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ESI EDUGYAN AND RINALDO WALCOTT

THE TRUTHTELLERS

Esi Edugyan is a two-time Giller Prize-winning Canadian fiction writer, for her novels Half-Blood Blues and Washington Black. Rinaldo Walcott, author of On Property, is the director of the Women and Gender Studies Institute at the University of Toronto.

This conversation is moderated by culture writer and podcast host Elamin Abdelmahmoud

I am really honoured to be having this chat with both of you. I want to talk about your books but also about ourselves and the context from where we’re writing from.

If y’all don’t mind, I want to start with asking about our different origins of Blackness. Esi, you were born in Calgary. Rinaldo, you came from Barbados. I was born in Sudan. That’s an interesting collection of access points to Blackness. I’d like to get some thoughts about how you conceive of being Black in Canada.

Esi Edugyan: I feel like it’s something that’s been ever-evolving with me, my relationship to my nation and my sense of belonging within it. My parents came from Ghana and I always had the sense, growing up in Calgary, that the small African diaspora population we were in constant connection to really felt like my core family. I never grew up with a sense of a larger extended family, they were always this nebulous presence across an ocean.

I took part in the Calgary Stampede every year, and these kinds of cultural touchstones and markers that really serve to connect you to the people around you, but I always had a sense of difference. There was a sense of this expectation for me to somehow conform to, or have emerged from this African-American idea of Blackness that people thought North American Blackness was about. And this was a stereotypical idea, of course, based on certain cultural imports, but I didn’t fit that mould either. It wasn’t until much later that I felt that Blackness is so large and it’s so deep. That’s something that I’ve taken upon myself to explore in my work. Rinaldo, what’s your sense of things? Rinaldo Walcott: There’s not a time in my life that I don’t know I’m Black. I was born in the Caribbean at the time of national independence and Black power. By the time I was 10, those things are well on their way, and part of those projects is to reconnect with a particular, imagined Africa: to know that there are Black people around the globe and especially in the Americas. Blackness to me has always been a global thing.

Arriving in Canada and encountering Black people from other parts of the world,

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2021-12-04T08:00:00.0000000Z

2021-12-04T08:00:00.0000000Z

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