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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

Anonymous

Pivot to Spanish

What follows is a very inflated argument for the first of three

proposals[1] I had for the development of “language policy” 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 MABC—and, by consequence, at

least somewhat away from French, which has been the sole beneficiary, up

to now, of deliberate efforts to shape the book fair’s 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 doesn’t only

pertain to the very limited subject of the Montreal Anarchist Bookfair,

which might not even happen in 2021 (and I don’t 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 don’t 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 matters—not because my own conclusions

are necessarily correct (and let’s be real: very few people would care

either way, as they aren’t nearly as interested as I am in the subject

of the Montreal Anarchist Bookfair’s 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 region—that

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 folks’ efforts. It

wouldn’t 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

“Kanonshionni’onwĂš:ke tsi ionhwĂ©ntsare” (available on The Decolonial

Atlas under the header “Haudenosaunee Country in Mohawk”).

— December 2020

About the book fair

The Montreal Anarchist Bookfair (the official style in English uses a

compound version of the term “book fair” and forgoes the diacritic in

“MontrĂ©al”) 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. It’s

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 aren’t

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 “official” 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©al’s

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 weekend—often

corresponding with the Victoria Day long weekend[5]—within 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, it’s 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©al’s 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 MABC’s 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 “policies”. 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 “the book fair”.

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 America—or more

precisely, all the ideas in circulation in society, and in anarchist

scenes, that pertain to this fact.

Some exposition on “national ideation” and North American French

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

“anti-Germans”, but that’s 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 “ethnically” German by any

definition; and second, in two locales (Athens and Montréal

respectively), they were—at the time that I met them, at least—involved

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.

I’ll 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

multivernacularity—which 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

“success”, i.e. its present status as the world’s most widely used and

understood language.

The similarity of these ideas and Kautsky’s notions about

“ultraimperialism” 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 thing—and that’s a problem! They

also align with an unhelpful and elitist attitude that I’ve encountered

among a minority of English-speaking francophone radicals, namely that

other francophones, if they can’t speak English or if they simply fail

to show enough enthusiasm for speaking the language, can be dismissed as

xenophobic and/or “lazy” 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 proposal—transforming 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 (I’m 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 people—francophones,

anglophones, and others[7]—in 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 supremacy—the so-called Seven Years’ War (1754-’63)—with the

competing imperial power based in Westminster, England. One of the

lasting results is that the larger colony of “Canada”, 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 “Quebec”

(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 “Conquest of Canada” by

Westminster agents—physically accomplished in 1760 and confirmed by

treaty in 1763—it probably wasn’t clear to anyone what the future would

hold for the Canadians, i.e. those people descended from the almost

wholly Catholic francophones and “near francophones” (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 “near

anglophones” (native speakers of Irish, Welsh, and other Celtic

languages who lived in other lands subjected to Westminster’s 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 “Thirteen Colonies” to the south

that seceded from Westminster’s 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 centres’ 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 “Revenge of the Cradles”[13]—a 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 “the nation” 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

“French-style” 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

“Three Rivers”), and QuĂ©bec City itself, whose populations had been

substantially, or even majority, anglophone in the early part of the

19^(th) century—all thanks to the post-1760 influx of new, mostly

anglophone immigrants (both Westminster loyalists from the south and

metropolitan newcomers from across the ocean)—inexorably 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 “white flight” 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 region’s

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 family—who might

have spoken French only occasionally, but still regularly, as they were

growing up—is 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 “Dual Monarchy” of

“Austria-Hungary” 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 power—no “democracy” 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 “ethnic”

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 “Laurentian Catholic”

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 “French people” 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 “QuĂ©bec” on a map; the idea

of “a country” for “a people”. 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

wasn’t even limited to Canadians of the classic type or people living in

or near the KaniatarowanĂ©nhne river valley. In the 1960s, the ‘70s, 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 nationalism’s 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 “Western Nationalism

and Eastern Nationalism: Is there a difference that matters?” (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 reason—though by no means the only reason—for

Québécois nationalism to have become widely viable in the first place

and for it to remain viable anywhere today.

