By Neil Armstrong
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| From left to right: Honor Ford-Smith, Courtnay McFarlane, Ayoola Silvera, Stephanie Martin, Douglas Stewart and Ramabai Espinet at 40 Years of Sister Vision: A Radical Legacy of Black Women and Women of Colour Publishing at McMaster University in Hamilton, Ontario, on September 25, 2025. |
Admirers of the work of Sister Vision — Canada’s first Black women and women of colour press — recently gathered to celebrate its establishment 40 years ago, and to give the co-founders, Makeda Silvera and Stephanie Martin, their flowers. Martin attended in person while Silvera tuned in online.
On September 25, writers, publishers, archivists, and scholars attended a symposium at McMaster University in Hamilton, Ontario, to reflect on the books, conversations, and interventions that Sister Vision made possible from 1985 when it was founded to 2001 when it folded.
“40 Years of Sister Vision: A Legacy of Black Women and Women of Colour Publishing,” the title of the conference, underscored that the founding of Sister Vision was a radical intervention in Canadian publishing.
It said that, “In describing the significance of the name Silvera notes: “We looked close to home for a name, in other words, at who we were—two sistas—two feminists with a vision. And so, the Press was named Sister Vision.””
The programme of the conference noted that, “Writings by and about Black women, Indigenous women and women of colour were significantly underrepresented and there existed numerous institutional roadblocks to publishing these works. Sister Vision would become an important space for publishing lesbian and queer writing. It offered a nexus for works articulating intersectional social concerns.”
The day included two panels, one on the writings of Silvera and the work of Sister Vision chaired by Dr. Michael A. Bucknor, Professor and Tier 1 Canada Research Chair in Black Global Studies at the University of Alberta; the other titled “Maps of Diaspora, Maps of Desire” chaired by Professor Beverly Bain, Women, Gender and Sexuality Studies, Department of Historical Studies at the University of Toronto Mississauga campus, and workshops.
The symposium ended with “Stories and Memories of Sister Vision: A Roundtable Conversation” chaired by Honor Ford-Smith with participants: Stephanie Martin, Ramabai Espinet, Courtnay McFarlane, Douglas Stewart and Ayoola Silvera.
In a statement read by her daughter Ayoola, Makeda noted that she could not attend because she was sick with corticobasal syndrome— a rare, progressive brain disorder and form of atypical parkinsonism—and as a result was unable to speak and move with ease.
Tracing her journey, Makeda outlined that she did community work in her teens and then worked at the community newspaper, Contrast, serving the Black community. Starting there as a typesetter— the only job available to women—she later worked her way up to cover news, especially the plight of domestic workers.
After leaving Contrast, she worked at Share newspaper as an assistant editor serving the Black community. While there, she covered the news and had a column called “Women’s Lips.”
Noting that she stuck with the domestic workers, Makeda said out of that came her first book, “Silenced,” which is about domestic workers and in their dialect.
“This was the first time anyone did that, write in a domestic worker’s own language,” she notes, adding that she did community work throughout her life.
Makeda was at the Black Education Project where she worked in their summer program. She knew she always wanted to start a press, but before that she worked at the newspaper and Fireweed, a feminist quarterly of writing, politics, arts and culture founded in Toronto in1978 by the Fireweed Collective.
The Jamaica-born writer was the only Black woman at Fireweed and remembered in 1984 when they published Issue 16, their first collection by women of colour.
Makeda stayed several years to hone her skills and while at the quarterly journal, she also worked at the Hotline for Black Youth and at the Immigrant Women’s Centre. She did community work at the first centre for immigrant women. “It was during that time that I had the urge to form a press.”
In 1983, Makeda was invited to Vancouver as one of four keynote speakers for the first Women and Words Conference which drew approximately 900 women from across Canada.
“As the keynote speakers, we were asked to address the question, how far have we come? I responded with “not far enough” and began my speech with, “For every step that we take as Black women, we have to fight, cuss, and kick every inch of the way.” I ended with, “Stop correcting our voices.” There were gasps followed by silence in the large auditorium.”
She overheard a well-established white woman writer ask another, “why don’t they start their own journals and presses and stop complaining?”
“When I got back to Toronto, I was determined to establish a press by and for women of colour. At the time, I could count on one hand the number of Black women who had published single author books or were featured in anthologies.”
