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| Tiki Mercury-Clarke Photo contributed |
By Neil Armstrong
Musicologist Tiki Mercury-Clarke is promising a lot in her
solo performance, “Toronto Black Then,” a musical
storytelling presentation about “growing up in Toronto, Black-in-the-day. “
She’ll be singing, playing the piano
and storytelling in this autobiographical piece which showcases instances of
her life in Toronto in the late 1950s and 1960s, and putting them in historical
context.
“So they’ll be trying to paint a sense
of not only what personally I experienced but our community as well, and the
community’s response to the times,” says Mercury-Clarke.
She says it’s an area that she thinks
hasn’t had enough of a voice and the Canadian-born Black community in the city
was almost invisible and not listened to because their numbers were so small.
“And then when the immigration laws
were finally changed and allowed in more folks who look like us, we were again
overwhelmed just in sheer numbers because within a very short time, within a
generation we went to an even smaller minority position. So a lot of the
experiences of the community at that time just got sort of got lost in the
shuffle.”
The jazz artist, singer-pianist,
storyteller, lyricist, composer and cultural historian says she recognizes that
mainstream media has never been open and truthful about white supremacy in
Canada and how it impacts on minority groups.
“So that kind of thing filtered into
the mindset of our own people where things that they experienced that they
should actually celebrate because it's a story of courage and dignity in the
face of a lot of hostility they have kept it very quiet as well.”
As it turns out this is the year of
Canada’s 150th anniversary and Mercury-Clarke says, “sometimes the
ancestors work things out that way” for this musical creation to happen now.
She has done bits and pieces in a
number of her nightclub shows and did a teaser in November at the “When
Blackhurst Street” exhibition at Markham Gallery.
She has designed it so she can plug in
various events and experiences of her eventful life at different times
depending on what the audience is.
Inspired by her grandfather who was a
church minister and scholar, Mercury-Clarke says he “inoculated me or
vaccinated me against a lot of attempts to have me accept an ideology of black
inferiority and its corollary, white superiority.”
“When other kids were getting stories
about Cinderella and Sleeping Beauty and all these other things, I was actually
getting stories about Queen Nzinga, Hatshepsut and very aware that there was a
time when we ruled the world and ruled ourselves. And it really changes how you
react to attempts to try to take that away when you’re taught that at a very
early age and that becomes part of your mindset. You look at the world in a
very different way than when you haven’t had anything and other people are
actually filling your mind.”
She remembers in Grade 1 going to a new
school in the suburb of Sheppard and Bathurst area at Christmas time.
In the public schools, students had to
colour nativity scenes and things of that nature but in her family her
grandfather was a minister of the British Methodist Episcopal church and a
Marcus Garveyite.
He taught them that at the time of the
bible the people depicted in the bible were people of colour. “And not only
people of colour, they were very dark people of colour and in fact, that whole
area of what is now called Palestine and Israel was an extension of the ancient
Egyptian empire which is a black empire.”
In her house, Jesus, Mary and Joseph
were all black people so when she was asked at school to colour in a stencil of
the nativity scene she made the people black because it never occurred to her
that they could be anything else.
“And the teacher lost her mind. She
just lost her mind and I didn’t understand what was happening. She was saying
things like ‘you make them dirty; you make them filthy, how could you do that?’
And I’m thinking in my child’s mind, okay, I must have been sloppy when I was
colouring them, I went outside the lines and I smudged it somehow.”
The teacher yanked the picture out of
her hand, ripped it to shreds and brought another black stencil and told her to
do it right. She carefully did so and do it black again.
Mercury-Clarke also shared a story
about the book, The Story of Little Black Sambo, being read by the teacher in
the classroom and she was made to sit on a stool at the front of the class with
the teacher making references to her appearance and what the book described.
“But I don’t want people to think that
it’s an entirely depressing show; it’s a very positive show. I also look at the
church and its influence but also its activities in very much a close-up way. I
want to pay tribute to our African spirit.”
Her show will take place on Feb. 4, 7:00 p.m.-8:30 p.m. in
Miss Lou’s Room at the Harbourfront Centre.
It is presented by A Different Booklist in collaboration
with the Harbourfront Centre as part of the 2017 KUUMBA Black History Month
celebration.
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