be held again in Helsinki, the
capital city of Finlandâs national republic, in January 2021. The
announcement included these words: âThe festival program will be held in
Russian or English. If needed, they will be translated into Finnish,
English, and Russian.â Which I understand to mean the following: the
constituent events of the festival (presumably very similar in form to
those that might happen at the Montreal Anarchist Bookfair) would either
be in Russian or English; there simply would not be any such events in
Finnish, the first language of most people in Finland and probably at
least many neighbourhoods and satellite communities of Helsinki. Neither
would there be any events in Swedish, the first language of a
substantial minority of the Finnish population, including a majority of
residents in localities not too far away from Helsinki and more than 5%
of Helsinkiâs own population.
Instead, the events would take place in English and Russianâmeaning, in
the first case, the principal language of the world as a whole, and in
the second case, the principal language of the substantial part of the
world that is Russia and its immediate periphery, including Helsinki.
Today, whether they speak Finnish, Swedish, or something else at home,
most Helsinki locals are generally competent in English; this is almost
even more true of the local anarchists. Many newcomers to the Helsinki
area, presumably including most of the anarchists among them, speak
English as well.
In this context, Finnish is the official language of an independent
national republic; itâs probably not about to disappear completely.
Swedish is the language of the old colonizing power to the west and also
an official language of Finland; itâs also doing just fine. There is no
serious risk, in this particular moment, of catastrophically final
cultural loss, as there is with many indigenous languages around the
world. But even if that situation were different? Well, most of the
people attending an anarchist festival in Helsinki probably wouldnât be
there for cultural activism on behalf of either the Finnish or Swedish
languages. They would have been there so that they could try to talk to
each other about all sorts of interesting questions, using whichever
languages would be most convenient for that purpose, given their own
competencies.
MontrĂ©al is not Helsinki, of course. But, noting that Iâve never
actually been to Helsinki, it seems to me that anarchists might benefit
from sidelining the local majority language, not entirely but certainly
a little bit, in the context of a big event that draws anarchists from
linguistically disparate places.
What I am proposing is not utopian. A trilingual Montreal Anarchist
Bookfair would be, in basically every respect, the same as a bilingual
event, i.e. as mediocre or as spectacular as any other book fair over
the years has been. Howeverâand this is the key thingâthere would be an
equitable amount of Spanish in terms of the copy produced by the MABC
and the events populating the book fair weekendâs official programme.
People would also be able to correspond with the MABC in Spanish during
the pre-fair organizing season, and at least one person at the welcome
table during the weekend itself would be able to understand and respond
to questions in Spanish.
There would be three versions of the website, and there would probably
be three microblog accounts (i.e. Twitter, if not a Mastodon account or
some other relatively obscure thing), each dedicated to making
announcements in a different language. Ideally the email account or
other channels of direct communication would get checked regularly by a
group of people whose combined language competencies could facilitate a
good response time in all three languages.
Perhaps there would be three versions of the poster, one for each
language. Or perhaps the publicity materials would employ artistic
interventions that either worked against fixed grammar and orthography
and/or a stable and discrete medium. Graphic design is not my
wheelhouse.
One would hope that at least some volunteers would be able to speak
Spanishâbut one could also reasonably expect that a collective that was
fully competent at exterior comms in Spanish would also be able to get a
few hispanophone or otherwise generally competent volunteers.
Some events would be in Spanishâperhaps only a few in 2021, but with the
ambition to have Spanish comprise a more equitable portion of the total
schedule later. I think that, after a few years of doing things right,
there might be some participation by distros and publishing projects
based out of Spanish-speaking communities (either in Latin America,[20]
North America, or Spain) and/or with catalogues either mostly or wholly
composed of Spanish-language material. In my time on the MABC, in the
context of mere French-English bilingualism, a few projects fitting this
description had already tabled at the book fair; I seem to remember a
few others in the years before 2016, and I am sure there were others in
the years before I arrived in Montréal for the first time. A collective
that was better at Spanish would presumably lead to greater
participation from Spanish-oriented projects, and that in turn would
make the event as a whole more welcoming and/or appealing to
hispanophones and near hispanophones.[21]
It might be that Iâm a language nerd, but I think this vision is good in
and of itself.
And yet.
In discussions of the book fair over the last few years, I have often
made mention of my idea of a trilingual event (because itâs a fun idea
to talk about). Very often, in the context of these conversations, I
have heard the same sort of objection: but Spanish is a colonial and
European language. The comment following this statement is usually to
the effect that it would be better for the MABC to focus on acquiring
some other language insteadâusually Arabic and sometimes KanienâkĂ©ha,
but Iâve heard quite a few different suggestions.
Around the world, Spanish is the fourth-most widely known language on
Earth, ranking after English in first place, Mandarin in second, and
Hindi in third. As a first language, it ranks second only to Mandarin in
terms of the total number of native speakers; English comes in at number
three.[22]
If oneâs goal is to communicate with other anarchists, and if we can
allow ourselves to think about the question abstractly (i.e. not
necessarily from the actual life circumstances of any one person),
Spanish is probably the second-most important language for âthe average
anarchistâ to learn, after English. Thought about from a different
perspective, if an anarchist doesnât speak English, the language they
are most likely to speak instead is Spanish. This is probably because of
the continued relevance of anarchism to social movements in both Latin
America and Spain, and the size and power of those social movements; by
way of comparison, anarchism appears to be quite marginal in both China
and India today (but I am no expert on the matter). Enough music,
literature, and discussion on anarchist themes is produced in Spanish
that it is quite possible to live life as an anarchist contentedly in
many countries without knowing English just as long as you have Spanish
instead.
Whatever its origins, Spanish is not (wholly) a European language today,
insofar as most of the people who speak it today are either not European
or otherwise about as European as I am (if not significantly less
European than I am), i.e. they were neither born nor raised in Europe,
they are not entitled to the benefits of citizenship in any European
country, they are not likely to be considered meaningfully European by
anyone whose opinion on the subject matters, etc. As for a âcolonial
languageâ, Spanish is certainly thatâas is French, as is English. In the
1500s, the Hapsburg empire, comprising most of the Iberian peninsula
alongside various other European realms, was the largest and most
dynamic superpower state on Earth, and most of the agents it sent on
missions of colonization across the oceans spoke a language weâd
recognize as basically modern Spanish today. That horror story is how
Spanish became the preeminent language of both officialdom and society
in the large region of Latin America today, but it has no real bearing
on why contemporary states and societies choose (to the extent that they
have a meaningful choice available to them)[23] to carry on using
Spanish, as opposed to some other option.
Anecdotally, I have met of lot of Spanish-language monoglots in my life,
most of them anarchist visitors to northeastern Turtle Island who had
grown up in, and would soon return to, Mexico. As far as my travel
experience in anarchist scenes goes, limited as it has been to scenes in
Turtle Island and Europe, the same situation doesnât seem to prevail
among native speakers of other non-English languages. From Athens to
Amsterdam and Ljubljana to Leipzig, the majority of European anarchists
I have known (and for these purposes, Iâm not counting the Brits or
other anglophones, of course) were either generally competent in English
or they were actively aiming to be, regardless of their own language
background, because English was considered necessary for speaking with
other anarchists from other places, as well as learning theory or
understanding struggles taking place in other parts of the world.[24]
The same has been true of anarchists in Montréal, Québec City, and
smaller locales in northeastern Turtle Island where most of the local
anarchists are francophones; almost all of them are either already very
competent in English or otherwise making a serious effort to learn. This
was less often the case in France, I found,[25] and much less the case
in Catalunya (presently politically incorporated into Spain).
I have a theory about this. Basically, in more populous countries where
English is relatively unimportant for daily life in large sectors of the
economy and society, there will also be relatively large numbers of
anarchists who donât speak English. The interlocking worlds of the
anarchist scenes in any of these more populous countries (France, Spain,
Turkey, Indonesia, Mexico, etc.) may produce enough activity,
discussion, literature, and music that there is no pressing need to
learn foreign languages (almost always English) in order to engage with
anarchism as an idea. Other factors of life outside of anarchist
scenesâthe quality of English-as-a-second-language education, the degree
to which local economies arenât just tourism or emigration to
higher-income countries, etc.âmay also support the possibility of being
an anarchist who neither knows, nor particularly cares to know, English.
My own experience suggests that things are quite different in smaller
European countries like Iceland, Greece, the Netherlands, and anywhere
in the former Yugoslavia, as well as in majority francophone parts of
North America.
In most cases, the linguistic world in which an anarchist scene is
situated will simply be less expansive than the world of Spanish,
comprising as it does multiple very populous regions on three
continental landmasses, in addition to some smaller places in Africa and
a few islands in the Pacific Ocean, and accounting for (very
conservatively) at least 400 million hispanophones all told, with no
indisputable centre of gravity. But I can explain better.
Take Russia, the largest country on Earth by most folksâ
reckoningâpossibly large enough that an anarchist could live their whole
life there without leaving. The most broadly important and/or useful
language across the Russian territory, in order to live any kind of life
(but certainly including many ideas of what an anarchistâs life ought to
look like), is Russian. To speak no other language than Russian is
therefore not so awful of a thing if that is the territory where a
person is located and where they intend to keep on living. As soon as a
person leaves Russia, however, there are less than a dozen other
countries where knowing only Russian is a particularly viable life
option, and even in these countries, with perhaps a few exceptions,
Russian is generally of secondary importance/utility, at best, in
comparison to some other language (Latvian, Ukrainian, Kazakh, etc.).
Thus a certain linguistic world is delimited. Itâs still a pretty large
world in this case: about 250 million speakers of Russian in total and a
fair bit of jurisdictional diversity, i.e. there is at least a
possibility of evading one governmentâs reach by fleeing to the
territory of a different government and starting a new life there. But
this is not as large a world as the one corresponding to Spanish. Most
other languages, even those with a very large number of total speakers,
correspond to even smaller worlds.
Another notable feature of Spanish is its multipolarity. Whereas the
variety of Russian spoken in Moscow and Saint Petersburg, or in old
Soviet movies and modern Russian TV, is often viewed by both prospective
learners and many native speakers as either the most prestigious and/or
most useful varietyâlikewise the variety of French spoken in Paris, most
smaller locales in metropolitan France, and French cinema, the variety
of Chinese spoken in Beijing, throughout mainland China, and the
majority of Chinese movies these days, etc.âthe variety of Spanish
spoken in Madrid et al. is hardly considered the most important in any
place but Spain itself. If anything, many native speakers of other
varieties consider metropolitan Spanish particularly weird, difficult,
and worthy of ridicule; compare how North American anglophones and
Brazilian lusophones talk about, respectively, the English spoken in
England and surrounding areas or the Portuguese spoken in Portugal. In
this regard, among the major world languages, Spanish is really only
comparable to English and, perhaps, Arabic (but that is a more
complicated story). It lacks a single centre of gravity, a âprestige
dialectâ in other words, against which all other varieties are
constantly compared.
Unless we are to buy into a notion of a homogenously English-speaking
global anarchismâwhich is neither completely realistic nor my idea of a
good timeâan orientation towards internationalism should compel any
outward-facing anarchist service project on Earth (like a book fair, a
social space, or a tech collective) that is already competent in English
to start developing its Spanish-language capacity. Taking geography and
other factors into account, other languages may of course be deemed a
larger priority; for instance, I doubt that anarchists active in Armenia
would want to prioritize gaining capacity in Spanish versus doing the
same in Russian, Turkish, or Farsi. Yet, for anarchists of the
TiohtiĂ :ke region, Spanish is indeed quite locally relevant.
I couldnât find a definite answer that enough sources agreed upon, but
in 2020, it appears that Spanish ranks anywhere between third- and
fifth-most widely used and/or widely known language in the TiohtiĂ :ke
region, in close competition with Italian (mostly known by people who
are past middle age, and much less so their children) and Arabic (a term
that encompasses significantly more lexical and even grammatical
diversity than Spanish, Italian, French, or English).[26]
Looking at the larger territory of North America, Spanish is
indisputably the second-most important language across the board. Many
visitors to the Montreal Anarchist Bookfair grew up and/or live in the
territory of the United States, where a very conservative estimate is
that Spanish is the first language of at least 12% of the population.
