Hanging Of Angelique [Paperback]

This book gives a very well written account of what happened to this Montreal slave woman convicted of burning down Old Montreal. Knowledge of Canadian slavery had been virtually unknown and well hidden until this book appeared. It has led other historians to subsequent research into the actual court proceedings. I suspect there will be more slavery disclosures in the near future.
Although the author seems to take a particular slant in this true story, it is not by any means a difinitive opinion. It is fairly steadily paced and colourful enough to hold the attention of even reluctant readers, and leaves plenty of opportunity for discussion and debate.

Cooper has assembled a vigorous and colorful history of black slavery as it affected the development North American society during its formative years of the 17th and 18th centuries. What she wants to do in this study is provide her reader with an accurate context by which to understand the life and times of Marie-Joseph Angelique, the slave woman accused and convicted of torching Old Montreal in 1723 and eventually executed for it. Evidence shows that while she was likely 'guilty' of arson, she likely did it out of a deep-seated need to get back at a very cruel owner. The capital punishment meted out to her for her crime was so terrible that it rivals that usually reserved for the Spanish Inquisition. Devoting only a small part of her book to the actual circumstances leading up to and including Angelique's tragic death, Cooper insteads probes three hundred years of history to determine how a black African slave of Portuguese descent ended up in Montreal in the midst of predominately Catholic-European society. As that answer emerges, Cooper builds a fairly credible picture of what the institution of slavery amounted to back then. Since slaves like Angelique were basically chattels to be used at the whim and fancy of the slaveholder, we can well imagine the many abuses and indignities these poor creatures had to suffer. In fact, records show that Angelique was constantly whipped for the smallest of infractions and insubordinations. As Cooper's research shows, the supposedly mild-mannered, backwater culture of British and French North America was not exempt from the practice of having and using slaves for commercial ventures such as mines and farms. The widely-held excuse for keeping such indentured labor was that workers were hard to find at an affordable price anywhere in the colonies. In total, Cooper has produced a very profound and informative review of one of those shameful chapters in Canadian history that often gets glossed over because of the lack of diligent research.

this is not a book of history. it is a book of historical speculation wherein cooper indulges her racist and disturbing "post colonial" fantasies of white murder through her main character

consider:

- she claims canada is racist because there is no statue of angelique in the very city, montreal, which she burnt to the ground. angelique was a terrorists, who destroyed the only church and hospital in the city and the homes of thousands of innocent hard working people, and cooper wants her to have a statue?

- she claims the canadian judicial system was biased against angelique, even though she agrees, ultimately, that angelique is guilty. cooper wants to have it both ways: she wants to paint angelique as the victim of a criminal injustice AND as a proactive and willing agent who struck a blow for all oppressed people with her defiant and violent revolutionary act. she wants angelique to be a blameless heroine, to better serve her agenda that all slave narratives are inherently about courageous blacks fighting injustice, when really this is about a cowardly liar who committed a sin just as bad as slavery. in order to justify her crime, cooper speculates about how hard life was for angelique (though all evidence points to the contrary)

- she also wants to paint HER angelique as an independent minded women who was beholded to none, and yet angelique was, ironically, completely dependent on a white man (her lover) for her escape and its planning, and she cowardly lied about the crime she committed.

- she claims angelique's lover cowardly "betrayed and abandoned her" when she was arrested for burning the town and faced execution himself (ie whitey got scared and ran away). but what was he supposed to do? if the roles were reversed she would easily have justified angelique's "betrayal"

- she claims canadian historians who see the tragedy of angelique as a love story (ie she burnt the city to flee canada with white lover) as racist and sexist for not crediting angelique with cooper's biased and preferred narrative of revenge against an evil society (even though angelique never ran away nor started playing with fire until she met her white lover, and there is no evidence montreal was an "evil white society" - quite the contrary, actually)

