Donna Bailey Nurse is a literary journalist, a lecturer, a critic for BookTelevision, and the author of What's a Black Critic to Do?: Interviews, Profiles and Reviews of Black Writers. She is a frequent book reviewer for the Globe and Mail, the National Post, the Toronto Star, and the Montreal Gazette, and her articles exploring race and culture have appeared in these publications as well as in Maclean's, Publishers Weekly, the Washington Post, and the Boston Globe. She lives in Toronto.
I grew up on the elbow of land between Lake Ontario and Frenchman's Bay, surrounded by Pickering's towering blue spruce and pungent wetlands. We played in fields of ruined farmhouses during summers as green and perpetual as the Caribbean Sea. In winter, the sky was white and still, like the land itself. The schoolyard was a snowy desert, and bundled thick as snowmen, my sister and I sank through to our knees. At home, Miss Iris, our Jamaican grandma, fixed us Ovaltine, then sat with her sisters in the back room, mending clothes and talking "big people business," while a pot of pigs' tail sputtered on the stove. I curled up on the sofa with Lucy Maud and Laura Ingalls and wondered, What did Katy do? But outside, brown skin was harder to negotiate than snowdrifts. You had to play dumb. A little girl asked: "Are you a ghost?" But she was the one who was white. I was a little girl too, but I knew that much. Skin colour was no big deal, until suddenly, without warning, it was. The ambush comment or question, the backhanded compliment, the acts of emotional violence meant to remind me of what I was not, which was not white and not from here. They were right and wrong. I'm not white but I am from here. Black and Canadian: equal parts race and place.
Literature has been the means through which I have learned to understand who I am and who I might be — as a human being, as a woman, and as a person of African descent. Over the years, my experience reading, studying, and writing about black Canadian letters, most recently as a literary critic, has served to reaffirm my identity as a Canadian. I became a critic of black Canadian literature largely because I wanted to engage others in a dialogue about black writing in this country, and it was important to me that the dialogue be led by somebody who was black. This literature is at the forefront of public and artistic spaces grappling with what it means to be of this race and of this place, and as such, it represents a crucial voice in the necessary conversation about the black experience in Canada.
Revival constitutes a conversation about the relevance of black Canadian writing like no other, and celebrates the coming of age of a black Canadian literature. It builds proudly upon previous anthologies that confirmed the existence of a growing body of black Canadian writing, including Lorris Elliott's Other Voices: Writings by Blacks in Canada (1985), Cyril Dabydeen's A Shapely Fire: Changing the Literary Landscape (1987), Ayanna Black's Voices: Canadian Writers of African Descent (1992), and George Elliott Clarke's Eyeing the North Star: Directions in African-Canadian Literature (1997).
