My life in books

Reading Maya Angelou’s autobiography, I Know Why the Caged Bird Sings, tells the story of her life to the age of 17. It is a deep look into, not just the circumstances that shaped a woman who would become a gifted and beloved poet, but also into the conditions of life for black Americans in the south.

In her autobiography, Angelou opens up her young life fearlessly, sharing personal details not only of her family and their lives, but her pain, shame and sorrow. At the same time, she paints vivid portraits of Black culture as she experienced it, both negative and positive. We see the grinding poverty and constant threat of white insult and violence in the rural areas, but also the strength of family and community ties. We see ourselves within the rich urban black culture of St. Louis, with its connections to the underworld, and its influence on the life of the city.

Angelou - born Marguerite Johnson - and her brother Bailey were sent to live in Stamps, Arkansas when they were three and four, respectively. Their parents, then living in California, had ended their marriage and neither was in a position to care for the children, so they were put alone on a train with address tags on their wrists and tickets pinned to their clothes and sent home to their paternal grandmother. After several years living in Stamps, they were taken by their father to St Louis, where they lived first with their maternal grandmother, and then with their mother, a woman well connected to the underground gambling scene, and her lover. While there, Angelou was raped by her mother’s lover. The man was convicted, but avoided serving time. When he was found dead not long afterward, Angelou believed he had died because she had lied in court about how often he had touched her, and decided never to speak again to anyone except Bailey lest she kill someone else with her words. Not long afterwards, she and Bailey were sent back to Stamps, Angelou wondering if they had been sent away because of her family’s frustration with her silence.

After several years in Stamps, Angelou and her brother relocated again, this time to San Francisco, where their mother was now living, not that far from their father, still in Los Angeles. It is here that she takes the first steps toward womanhood and independence. School, her first job - as the first black female tram conductress - coming to terms with a father who was too self-absorbed to love her, the growing between her and her brother, her developing sexuality, and, in the final sequence recounted in the book, the birth of her son after a casual sexual interlude undertaken just to see what sex was all about.

Angelou offers loving portraits of those who helped to shape her life, from family to members of the community who introduced her to literature and the power of well-crafted words, to others further outside her circle who, kindly or otherwise, taught her about life beyond her grandmother’s general store (which served both blacks and poor whites) and her mother’s gambling connections. And she connects the events of her life to the condition of blacks in America, showing in a hundred ways, large and small, the strength and resilience of a people oppressed.

Angelou wrote several other autobiographical volumes, something I had not known before, as this volume is the one the everybody talks about. I think I’ll have to find and read the others.

Zarqa Nawaz is a very funny person. This should not surprise anyone who knows that she is the creator of the Canadian comedy series, Little Mosque on the Prairie. She is also the author of Laughing All the Way to the Mosque, a memoir that begins with her experience as a Muslim girl growing up in Brampton Ontario.

Nawaz was born in England, but her parents, originally from Pakistan, moved to Canada when she was three in search of a better life for themselves and their children. These days, Brampton is one of the most multi-cultural cities in Canada, a minority-majority community where a very large proportion of the residents are from South, Central and West Asia. When Nawaz’s family arrived, she was the only brown girl in her classroom, though she was joined a few years later by a girl whose parents had immigrated from Afghanistan.

Because she is a very funny person, Nawaz speaks lightly, humorously, about not fitting in, about bring ostracised by the nice white girls because of the food she brought for lunch, her unfashionably modest clothing, her hairy legs on display in gym class, the list of differences that set her apart, marked her as alien. The list of incidents, large and small, that extended into adulthood, representative of the unthinking racism around her.

At the same time, Nawaz describes with considerable wit the contradictions and complexities of living as a faithful, but modern, Muslim, in a primarily non-Muslim world, from finding halal marshmallows for a campfire to persuading your parents not to arrange your marriage, at least not yet. She talks about finding her husband, getting started as a journalist and documentary filmmaker, about her experience making the hajj, about being a Muslim in North America after 9/11, and about the making of Little Mosque on the Prairie. Along the way, she educates her readers, through some occasionally side-splitting anecdotes, about many aspects of Muslim life, from the importance of designing a bathroom for ease of ritual ablutions to the controversies over men and women praying together in the mosque, to the Muslim traditions of observance for the dead.

Laughter is a universal human experience, and there are ways of de-mystifying and de-exoticising that perhaps can best be done through humour such as this. Certainly I felt in reading it, a great sense of connection to an intelligent, witty woman who takes the essence of her religion seriously, but questions its sexism and its quirks, and can laugh with love at the foibles of her family and community while demonstrating the shared humanity that links all our experiences. And in terms of the aspects of her personal life that she shares in this memoir, there are things that I’m pretty sure every middle class working mother of four can relate to with a sense of recognition.

Too often, in parts of the world that are mostly white and Christian, Islam is misunderstood, its differences made to stand out. But Nawaz makes us see the similarities. In her description of the hajj, for example, the rituals, the places, the histories and events connected with each part of the pilgrimage, the symbolism of the acts required of the Muslim on hajj, and her own emotions and responses as she moves through the process, one sees the ways in which this central Muslim experience is like the (more familiar to Western minds) Christian religious rituals and traditions, from Lent to pilgrimages to such places a Lourdes, in how it develops, and what it means to those who take part.

In the end, perhaps the best thing I can say about Nawaz’ book is that I laughed all the way through, frequently nodded in recognition, and ended up feeling more than ever that people are people regardless of how they worship or what they wear.

