Black
Writers
Matter
Black Writers Matter
edited by
Whitney
French
© 2019 University of Regina Press
All rights reserved. No part of this work covered by the copyrights hereon may be reproduced or used in any form or by any means — graphic, electronic, or mechanical — without the prior written permission of the publisher. Any request for photocopying, recording, taping or placement in information storage and retrieval systems of any sort shall be directed in writing to Access Copyright.
Printed and bound in Canada at Marquis. The text of this book is printed on 100% post-consumer recycled paper with earth-friendly vegetable-based inks.
Cover design: Duncan Campbell, University of Regina Press
Text design: John van der Woude, jvdw Designs
Copy editor: Marionne Cronin
Proofreader: Kristine Douaud
Library and Archives Canada Cataloguing in Publication
Black writers matter / edited by Whitney French.
Issued in print and electronic formats. isbn 978-0-88977-616-6 (softcover).—isbn 978-0-88977-617-3 (pdf).—isbn 978-0-88977-618-0 (html)
1. Creative nonfiction, Canadian (English). 2. Canadian literature (English)—Black Canadian authors. 3. Canadian prose literature (English)—21st century. i. French, Whitney, 1987-, editor
PS8235.B53B53 2019 C810.8'0896071 C2018-906025-5 C2018-906026-3
10 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1
University of Regina Press, University of Regina
Regina, Saskatchewan, Canada, s4s 0a2
tel: (306) 585-4758 fax: (306) 585-4699
web: www.uofrpress.ca
We acknowledge the support of the Canada Council for the Arts for our publishing program. We acknowledge the financial support of the Government of Canada. / Nous reconnaissons l’appui financier du gouvernement du Canada. This publication was made possible with support from Creative Saskatchewan’s Book Publishing Production Grant Program.
Contents
Acknowledgements
Foreword
Performing Miracles: Black Writers Matter by Dr. Afua Cooper
Introduction
The Act of Gathering by Whitney French
EVERYDAY PEOPLE
What Will You Tell Your Children by Simone Makeba Dalton
Glass Lasagna by Cason Sharpe
Hunger Games: A Quiz by Rowan McCandless
Being a Shark: Reflections on Blackness in Canadian Wildernessby Phillip Dwight Morgan
Heavy Scarves by Fatuma Adar
In Chayo’s Cab: An Interview with Chayo Moses Nywello by Whitney French
Uninterrupted by Méshama Rose Eyob-Austin
Progress Report by Christina Brobby
LETTERS TO COMMUNITY
Diasporic Narratives: Lived Experiences of Canadians of African Descent in Rural New Brunswick by Mary Louise McCarthy
Paternal Blood Memory: Volume 1 by Kyla Farmer
On Haunted Places: Encountering Slavery in Quebec by
Délice Mugabo
The Place That Is Supposed To Be Safe by Angela Wright
Shame and the Kinship of Sexual Violence by Rachel Zellers
As Long As They Think They Are White by Scott Fraser
A Family Complication: Writing About Race as a Black, South Asian Woman by Eternity Martis
My Ancestors’ Wildest Dreams: Interviews of Identity, Selfhood and Joy with Afro-Indigenous Youth by
Shammy Belmore, Simone Blais, Wenzdae Brewster, Kaya Joan
BLACK WRITERS MATTER
Sister Vision: Black Women and Women of Colour Press by
Makeda Silvera
Becoming Poetry: Queer Blackness as the Full Absorption of Light by Sapphire Woods
Memorialty by Christelle Saint-Julien
Fiction Is Not Frivolous: A Lecture by H. Nigel Thomas
A Picture of Words by Angela Walcott
Demand Space by Chelene Knight
Black/Disabled/Artist by Brandon Wint
About the Authors
Acknowledgements
Give thanks to the Creator, first and foremost. I’d also like to acknowledge my ancestors, known and unknown; I dedicate any writing I create to you. And to acknowledge my literary guides—those walking this Earth and those who’ve transitioned to other realms. You left artifacts of writing to remind me of my humanity. To my parents, Angella and Lascelle French, for their unwavering support. Every story presented in the anthology, I picture you both reading it. You two are my compass. So much love to my sisters Carla and Nicolette, who are the most hard-core cheerleaders a girl could ask for. And to my best friend Anita Abbasi, who holds so much emotional space for me, always.
I’d like to thank the University of Regina Press and Bruce Walsh for presenting this exciting project to me. Much love to Scott Fraser, my anthology’s ‘midwife,’ endless gratitude to my mentor David Chariandy whose generosity and encouragement not only helped me through early developmental stages but also allowed me to focus on the heart of what this work truly is. A thousand thanks to my P.C.O. crew for feedback on early versions of the introduction: Gwen Benaway, Alicia Elliot, Kim Senklip Harvey, Rebecca Salazar Leon, Carrianne Leung, Canisia Lubrin, Minelle Mahtani, Eli Tareq, Cason Sharpe, Natalie Wee, and Jenny Heijun Wills. Respect and thanks to M. NourbeSe Philip for sage advice around writing and anthology work. Thank you to Sommer Blackman for reminding me to fight for what I deserve. Respect, love, and inspiration to Dawn Dumont, Night Kinistino, Lindsay Knight, Erica Violet Lee, Nickita Longman, and Sylvia McAdam. Miigwetch to Jamaias DaCosta, who helped immensely with coordinating the “My Ancestors’ Wildest Dream” interviews. A heart-filled thanks to Dr. Afua Cooper for making time to write the foreword. To Lily Quan for recommending Black writers up north. Also big up Dalton Higgins for being a sounding board for so many frazzled ideas in my head. So much gratitude to Angela Wright for ranting alongside me during the most frustrating phases of this anthology. To my literary soul sister Sheniz Janmohamed, who forever surprises me with her love, verve, and passion for life.
