3 memoir writers share early experiences of finding their voices

Bookends with Mattea Roach54:453 writers on finding their voices — and the power of personal stories

Tanya Talaga, Morgan Campbell and Amal Elsana Alh'jooj may be memoir writers from different walks of life — but a common thread in their work is how they continually use their voices to negotiate challenging conversations.

On a panel for Bookends at the Festival of Literary Diversity (FOLD) in May, they joined Mattea Roach to discuss having difficult conversations in a constructive way — and how telling personal stories creates empathy at large.

Talaga is a journalist, author and a member of the Fort William First Nation. Her latest book and four-part documentary The Knowing traces her great, great grandmother's story and the history of Indigenous people on Turtle Island.

Campbell is a sports journalist and a senior contributor at CBC Sports. His book, My Fighting Family, explores African American resilience and how personal history shapes who we are. 

Alh'jooj is a Bedouin Palestinian academic, activist and Nobel Peace Prize nominee. Her memoir, Hope is a Woman's Name, tells the story of her fight for justice, peace and equality. 

Mattea Roach: Can you take us back to an early moment where you had to raise your voice and really make it count on a subject that was perhaps a bit difficult to negotiate?

Tanya Talaga: Growing up North of Toronto, in what was then a largely white neighborhood, and having to explain to people who I was. I wasn't a Smith or a Miller. I was a Talaga. I looked so exotic. That's what I got all the time, "Oh, you must be Italian or Palestinian or Spanish or Mexican."

I always remember as a little girl having to stand up and say, "No, that's not who I am." 

I remember telling people, "No, I'm Ojibwe and Polish. But saying that, people would look at me like they've never heard what that is. I would always have to explain to people what an Ojibwe person was, what an Anishinaabe person was and that contributed to my feeling of erasure.

I would always have to explain to people what an Ojibwe person was, what an Anishinaabe person was and that contributed to my feeling of erasure.- Tanya Talaga

Because when I was a student in school, in public school and in high school and in university, we didn't talk about First Nations people, we didn't talk about what had happened in this country.

That was hard. No one ever saw me. They just didn't know what it was. And so they would dismiss you and it's like, "Oh well, whatever, just keep going."

Amal, do you have early experiences of having to really take up space because otherwise you were just going to be brushed to the side?

Amal Elsana Alh'jooj: I would say that all my life was a search for my place from day one. I was born as a fifth girl and that wasn't nice news for my parents. My mom was worried that my dad would marry a second wife to have boys. 

The compromise was that my dad said to my mother, "Let's give her the name hope, hoping God will give us boys after her," and five boys were born after me. 

I was juggling these struggles at the same time: trying to find your place in your society, in your family as a girl and also trying to find your place as a Palestinian in a Jewish state. 

I remember even my sisters and my mom used to call me crazy because. If we sat around the food and my mom would give my brother there a nice piece of chicken, I would grab it and run away and then they would look at me. "Why can't you just accept and live your life?" But I always felt there is something there that I need to fight for, which is my place in society and my place in the world. 

I always felt there is something there that I need to fight for, which is my place in society and my place in the world.- Amal Elsana Alh'jooj

Morgan, what about you? When did you first kind of have to claim your space? 

Morgan Campbell: I don't know if it's the first, but I'll give you a concrete example. I grew up in Mississauga in a similar time frame to Tanya, late 80s, early 90s. So I'm in Grade 10 history classes, the spring of 1991, Woodland School in Mississauga.

I had looked through this textbook, forward, back, up and down because I wanted to see if there are any pictures of just one Black person. There was one picture of Ben Johnson. He was the only Black person in there pictured, mentioned by name. 

One of the sections in this book were a few pages about movies that were really popular in the early 20th century, and one movie in particular got a few paragraphs. It was D.W. Griffith's Birth of a Nation. The explanation in the textbook about why this movie was so popular among Canadians was about the direction, the technology, the filmmaking, the cinema, cinematography. It was all cutting edge. This is why Canadians loved this movie, according to my textbook.

Now my classmates, they were a lot of colours. I was the only Black person and I was the only African American. Not only was I only African American, but I grew up with parents that made sure that I understood that being Black in America, it's not a default setting. It's not something that's in the background. It's something specific. That's who you are. That's who you come from. This is your history.

Being Black in America, it's not a default setting. It's not something that's in the background. It's something specific. That's who you are.- Morgan Campbell

I knew that Birth of a Nation was a film adaptation of a novel called The Clansman and so I put up my hand and said, "Hey, does anyone in this class know what nation was being born in this film? They were like, "No." 

It was the Ku Klux Klan. Canadians liked this film because Canadians were racist. And we got into this whole discussion. "Oh, how do you know it was about racism?" And I was like, "Well, who else is going to sit here and fill a movie theatre to watch a movie about Black people getting lynched? If you don't like racism, it's not going to matter how much you like the cinematography."

I didn't talk in class unless it was to just disrupt but they weren't used to me contributing to classroom discussions this way. But I felt I had to stand up and sort of get this conversation back on track to where it should have been. But the teacher and the rest of my classmates weren't equipped to have that discussion.

This panel has been edited for length and clarity. It was produced by Lisa Mathews.