Amani Al-Khatahtbeh, the founder of MuslimGirl.com, a prominent website created by and for Muslim women, has written a memoir about growing up as an American-born Muslim, the daughter of refugees from Jordan and Palestine, in a post 9/11 world. It’s an account that’s both deeply saddening and angering, and a celebration of the determination of a young woman to survive despite the violence and hatred directed toward all Muslims because of the actions of a radical minority.

The wave of Islamophobia that swept the West following the terrorist attacks on America in September 2001 were perhaps to be expected. Racism is always close to the surface in the West, and one of the characteristics of racism is that whatever wrong may be done by one member of a racialised group is held to be a general fault of all, while any good is seen as the act of an exceptional person, someone who ‘isn’t like the others.’ Before 9/11, racism against the peoples of the Middle East had been muted - they certainly weren’t white, with all the privilege that entails, and the stereotypes were many and varied, but they had not been actively criminalised, the way black people in North America had. 9/11 changed all that. Suddenly, the image of the Muslim from the Middle East became that of a fanatical terrorist, bent on committing violence against all white nations and their citizens.

Al-Khatahtbeh was only a child when this change happened around her. With the exception of a brief period when her father attempted to move the family to a place of greater safety, returning to the US after a health crisis which nearly killed her mother, Al-Khatahtbeh grew up in a hostile environment where her sense of her self as a Muslim, as a child of immigrants and refugees, sometimes her very right to exist was challenged.

She writes movingly about the effects of this constant devaluation of herself, about the sense of inferiority that overwhelmed her, making it almost impossible for her to speak up for herself or even ask for her due. At times, she even denied her Identity as a Muslim to avoid the response of those around her.

It was in part the time spent among her cousins, attending a Jordanian school and living among fellow Muslims who might idolise the US in some ways, but had not had to face the consequences of being a young Muslim in an Islamophobic society, learning about the history of Islam, that helped her reaffirm her pride in her religion, not just as a personal choice, but as a part of her identity, that helped bring her to the decision, as an adolescent, to make that identity visible by wearing the hijab. She writes about the symbolism of the hijab:

“With that decision, I inherited the entire history to which the hijab has been tied, and carried it on my head like an issue for public debate.

Throughout time, the headscarf has evolved to symbolize autonomy and control over Muslim women’s bodies. An empowering rejection of the male gaze, colonialism, and anti-Muslim sentiment, it can just as easily be twisted into a disempowering tool of subjugation and repression through its forced imposition. In any given time period, the headscarf would be at the center of a tug-of-war between people and their governments, between colonizers and colonized people. During the French colonization of North Africa, the veil became an object of extreme sexualization, with white men writing literature fantasizing about ripping the scarf off sexy Arab women’s heads—an act that became, in their minds, the most gratifying assertion of power. Edward Said taught us of the orientalized depiction of Middle Eastern women as seductresses hidden behind fictionalized harems—forbidden spaces kept for women only—that were a figment of the white man’s imagination, an imagery that colonizers would stage for postcards to send back home to Europe. Today, some governments are just as eager to mandate its wear in public as others are to forbid it. In all cases, any decision to intervene in how a woman dresses, whether to take it off or put it on, is just the same assertion of public control over a woman’s body. Iran’s honor police enforce that all women wear a headscarf in public, while today’s French laws forbid the veil in public schools. It’s funny how, in our patriarchal world, even two entities at the opposite ends of the spectrum can be bonded by their treatment of women’s bodies. Sexism has been employed in many ways throughout history to uphold racism.”

Al-Khatahtbeh began developing the Muslim Girl web presence with some friends while still in high school, spurred by the lack of media representation and Internet presence of young Muslim women. Though she would work for several mainstream media outlets after university, Muslim Girl became a larger presence in her life and she began to be sought out for the Muslim women’s perspective. The latter part of the book is as much a critique of the representation of Muslims in the media, and the ways that has affected the lives of Muslim men and women in America as it is a personal memoir. She writes about the narratives of terrorism, violence, barbarism, and gender inequality that have dominated the public images of Islamic peoples in America and around the world. She talks openly about being afraid, at times, to go out in public as a hijabi. She writes about the ways in which the Trump campaign - the book was written before the election, although it’s clear that she expected he would win - aggravated the situation, inciting a new level of violence against Muslims.

“Trump discovered that milking anti-Muslim sentiment, with complete disregard to the dangers it poses to our very lives, keeps him in the spotlight and gets him more airtime. Since his ascension to the national stage, I have been receiving press requests around the clock during his media circuses to explain, again and again, “the current climate for Muslim women.” By the time the ­Muslim-ban comments came, I had run out of different palatable ways to say, “Our lives are under threat right now”—ironically, not from ISIS extremism or the brown men that our society is raising pitch forks against, but from our own Western society itself.”

But there have also been breakthroughs, and Al-Khatahtbeh, through her work with Muslim Girls and her activism a a voice for Muslim women has been a part of these. She ends this memoir, which contains much of her pain and fear, and that of other Muslims in an Islamophobic world, with an acknowledgement of all this, and with hope.

“I think of the little girls we were and the little girls we could have been, and the little girls who never were and what little girls will be if we have anything to say about it. I think of how our generation is a fateful one. We were the little girls who had our voices robbed of us. We were the little girls who had our bodies and our homelands ripped apart while our hands were tied behind our backs. We were the little girls who were told to sit down and shut up while our world betrayed us. We are rising up—we are the ones reclaiming our voices, the ones talking back, and the ones reminding the world that no, we haven’t forgotten. We grew to become our own saviors.”

