Fireweed's revolutionary Women of Colour issue lit a path for feminist publishing 40 years ago

Against the Grain is a monthly column by Huda Hassan examining popular culture and the arts through a Black feminist lens.

In fire-scarred areas, fireweed is the first growth that appears. It becomes a tall weed, with alluring, magenta-coloured flowers at its tip. It is evidence of trouble. Spreading like wildfire, it invades bomb sites, wasteland, and disturbed areas. It colours beauty into gaps left behind by harm. It's the first thing to emerge in a boreal forest fire. In some cultures, fireweed is food, medicine, or a sign of beauty. 

Fireweed is also the title of a feminist quarterly journal that was launched in Toronto in the late 1970s by the Fireweed Collective. 40 years ago, they published their spring 1983 edition featuring an editorial team led by women of colour feminists, including Makeda Silvera, Dionne Brand, Ayanna Black, and Afua Cooper. The writing in the issue addressed the structural gaps shaping the feminist movement. A group of artists, activists, and organizers took charge of a literary journal to colour it up. 

I've spent many years reflecting on the interventions made by some of my hometown heroes, including the ones featured in this issue. Like fireweeds, these feminists reappeared in the face of disturbance. 

The emergence of Fireweed 

The history behind this special issue involves a complicated one. Nila Gupta and Makeda Silvera detail it in the issue's foreword, titled "We Were Never Lost." As the story goes, Brand and Silvera had approached the literary journal two years prior suggesting a collaboration. They proposed a group of women of colour editors. The response was hostile. The collective was hesitant to let women of colour have full editorial control over one issue. 

One year and a half later, in the early 1980s, the Fireweed Collective reached out to them again, inviting them to guest edit and write a special issue dedicated to women of colour. The members, who would have full control over the journal's only women of colour feminist-led issue, were offended. 

"We found the invitation racist in fact if not in intent," they wrote. "We had questions. Did Fireweed now feel the climate was right? Was it now 'politically correct' to devote an issue to women of colour?" 

The tensions among feminists of the 1970s and 1980s were clear in this interaction. How could the feminist movement ensure it offered liberation to all women? In 1979, Audre Lorde wrote an open letter questioning the assumption that all women suffer the same oppression, as suggested in author Mary Daly's book, Gyn/Ecology: The Metaethics of Radical Feminism (1978). Two years prior, the Combahee River Collective wrote a statement calling attention to women living at the margins, outside of the white male left, and how lived experiences produce knowledge before it is theorized. In 1982, Hazel Carby told white women of the feminist movement to stop and listen. This issue of Fireweed illuminated similar interventions and demands. 

Reflecting on the 'Fireweed: Women of Colour' issue 

Eventually, a collaboration was agreed upon. What resulted was a historical archive in Black and transnational feminist writing in Canada. To this day, it presents some of my favourite writing and drafts of texts to join the feminist canon. 

In the 84 pages of this journal issue, you can find the sketches of Makeda Silvera's Silenced, which explores the experiences of migrant women who populate cities like Toronto as domestic workers, searching for work, longing for their loved ones back home. It recalls the paranoia and hardships that come with city living for immigrants. The short autobiographical story eventually became a book bearing the same name. 

Silvera faced many rejections by publishers at the time. It was the 1980s, and women of colour still found themselves excluded from the worlds of literature, politics, and art making. Amongst the noted feminist press houses that rejected Silvera was Toronto Women's Press. In response, she created Sister Vision Press — the first women of colour publishing house in Canada. Silenced (1983) was the first book they published.

Another notable piece in Fireweed: the Women of Colour issue is "Lesbians of Colour: Loving and Struggling". The transcript is a frank conversation between three lesbians who speak in anonymity. A large portion of their conversation explores the meaning of "coming out" or coming in to loved ones about their truths. One of them says: "We are isolated from our communities because of our sexual preference. And the support we need we often don't get from the feminist/lesbian community. We experience so much racism from within the women's community." 

The issue also includes a thorough review of Angela Davis' Women, Race, and Class (1983), a canonical text in the feminist archive. Kerri Sakamoto's short story, "The Coat," is a gorgeous narration of a lustful gaze of desire that transcends into a nostalgic encounter of intimacy. It is so casual but the feminist narration is clear. In "Three Poems," Claire Harris writes "I grow yellow in exile." Prabha Khosla's essay, "Profiles Of Working Class East Indian Women," is about the search for labour and the protection of unions for South Asian women. The movements of Indigenous families are also conveyed in the writings of Karen Pheasant. "The elders say that cities aren't a place to live," she writes. It is an example of extraction in the ongoing relationship between colonized people and land. 

My favourite part of Fireweed's Women of Colour issue is its poetry. Ayanna Black and Dionne Brand grant us some of their early gifts. Sylvia Hamilton's "Someone's Old Favourite" is a poem about the first, last, and ongoing experience of hearing racial slurs as a Black person, ending with the harshest of all. It conveys what slurs do to the body, mind, and spirit. 

And then there are the photographs. 

In one essay, we get a visual reading of the Bathurst strip. Claire Prieto and Roger McTair's photography show us the activism on the historic strip, once a home to Canada's first Black communities. We see images familiar to city living for Toronto city dwellers — a woman in a headwrap leaving Bathurst Station; families congregating in Alexandra Park; organization efforts in front Toronto Public Library's Sanderson branch. 

The visuals remind me of recent demonstrations tackling the same structural issues in front of those same locations. The pictures of Bathurst street in the 1980s make me recall the ongoing efforts of local liberation collectives Not Another Black Life and others in their ongoing acts of love to city dwellers. Bathurst Road is not an unfamiliar site of Black history in Toronto. 

Fireweeds to come

When I return to the work of Fireweed's Women of Colour issue today, I become nostalgic. It reminds me of some of the present-day creative and political writing, affirming the endurance of Black radical feminist thought happening in the city.

I am reminded of Yusra Khogali's chants in the streets in defence of Black life. I recall the teachings of liberation educations, such as El Jones and Rania El Mugammar, or the necessary confrontations of Jane Finch Action Against Poverty, No Pride in Policing Coalition, or Policing Free Schools. I reflect on all the work done and still undone.

It is a reminder of our continuum — the pendulum swing of power. There are fireweeds still amongst us. They embed the anti-linearity of radical Black feminist thought. They, too, are growing from the ashes of the fires around us.

Excerpts from Fireweed: A Feminist Quarterly originally published with the Rise Up! Feminist Digital Archives.