THEY SAID THIS WOULD BE FUN

By TAPAS EASWAR, home page image by JORGE FAKHOURI FILHO on Pexels

They Said This Would Be Fun by Eternity Martis, McClelland & Stewart, $25. Over the last few months, I've been working my way through memoirs about the experiences people of colour have in North America, tackling subjects such as the BLM movement, racism, white supremacy  the governments, and bigoted polices that help maintain the incredible inequality between those who are and are not white.

In They Said This Would Be Fun, Eternity Martis has written a smart, moving, and extremely relevant memoir about her experiences as a mixed-race Black female student in a predominantly white university.

Martis shares compelling stories and statistics about racism, sexual assault, and rape culture in Canadian post-secondary institutions, often times surprising me with things I wasn’t even remotely aware of.

As I read, I constantly found myself reflecting on my own past experiences as I moved through high-school and university in a new light.

Of all the books, videos, and social media posts I’ve consumed, Martis’ writing is what I connected to the most for two reasons. First, she was attending university right around the same time I was, which made it easier to place myself in her shoes and empathize with what she had to experience. Second, her focus on the Canadian experience is something we don’t often hear, especially with our neighbours to the south having a much larger presence in our lives than we’d like to admit.

While this book is not PG, nor overtly graphic, Martis holds no punches, and that makes for a tough read at times, but one that is absolutely essential. It doesn’t matter if you’re currently a student, already graduated, a teacher, or a parent – everyone needs to read this book.

CONNECT THE DOTS

This Red Line Goes Straight To Your Heart by Madhur Anand, Strange Light, $24.95. Described as a memoir in halves, this is generational story-telling about the partition of India and immigration.

On one side of the line that divides this book, we meet a young couple that is drawn together as a country splits in two. We follow them as they move to Canada and raise their children in a mining town, in Indigenous settlements and in crowded apartments.

Madhur Anand presents the trauma of the partition without embellishment, letting the tales she has heard convey the tragedy.

So many empty houses. So many empty subsets. Wedding bangles divided, some buried under the soil in Muslim friends’ farms in Pakistan and some thrown from train windows in India to avoid attracting the native evil eye. Villages were like dice rolled across the map.

And the little joys of a life that follows when the uprooted find room to grow again. Of her mother meeting a boy called Ruskin Bond in Dehradun and of her father being welcomed by a stranger he called out of a telephone book on landing in Canada. And then, a few years later, of their welcoming in turn, another immigrant from India into their home. 

When we turn the book over, we see how old hurt and rage is felt and interpreted by the next generation. “What do you know?” her mother asks Anand, when she begins chronicling her family history.

I wonder whether every single person in my family has some mild from of schizophrenia. Bhanu Kapil wrote about the tendency for this to happen in the Indian diaspora in Schizophrene.

Anand, the inaugural director of the Guelph Institute of Environmental Research, is also a poet and in this book, she weaves together poetry and science to navigate from the past to the present to beautiful effect.

For a less-scientifically minded person, however, it can get a tad too technical at times.

And as someone born and raised in Canada, Anand displays the disconnect between memory and knowledge. Old songs that she might have heard her parents hum, for instance, get fractured in translation.

Jiya bekarar hai, aayi bahar hai becomes Jeeya bekare hai, surya aya bahar hai...

Or, Thum rooti ro, main manatha ro, which she translates as Go on, be as stubborn as a root. It should, of course, have been Tum roothi raho, main manata rahoon or, I’ll cajole you out of your sulk!

Her mother talks about her masi’s father – wouldn’t that then be her mother’s father, too? Her grandfather?

A relative, Jagannath, becomes Juggernath, a hybrid of the original and the English juggernaut.

But these are minor quibbles, easily overlooked, as one immerses oneself in the history of this family of immigrants that carries the scars of their time as refugees in another time, another place. The memories and the pain, passed down from one generation to the next.

Fun fact # 1: I learn from the book that the Ojibwe script is related to Sanskrit. That is was developed by an early settler named James Evans, who, having lived in British India, was familiar with Devnagri script.

Fun fact #2: Virus is from the Sanskrit word visa, meaning poison.

