In the Vancouver spoken word scene, Johnny Trinh, Vancouver Poetry House artistic director, is well known for reminding poets and audiences that “it takes a community to raise an artist.” As a veteran of many poetry shows in Vancouver and throughout the country, I have had many opportunities to ruminate on the meaning of this phrase; in particular, its invocation of the collective as the inherent foundation by which a poet, or any type of artist, nurtures the sort of self and worldly awareness that makes artistry viable and valuable. I am also reminded of author and cultural critic bell hooks’ assertion: “I think that part of what a culture of domination has done is raise that romantic relationship up as the single most important bond, when of course the single most important bond is that of community.”

Recently, I attended the BC premiere of Play It Loud! How Toronto Got Soul, a film directed by Graeme Mathieson about legendary Jamaican-Canadian singer Jay Douglas’ life and musical career, at VIFF Centre.  In the moments before the theatre darkened and the film began to play, Douglas thanked the audience preemptively and gave deference to the power of music itself for allowing “us to be messengers of peace and love.” Perhaps in that moment, even before the film could be experienced, Douglas was wise enough to bind everyone in attendance into a community. He seemed to acknowledge that each of us, by virtue of our attendance that evening, was raised and fortified by music; and at the same time, artistry, whether through music or film, relies upon an audience, a reciprocity, a catalyzing social understanding in order to achieve its greatest effect.

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On the evening of February 1st, a large black van lingered outside of my home, its rear lights blinking against the dark, ice-fringed street. Gabrielle Martin, the artistic director of PuSh festival, had sent an Uber ride for me. It was meant to take me to a gathering she organized, aptly titled “Soft Landing.” The drive from Strathcona to the outer reaches of North Vancouver felt obscure and harrowing. The driver cautiously slalomed through undulating, dimly-lit roads for twenty minutes, as if winding through a forested, secret path at the edge of the world. When we finally arrived, what waited at the bottom of a clearing was a beautiful house and a gathering of Black artists from every imaginable artistic discipline and country of origin. Entering the kitchen, I immediately found myself in conversation with a Black Brazilian contemporary dancer, and a lighting designer visiting from Stockholm, Sweden. Later, I found myself on a couch, passively shoveling crackers and dip onto my small white plate. It was a moment that was quiet and far enough removed from the bright music of conversation that I could really think about where I was. It was as if I was living in a dream, a room full of my wildest imaginings, where Black British performance artists were in rapt conversation with Haitian-Canadian street dancers; where Vancouver-born singers were sharing jokes with Congolese filmmakers and South African projectionists. It made my mind flash to all the photos I’ve seen of the Harlem Renaissance, or the descriptions I’ve read of Maya Angelou’s early writing life, blossoming in the presence of a group of Black, politically-engaged writers. As the notion of such deep and necessary belonging rattled through my brain, I found myself shoulder to shoulder with Detroit-born, Vancouver-based singer Khari Wendell McClelland. We struck up a conversation, not about the legendary Black creative and political figures of a bygone era, but about what it feels like to be Black artists in Vancouver right now.

I came to Vancouver in the summer of 2020 and felt the pallor and relative silence the COVID-19 pandemic had thrown over the city. I encountered a place, like all cities, struggling to hang on to a semblance of its vividness while the mere prospect of social gathering was lethal. It bears mentioning that we are still in the midst of the pandemic, and the social and economic impacts on creative scenes and communities continue to be felt. Khari painted for me a picture of a city that had the means for a thriving art scene and has now become nearly unaffordable for independent artists to live within. When Khari arrived in Vancouver in the early aughts, it was still a place where a young musician could easily afford rent on restaurant server or barista wages. There was an ecosystem of local venues still accessible enough for artists in community with one another to cobble together enough money to rent a place to rehearse or play a show. Vancouver was still a livable enough place that a young guitarist could strap their instrument to their back and, with a $10 bill in their pocket, wander down Commercial Drive and find a local concert, or sus out the location of a jam session happening in the parking lot of one nondescript building or another. 

As it stands now, in the early weeks of 2025, Vancouver is a city wherein restaurants and arts venues struggle under the burden of erratic rent increases. My social media feed is crowded with small business owners confessing the long list of reasons why another beloved community gathering place is on the brink of shuttering. 

If it takes a community to raise a poet, musician, filmmaker, painter or dancer, how does an artist survive in the absence of spaces where artists can gather and collectively reckon with the merits of their creative practices? How does an artist survive in a place where it requires two jobs to afford the time and space to pick up a guitar or confront the possibilities of a blank canvas? How does an artist mature in an environment where time is a capitalist commodity, and all creativity is contorted by the urgency of monetization?

These questions, though framed differently, were in the room as I listened to the story of The Cougars, the band which Jay Douglas fronted in the 1960s and early 1970s. In 1969, Toronto’s Yonge Street was lined with music venues where Jay and his generation of peers would watch world-renowned Black musicians like Stevie Wonder, James Brown, The Supremes, and others play legendary stages like Le Coq D’or or Zanzibar. I watched the eyes of Jay Douglas flicker with vivid recall as he recounted the importance of honing his stage presence at Club Jamaica or the W.I.F Club. When, later, we were told that by 1972, many of the popular music venues had transformed into topless bars and body rub parlours, I was hit by a sobering feeling of familiarity, of inevitability. By the early part of the decade, most of the gigs that The Cougars and other Caribbean musicians relied upon in Toronto had dried up. Jay and his band adapted to Toronto’s shifting cultural and commercial environment by pushing further north, into places like Barrie, Huntsville, Owen Sound, and communities in Quebec like Val D’or. On the whole, these Ontario tours were described as more positive than negative, but archival footage and Jay’s own retellings reveal that these small Ontario towns were not always welcoming of Caribbean cultural aesthetics, or the presence of Blackness. More than once, local newspaper headlines in these towns spoke of The Cougars being assaulted, their car windows bricked, and their property vandalized.

