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Blackout: The Concordia Computer Riots (2024)

At a time when university students once again endure heavy police intervention while leading charges for institutional and social reform, it’s worth revisiting earlier moments of student organizing. The extended playbook for the production Blackout: The Concordia Computer Riots (Playwrights Canada Press, January 2024) places these struggles into a wider Canadian history, one that powerfully draws on the experiences of the diverse black student population of twentieth-century Canadian academia. The play was written by Tamara Brown, Kym Dominique-Ferguson, Lydie Dubuisson, and Mathieu Murphy-Perron for the Black Theatre Workshop of Montreal. But if you know anything about the Canadian theatre landscape, you are painfully aware of its suffocating whiteness. This is typically reflected in the slim pickings of productions that are mounted in February (the month into which most “black” theatre is crammed in honour of Black History Month), and the constant re-engagement with productions like Lorena Gale’s Angélique (1998), which although profoundly important, should not be made to bear the weight of black Canadian theatre.

But the problem of our absence from the Canadian theatre landscape runs deeper than this. It was not long ago (2014 to be exact) that the francophone Le Théâtre du Rideau Vert of Montreal staged a year-end comedy review which included a white male actor in blackface impersonating the now-retired superstar, Jamaican-Canadian hockey player, philanthropist, TV personality, and media mogul P.K. Subban. Dismissing objections about the deeply racist practice, the white artistic director Denise Filiatrault argued that she did not see the point in hiring a black actor for a 12 second appearance, revealing that she clearly could not fathom the possibility that black actors could form a part of the theatre’s permanent cast. Given these issues, plays by black playwrights about black characters and histories are a welcome addition to the Canadian theatre landscape.

Poignantly, Blackout was first stagged at Concordia University from January 30 to February 10, 2019, in the very same building where 50 years prior, a group of Caribbean students and allies occupied rooms to protest the institutional racism at Sir George William University (one half of the precursors to Concordia University) and the university’s subsequent mishandling of charges of racism and academic misconduct by the white Biology professor, Perry Anderson.

The publication includes the script, playwright’s notes, a foreword by play choreographer Rodney Diverlus, casting/staging notes, and afterwards by Nantali Indongo and Rodney John who was one of the original six students that launched the initial complaint against Anderson. While the staging of the play may vary, the script incorporates vocal chorus and cues for dance and rhythmic instruments to ground the play as a black diasporic cultural and spiritual space. With elements of group-created sound and music and powerful chants the production would be impactful and moving to experience live. From humour to serious scenes, the plot is engaging and connects seamlessly to many contemporary issues which remain more than fifty years after the protests.

The play artfully imagines the conversations and comradery among Caribbean students in Montréal. Anderson has monologues exposing his inner thoughts and prejudices. Other portrayals are more factual to the historical events that unfolded. Although some of the students submit identical work, the white students receive higher grades and black students get anonymized in class as “mister.” Eventually, students meet with administrators who do not take their concerns seriously, and Anderson’s promotion goes ahead despite serious allegations. When Principal D.B. Clarke takes over the school in December 1968, he gives the students a deadline to formalize their complaint. Black faculty, Professors Bayne and Davis, are named to the committee tasked with solving the affair but resign within seven weeks citing its ineffectiveness. Vice-Principal Academic John O’Brien writes Anderson about a “risk of violence” if he resumes teaching. When black students obtain a copy of the letter and the warning, they are offended at the racist assumptions. The play imagines the student confrontation with O’Brien in his office, at which they demand that he retract the statement. Instead, he formally charges students with “unlawful confinement”. Eventually on January 29th, 1969, over two hundred students left a hearing committee and began their occupation of the ninth-floor computer centre. The university and students reached an agreement by February 10th, 1969, but the administrators reneged, and remaining students barricade the doors. The next day Montréal riot police stormed the building, and a fire was started. Police blamed students for the fire, but students contended that the police used the blaze to force them out of the expensive computer lab which was locked and barricaded. The play grapples with the history, that in the aftermath of the standoff, ninety-seven students were arrested, some jailed, some deported, and one black woman, Coralee Hutchinson, died because of her injuries.

