Angelique: History and Literary Discourse: On the Occasion of the Montreal Launching of Afua Cooper's "The Hanging of Angelique".

Angelique: History and Literary Discourse.: On the occasion of the Montreal launching of Afua Cooper's, The Hanging of Angelique. HarperCollins. 2006.

My first serious consideration of Marie-Joseph Angelique was on my reading Dr. Leo Bertley's pictorial history of Blacks in Canada: Canada and Its People of African Descent (1971). Bertley's book presents a well known portrait of her, believed to be painted by one of her lovers. Angelique was owned by a rich merchant of Montreal Francois Poulin de Francheville, who is portrayed as a man who took her maybe not always against her will but when he wanted her. The picture is the portrait of a lusting eye which seems to possess you as you gaze upon it. It makes you wonder what would I do if she stood before me, and I had the opportunities afforded White males. What would I do if she looked at me the way she does in the portrait with a single breast exposed like an organic grape filled with the wine of seduction? There is no Mona Lisa innocence there. The painter imbues her with a confidence and sauciness that borders on defiance, perhaps revealing her magnetism to the artist himself, masking his demeaning attitude towards Black female slaves. Perhaps revealing the artist's inner eye for beauty found in places forbidden recognition by his social class.

This portrait stands in sharp contrast to the dreadful fate that befalls the person who posed for it, in sharp contrast to the desperate personality that informed her actions, her carousing, the passion and anger that defines modern portrayals of Angelique. Marie-Joseph Angelique was only twenty nine when she was accused of burning down half the City of Montreal on the evening of April 10 or 11 1734. She was tried in a Montreal, tortured and convicted of setting the fire. She was sentenced to have her hands cut off and burnt alive. This was later changed by the higher court of Quebec City. Her hands would not be cut off and she would not be burned alive: she would be hung, her body burned alive at the stake, and her ashes scattered to the winds.

In today's Montreal, a City where the plight of Blacks is benevolently neglected and unemployment runs at two to three times the Provincial average, where promises of social adjustment have become "an-all-fools- day" jest, the presence of Yolande James, a young Black female MNA, no older than Angelique at her hanging, makes little difference to the repeating of this jest. After 272 years a plaque has been installed in Angelique's honour at Maison Parent-Roback, a woman's centre on St Therese Street in old Montreal. Will this change the fact that the "Racism of today is an extension of the lingering racism of yesterday?". And will the presence of the Governor General of Canada, Michaelle Jean, and the Mayor of Montreal, Gerald Tremblay, at the commemoration bring to National light this dramatic and muffled aspect of Black history: "La Torture et la verite, Angelique et l'Incendie de Montreal"? Is this enough to quench the fire in the guts of the Black communities of Montreal? The historians, the writers and the artists have been vigilant, and determined not to allow Angelique's voice to die. Marcel Trudel in his "L'Esclavage au Canada Francais" brought to the attention of Quebecers the practice of slavery in Quebec and the connection of Black slavery to the dramatic burning of Montreal in 1734.

After Trudel many writers have unmasked the thesis of the gentler form of slavery in Quebec, by revealing the desperation of the slave and the indignity of slavery. Lorena Gale in her Play "Angelique" gives us a dramatic and emotional picture of the agony this Black female slave abused by Master and Mistress, willing to die. For love? Or her dignity? These questions continue to fuel the debate. Beauregard-Champagne in his book published in 2004, Le Proces de Marie-Joseph Angelique, brings authenticity to her presence and proof that she walked the streets of Montreal and is an important part of the living history of Quebec. Afua Cooper in her book "The Hanging of Angelique" (2006) addresses the English population and engages us in a Socratic debate to show that, contrary to Trudel and other writers on the matter, that Angelique set the fire for revenge, not for love.