This Red Line Goes Straight To Your Heart was selected as one of Top Books of 2020 by Quill & Quire.

A LAMENT...AND HOPE

We Might Have...by Kusum Lata Sawhney, $4.99. We rarely review self-published books because most are not edited or proofed by professionals and tend to be riddled with errors.

And this has its share, but it’s hard to pass on one from an author who has garnered glowing reviews in international press. In fiction and poetry, Kusum Lata Sawhney explores and weaves her stories from real life issues that surround us. Poverty, rape, unhappy marriages, social stigma, incest, sexuality, the right to have a voice. Her latest is a cautionary collection of poems of our times.

A collection titled We Might Have... might lead one to think it is a lament, a despairing cry about what we might have foreseen and perhaps prevented. Or at least been better prepared for.

We might have seen it coming

A red rage so full of fury

But while it is that, to some extent, it is also about the stages the world has witnessed this past year. All the way from disbelief to shock and horror to a tentative hope.

We might have seen it coming

A different world, a novel approach

We might feel the hiss of spray

As it disinfects and keeps us in control and away

We might chant mantras day and night

And cover our faces when in sight

We might no longer hug and press

Our bodies at a distance remain the best

We might have seen it coming

A different world, a novel approach

Our salvation, she writes, lies in transforming ourselves and ushering in a kinder, more thoughtful world.

WHAT HAVE WE LEARNT?

A Troublesome Inheritance by Nicholas Wade, Penguin, $19. First published in 2014, A Troublesome Inheritance got into trouble right away for daring to tackle a subject most – even academics – shy away from.

In this updated edition, Nicholas Wade defines the purpose of his book, which was “to show how evolutionary differences between human populations can be described without providing the slightest support for racism, the view that there is a hierarchy of races with some superior to others.”

Which is not to say there are no differences between races, he asserts. The differences exist because, once spread across the globe, the various human populations have necessarily taken different evolutionary paths.

Race is not a social construct, he writes, contrary to what many social scientists hold. However, “scientific fact only emphasizes the genetic unity of humankind”.

Anyone who has done one of those genetic tests just for fun and discovered ancestors in far-flung corners of the globe would agree.

A TREAT

Sanditon by Jane Austen, Penguin, $19.99. Young Charlotte Heywood is transported from her rural home to a newly established seaside resort where she meets a glorious cast of hypochondriacs and speculators – and the handsome Sidney Parker. 

Written in the last months of her life, Sanditon reveals an Austen contemplating a changing society with her characteristic scepticism and amusement. This edition also includes the early epistolary novel Lady Susan and the delightful fragment, The Watsons – a real treat for Janeites.

EWWW!

Smell My Foot by Cece Bell, Candlewick Press, $14.99. A hilarious exchange between Chick and Brain on what constitutes polite conversation. Anyone who has seen a child giggle over someone pretending to sniff her foot will enjoy reading this book with little ones.

TEEN REVIEW

By HARNOOR KEHAL

The Lost Twin by Sophie Cleverly, HarperCollins Children’s Books, $10.99. The Lost Twin by Sophie Cleverly is about twins  Scarlet and Ivy. Ivy Grey, the twin who at first was not accepted into Rook-wood School, must now attend it in place of her sister Scarlet Grey, who mysteriously vanished in the school.

Ivy is forced to take Scarlet’s place by the school’s headmistress, Miss Fox, and impersonate her clever troublemaking sister, Scarlet. At Rookwood, Ivy discovers Scarlet’s secret diary that holds clues to Scarlet’s disappearance. As Ivy uncovers more clues, she realizes that Scarlet’s supposed death was not as it seems. She must now work with her intelligent friend and supportive ballet teacher to uncover what really happened to her lost twin.

The book was very enjoyable and kept me on the edge of my seat waiting to discover what clues Ivy would find next. It was fast paced until about halfway when the pace slowed down. There would be extended periods where Ivy is unable to find the next clue, causing the story to drag a bit. However, the author communicated the message – not to give up and pursue to determine the truth.

I would recommend this novel and the series to others interested in a bone-chilling mystery.

• Harnoor Kehal is a youth volunteer at Brampton Library.