None of the various historical episodes—the 1837-’38 rebellions, the

“Great Darkness”, the “Quiet Revolution”, the two referenda, etc.—are

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 “in QuĂ©bec” 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 parts—sometimes

said to include MontrĂ©al—the 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 possible—there are

disagreements and debates among anarchists about historiography and all

sorts of “national questions”, this case being no different—but it’s 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 “for QuĂ©bec”, 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, anarchists’ rhetoric with regard to the nationalists

(and even partisans of “oppressed nationalities”) 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

gatherings—Greek 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 on—is 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 anarchists’ 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 “defending the

French language” 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 value—not 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 together—but 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 “for QuĂ©bec” (which, through a particular kind of

historically reductive anti-colonial lens, can even be viewed as being

“for France”), 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 “QuĂ©bec”,

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 “French” or “français” 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 it—therefore “French” it is.

In 2020, most of the people who speak French and who presently live on

this continent aren’t 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 “heritage” or “tradition” (without

further qualification) had “value” (how is it valuable? to whom? why?),

I am just not sure I can even get where people are coming from on this

issue—and 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 hours’ 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

yes—if it’s worth it to do so—who 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 “right answer”

will obviously vary, it’s 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. It’s very big picture stuff,

when sometimes, it’s worth narrowing our focus—in this case, to the

still enormously complex area of language dynamics.

Bilingualism and trilingualism at the Montreal Anarchist Bookfair

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 fair’s entire

history, but when I became a member of the MABC in late 2016, there was,

at that time, a commitment—enshrined as a “policy”—that 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 you’re 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 person’s presence on the

collective—which 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 “se habla español” 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 MABC—but 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

“pseudotrilingualism”; 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-’17 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 MABC’s 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 collective’s capacity to communicate

effectively (that is, both speedily and clearly) in French had been

significantly degraded during the 2019-’20 pre-fair organizing season.

How this happened, precisely, is a long story—but 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 Finland’s national republic, in January 2021. The

announcement included these words: “The festival program will be held in

Russian or English. If needed, they will be translated into Finnish,

English, and Russian.” 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 Helsinki’s own population.

Instead, the events would take place in English and Russian—meaning, 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; it’s 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; it’s 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 wouldn’t 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 I’ve 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.

The goal

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. However—and this is the key thing—there would be an

equitable amount of Spanish in terms of the copy produced by the MABC

and the events populating the book fair weekend’s 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

Spanish—but 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 Spanish—perhaps 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 I’m a language nerd, but I think this vision is good in

and of itself.

And yet.

Why Spanish?

In discussions of the book fair over the last few years, I have often

made mention of my idea of a trilingual event (because it’s 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 instead—usually Arabic and sometimes Kanien’kĂ©ha,

but I’ve 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 one’s 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 “the average

anarchist” to learn, after English. Thought about from a different

perspective, if an anarchist doesn’t 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 “colonial

language”, Spanish is certainly that—as 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 we’d

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 doesn’t 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, I’m 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 don’t 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

scenes—the quality of English-as-a-second-language education, the degree

to which local economies aren’t just tourism or emigration to

higher-income countries, etc.—may 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 folks’

reckoning—possibly 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 anarchist’s 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. It’s 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 government’s 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 variety—likewise 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.—the 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 “prestige

dialect” 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 anarchism—which is neither completely realistic nor my idea of a

good time—an 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 couldn’t 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 region’s 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-’09; 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

person’s 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,

francophones—who comprise the majority of the Tiohtià:ke region’s

anarchists—can 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 resources—aimed at francophones, anglophones, and many

others—for 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.

What does Spanish do for us, in this place?

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 it’s 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 members—and 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 “fail”—whatever

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 MABC’s commitment to

bilingualism had already degraded past what I would have thought was the

barely acceptable minimum when I joined on in 2016. It’s not failure

that worries me, because failure has already arrived.

So, accessibility is a very large concept. An “accessibility lens”

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 I’m 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 wasn’t 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 MABC’s commitment to accessibility in practice.

With respect to the topic of this zine, I would argue that the MABC’s

commitment to bilingualism—which 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 events—has always been, at

its core, a commitment to making the book fair as accessible as

possible. This was also true of previous years’ gestures towards

trilingualism.

But no space can be accessible to absolutely everyone who may

theoretically want to attend or participate. Sometimes—in fact, pretty

frequently!—the 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 multiplicity—that 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 “accessible” 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 “absolute accessibility” is

achieved, but by how much we are able to chip away at meaningful

barriers to access—without 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 May—but 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

languages—but in this context, the MABC’s policy mirrors that of the

modern Canadian state, which isn’t about accessibility at all. The

Canadian state’s 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 parliament’s control.

