Self Be True
with Monia Mazigh and Canisia Lubrin
Hosted by Omayra Issa
Written in language that crackles with life and humour, the stories in Canisia Lubrin’s Code Noir: Metamorphoses usher us into the lives of their narrators, lives that are filled with a kind of wonder and surprise. Such an invitation to enter and imagine their worlds. In its formal inventiveness and sheer audaciousness, Code Noir is unlike anything else that I’ve ever read. Lubrin is a force.
How does one prosper in a world that questions your very humanity? Award-winning journalist Omayra Issa hosts a conversation with three of the country’s most acclaimed authors whose new work explores the struggle to be true to oneself in a world built on colonial structures of oppression and control.
PLEASE NOTE: katherena vermette is unable to participate in this event as planned.
Author and activist, Monia Mazigh, returns to the Festival stage with Farida, a new novel, translated into English by Phyllis Aronoff and Howard Scott.) Farida, a young woman in Tunis, is passionate about reading and loves the French language. But she is compelled to marry Kamel, a brute of a man, who drinks, keeps mistresses, and beats her when she talks back. But she is defiant, and takes comfort from her secret reading. Finally after ten years she is granted a divorce by the courts and lives with her son Tewfiq. A smoking, independent-minded divorcee, she sees the country attain its freedom from the French and its arrival into modern times; the growth of her son into a young businessman; and her granddaughter Leila mature into an independent, educated young woman.
Griffin Poetry Prize-winner Canisia Lubrin’s debut fiction, Code Noir, combines immense literary and political force. Its structure is deceptively simple: it departs from the infamous real-life “Code Noir,” a set of historical decrees originally passed in 1685 by King Louis XIV of France defining the conditions of slavery in the French colonial empire. The original Code had fifty-nine articles; Code Noir has fifty-nine linked fictions—vivid, unforgettable, multi-layered fragments filled with globe-wise characters who desire to live beyond the ruins of the past.
From katherena vermette, the author of the nationally bestselling Strangers saga, comes real ones, a heartrending story of two Michif sisters who must face their past trauma when their mother is called out for false claims to Indigenous identity. June and her sister, lyn, are NDNs—real ones. Their estranged and very white mother, Renee, is called out as a “pretendian.” Under the name (get this) Raven Bearclaw, Renee had topped the charts in the Canadian art world for winning awards and recognition for her Indigenous-style work. As the sisters are pulled into the painful tangle of lies their mother has told and the hurt she has caused, searing memories from their unresolved childhood trauma, which still manages to spill into their well-curated adult worlds, come rippling to the surface.
Books are available from our friends at Perfect Books.
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