Tag: Canada

Almost Brown: A Mixed Race Memoir by Charlotte Gill

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Almost Brown: A Mixed Race Memoir by Charlotte Gill

As a historian I deeply appreciate Gill’s memoir, and for multiple reasons. Gill’s childhood experiences and those of her parents, captured from her memories and filtered through an adult lens retrospectively, highlights mid-twentieth century tensions of empire and our global journey towards decolonization. Moreover, Gill does it with a sensitivity to the internal, subjective conflict “colonials” often face as they grapple with their identities. The frustration of Self that Gill reveals to the reader, through her parents and her own struggles, is not an artifact of the past, singular to the decades of peak decolonization in the mid-twentieth century; these are still liminal spaces individuals occupy and traverse today.

In that respect, Gill’s memoir not only captures a particular zeitgeist of the 1950s-1980s — decades which saw a mass migration of colonials across the world, decolonization and independence movements coming to fruition, and a general cultural revolution across the world in terms of race, racism, and anti-paternalism — it also makes the reader aware of the continuity of this historical spirit and its legacy as it is lived today.

The success of this memoir is in large part due to Gill’s self awareness and willingness to see her parents (and herself) for the people they are; Gill examines them with an academic eye, as historical subjects, but also as emotional, affective beings whose desires and needs are universal across time and cultures. The result is a very relatable, human memoir, one which draws the reader into the nucleus of Gill’s family as well as the age in which they lived.

Some of Almost Brown‘s success must also be attributed to the fanciful and (for their time) outrageous characters her parents are, for the daring ways they each challenged the norms of their age in terms of race/racism, gender, and transnationality. This is where Gill’s memoir appeals to more than the smallish subset of readers whose interest is in post-colonial subjectivities; for while the memoir hinges on post-coloniality as its primary locus, it is also about the oppressions we inflict upon each other, the intersectionality of our daily lives, and the myriad of ways in which power flows or not even within a family. Gill’s mixed-race family serves as the perfect case study in which brown people and white people — that is, race — can be upended by gendered expectations, or vice versa. Gill’s white mother was submerged under her brown husband, even while he was marginalized by a society that saw him as inferior by dint of his skin color. She, in turn, was snubbed by both her husband and society for daring to be that which society deemed heroic: an independent-minded mother.

In short, Almost Brown is a memoir well worth the reading.

The Education of Augie Merasty: A Residential School Memoir by Joseph Auguste Merasty and David Carpenter

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The Education of Augie Merasty: A Residential School Memoir
by Joseph Auguste Merasty and David Carpenter

Every memoir is significant, on the basis that it documents a part of the human experience — and in the end, what do have if not an experience of life? In the context of the universe, this is what makes our existence unique — but there are some memoirs, some human experiences that possess a weightiness absent in others. That is, they reveal a humanity that transcends individual experience. The Education of Augie Merasty is one of these memoirs.

The cruel history of colonial settlement isn’t newly discovered — but it was hidden, deliberately and systematically for centuries. In the past fifty years and much more recently, excavations of memories, land, and archives have revealed the depth to which this erasure was taken. Merasty’s memoir is one of these excavations. [My Name is Seepeetza by Shirley Sterling (30th Anniversary Edition) is another memoir of residential schools and colonialism in Canada I’ve read this year, if you’re interested.]

I have an especial interest in these kinds of historical documents, not only as a historian of decolonization, but as an educator; the utility of the historical documents in the classroom are invaluable to convey the real effects of racism, colonialism, the power of the state in shaping our lives. Students often see the government as some kind of abstracted, remote thing, a hovering object over their lives that merely casts a shadow every once in awhile. Memoirs of this nature reveal how wrong that assumption is; the state is neither above nor below, it is embedded in every part of our lives and beings — even our DNA and the genomes that make up ourselves and our ancestry have been shaped by states and power. The Education of Augie Merasty is proof of the depth of the state in shaping human experience.

What makes The Education of Augie Merasty poignant is not only the memories he shares with the reader, but the whole of the story of this memoir’s making. The convoluted path and necessary involvement of the writer, David Carpenter — who serves as historian here — is a testament to the damage and legacy of settler colonialism in North America. The incompleteness of the stories, the silences and gaps in time and memory, as well as Augie’s language, preserved here by Carpenter, are evidence of the zigzag pathway that history is recorded, preserved, interpreted and ultimately used. As a tool to teach historical methodology, The Education of Augie Merasty is a fantastic case study.

The chronology of the memoir too, in the way it links the past to the present, is invaluable. Too often students see history as a static, buried thing of the past. That myth is a hard one to kill. But kill it we must, because history is not only the root of the present, it is also a reflection of our present selves and world. That is a key characteristic of history: Carpenter’s presence in these pages and the unresolved ending (unlike many memoirs, this is not posthumously produced) help to deliver this lesson.

