Esi Edugyan's Out of the Sun is an illuminating look at race, art & literature through the centuries
Esi Edugyan is the author of the 2018 Scotiabank Giller Prize-winning Washington Black. Washington Black was also a finalist for the 2018 Man Booker Prize and the 2018 Rogers Writers' Trust Fiction Prize.
Edugyan is also the author of the novels The Second Life of Samuel Tyne and Half-Blood Blues, the latter of which won the 2011 Scotiabank Giller Prize and was defended on Canada Reads by Donovan Bailey in 2014.
She recently delivered the six-part CBC Massey Lectures and adapted the series into the nonfiction book Out of the Sun: On Race and Storytelling. Raised in Calgary, Edugyan now lives in Victoria.
Her first major work of nonfiction, Out of the Sun examines the relationship between art and race through the lens of visual art, literature, film and her own lived experience.
Out of the Sun looks at being Black and the concept of Blackness over the centuries, noting that society is worse off for not knowing the story of our past — stories that are left out of the historical record of who we are. Edugyan spoke with CBC Books about Out of the Sun.
Much like the CBC Massey Lectures it is adapted from, Out of the Sun celebrates Blackness in a way that doesn't lead with hardship. What was your thought process in writing the book?
I wanted to show, validate, expose and celebrate all manner of lives and experiences throughout the African diaspora and throughout history. I also wanted to look at different geographies — to look at places where we maybe don't think of Black people or Black communities.
I wanted to show, validate, expose and celebrate all manner of lives and experiences throughout the African diaspora and throughout history.
Many are surprised to learn that there have been Black communities in Japan since the 1540s. What did that look like? How did that emerge? I wanted to tell some of these stories that are, maybe for some, a little bit more obscure. That includes stories of hardship, but it also includes other stories of experiences of life, which consist of joy as well as pain.
What did you want to say about how Black people and the concept of Blackness has been perceived — and erased — over the centuries through art and storytelling?
That idea has always had a kind of negative charge. When you read 19th century European literature or when you look at portraiture from the 18th century, there's always this sense that Blackness is lesser — that Black people are meant to take a certain lower role.
Obviously, I'm leaving out the iconography of Africa itself, in which Blackness is obviously a very different thing historically.
But I was just looking at various geographies and even seeing the impact of something like European perceptions of Blackness in the 1500s on Japanese attitudes to Blackness around the same time. It was an importation of perspectives, almost.
When you read 19th century European literature or when you look at portraiture from the 18th century, there's always this sense that Blackness is lesser — that Black people are meant to take a certain lower role.
How have Black people been able to control a narrative over the centuries?
Blackness is something that's always meant so many different things. There are so many different Black experiences. We talk about the Black experience, but it's not one experience.
When I was growing up in Alberta, the whole idea of Blackness that people had around me was this idea of packaged African-American that's taken mostly from movies and popular culture. And then people would turn to me to wonder why I didn't fit into whatever mould it was that they had of what a Black person should be.
But Black people have so many different histories.
For me, having been born and raised in Calgary, with parents who are both Ghanaian, that was always interesting to me.
How should Black artists and writers tell stories then? How does race and Blackness centre into it?
For me, the story always comes first. I was recently asked if I write with a sense of responsibility for having to depict Black people in a certain way and also give hope to people. But I feel if I had to do those things, I don't know if I could write. For me, I'm just telling the story of a particular life at a particular time. This is necessarily probably always going to be the story of a Black life — obviously, as a Black woman, my focus, my experience and my point of view is to write out of that.
But having said that, these are very particular stories about very specific times. I am writing about some of the challenges my characters face.
As a Black woman, my focus, my experience and my point of view is to write out of that.
Washington Black, for example, is a gifted Black man in the 1830s. He's traveling around the world and as an author, you have to grapple with racism. You have to grapple with the limitations that are going to be placed on him. That's always interesting to me in a sense, because then you kind of extrapolate and ask yourself how things have changed and how they haven't.
But I definitely always start with the character and with the story.
At the end of the day, what do you hope people take away from your CBC Massey Lectures?
I have had people come up to me and say, "I had no idea. I had no knowledge of how people were depicted in portraiture in the 18th and 19th century.'
I've had people say it's made them stop to think about things like the history of racial passing or how segregation was codified into law. I hope people walk away having learned something that they didn't know before. Even if they did know, that now having juxtaposed that knowledge with the material to have a fresh sense or new feeling about African diasporic experiences.
I hope people walk away having learned something that they didn't know before.
I hope that people feel like their perspectives have shifted, even just a little bit. I think that would be great.
Esi Edugyan's comments have been edited for length and clarity.