Most writers have argued that Angelique was not an evil arsonist striking out against society in general, but a Black woman that struck a blow against the indignities of slavery, the violation of her freedom and her rights to the ownership of her body: her rights to share her body in love with the person she chooses to love. Cooper rests her case on the fact that Angelique refuses to implicate Thibault her White lover in the plan to set the fire or in the act of setting the fire: Raimbault a Angelique. Qui t'a aidee? Dis-moi qui sont tes complices? Angelique responds: C'est moi et point d'autre personne ... Je veux mourir!" (It is I. No body else is involved. I want to die!). This seems to be interpreted by Cooper to mean that it had nothing to do with a love affair with Thibault, but her rage at her mistress who told her she had sold her. And that she was going to be shipped off to the Caribbean.

Cooper argues that by "emphasizing love as Angelique's primary motive, these writers not only rob her of the agency that she exhibited in her quest for liberty, they also diminished the violence inherent in slavery." To establish this Cooper seems willing to give credence to the evidence of racists such as Beauhanois and Hocquart. who claimed that "the accident took place because of the wickedness of a Negress slave belonging to Widow Francheville, who, as a result of some displeasure expressed by her mistress, deliberately set fire...." This line of thinking is also expressed in the words given to Angelique by Lorena Gale in her play, Angelique (Playwrights Canada, 2000). In Act 1, Scene 16, where Francois "pumps her like he is f--king her from behind." Angelique makes believe that the ecstasy she feels is that of being "freeeeeee," washed up on the shores of [her] beloved Madiere..." But the moment wanes and she realizes that she is still in her hell:

   I am here
   I see.
   The dog has caught the cat. The mouse is playing dead
   You think you own me. This body, That
   complies. That never fights. The best you feel
   is white hot rage scorching the inside of my
   mind. A blazing fury I bite back. Fire I would
   spit into your face. If you would face me
   coward. You would know ... One day...

It matters little, whether in your analysis you give credence to the racist model that portrayed Black slaves as less than human, and capable of this type of act without just cause; or you believe that the brutal nature of slavery as an institution and its denial of Blacks the very fundamental need for love on the spiritual and physical planes drove Angelique to torch the City of Montreal when they both lead to identical unjust outcomes: conviction by hearsay and torture? Thus, as if in anticipation of the plaque at Maison Parent-Roback, the Black Studies Center (Montreal) in 1991 engaged the artist, Richard Horne to create a representation of Angelique that breathes defiance while Montreal burns in the background. We see an Angelique that is a transformation of the de Francheviile painting. It is an angry Black woman that is outraged by being bought and sold at the master's will, classified as chattel, valued in the market in terms of her menial labour services, fucked from behind by the master, flogged by the jealous mistress, and fingered on the selling block to the derisive laughter of the male merchants. She has heard the voice of the beast and submitted to its force: "Vipere! Tu m 'appartiens et j'userai de toi comme bon me semblera, lui souffia-t-il a l'oreille, lui serrant si fort la gorge qu'elle lacha prise (L'Esclave, by Michelle Bail). In the year 2006, April 7, 272 years after Angelique was hung and her body thrown into a bonfire and burnt, the Governor General of Canada, herself a Montreal immigrant, descendant from Haitian slaves, lays a bouquet beneath a plaque in Angelique's memory. What do we imagine Angelique would say on this occasion?

   In Commemoration

   She touched the cold bronze metal
   and the words that are raised etchings
   opened the gates of time to send its brail
   Messages felt on her finger tips awaken me.

   I, Marie-Joseph Angelique nee Portugal
   am resurrected from the dark past
   Freed from a body dismembered
   unjustly condemned to a crystal ash.

   Michaelle, you weep. Our tears are one
   For we have been apart so long
   Waiting for this moment when
   I celebrate you, and you my past.

   I have walked these cobbled streets a Montreal
   Felt its derision, felt the chirurgien finger grope
   Announcing my lost innocence to merchants
   Who dismissed my self-respect to promiscuity.
   Your eyes cry the Pieta's tears that purify my wounds

   Your touch soothes and heals our festering sores
   We have one understanding of a past that transcends