With respect to the situation north of the border, I am hesitant to say
anything so certain about the precise positions of major languages after
French and English. Nevertheless, Spanish is definitely one of the ten
most widely known languages in the Canadian territory as a whole, and it
may be in the top five.
But I would rather cite my own experience than census data, anyway. In
the years I have lived in Montréal, I have at various times shared
living quarters with anarchists whose social life with other local
anarchists largely transpired in Spanish,[27] while I was never even
once made aware of a local group of anarchists (as opposed to travelers
who were just passing through town) that spoke any fourth language.[28]
I know, too, that during the entire time I have lived in Montréal,
seasonal workers, largely from Central America and Mexico, have swelled
the populations of small towns in nearby Monterégie, such as Saint-Rémi
and Rougemont, every single summer. I have never gotten myself
particularly involved in solidarity activism with these workers, but I
know that others in the regionâs anarchist scenes have done so, and
there are some anarchists who actually reside in rural parts of
Montérégie, who might be neighbours with these workers. On the streets
of Montréal itself, I have witnessed a variety of public campaigns over
the years to regularize the status of Mexican citizens, specifically, or
to accord a better status to immigrants fleeing scarce work and low
wages in Spain after the financial crisis of 2007-â09; some of the
people involved in these campaigns have also been part of anarchist
scenes. I would mention as well the several long-standing connections
between anarchist activists in both the TiohtiĂ :ke region and Colombia,
especially as embodied in the Projet accompagnement solidarité Colombie
(PASC), a project that started up shortly after the 2001 anti-capitalist
mobilizations against the Free Trade Area of the Americas summit in
Québec City.
It is not out of any sense of favouritism, then, that I have suggested
Spanish should be the third working language of the Montreal Anarchist
Bookfair after French and English. I have principally come to this
conclusion because of the relevance of the Spanish language to the world
in general, to the anarchist tradition,[29] to the global anarchist
movement as it is constituted today, to the TiohtiĂ :ke region and the
anarchists who live there or spend time there, and occasionally to the
project of organizing the Montreal Anarchist Bookfair itself.
Learning a language as an adult is a difficult thing, as a rule, but
some languages are easier for some people to learn than others are. A
personâs pre-existing language competencies are an important factor, of
course; it is generally easier to learn a language with a close genetic
relationship to a language that is already known than it is to learn a
language with either a distant genetic relationship or no relationship
at all. As a result, even setting aside the fact that written Spanish
has a remarkably regular orthography and uses Latin script, we should
expect it to be easier for an anglophone or a francophone to learn
Spanish than, say, Mandarin, Punjabi, any variety of Arabic, or any
language indigenous to Turtle Island (possibly excepting indigenous
creole languages that use French as a lexifier, e.g. Michif, but I am
not well-informed on this subject).
From the perspective of seeing an actual change in the world, easy is
good. Because Spanish and French are both Romance languages,
francophonesâwho comprise the majority of the TiohtiĂ :ke regionâs
anarchistsâcan be expected to have an even easier time, compared to
speakers of most other languages, when they set their minds on attaining
Spanish competency.
If the collective could develop capacity to communicate in many other
languages beyond French and English, that would be great, but with any
language other than Spanish, the path from zero or near-zero capacity to
an adequate level of competency is much more difficult to ascertain. At
least with Spanish, there have previously been collective members who
were generally competent. There is also a relative abundance of Spanish
competency (both basic and general) in the local, regional, and even
transcontinental scenes from which the MABC draws members and
volunteers. Furthermore, there exists both the benefit of a very close
genetic relationship between French and Spanish, and a wide availability
of educational resourcesâaimed at francophones, anglophones, and many
othersâfor those who aim to acquire capacity in Spanish.
The same cannot be said, certainly not in terms as strong as these, with
respect to any other language that the collective could set its mind
upon instead.
I believe I have made a strong case as to why, in comparison to any
other candidate for a third working language for the Montreal Anarchist
Bookfair, Spanish is the one to aim at incorporating into the project.
It is both a relevant language for the project and the region, and its
incorporation is also eminently achievable. I have not, however,
explained the advantage of investing time and resources towards
achieving French-English-Spanish trilingualism versus the alternative,
which is simply to keep the book fair where itâs at now, as (at least in
theory) an equitably bilingual French-English event.
Gaining a baseline of competency in Spanish will require, if nothing
else, conversation between collective membersâand conversations take
time. It will likely require all of the following: creative thinking
about finding anarchists who are generally competent in Spanish and who
could work well with other members of the collective; setting up and
then supporting a corps of both French-to-Spanish and English-to-Spanish
volunteer translators; and it might even mean personal efforts on the
part of some or all collective members to obtain at least a basic level
of competency in Spanish. After all this, a commitment to trilingualism
would also mean a permanent addition to the already harrowing task of
translating copy, insofar as the aim would be to sustain an equitable
proportion of Spanish-language content in terms of promotional materials
and external comms. Given the difficulties the MABC faced in 2020 in
trying to maintain an equitable amount of French and English on its
website and in its other communications, I am very sensitive to the fact
that, by adding responsibilities, the collective might simply be setting
itself up for failure.
That being said, I believe that, with respect to both accessibility and
keeping up with historical trends, it is worse for anarchists to lack
sufficient ambition than it is for their projects to âfailââwhatever
that may mean. To paraphrase Bakunin, I think we ought to demand the
impossible of anarchist scenes themselves, including such institutions
as the MABC and the Montreal Anarchist Bookfair. It is only by striving
for things we suspect are impossible that we can determine what is
actually possible and impossible, and thereby get closer to the horizon
of what we envision. Besides, by 2020, the MABCâs commitment to
bilingualism had already degraded past what I would have thought was the
barely acceptable minimum when I joined on in 2016. Itâs not failure
that worries me, because failure has already arrived.
So, accessibility is a very large concept. An âaccessibility lensâ
informs many different visions of mutual aid and autonomous space. It
speaks directly to a vast array of personal experiences of discomfort,
exclusion, insult, and violence, and it tends towards critique of every
power structure in existence. Thus, if I were to tell you that the MABC
is committed to making the book fair accessible, you would be justified
in asking, What does that concretely mean? To which I would answer:
historically, it has meant several different things, and while Iâm not
necessarily well-equipped to provide a comprehensive answer, I can say a
few things. To wit: circa 2004, the MABC of that era tried to institute
a nut-free policy, given the fact that a significant number of people
have dangerous allergies to one or more kinds of nuts; this policy was
eventually withdrawn because the collective wasnât in a position to
adequately enforce this policy, and ultimately folks determined that it
was actually </em>more</em> dangerous for people with nut allergies to
indicate that the space was allergen-free when, in fact, it might not
be. Another example: in 2019, for the first time in its history, every
public space comprising the book fair (except for the childcare room)
was wheelchair-accessible. These examples, and numerous others,
constitute the MABCâs commitment to accessibility in practice.
With respect to the topic of this zine, I would argue that the MABCâs
commitment to bilingualismâwhich has historically meant duplicate copy
of English and French text in all public copy produced by the MABC
itself, and an effort to provide adequate simultaneous translation
towards the other working language for all eventsâhas always been, at
its core, a commitment to making the book fair as accessible as
possible. This was also true of previous yearsâ gestures towards
trilingualism.
But no space can be accessible to absolutely everyone who may
theoretically want to attend or participate. Sometimesâin fact, pretty
frequently!âthe accessibility needs of one person will (appear to) be
irreconcilable with the needs of another person; and in at least some of
these situations, different needs will really be impossible to address
adequately in the same space, no matter how much time and creativity
anyone invests in the issue.
To name but one example, a space can either allow drinking and drug use,
or it can (try to) forbid those things. Either way, the space will be
made less accessible to some people, even as it becomes more accessible
to others. In the real world, this kind of thing is inevitable; there
are a lot of extenuating circumstances preventing people from being
perfect ethical subjects. So, while there are many different ways to try
to negotiate the needs of both a) people who have determined they need
to drink or use drugs at a steady clip for one reason or another, and b)
people who have determined for themselves that they cannot be in the
same space as drinking or drug use for one reason or another, there is
no way to perfectly negotiate the needs of all the people in both camps
whom we might wish to feel welcome at our event.
Accessibility can obviously be a worthy pursuit in and of itself, for
lots of reasons, but a book fair (or any other anarchist gathering,
social space, peer-to-peer network, or demonstration) cannot be
everything to everyone. Trying to make it so guarantees failure,
probably sooner than later. For practical reasons, we need to turn this
inconceivable, ultimate-level objective into something that can actually
be aimed at and accomplished.
The correct response to this problem, I think, is multiplicityâthat is,
more spaces and more initiatives. Single, large spaces will inevitably
fail in multiple respects, because no space can be perfectly accessible
(or perfect in any other respect). If there are many spaces, though,
then there is more capacity for people in the larger adjacent scenes to
find spaces that work better for them and their needs.
With respect to the Montréal book fair, there is a degree to which the
event is already made up of many smaller parts, each of which could,
theoretically, have its own parameters of access and/or other focus. At
the same time, the book fair is a single large event taking place in a
specific place, and some parameters are by necessity universal. For
instance, the event is only âaccessibleâ in the most straightforward
sense of the word if it is possible to get to parc Vinet in Little
Burgundy on a given weekend in May. This ought to be pretty easy for
most people living in, say, nearby neighbourhoods like Saint-Henri and
Point Saint-Charles, historically home to storied anarchist scenes. At
the same time, it must effectively exclude tens of thousands of people
(and perhaps tens of dozens of anarchists) who live nearer or farther
away within the broader TiohtiĂ :ke region, as a consequence of a whole
litany of factors: the lack of elevators throughout most of the métro
network, the poor transit options in boroughs like Montréal-Nord and
car-centric suburbs like Saint-Lazare, not being able or down to hop,
needing to work weekends, etc.
The goal, then, should be to strive to make the event as accessible as
possible for as many people as possible. Success should be measured, not
by the degree to which some ideal state of âabsolute accessibilityâ is
achieved, but by how much we are able to chip away at meaningful
barriers to accessâwithout creating new, arguably worse problems as a
result (as old collective members eventually determined was the case
with their nut-free policy in the mid-2000s).
It is in this spirit that I want to propose that, going forward, a
commitment to trilingualism would serve the goal of making the book fair
accessible better than a commitment to bilingualism. I will address the
most obvious part of this first. Basically, yes, three languages are
better than two. I want monoglot hispanophones, and anyone else who
understands Spanish but lacks general competency in both French and
English, to be able to participate with no major impediments compared to
either monoglot francophones or monoglot anglophones. It is possible
that there are only a few people who fit this description, who also want
to come to the book fair and actually have the ability to get themselves
to parc Vinet and its vicinity on a weekend in Mayâbut that being said,
even in my short time on the collective, I actually met a few such
people. If trilingualism was a serious and established policy, I expect
at least a few more people fitting this description would probably show
up.[30]
More importantly, though, French-English-Spanish trilingualism would be,
without any ambiguity, about accessibility in a way that French-English
bilingualism simply never can be, at least not in the political and
historical context of our region. Were this an anarchist book fair in
Calais or Mauritius, perhaps English and French would suffice as working
languagesâbut in this context, the MABCâs policy mirrors that of the
modern Canadian state, which isnât about accessibility at all. The
Canadian stateâs bilingualism is about defusing the threat of QuĂ©bec
separatism, meaning the establishment (and, possibly, external
diplomatic recognition) of a new Québécois nationalist polity completely
outside of the Canadian parliamentâs control.
