RACE RELATIONS
Author tackles small-scale personal issues and large-scale political ones
What does a mild racial encounter look like? How does it wear you down or erode you over time versus burning you up because of a bad verdict or because of a shooting? Ian Williams
Disorientation: Being Black in the World Ian Williams Random House Canada
There is an amusing passage in Ian Williams's book of essays, Disorientation: Being Black in the World, where he describes his interaction with a fiery, justice-seeking Margaret Atwood.
Well, it's amusing for the reader. It was perhaps a bit intimidating for Williams. The Toronto-based author and poet and Atwood were participating in an online discussion last summer. In the virtual “green room” away from the public, Williams told the 81-year-old literary icon about his struggles moving from Vancouver to Toronto. Most of this seems due to a staggeringly inept moving company that leaves him without furniture, pots and pans, a bed or much else for months on end during the pandemic.
Atwood is outraged and offers to intervene on his behalf, which Williams politely but repeatedly declines. Friendly and witty during the public conversation, she turns quite serious when discussing his moving disaster.
“Some people are just activists by nature and it doesn't matter what the injustice is, they are activists,” Williams says in an interview from Toronto, where he teaches creative writing at the University of Toronto. “She's got that spirit. Some of us are just content to let things happen to us.”
Disorientation mixes a broad analysis of systematic racism and what it means to grow up Black in Canada with these personal anecdotes. While obviously frustrating for him at the time, his dealings with the moving company are sprinkled throughout the back half of the book as a bit of dark comic relief for the reader. But while Williams eventually concludes that the incident has more to do with dealing with a particularly bad moving company than his race, it does lead to some deeper themes that are central to Disorientation and what he calls “the constant, ever-present low hum of race in my life.”
“What it allowed me to think about was home and relocation and being without your stuff,” says Williams, who will participate in an online conversation with author Omar El Akkad on Tuesday as part of Calgary's Wordfest 26@26 program. “What is owed to you and what is taken away from you and what do you possess? It's those kinds of things, kind of a metaphoric example of doing without and making compensation and what is in your control. I think I read that differently as a Black man. There's a kind of helplessness that I sometimes feel. Other people might just see it as terrible customer service. I still want some kind of justice and I guess it's more pointed for me. When you're constantly on the short end of the justice spectrum and then this furniture thing is like the last straw.”
It reflects the tone Williams adopts for Disorientation. Not unlike Desmond Cole in his 2020 book The Skin We're In: A Year of Black Resistance and Power, he thoroughly dismantles the myth that Canada has become a post-racial nation. As a Black man in Canada, Williams says he thinks race every day. He has experienced racism first hand.
In his essay The Ten Bullets of Whiteness, he explores how institutional discrimination is so deeply ingrained in our culture that those who benefit from it see as a natural order or fail to recognize it at all while people of colour feel hopeless under its weight. He writes about his own career and schooling, and how he was often the only Black person in the room in the academic world, something he refers to as “The Only.” He also writes from the unique perspective that his background allowed: He was born in Trinidad and lived part of his childhood in the Black majority, moved to Canada where he was definitely in the minority and lived for a period in the United States where he had a different sort of outsider status as a Black man from the Caribbean. So Williams certainly doesn't shy away from heavy topics. But, as he writes near the beginning of the book, while he may think about race “several times a day,” he rarely externalizes it. “I care about race, but I don't march in the streets with homemade signs,” he writes.
“I'm hoping for the book to address people in this middle zone, who don't really believe the inflammatory rhetoric suits them or they can engage in that properly,” he says. “I'm of that mode too. Although racist things have happened to me my whole life, I haven't protested them, I haven't angrily done these things about them. But they do have an effect. What does a mild racial encounter look like? How does it wear you down or erode you over time versus burning you up because of a bad verdict or because of a shooting? There are so many other ways that race operates. When we look at the high-pitched tenor of race all the time, we neglect the more insidious and low-grade and equally damaging ways that race moves through our lives.”
Williams began penning the essays in the summer of 2020, putting aside his work on a followup to his 2019 Giller-winning debut novel Reproduction.
“There were wildfires, there was COVID raging and all of these justice movements and protests happening,” Williams says. “There was a kind of urgency. I had to put aside that novel to write this non-fiction. Obviously as a Black man, I've thought about race every day of my life. It's not anything new. But what's different I think is a kind of willingness in the world to pay attention right now and also a coalescence of my age, I'm 42 right now, with a generational movement. Every generation has this struggle with inequity and right now I think my generation is facing it. The questions that come out of that are: What are we responsible for? How do we relate to the past? How is the past still operating on us? What power do we have to make systemic change?”
Disorientation benefits from Williams's broad talents as a writer.
The three essays at the beginning of Disorientation analytically tackle those big, universal questions about institutional and cultural whiteness and the idea of “disorientation.”
In the rest of the book, he moves to more personal anecdotes about his own experiences or those of his family and friends that have caused that disorientation, including a story about his Grade 6 music teacher suggesting his lips were too big to play French horn or the financial and emotional consequences of a Black friend's encounter with a white police officer after being pulled over for speeding.
“I hope we can see this dynamic between the small-scale personal and the large-scale political reverberating back and forth,” he says. “So I start with the big ideas but then go to `Hey, this is how my niece participates in this' or `I'm moving across the country and is it a racial encounter or not a racial encounter that my furniture is not getting to me?”