Author Esi Edugyan drawn to stories outside the margins
Esi Edugyan knows what it’s like to be an outsider.
The daughter of Ghanaian immigrants who had immigrated to the western Canadian city of Calgary — in a province, Alberta, that is sometimes called “the Texas of Canada” — she has rarely been able to easily blend in. She’s tapped into that wellspring of otherness over the course of her three novels, including her first in 2004, “The Second Life of Samuel Tyne,” about a black family in rural Alberta in the ’60s, and the widely acclaimed “Half-Blood Blues,” a lyrical chronicle of black jazz musicians caught in the nightmare of Nazi Germany that was shortlisted for the Man Booker Prize in 2011.
In her latest, “Washington Black,” she turns to the 19th century to tell a story of a young slave named Washington — “Wash” for short — who, thanks to an inventor and abolitionist named Christopher Wilde, ends up fleeing on an odyssey that takes him from the shackles of Barbados to the freedom of the Arctic and Morocco. It’s loosely inspired by Victorian England’s real-life Tichborne case in which a former Jamaican slave living in England, Andrew Bogle, was sent by the family for whom he had long worked as a valet to Australia to identify a man some believed to be a long-missing heir named Roger Tichborne.
But after completing most of a draft that hewed closely to history, Edugyan — who appears Monday at Houston’s Cullen Performance Hall as part of the Inprint Margarett Root Brown Reading Series — decided to dispense with the details of that particular story.
“I was more interested in the psychology of going from one very predetermined life as a slave — and he’d been born on a plantation and seen horrible deaths and probably just assumed that he was also going to die probably unnaturally and young — to being put in a place that was just so different from everything he’d known, linguistically, geographically, climate and culturally,” Edugyan said by phone from her home in Victoria, British Columbia. “You know, I was just more interested in that, and so that became my focus. I completely abandoned the framework of Tichborne.”
In fact, at first, she hadn’t planned on writing a slave narrative at all, and still doesn’t really consider it such. “It wasn’t conceived as a slave story. I think if I had thought of it that way from the very outset, I think it would have been very daunting, and I don’t know if I would have been able to persevere,” she said. “But because I was looking at this very specific character and his circumstances, and I knew that he would leave the plantation at one point, I was looking at it as being more like a post-slavery narrative than a book about slavery. I was able to get my mind around that. … (But) all the punishments described in the book are taken from life. … When you’re researching this material, obviously, it weighs on you.” Growing up black and Canadian
Though writing from the perspective of the outsider is not something Edugyan says she does consciously, she concedes it’s an inescapable element in her work. “This pattern of the outsider is something that I can understand looking back over the last three novels,” she said. “It certainly wasn’t in the forefront of my mind when I was writing any of the books.”
But she says she is drawn to stories about those on the margins, as when she first read about Alberta’s early black settlements, an idea that became the basis for “The Second Life of Samuel Tyne.”
“I was really, really, really floored,” she recalled. “I think maybe I’m attracted to those stories because I was — I wouldn’t say marginalized, I wouldn’t use that word — but I certainly felt a bit apart.”
Black Canadians make up less than 3 percent of Canada’s population of just over 36 million, with most in the eastern provinces of Ontario, Québec and Nova Scotia, which were either the terminus for the Underground Railroad or have been magnets for immigration from the Caribbean. Calgary, more than 2,000 miles west of Toronto, saw much less of this activity. So, growing up there had its challenges.
“There was a sense of being very much the lone figure,” she said. “It’s difficult because you feel a little bit representative of a whole, and people are looking to you that way. I think as a kid that can be a bit daunting. I think obviously that affects my vision when it comes to what I want to explore … I haven’t lived there in so long, and I understand that it’s quite a bit more multicultural and quite different. But certainly, in the early ’80s, yeah, there was not a lot of racial diversity.
“It was a very, very conservative province in general. In terms of race relations, I grew up feeling a bit of a curiosity. You walk down the street and people would be turning to look. … As a child, it can’t help but inform your psyche a bit.”
Going to Ghana for the first time in 2007 with her family proved to be both strikingly foreign and familiar.
“We looked as though we belonged in terms of our features, but people could tell right away that ‘You’re not from here,’ even before we opened our mouths,” she remembered. “There was a sense of — I had the same feeling (as in Canada), it was very distinct. We definitely stood out in some kind of indiscernible way. … We understood that we were not a part of this culture in a way. We were both a part of it and not a part of it. At some point, somebody pointed at me and referred to me as ‘oburoni,’ which is white person. … That was really funny.”
Edugyan dealt with some of these vexing cross-cultural issues in her 2014 nonfiction work, “Dreaming of Elsewhere: Observations of Home.” Yet, the more she travels the world, the more she’s thankful for having Canadian roots, no matter how many alienating moments the country may have caused her in the past.
“Obviously, no place is perfect. We still have a long way to go with aboriginal people and just race relations in general but … I’ve lived and traveled to a great many places in the world, and I do think that, speaking as an African-Canadian, maybe we’re doing a better job of it than certain other places,” she said. “It’s the desire to meet or try and live up to that stereotype of the happy multicultural nation. I think that’s good.” All in the family
Edugyan isn’t the only writer in her household. She’s married to poet/novelist Steven Price, a professor of poetry and literature at the University of Victoria. Having a kindred spirit as a spouse has been essential for her own creativity.
“We definitely are deep into each other’s work,” she said. “His editorial skills are just so finely honed, so he’ll read over several drafts of every one of my novels … I think the novels would be completely different novels without his input. He’s been so instrumental in my editorial process.”
Having a child in 2011 changed things a bit, not in terms of what she writes but when and where. She used to write only in the quietude of late nights. A newborn made that impossible.
“I’m able to write in places that I couldn’t do it before,” she said with a laugh. “So I can write in hotel rooms. I’ve written on planes. … Before, I had to have complete silence, and if somebody coughed in the next room, it would drive me crazy. … Now, it’s a good skill to be able to write with the noise and chaos.”