- she details the atlantic slave trade but make NO mention of the complicity of africans themselves in said trade. the one sentence mentioning the complicity of africa is dismissed because "all whites hold institutional power over all blacks" (the kind of unsophisticated nonsense you get from an undergraduate course on colonialism)

- she borders on antisemitism by going out of her way to exaggerate the role that jews played in the slave trade, while making NO mention of the role of muslims in the trade (she has only good things to say about islam in this book, as she is herself a muslim, and has nothing good to say about judaism or christianity, the latter of which she sees as nothing but a tool of oppression (islam still has slavery, christianity and christians abolished it)

- she borders on french racism, calling french canadians dirty and filthy. she seems to revel in passages by anelique and her lover about how much they despise the french and want to murder them

- her worst sin in this book is of consistently accusing angelique's montreal master of raping her though there is NO evidence for this at all. this is absolutely unacceptable for a professional historian to do. it is often couched in "did he rape her? we dont know, so we'll have to assume he did. i mean, white people raped slaves all the time so why not this guy?". unbelievable. she repeats this over and over in her book hoping if she repeats this PURE SPECULATION enough people will believe this man, who angelique says treated her well, raped her

- this book is riddled with speculation and contains NO original research. and yet she claims anglique has been ignored by canadian history, which is written by racist whites, while ALL of her info is culled from secondary canadian sources. and what research the book contains is scant - she basically quotes from ONE book, by trudel (who, by the way, she accuses of being racist and sexist and yet thanks in the afterword for his kind help.)

- she paints a very misleading picture of slavery in canada. she says slavery was in canada for FOUR centuries and yet later in the book she says the first slave came to canada in 1691 and later says that slavery was completely abolished in canada in 1837. you do the math.

- she says slavery was everywhere in canada, that it was systemic, and yet she NEVER gives us the actual number of slaves in canada (it was about 1300 in total, ever). in her footnotes she mentions censuses done that counted the slaves BUT NEVER tells us how many. why? because she knows that her whole book is based on her own lie - the slavery was everywhere in canada, when in reality it was very, very small and much, much different that in the US and latin/south america.

- she says artisans owned slaves, yet never once give the name of a single artisan who owned a slave. the only canadian slaveholders we are told of in this book are all part of the french aristocracy (who all left canada for france after british conquest). a few very wealthy merchants are mentioned (though they treat their one slave just like their other indentured servants), but they were also part of the elite. she claims slavery was not the monopoly of the elite, yet gives ONLY examples of elites (maybe 15 slave owners in all are mentioned in her book, out of a population of tens of thousands)

- she makes NO differentiation between the slavery in canada and slavery in the south; she says all slavery is equally bad. YET, consider that angelique was allowed to run away several times without ever being punished and she was allowed to carry on multiple love affairs with white men in the open. she would have been killed or worse if she was in the southern states or jamaica. the slavery in canada was very mild compared to the slavery in canada. slaves were baptized and thus considered fully human, had access to the courts (could sue for their freedom), could give testimony in court, etc - all rights no one in the US had. and angelique had her sentence, for BURNING AN ENTIRE CITY FULL OF HARD WORKING POOR PEOPLE reduced from having her hand cut off and being burned at the stake to hanging only. this seems like very charitable restraint

- cooper wants to paint canada as just as racist as the south of the US but her own facts, or lack thereof, do not support her own racist assumptions.

- she paints all whites as the same (inherently racist) and all blacks the same (consider her SPECUALATION about angelique's black hangman - "was he thinking how evil white people are for making him kill one of his own? probably")

- fact is that the lives of slaves in canada were no different than indentured servants. life was hard and undignified for over 95% of all people in the 17th and 18th century. yet she wants to make angelique a martyr because she was a cook and a maid, who had other cooks and maids helping her.

this book is what is wrong with the post-colonial, identity theory cultural relativism that is sullying the discipline of history. do facts no longer matter?

and let me add that for a "spoken word artist" (whatever that is), this book is poorly written. there is so much repetition and filler in this book, which at 300 pages could easily have come in at 85 without losing anything.