I repeat: the MABCâs commitment to bilingualism has always been, at its
core, an accessibility commitment. It has never been intended as an
expression of the collectiveâs position on any horseshit ânational
questionâ or âgeopolitical issueâ whose premises we should, as
anarchists, entirely reject out of hand. Despite this, bilingualism
still says something on that frontâor, at the very least, it appears to
do so. And what it appears to say isnât good!
The most obvious issue with what itâs saying is that, like the Canadian
state, it affirms two languages of European origin as âofficialâ (my own
preference for the term âworking languageâ notwithstanding). At the same
time, it accords no status whatsoever toâand not even any consideration
ofâany other languages.
There are other issues that may be less obvious, though. For instance,
it privileges French unduly in comparison to English. As is the case
among bureaucrats of the Canadian state, being a French-English
bilingual is un atoutâexcuse me, an asset. In the federal government
departments in Ottawa, but also many other state and corporate
institutions across the Canadian territory, when seeking a better-paying
and/or more prestigious position in any given institutionâs internal
hierarchy, itâs always a leg up on oneâs colleagues if one is able to
speak French (or convince the higher-ups that this is the case) even if
the job doesnât require a lot of it, and even if there is enough money
available that it will be possible to pay someone else for translation
services as required. The dynamics are certainly different with respect
to the Montréal book fair, but subpar content is more likely to take up
space on the event schedule if itâs in French (or if the collective was
told it would be in French and/or âin both languagesâ).
Before 2020, the MABC had a target quota of âat leastâ 50%
French-language events.[31] As far as I am aware, this had always been
the policy of the MABC, going all the way back to the beginning in 2000.
While I was on the collective (from 2016 to 2020), we always received
more submissions to present an event in English than to do the same sort
of thing in French. This isnât that surprising in consideration of the
Montreal Anarchist Bookfairâs status (at least at one time) as the
largest annual gathering of anarchists in North America. Most anarchists
(and other people) living within the borders of the worldâs largest
joined-at-the-hip settler colony speak English and they do not speak
French. Even in and around Montréal, many anarchists are anglophones
and/or grew up outside of the province; many of them are either not
generally competent in French (yet), or they are simply more comfortable
using English in most or all circumstances.
Francophone anarchists living in the TiohtiĂ :ke region, on the other
hand, generally speak English very well. If they have ever worked in
customer service locally, then they are probably well-experienced in
speaking English to anglophones and allophones.
Beyond even that, some francophone anarchists find themselves in
situations where most of their closest friends and collaborators either
typically use English everyday or they canât even really speak French at
all. For people who fit this description, it may be trivial to use
Englishâor in some cases, even slightly unnatural to use French!âwhen
discussing struggle, theory, history, or queer poly drama. And sometimes
a francophone anarchist will simply prefer to publicly present their
ideas in English because thatâs what they want to do and itâs their own
choice to make.
In any case, there was a larger number of submissions for
English-language events than there ever was with respect to
French-language events.
Thus, predictably, the MABC always found itself facing a larger stack of
English-language submissions that seemed to us, by some metric at least,
âgoodâ. Perhaps this speaks to some unexamined bias on the collectiveâs
part, but I strongly expect that even a more markedly âFrench-orientedâ
collective (for example, composed principally or entirely of
francophones) would feel similarly, insofar as they were still
anarchists. Certainly there were always many submissions in both
languages that were uninteresting, but the difference is that, in order
to meet the quota the MABC had set for itself, any single uninteresting
French-language proposal (as well as any proposal for a âbilingualâ
event) had a slightly better chance of being approved for the programme
and given a time slot than any single uninteresting English-language
proposal. It is insulting to good ideas expressed in any language to
reward someone with a platform simply because they convinced the MABC
that they would be able to express those ideas in French, but that is
what happened, I think, at least some of the time.
Some genres of eventâfor instance, reports on struggles taking place
elsewhere on the continent or somewhere else around the world,
facilitated by people who may may have grown up in those placesâare
unlikely to be delivered in French. Can we really expect many people
from the Wetâsuwetâen yintah, Poland, Japan, or Texas to speak French?
Even if, by chance, some of them do have some capacity in French, how
likely is it that someone from away will be able to understand questions
from an audience that mostly speaks North American varieties of French?
Unless they actually grew up among, and learned from, North American
francophones, the competency of those who learned French in school
probably pertains to a very crisp, metropolitan, âinternationalâ French,
not the kind of French that a lot of anarchists and other people around
here actually speak.
Also, âcelebrityâ events (that is, events involving more widely known
anarchist authors, for the most part) would be less likely to be in
French than in English. There are simply more such authors writing in
English than there are writing in French. This is even more true if we
restrict our focus to the situation in North America, as we should. The
MABC, despite having access to some funding, isnât really in a position
to subsidize individualsâ travel. For many U.S.-based anarchist authors
(many of them anglophones, naturally), it wasâbefore the pandemic at
leastâreasonably easy and affordable to take a trip to MontrĂ©al and
maybe even bring some books across the border. Coming from Europe, or
anywhere else that well-known francophone anarchist authors who donât
live in QuĂ©bec might be expected to live instead, itâs costlier.
The target quota limited the number of âinternational struggleâ events
and âcelebrity authorâ eventsâwhich is to say, it limited the number of
events that I, personally, think are overall the most important for an
event like the Montreal Anarchist Bookfair (especially insofar as they
help to realize lasting international connections), as well as the
events that would probably attract the greatest degree of enthusiasm
among attendees.
Even from the perspective of its own limited goalânamely, to achieve 50%
parity between French- and English-language contentâI always thought
that the bilingualism policy, as practiced, seemed to produce subpar
results. Some submissions suggested that the proposed event would be âin
both languagesâ or something to that effect; my experience of such
events has been that, more often than not, they lean English. In fact,
both at the book fair and in other anarchist settings in the TiohtiĂ :ke
region, my experience has been that even events tagged as being just in
French sometimes switch to English. This is not surprising when you
consider the following: there are often zero francophones in the room
who arenât generally competent in English, while there are often
multiple anglophones present who arenât generally competent in French.
Sometimes there are one or two monoglot francophones who need a
simultaneous interpretation for English-language discussionsâsomething
that a single competent person can usually provide, and at a relatively
low volume. In the opposite scenario, however, a larger group of
anglophones might strain to listen to a single interpreter who is trying
to speak loudly enough for their audience to hear, but not so loud that
it will disturb the participants in the principal (that is,
French-language) discussion.
Interpreters can fail to strike a good balance despite their best
efforts. Audiences will often have trouble hearing. Others participating
in the discussion sometimes get distracted by the loud-ish murmur of
English coming from another part of the room. And so naturally, for
eminently sensible reasons, many conversations that start off in French
often turn to English after a while, even when most participants are
francophone.
And most of the time, thatâs absolutely fine. As I have already
indicated, when anarchists in the TiohtiĂ :ke region gather together in a
room (or by a fire, or whatever), chances are that many of the
francophones present (if there are any at all) will be generally
competent in English, and there will be no great difficulty addressing
the translation needs of any monoglot francophones who also happen to be
there. Itâs the monoglot anglophones who are present, and other
anarchists who speak English but not French, whose interpretation needs
will typically be greater.
My point isnât that francophones shouldnât make their point in French if
they want to (because they absolutely should speak French, and even feel
entitled to do so, if thatâs what they want to do), or that the needs of
monoglot francophones, and others who are competent in French but not
English, are always addressed sufficiently (because some of the time,
they are not). What Iâm saying is that, for many people in MontrĂ©al,
having the conversation in English is nearly as easy as having it in
Frenchâand this is even more true of francophones, of anarchists, and of
the people who are both than it is of the overall population in the
TiohtiĂ :ke region, which is itself growing more bilingual with every
passing year.
When visitors or new arrivals to this region are presentâwhich is very
often the case at the Montreal Anarchist Bookfair specificallyâmost of
the time it will be the case that a larger number of people involved in
a discussion will be able to understand English than is the case for
French. In such a setting, using English probably means tasking fewer
people with interpretation. This approach is usually more efficient
overall, efficiency being an important thing in long discussions, days
of many such discussions, and so on. It might also be quieter.
Now, back to nationalist politics.
It makes sense for the modern Canadian state to pursue its policy of
English-French bilingualism because of the potentially existential
threat of QuĂ©bec separatism. Granting French an artificial âequalityâ
with English across the modern Canadian territory was one means by which
the parliament in Ottawa tried (and, certainly to some degree,
succeeded) in declawing, defanging, and derailing past yearsâ movements
for francophone civil rights and/or âself-determinationâ. Some of these
movements were, at times, genuinely combative with respect to
established power structures (even if they only sometimes identified
capitalism as a problem, and rarely if ever recognized settler
colonialism as such, never mind critiqued it). In any case, on the part
of the federal government, this bilingualism policy has meant investing
in French-language cultural institutions (to an inequitable degree, by
any metric, with respect to indigenous institutions). It has also meant
tolerating programs of French-language territorialization in the
delimited territory of the province of Québec (i.e. the Charter of the
French Language, which became law in 1977) that have often impeded upon
the civil rights, such as they are, of non-francophones living there.
All of this is strategic; none of it is principled. Canadian
confederation remains in effect, so it could be said that the approach
is working. But for anarchists, having an akin policyâwhich is precisely
what the MABCâs bilingualism quota was!âmakes no sense at all, at least
when itâs not doing anything useful for us.
The bilingualism policy was a good place for the MABC to start with in
2000âit was a different time, and the project was just getting
startedâbut heading into 2021, itâs outmoded. The policy does nothing to
really enable accessibility for monoglot francophones; itâs
French-English bilingual volunteers who do that, and they would do that
whether the policy was there or not. If theyâve been MontrĂ©alers for a
while, they may be able to do it quite organically.
So what are the alternatives to this situation? Well, there is
French-English-Spanish trilingualism, which would require the titular
pivot to Spanish, meaning the development of Spanish-language capacities
on the MABC itself and among the volunteer cohort. But there is also
another obvious option, namely a pivot to English, which might be better
conceived as a pivot away from French.
Rather than building new capacity, the MABC could accept that English is
the language of the world and/or the future and/or anarchism (or close
enough, to the point that no one needs to worry about any other
languages). It could abandon some or all of its commitments vis-Ă -vis
French, a certain quota of French-language content, providing
information to the public in duplicate French and English text, etc.
Perhaps French-language service could be reimagined as âavailable if
necessaryâ (something that would inevitably reduce the quality of that
service).
In other words, the collective could take a huge step backwards for
accessibility. Yet obviously the present policy of bilingualism isnât
doing much thatâs concretely useful for either the collective or for the
people that come to the book fairâeven as it creates dynamics that
mirror some of those in play in the culture of Canadian state
institutions. Trilingualism, on the other hand? Such a policy would
indicate a clear commitment, on the MABCâs part, to enable access for as
many people as possible, while also distinguishing the book fair, as an
institution, from any part of Canadian officialdom.
In many âpost-colonialâ contexts around the world, English, French, or
another language of European origin serves as a common language for many
people living in a shared, delimited, and ânationalâ territory whose
first languages (which are, in many if not all cases, indigenous
languages) differ from one another.
One of many possible examples is India, where Hindi is the first
language of just shy of 45% of the territoryâs population[32] and an
additional language (that is, acquired after the first) for another 12%
of the population (57% total). It is hardly a coincidence, either, that
the capital of the post-1947 Indian national republic, New Delhi, is
located squarely within the countryâs northern âHindi beltâ. For these
reasons, Hindi is by most measures the most important language in the
country. It is often accorded political purpose by activists of
different kinds: either it will be the unifying language in the
quasi-theocratic ethnostate that Hindu nationalists want, or it will
serve a similar role in less sanguine, purportedly more enlightened
visions about a secular and democratic India. Either way, speakers of
minority languages in India have often been unenthused about Hindi and
what it seems to represent.
