Last autumn, I attended a presentation by C& (Contemporary And) — an internationally renowned platform for contemporary art from Africa and its global diaspora — at an event co-organized by BAND (Black Artists' Network In Dialogue) and Gallery TPW here in Toronto.

The room was full of fascinating creative souls from all over the country, many of them in town for Art Toronto. The kind of energy you feel when a big idea meets the right moment.

C&'s Executive Director, Dr. Yvette Mutumba, was presenting the platform's vision: to create content about contemporary artists from Africa and its diasporas in non-colonial languages. For most people in that room, it was an inspiring concept.

For me, it felt like coming home.

A Language You Learn to Hide

I was born in Martinique. Antillean Creole is my mother tongue — the language of my family, my friends, my earliest memories. It is warm, percussive, intimate. It is the language in which I first understood what it meant to belong somewhere.

But Creole, for all its richness, carries a stigma. Growing up, it was understood — never explicitly stated, but deeply felt — that Creole was informal. You could speak it with friends, with family, in the street. But not with teachers. Not with authority figures. Not in any space where you needed to be taken seriously. I am trilingual: Creole, French, English. And for most of my life, I have navigated which language was acceptable in which room, with Creole quietly left at the door.

To this day, I would not open a client pitch in Creole, or address a stranger in it without knowing them first. That is slowly changing — universities are now studying and teaching it, scholars are documenting it — but the wound of its institutional invisibility runs deep for those of us who grew up speaking it.

The Long Way Around

Like many teenagers from Martinique, I left the island to study in France. Even though Martinique is technically French territory, leaving felt like emigrating. And France confirmed it. It was there, for the first time in my life, that I experienced racism — not because of how I looked, but because of how I sounded. My accent marked me. My Caribbeanness, the thing I had simply been, suddenly became something that had to be managed.

I finished my studies, began working in France, then moved to London for seven years, and eventually to Toronto where I have now lived for ten. The further I got from continental Europe, the more I could breathe.

I think about it in terms of the old world and new world. In France, the model is assimilation and you are expected to become French, fully and without remainder. In London and Toronto, something different is possible. The Caribbean community here is large, vibrant, and respected. Caribana draws people from across the United States. The Haitian community in Montreal is extraordinary in its energy and cultural production. Organisations like NIA Centre and BAND do essential work holding space for Black culture in this city. In Toronto, I do not have to leave my identity at the door. I can own it.

The proximity helps too. From the North American east coast, the Caribbean is just a short flight away, nearly in the same time zone. The connection stays alive in a way it never could from Paris.

Lost, and Found Again

For years, I worked in institutional finance. I will not dwell on those years except to say this: I was doing my best to conform. Bay Street and the City of London have a way of communicating, very clearly, who you are expected to be and how you are expected to sound — especially when you do not look or sound like everyone else. I conformed. And in conforming, I slowly lost the thread back to myself.

It took loss to find it again. Corporate struggles. Separation. The grief of losing people close to me. In the aftermath of those things, I found myself drawn back, almost involuntarily, toward culture — toward the music, the art, the language, the history of the Caribbean. It was not a career decision. It was a survival instinct. Culture became the way I reconnected to myself, to meaning, to purpose.

That is what led me to cultural strategy and art consulting. Not ambition. Healing.

When Dr. Mutumba described C&'s commitment to publishing in non-colonial languages, I did not hesitate. I approached her after the presentation with a simple proposal: let me help C& publish their first article ever in Antillean Creole.

What followed was months of quiet, collective work across the Caribbean. Drawing on my network, I curated a longlist of contemporary visual artists from Martinique and Guadeloupe. C& shortlisted two of them. I sourced the writer — someone capable of bringing genuine personal sensibility to the work — and found a translator who could honour not just the words, but the beauty and poetry of our Creole.

The artist we ultimately featured is Kelly Sinnapah Mary, a Guadeloupean whose work explores Indo-Caribbean identity and engages deeply with the thought of Aimé Césaire and Édouard Glissant. Her practice felt like the perfect opening chapter for this kind of linguistic first. The article is a sensitive and beautiful portrait written by Kai Trotz-Motayne and translated with care and grace by Marie-José Desnel.The article is a sensitive and beautiful portrait written by Kai Trotz-Motayne and translated with care and grace by Marie-José Desnel.

Antillean Creole belongs to a family of French-lexified Creoles spoken by over 14 million people — across Martinique, Guadeloupe, Haiti, Saint Lucia, Dominica, French Guiana, Réunion, the Seychelles and Mauritius. It is a living language, a language of resistance, a language that carries the memory of the Middle Passage and the poetry of the Caribbean basin. And until this article, it had never appeared in a major international contemporary art magazine.

What humbled me most was the response from Creole scholars back home. Even early in the process, while I was simply trying to source a translator, the academics who study and preserve our language reached out with admiration and respect. A child who had been taught to leave Creole at the door was now being told, by the people who understand its value most deeply, that he had done something worth doing.

What Comes Next

For those of us from the Caribbean diaspora in Canada, institutional invisibility is a familiar experience. Our cultures, our languages, our artists exist in the world with tremendous depth and vitality, yet they remain absent from the structures that decide what gets called "contemporary," "international," or "significant."

What happened with C& is small in one sense. One article, one language, one artist. But what it represents is larger: proof that these gaps can be closed, that Caribbean voices belong in global cultural conversations, and that the bridges between our communities and the wider world are there to be built.

My vision is to keep building them. I want to see more Creole articles published — in C& and beyond. I am working on travel experiences that bring visitors into the heart of Martinican culture: the food, the decolonized rum, the carnival, the architecture — that extraordinary intersection of Caribbean identity and French influence that makes the island unlike anywhere else on earth. And through my art advisory practice, I am working to give African and diasporic artists more visibility, and African and diasporic collectors more access to the art that belongs to their own story.

Culture healed me. I want to help it heal others too.