I repeat: the MABC’s commitment to bilingualism has always been, at its

core, an accessibility commitment. It has never been intended as an

expression of the collective’s position on any horseshit “national

question” or “geopolitical issue” whose premises we should, as

anarchists, entirely reject out of hand. Despite this, bilingualism

still says something on that front—or, at the very least, it appears to

do so. And what it appears to say isn’t good!

The most obvious issue with what it’s saying is that, like the Canadian

state, it affirms two languages of European origin as “official” (my own

preference for the term “working language” notwithstanding). At the same

time, it accords no status whatsoever to—and not even any consideration

of—any 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 atout—excuse 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 institution’s internal

hierarchy, it’s always a leg up on one’s colleagues if one is able to

speak French (or convince the higher-ups that this is the case) even if

the job doesn’t 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 it’s in French (or if the collective was

told it would be in French and/or “in both languages”).

Before 2020, the MABC had a target quota of “at least” 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 isn’t that surprising in consideration of the

Montreal Anarchist Bookfair’s 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 world’s 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 can’t even really speak French at

all. For people who fit this description, it may be trivial to use

English—or in some cases, even slightly unnatural to use French!—when

discussing struggle, theory, history, or queer poly drama. And sometimes

a francophone anarchist will simply prefer to publicly present their

ideas in English because that’s what they want to do and it’s 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,

“good”. Perhaps this speaks to some unexamined bias on the collective’s

part, but I strongly expect that even a more markedly “French-oriented”

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 “bilingual”

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 event—for 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 places—are

unlikely to be delivered in French. Can we really expect many people

from the Wet’suwet’en 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, “international” French,

not the kind of French that a lot of anarchists and other people around

here actually speak.

Also, “celebrity” 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, isn’t really in a position

to subsidize individuals’ travel. For many U.S.-based anarchist authors

(many of them anglophones, naturally), it was—before the pandemic at

least—reasonably 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 don’t

live in QuĂ©bec might be expected to live instead, it’s costlier.

The target quota limited the number of “international struggle” events

and “celebrity author” events—which 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 goal—namely, to achieve 50%

parity between French- and English-language content—I always thought

that the bilingualism policy, as practiced, seemed to produce subpar

results. Some submissions suggested that the proposed event would be “in

both languages” 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 aren’t generally competent in English, while there are often

multiple anglophones present who aren’t generally competent in French.

Sometimes there are one or two monoglot francophones who need a

simultaneous interpretation for English-language discussions—something

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, that’s 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. It’s the monoglot anglophones who are present, and other

anarchists who speak English but not French, whose interpretation needs

will typically be greater.

My point isn’t that francophones shouldn’t make their point in French if

they want to (because they absolutely should speak French, and even feel

entitled to do so, if that’s 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 I’m saying is that, for many people in MontrĂ©al,

having the conversation in English is nearly as easy as having it in

French—and 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 present—which is very

often the case at the Montreal Anarchist Bookfair specifically—most 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 “equality”

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 years’ movements

for francophone civil rights and/or “self-determination”. 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 policy—which is precisely

what the MABC’s bilingualism quota was!—makes no sense at all, at least

when it’s not doing anything useful for us.

The bilingualism policy was a good place for the MABC to start with in

2000—it was a different time, and the project was just getting

started—but heading into 2021, it’s outmoded. The policy does nothing to

really enable accessibility for monoglot francophones; it’s

French-English bilingual volunteers who do that, and they would do that

whether the policy was there or not. If they’ve 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 “available if

necessary” (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 isn’t

doing much that’s concretely useful for either the collective or for the

people that come to the book fair—even 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 MABC’s 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 “post-colonial” 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 “national” 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 territory’s 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 country’s northern “Hindi belt”. 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 “neutral quantity”

within India’s 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 republic’s early days were already

competent in English, whereas they weren’t necessarily competent in each

other’s first languages. Thus, when used as a working language in Indian

institutional contexts, English was often (and remains today) a more

“neutral” choice in comparison to Hindi or, indeed, other local

languages. But not just a neutral choice, because English was also (and

remains) practical—often 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, “official”

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 brigade’s 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

“Anglo-Saxons” whose ancestors were some kind of Protestant) aren’t 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 “privilege”

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 “sovereign QuĂ©bec” (it won’t 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 it’s

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), there’s 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 Earth—and preferably even sooner among those involved in

anti-systemic social movements!—simply 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 doesn’t

understand the language of the oppressed, but the opposite isn’t 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-nationals’ 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 it’s pretty obvious that Spanish wouldn’t be a particularly

useful working language in the local context by itself—but in a role as

both complement and counterbalance to French and English, several

benefits would become evident, most of which I have already discussed.