Thank you to anyone on social media who spread the word about the call-out and thought that this project was worth sharing with their networks. This anthology wouldn’t have happened without you. Honest. And of course, to all the contributors for trusting me with your writing. I hope I honoured your stories. You all inspire me so.
And give thanks to my brain…for not exploding.
FOREWORD
Performing Miracles: Black Writers Matter
— Dr. Afua Cooper —
Whitney French has performed a small miracle by bringing these stories in Black Writers Matter into a single anthology. This collection stands out from previous literary anthologies in that all the stories are written from the first-person perspective, and thus are extremely personal. And yet they are simultaneously political because Black writing by its very nature is political.
These voices range across age and space. This collection is a rich potpourri, a jambalaya of Black Canadian voices. These stories include memoirs, interviews, questionnaires, meditations, and other creative non-fiction pieces. The writers are high school and university students, artists, academics, cab drivers, poets, dreamers, lawyers, and community workers. They come from diverse parts of the Black Diaspora, but they and their families now converge and live in Canada, whether it’s for a few decades or a few centuries.
As I read each story, the James Baldwin quote that “to be a Negro…and to be relatively conscious is to be in a rage almost all the tim
e” resounded in my head. All the writers in the collection touch a place of rage in their writing as they narrate, chronicle, and relate their experiences as Black, gendered, and sexualized individuals living in different places in Canada. In fact, as shown by Angela Wright’s story “The Place That Is Supposed To Be Safe,” by the time some Black children are in grade six they experience rage on a daily basis.
It was a privilege to be asked to write this foreword. As I read the pages, I realized that I was holding sacred text. Reading these stories gave me both joy and grief. Laughter broke out unexpectedly as I read Dwight Philip Morgan’s “Becoming a Shark,” as he cycled uphill to Whistler, BC, asking himself “What am I doing here?” as he tried to prove his Canadianness. I was moved to tears as I read Rowan McCandless “Hunger Games,” a startling and intensely personal piece on anorexia and bulimia, and Rachel Zellers’s “Shame and the Kinship of Sexual Violence” that speaks to intergeneration shame and sexual trauma within Black families. Brandon Wint stills the breath with his beautiful meditation on being Black, a poet, and disabled. And Meshama Eyob Austin, on the cusp of her glorious womanhood, through the help of her mother, discovers her voice, and challenges a school teacher who refuses to attend to the complaints of racism from her students. And who would not be moved by the image of Mary Louise McCarthy walking through abandoned cemeteries in New Brunswick, looking for evidence of her Black ancestors that white society sought to bury forever? We are doubly blessed with the wisdom of the s/ages from seasoned writer H. Nigel Thomas, who reminds us that for many Black writers literature has always served as a liberatory tool. Scott Fraser urges us to remember that racism is really white people’s problem because they created it, but he also advises that we must always, echoing Baldwin, live our life as if we have a right to it. Kyla Farmer brilliantly uses a multidisciplinary approach to tell a story of her African Nova Scotian paternal roots.
A cab driver is reminded of a locale in Ethiopia when he lands at a village in British Columbia. And by doing so links African memories with the new ones he is creating in the Diaspora. And this is one of the geniuses of this collection. How often do we hear the narratives that Black cabbies have to tell? They are cab drivers after all. They should just drive. But Whitney French thought otherwise, and in her decision to interview a Black cabbie, a new world is revealed.
If there is a unifying theme in this anthology, it is the pain and burden of anti-black racism. Each writer tells us in a different way how painful it is for them as they realize, sometimes abruptly, sometimes over a long period, that white Canadian society views Black people as inferior beings and the damage to Black psyches and bodies that this view has wrought. But as Alice Walker grasps: we carry within us the medicine for our pain.* And that is what Black Writers Matter does: it presents the pain, mourning, and sorrow, but each story carries within it its own medicine, its own balm, its own antidote. And that is part of the small miracle that French has performed.
Each writer draws on their own lineage of the past and steers their vision to champion and create a revolutionary afrofuture. And so we write. These writings come out of our interior spaces, our humanity and loves writ large; but the dialectic is ever present. In the outer world: we march, protest, revolt, rebel, rage, sing, drum, firebun, and fight like raas.
These stories remind me of my own lineage, history, trajectory, immigrant experience, and coming into my own as a writer. I smile as I hear some of the writers, like French, talking about their own hesitant journey toward embracing the writer within themselves, and coming upon that stunning realization that their writing matters. French is to be commended for giving this gift of an anthology to the world.