English, on the other hand, is something like a âneutral quantityâ
within Indiaâs language dynamics. It is no longer a symbol of foreign
domination, or at least its potency as such a symbol has been greatly
reduced in the decades since 1947. A lot of people involved in various
Indian institutions during the republicâs early days were already
competent in English, whereas they werenât necessarily competent in each
otherâs first languages. Thus, when used as a working language in Indian
institutional contexts, English was often (and remains today) a more
âneutralâ choice in comparison to Hindi or, indeed, other local
languages. But not just a neutral choice, because English was also (and
remains) practicalâoften more practical than any single local language
would be.
In a different geographic context, circa 2016, the group Brigada Antifa
Tel Aviv appears to have made a decision to use English instead of
Arabic, Hebrew, or any other locally used language for banners, social
media, and other forms of externally directed, âofficialâ
communication.[33] This decision was justified on the grounds that
English is widely understood locally. Within the prism of the
Palestinian-Zionist conflict, usage of Hebrew, the majority language in
Tel Aviv for sure, would (at least arguably) send a problematic message.
At the same time, it would not be practical to use Arabic, a language
that most residents of Tel Aviv can neither read nor write (possibly
including a majority of the brigadeâs own members and supporters).
In comparison to Helsinki (mentioned in a previous section), Tel Aviv,
or any place in India, it is not really possible to receive English
neutrally in the TiohtiĂ :ke region. Unlike the Indian context, for
instance, anglophones (including but not limited to those of us who
belong to the narrower, more-than-linguistic category of typically white
âAnglo-Saxonsâ whose ancestors were some kind of Protestant) arenât gone
in the same way. There are still lots of us living here, and we (are
perceived to) enjoy certain advantages in comparison to all other
groups, including francophones. The precise texture of the âprivilegeâ
dynamics here are entirely secondary to the point I am trying to make,
which is that the perception of privilege itself can motivate a type of
anti-anglophone resentment among francophones. This, in turn, finds a
counter in the resentment that genuinely chauvinistic anglophones feel
towards francophones. Both resentments build off of one another, and
tend to justify one another.
This is all great for our local ruling class. All the better for them if
we are invested in stupid and divisive bullshit like linguistic identity
politics, the project of realizing a âsovereign QuĂ©becâ (it wonât be
sovereign from capitalism or the biosphere), and other things of the
kind, rather than building up and sustaining the fires of revolt,
deserting stale and antiquated forms of life, learning new things,
having fun, healing and growing, etc.
English by itself can be a fine working language for an anarchist
project in Montréal, and especially for a project that requires the
organizers to interface to a huge degree with people living in other
North American places and sometimes even further afield. But itâs
certainly not perfect towards that end, and especially not in a
public-facing application. Even if anarchists were wholly nihilistic
with respect to issues of nationality and wholly devoid of chauvinistic
attitudes (which is simply not the case), thereâs no way for this kind
of project to do as well as it could in our region without French.
In any case, no language would serve the role of general working
language perfectly, either in this context or any other. Some people,
like the Germany- and Austria-associated anti-nationals that I mentioned
in a previous section, seem to think that it would be a good thing if
everyone on Earthâand preferably even sooner among those involved in
anti-systemic social movements!âsimply switched from speaking whatever
provincial vernacular they had spoken their entire lives to speaking
English instead. The most generous thing I can say about this notion is
that it is very ill-conceived. Language diversity, the existence of
monoglots, and the reality of unintelligibility can certainly create
some problems at the level of lived experience, but at the level of
populations, they have historically made it harder for states to
consolidate their control over society. When the oppressor doesnât
understand the language of the oppressed, but the opposite isnât true,
that is to the advantage of the latter (and the oppressed need as many
advantages as they can get). Thus, to the extent that we should care at
all about the languages that other people speak, this is how we ought to
approach the issue as anarchists.
Incidentally, regarding the anti-nationalsâ proposal, only an even more
totalitarian and life-disruptive regime of education than what we have
today could succeed in getting billions of people fluent in a singular
master language. Such regimes of assimilation have been established
before, albeit never on the scale that this colossal project would
require. There is absolutely nothing to admire about those historical
experiences.[34]
I think itâs pretty obvious that Spanish wouldnât be a particularly
useful working language in the local context by itselfâbut in a role as
both complement and counterbalance to French and English, several
benefits would become evident, most of which I have already discussed.
Letâs go through it again though.
The most straightforward benefit is that a policy of trilingualism would
better enable access for monoglot hispanophones, a group whose needs
cannot and will not be served quite as organically as those of the
TiohtiĂ :ke regionâs monoglot francophones or anglophones. The quality of
the book fairâs events could be improved insofar as the addition of a
third language could lead to a selection process that does not accord as
much undue privilege to French-language content. Trilingualism would
also distinguish any anarchist group quite markedly both from the
cultural policy of the presiding state, Canada, and from any group of
Québécois nationalists. It might be possible for the use of Spanish to
convey neutrality regarding competing anglophone and francophone
chauvinisms, and I think that is a worthwhile thing in itself.
I also wrote that Spanish is the main language of conversation in more
anarchist scenes than almost any other today, behind only English; I
argued using it in the context of the Montreal Anarchist Bookfair would
be a good way to demonstrate our commitment to internationalism. It is
with the subject of internationalism in mind that I will conclude this
section.
In earlier years, when I was still unable to express myself very
effectively in French, I appreciated the fact that there were
discussions and presentations at the book fair that took place in
French. I was able to use them as opportunities to practice listening
and speaking. I cannot attribute any great benefit to my attendance of
any single French-language event at the book fair, but generally
speaking, during the book fair and the rest of the year, I think I
learned a great deal from trying to engage with French-language
conversations whose content and implications I actually cared
aboutârather than, for instance, the rote coursework I had to do when I
was learning French in school.
Of course, I was an anglophone who had chosen to make Montréal his home;
French was a sensible target language for me. Many other people who
attend the book fair fit a different description. Some of them may spend
most of the year in places where Spanish is much more practically useful
on a day-to-day basis than French. Some of them speak Spanish with their
families, or they have spent enough time in Mexico, Colombia, or some
other country that they managed to pick some Spanish up. Some of them
are residents of MontrĂ©al, but perhaps not for long; they donât plan to
settle down here, and may in fact have ambitions that involve other
parts of the world.
For Montréal anarchists who already have some capacity in Spanish,
and/or those who want to acquire the language for whatever reason, I
think it would be great if the book fair could provide a real-world
context in which Spanish could be used. It is my sense, given that a)
most anarchists in the TiohtiĂ :ke region, its hinterlands, and places
downstream speak French already, b) there are bountiful opportunities to
practice French (including in social movements) for those who donât, and
c) many visitors to the Montreal Anarchist Bookfair donât live in places
with significant francophone populations, there might be more people at
the book fair who would be actively seeking out opportunities to
practice their Spanish than would be the case with French.
Most of the anarchists active in the 19^(th) century and the first half
of the 20^(th) century, and whose names we remember, were at least
bilingual if not polyglots. They traveled and they associated with other
travelers. This is a large part of what made them as effective as they
were as propagandists, strike organizers, outlaws, writers, and (of
course) translators. This may have been, in part, the product of their
circumstances, as we are often speaking of migrants from China to
France, from Italy to Argentina, from the empire of all the Russias to
colonized Turtle Island, sometimes with great detours along the way.
These people did not just absorb languages as if by osmosis, they made
the choice to learn them, and they did so precisely because of what that
enabled them to do. Competency in multiple languages was a boon for them
as they arrived in new countries and made new relationships, as they
received friends and publications from faraway places, and so on.
The world has changed in many ways since this early era of anarchism. By
1960 or so, anarchists in China, at one point large enough in number to
be influential upon the most consequential of Chinese social movements,
had largely been liquidated, and had their ideas suppressed, in various
campaigns initiated by both the Communist Party and the Nationalist
Party. The European immigrant anarchist scenes of North America, whose
newspapers were published in Yiddish, Italian, and other languages, were
in an advanced state of decline. From at least the late â70s onward, if
not even earlier, a variety of political and cultural forces (including
punk rock) positioned English as the major international language of
just about everything, including anarchism. Today, all over the world,
languages other than English remain relevant to many anarchists and
their pursuits, ensconced as they often are in local contexts where
English isnât the single most important and useful language. For
anglophone anarchists living in North America, however, there is very
little in the way of organic opportunity (that is, opportunity derived
from daily life, rather than from study) to acquire such languages.
Francophone anarchists in North America typically have lots of organic
opportunity to learn English, but thatâs it.
Were there book fair events in Spanish, that would complement some
MontrĂ©al-based anarchistsâ personal projects and ambitions, namely: to
acquire competency in Spanish; or to build on whatever competency they
already have; or to keep their Spanish from getting rusty. With respect
to our collective capacities, too, there would be other benefits to a
larger number of the regionâs anarchists being able to use and
understand Spanish. I wonât list these benefits extensively, but they
could include being able to communicate with people in other countries,
being able to contribute to certain kinds of solidarity projects, being
able to welcome and help out travelers, and so on.
As an anarchist, I want the place I call home to be a welcoming and
inviting to people from other parts of the world. I also want it to be
an attractive and inspiring place where people regularly win victories
against the police and capitalâsomething looking like a rose of fire or
a free territory from afar. And Iâm not kidding when I say that I think
improving the capacity of local anarchists to speak, understand, read,
write, and think in Spanish would, in a number of ways, improve the
general capacity of the whole population (including, but not limited to,
the anarchists) for upheaval and social revolution. Local successes on
these fronts would resonate, making more things possible in other
places, in ways hitherto unimaginable... This is what it means, to me,
when I think of what more local anarchists attaining general competency
in Spanish might enable.[35]
Or maybe not! I think Spanish is worth it because I think itâs something
that might contribute to total anarchist triumph, but there are good
reasons to be skepticalâand yet, I have also identified a few incidental
benefits I would expect to see, which could be enough on their own to
make a pivot to Spanish worthwhile. Assuming the reader is interested in
some of these same benefits, big or small, I ask that they consider my
proposal from the perspective of its strategic sense. Does the idea have
merit? Or, would this approach at least be better than what we have
going on now?
In order to make trilingualism a reality, there needs to be, at some
point, an actual pivot towards Spanish on the part of the MABC, i.e. a
decisive series of moves towards incorporation of Spanish into the
project of the Montreal Anarchist Bookfair. There would be a lot of
aspects to this, and I do not believe it is appropriate or helpful for
me to provide a comprehensive blueprint as to what that would or should
look like. However, I do think the following three issues will present
some amount of challenge to the collective, and I have a few things to
say about them in advance, starting with the easiest issue to resolve
and ending with the trickiest.
The MABC typically pays an artist an honorarium to design a poster and,
then, to provide a few different versionsâfor instance, one in French
and one in English, alongside black-and-white and colour versions, large
posters and smaller handbills, and whatever else the collective might
want. The addition of a Spanish version would mean a little bit more
work for the artist, but I donât believe very much more. It ought to be
easy enough to swap out the copy in one language for another.
It would probably be best to have multiple languages on one
posterâeither all three, or to have two different versions with two
different combinations, namely French-English and French-Spanish. I
think, in many neighbourhoods of Montréal, it was already baiting
vandalism to have a poster just in English; the same would be true of a
poster just in Spanish, with the additional problem that it would be
even less able to convey information to the average Montréaler. But with
two languages on the same poster, one of them being French, most readers
will get the relevant info, while some amount of nationalist impulse to
vandalize or destroy the poster is likely to be disarmed.
As of my last day as a collective member this past June, my
understanding was that no one on the collective possessed a very large
capacity to read, write, speak, or understand Spanish. If any fellow
collective members did have such a capacity, I certainly wasnât made
aware of it at any point. (Note: Itâs possible that there will be new
members by the time you read this, or even that the collective had
already brought on new collective members when I first composed this
paragraph back in the summer of 2020.)
