Black Diasporas Tkaronto-Toronto: “Our Voices Telling Our Stories”
By Chris Gismondi
The exhibition Black Diasporas Tkaronto-Toronto at the Museum of Toronto takes the city’s slogan, “Diversity is Our Strength,” seriously, and aims to celebrate and analyze that claim. The Museum of Toronto, formerly Myseum, began as an idea in 2014 to cater to the stories of Toronto. Since 2015 it has existed in digital and physical forms throughout the city and currently has a brick-and-mortar space at 401 Richmond for its programming. Its mission is to fill a gap in telling local histories about the city of Toronto and all the communities that call it home. Its programming ranges from educational, public history like the Derailedexhibition (2022) on Black train porters, to pop culture milestones of the city like Mr. Dressup to Degrassi (2023). The museum is amassing a digital collection of exhibitions and materials that tell various stories about the city of Toronto.
The Black Diasporas project came from African-Australian academic Kholisile Dhliwayo who launched a similar research initiative and exhibition in Australia aimed at changing the narrative around contemporary black life. Bringing the same framework to Toronto, one goal of the project was to document black experience, but also build bridges between the various unique black communities around the city. The project is a culmination of a yearlong research undertaking with afroOURban, Inc. that synthesized over 500 stories, 100 black Canadians’ efforts, 50 story contributors, 25 interviewers, and 10 filmmakers. The research process was an organic method of collection whereby collaborators sourced other contributors from community connections.
The result is an archive and exhibition that creates a thoughtful, personal, and nuanced understanding of black life and diversity in the city of Toronto, the fourth largest in North America. The presentation of the new archive and exhibition is organized around the five tenants of courage, building, movement, faith, and relationships. The exhibition presents an incredible multimedia body of work that documents black experiences, family, community, and life throughout the city from about the 70s to the 2000s up to the present day. It’s an expansive resource and presentation of personal storytelling, place making, community remembrance, and collaboration.
The exhibition seeks to speak to, for, or about, the over 265,000 people in Toronto who identified as black in the 2021 census. By the way, there are now some 1.5 million black Canadians! Visitors are greeted by a video presentation, a map of the world, and a brief timeline. The map asks visitors who identify as black to add pins indicating places around the globe or Canada where they were born, have ties to, or consider home. The timeline presented stretches from 1783 to 2024, beginning with the American Revolution and the influx of Loyalist enslavers into the Great Lakes region, concluding with Dr. Jill Andrew as the first queer black person elected to the provincial legislature in 2018. The small history focuses on early black migrants and trail blazers, 1960s immigration reforms, and marks conflict in Haiti, Nigeria, Ethiopia, and Eritrea as central factors of black migration to the city. It is important to note that black people, both enslaved and free(d), lived in the region that became Toronto and Canada before 1783, but the exhibition begins in the eighteenth century and mainly focuses on contemporary themes that culminate in the present day. While this keeps the exhibition’s focus tightly to the present, it centres the collaborators experiences and likely aims to move past some of the more trauma-centric narratives of black history. Yet, the historical timeline could have been more deeply annotated and researched to mark an even longer and more complex black history and presence in Toronto and Canada throughout the seventeenth, eighteenth, and nineteenth centuries.
The exhibition presents its findings on courage, movement, building, and faith as multimedia screens with which viewers can interact. Two monitors (with headphones) play sequenced passages from storytellers and invite viewers to linger and listen. In the building section, storytellers reflect on starting new homes, careers, and families, honouring ancestors and creating new traditions. Many of the audio video displays are simple with a text transcript playing on screen while viewers listen to the recording. The faith section is similarly focused on the storytellers’ words sparsely and intentionally. Beyond literal religion and spirituality, themes of family, friendship, tradition, community, or the spectrum of loyalty and negotiation are present as storytellers reflect on the inner workings of their immediate black communities. In the movement area, reflections on going towards or away, states of in-between-ness, old homes and new are accompanied by a satellite map on screen jumping around the city, the country, and the globe based on the storyteller’s own personal history and journey. While discussing internal shifts of identity, the displays also visually capture the geographic spaces through which people moved and the migrations within diasporic communities.