The buzz about Tomi Adeyemi’s Children of Blood and Bone has been building higher and higher, and there’s a host of reviews out there voicing one superlative after another about this book. Some of that buzz, I think, is warranted - but not all of it.

The story is set in the land of Orisha, which is largely based on the place we call Nigeria, and draws heavily on Yoruban culture and tradition. The time period is vague, there are some things - mostly weapons and instruments of control and torture - that hint at a well-developed technology, but at the sane time, people travel on the backs of animals and soldiers carry swords.

The land of Orisha was until fairly recently a place where maji, also called diviners, people who can - or could, at one time, not too long ago, before the magic disappeared - call on extraordinary powers, were in the ascendancy, mostly using their abilities for the wellbeing of the people, but slowly falling into the corruption that power brings, coming to be hated and feared rather than loved and cherished. Eleven years before the novel opens, the powers of all the maji simply vanished, leaving them helpless before the resentment of the ordinary populace. King Saran, not himself of a maji family, ordered the Raid, in which thousands of maji were killed or taken prisoner, the remainder stripped of their possessions and position, condemned to live as a marked and reviled caste, easy to recognise by their darker skin and white hair.

Zelie is a maji, the daughter of a maji woman who died in the Raid and a non-maji father, a simple fisherman. Like several other young women in her village, she has been trained in secret to fight with a staff. The story begins with Zelie and her non-maji brother Tzain traveling from their own village to the royal city of Lagos to sell a rare fish at the market there, in the hopes of bargaining for enough money to pay the crippling taxes levied on families with diviners.

Zelie sells the fish successfully, but before she can leave Lagos, she is approached by a terrified young woman, nobility by her paler skin and rich clothing, who begs her help in escaping the king’s soldiers. Impulsively, Zelie does just that, which results in the three young people fleeing from Lagos, now marked as fugitives.

The young woman is Amari, the King’s daughter, who, horrified on seeing her father kill her closest friend, a diviner servant girl, has stolen an artefact that seems to have the power to awaken the lost gifts of the diviners, and fled from the palace. Tasked with pursuing her and her new allies Zelie and Tzain is her brother Inan, heir to the throne and a captain of the King’s guard. The novel, first in a trilogy, tells the story of Zelie, Amari, and Tzain’s quest to use the artefact to restore the powers of the maji in Orisha.

I have a strange, mixed reaction to this novel. Perhaps because it is intended for young adults, perhaps because it seems to borrow heavily from some of the storylines of The Last Airbender, the narrative line seems overly simple, almost predictable at times. The romantic element was actually somewhat repellant to me, because it reinforces the tropes of a fated attraction to the man who hurts you, and trying to save him through changing him. I became frustrated with what seemed to me to be a repetitive structure through much of the novel where story elements were recycled to create more action, without much real movement. Even more frustrating, in some ways, the story seems to spend more energy on Inan’s journey than that of Zelie or Amari - but that could just be me, identifying more with the two girls and wanting the focus to be on them, not the self-loathing, violent and untrustworthy ‘bad boy’ who is nonetheless positioned as the love object for the story’s main protagonist. However, the final scenes appear to subvert some of the more annoying tropes, so I have hopes that the second novel will be more rewarding in these areas.

But. Despite my criticisms of the novel, there are some solid reasons behind the praise it has garnered.

It’s without doubt a powerful exploration of oppression set in a wholly African-derived world. This is a novel of a kind we still have far too little of, a novel that draws on African history, culture, religion, that assumes as a given that a story in which all the characters are black is just as relevant as the thousands of novels in which all the characters are white. It is important because of where it is set, what are its sources, who are its heroes.

And then, too, there is the kind of world in which this story is set, the circumstances that surround the story. The individual incidents of oppression, violence, dysfunctional family dynamics, and wholly toxic masculinity that the two girls encounter again and again in their quest to restore the connection between men and gods that allows magic to flourish, are powerful, searing, indelible images. It is important that we see the horrors that humanity inflicts upon its most vulnerable, that we never forget why we fight for justice.

In the final analysis, it seems to me as if the weight of meaning behind the story is more potent than the story itself, and that leaves me oddly dissatisfied, wishing for a stronger, more unique story to pin such important messages on. But perhaps I’m asking too much. This is, after all, a first novel from a young writer. And had it not been for the hype, I think I’d have been more receptive. As it was, I kept waiting for this book to astound me, to be life-changing and awe-inspiring, and it simply isn’t a strong enough work to deliver on that overwrought expectation. It’s a good debut novel, it presents its secondary world well, and carries some powerful messages about fighting oppression, and it’s an important addition to the growing number of science fiction and fantasy novels that are not based in European history and culture. It’s a good read, and I expect Adeyemi’s work to mature over time. But for me, Children of Blood and Bone does not live up to the press it’s received.

When you start reading a book, and the first three named characters are a young lesbian, and two young gay men, one black, one Latino, who have just met and are bonding over The Force Awakens, then you kind of know you’re reading something different and good. But I had no idea just how powerful the experience if reading this would be.

It starts out as a ‘meet cute’ scenario. Moss - Morris Jeffries Jr. - and his best friend Esperanza are stuck on a stalled BART train. When the train starts moving suddenly, the passengers are jostled a bit, and Moss connects, literally and figuratively, with Javier Perez. But the light opening gets dark almost immediately, as they arrive at the station to find police confronting a demonstration against yet another police shooting of an unarmed black man. And that sets the tone for what is to come. Short notes of sweetness amidst the bitterness of life as a person of colour in a racist world.

