Giller-winner Ian Williams mixes small-scale personal and large-scale political with book of essays about being Black in the world
There is an amusing passage in Ian Williams’ 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 organized by Calgary’s WordFest 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 left 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.”
“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.”
“It’s always tricky to talk about this,” he adds. “No one shot me in the suburbs in Brampton. But how does that look (I got) in Zellers in 1989 still reflect every time I walk into a department store?”
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.
Disorientation benefits from Williams’ broad talents as a writer. Before writing Reproduction, Williams won acclaim and the Danuta Gleed Literary Award for his 2011 collection of experimental short stories, Not Anyone’s Anything. His 2012 poetry collection, Personals, was shortlisted for the Griffin Poetry Prize. The three essays at the beginning of Disorientation analytically tackle those big, universal questions about institutional and cultural whiteness and the idea of “disorientation,” which Williams described to the University of Toronto newspaper The Varsity as the idea that as “Black folks, we go about living our lives every day, and then, suddenly, something just bonks us over the head. We’re constantly disoriented by race.”
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 the 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?”
Ian Williams will be in conversation with Omar El Akkad, author of What Strange Paradise, for the Wordfest’s online program 26@26 on Sept. 21 at 7 p.m. Visit wordfest.com