That the MABC lacks general competency in Spanish is obviously a problem
for this whole proposal. It might be possible to translate copy into
Spanish with the aid of volunteers alone, but at some pointâfor example,
in corresponding about sensitive mattersâit will be necessary for people
on the collective to be competent in Spanish themselves. Not necessarily
all people on the collective, but at least some of them. Beyond that,
though, any degree of Spanish-language competency by collective members
would be sure to provide a boon for all tasks where Spanish was
required; it would allow MABC members to share tasks and discuss them
(i.e. in any situation where the best way to word something isnât yet a
resolved issue), and to better understand how the project as a whole
works (assuming that the project might start involving a larger number
of Spanish-language components, which, of course, it would).
Thus, the composition of the collective itself would have to change.
Alternatively, no one new would have to join the collective; a number of
collective members could, instead, simply upgrade their Spanish
competenciesâbut that is less realistic, I think, than getting new
people involved who, apart from other qualities that might make them
good collective members, are already generally competent in Spanish. So
there will need to be new people, and that means that either some people
will need to leave the MABC, if it is additionally desired for the
collective to remain a small group of people, or otherwise the MABC will
need to start conceiving of itself as a necessarily larger group than it
has been in recent years.
I donât think it should be absolutely necessaryâcertainly not at this
timeâfor every member of the collective to be generally, or even
basically, competent in Spanish, but I do think that itâs critical that
there be some degree of redundancy, i.e. not just one person, or even
just two people, who are capable of accomplishing tasks that require
Spanish competency. I donât know what the right number is, but itâs a
few people. There are lots of anarchists living in the TiohtiĂ :ke region
who are generally competent in Spanish, at least some of whom I feel
would probably be happy to be involved in the project.
Itâs worth saying, too, that for most tasks during the pre-fair
organizing season (promotion, translation of copy, etc.), there is no
longer any concrete need for collective members to live particularly
nearby, just so long as they have a stable and usable
computer-and-internet set-up and the people involved are able to live
with device-mediated meetings.
on working languages.
Equity is not the same as equality, which is to say, an equal amountâor
as close to equal as possibleâof French, English, and Spanish in all
aspects of the book fair (literature for sale, events, posters, etc.).
It is, instead, a matter of doing whatâs âfairâ with respect to the
speakers of each of these languages, and preferably, with respect as
well to the speakers (and learners) of other languages beyond these
three.
This is one of the fundamental failures of French-English bilingualism
for the purposes of an anarchist book fair taking place in the
TiohtiĂ :ke region: it lends itself too easily to forgetting about
language groups other than anglophones and francophones, despite the
fact that some of these groups number in the tens of thousands locally,
and certainly in the dozens or hundreds at certain street corners, in
certain workplaces and schools, etc. All of these languages, it is worth
saying, receive much more limited institutional support (if they get any
at all) in comparison to either English or French. In the case of
KanienâkĂ©ha, Yiddish, and possibly other languages, there are only a few
other places where any sizable group of speakers exist at all, and this
thanks, in part, to genocidal processes that officially English- and
French-speaking states either pursued or abetted. Given these histories,
I think it is important that the institutions produced by the anarchist
movementâand social movements in which anarchists participate, as well
as artistic and cultural movementsâproduce something that is distinctly
other from the cultural policies of oppressive and extant colonial
states, which in the local context means official Canadian bilingualism.
My experience has been that most conversations about anarchist spaces
and equity, whether that term is used or not, are usually about race. I
want to touch on this briefly because I think many readers are likely to
interpret my proposal as a suggestion of how to make the Montreal
Anarchist Bookfair more inclusive of people of colour (or in furtherance
of some like goal). In one sense, I suppose it is exactly that; the
successful implementation of English-French-Spanish trilingualism ought
to result inâand would probably require in the first placeâa larger
representation of hispanophones (most of whom, both globally and
locally, arenât white by North American standards) on the MABC itself
and/or in the volunteer cohort and/or among the people who simply attend
the book fair.
At the same time, Iâd rather that people not view this proposal through
this lens. Incorporating Spanish is a worthwhile thing on its own
merits, but understood as an instrument for a larger anti-racist
project, it is woefully limitedâIâd go so far as to say conservativeâand
almost certainly tokenistic. Itâs not really feasible for an
organization the size of the MABC to have more than three working
languages (and letâs remember, in 2020, it struggled and largely failed
to use even two), but that is what any kind of linguistic project of
anti-racism would require.
Certainly any additional language competency will require a lot from the
MABC, and given the time and resources that are available, thatâs
already a tall order. Thus anyone who criticizes the book fair from the
position that it should incorporate, say, Mandarin, without producing
any compelling reason as to why Mandarin specifically ought to be made a
working language, should probably fuck right off. If there was an
anarchist who was genuinely competent in Mandarin, of course, and who
wanted to join up with the MABC as either a collective member or a
volunteer, that could be a positive thing. I would hope that the
collective would be open to whatever came out of that! So too for plenty
of other languages that have fewer speakers, either globally or locally,
than Mandarin does. But, without a major shift in the linguistic
character of our region (i.e. at the scale of a few decades of
inexorable change, as with the emergence of francophone majorities in
cities and towns in the Kaniatarowanénhne river valley in the 19^(th)
century), most languages arenât really feasible options as working
languages for the MABC; there is simply no way to imagine enough people
who are generally competent getting involved, at least not on a short
time scale of two to five years.
But letâs say, for sake of argument, such a major demographic shift did
take place.[36]
In 2015 and 2016, the so-called ârefugee crisisâ was taking place in
Europe. I do not consider this episode to have been a world-historic
event so much as a temporary intensification of a systemic problem, but
at the time, I recall that it seemed like a big deal, both for myself
and many others. I know several European anarchists (and a few North
American ones) who started learning either Arabic or Kurdish around that
time; in some cases, these anarchists actually took the project quite
seriously, gaining a useful degree of competency. This is all to the
good, because being multilingual is greatâso keep that in mind as I say
the next thing. Basically, it was in no way incumbent upon these
anarchists (or upon anyone else for that matter) to learn languages
spoken by any of the newcomers. Nor would it ever be incumbent for
anarchist institutions in the TiohtiĂ :ke region (at least those not
principally concerned with supporting migrantsâ struggles against the
state) to do likewise, even in the increasingly likely event that an
area as densely populated as Tokyo needs to be rapidly evacuated,
sending refugees all over the world.[37]
So long as the youth take care of their elders, and they are at least
relatively unbenighted by racism and xenophobia (in one form or
another), people will generally get on okay in new countries where they
speak neither the local majority language (be it French, Swedish,
Korean, etc.) nor a relevant lingua franca (in many parts of the world,
including here, English). The kids will quickly pick up the languages
that are used by their neighbours, their teachers (if they have access
to school), and other kids. Most older adults will be able to acquire at
least some degree of competency, to the extent that they need it, and
they will benefit from their relations with youth who speak the same
âheritage languageâ as they do. Given the longer view of a few years,
then, the better thing for local anarchists to doâif they are starting
from a place of zero capacity in a given group of refugeesâ language,
but nevertheless want to make connections with and/or provide support to
people among that groupâis not to try to acquire competency in the
language (often a large undertaking), but to create spaces of encounter
where minority language monoglots can be exposed to the majority
language and/or the lingua franca, and where there is also a shared
context around which relationships can form. Intergenerationality and a
culture of anti-bigotry go a long way, too.
This approach is much better than a mentality of simply aiming to
publish announcements, produce copy, and acquire competencyâeither as
individuals or as organizing teamsâin a dozen or more languages. At that
point, any consideration of equity is, really, a way of talking about
legitimacy and charity, i.e. who deserves our support. The answer is
that everyone deserves support, which is what makes an overly broad
consideration of diverse refugeesâ first languages a poor use of time
and energy at best. Itâs not really equitable to haphazardly increase
the number of languages in use, whenever and however possible. In fact,
without a sufficient follow-through, i.e. actually obtaining basic
competency in the language (at a minimum), using another language (or
gesturing as though one is capable of doing so) is more likely than not
to simply confuse and/or insult people who have a closer relationship to
that language.
It is with these sorts of considerations in mind that I propose the
following: the MABC should not simply use the old quota policy plus
Spanishâthat is, having one third of events take place in French, one
third in English, and one third in Spanishâbut, instead, aim for
something like a quarter French, a quarter English, a quarter Spanish,
and a quarter in any language (probably one of the aforementioned three,
but maybe something else). The unassigned quarter would serve an
important function, allowing for some flexibility on the collectiveâs
part. For my own part, Iâd prefer that that quarter wouldnât end up
wholly occupied by English-language events. At the same time, if that
outcome meant a better quality of events overall, I think that it would
be acceptable.
Such a ratio (treated as a rough guideline to aim for, not as a strict
quota) would provide plenty of content for the minority of francophone
monoglots to participate without needing translation, while also making
the event submission process more equitable for the majority of
anarchists, on this continent or from around the world, who cannot
convey their ideas to others in French. It would probably be difficult,
at first, to find as much as a quarter of content in Spanish, especially
in the first year or two of such a policy, in which presenters also
generally competent in French or English might suspect that their ideas
would have a more limited audience if presented in Spanish;[38] but it
would impart the notion that the Montreal Anarchist Bookfairâs policy
was orientated towards internationalism, rather than towards either some
kind of wholly English-language âglobalâ anarchism or, even worse, a
mediocre and inadequate âCanadian bilingualâ anarchism.
Presumably events facilitated in languages other than French, English,
and Spanish would be welcome on a case-by-case basis (and assigned to
the fourth quarter), though I think the MABC would probably have to
demand that organizers of such events arrange for simultaneous
translation (or subtitles, in the case of a film) towards at least one
of the book fairâs three working languages in order to enable
participation by as many people attending the book fair as possible.
Otherwise, the collective would have to take it upon itself to arrange
the same.
To recapitulate what I wrote earlier, I was not the first collective
member to take up the idea of trilingualism. The original articulation
of the idea was less verbose than the text you are reading, but the
proposal was no less serious when it was expressed, in late 2016, by the
most experienced member of the collective at that time (whom I referred
to before as an âenthusiastâ of Spanish). His enthusiasm, unfortunately,
was not accompanied with any idea about implementing a more
comprehensive sort of trilingualism, any strategic proposal for
achieving any sort of concrete goal, etc. Instead, the MABC had a new
hispanophone volunteer, who had been recruited to the project shortly
after I had joined on; she was the friend of another collective member
who had, himself, not been involved with the MABC for much more than a
single pre-fair organizing season.
What ended up happening is that the rest of us gave this new
hispanophone volunteer a lot of work to do, and not just Spanish stuff
either. Shortly after the 2017 book fair, she decided that she would not
remain a part of the MABC, presumably because, as I understand it, she
didnât feel like it was the best use of her time and energy. Fair
enough.
I think there were a lot of problems with the internal culture of the
MABC at that time. Some had changed by the time I quit the project, but
some had not. Organizing the Montréal book fair remains an enormous
amount of work for a very small group of people who, typically, also
have a lot of other things going on in their lives. Without the time to
discuss strategy, in as much granular detail as necessary and for as
long as the discussion requires, there is no real guarantee that things
will work out. I always liked the line written by some Italian comrades
in the 1990s (Ai ferri corti con lâesistente, i suoi defensori e i suoi
falsi critici, aka âAt Daggers Drawnâ, 1998): âThe secret is to really
begin.â Yet, at the same time, Iâm really not stoked about any idea of
âthe secretâ, a phrasing that by itself evokes something a bit more
North American, which I have mostly heard about in earnest from people
who picked me up hitchhiking over the years.[39] Success is not simply
attracted by good vibes or positive intent. It is obtained, either
through luck (and if luck is on your side: sweet!) or by figuring out
how to do things and then doing them wellâand sometimes both, of course,
though it is the latter that we actually have control over.
I stated earlier that I believe that the more urgent priority for the
collective is to regain its capacity to both communicate and to produce
adequate copy in Frenchâto at least return to the capacity that the MABC
had in the 2017 pre-fair organizing seasonâbefore developing new
capacity in Spanish. This by itself will take some good planning, or
else it is unlikely to happen.
