Us, Now

By Lisa Moore, Ayse Sule Akinturk, Zay Nova and 9 more

Us, Now roves from Indonesia to the Middle East, Taiwan, Mexico, China, Africa, Jamaica, Barbados, India, Pakistan, and points in between, converging in Newfoundland. These stories by racialized Newfoundlanders are by turns joyous, tender, hilarious, and heart-wrenching. They confront racism and celebrate the act of enduring. They are about settling and getting unsettled, about parents and their children, about language, about facing down the horrors of homophobia, about the joy of love, about lifelong relationships or the glee of a magnificent crush. Here social and domestic violence are countered with tenderness and the penetrating power of narrative. This is a book about distance and coming together, about what it means to be seen and understood, or—devastatingly—to be seen and judged, or to be invisible and misunderstood. What it means to belong. These are new writers and new visions of an in-the-present-moment Newfoundland, stories shaped by powerful voices, stories urgent, radical, and sparking with beauty.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Breakwater Books
• Release date: May 15, 2021
• ISBN: 9781550818826

Ayse Sule Akinturk

AYSE SULE AKINTURK was born and raised in Istanbul. She holds a doctoral degree in political science and lives in St. John’s.

Book preview

A LETTER OF INTRODUCTION

by Lisa Moore

Us, Now began in a six-week creative writing workshop whose participants would form the racialized group of writers called The Quilted Collective.

In the spring of 2019, I was approached by Remzi Cej from the Office of Immigration and Multiculturalism in Newfoundland and Labrador. He asked if I’d be interested in offering a series of fiction-writing workshops for new Newfoundlanders, with an eye to creating a publication.

I leapt at his offer because I believe Newfoundland literature—all literature, in fact—needs a richness of voices to be vital and relevant. Richness not only concerning subject matter but also style: voice, diction, dialect, description, cadence, point-of-view. And most of all, richness in how we manipulate that tensile tactile malleable organic ripcord candlewick material—language!

It was a chance to read a new kind of Newfoundland fiction.

I said yes because I wanted to hear stories situated in transition, in a wealth of geographies and experiences, full of flux and motion, coming and going.

The stories in this collection tell of settling and separation, profound familial love and generational fallout, rupture, coming together, and coming through. Here are queer love stories, stories of dislocation, hard work, and sacrifice for the sake of the children; here are stories about characters who have travelled great distances, who have come to Newfoundland from all over the world.

Gathering these stories felt like an opportunity to take a jackhammer to retrograde ideas of the nation-state, or any kind of border or checkpoint, because stories infamously, magically, slip through all kinds of borders, the imagination uncontainable.

After the initial six-week workshop, the group continued to meet. The backdrop of this story collection is a time of political polarization with the rise of conservative isolationism and the building of the international refugee crisis due, in part, to climate change, especially in the global South.

In the face of these fractures and disasters, the collection felt like an urgent opportunity to celebrate difference.

A story is a vessel into which we pour the essence of being human: the sights, sounds, smells, textures, and tastes through which we come to know the world. Those sensations make up our experiences, inform our thoughts and feelings.

I remember reading Chinua Achebe’s Things Fall Apart for the first time in a course that was then called Commonwealth Literature at Memorial University in the mid-eighties. I read Wole Soyinka, Carlos Fuentes, Yukio Mishima, Jamaica Kincaid, and Gabriel García Márquez. Through that course, I became addicted to literature set in places I’d never been, thrilled by how familiar the emotional terrain of the characters felt, even as the landscapes, cultural practices, and the social and political contexts were wholly new to me.

Around the same time, fiction from Newfoundland was exploding onto the international stage. In the early eighties Memorial University began offering creative writing courses. Writers came out of the woodwork. Stories proliferated. As I read local literature, I felt the concrete under my feet—the streets I walked and the bars I frequented, the music I heard—becoming concrete in the world of fiction. The colonized world—both Newfoundland and those places I’d never been—opened up for me and became new, even as the Commonwealth began to crumble and the cries for decolonization grew louder.

I’d read Tales from Firozsha Baag by Rohinton Mistry and travelled through India around the same time. Mistry’s stories changed my perception of the way I’d experienced the Indian landscapes and cityscapes, the people I’d encountered on trains, in hotels, in the markets, and at weddings—Mistry’s stories deepened and enriched my memories. The God of Small Things by Arundhati Roy had the same effect.

These stories also taught me new ways to write my own experience.

Now, of course, the voices of racialized writers from Newfoundland and Labrador are proliferating, telling stories of all kinds. There has been an explosion of creativity across disciplines from racialized writers, artists, directors, and playwrights that provide new perspectives on the culture of Newfoundland and Labrador.

