Voices: Canadian Writers of African Descent

J.M. Perreault is an assistant professor of English at the University of
Calgary and the co-editor of Native Women of Western Canada: Writing the
Circle: An Anthology.

Poet, essayist, and activist Ayanna Black has compiled a fine collection
of poems and stories by 15 Canadian writers of the African diaspora.

Makeda Silvera’s “Her Head a Village” and Dany Laferriиre’s
“Why Must a Negro Writer Always Be Political?” address the internal
and external pressures to create only in accordance with conventional
political impulses of resistance. Other pieces leave overtly politicized
issues aside and speak of love, home, betrayal, and, most often, of
finding a language for the multiplicity of selves that are struggling
for voice here. Cyril Dabydeen cries out, “i am not west Indian / i am
not,” yet ends this poem, “i breathe harder / with my many selves, /
turning back.”

George Elliott Clarke gives us poems of passionate rigor and wit:
“Becoming fierce and fiercer for her, his measures / broke up sonnets
because they couldn’t accommodate / the immense pleasure of her
kiss.” Claire Harris’s exquisitely crafted “Under Black Light”
speaks in the voice of a woman whose children have been used sexually by
their father and his friends: “on the first Saturday of every month at
/ eight o’clock / the girl is yOurs / the boy is yOurs.” Other (and
happier) children’s worlds also appear here. Composer and poet
Frederick Ward’s formally playful story “Kitten Face” splices a
child’s obsession with his mother’s computer with the complex
mysteries of family life.

Voices covers an extraordinary amount of ground, both internal and
geographical, and helps us understand more fully what being a Canadian
writer means. Canadian literature courses need this book.