Mark Oshiro’s debut, the young adult novel Anger Is a Gift, is a portrait of growing up in America today, the kind of America that’s multi-racial, where immigrant families from Korean and Ethiopia mingle with black and Latinx families whose roots on the land go back further than most whites. Where your friends at school are Nigerian and Muslim and trans non-binary and one of them needs a mobility device to get around.

Where there’s an armed guard at the school door and random locker searches. Where there’s no money for school supplies and they sold all the books in the school library, so your English teacher reluctantly arranges for you to get pirated epubs of Things Fall Apart by Chinua Achebe. And you have panic attacks every time you see the cops because you saw your father killed before your eyes just because he was black and in the wrong place at the wrong time - which translated means he was just doing the same things everyone does, stopping off at the local market to do some shopping, but he was black and some cop decided he was a criminal.

This is a book about what it’s like to be young and not white in America, to be the focus of unrelenting racial profiling at school, on public transit, in the streets, in any public place. About the school to prison pipeline. About the brutality of the state toward the young and marginalised. About trying to resist and find joy in the midst if it all.

The narrative follows Moss as he navigates both traditional young adult topics like dating and figuring out what to do when you grow up, and far more difficult issues, like trying to block your school from installing metal detectors and discovering that your best friend, despite her Puerto Rican heritage, doesn’t always see past her privilege as the adopted daughter of well-off white intellectuals who send her to private school where she doesn’t face the same things you do every day. And what to do when the cops strike and your fiends are hurt and dying.

The metal detectors are installed because of a “brawl” - students reacting when one of their own, Shawna, is brutally handled by the school’s ‘resource officer’ because he found her epilepsy medication in her locker and assumed it was illegal drugs. On the first day the metal detectors are in operation, Reg Phillips, a student recovering from major surgery after a car accident that left his legs badly damaged, refuses to go through the detector because he is concerned about its effects on the metal pins and other hardware in his legs. The police officers grab him and shove him through the machine, which malfunctions, tearing the metal in his legs out of position and sending him to the hospital, where surgeons determine that not only has the damage undone the progress he’s made, but it’s made his condition worse - he is now unlikely to ever walk again.

It’s the last straw for Moss and his friends. Drawing on the help of some adults, like Moss’ mother Wanda who was an activist and organiser before the murder of her husband, they call a community meeting and decide to demonstrate as a community against the use of the detectors at school. The students plan a mass walkout to co-incide.

One of the few narrative threads that isn’t overtly filed with tension over the coming confrontation with the authorities is Moss’ budding romance with Javier, who we learn is, along with his mother, an undocumented migrant from Guatemala. Their gentle courting, getting to know each other, all the sweet high notes of falling in love for the first time, is like an island of peace in the midst of the heightened anxiety of waiting for the day of the walkout. And yet.... the very presence of this oasis of comfort and hope is a site of tension because what should be unthinkable, that this innocent awakening of love can not survive the brutality of this place and time, is all too possible.

On the day of the walkout, the students arrive to a sea of police in riot gear. When the time comes for the protest, everything you would expect from a military operation primed to view young people of colour attempting a peaceful demonstration as a gang of violent criminals takes place. There are multiple horrors, and tragedies large and small. Armed cops against children. The essence of modern America.

There’s a lot here that hits hard. I’m a middle-aged white cis woman who has none of the lived experience that kids like Moss and Javier and Shawna and their friends know, but this helps me understand as much as I’m able too - that’s the gift of art. It lets you see from other perspectives, feel what it’s like, to a degree, to be someone other than yourself, to live under other conditions. But this book does something else, too, something that white readers need to see and understand. There are white characters in this book. The cops, obviously. But there are white teachers, some white folks who live in Moss’ neighbourhood, Esperanza’s adoptive parents. Some of them even think of themselves as allies, as people trying to help. But the thing for white people reading this book to understand is that allyship is hard. Because we don’t understand. We don’t get it. And the book demonstrates that. There are no examples of good white allies here. Only white people who don’t try, or try and fail, some of them with disastrous results. And that’s the essence of modern America, too.

But one of the most important messages here is right in the title. Because what moves the story past the tragedy and horror is Moss’ anger. Anger is a gift. These days, there’s a lot of what we call tone policing going on. Marginalised people are angry, and yet when they speak up, act on their anger at the years of injustice they’ve faced, the white liberal response is far too often about being patient, engaging in dialog, being persuasive, using the ‘right’ tactics. Waiting your turn. Not antagonising people who maybe could help your case if you’re properly calm and respectful. Anger hurts the movement, they say.

I call bullshit on that. If being polite and waiting your turn could have made this world more just, we’d all be living in a social justice paradise. And as for not antagonising potential allies - if your commitment to doing the right thing is dependent on people being nice to you, your commitment isn’t worth shit and won’t last past the first rough patch anyway.

Anger is fire. It lights the way, it gives us the energy, the determination, the will, to survive and to keep fighting. It blazes against the darkness of injustice, cruelty, hatred. It burns out evil, and makes a space where we can rebuild something better, if we have the will and desire. Anger is a gift.

Charlie Angus, politician, author and journalist, is a longtime socialist, social justice activist, and Indigenous ally. His book, Children of the Broken Treaty: Canada’s Lost Promise and One Girl’s Dream, arises out of these multiple threads. Angus takes a hard, journalistic view of the way that Canadian society, government and institutions have failed Indigenous children, giving his account a strong centre by focusing on young Cree activist Shannen Koostachin, a member of the Attawapiskat First Nation, and her fight for equal access to education for the students of her community and for all Indigenous youth across Canada. Angus has a personal connection to this story - Attawapiskat is a part of the riding he represents in Parliament, and he knew and supported Shannen Koostachin in her campaign, but he treads carefully in writing this account, avoiding sentimentality and never injecting himself needlessly into the narrative - rare restraint from a politician.

