In the following blog post I discuss how the three-day Engrenage Noir / LEVIER-sponsored event entitled How Many Slaves do You Own? Art and the Economies of Exploitation, Past and Present helped me to deal with feelings of anger. I explore how art and anger can be intertwined and how I have dealt with this in the past.

Anger is a normal and healthy reaction to injustice and oppression. Personally I think that if anger is not present or felt there is something missing. Feelings of anger signify to me that there is still compassion and optimism left - that one is still striving for a better world. However, I do not think it is necessarily healthy to stay with the anger either, to dwell and to ruminate in it because if one does, then there is no forward motion, no positive and productive change that occurs after the initial anger and disbelief.

I could not have written the above paragraph two or three years ago. Everything was too new and fresh. I was just beginning to really learn about society and about how things worked and what I did and did not like about it. For quite a while I would say (with the ability to reflect on myself retrospectively) I was stuck in the anger, unable to move or to think of anything proactive I could do. After having been exposed to various communities within Montreal and the Concordia and McGill networks, I have seen and experienced ways to have an impact and to feel like I am out there, being apart of the world and society, learning and growing as well as hopefully making some sort of a dent in changing societal structures that I see as extremely damaging and oppressive.

In this blog post I do not want to comment on or reflect upon a specific performance piece, roundtable or keynote discussion associated with the 3-day How Many Slaves Do You Own? event, but rather speak to a general feeling (or one of the many general feelings) I came away with after the weekend - a feeling I was especially aware of during the final discussion where we all thought of and shared questions that we wanted to ask ourselves after having experienced and been apart of this weekend together. This is something that I found myself thinking about a lot - reflecting on my reactions to hearing about all of these injustices and things going on in the world and in my own “backyard” that make me feel sick. Comparing and contrasting my reactions and thoughts now to those many years ago - how I have grown and changed since then but also how I haven’t.

To move past the anger, I have found, is not necessarily easy. I have seen and experienced, for myself at least, that moving past the anger is most effective if it is done with others as part of a collective process of conversation and honest expression. Involving myself with collective artistic creative processes - that is creating something with a group of people - is one particular way that has worked for me. Participating in a process with a group of people who care about something and come together to create art about it has been very significant to me; even more so when the group first discussed everything together (a lot) and worked through everything meticulously. I have found that this collective creation process has inspired me to really ask tough questions and to work through my thoughts and beliefs in a way that other processes do not. Through this I can work through my anger and find a way of proactively engaging with it.

During the How Many Slaves? weekend, the art that I saw made me think about this - about anger, the healing and reflective power of art, and finding forgiveness through this process. Although the subject matter and issues discussed and presented through different mediums and forms during the weekend were issues of pain, I found and saw a lot of forgiveness. I thought this was really powerful and amazing to see and to experience.