As-tu oublié qu’on vivait ici?

Thanks to Montréal Multiple, an excellent blog about multiethnic Montreal written by two La Presse journalists, I came across this video video for L’oubli, the new single off of Dramatik’s new album La Boîte Noire. Dramatik, who suffered a childhood as a rest-avec — a modern-day house slave — in Haiti, raps about Montreal North, the borough that was wracked by riots last year after police shot and killed a young teenager, Fredy Villaneuva. The song’s refrain says it all: “Did you forget that we lived here?”

The Montreal North Riot

Montreal is no stranger to riots. Over the course of its history, it has seen political riots, sports riots, nationalist riots and punk riots. From 1844 to 1849, Montreal was the capital of a united Canada, but imperial authorities stripped it of that status after rioters (most of them conservatives angry over the supposedly light punishment given to the 1838/39 rebels) trashed and burned down the colonial parliament. A little over a century later, Montrealers angry over the suspension of Maurice Richard left Ste. Catherine St. in tatters; the Richard Riot, as it was known, signalled the dawn of the nationalist era in Quebec life and politics. More recently, hockey fans and hooligans smashed windows and burned cars downtown after the Canadiens won the first round of the Stanley Cup playoffs.

So what about Sunday night’s riot in Montreal North, then? It isn’t the first time mobs of angry people have burned cars and looted shops, but somehow it seems distinct from Montreal’s other riots. Maybe it’s the undercurrent of racial tension that seemed to run through the destruction. All riots start with a public united by a sense of injustice; in this case, it was frustration and anger directed against a police force and municipal authorities that seem to treat Montreal’s minorities — and in particular, blacks, Latinos and Arabs — with contempt, suspicion and, at times, violence.

Saturday’s police shooting of an unarmed 18-year-old, Fredy Villanueva, seemed all too familiar to those Montrealers who still remember other incidents in which a police officer, for reasons that are never made clear, has killed a man of colour. Most recently, in 2005, Mohamed Anas Bennis was shot when he passed by an unrelated police investigation in Côte des Neiges. (Police claim that Bennis stabbed an officer, but evidence of this has never been made public.) All told, an average of 20 civilians die every year in police custody, many of them in rather shady circumstances. Whether police behaviour in these instances was justified or not, the reticence of the police to fully explain them has angered many Montrealers. Combined with the often-strained everyday interactions between police and people in neighbourhoods like Montreal North, it creates a toxic atmosphere that can easily ignite.

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