Let’s 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

Tiohtià:ke region’s monoglot francophones or anglophones. The quality of

the book fair’s 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

about—rather 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 don’t 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 don’t, and

c) many visitors to the Montreal Anarchist Bookfair don’t 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 ‘70s 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 isn’t 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 that’s it.

Were there book fair events in Spanish, that would complement some

MontrĂ©al-based anarchists’ 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 region’s anarchists being able to use and

understand Spanish. I won’t 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 capital—something looking like a rose of fire or

a free territory from afar. And I’m 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 it’s something

that might contribute to total anarchist triumph, but there are good

reasons to be skeptical—and 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?

Implementation

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.

First, posters.

The MABC typically pays an artist an honorarium to design a poster and,

then, to provide a few different versions—for 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 don’t 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

poster—either 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.

Second, the collective itself.

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 wasn’t made

aware of it at any point. (Note: It’s 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 point—for example,

in corresponding about sensitive matters—it 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 isn’t 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

competencies—but 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 don’t think it should be absolutely necessary—certainly not at this

time—for every member of the collective to be generally, or even

basically, competent in Spanish, but I do think that it’s 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 don’t know what the right number is, but it’s 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.

It’s 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.

Finally, how to understand equity in the context of a general policy

on working languages.

Equity is not the same as equality, which is to say, an equal amount—or

as close to equal as possible—of French, English, and Spanish in all

aspects of the book fair (literature for sale, events, posters, etc.).

It is, instead, a matter of doing what’s “fair” 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

Kanien’kĂ©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

movement—and social movements in which anarchists participate, as well

as artistic and cultural movements—produce 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 in—and would probably require in the first place—a larger

representation of hispanophones (most of whom, both globally and

locally, aren’t 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, I’d 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 limited—I’d go so far as to say conservative—and

almost certainly tokenistic. It’s not really feasible for an

organization the size of the MABC to have more than three working

languages (and let’s 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, that’s

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 aren’t 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 let’s say, for sake of argument, such a major demographic shift did

take place.[36]

In 2015 and 2016, the so-called “refugee crisis” 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 great—so 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 migrants’ 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

“heritage language” as they do. Given the longer view of a few years,

then, the better thing for local anarchists to do—if they are starting

from a place of zero capacity in a given group of refugees’ language,

but nevertheless want to make connections with and/or provide support to

people among that group—is 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 competency—either as

individuals or as organizing teams—in 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 refugees’ first languages a poor use of time

and energy at best. It’s 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

Spanish—that is, having one third of events take place in French, one

third in English, and one third in Spanish—but, 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 collective’s

part. For my own part, I’d prefer that that quarter wouldn’t 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 Bookfair’s policy

was orientated towards internationalism, rather than towards either some

kind of wholly English-language “global” anarchism or, even worse, a

mediocre and inadequate “Canadian bilingual” 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 fair’s 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.

On commitment

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 “enthusiast” 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

didn’t 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 l’esistente, i suoi defensori e i suoi

falsi critici, aka “At Daggers Drawn”, 1998): “The secret is to really

begin.” Yet, at the same time, I’m really not stoked about any idea of

“the secret”, 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 well—and 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 French—to at least return to the capacity that the MABC

had in the 2017 pre-fair organizing season—before 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 help—anarchists 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

trilingualism—will 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 “20 Years

of the Montreal Anarchist Bookfair” 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 didn’t

amount to anything. Without a public commitment—in writing, on the

website, and easy to find from the front page—very 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 serves—i.e. the people who actually come, the people who might

come, and the people we want to come—is 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 well—and 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 trilingualism

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 “the Americas” (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 fair’s 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

it’s 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, Kanien’kĂ©ha, the traditional language of the Kanien’kehĂ :ka.[40]

As opposed to every other language I have mentioned throughout this

text, incorporating Kanien’kĂ©ha wouldn’t really be about enabling

accessibility, at least not in any straightforward sense. Effectively

all Kanien’kehà:ka today, in the Tiohtià: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

Kanien’kĂ©ha for several reasons: local history (which is to say, folks’

understandings of it), the fact that a lot of us know more about

Kanien’kehà: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

Tiohtià:ke region’s urban core, and so on.