Makeda said she then formed Sister Vision with Martin, who at that time was her partner. “It was during that time I quit my job and dedicated my time to Sister Vision, that was in 1985. Sister Vision was formed in the basement of 101 Dewson [Street]; all this time, I was still involved in the Black community going to demonstrations and also involved in the women’s community and the gay community.”
She said they started Sister Vision Press with a book of poetry in the dialect of Jamaican Patois. Publishing the book of dub poetry, Speshal Rikwes, by ahdri zhina mandiela, was to prove to the audience that they intended on publishing people in their own language.
Another early publication was the book, Blaze a Fire: Significant Contributions of Caribbean Women, by Nesha Z. Haniff, about famous grassroots women that were nameless, farmers and people that did ordinary jobs. They soon started publishing women from the community.
“Stephanie and I relied on lots of volunteers to do the work. We couldn’t do the work without them.”
Makeda mentioned the book, Lionheart Gal: Life Stories of Jamaican Women, by Honor Ford-Smith for which the rights were with The Women’s Press in London, but Sister Vision wanted to publish it and in doing so learned the skills of joint publishing and buying rights to be able to publish it in Canada.
Ayoola said when she was 14 years old and could use a typewriter, she was helping to transcribe manuscripts from the hard copy to the floppy disk format during the production of Creation Fire: A CAFRA Anthology of Caribbean Women’s Poetry by Ramabai Espinet.
She said at the time, 101 Dewson Street was structed as a collective for a few years with most of the other people being racialized lesbian mothers in the 1980s and 1990s.
“I think that gave the kids in the house the gift of a kaleidoscopic view of the world, by which I mean we had assumptions and paradigms that people around us didn’t have and we didn’t know that until we went out and said things, and started talking and people were silenced.”
Stephanie Martin described the time that Sister Vision started as tumultuous, crazy, and a wild time, but it also had wonderful gifts, joy, and laughter.
“We lived in a home, which as Ayoola said, was a collective environment. We had Doug [Douglas Stewart], Debbie Douglas, the children, myself, the other children, and Connie Fife. And it was different, and it definitely had a different view of life,” she said, noting that they could sit and talk about many stories related to 101 Dewson Street.
Martin said she and Makeda did not research anything about starting a press, they just decided to do it.
She said when Makeda wrote “Silenced,” she approached the Women’s Press but nobody was interested because of the voices or wanted to read the dialect, the patois, the Jamaican language or the other languages in the book.
Martin said the dream of publishing and owning a press was Makeda’s vision. “It was a struggle; it became a life kind of obsessive struggle, it was very difficult. We had no money and it doesn’t make money so it was hard because I’m sure it was hard on the young people because we were focused on this press and they were a part of it.”
Sister Vision was the nucleus at 101 Dewson Street and all the other political organizations started there; it was really a hub of political activity, she said.
Her advice to anyone wanting to start a press is to do the research, learn about business management, accounting, and marketing. Sister Vision had many volunteers and Martin said they could not have accomplished what the press did without them.
From left to right: Honor Ford-Smith, Ayoola Silvera with her standing standing in front of her, Stephanie Martin, Douglas Stewart, Ramabai Espinet, Courtnay McFarlane and Ronald Cummings
McFarlane said he, Martin, and Debbie Douglas for the last few months have been working on putting together a text for a plaque that will go outside 101 Dewson Street.
He said 101 Dewson Street was the home of Sister Vision Press and “the home for some of us who weren’t working with Sister Vision Press and weren’t living in the house, but for whom 101 Dewson was a safe harbour.”
McFarlane said he connected with the house through ZAMI, which was the first group for West Indian gays and lesbians that held its meetings at The 519 Community Centre.
This was in the mid-1980s and McFarlane said he was in high school, very conscious of his queerness and his blackness, and felt isolated in Scarborough.
Describing 101 Dewson Street as a memorable site, Espinet said she is pleased to know that a plaque is being worked on because it was a site in the city that was, “a creative hub, a political hub, a liming spot, a cussing spot; it was everything” and she spent wonderful times there.
She said the first book she published with Sister Vision was in 1990, Creation Fire: A CAFRA Anthology of Caribbean Women’s Poetry.
Espinet said, in March 1985, a meeting was held in Barbados to mark the end of the UN Decade of Women. It was convened by the Women Development Unit (WAND) at the University of the West Indies at Cave Hill.