The relationships section is nestled in a curtained alcove and displays the ten films that filmmakers made in response to stories collected from the research process. Relationships are considered as lineage, blood, and chosen family, local or distant, and the networks that can ground or sometime disrupt life. Filmmakers were prompted to engage with the oral history archive about stories that resonated with them and express them in a visual language. The ten filmmakers produced twelve videos in a verbal-video exchange as they chose to react to, harmonize with, and enrich the passages of other storytellers. In Ayo Tsalithaba’s 3rd Class Citizen, they take up an oral history of the precarity and hustle of immigrant life. The dynamic video accompanies the storyteller’s anecdote “people think immigrants mooch off the system, we give everything we have to the system of Permanent Residence. We pay international fees and are told to get the f*** out.” It’s a real and raw reflection on red tape, status, and exploitation. In Reggae Soul, filmmaker Chelsea Nyomi brings to life a familiar sentiment of connection through separation and longing. Her storyteller recalls being engaged in the local Caribbean community but also visiting and feeling so at home in Jamaica. The flashy visuals of colourful, everyday island life are the backdrop for intimate reflections like “I was born in Canada, but being Jamaican was born into me.” Filmmaker Aisha Fairclough’s (Re)membering Us documents discussions with black archivists as they think about story collecting and preservation. The video interviews Choltu behind the digital, community sourced @torontoblackarchives project and archivist Melissa J. Nelson of the Archives of Ontario who inherited personal family photographic collections of black family, joy, and childhood. Nelson reflects on preserving and sharing these artifacts, “we are so much more than the oppression we face.”
The end of the exhibition provides more resources to visitors. It highlights various community organizations active in the city since 1920 like the Home Service Association which provided black veterans and other communities with social assistance until 1960. The Black Action Defence Committee was founded in response to police violence and was directly responsible for the formation of the city’s Special Investigations Unit. Other groups highlighted include the Black Artists Network in Dialogue, the Black Legal Action Centre founded in 2017, and the Wildseed Centre for Art and Activism launched by BLM TO in 2021 as a creative community hub. A different didactic panel notes other community fixtures and businesses for viewers to support: Joyce’s West Indies, A Different Booklist, Reggae-Lane, the “Blackhurst” neighbourhood, and Immi-Can. Events and festivals given special mention include Afrofest since 1988, The Toronto Caribbean Festival/Caribana since 1967, and Blockorma as part of Pride programing since 1988. The end of the exhibition has laptops and interactive geolocating maps if viewers want to stay and explore their specific neighbourhoods.
But a celebration of Toronto’s Black Diaspora would not be complete without highlighting the food and cuisine from Africa and the Caribbean that pulls community together, perhaps inviting viewers to savour them for themselves. Some specialities included: Jamaican patties and jerk, Trini doubles, Ethiopian injera, Caribbean roti, Moroccan tagine, Ethiopian doro wat, various countries jollof rice, Eritrean coffee, and Nigerian suya.
With a title like Black Diasporas Tkaronto-Toronto, viewers may anticipate a more archivally-researched and materially-grounded historical exhibition of black presence. Its subtitle as “Exploring the rich history of Black communities in Toronto and Canada” felt misleading when the historical scope instead offered a few generations past. Promotional materials do clarify that the exhibition presents films, archives, and recordings of black Canadians in contemporary Toronto, but still history buffs may feel short changed when the expectation of a history exhibition is met with exclusively contemporary oral history interviews.
It would have been an easy addition to add print culture like newspaper advertisements from nineteenth and twentieth century black entrepreneurs, barbers, and others to stake a longer claim to black presence,excellence, belonging, and comradery in the city. But, staying true to the research creation and contemporary focus of the project pigeonholes the resulting exhibition into something very contemporary with shallow historical roots, represented by a scant timeline. Historical archival photographs from holdings like the McCurdy Collection at Archives of Ontario (Toronto) and The Rick Bell Family Archives at Brock University (St. Catharines) would have been such a rich addition to these stories of contemporary black life, community, and family to ground these conversations into a longer presence and more activated history of black Toronto.
Overall, the exhibition is a thoughtful snapshot of various personal and community experiences. It succeeds in an effortless way to demonstrate parallels in different generational and immigrant experiences through family, migration, and connection. This is accompanied by intimate and personal reflections on identity and belonging. I think its biggest success as a space is creating a cozy and inviting environment through dim lighting and comfortable furnishings whereby visitors want to come in from the wind-swept streets and relax and absorb these stories. The comfort of the space worked to encourage visitors to fling off their coats, put on some headphones, and listen to the community archive. The exhibition is accompanied by rich programming on community archiving, panel discussions, and curatorial tours. It’s a fascinating and unique multimedia presentation of community preservation and representation, that could serve as a great model for other community-centred explorations of various cities and sites.
Chris Gismondi Bio
Chris Gismondi is a PhD candidate in the History Department at the University of New Brunswick and a Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council of Canada awarded art history scholar. He is also a curator and a current Graduate Research Fellow of Slavery North. His research focuses on the visual and material culture of Canadian Slavery. He is queer-white settler from Dish with One Spoon, Head of the Lake Treaty no. 14 (1806) territory.