By Jael Richardson (@jaelrichardson)
The month of August begins with Emancipation Day, observed nationwide on August 1 to commemorate the abolition of slavery across the British Empire. It’s a meaningful time to explore the range and richness of Black Canadian literary fiction and the many ways Black writers engage with identity, history, family, belonging, and freedom.
Robert de la Chevotière’s Tall Is Her Body is a powerful novel that explores history, identity, and human connection in both Dominica and Nova Scotia. Myriam J. A. Chancy’s Village Weavers is a beautifully layered story that follows the lives of two Haitian sisters and explores community, memory, and the ties that bind generations together. Kagiso Lesego Molope’s We Inherit the Fire is a powerful coming-of-age novel set in South Africa that explores grief, justice, and the difficult work of forging your own path. I’m also looking forward to Tea Mutonji’s My Person, which is coming out later this month.
Whether you choose one of these books or another title by a Black Canadian writer, I hope this month’s challenge introduces you to a story that stays with you long after the last page.
1) Tall is Her Body by Robert de la Chevotière (Erewhon Books)
Before the oracular gadèt-zafè came to warn his mother she would die, 6-year-old Fidel knew only the everyday mystery of the Guadeloupe around him. The lush greenery, the dusty roads, the sugar cane growing and the neighbors arguing, the push and pull of love and resentment between people who rely on each other—his world is small but full. Until a few moments of violence change his life forever.
Orphaned, Fidel returns to his mother’s native Dominica and whirls from one relative and reality to another, learning pieces of his own story. His heritage is one of layered secrets and sharp divisions—between the grandmothers who love him and the aunt who wants him dead, the Catholic orthodoxy of his school and the Obeah knowledge of his grandfather, and the indigenous and the colonial. The violence he’s witnessed inhabits not only strangers but himself. The spirits of the dead visit him with advice, threats, and explanations. And when he sees a path toward happiness in Canada, he must reconcile his intense, bittersweet love of his home with the possibility of leaving it.
2) We Inherit the Fire by Kagiso Lesego Molope (McClelland & Stewart)
There is that photograph, of course. My mother: standing in front of a soldier, closer than anyone else would dare . . .
In late-1980s South Africa, teenager Kelelo is forced to leave her mountain school for a newly desegregated school in town, where her identity as the daughter of celebrated freedom fighter Kewame “Dolly” Malaka makes her an instant curiosity. While her classmates see her as a symbol of progress, at home she struggles with a mother who is emotionally unreachable, still haunted by the violence and deprivation she endured as a political prisoner under apartheid.
Kewame, now living in material comfort, hides a growing inner collapse as memories of prison life and the women who sustained her resurface, stirred by her grandmother’s illness and the pressure of maintaining a façade of perfection. As mother and daughter navigate a shifting political landscape, We Inherit the Fire interlaces their voices to reveal the unspoken wounds, buried histories, and complex inheritance of resilience, pain, and responsibility that bind and divide generations of Black South African women.
3) My Person by Téa Mutonji (Random House Books)
Best friends of over twenty years, Tania and Margot are preparing to host their monthly Sunday Loaf dinner party, when Tania tells Margot this isn’t working for her anymore—they’ve been entangled for too long and she wants to “unknow” her. But how do you extricate yourself from someone whose family owns the apartment you live in, who has taken you in as their own, even claims you as their “person”?
As Tania attempts to live her life loudly on the outskirts of Margot’s bubble, Margot’s past betrayals become increasingly clear. But she means well, doesn’t she? They’d felt like sisters from the start. Or had Tania just been blind to Margot’s antics?
Set in the framework of a tense will-they-won’t-they break-up, Tania and Margot get entangled in a rigorous revision of history, their once delicate dance intensifying toward a frantic finale and forcing them to reckon with where it all went wrong . . . or whether they were simply wrong for each other to begin with.
A taut, piercing exploration of race and privilege, codependency and the ways in which world-defining friendships can be both beautifully and excruciatingly life-altering, My Person is an addicting, astutely observed novel from a major talent.
4) Village Weavers by Myriam J. A. Chancy (Tin House)
In 1940s Port-au-Prince, Gertie and Sisi become fast childhood friends, despite being on opposite ends of the social and economic ladder. As young girls, they build their unlikely friendship—until a deathbed revelation ripples through their families and tears them apart. After François Duvalier’s rule turns deadly in the 1950s, Sisi moves to Paris, while Gertie marries into a wealthy Dominican family. Across decades and continents, through personal success and failures, they are parted and reunited, slowly learning the truth of their singular relationship. Finally, six decades later, with both women in the United States, a sudden phone call brings them back together once more to reckon with and—perhaps—forgive the past.
Told with power and frankness, Village Weavers confronts the silences around class, race, and nationality, charts the moments when lives are irrevocably forced apart, and envisions two girls—connected their entire lives—who try to break inherited cycles of mistrust and find ways back into each other’s hearts.
The FOLD Admin