She said it was the Caribbean celebration of this event. “Activists from across the region attended the launching of CAFRA, which is the Caribbean Association for Feminist Research and Action, followed the WAND celebration. And to mark the occasion, many women there spontaneously wrote poetry. They shared them at the meeting and there and then the idea of an anthology of poetry was born.”
Espinet was asked to lead the project by CAFRA. She said the 1980s was a time when many organizations were formed and women activists were travelling across the region and got to know each other for the first time, and got to know the territories as well.
They defined themselves as “feminists,” a word Espinet said provoked anger and disdain in mainstream quarters in the Caribbean at that time.
The writer, academic and critic said at the Canadian end Sister Vision realized their radical vision of creating a publishing house dedicated to producing work by Black women and women of colour.
“It was a revolutionary act and a challenge to the Canadian literary establishment. Almost all the literature published at that time was written by Caucasian Canadians. There was simply no room for the category of writer whose publishing needs Sister Vision was addressing.”
Stewart, whose mother recently died, said one of the things his brother reminded him of is that men are often regarded as giants, but their mother was the giant of their family.
“We feel that frankly when we look around our families and around our communities, the giants are often women, often unacknowledged, often being undermined in all kinds of ways.”
Stewart said one of the things he is struck by regarding Makeda—and for many in movements, particularly in early queer activist movements — is that many are rooted in their Black communities.
“Outside of identifying as queer people, we were clearly centred in our communities, in our families.”
He said Makeda was also part of the Rastafarian Movement and anchored in the music community, hip hop, reggae, and so on that was evolving and carnival.
The 1980s was a fertile time for social and political movements, activism, and creativity in Toronto.
“One of the things that I really appreciate in Sister Vision’s journey was being in a household where every weekend, also like every day, there was some personality in the house—Ramabai, Jean Binta Breeze….
“Literally, anybody who was anybody doing stuff, it was a magnet house for us to be exposed.”
Stewart, McFarlane, Debbie Douglas and Makeda were the editors of Ma-ka Diasporic Juks: Contemporary Writing by Queers of African Descent, published in 1997.
Ford-Smith said 101 Dewson Street was transnational, “people were brought together through Sister Vision across national borders that wouldn’t have had any connection otherwise. It was prefiguring what people write about and talk about now. It was also prefiguring intersectionality.”
She said it consciously challenged class and colour binaries in many ways and even Stephanie and Makeda’s relationship embodied that, it was cross class and different social locations, it was inspiring and “they were never afraid to rupture the politically correct.”
Ayoola said some words that come to her when she thinks about the legacy and the past are joy, love, and cost. “Moving forward all of those three ingredients are always going to be present in anything truly revolutionary—love, joy and the cost.
“We don’t choose the cost; the dominant power chooses what it’s going to cost.”
Noting that she wished Makeda had attended the conference in person, Martin said: “I wish she could be here to feel the love, the respect, the admiration, and just how much people recognize her awesome strength, her courage, her militancy, her stubbornness, her renkness.”
Linzey Corridon and Ronald Cummings, organizers of 40 Years of Sister Vision: A Radical Legacy of Black Women and Women of Colour Publishing at McMaster University in Hamilton, Ontario, on September 25, 2025.
The conference was organized by Ronald Cummings, Professor of English and Cultural Studies, Faculty of Humanities at McMaster University in Hamilton, Ontario, and graduate students.
“Sister Vision Press is an integral part of the story of Black feminist, women of colour and queer politics and organizing in Canada. Makeda and Stephanie were absolute visionaries and managed to assemble an important collection of transnational stories. To look at the books by the Press is to remember the deep solidarities of relation between Black and Indigenous women and working-class women of colour and the urgency of telling their stories on their own terms. The books reflected this,” said Dr. Cummings.
He said the press was based in Toronto, but the impact of Sister Vision’s work was undoubtedly transnational.
“The conference asks us to remember this and also to honour the history and visionary legacy of the press. Planning the conference has also involved working with a new generation of students and scholars, reminding them about the necessary political and publishing work that was made possible towards the end of the last century. It is urgent that we remember this in the crisis of the present as a new wave of fascism descends and when there is also much talk about banning books,” said the professor whose research focuses on Caribbean literatures, cultures and diasporas.
The Sister Vision fonds is at the University of Ottawa.