Shannen’s story is short, inspiring and tragic. At 13, she challenged the federal government to build a new school in her community to replace the mould-filled portables sitting on toxic, contaminated land that had been the only educational facility available to the children in her remote community for years. Her drive, her charismatic presence, called out to other youth across the country to support her. Even after her death in a car accident, the fight she started continued until the government finally was forced to recognise the demands she and her supporters made. But as Angus says, Shannen’s story is emblematic of a problem that affects Indigenous communities across Canada.

“And this is where the story of Shannen Koostachin takes on larger political significance. The story of the inequities faced by students in Attawapiskat provides a window into a world that most Canadians never knew existed. It has opened a political and social conversation about how a country as rich and inclusive as Canada can deliberately marginalize children based on their race or, more accurately, marginalize them based on their treaty rights.

What Shannen’s story shows us is that, though the conditions in Attawapiskat might have been extreme, they were by no means an anomaly. All over Canada, First Nations youth have significantly fewer resources for education, health, and community services than those available to non-Indigenous youth. Certainly, there are many reserves with proper school facilities. But other communities make do with substandard schools or condemned schools or, in some cases, no school at all. It is the arbitrary nature of the delivery of education that speaks to its inequity. What all these communities have in common is systemic underfunding for education by the Department of Indian Affairs compared with communities with students in the provincial school systems.”

Angus begins his acount with the signing of Treaty 9 at Fort Hope in .Northern Ontario on July 19, 1905. He recounts the promises - all lies - made to persuade the Cree to sign, the guarantees that their way of life would not be threatened and the offer of education for their children. And he describes what followed - the concerted attempt to destroy Indigenous culture and assimilate Indigenous children through indoctrination, humiliation, violence and terror at the residential schools. He quotes Duncan Scott Campbell, architect of Treaty 9 and head of the Department of Indian Affairs: ““I want to get rid of the Indian problem. . . . That is my whole point. Our objective is to continue until there is not a single Indian in Canada that has not been absorbed into the body politic and there is no Indian question, and no Indian Department.”

Angus focuses his narrative on one of the Canadian government’s key strategies for elimination the ‘Indian question’ - the horrifying system of residential schools in which children were taken from their families and communities, forbidden to speak their language or practice any aspects of their traditional culture, and frequently subjected to psychological, sexual and physical abuse. As many as one-third of children in the so-called care of the residential school system did not survive their experience. Far too many of those who did, left the schools with no connection to their culture, traumatised in ways that would mark their communities for generations. And in examining the system of deliberate cultural genocide and attendant abuse that was the hallmark of the residential school system, Angus pays particular attention to St. Anne’s Residential School. This school, run by the Catholic Oblate order, was situated in the region that Angus represents, and was thus, for Shannen Koostachin and the Attawapiskat First Nation community, part of their lived experience. I’ve read other accounts mentioning the situation at St. Anne’s, notably the courageous memoir of Chief Edward Metatwabin, Up Ghost River, which is cited by Angus here. The picture that emerges from the testimony of survivors of St. Anne’s s one of an utter disregard for the health and dignity of the children entrusted to the institution’s care, combined with outright racism, abuse, and violations of the children’s rights as human beings, and the parents’ rights to even so much as be informed of what happened to their children. It is a picture of deliberate, racially motivated genocide.

Even with the closure of the residential schools, the deliberate attempt to forcibly assimilate Canada’s Indigenous people by destroying families and cutting children off from their communities and culture continued - and continues into the present day. Indigenous children were, and still are, placed in white foster homes on the flimsiest of pretexts, away from their parents, their homes, among people who knew nothing about their foster and adopted children’s languages or cultures, and had no interest in allowing the children placed in their care to learn about their Indigenous roots.

“The huge number of children taken from their parents under this agenda has been named the “Sixties Scoop.” Theresa Stevens, who works in Indigenous child welfare services in Kenora, Ontario, was recently interviewed by the National Post on the devastating impacts of the Sixties Scoop in her community of Wabaseemoong (Whitedog First Nation) in northwestern Ontario. She said that child welfare workers would arrive in the community with a bus that they filled with local children who had been apprehended. The children were then flown to another isolated community and given away to strangers. “When the planes landed at the dock, families there were told they could come down and pick out a kid,” she stated. So many children were taken from her community that teachers at the local school were laid off because there weren’t enough children left to be taught. Stevens said that the process continued until 1990 and was only stopped at her home reserve when the band members openly defied the child welfare authorities. “They stood at the reserve line on tractors with shotguns saying, ‘You aren’t coming into our community and taking any more of our children,’” she stated.”

In 1976, the Attawapiskat First Nation finally got their own school. But there were problems from the beginning. The construction of the facilities, including residences for teachers, failed to take into account the climate conditions in such a northern region. Within a few years, the freeze and thaw cycle cause shallowly buried fuel pipes to buckle and break, resulting in leaks that seriously contaminated the soil on which the school was built. Health problems developed among students and staff. Some attempts were made to remove contaminated soil, but the leaks continued, adding to the load of toxic diesel fuel in the ground and the health risks to the students. The school, which was under the jurisdiction of Indian Affairs, not the provincial educational system, continued to operate. Finally, in 2000, the band declared the school as a condemned building and demanded that a new school be built. One was promised, but no action followed on that promise. Instead, classes were taught in portables set up near the old school - still close to the source of contamination, cold in winter, lacking in facilities to support the basic educational program, and screaming “slapdash solution to a serious problem.”

