This month, we enter the TCR archives with Black History on our minds, highlighting the work of three important contributors to the Black literary tradition, M. NourbeSe Philip, Wayde Compton, and Hope Anderson. In the Fall 2005 Issue, TCR published sections from M. NourbeSe Philip’s then in-progress, ground-breaking text “Zong!” that brings into public view the massacre of Africans aboard the slave ship, Zong. Her 182-page poetry cycle, drawn from court documentation of the ship-owner vs. the ship-insurer, ruptures “the coded, documented silence of the historical text.” Hope Anderson was one of the North Vandals and co-editor of the anthology The Body published in 1979 by Tatlow House, an enterprise established by Anderson and David Phillips in North Vancouver. After moving to Victoria, he organized the Sun Fest in 1984, attended most notably by Amiri Baraka.

One poem for every document identifying me by race during the course of my life

Seeing ships in the Strait of Georgia wears a groove in your cerebral cortex

A camera dollying through a video for a black metal cover of a Smokey Robinson composition

When the tsunami comes, downtown Vancouver will become an island, a secession, a micronation, a spacecraft

I could be Catherine of silver
and i eat leaves i wear overalls
most of all i sing even when i am
not asked