One question that arose often, as the writers worked through the stories, was the question of audience. Who were these stories for? How much would the writer need to translate experience for the reader? Where would the audience and writers meet?

We talked about letting the audience meet the writers halfway.

This meant not compromising in terms of dialect, tone, or subject matter. It meant the writer could keep a foot in both worlds, or many worlds in some cases. Straddling difference. Illuminating difference. And recognizing the things we hold in common. The things we share.

The desire to know another person’s experience, to leap into their skin, is the fuel of fiction, a desire that’s potent and sometimes incendiary. It leads, with a speed-of-light circuitry, to the heart, to empathy.

Empathy might be what it takes to make us agile in a fast-changing world; it might show us how we leap from ice pan to ice pan as the turbulence of political unrest, injustice, climate crisis, and—on the opposite end of the scale, love, beauty, and truth—work to upend us, alter us, make us new.

The word us is deliberate. In the title of this collection, I believe the us is inclusive, decoupled from its cold, brittle twin them.

In the title of this collection, us is linked with now. The brief pause between the two words, the comma, lets the reader understand it has taken us some time to get here, to the now, but we are all here together.

This is a book about belonging. Sometimes in these stories, belonging is fragile and fought for, but the act of writing from a place and about a place is belonging—the sometimes sacred, sometimes scary act of witnessing means writers always stand apart and, at the same time, are a part of.

I hesitated to write this introduction because I am white, and during this year of rich discussions about all the things writing can do, I was the only white person in the room. I knew I didn’t want to speak for but speak with. I had to reckon with the extreme privilege I have enjoyed as a professor of creative writing at Memorial University and as a published writer.

The writers, during one workshop, suggested I could think of this writing as a letter of introduction—an opportunity to announce emerging voices, on fire with talent, to the Newfoundland and Labrador audience and, of course, beyond. I am extremely grateful to the writers for this opportunity.

Throughout the year of working with this group, I came to know a lot more about racism, sexism, and homophobia in our province, our country, and the world. This collection came together during the last year of the Trump presidency, when the United States was torn apart by racial tensions. We met to talk about writing as the Black Lives Matter movement grew in momentum and power across the continent and the world. Violent, racism-fuelled clashes with police, and other forms of racial prejudice unfolded in Canada, the States, and in Newfoundland and Labrador. We talked about racism against Indigenous people in the province, and thought about colonialism and who gets to have a voice in literature.

During the workshops that led to this collection, there were many discussions about systemic racism. The deadening slowness of the process of applying for citizenship is a good example—hoop after hoop, a bureaucracy capable of burying a soul in paper, a process that sometimes keeps new Canadian artists and writers who haven’t yet received permanent residency from applying for arts grants, for example, or health care benefits, though they contribute generously to the economy and the well-being of the province by enriching artistic culture.

These stories were written during the pandemic. We continued to meet over Zoom and began developing, along with this collection, a podcast—under the direction of Santiago Guzmán and his production company TODOS Productions—that considers how COVID-19 exacerbated tensions around race and inequality.

In June of 2020 the inaugural St. John’s Black Lives Matter rally gathered at the Confederation Building. The masked crowds—thousands of people who had poured in from the parking lots of the College of the North Atlantic, from the surrounding suburban neighbourhoods to the farthest reaches of the city—listened to speaker after speaker talk about experiences of racism they had encountered in the province. The speakers at this rally pulled no punches. We knelt in silence for eight minutes in respect for George Floyd, an African American who had been murdered, the victim of police brutality and systemic racism. Floyd’s death is grieved around the world.

This is also a part of the backdrop in which these stories were written.

But these stories, despite the difficulty of the year we’ve come through, are uplifting, not because they shy away from difficult truths—they do not—but because they are complex and tender portraits of lovers or families sometimes separated by the pressures of making a living, supporting one’s children, achieving one’s goals.

They are full of insight.

In the stories of Tzu-Hao Hsu, Ayse Sule Akinturk, and Richard Elcock, familial bonds are strengthened and a deep love pulses despite distance and geography. The acknowledgement of parental sacrifices is both elegiac and clear—each of these writers captures with delicate grace the poignant understanding that our parents, no matter how strong, become fragile with age, often after their children have joined the diaspora, and these parents must struggle alone.

Tzu-Hao Hsu’s short story is written in the second person; this point-of-view seems particularly poignant as the protagonist—the story’s you—struggles with the question of whether he has been a good father to his children. The second-person perspective embodies the distance between his home in Taiwan, and Newfoundland, where his children and wife, who love him