Angus carefully details the campaign originated and driven by the students of Attawapiskat, and the shameful responses - obfuscations, denials, diversions and outright lies - of the government of the day and the various Indian Affairs ministers, who held the portfolio during the Harper regime.

He also paints a powerful and painful picture of what Indigenous children, particularly those living in remote and isolated communities, deal with. The poverty, lack of resources, lack of housing, schools, community infrastructure, social programs. He speaks about the epidemics of depression, apathy, suicide, that have swept through indigenous communities. The problems faced by Indigenous youth taken from their homes and placed in foster care or in institutions. The endless wasting of talent, potential, and lives that would never be tolerated if these children were white.

The basic truths that Angus speaks are these: that the federal government, regardless of what party currently forms it, has never paid attention to the real needs of Indigenous communities, has never listened to the people it abandoned, has never wanted to spend the money necessary to ensure the most important supports: safe, clean housing; medical care; essential infrastructure; education comparable to that provided by provincial authorities; social programs with a goal of keeping families together, children in their communities, and indigenous cultures strong; economic development to enable communities to be self-supporting. That white settlers stole their land, tried to erase their very existence and gave them nothing but empty promises. That the colonial project of genocide continues to this day. And that the resistance to this project is alive and growing.

In Clearing the Plains: Disease, Politics of Starvation, and the Loss of Aboriginal Life, James Daschuk sets out to tell the history of the European colonisation of the the Canadian Great Plains as it affected, and continues to affect, the health of Indigenous peoples in Western Canada. As he states in his introduction: “Racism among policy makers and members of mainstream society was the key factor in creating the gap in health outcomes as well as maintaining a double standard for acceptable living conditions for the majority of the population and the indigenous minority.” This book shows how that double standard was created and maintained.

“Canada consistently places among the top nations in the world according to the UN Human Development Index. In its report for 2007–08, only Iceland, Norway, and Australia ranked higher than Canada in the criteria considered by the United Nations. Yet also a regular story is the dismal condition of Canada’s indigenous people in comparison with its mainstream population. The gap between these populations is so wide that official communications of the Assembly of First Nations, the largest aboriginal organization in the country, state that Canada’s indigenous population would rank sixty-third on the same index, the equivalent of Panama, Malaysia, or Belarus. On average, indigenous Canadians can expect to die between five and eight years earlier than other Canadians. Canadians have come to expect the highest-quality medical care as their national right, but indigenous people routinely suffer from poverty, violence, sickness, and premature death. Substandard health conditions are so entrenched that a recent text on the social determinants of health listed aboriginal status as a key predictive variable in the analysis of the country’s overall health outcomes. The chasm between the health conditions of First Nations people and mainstream Canadians has existed for as long as anyone can remember; it too has become part of who we are as a nation. The primary goal of this study is to identify the roots of the current health disparity between the indigenous and mainstream populations in western Canada. Health as a measure of human experience cannot be considered in isolation from the social and economic forces that shape it. In Canada, the marginalization of First Nations people has been the primary factor impeding improved health outcomes for all of its citizens.”

I don’t think I could present a better summary of Daschuk’s work than the one published in the Literary Review of Canada, written by Anishnaabe scholar Niigaan Sinclair, department head of Native Studies at the University of Manitoba, from which I quote below:

“In the book, Daschuk presents an intricate examination of how Canada cleared the plains coldly and opportunistically, taking advantage of a famine caused by the loss of bison populations, due to the flooding of Nakota, Dakota, Nehiyawak, Niitsitapi and Anishinaabe territories by settlers. Methodically, using draconian legislation regarding Indians and starvation, Canadian leaders coerced indigenous leaders into signing treaties and acquiescing to federal control—all in an attempt to exterminate indigenous peoples from the national consciousness. In other words, Indians were forcibly and willfully manipulated, removed, and murdered for the sake of “progress.” None of this is an overstatement: it’s all there in the evidence Daschuk unearths in deft research and prose.

The most remarkable aspect of Clearing the Plains is the narrative arc of the book. He draws a direct line connecting 19th century Canadian Indian policy, Sir John A. Macdonald’s railroad, western settlement, Canada’s economic foundation and territorial theft of indigenous communities, ethnic cleansing and genocide. The conclusion of this story is that indigenous peoples now experience, a century and a half later, dire circumstances due to these events: the lowest life expectancy, the greatest amount of poverty and ostracization, and the highest amount of racism and violence. Simply put, the situation indigenous communities face today is the result of an elaborate and extensive plan in which every Canadian is culpable. Throughout the 19th century, Canada pursued a “state-sponsored attack on indigenous communities,” Daschuk states, that continues to “haunt us as a nation still.”