Other aspects of the memoir make it even more perfect for classroom and course use: its length is short, its language is accessible, its story is compelling and shocking. The absence of larger historical events occurring in Canada and the world are also bonuses here too, allowing the instructor to compliment the text as appropriate to the course level.

Merasty’s memoir is one I will be considering for use in my courses.

My Name is Seepeetza by Shirley Sterling (30th Anniversary Edition)

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A student recently asked me in class, “Why are there reprints of books? Why do they get reprinted?” Among the reasons I gave them was this one: “Sometimes new information emerges and something important needs to be added. Or, sometimes, the content of the book becomes relevant again, given certain events or things that are happening right now.” I added, “Remember, history is less about the past, than it is a reflection of our present moment or our desire for what we want our future to look like.”

Sterling’s My Name is Seepeetza, the 30th anniversary edition epitomizes this reason. The recent discovery of several hundred bodies of indigenous children buried and hidden at several residential schools across Canada — Fort Pelly, St Phillip, St John, just to name three — is a heavy reminder that the state sanctioned annihilation of Canada’s indigenous culture and peoples over the past four centuries is not a remnant of the past, but a living monster that still lives and looms over the lives of the 150,000 children and their countless descendants.

This is a living trauma, its horror and long reach remain unknown.

For this reason alone, I am considering using this book in my next iteration of a 100-level history course I teach to undergraduates for this reason.

Sterling’s accessible, authentic prose in the voice of a young girl only gives me more reason to assign it as a course reading. The length is perfect for a semester and the format in epistolary style as a diary allows me to use this in class, for small group work within the time constraints of a class session or for short individual activities.

The content though is the main appeal here. Sterling’s own experiences makes My Name is Seepeetza all the more powerful, opens an avenue for an educator to discuss this in more depth as a primary source, as a part of historical record, opens the door for historical discussions and framing it within a larger landscape of indigenous history, gendered and racial violence. My Name is Seepeetza hits on the major nerves: language weaponized, education as violence, eugenics, parenting as cultural intervention, skin color and its tormented relationship with race and ethnic autochthony. History.

A reprint is not merely a revival, it is a reflection and delivery of knowledge we need right now.

The Ghosts That Haunt Me: Memories of a Homicide Detective by Steve Ryan

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The Ghosts That Haunt Me: Memories of a Homicide Detective
by Steve Ryan

These memories have haunted Steve Ryan, and now they haunt me too. Ryan warns the reader that the contents of this book will be dark, warns us to close it and move on if we value our peace of mind. He’s right. This book will cleave to my bones like scars from bites. The murderers in Ryan’s cases are depraved animals, creatures looking like humans but lacking humanity. The crimes recounted to us are sweat-inducing-chills-on-the-soles-of-my-feet terrifying. The thing is, they were committed for such trivial, banal, forgivable reasons, sometimes for no reason at all except for the purpose of inflicting pain.

Ryan weaves into his account the effect of these crimes on his psyche, giving us — those who have not worked in policing work or its related domains — insight into the damage being witness can cause. We don’t just see the effect on Ryan, but on the entire community of those who do this work. It becomes quickly clear that this work is as emotional and psychological as it is mired in materiality: these people study the severing of a life from its body, but in this memoir we see how deeply entwined the soul is to the the gory material left behind. In a sense, the homicide detective is required to lend the dead their own soul, a poor but necessary substitute in the effort to ameliorate the injustice of the victim’s murder.

The reader will weep for Ryan and for all homicide detectives as much as they weep for the victims and their families. And, let us also not forget, the families of the murderers — in some cases, the extended family of the murdered and the murderer are one and the same, a double slice, the cut twice as deep.

Ryan takes us through six of his most memorable, most awful cases, the ones which made him value his humanity. They are baffling in different ways: How could this have happened? In some cases the murder was sudden, a crime of impulse and opportunity. In others, it was planned with meticulous attention to detail. Some murders were the inevitable outcomes of years of abuse, the eventual killing a culmination of many crimes perpetrated. The scars were not always only the fatal ones.

These cases occurred in Canada, Ryan being a detective in Toronto and serving the GTA (Greater Toronto Area), but these will be familiar to any urban resident. The cases here involved immigrants, travelers, transnational cultures and expectations, mothers, wives, husbands, lovers, children, fathers, brothers. There is the odd stranger as well, a crime committed via a random encounter by someone the victim does not know — to be fair, the discovery of a murderer in the family can invoke a feeling of utter strangeness and dissonance, it is so unfathomable that someone we hold close and love could be capable of these kinds of crimes — but Ryan proves to us that intimacy is not a prerequisite for really knowing the interior mind of anyone. We can never really know the person we sleep next to at night. That’s the horror here. Trust is malleable in the mind and hands of murderers.

I’m glad to have read this book, chilling as its contents are. I sleep worse for it. But I a little less so because of people like Steve Ryan. I am grateful people willing and able to sacrifice a little of their soul to deliver justice to victims of crimes like these.