If the situation with French is fixed, however, committing to a pivot to
Spanish ought to be the next move. There are many possible ways to
conceive of the strategic dimension of this pivot, but the most
important thing, I think, is that the MABC publicly announce that it is
making such a commitment. This means that people who are actually
positioned to helpâanarchists who are competent in Spanish and wish to
volunteer for certain tasks, join the collective, or contribute to the
articulation of a strategy for successful implementation of
trilingualismâwill know that they can and should reach out.
The earlier such a commitment is announced, the better.
In the past, even when the whole collective was theoretically on board
with a pivot to Spanish (and during my time on the collective, whenever
the idea was brought up in meetings, it was never opposed by anyone), it
was never at any point a project that even half of the collective
dedicated much time to. This is understandable, of course, given that
there are always other things to do, and some people may have been
neither well-positioned to contribute to such a pivot nor particularly
interested on a personal level (unlike myself, who became an even
greater enthusiast of Spanish than the first guy had been). As a result,
however, the pivot was essentially fictive.
During the 2019 book fair, I announced during a panel entitled â20 Years
of the Montreal Anarchist Bookfairâ that the MABC intended to make the
book fair trilingual for 2020 (or, at least, make serious moves in that
direction), but only the handful of people in the room for that event
heard me. I was speaking with the explicit consent of the whole
collective, but without commitment to that goal, their consent didnât
amount to anything. Without a public commitmentâin writing, on the
website, and easy to find from the front pageâvery few people from
outside the collective were ever in a position to know that the
collective had failed to achieve a goal it had set for itself, never
mind the logic of that goal. As a result, they were pretty unlikely to
ever feel compelled to offer to help, even though more help is precisely
what the MABC always needed with respect to Spanish (and French, and a
lot of other things) during the time that I was on the collective.
My position is that it is always a good thing if the community that the
MABC servesâi.e. the people who actually come, the people who might
come, and the people we want to comeâis informed of what the collective
is setting out to do. And when the collective fails at something, the
community should (be able to) know that it failed. It should also be
informed about how and why that failure came to pass. This applies to
many things apart from the little matter of Spanish, too (for instance,
the possibly larger matter of French during the 2020 book fair), and I
think it applies to many other collective projects as well.
No anarchist project exists in isolation; it can always get help from
the outside, assuming people in the larger scenes are invested in the
continuation and successful execution of the project as wellâand this is
definitely the case with the Montreal Anarchist Bookfair, in my
experience. But the people involved in that project first need to
communicate the fact of their commitments and then, if there is any
trouble, their difficulties in achieving those commitments. The
situation is much less likely to improve otherwise.
After Spanish, should there be a fourth working language? A fifth? I
wrote at length on this subject in a previous draft, but sober minds
told me to cut it out. Nevertheless, I want to speak briefly about a few
candidates for subsequent (or even simultaneous) language acquisition on
the part of the MABC.
First, Portuguese, the third-most widely spoken language in the broad
area of âthe Americasâ (ranking above French) and, given that it is a
Romance language, complementary to the pre-existing competencies of any
book fair collective already competent with French as well as Spanish. I
think more connections between anarchists in Brazil and anarchists in
North America, specifically, are important to cultivate. Personally, I
would just love to see the French-language page on the SĂŁo Paulo
anarchist book fairâs website somehow reciprocated in the future.
Second, either American Sign Language (ASL) or Québec Sign Language
(LSQ); I am not sure which would be more appropriate, and perhaps it
would be possible to take on both. This could warrant an entire text in
and of itself, but apart from the obvious accessibility reasons, I think
itâs fair to say that greater proficiency in signing among anarchists
would have a lot of incidental benefits. How often do some of us find
ourselves at pain to communicate to a friend at a punk show? In a loud
party? With flashbangs ringing in our ears?
Third, KanienâkĂ©ha, the traditional language of the KanienâkehĂ :ka.[40]
As opposed to every other language I have mentioned throughout this
text, incorporating KanienâkĂ©ha wouldnât really be about enabling
accessibility, at least not in any straightforward sense. Effectively
all KanienâkehĂ :ka today, in the TiohtiĂ :ke region and further afield,
speak and understand English; it is often their first language,
sometimes their only language, and typically their strongest language.
The reason for this state of affairs, broadly speaking, is the large
historical phenomenon of colonialism. It is as a practical commitment to
anti-colonialism, and not accessibility, that has led many anarchists to
express support for the use of indigenous languages in various settings.
For anarchists living in Montréal, these conversations usually focus on
KanienâkĂ©ha for several reasons: local history (which is to say, folksâ
understandings of it), the fact that a lot of us know more about
KanienâkehĂ :ka and Haudenosaunee history writ large than we do about the
other indigenous nations whose traditional territories also overlap this
region, the physical proximity and political relevance of KanehsatĂ :ke
and KahnawĂ :ke to anti-systemic social movements based in and around the
TiohtiĂ :ke regionâs urban core, and so on.
I donât have much to say about what incorporating KanienâkĂ©ha can or
should look like, either with respect to the Montreal Anarchist Bookfair
or any other local project or institution. Someone else needs to write
the text on that subject, not me. I will say, however, that anarchists
in this regionâand in other places across the continent, tooâought to
think seriously about what the ideas they express about local indigenous
languages might imply for their own lives. Otherwise, they should
probably express fewer ideas on the subject.
In my whole life as a MontrĂ©al anarchist, the âtwo solitudesâ
problem[41] has been a perennial concern among my peers. This is how the
problem is expressed: there is an anglophone anarchist scene and a
francophone anarchist scene, and apart from language, the one scene is
defined by U.S.-style identity politics and/or âthird waveâ feminism
and/or insurrectionary anarchism, whereas the other is characterized by
French-style class politics and/or âsecond waveâ feminism and/or
Tiqqunism. There are many comments on âculturalâ differences as well,
from purportedly different relationships to time and punctuality, to
broad attitudes about drinking and drugs in various settings, and so on.
In such portrayals, language is simply the most visible distinction
between the two scenes, but there are a number of other similarly stark
points of contrast between them.
Simple binaries have a lot of explanatory powerâtoo much, in fact. Itâs
not as though they cannot be used to speak truth; people use them to say
things that are true all the time (or at least true enough, within the
bounds of a certain kind of conversation). Unfortunately, as they are
overused, as they becom particular e clichés, they tend to render
obscure the real texture of any give particular n sociality. This is
certainly true of the all-too-Canadian conceit of âsolitudesâ when it is
applied to the TiohtiĂ :ke regionâs anarchist movement, which is hardly
composed of two easily contrasted scenes marked by language, but a wide
diversity of much smaller (and obviously overlapping) scenes, each with
its own culture. Whether or not a given scene is mostly French-speaking,
mostly English-speaking, mostly Spanish-speaking, or characterized by
constant code switching is only one of its many cultural traits, and
probably less generative of the scene (i.e. less the reason that people
continue to share the same spaces, creating something that it makes
sense to call a scene) than other factors: living in the same
neighbourhood, liking the same music, shared interest in particular
activities, shared history of involvement in particular social
movements, etc.
In other words, language used is probably an incidental trait of most
local anarchist scenes, not an essential one. I presume it is usually a
function of people determining, perhaps without much conscious thought
about it, which particular vernacular is best for the conversation given
the language competencies of the people involved. Much of the time, in
this region, that language will be French. Other times, it will be
English. At least some of the time, it will be something else, like
Spanish. But, outside of situations where the major reason that people
are choosing to hang out with each other is language acquisition,
language activism, or a similar preoccupationârarely the case for
anarchists (though maybe it shouldn't be), and were it the case in the
TiohtiĂ :ke region, itâs likely the language of interest would neither be
French nor Englishâit probably makes much more sense to speak of a
syndicalist scene and an insurrecto scene, or a Hochelaga scene and a
Southwest scene, or cis menâs spaces and non-mixitĂ© choisi[42] spaces,
or whatever else. Ideological orientation, neighbourhood, (relationship
to) gender, and other factors are, I think, more directly impactful upon
the shape and elaboration of local anarchistsâ sociality than language
competencies are (which isnât to say that language isnât a factor at
all).
But this isnât accounted for at all in the logic of binary clichĂ©s.
Third, fourth, fifth, and subsequent possibilities complicate things,
yet the âvalueâ of the clichĂ© is that it is simple, that it shoves all
of that tedious complexity under the rug.
I have no interest in presenting Spanish and the associated world as a
âthird solitudeâ in the TiohtiĂ :ke regionânot only because that term has
already been applied to Yiddish and its world (for instance, by Gerald
Tuchinsky in a 1984 scholarly article, and by the Museum of Jewish
Montreal for its Tumblr blog, active 2011-â16), but because the very
notion of a âsolitudeâ that does not communicate with the other, that
cannot understand the other, is a fiction. The individual monoglot,
unable to communicate to others who do not share their language, may
experience a personal solitude, but that is not true (in most cases, at
least) of the collectivity of people who share a language, many of whom
are likely not monoglots, or who wonât be monoglots forever. A
nationalist project, or any other political project of affirming and
maintaining distinctions between different groups of people, can
certainly have some degree of success, particularly when backed up by
states, but the tendency is always for neighbouring human collectivities
to influence one another (in ways that are negative, positive, or
benign, all of which is a matter of perspective anyway), even if some
members of both collectivities cannot converse directly (that is,
without the aid of a translator). This influencing is readily apparent
in local language dynamics: francophone monoglots in Montréal still
speak a language that is peppered with anglicisms and entire turns of
phrase that are lifted from English (like one of my favourites, âthatâs
it thatâs allâ); the speech of local anglophones who are unable to
express complicated thoughts in French will nevertheless use a wide
roster of French nouns that most other North Americans donât use (like
âdepâ, âterrasseâ, âruelleâ, and âmanifâ).
This text has had a much more narrow focus, but I hope that my words
will do something to erode the lingering viability of the solitudes
cliché, to the point that it is no longer deployed as a quick, evidently
satisfying answer as to why it is difficult to get all of the anarchists
in the same room togetherâas if there arenât a hundred other factors to
consider!âor why it is sometimes difficult to meet new peopleâas if the
seductive comfort of domesticity and/or the fractured nature of digital
information silos arenât more pressing issues!
It is hard to learn languages, to get people together into a room, to
meet new people, and so on. It is often not too difficult to understand,
in broad strokes, aggregate social systems particular; most people can
understand an explanation in plain language, so long as they donât have
a vested interest in not understanding. But it is significantly more
difficult to keep in mind all sorts of dynamics when trying to predict
the results of any course of action.
I think it does no one any good to deny the challenge of some of these
tasks. That is why I want to emphasize, at the conclusion of this text,
the importance of a necessarily collective practice of conversation,
experimentation, and striving to do better.
[1] The other two proposals, in a nutshell, were as follows: first, that
anyone contributing to consensus decisions about the book fair ought to
be generally competent in French (as was required at some points in the
past); and second, that there ought to be an official style guide for
the book fair so that, among other things, place names from indigenous
languages would no longer be spelled differently in different parts of
official book fair copy. I still think a case could be made for both
ideas, but I no longer feel motivated, myself, to argue either case at
length.
[2] There is a terminological debate, mostly taking place among speakers
of the language in question, as to whether âSpanishâ (that is, español)
or âCastilianâ (castellano) is the better name for it. In my opinion,
the latter option strikes me as more correct, mostly because there are
several languages that are indigenous to different parts of the land
most people call some version of âSpainâ today. The language in
question, however, is descended principally from a language already
spoken in the central region of Castile six centuries ago, and Castile
has long been the politically dominant region of Spainâa land that,
before the 1700s, was almost always referred to (in the language in
question, at least) using a pluralized form, i.e. âthe Spainsâ (las
Españas).
Both terms are used by some people, and understood by most people, in
just about every context where this language is spoken. For an
English-speaking readership, however, I think it would be a bit
distracting if I opted to use âCastilianâ in lieu of âSpanishâ
throughout this text.