In 340 pages Daschuk’s Clearing the Plains does more to tell the true story of Canada’s history than the entirety of Eurocentric pioneer narratives, “award-winning” textbooks, and self-congratulatory encyclopedias that flood bookstores, libraries and classrooms across this country. Daschuk announces the secret that indigenous peoples have been telling all along but Canadians weren’t ready to hear (frankly, until one of their own said it): Canada’s settlement, growth and economy was not a simple, earned and positivistic set of events but a cold, methodical and exploitative plan built on sacrifices by and theft from indigenous peoples.”
(http://reviewcanada.ca/the-lrc-25/clearing-the-plains/)

This is the story of a genocide, in which all settler Canadians are complicit. Daschuk begins with a picture of life before the influence of English and French fur traders began to affect the Indigenous Great Plains peoples, a semi-nomadic life that hunted bison in a sustainable manner, and prohibited hunting of beaver to ensure the water supply, dependent on the dam-building behaviours of beavers, remained stable. The coming of white settlers and traders was felt on the Plains long before whites actually reached the area. The growth of European colonies in the east pushed the Indigenous peoples of Central Canada westward, destabilising conditions across the continent. Trade in horses along the north-south trade routes with Mesoamerica brought changes to long-established hunting methods. And with both these movements came smallpox, which would irrevocably affect both the demographics and the population levels of the Plains peoples. Other diseases - tularaemia, tuberculosis, whooping cough, venereal disease, measles - followed as contacts with Europeans increased and the fur trade encroached on the Plains economy and ecology. The fur trade, with its insatiable demand for beaver pelts, its introduction of highly distilled alcohol products, and its creation of competition for hunting grounds among the peoples who took part, further impacted the Indigenous Plains nations’ stability and way of life. Food shortages became a serious threat to the Plains peoples. Violence between Indigenous peoples, between whites and the Indigenous hunters they exploited, and between rival trade companies Hudson’s Bay Co. and North West Co. was endemic. “By 1821, the Canadian northwest was in social, demographic, and environmental crisis. Harsh climatic conditions compounded by the eruption of Mount Tambora, along with catastrophic disease episodes, created severe conditions for the physical environment and people of the northwest.”

Throughout the 19th century, as the fur trade, followed by the beginning of white agricultural settlement, followed by successive gold rushes, and an increased military presence, brought more and more movement of white people into and through the plains in both Canadian and American territories, waves of infections swept through indigenous communities, decimating populations already weakened by malnutrition due to the hunting out of fur-bearing species and the buffalo and bison. With the end of the traditional bison economy and the more recent fur-trade economy, the only option for many Indigenous communities was to negotiate treaties and convert their economies yet again, this time to an agricultural economy under the reserve system. Many treaties included, at the insistence of the Indigenous parties, the provision by the government of a “medicine chest” to combat the frequent epidemics, and rations during times of famine - provisions rarely honored by the government once its goal of isolating Indigenous peoples on reserves was achieved.

The deadly conditions continued, exacerbated by Government policies and lack of concern at the highest levels for the suffering of Indigenous peoples, bereft of their traditional ways of life, hemmed in by restrictive laws, weakened by famine and disease, subjected to multiple forms of abuse by Department of Indian Affairs employees and agents.

Daschuk’s account concludes with the following comments:

“This study has shown that the decline of First Nations health was the direct result of economic and cultural suppression. The effects of the state-sponsored attack on indigenous communities that began in the 1880s haunt us as a nation still. The Cree negotiators at Treaty 6 recognized the need for their people to adapt to the new economic paradigm taking shape in the west. They acknowledged that the conversion would be difficult. What they failed to plan for was the active intervention of the Canadian government in preventing them from doing so. Tuberculosis and pathologies that have emerged in aboriginal communities in recent decades are the physical manifestations of their poverty and marginalization from mainstream Canadian life.

The gap between the health, living conditions, and other social determinants of health of First Nations people and mainstream Canadians continues as it has since the end of the nineteenth century. While Canadians see themselves as world leaders in social welfare, health care, and economic development, most reserves in Canada are economic backwaters with little prospect of material advancement and more in common with the third world than the rest of Canada. Even basics such as clean drinking water remain elusive for some communities. Identification of the forces that have held indigenous communities back might provide insights into what is required to bridge the gap between First Nations communities and the rest of Canada today.”

Canada’s genocidal war on Indigenous peoples continues.

Black Panther: Avengers of the New World, Book One is the beginning of a new narrative arc in the Black Panther comic written by Ta-Nehisi Coates. The rebellion is ended in Wakanda. A new constitution, a new, more representational form of government is being forged. But T’Challa and his people face a new crisis - the disappearance of the Orishas, the gods of Wakanda, who have until the recent rebellion been an active force in Wakandan life. But now prayers and entreaties go unheard, and not even the Black Panther can commune with his patron orisha, Bast, as he has in the past.

But there are other threats. Strange, violent reptilian beings have begun appearing, entering Wakanda through portals that Wakandan science cannot control, and Wakanda’s shamans cannot close without facing their own deaths. All that is known is that these Simbi are ancient enemies from Wakanda’s far-distant past. And the Simbi are not alone. Other creatures appear, giant ape-like creatures called Vanyan, the spider-men known as the Anansi, and other dooms from the past.

Guided by the spirits of former Black Panthers, T’Challa seeks out a potential ally, the ancient sorcerer Zawavari, who appears to know something about what is going on. He manages to close a gate, killing a troop of invading Vanyan, but falls into a coma - first uttering the chilling words that the gods are dead, and predicting that the Originators will return. With Zawavari unable - temporarily, they hope - to help, Shuri persuades T’Challa to seek the help of his former wife Oromo, the warrior goddess known as Storm.

As the crisis worsens, news is brought to T’Challa of a new religious cult - in the name of the “twice-risen” god Sefako - sweeping the land, filling in the gap left by the disappearance of the orishas.

And there are other enemies circling Wakanda as well - Zeke Stane, Doctor Faustus, Fenris, and the rebel Zenzi are planning to take advantage of Wakanada’s unrest. The first dign of their involvement comes when T’Challa learns that Fenris has kidnapped T’Challa’s old friend Asira and given her to Wakanda’s enemies, the Azanians. Aneka and Ayo of the Dora Milaje are sent to rescue her, but are taken prisoner by Doctor Faustus and Klaw.