Afua Cooper
Halifax, Nova Scotia
August 2018
INTRODUCTION
The Act of Gathering
— Whitney French —
I am six years old:
tracing the rings of a tree stump, a crass cut, its former self a hazard, being so close to the playground and so close to a phone pole. My fingers follow the rings of the creamy sapwood, counting an uncountable number for a kindergartener, whispering guesses of the tree’s age. The pith is cracked and black, a contrast to the smooth texture of the inner flesh, all the while the outer bark rubs against my socked foot.
As a small-town Black kid wanting to write, surviving off the works of Toni Morrison and James Baldwin and in later years M. NourbeSe Philip and George Elliott Clarke with vision and scope and subject matter far beyond my understanding, I was granted strength and love from Black people through words.
And so my mantra throughout the building of this anthology is: every day, everyday. The rhythmic duality grounds me. The first ‘every day’ is a constant reminder that I am and will always be Black, every day. My blackness doesn’t change, it doesn’t grow, it doesn’t fade. It is my everyday and so I must meditate on my relationship to that reality and to the works that I come in contact with constantly.
The second ‘everyday’ is a reminder of the people, and a reminder to self to cultivate community. Parents, children, workers, teachers, lovers, dreamers—everyday people are the soul-blood of Black Writers Matter. Authors will be forever canonized, but who will document everyone else?
I am six years old:
scanning the world around me, the bigness of the playground, which is near the centre of town, which is a town hugged tightly by a canal, which is a canal that is wrapped around a marsh, one of many that make up the green belt in Southern Ontario, which is of a territory that is not mine. It hardly feels half-mine. I’m scanning the world around me, looking for colours that match me (yesterday I used up the all black and brown and orange crayons in the mesh basket), colours like this dark pith or this burnt almond leaf or this wing tip of a sparrow or this nut brown of an acorn—that matches me.
The weight of an anthology is to be acknowledged and honoured but it is also a form of canonizing, which by its very nature includes and excludes. My intention is that this collection—far from any definitive—acts as an invitation to read, share, and tell stories of Black narratives that are close to the bone. I am reminding myself to carve space for unique tellers, overlooked tellers. The process of interviewing, blog-hunting, and excavating stories in unexpected places was integral. The anthology as a text acts as a gathering and actions me to gather.
I am six years old:
collecting bits of things that I can see in me, that elicit temporary comfort, but all my gatherings of colours and phrases and images from tv, from strangers, from friends, from family, fall flat against the starkness of white-Bradford.
Born without a community of Black folks outside my kin, I’ve been compulsively collecting and creating communities of colour, and Black communities especially, since leaving my hometown. I am compelled to look at the ways stories ravel and unravel through time and even in spite of time. Non-linear expression encourages a playfulness, a serious investigation, a more embodied way of dealing with text without chronological predictability and hindrance. I am no longer obsessed with ‘accuracy’ or the weight of any Eurocentric understandings of ‘nonfiction.’ Instead, I turn my attention to multiple truths that surface from these tellings and try to expand the very container that we argue, disrupt, challenge, and recreate. This practice generates boundless room to parse out our own personal myths and our own centralized truths.
I am six years old:
make-believing all the things outside of my present reality, blowing up the universe beyond the realm of teachers who do not place value on Black History Month, of friends’ parents who think I steal from their homes, or of adults who tell me that slavery “was a good thing” since Black people came to know Jesus Christ as their Lord and Saviour; blowing up the universe beyond the confines of a town so small and so big at the same time.
A part of me wanted this anthology to have the energy of a big dinner where everyone is loosely related, some
folks know each other, some do not. We’ve all come from different places, and all have made long journeys to get here; sitting inside of someone else’s experience through the written word.
I am six years old:
listening to my second-grade teacher tell me of a story of how a Black girl from Bradford can become a writer, if she wants to. It is the most impactful story of my life. It is the only thing, the biggest thing, I can gather and it feels mine.
Fully mine.
The big family dinner thing, I know now, is less about the illusion of unity and more about the immediate and undeniable truths of our stories. Our plainness and extraordinariness. Our mundane disasters and collective devastations. Our stories are our survival and to slap lofty ideals of coherence and conclusiveness would be false, a distancing from ‘nonfiction.’
So I invite readers to shift/rattle/augment their understanding of creative nonfiction—which often appears in the form of an essay that proves a point—to a blending of multiple genres. This blending is organically Canadian. A true multiverse of cultures that doesn’t ignore systemic oppressions, unlike the branded benevolent multiculturalism we’ve been fed for far too long.
Maybe it is unfair to say—or too fair to say—that collecting bits of things, gathering, and amassing is a process that feels particular to the Black Canadian experience. By showing our experiences in its multitudes and smashing the monolith, Black Writers Matter injects new meaning into the word diversity; it harbours a sacredness and an everydayness that offers Black people dignity. Six-year-old Whitney, so desperate for validation, has grown up. I’m not interested in asking people to see our humanity. I’m simply here to celebrate it. Read on, and celebrate alongside me.
Black Writers Matter Page 1