The fact that Jay Douglas is still performing music is a testament to his passion and success. His presence at VIFF Centre that evening, alongside his words of love and hope, signaled that he is not a man interested in resting on his laurels. He has not simply accepted the honourific of “legend” and let it stand in for his life’s work. Rather, he is an artist still invested in imbuing each interaction — whether on stage or off — with a little bit of magic. This much was obvious as I watched him recline in his grey chair and answer questions from the audience. No matter what he was asked, his response always returned to the power of love and the spiritual technology of music. I was, and am, grateful to see him still alive and avid in this way. 

As the film closes, it does so with a montage of Canadian musicians, journalists, and historians testifying to Jay Douglas’ indelible contribution to Canadian music and the threads of Caribbean-Canadian art that thrive today in places like Toronto and Montreal. In what was, for me, one of the film’s most poignant moments, director Graeme Mathieson asks Jay’s longtime bandmate and friend, Everton “Pablo” Paul, “What do you hope a film like this will accomplish?” He responds, through tears, that he hopes that “this will further Jay’s career.” Not just because of the love between the two men, or the exceptional quality of Jay’s vocal performances throughout the years, but because “[Jay] deserves a break.”

These parting words from his friend and peer linger with me, despite Jay’s effervescent charisma. “He deserves a break.”

There is a double-edged sort of praise that Canada, and cities like Vancouver, have mastered. If a racialized artist manages to survive the absence of mainstream support and radio play; if they manage to smile despite the presence of institutional racism; if one’s cultural and artistic community is devastated, or pressured into giving up, by the urgent machinations of capitalism, and you still persist — they will call you a legend. They will thank you for the enormity of your contribution to the social and spiritual well-being of the cherished city, but they will not reconcile all the forms of abandonment and exclusion racialized artists must confront before grasping the provisions of success.

For me, even with the obvious beauty of Jay Douglas’ story, the same questions persist: How can we make sure we are raising artists, sustaining them, and not simply elevating them belatedly, if they so happen to survive the coarseness of societal neglect? How do we deal with the displacement of communities meant to regard and nurture artists?

Appearing ever-gracious in the face of such implications, Jay Douglas uses his final words in the film to affirm how blessed he has been to contribute to music, which he calls the “international language of joy, love.” Perhaps it is Jay’s faith in music that has sustained him over the course of his more than fifty-years-long career, and which gave him the vigour to speak with such life-affirming conviction during his brief stop in Vancouver.  

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Despite the challenges posed by Vancouver’s prohibitively high cost of living, there have been several artists and community builders who have ushered me into moments of peace, joy and love. In the summer of 2024, in the wake of a romantic break-up, Indian Summer Festival renewed my hope in the beauty that Vancouver can produce. Eighty people sat at the edge of the water on Granville Island as False Creek shimmered with sunlight and flecks of poetry and music offered by Cecily Nicholson, Hari Alluri, Jody Okabe, Sejal, Gordon Grdina and others. To close, legendary author, performance poet, and memoirist Arthur Flowers shuffled down the hill to take his seat on stage – a modest spot of grass graciously shaded by a gazebo. With only his sonorous voice, his high-arching, generous laughter, a handpan, and a collection of stories from the African American Hoodo folkloric tradition, Arthur transported the audience on a journey that felt spiritual transcendent. I have felt other Vancouver artists wield this combination of love and spiritual earnestness, too. I have been moved to tears by the emotional honesty of poet Jillian Christmas as she stood singing, praying, and honouring her ancestors in the purple-red lights of the chapel of St. Andrew’s-Wesley United Church. I have sat, awed and grateful, as poet Fanny Kearse turned Vancouver Public Library into a space of warmth, courage, and beauty on an otherwise frigid Wednesday evening. I have cried in dark theatres to Black Canadian films curated by Kika Memeh. Even as I converse with friends about the difficulties of sky-high rent prices, and commiserate publicly about the loss of venue after venue, it is not hard to find examples of Vancouver-based artists doing the hard work of building culture and sustaining community. 

It is deeply intentional that Jay Douglas calls musicians “messengers of peace and love,” because it is a reminder that the work of an artist is not simply to reflect culture, but to shape it, beautify it, and bend it toward something resembling liberation. I am reminded that peace and love are, in practice, as much social realities as they are spiritual ones. At their very best, artistic and community spaces–such as Couch Jams, Dead Poets Reading Series, Under The Table Poetry Collective, Unbound Reading Series, Vancouver Black Library, Vines Arts Society, and so many more–are places where artists and audiences can engage in the collaborative, creative practice of justice-making. Even here, in a city where capitalism wields a bludgeoning force, artistic gatherings and practices help us devise new ways of expressing our humanity and reckoning with what might be required to make this city not just survivable, but truly livable.

Brandon Wint is an Ontario-born poet, spoken word artist, educator and filmmaker based in western Canada. For more than a decade, Brandon has been a sought-after touring performance poet, having shared his work all over Canada, and internationally at festivals and showcases in the United States, Australia, Jamaica, Latvia and Lithuania. Brandon is ever-grateful for the power of poetry as a spiritual technology and social force. He is devoted to using poetry as a tool for refining his sense of justice, love, and intimacy. Brandon Wint's poems and essays have been published in The Ex Puritan, Event Magazine, Arc Poetry Magazine, and Black Writers Matter, among other places. Divine Animal (Write Bloody North, 2020) is his debut collection of poetry. In recent years, his films have screened at  DOXA documentary film festival and Reelworld Film Festival.