September 2017


Issue Home >>

“I hope you enjoy this movie and it speaks to you, but I want you to pay attention to the credits.” Trinidad-born, Canadian-based producer, Selwyn Jacob cautioned the packed Centre for Language Learning (CLL) Auditorium’s audience before the screening of the documentary, Ninth Floor on July 20. The atmosphere in the auditorium buzzed with anticipation as unceasing rows of patrons flowed into the auditorium, forcing hosts, the Department of Literary, Cultural and Communication Studies (LCCS) and the trinidad+tobago film festival (ttff) to create makeshift seating and additional accommodation.

The event’s large turnout was unsurprising, given the unfortunate relevance of the 50-year-old subject matter – the violent racial conflict surrounding the then, Sir George Williams University (now Concordia University) student-led protests in 1969 Montreal. The film recounts this watershed moment in Canadian history, dubbed the Sir George Williams affair, where more than 100 students peacefully occupied the ninth floor of the Henry F. Hall Building in an act of civil disobedience against the university administration’s decision regarding a complaint of racism that had been filed months earlier by six Black students from the Caribbean. The “undersigned six” charged white biology professor Perry Anderson with racial discrimination and biased treatment as compared with their white counterparts.

Under the direction of Mina Shum, the film reveals how the Caribbean students came into black consciousness through their racist experience. Jacob uses archival footage to highlight the institutional racism within the University as white professors came up with a rubric for differentiating between West Indians and Afro-Canadians with stereotypes such as, “West Indians laugh immoderately, are frequently obscene and don’t take much at face value.” The crowd laughed in response to this comical description – a rare moment of levity in the 82-minute film which hammers home how traumatic the ninth floor occupation was to the Caribbean students involved. The students locked themselves in the Computer Centre located on the ninth floor as an act of peaceful protest against the Administration’s mild punitive suspension of Perry Anderson. This went on for a few days and on February 11, everything escalated. A fire broke out in the data centre resulting the students hurtling hundreds of computer cards and other documents through the windows, “like snow out of heaven onto the brains of society scattered in the wind,” according to one of the survivors in the film. The students’ cries for help were met with police and riot squad officers who stormed the computer room, arresting 97 people, whites as well as blacks.

The importance of Jacob’s mandate to focus on the names mentioned throughout the documentary becomes evident as their lives after the incident becomes the real focal point of the film. He admits, it has been his life’s work to tell this story ever since he was a young man considering going to university in Canada, “I always knew that I would tell this story – I had been saddled with the good-for-nothing perspective; these good-for-nothing students came up here and destroyed the people computer. Don’t be like them.” The audience got to see “them,” not as a static names in a newspaper report, but as three-dimensional people who survived. Names like Terrance Ballantyne and Hugo Ford – two of the original six students whose complaint led to the riot. The West Indian students who would later be involved, include Valerie Belgrave, Bukka Rennie, Rosie Douglas, who was imprisoned and then deported and later became Prime Minister of Dominica. Anne Cools, originally from Barbados, who went on to become the first Black

Canadian to be appointed to the Senate, and Rodney John has had a distinguished career as a psychologist and several others.

Persons like Kennedy Frederick – who was shown only through his clips of his incendiary younger self as a fearless catalyst for the occupation. Sadly, he never recovered from the events of 1969 and was forced to go into hiding and throughout the years since, he suffered a host of mental illnesses. He is the film’s reminder of the hidden price one pays for being on the right side of history. In 2017, it’s easy to forget that the social activism had a negative connotation. Jacobs stressed that although, he wanted to have more voices in his film, “some people didn’t want to be found because of the stigma attached. People changed their names, moved to the US...some disappeared.”

The film night ended on a more optimistic note with Jacobs encouraging the audience to applaud the courageous students involved in the incident some that were present that night like Terrance Ballantyne. Like a teacher addressing his students, Jacobs advised, “The film is really about these people – they made a decision at a certain point in life and were stigmatized, but they overcame.”

Jeanette G. Awai is a freelance writer and marketing and communications assistant at The UWI St. Augustine Marketing and Communications Office.