I don’t have much to say about what incorporating Kanien’kĂ©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 region—and in other places across the continent, too—ought 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.

Conclusion: Against cliché!

In my whole life as a MontrĂ©al anarchist, the “two solitudes”

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 “third wave” feminism

and/or insurrectionary anarchism, whereas the other is characterized by

French-style class politics and/or “second wave” feminism and/or

Tiqqunism. There are many comments on “cultural” 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 power—too much, in fact. It’s

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 “solitudes” when it is

applied to the Tiohtià:ke region’s 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 preoccupation—rarely the case for

anarchists (though maybe it shouldn't be), and were it the case in the

Tiohtià:ke region, it’s likely the language of interest would neither be

French nor English—it 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 men’s 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 anarchists’ sociality than language

competencies are (which isn’t to say that language isn’t a factor at

all).

But this isn’t accounted for at all in the logic of binary clichĂ©s.

Third, fourth, fifth, and subsequent possibilities complicate things,

yet the “value” 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

“third solitude” in the Tiohtià:ke region—not 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-’16), but because the very

notion of a “solitude” 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 won’t 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, “that’s

it that’s all”); 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 don’t use (like

“dep”, “terrasse”, “ruelle”, and “manif”).

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 together—as if there aren’t a hundred other factors to

consider!—or why it is sometimes difficult to meet new people—as if the

seductive comfort of domesticity and/or the fractured nature of digital

information silos aren’t 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 don’t 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 “Spanish” (that is, español)

or “Castilian” (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 “Spain” 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 Spain—a land that,

before the 1700s, was almost always referred to (in the language in

question, at least) using a pluralized form, i.e. “the Spains” (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 “Castilian” in lieu of “Spanish”

throughout this text.

[3] By “Tiohtià:ke region”, I mean something roughly equivalent to what

is designated by the English term “Greater MontrĂ©al”, 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

“North America”, I do not mean the continental landmass, which I call

“Turtle Island” 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 (“Greenland”), this zone

largely corresponds to the territories designated as “the United States”

and “Canada” on most globes and world maps. I sometimes also use the

term “North American” 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 is—according to the Canadian government, among

others—the 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

“Nationalist Anti-Nationalism: The Anti-German Critique and Its

All-Too-German Adherents” by CrimethInc. (Rolling Thunder #3, 2006) or

“The Antideutsch and Me” 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

Palestinians’ 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 “first language” (for

instance, in the case of many people who had one francophone parent and

one anglophone parent, whom I often call “franglophones”), 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 don’t use at all. It’s 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 households—places like South Africa, the former

Yugoslavia, and the Philippines—using -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

lusophone’s first language is Portuguese; a sinophone’s, (some variety

of) Chinese.

[8] KaniatarowanĂ©nhne is denoted on most maps as “Saint Lawrence River”

in English and “fleuve Saint-Laurent” in French.

[9] The diacritic in the name “MontrĂ©al” was also dropped by

contemporary anglophones. My personal preference is to include the

diacritics in both “MontrĂ©al” and “QuĂ©bec”, even in English copy, and

that is the style employed throughout this text (except in proper nouns

like “Montreal Anarchist Bookfair”, as noted before).

[10] QuĂ©bec is usually called “QuĂ©bec City” in English in order to

distinguish it from the larger territory (as designated on most maps and

globes) and present-day Canadian “provincial” 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 “je dĂ©teste

le QuĂ©bec”) indicating the larger territory/polity—or, by extension, the

settler “nation”—and the absence of one (as in “je dĂ©teste QuĂ©bec”)

indicating the city.