[3] By âTiohtiĂ :ke regionâ, I mean something roughly equivalent to what
is designated by the English term âGreater MontrĂ©alâ, but which I would
define as: 1) the whole area where KanĂ :tso, a river flowing from the
northwest, joins up with Kaniatarowanénhne, a greater river flowing from
the southwest towards the ocean; plus 2) the whole archipelago that is
adjacent to this confluence, both to the east and south; plus 3) both
the north and south shores of the section of the river valley just
described, and stretching as much as 50 kilometres maximum into the
hinterlands in any given direction.
It is, in any case, a larger and more populous region than the ring of
relatively anarchist-dense neighbourhoods clustered around the downtown
core of Montréal.
[4] Throughout this text, when I refer to the geographic category of
âNorth Americaâ, I do not mean the continental landmass, which I call
âTurtle Islandâ following the convention of most anarchists in this part
of the world; I am referring instead to all land north of the
U.S.-Mexico border and the islands of the Caribbean Sea (give or take a
little bit). Setting aside Kalaalit Nunaat (âGreenlandâ), this zone
largely corresponds to the territories designated as âthe United Statesâ
and âCanadaâ on most globes and world maps. I sometimes also use the
term âNorth Americanâ to refer to anything pertaining to (the dominant
culture of) the combined settler societies of the United States and
Canada, both of which are more importantly similar to each other than
they are importantly different.
[5] Victoria Day isâaccording to the Canadian government, among
othersâthe second-last Monday in May. Many workers and students will
typically have the day off.
[6] For those who know nothing of the subject, I recommend either
âNationalist Anti-Nationalism: The Anti-German Critique and Its
All-Too-German Adherentsâ by CrimethInc. (Rolling Thunder #3, 2006) or
âThe Antideutsch and Meâ by David Rovacs (CounterPunch, 2013), both of
which are easily accessible online, and which summarize the whole sad
story pretty well (though I am sure there are valid criticisms of both
articles). My short version, however, is as follows: many anti-Germans
(whether they would call themselves that or not) accept and affirm the
Zionist conceit that the contemporary Israeli state and the Jewish
people (or at least the Jews whose opinions matter) are effectively one
and the same entity; as a result, this same subset tends to oppose the
Palestiniansâ struggles writ large, rhetorically defend the Israeli
state as progressive or even communist, get loud and shouty with
anti-Zionist Jews, and so on.
[7] All linguistic terminology using the -phone suffix is necessarily a
bit reductive and ad hoc. Basically, a francophone is a person who
speaks French as a first language, and an anglophone is a person who
speaks English as a first language. Many people in the world fit neatly
into either of these categories, or into other categories: russophones
(who speak Russian as a first language), italophones (Italian), and so
on.
There are many people who did not have a singular âfirst languageâ (for
instance, in the case of many people who had one francophone parent and
one anglophone parent, whom I often call âfranglophonesâ), or who, as
adults, may be fluent in an additional language they started learning
early in life, but not generally competent in a first language that they
use infrequently or donât use at all. Itâs worth saying, too, that in
the context of societies where the politics of language are
significantly more complicated than they are in most North American
contexts, or where there are simply more languages in active use (some
of which may be located on the same dialect continua) and a larger
number of multilingual householdsâplaces like South Africa, the former
Yugoslavia, and the Philippinesâusing -phone terminology to refer to
different language groups could prove too reductive or too imprecise for
a useful discussion of local language dynamics.
Additionally, established English-language -phone terms for some
language groups can be difficult for many readers to parse. A
lusophoneâs first language is Portuguese; a sinophoneâs, (some variety
of) Chinese.
[8] KaniatarowanĂ©nhne is denoted on most maps as âSaint Lawrence Riverâ
in English and âfleuve Saint-Laurentâ in French.
[9] The diacritic in the name âMontrĂ©alâ was also dropped by
contemporary anglophones. My personal preference is to include the
diacritics in both âMontrĂ©alâ and âQuĂ©becâ, even in English copy, and
that is the style employed throughout this text (except in proper nouns
like âMontreal Anarchist Bookfairâ, as noted before).
[10] QuĂ©bec is usually called âQuĂ©bec Cityâ in English in order to
distinguish it from the larger territory (as designated on most maps and
globes) and present-day Canadian âprovincialâ polity that goes by the
same name. The distinction is made more subtly in French, with the
presence of a definite article in front of the name (as in âje dĂ©teste
le QuĂ©becâ) indicating the larger territory/polityâor, by extension, the
settler ânationââand the absence of one (as in âje dĂ©teste QuĂ©becâ)
indicating the city.
[11] Throughout this text, when I speak of âCanadiansââthat is, of
people who it is fair to collectively describe as suchâI only mean
people belonging to an âethnic groupâ that derives from the settler
population of the pre-Conquest colony of Canada, which was just one
section and outpost of a larger colonial empire. As an inverse
consequence, I do not mean either some or all citizens of the modern
Canadian state, as recognized by that state or any other states, or some
or all residents of ostensible Canadian territory, as depicted on most
globes or world maps.
I have chosen to use the word in a conspicuously antiquated sense
because I think it does something to denaturalize widespread conceptions
of both Canadian and Québécois nationality. Before World War I,
francophones living downstream of KenâtarĂłkwen (e.g. the site of
present-day Kingston, Ontario) or otherwise within the Kaniatarowanénhne
watershed largely referred to themselves as âCanadiansâ (that is, as
canadiens and canadiennes) to the exclusion of anglophones and others,
whereas local anglophonesâ conceptions of national identity (to the
extent that they were present at all) concentrated on the categories of
the American, the British, or occasionally Irish, Scottish, and
sometimes other âethnicâ types. The notion of being specifically
Canadian was quite unemphasized in any English-language discourse about
nationality and peoplehood until after 1918.
[12] In the years immediately following the Conquest, the territory
designated âQuebecâ in Westminsterâs reckoning extended as far to the
south as present-day Ohio and as far to the west as present-day
Wisconsin. In reality, much of this territory remained outside of
European statesâ effective domination, but that didnât stop Westminster
from ceding its claim to some of this territory in a 1791 treaty with
the United States. The remaining part was divided into two separate
colonies, called âUpper Canadaâ and âLower Canadaâ; these were united
into a single âProvince of Canadaâ in 1841, as an administrative
follow-up to the 1837-â38 rebellions, but then split from one another
again in the context of confederation with the more immediately oceanic
colonies of Nova Scotia and New Brunswick in 1867.
Thus the modern conceptions of âCanadaâ (that is, Upper Canada, Lower
Canada, and additional, erstwhile non-Canadian territories) and âQuĂ©becâ
(the former Lower Canada) as two distinct territorial entities, the
latter of which is nested within the former, dates only to the
confederal event. Prior to this, in both French and English, the word
âOntarioâ had mostly referred to the easternmost Great Lake, and never
to any parcel of land large enough to show up on a globe or a map of the
world.
[13] The name sounds better in the original French: la Revanche des
berceaux.
[14] Canadians who live within the modern borders of Ontario usually
refer to themselves as âFranco-Ontarianâ these days, and they have had a
distinct (e.g. non-Québécois) identity for much of the time that the
Québec/Ontario administrative distinction has existed. From what I can
tell, a lot of these folks see themselves as excluded from, and
abandoned by, Québécois nationalism, especially in its separatist
manifestations. The only other significant Canadian subgroup, the
Brayonsâwho live in the northwestern âMadawaskaâ region of New Brunswick
and across the U.S.-Canada border in northern Maineâdonât seem much
interested in Québécois nationalism either.
[15] It is worth emphasizing, too, that North American French simply is
valuable to many people currently living on this continent, whatever
people with anarchist or otherwise anti-colonial ideas think about that.
[16] In the Western Hemisphere, the French colonial empire has been
greatly diminished; what is left is mostly located in the Caribbean.
There are some dual citizens of France and Canada, of course, and thanks
to a number of policies and accords between the governments, it is
pretty easy for citizens of Franceâespecially white citizens with high
salaries and/or rich parentsâto move to Canadian state territory if they
ever decide that thatâs something they want to do. Yet, notwithstanding
rumours that âthe Frenchâ are singularly responsible for gentrifying
MontrĂ©alâs Plateau neighbourhood, this population is not particularly
significant in comparison to the North American francophone population
as a whole. Some such francophones have no ancestors born and raised in
France whatsoever. Most others do have such ancestors, but often not
within a few generations.
[17] SABâs Spanish website doesnât quite replicate all content available
on the French and English sites, which seem to comprehensively mirror
one another. Nevertheless, compared to the MABC, I think it fair to say
that SAB has taken French-Spanish-English trilingualism seriously; the
majority of all copy seems to exist in all three languages.
[18] A hispanophone is a person whose first language is Spanish. The
prefix hispano- comes from the Latin word âHispaniaâ, an old name for
the Iberian peninsula; the Spanish state's mainland territory
corresponds to the greater part of this landmass.
[19] As of December 2020, it was down to just âespañolâ.
[20] French, incidentally, is in fifth place with respect to the total
number of speakers (not bad), while it is in fifteenth place (!) with
respect to native speakers.
[21] What is said of hispanophones in this section, and throughout this
text, generally also applies to near hispanophones, i.e. many native
speakers of indigenous languages in Latin America, most native speakers
of regional languages in Spain, native speakers of other languages who
nevertheless grew up in Spanish-speaking societies and achieved general
competency in Spanish, etc.
It would be tedious to mention these near hispanophones by that name
again and again, insofar as there is no significant qualitative
difference between their experience and those of âtrueâ hispanophones
that I am qualified to talk about, and also because I have opted to
avoid unusual orthographic marks like asterisks (*) or daggers (â , âĄ) in
this text. It is thus left to the reader to determine whether or not a
given statement about hispanophones might also apply to (any group of)
near hispanophones.
[22] By âLatin Americaâ, I mostly mean the part of âAmericaâ that can be
contrasted to âNorth Americaâ as described in footnote #4âwhich is to
say, the territories designated on most globes and world maps as
âMexicoâ, âCubaâ, âPuerto Ricoâ, and more or less all land further to
the south, to the extreme southern point of Tierra del Fuego.
Designating this vast region as uniformly âLatinâ is imperfect, if not
problematic, for a number of reasonsâyet the name âSouth Americaâ is
already specifically reserved in English for the southern continental
landmass joined to a larger northern one (widely called âTurtle Islandâ
in North American anarchist scenes these days) at the Panamanian
isthmus. There is also no other obvious candidate for a âfoilâ term with
respect to what is designated by the term âNorth Americaâ.
I hope people will appreciate that I am not committed to the idea that
places like Jamaica, Aruba, and Maya-speaking parts of Guatemala are
âLatinâ so much as I am committed to saying that they are geographically
âAmericanâ (e.g. they exist on or very near the continuous âAmericanâ
landmass, which is normally conceived of as one continent in Spanish and
as two continents in English) but situated outside of the specific
settler-colonial system of North America. The precise boundary between
the two is a bit fuzzy in places, but it mostly starts at the
U.S.-Mexico border in the west and the southern extremity of Florida in
the east.
[23] There are, to be clear, many examples of societies making a
conscious choice to use new languages. In some cases, this may simply
mean a policy change by government, as with the Rwandan governmentâs
decision in 2008 to adopt English instead of French as the language of
education, but the histories of Hebrew, Finnish, and other languages
make it clear that a state is not necessary for this to happen; people
started learning these languages, and then imparting them to their
children, long before the Israeli state was founded, before the
parliament of Finland declared independence from Russia, etc. It could
be argued that a state has often been a crucial part of elevating a
particular language to a place of principal importance in a given
territory (this would explain why the constructed language Esperanto,
also the beneficiary of a certain degree of genuine enthusiasm, is
spoken by a dispersed population around the world, not strongly
associated with any particular locale, etc.), but a popular social
movement organized around the language is typically the more important,
prerequisite factor.
