line of resistance

an ode to family business in black and white

As I walk so frequently the length of Sherbrooke street from Loyola campus, the remnant of Jesuit architectural traditions now turned into a strange blend of modern architecture and old history, walking past the at first quiet homogeneity of residential streets, until I cross Cavendish, the few blocks of chain stores, and then the lovely chaos of random storefronts. Small family businesses a bright eclectic mix of languages and ethnicities, standing along this tree lined street, their presence a gentle defiance of both concrete and capitalist redundancy. The greeting by name when buying vegetables at Rocky Montana, the organic French bakery, next to the EcoVert coop. Tantalizing used books next to the refurbished retro 60 furniture store. A line of restaurants crossing various oceanic divides all gently strung in a non sequential chain of delightful eatable items: Indian, Jamaican, Korean, French, Italian, Persian. Intersperse graffiti across the brown to red brick hue of walls. A grocery where all the items take me back to Asia, across the street from the best middle eastern market, with shishas perched next to backgammon sets in the glass window… the simple tangible presence of lives being lived, amidst cultural diversity, resisting that creeping sense of mass consumption and uniform production of identity.

by sarah