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UWI TODAY
– SUNDAY 10 SEPTEMBER, 2017
FILM
Jeanette G. Awai is a freelance writer and marketing and communications assistant at The UWI St. Augustine Marketing and Communications Office.
“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 filedmonths 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
betweenWest 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 theAdministration’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
HISTORY REVISITED
What happened after the fateful Ninth Floor occupation in Montreal
B Y J E A N E T T E G . A W A I
survived. Names like Terrance Ballantyne and Hugo Ford –
two of the original six students whose complaint led to the
riot. TheWest 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 activismhad a negative connotation.
Jacobs stressed that although, he wanted to havemore 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.”
Selwyn Jacob, Lynne Murray and Terrance Ballantyne at the screening of Ninth Floor.
DIGIMEDIA PHOTO & CINEMA, COURTESY TTFF