[24] There may be other incentives to speak English, tooâfor instance,
the exigencies of the capitalist economy.
[25] To be quite honest, though, I only spent about four days total in
Franceâand Iâm not certain how many of the people I associated with in
that time would have called themselves âanarchistsâ. My impression is
more importantly informed by encounters I have had with French
anarchists (that is, born and raised in France) that I have met in the
TiohtiĂ :ke region, around Turtle Island, and in other parts of Europe,
numbering at least several dozen in total.
[26] Arabic is more of a dialect continuum than it is a single language;
some varieties arenât mutually intelligible when spoken. A friend who is
learning tells me that it is as if the people of the Latin world (no
more ridiculous a term than âArab worldâ) all read newspapers in Latin,
got the news from Radio-Canada, Noticias Univision, or whatever other
local broadcaster in Latin, but in their conversations with friends,
neighbours, and family members, they spoke French, Spanish, Italian,
Romanian, or whatever else, depending on what country they lived in.
[27] I have also lived with hispanophone anarchists in Montréal whose
social life with other local anarchists did not transpire in Spanish
very often or at allâso, just in case anyone is out there wondering
otherwise, I am not counting such people for the purposes of this
anecdote!
[28] On a few occasions, I have been adjacent to conversations between
anarchists that were largely conducted in either Hebrew or Russian;
there are, of course, a few local anarchists who are generally competent
in these languages, and sometimes people who pass through for a few
weeks or a few months with the same competencies. I have never been made
aware of any local Hebrew-speaking or Russian-speaking anarchist (or
even quasi-anarchist) scene, however, by which I would mean a group of
(full disclosure: I chose the following number arbitrarily) at least
five people who know each other, hang out with one other pretty often,
and who habitually and unselfconsciously use Hebrew or Russian to
converse rather than French, English, or anything else.
I think there is a decent chance that there is, or recently was, one
small Arabic-speaking anarchist scene in Montréal, and an even better
chance that there was an Arabic-speaking scene of people involved in
Middle East solidarity activism of some kind which, if not exactly
anarchist, may have been adjacent to anarchist scenes and/or included
two or three people who called themselves anarchists. I have never been
seriously involved in Middle East solidarity activism during my life as
an anarchist in Montréal, nor have I ever had any roommates or close
friends who regularly talked about anarchist stuff in Arabic, so I canât
speak to the current or historic existence of such a scene. I will say,
however, that the formation of an Arabic-speaking scene in Montréal is
altogether less likely than the formation of a Spanish-speaking one,
mainly because of what was described in footnote #26. If two people are
generally competent in very different varieties of Arabic (for example,
Moroccan Arabic vs. Palestinian Arabic), that presents a challenge to
mutual comprehension. If they happen to be generally competent in either
French, English, or both alongside whatever variety of Arabicâas is
quite likely the case for local anarchists and/or people involved in
almost any kind of activismâthen it will probably be more
straightforward and complication-free for them to converse in French or
English instead.
[29] The historical archive of Spain 1936-â37, by itself, would probably
be enough to qualify Spanish as âimportantâ in this respectâbut of
course there is much more.
[30] It is worth noting, too, that given the situation with covid in
2020, the collective opted for âconnecting ideas across distanceâ this
year, i.e. we organized an online and over-the-radio event. Geography
and borders would not have been a meaningful constraint on the
participation of the vast number of hispanophone anarchists who do not
live in the TiohtiĂ :ke region and who also, for whatever reason, canât
feasibly visit. All a person would need instead was a decent internet
connection. As of my last day on the collective, I was pretty certain
the MABC was probably heading towards organizing some kind of âonline
componentâ for future book fairs, again for accessibility reasons, and
regardless of the situation with respect to covid.
[31] A current member of the MABC, upon reading an early draft of this
text, indicated that this quota was actually scrapped in 2018, in the
lead-up to that yearâs book fair, and not 2020. I was evidently not in
attendance of the meeting where this was decided upon (I left Montréal
for a few weeks in the spring of that year, and we werenât able to
figure out online meetings at that time), and as far as I can remember,
I was never made personally aware that such a decision had been made.
I think it is fair to say that, during the 2018 pre-fair organizing
season, and the organizing season that followed, there was a greater
degree of flexibility with regard to the quotaâbut the composition of
the event programme nevertheless approximated 50% French-language events
and 50% English-language events. I was more actively involved in the
event selection process for the 2019 book fair than I had been in 2018,
and my own considerations included respect for the quota; I assumed the
same for othersâ considerations. It was only in the particularly arduous
context of the 2020 pre-fair organizing season that I stopped thinking
about how to achieve at least rough parity. We did not have any
conversation about dropping the quota, as I recall (in which case it is
possible that I would have heard about the 2018 decision); instead, we
simply did our best to find whatever content we possibly could for our
experiment in âconnecting ideas across distanceâ, which ended up meaning
exactly one presentation in French.
It is my contention that, if I was unaware of a policy change as a
member of the collective, then, in effect, the policy was not changed. I
would also contend that this difference in perception speaks to a
problem in terms of the MABCâs internal culture (which, of course, I
contributed to) insofar as all members ought to be on the same page
about any number of collectively made commitments.
[32] This number excludes ostensible speakers of Urdu within India
(about 4% of the population). An argument can be made that Hindi and
Urdu are essentially the same language, which I have seen referred to,
in some quarters, as either âHindi-Urduâ or vice versa. To be clear, the
formal register of Hindi is quite distinct from the formal register of
Urdu; the former draws a great deal of its vocabulary from Sanskrit,
whereas the latter draws more from Arabic and Farsi. These formal
registers are of largely recent construction, however, and those who
constructed them did so in service of nationalizing projects. The
informal registers of both languages, as used on the streets of Delhi
and Rawalpindi, are generally mutually intelligible.
[33] I became aware of this group in 2016 as a result of perusing
Tumblr, specifically because the personality behind a (now defunct)
âliberal Zionistâ blog complained about them. Part of the criticism of
the Brigade was that they expressed themselves in English, not Hebrew;
this was cited as evidence of their inauthenticity as Israelis and the
invalidity of their opinions. My understanding is that most of the
controversy, and the Brigadeâs response to that controversy, actually
unfolded on Facebook.
[34] Some of these experiences arenât even historical. At the time of
this writing, precisely such a policy is being enacted upon the local
population in the region of Central Asia mostly widely known as
âXinjiangâ (which means ânew territoryâ or ânew frontierâ in Mandarin).
[35] There are, of course, a number of local groups that already achieve
this goalâtypically not explicitly anarchist groups, but often with a
large degree of participation by anarchists. I wonât provide a
comprehensive list (though I previously mentioned SAB) because, in doing
so, I would inevitably overlook one important group or another. I also
may not have a very good grasp as to whether or not a group is actually
trilingual (i.e. there is a more or less equitable amount of French,
English, and Spanish in published copy and/or it is possible to receive
service in all three languages) or merely âpseudotrilingualâ, i.e.
gesturing towards trilingualism but not actually doing the work of
making it happen, as with the MABC from at least the 2017-â18 pre-fair
organizing season and up to my last day on the collective.
[36] Two currents of thought motivate the inclusion of the following
paragraphs. First of all, I just want to honour something about the
origins of this text as a whole. The summer of 2017âi.e. the period
immediately after the first book fair I had had a hand in organizingâwas
marked by the TiohtiĂ :ke regionâs own ârefugee crisisâ caused by the
election of Trump to the U.S. presidency and the new administrationâs
stance on Latin American immigrants. Although there were many people
from a variety of backgrounds crossing into Canadian territory at this
time, a substantial number were of Haitian origin. Trump had indicated
that he would not be extending the âtemporary protected statusâ visas of
about 58,000 Haitians living in the U.S. There was a lot of speculation
that a similar fate might befall other populations, mostly hispanophone:
about 195,000 Salvadorans, 60,000 Hondurans, and 2500 Nicaraguans whose
status in the U.S. relied upon precisely the same kind of visa.
This is what I was thinking about when I first started putting words
together about what a pivot to Spanish could look like, how it ought to
be accomplished, and why it would make sense in the first place. I
wanted the Montreal Anarchist Bookfairâand by extension, the TiohtiĂ :ke
regionâs anarchist scenes as a wholeâto be able to welcome the large
numbers of hispanophone refugees, at least some of them likely
monoglots, that might have been coming to our region in 2018.
The second current of thought comes from experiences hanging out in
Toronto. I donât want to be too categorical about this, but I have
sometimes seen what I would call a performative multilingualism in the
posters that people involved in various social movements and/or NGOs
have put up around that city. To be clear, it is great to have included
languages beyond English, some of which are probably very useful for
publicity in different parts of Toronto or its environs. Circa 2014, I
was particularly impressed to see posters in Hungarian in the
neighbourhood of Parkdale; this was in the context of a very recent
influx of Roma refugees from Hungary, many of whom (including the
children) did not yet speak English. With respect to established
âheritage languageâ communities in the Toronto area, however, the vast
majority of people also read English very well; there is no pressing
accessibility need to have a poster in Serbo-Croat, Tibetan, etc.
[37] In the early hours after the Fukushima #1 Nuclear Power Plant
disaster in Okuma, Japan, on March 11, 2011, it was unclear how dire the
situation was. Tokyoâcomprising, alongside its vast environs, the most
populous metropolitan area on Earthâis located just to the south of the
Fukushima prefecture, and the necessity of rapidly evacuating the entire
population of Tokyo really loomed large in the early days of the
disaster. So, if this had happened, where would all these people have
gone?
Itâs unclear to me if the rest of Japan would have been prepared, in
that moment, to accommodate such a massive number of refugees. I think
it is quite certain, however, that Korean, Chinese, and Russian
politicians would have been unwilling to host an unlimited number of
Japanese refugees from in and around Tokyo. Perhaps some residents of
Greater Tokyoâmany of whom, as I understand it, speak neither English
nor any language other than Japaneseâwould have had to take up residence
(at least temporarily) in societies much further abroad, including those
where very few people, if any, can understand Japanese, e.g. almost
everywhere.
[38] This is based on my own experience, during my time on the MABC. I
asked a few hispanophone friends of mine, whom I knew had experience
presenting on varied subjects in anarchist or anarchist-adjacent
spacesâtypically in English, at least when they were in this part of the
worldâif they would ever be interested in presenting in Spanish at the
MontrĂ©al book fair. In all cases (which wasnât actually too many cases,
to be clear), they were skeptical as to whether there would be âenoughâ
people present who were capable of listening to and understanding
Spanish. We did not rigorously define what the word âenoughâ might mean
in this case.
[39] This may go over the heads of at least some readers, so what I am
referring to is The Secret, a best-selling âself-helpâ book by Rhonda
Byrne, first published in 2006. Having never read it myself, my
understanding is that it posits a quasi-spiritual idea, namely that
positive thinking will attract positive events, as a result of some very
reductive understanding of how âenergyâ works. I could say many other
things about (my understanding of) Byrneâs ideas, but suffice it to say
that I believe these ideas fit in well with a certain idea of why
society is the way that it is. It works well with extant oppressive
modes of religiosity on this continent, which tend to normalize and
justify the leviathanic horrors of our era, sabotaging any impulse to
change things.
[40] In English, the more widely used name for both this language and
the people who speak it is âMohawkâ, probably derived from an exonym
(that is, an externally used name) in the now unspoken Narragansett
language.
[41] Two Solitudes is the title of a 1945 novel by Hugh MacLennan
(which, as of this writing, has a page dedicated to it on English
Wikipedia, but not French Wikipedia). I havenât read it, but I guess
itâs a pretty straightforward political allegory. The phrase is widely
used today in English-language Canadian political discourseâand less
commonly in French-language political discourseâto indicate a sense of
irreconcilability between an English-speaking political subject and a
French-speaking political subject, either across the Canadian territory
at large, in a given locality like Montréal, or wherever else.
[42] In local feminist parlance, the term âchosen non-mixednessâ
indicates a space without cis men.