Elya's residency project is a decolonial approach to film studies by curating Caribbean-Canadian films with a focus on how Blackness is represented within a Canadian context.
Elya Myers is a researcher, writer and creator having recently graduated with a Specialized BFA in Film Studies at Concordia in Montreal. Her current research and interests orbit around anime, animation, Blackness, and race and representation across media. Her recent work at Short Ends Collective, Noir Caesar, and various collaborations with artists reflect these recurring subject(ivitie)s.
Since I was young, I’ve had a recurring vision. Apparitions of hands hover over my body as they conjure translucent sheets of blackness, laying hands one over the other until everything turns from white to black. I imagine the immensity and multidimensionality these layers absorb and release, inviting me to a place where each layer of lightness and darkness holds space between these states of being—suspended between consciousness and unconsciousness. Black to white. I use this as a way to make sense of the intersecting planes of existence we are affected by and suspended between the past, present, and future being part of the Black diaspora.
Being half Jamaican, half settler-Canadian, I find myself betwixt and between spaces. I am the representation of a "unity between the familiar and the alien", another token in the multiculturalist narrative. Though I was born here, I do not belong.
Dionne Brand, a Caribbean-Canadian poet, writer, and filmmaker relates, “I am without destination; that is one of the inherited traits of the diaspora. I am simply where I am; the next thought leads me to the next place.” Suspended between these states of being, I have sought out these islands of belonging—places that hold space to be.
The films I chose to add to the permanent collection at the Visual Collections Repository (VCR): What My Mother Told Me (UK, 1995); I Is a Long Memoried Woman (UK, 1990); Resilience: Stories of Single Black Women (Canada, 2010); Akilla’s Escape (Canada/US, 2020); But You’re Not Black (Canada, 2020) present the multiplicity and fluidity of Blackness across overlapping planes of space and time. And more specifically, these films trace the mixedness of Caribbean identities and the role they play within national sentiments where the collective or community exists.
In exploring the more contemporary relationship between Caribbean descendants and immigrants, the collection intimates the relationship between intergenerational trauma, mixed identities, and personal histories. From these interweaving narratives across diasporas, I felt that I had already recollected many of these traumas where the collective voices led back to my own familial roots. These same stories on screen echoed many of my own experiences, as well as those vulnerable and fragile family histories whose struggles bear upon both collective memory and identity that span over generations.
Scholar Lauren McCleod Kramer uses an architectural approach to envision a Black cinema that, “[...] visualizes the possibility of a universal [film] archive precisely because Black cinema is suspended between the absolute visibility of the image and the invisibility of Blackness.” In this way, the residency has opened up avenues of practical application of research in film studies that extend beyond (institutional) engagement and, by physically adding media to the film archive, expands visual representations of Blackness. The project has been an active process of understanding the time and care that goes into community building, accessibility, and reparative practices within curation and archival work.
Brand, Dionne. A Map to the Door of No Return: Notes on Belonging, Kobo, Published by Doubleday Canada, 2012.
Cramer, Lauren McLeod. “Building the Black (Universal) Archive and the Architecture of Black Cinema.” Black Camera, vol. 8, no. 1, 2016, pp. 131-45.
In my curatorial note, Suspended States, I talk about the process of the residency project as a practical application of research within film studies that includes the film community in decolonizing the archives meaningfully. The focus of my research was on Caribbean-Canadian films but, more broadly, how Blackness is represented within a Canadian context.
I used the title Suspended States to convey what Lauren McCleod Cramer envisions, “a true Black cinematic archive would mean imagining an archive of everything, and everything in between.” Being half-Jamaican half-settler Canadian, I had often found myself exasperated with the incessant lack of purposeful and unhindered diverse representation in film. I had recognized this altered space early in life as it was present in my everyday—constrained within these oppressive monolithic structures that whiteness demands of the representation of the other/subaltern. Over the course of the residency, however, I dove into the works of other Black writers, thinkers, and creators connected me to other ways of knowing and being outside of these tyrannical institutional and social structures.
From this research, the collection I’ve put together focuses on the relationship that the Caribbean diaspora has with anti-blackness and explores intergenerational trauma, mixed identities, and personal histories.
Still from What My Mother Told Me a film by Frances-Anne Solomon (1995)
Synopsis: A young woman living in England meets her estranged mother after the death of her father in Trinidad. Both revisit, relive, and reckon with the trauma inflicted upon them within their family histories.
Still from I Is a Long Memoried Woman a film by Frances-Anne Solomon (1990)
Synopsis: The histories of slavery are transmitted through the surviving bodies of Black women that traces the poetic movement across diasporas, languages, and bodies through time.
Still from Resilience: Stories of Single Black Women a film by Lana Lovell (2010)
From one side of the country to the other, single Black mothers battle stereotypes and tropes of Blackness in Canada.
Still from Akilla’s Escape a film by Charles Officer (2020)
One night, when an armed robbery goes wrong, a man has the chance to disrupt the cycle of generational violence when he is given the opportunity to change the course of a fifteen-year-old boy caught in similar circumstances.
Still from But you’re not Black a film by Danielle Ayow (2020)
A young Chinese-Caribbean-Canadian woman explores why her cultural lineage and racial identities are constantly brought into question throughout her life and confronts this scrutiny head-on in this short documentary.
In collaboration with the Black Perspectives Office (BPO) and the Visual Collections Repository (VCR), I was able to present some of this research through a screening series with the goal of engaging in thoughtful discussion and participation with the local Black community. I absorbed a lot from the people who attended the event and had recognized the micro to the far-reaching experiences of Blackness on screen. Opening up the event for public consumption for the Black community, without the weight of academia steering the conversation, allowed for fluid back, forth, and between the film and the audience members.
Having this varied engagement with the Black community in Montreal, opened up conversations around accessibility, history, and representations of Blackness in film. Through this experience, I was able to hear what the Black community thinks of our own (art)works, histories, and cultures—not just empty diversity caricatures and quotas only to be subordinated to the archives removed from mainstream consumption or education (specifically present within a Canadian context). In reference to Barry Avrich’s ignorant views at the Canadian Screen Awards this past year, it does matter who tells our stories and serves to show how deeply entrenched white settler-colonialist beliefs are within our everyday experiences to representations on the screen.
Since moving to Montreal from Calgary, I have made it a point to understand the histories surrounding Black communities from where I’ve been, in an effort to expand my own knowledge within this field.
And from the time I started this work, I have been seeking out more opportunities within Montreal’s Black community, as a way to connect to the local histories and communities I have come to know during my time here. It has become a priority for me to keep building upon the previous works of Black scholars and creators with the communities I’ve come to know and be part of—bridging together these islands of belonging.
© Concordia University