Apart from the compounding losses – social, emotional, and physical – the play tackles the embedded racism at Sir George William, in Canadian academia, and in Canadian society at large. In line with centuries-old slavery stereotypes of black people as inherently criminal, white faculty routinely described the complainants as “threatening”. Coverage of the fire and arrests were interspersed with bystanders chanting “let the niggers burn”. At times the playwrights dig back into Canada’s not-too-distant past evoking Civil Rights pioneer Viola Desmond, or Transatlantic Slavery through figures like the enslaved people Olivier Le Jeune or Marie-Joseph Angélique in an echoed chorus. Accused of arson in Montréal in 1734, the enslaved woman Marie-Joseph Angélique was tortured, charged, and executed. Le Jeune, a boy from Madagascar, was documented in the first known slave sale in Canada circa 1633. These names are echoed in haunting refrains within the script alongside the phrase “say her name” which puts the plot in dialogue with the many black lives threatened or stolen by domestic terror, and state and police violence in Canada, in the UK, the USA, Brazil, and across the diaspora.

The play, while both humorous and serious at times, evokes West African and black diasporic spirituality as a unifying and honorific source of power. Moments of spoken chorus throughout the play have stage notes for drums, dance, joint breath, and unison chants. Through rhythm and emphasis “the Orishas are present” write the playwrights, bringing the production power and holism. At times of tension, distress, or evoking past figures of slavery, Civil Rights, and police and state violence, these chants are emphasized with the Yoruba phrase “Ase”. The phrase “Ase” evokes sacredness but also commands authority to name the student protestors or calls for black life and liberation.

The playwrights artfully address how anonymity and homogeneity have been weaponized against black individuals and populations to diminish our humanity. In the play, Anderson denies the individuality of his black students by calling upon them as “mister,” but takes the time to learn the names of his other students. In response, one character attests, “I have a first name… and it’s a precious gift handed down to me in honour of a beloved ancestor. My last name was branded onto us by a hated slave owner, generations ago.” The casting lists the students anonymously by number. It is not until the second act of the play when specific details about their identities and names begin to emerge and their roles in the narrative are revealed. Casting notes make it clear that certain students should represent the black or Anglo-Caribbean demographics reflected at Sir George Williams in the 1960’s like Jamaica, Trinidad and Tobago, Barbados, Guyana, American, and Canadian students. At the time, Franco-Caribbean and Franco-African students attended francophone universities speaking to their omission from the play and casting. The students sometimes speak in pidgin or creole dialects attesting to their Caribbean roots: “And they can’t understand us when we chat patois anyway. A wha gwan?” Other times they “code switch” between speaking with peers jovially and communicating tentatively with university administrators. They are wary of navigating the white authority of academia and the prejudice that they are “difficult” or “confrontational”.

The theme of racist associations between blackness and criminality are present throughout. Students were perceived as “threatening,” their confrontation with university authority coded as a “confinement,” their organizing described as provoking “risks of violence.” Black activists in Quebec at that time contended with ethnic-nationalist Quebecois organizing and political thought. A white-nationalist movement that referred to themselves as the “negres blanc d’amerique” appropriated the subjugation of British rule to erase discrimination, histories of slavery, and the ongoing disenfranchisement of black and indigenous populations in Quebec. The play lends political contextualization to this moment which followed the Montréal Congress of Black Writers in 1968. Ideas of black liberation and a more militant fight against discrimination were circulating. Therefore, as the play makes clear, Sir George William’s black student organizing – which intersected with a broader Black Diasporic and Pan-African ethos – provoked a white institutional “Fear of a Black Nation” exemplified in the conspiracy between academia and policing to contain and silence the students.

The play thoughtfully explores the (in)ability of institutions to change, deep-seated discrimination, how proverbial bad apples get protected, how reform is achieved, and at what extreme cost. While all institutions can be characterized as slow, the pace of progress on racial equality and justice in academia is glacial. As our fearless leader has articulated, the reasons stem from the embeddedness of university histories in Transatlantic Slavery. Blackout reminds us how far things have come, but also the force required to change colonial institutions that act as gatekeepers and moral arbiters of so-called higher education. Blackout provides many thoughtful connections and reflections for our present moment. Indeed, there are many lessons still to be learned from the mid-twentieth-century that have often gone under appreciated and unrecognized, much like black Canadian history generally. As exemplified in Mina Shum’s National Film Board of Canada (NFB) documentary Ninth Floor (2015) and this play, the Sir George William Affair holds the power to teach us about the intersecting webs of institutionalized racism in academia and policing in Canada, the resulting strategic disenfranchisement and repression of black students and faculty, and black organizing and resistance. This playbook, and surely future stage productions, attest to the transformative art that can be created from places or histories of injustice, oppression, and unease. The parallels to current and continued calls for change are profound and thought provoking.