[11] Throughout this text, when I speak of “Canadians”—that is, of

people who it is fair to collectively describe as such—I only mean

people belonging to an “ethnic group” 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 Ken’tarókwen (e.g. the site of

present-day Kingston, Ontario) or otherwise within the Kaniatarowanénhne

watershed largely referred to themselves as “Canadians” (that is, as

canadiens and canadiennes) to the exclusion of anglophones and others,

whereas local anglophones’ 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 “ethnic” 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 “Quebec” in Westminster’s 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 states’ effective domination, but that didn’t 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 “Upper Canada” and “Lower Canada”; these were united

into a single “Province of Canada” in 1841, as an administrative

follow-up to the 1837-’38 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 “Canada” (that is, Upper Canada, Lower

Canada, and additional, erstwhile non-Canadian territories) and “QuĂ©bec”

(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

“Ontario” 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 “Franco-Ontarian” 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

Brayons—who live in the northwestern “Madawaska” region of New Brunswick

and across the U.S.-Canada border in northern Maine—don’t 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 France—especially white citizens with high

salaries and/or rich parents—to move to Canadian state territory if they

ever decide that that’s something they want to do. Yet, notwithstanding

rumours that “the French” are singularly responsible for gentrifying

MontrĂ©al’s 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] SAB’s Spanish website doesn’t 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 “Hispania”, 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 “español”.

[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 “true” hispanophones

that I am qualified to talk about, and also because I have opted to

avoid unusual orthographic marks like asterisks (*) or daggers (†, ‡) 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 “Latin America”, I mostly mean the part of “America” that can be

contrasted to “North America” as described in footnote #4—which is to

say, the territories designated on most globes and world maps as

“Mexico”, “Cuba”, “Puerto Rico”, 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 “Latin” is imperfect, if not

problematic, for a number of reasons—yet the name “South America” is

already specifically reserved in English for the southern continental

landmass joined to a larger northern one (widely called “Turtle Island”

in North American anarchist scenes these days) at the Panamanian

isthmus. There is also no other obvious candidate for a “foil” term with

respect to what is designated by the term “North America”.

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

“Latin” so much as I am committed to saying that they are geographically

“American” (e.g. they exist on or very near the continuous “American”

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 government’s

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, too—for instance,

the exigencies of the capitalist economy.

[25] To be quite honest, though, I only spent about four days total in

France—and I’m not certain how many of the people I associated with in

that time would have called themselves “anarchists”. 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 aren’t 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 “Arab world”) 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 all—so, 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 can’t

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 Arabic—as is

quite likely the case for local anarchists and/or people involved in

almost any kind of activism—then 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-’37, by itself, would probably

be enough to qualify Spanish as “important” in this respect—but of

course there is much more.

[30] It is worth noting, too, that given the situation with covid in

2020, the collective opted for “connecting ideas across distance” 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 Tiohtià:ke region and who also, for whatever reason, can’t

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 “online

component” 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 year’s 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 weren’t 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 quota—but 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 others’ 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 “connecting ideas across distance”, 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 MABC’s 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 “Hindi-Urdu” 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)

“liberal Zionist” 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 Brigade’s response to that controversy, actually

unfolded on Facebook.

[34] Some of these experiences aren’t 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

“Xinjiang” (which means “new territory” or “new frontier” in Mandarin).

[35] There are, of course, a number of local groups that already achieve

this goal—typically not explicitly anarchist groups, but often with a

large degree of participation by anarchists. I won’t 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 “pseudotrilingual”, i.e.

gesturing towards trilingualism but not actually doing the work of

making it happen, as with the MABC from at least the 2017-‘18 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 2017—i.e. the period

immediately after the first book fair I had had a hand in organizing—was

marked by the Tiohtià:ke region’s own “refugee crisis” caused by the

election of Trump to the U.S. presidency and the new administration’s

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 “temporary protected status” 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 Bookfair—and by extension, the Tiohtià:ke

region’s anarchist scenes as a whole—to 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 don’t 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

“heritage language” 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. Tokyo—comprising, alongside its vast environs, the most

populous metropolitan area on Earth—is 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?

It’s 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 Tokyo—many of whom, as I understand it, speak neither English

nor any language other than Japanese—would 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

spaces—typically in English, at least when they were in this part of the

world—if they would ever be interested in presenting in Spanish at the

MontrĂ©al book fair. In all cases (which wasn’t actually too many cases,

to be clear), they were skeptical as to whether there would be “enough”

people present who were capable of listening to and understanding

Spanish. We did not rigorously define what the word “enough” 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 “self-help” 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 “energy” works. I could say many other

things about (my understanding of) Byrne’s 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 “Mohawk”, 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 haven’t read it, but I guess

it’s a pretty straightforward political allegory. The phrase is widely

used today in English-language Canadian political discourse—and less

commonly in French-language political discourse—to 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 “chosen non-mixedness”

indicates a space without cis men.