Editor Terese Mason Pierre has collected ten fabulous (in both senses of the word) stories by Black Canadians into what has instantly become one of my all-time favourite anthologies.
The opening story, Chimedum Ohaegbu’s, “Ravenous, Called Iffy”, sets the tone. There is a dream-like quality to the writing: each individual moment is clear and meaningful and relatable, but subject to absurdist segways: “After my mother’s third death . . .”. Wait, what? But of course, the purpose of such intrusions is to shake the reader loose from the literal context to connect the reader to the universal experience of family. The story is ostensibly about the ambivalent identities and life experiences of second-generation immigrants, but using magic realism as the canvas, Ohaegbu is able to integrate those specific understandings into the broader human condition. This story may not be about you or your family—even though it very much feels like that time your cousin explained to you, yet again, how they were related; or that time your bestie got married and you couldn’t just go over all the time anymore; or when your mom made you feel like she was disappointed in you because she did something perfectly reasonable, but unexpected—but Ohaegbu makes you feel all the feels as if it were your life and your family. That sort of specific representation and universal relatability is a lot to ask of a short story, but Ohaegbu pulls it off perfectly.
Several other stories use speculative elements to deeply explore this theme of family. Whitney French’s “Deh Ah Market” invokes the rhythms of language, culture, and genetics to reveal how the family’s origins in the islands of the 1840s connect with their relations in contemporary island-like neighbourhoods in Toronto, cousins entangled across time and space. Instead of going backwards to explore roots, Francesca Ekwuyas, “Hallelujah Here and Elsewhere” goes sideways into a parallel world. Ekwuyas posits that even when the details differ across timelines, the fundamentals of one’s relationships don’t change. Trynne Delaney’s “Playing Dead” takes the opposite approach, depicting what happens when families become disconnected from their histories and each other. In a future shaped by billionaires and pandemics, Delany’s nanny observes how her employers’ narcistic obsession with immortality has literally drained the life out of their family. (Given the current news cycle, this story feels less like futuristic SF and more like exposé.) Lue Palmer’s interrogates the shadows that actively haunt a family dynamic in “Mother, Father, Baby”.
Chinelo Onwualu’s “The Hole in the Middle of the World” widens the lens to explore the historical experience of vulnerable populations by projecting them into the future. The viewpoint character is a refugee finding ways to endure while her application for status wends its way through the bureaucracy. The SF element is subtle and chilling, but the moment you realize what’s actually happening is the moment you think, “that’s what it must have been like for the Indigenous”. It is a moment of sudden clarity, because stripped of its original eugenics and 60s Scoop background, the story bypasses the reader’s automatic defensiveness to tap directly into empathy. As a bonus, Onwualu provides an optimistic ending that suggests it is not too late to do better. The rest of the anthology is balanced by somewhat lighter fare. Suyi Davies Okungbowa’s “Peak Day” is a wincingly funny satire of Prime Day, consumerism, and worker exploitation. Zalika Reid-Benta’s “Paroxysm” may have been inspired by the Covid pandemic, but takes a sharp left turn into the surreal to illustrate the psychological costs of lockdown. “Just say Garuka” by Aline-mwezi NiyonSenga is an absolute delight, as queer teens develop a friendship over . . . let’s say, driving lessons. Editor Terese Mason Pierre’s own entry, “A Fair Assessment” starts from the intriguing premise of summoning the ghosts of the former owners of various antiques so their stories can be added to the sales pitch. Pierre then throws in the additional curve ball of accidentally calling up one’s own ancestor.
As the Earth Dreams: Black Canadian Speculative Stories, then, is a brilliant example of how modern Canadian speculative fiction can be used as a canvas to interrogate identity, culture, and the meaning of life from formerly excluded perspectives. The infusion of these diverse voices also demonstrates how different sound, diction, cadence, grammar, syntax, metaphor, allusion, and so on allows authors to explore the structure and implications of language and culture—without resorting to Klingon. As the Earth Dreams is published by Anansi Press.
This review originally appeared in the Ottawa Review of Books
