By Alexandra Yeboah
This month marks a new season and an occasion where storytellers worldwide observe International Literacy Day, which affirms literacy as a fundamental human right. In that spirit, we’re highlighting books by five acclaimed Black Canadian authors whose writing explores themes of family and belonging, identity, grief, colonialism, otherness, Blackness, race, and the search for meaning in times of chaos.
Our collection features multifaceted works that span memoir, autobiography, lyrical poetry, and hybrid forms, all of which demonstrate the many ways stories can take shape and transform, as well as the possibilities that exist within the literary landscape. We hope they inspire and empower you on your journey of self-discovery, while deepening your connection to our shared human experience.
1) Policing Black Lives by Robyn Maynard (Fernwood Publishing)
The bestselling first edition of Policing Black Lives became a mainstay of bookshelves and classrooms across North America and Europe as the first comprehensive account of the state-sanctioned surveillance, criminalization and punishment of Black lives in Canada. The revised and expanded edition updates the original text in the wake of global Black uprisings in 2020 and offers new insights on how to build livable futures without policing.
Delving behind Canada’s veneer of multiculturalism and tolerance, award-winning scholar and activist Robyn Maynard traces the afterlives of slavery across multiple institutions. Maynard sheds light on the state’s role in perpetuating colonial dispossession, racial profiling, police killings, incarceration, immigration detention, deportation, exploitative migrant labour practices, disproportionate child removal and the school-to-prison pipeline, as well as the ubiquity of Black resistance.
The first new chapter meticulously documents how half a century of police reforms have served to undermine Black freedom struggles while expanding the scope and scale of policing in Canadian society. In the second, Maynard advances a compelling vision for making policing obsolete and building new forms of safety.
Policing Black Lives is one of the FOLD’s 12 Books that Shaped the Way We Read.
2) Salvage: Readings from the Wreck by Dionne Brand (Knopf Canada)
Dionne Brand explores English and American literature, and the colonial aesthetic that shaped her sense of self and the world, of what was possible and what was not.
In Salvage: Readings from the Wreck, Dionne Brand’s first major book of non-fiction since her classic A Map to the Door of No Return, the acclaimed poet and novelist offers a bracing look at the intersections of reading and life, and of what remains in the wreck of empire. Blending literary criticism and autobiography-as-artifact, Brand reads Aphra Behn’s Oroonoko, Daniel Defoe’s Robinson Crusoe and Jane Austen’s Mansfield Park, among other still-widely studied works, to explore encounters with colonial, imperialist and racist tropes from the seventeenth to the nineteenth century—tropes that continue in new forms today. Brand vividly shows how contemporary practices of reading and writing are shaped by the narrative structures of these and related works; and explores how, in the face of this, one writes a narrative of Black life that attends to its own consciousness and expression.
With the power and eloquence of a great poet coupled with the rigour of a deep and subtle thinker, Brand reveals how she learned to read the literature of two empires, British and American, in an anti-colonial light—in order to survive, and in order to live.
This is the library, the wreck, and the potential for salvage she offers us now, in a brilliant, groundbreaking and essential work.
3) UnRavel: Poems by Tolu Oloruntoba (McClelland & Stewart)
“These are poems of deep thought, passionate engagement, and often searing images.” —Toronto Star (on Each One a Furnace)
A poetic exploration of the cyclical philosophy of dismantling and remaking, Unravel is a moving and inventive rove through what could happen in the deconstructed aftermath of person and world.
4) Curious Sounds by Roger Mooking and francesca ekwuyasi (Arsenal Pulp Press)
A collaborative, multi-faceted book by two extraordinary Black artists about finding beauty in the chaos Roger Mooking is a Trinidadian-born, Canadian-raised talent who creates immersive experiences in the arts, and francesca ekwuyasi is a writer whose debut novel, Butter Honey Pig Bread, has received wide acclaim. These two artists come together in Curious Sounds, a book of art, stories, and conversations illuminating their search for solace and perspective.
A dialogue between two artists across various mediums, Curious Sounds uses Mooking’s most recent album, SoundBites, as scaffolding for the artists’ conversations on creativity, Blackness, family, grief, and more. Composed of ekwuyasi’s essays reflecting on artmaking, storytelling, and creative expression and Mooking’s multimedia visual art, micro stories, music, and lyrics, this book is a collage of ideas about making meaning through life’s rhythms.
Arranged in three parts, which mirror the arc of a life – the Learning, the Living, and the Leaving – Curious Sounds is an interactive collection of fleeting moments and visuals that explore the beauty in chaos.
The FOLD Admin