Reading Toronto: The Black Experience
February 25, 2014 | Winona | Comments (0)
Did you know that Toronto was the first city in Canada to officially recognize Black History Month?
In the 1950s, the Canadian Negro Women's Association successfully petitioned Toronto City Council to recognize Black History Week. In 1979, thanks to advocacy by the newly formed Ontario Black History Society, February was proclaimed Black History Month in the City of Toronto, and later proclaimed provincially in 1993 and across Canada in 1995.
The history of the Black community in Toronto has its origins in the early settlement of the city, when the first African Canadian residents arrived with the British and United Empire Loyalist settlers. In 1799, 15 Black residents were living in Toronto (then York), and by 1837 there were 50 families. Today, Toronto's Black community includes the descendents of those early residents, as well as those of fugitive slaves from America in the 1800s and migrants from Africville in Nova Scotia or southwestern Ontario in the 1900s, plus more recent immigrants who have come from Caribbean, African, and Latin American countries in the 20th and 21st centuries.
In celebration of Black History Month, and to honour the experiences of Toronto's African-Canadian and Carribean-Canadian communities, I offer you this selection of fiction and non-fiction books by some of Toronto's great Black storytellers. You can read them any month of the year.
The Refugee: Narratives of Fugitive Slaves in Canada edited by Benjamin Drew, with an introduction by George Elliott Clarke
This collection of interviews with fugitive slaves, first published in 1856, includes the stories of ten men living in Toronto. The book is plainly propagandistic: it condemns slavery in the United States and portrays Canada as a paradise, forgetting that slavery was legal here until 1834. But it is also, as George Elliott Clarke points out in his introduction, a fascinating collection of "settler narratives" that "are also great reads. They exhibit the rough intrigue and derring-do of historical romance, as well as the Byzantine traps and torments of the Gothic."
A Black Man's Toronto, 1914-1980: The Reminiscences of Harry Gairey, edited and with an introduction by Donna Hill
Harry Gainey was born in Jamaica in 1898, moved to Cuba as a boy, and came to Canada in 1914 on his own at the age of 16. He soon settled in Toronto where he found employment with the Canadian Pacific Railway as a sleeping-car porter, then helped to organize the Brotherhood of Sleeping Car Porters, worked to make changes to Canada's immigration laws, and went on to become a senior statesman in the city's Black community. This wonderful oral history is transcribed from nine hours of interviews, and offers insight into daily life in Toronto and its emergent Black community, as well as life on the railway, and the casual discrimination and systemic racism he experienced. You can read a partial excerpt of the book here.
The Meeting Point by Austin Clarke
This is the first novel in the "Toronto trilogy" (the others are Storm of Fortune and The Bigger Light) about the experiences of a group of West Indian immigrants, their friends, lovers, relations, and employers, in late 1950s Toronto. The story centres on Bernice, a Barbadian woman employed as a live-in maid by a wealthy family, and the at first comic, then tragic, events that unfold when cultures collide. Bernice's fictional experience is modelled on the real experiences of women during the notorious Domestic Workers Scheme, in which Caribbean women age 18-35 were recruited to live in Canada as domestics, thereby allowing Canadian women to enter the workforce. Austin Clarke himself came to Canada in 1955 from Barbados, to study at the University of Toronto, and is considered the first Black writer to achieve major attention in Canada. In 2002, Clarke won the Giller Prize for his ninth novel, The Polished Hoe, and in 2005 he won the Toronto Book Award for More.
Sleep On, Beloved by Cecil Foster
Cecil Foster's second novel also uses the Domestic Workers Scheme as a starting point to explore the complex culture of racism experienced by immigrants from the Caribbean diaspora. Ona Morgan leaves behind her Jamaican home and her baby for a new life in Canada. When she and her daughter are reunited in Toronto, twelve years later, the two must struggle to reconnect with one another and with their cultural heritage. Sleep On, Beloved was shortlisted for the 1995 Trillium Award. Foster has a new novel out this year, Independence, and it's already getting great reviews.
Soucouyant by David Chariandy (e-book | talking book | book club set)
Set in Scarborough in the 1970s, David Chariandy's debut novel centres on Adele, a Black woman of mixed race who immigrated from Trinidad in the 1960s and now suffers from early onset dementia. The story is told from the perspective of the son who has returned to care for his deteriorating mother and the collapsing family home. In Caribbean folklore, a soucouyant is an evil bloodsucking spirit; the publisher notes that here the soucouyant is a symbol "of the distant and dimly remembered legacies that continue to haunt the Americas." This beautifully told, complex novel was nominated for ten literary prizes, including the 2008 Toronto Book Award. Look for Chariandy's second novel, Brother, to be published sometime next year.
What We All Long For by Dionne Brand (ebook | talking book)
The city is a major character in Dionne Brand's third novel, which won the 2006 Toronto Book Award. This book gives voice to the experiences of four twenty-something second-generation Torontonians - Tuyen, Carla, Oku, and Jackie - as they struggle with identity, displacement, and desire. There are are also brief, evocative glimpses of Toronto's Black communities of the past, such as passages that describe nights out at the Paramount Tavern and the Elephant Walk Club, two infamous clubs on Spadina Avenue in the 1970s. Brand is also an award-winning poet whose long poem thirsty also explores the many cultural intersections in Toronto.
T-Dot Griots: An Anthology of Toronto's Black Storytellers, edited by Karen Richardson and Steven Green
From the afterword: "We are Toronto's Black storytellers; standing together in hopes that the world might see us, Africans in a foreign land where transplanted roots fight for a foothold in the snow. This winter I am hopeful. I look forward to embracing fellow artists and friends. I am warmed by the fire in their words, soothed by the heat of their voices. From the Bluffs to the Caledon Hills, the Pickering power plant to Sky Dome, right up to the Maraine, my words find residence. I hear the crackling syllables on open stages and I know something is happening. Our words live here and in case you haven't noticed - so do we."
You may also enjoy these books by more of Toronto's Black storytellers:
- Women Do This Every Day poems by legendary Toronto dub poet Lillian Allen
- Motion in Poetry poems by second-generation Torontonian, hip hop artist, and author Motion
- Brown Girl in the Ring Toronto in dystopian future fiction by science fiction and fantasy author Nalo Hopkinson
- The Heart Does Not Bend a novel, set in Jamaica and Toronto, about family, betrayal, and love by Makeda Silvera, co-founder of Sister Vision Press
For related reading, check out Katherine's post Canadian and Black on the Toronto Reference Library blog.
You may also be interested in the Toronto Public Library's collection of materials on the Black historical and cultural experience, with special emphasis on Canadian material: The Rita Cox Black and Caribbean Heritage Collection.
Do you have a favourite book about the Black experience in Toronto? Please share it in the comments section below!