It’s an action-filled, tense beginning to the next Black Panther adventure. I find the missing orisha plotline more engaging at the moment, but that’s probably because I lack context for all these villains and their history with the Black Panther. I’m certainly enjoying the fact that in Black Panther, we have a hero surrounded by women without whom he would be quite lost. And I find the idea of Wakanda, an uncolonised African nation, ever resisting, very powerful.

Martin Delany, author of Blake, or The Huts of America, was a free black man, associate of Frederick Douglas, an abolitionist, journalist, physician, soldier and writer, and an early advocate of black nationalism. He wrote his two-part novel, the first part of which was serialised in the The Anglo-African Magazine in 1859, in response to Harriet Beecher Stowe’s Uncle Tom’s Cabin. Where Stowe’s book urged patience and resignation for enslaved black people, and valorised Christian piety among slaves, Delany tells a story of planning for an armed insurrection of black people in North America, and Cuba and labels Christianity as the religion of the oppressor. It should be noted, although, that by this he means a white-led Christian church which preaches patience and acceptance of one’s fate. His main character espouses instead a form of liberation Christianity in which black Christians will interpret scripture directly and in revolutionary terms.

Delany explains his concept of religion most clearly in this speech by his main character, Blake (known throughout the first part of the book as Henry Holland): “No religion but that which brings us liberty will we know; no God but He who owns us as his children will we serve. The whites accept of nothing but that which promotes their interests and happiness, socially, politically and religiously. They would discard a religion, tear down a church, overthrow a government, or desert a country, which did not enhance their freedom. In God’s great and righteous name, are we not willing to do the same?” .... “Our ceremonies, then,” continued Blake, “are borrowed from no denomination, creed, nor church: no existing organization, secret, secular, nor religious; but originated by ourselves, adopted to our own condition, circumstances, and wants, founded upon the eternal word of God our Creator, as impressed upon the tablet of each of our hearts.”

The full text of the novel has been lost, but Part One and a large part of Part Two survive. [1] It is a fascinating read, being of interest both as a work of African-American nationalist literature, and as an early work of black speculative fiction.

The novel begins with the heart-rending account of the break-up of a black family through the sale of a young slave woman. Colonel Franks, a Southern landowner, is persuaded by Arabella Ballard, a relative of his wife’s, and the wife of a business associate, to sell her Maggie, a house servant trained as a lady’s maid, to accompany her on a trip to Cuba. It is strongly suggested that his decision to sell Maggie - his biological daughter - is motivated by her refusal of his sexual advances toward her. By this sale she is separated from her young son Joe, her husband, known as Henry Holland, an educated black man from the West Indies tricked into slavery when young, and from her mother, Mammy Judy, the cook, and Mammy Judy’s husband Daddy Joe, who are also devastated by the loss.

But where Judy and Daddy Joe try to accept the loss of Maggie with Christian platitudes about suffering and being together again in Heaven, Henry is outraged at the callous destruction of his family and rejects the advice of the others to accept the loss and trust in God. He confronts the Colonel over the sale of his wife, and in turn is sold himself. But before his new master can take possession, he runs away. After arranging for his son to be carried to safety in Canada, he contacts two trusted friends, Andy and Charles, and shares with them his plan, not only to never be enslaved again, but to organise a country-wide slave revolution, a goal that they eagerly agree to support him in.

Delany makes the reader look at all aspects of slavery, from the philosophical arguments used to justify the ownership of human beings, to the economics of plantation culture, to the casual everyday cruelty exhibited toward enslaved blacks. He also examines the range of survival strategies used by black people under slavery, showing the ways in which the myths of the slave who is eager to please, happy amusing, slow-witted, childlike, or a comforting ‘mammy’ are all, to some degree or other, masks adopted as means of surviving interactions with whites - with varied results, depending on the skill of the actor and the mood and whim of the target. The real hearts and minds of black people appear only when they speak together, or act out of the sight of whites, in the black-occupied ‘huts of America’ where they can congregate away from the gaze of the master. Even the very real faith of some blacks is exaggerated into a performance of confused and frenzied religiosity - for example, when Mammy Judy uses this strategy as a way of avoiding uncomfortable questions about the whereabouts of Henry and his son Joe. There are no happy plantation stories here.

As Henry travels through the South, spreading the idea of an organised rebellion, his encounters with the workers on different plantations provide a sense of the scope of slavery as a means of cheap labour - the sheer numbers of blacks working to produce the cash crops that drove the economic growth of not only the plantation south but the industrial north - and the ways in which this commodified labour force was treated.

Henry’s travels through the Southern states, rousing the black populace to prepare for a coming insurrection, occupy much of the book; having made this circuit, he returns to the Franks plantation, gathers these closest to him, and leads them to Canada, where he buys land and sets up a community of escaped slaves. Then, his family and friends taken care of, he heads toward Cuba in search of his wife. Thus ends Part One of Blake.

Where Part One was largely an exploration of the life of blacks under slavery, with some detailed advice on the dangers facing escaping slaves due to the Fugitive Slave Act and directions on how to reach Canada - complete with warnings not to expect much beyond freedom on arrival in what was still a very racially stratified society - the early chapters of Part Two examine first the conditions of slavery in Cuba, and then the conditions of the slave trade itself, as Henry’s adventures continue. It is in this section of the novel that Delany’s African nationalism is most strongly elucidated, in passage such as this:

“Heretofore that country [Africa] has been regarded as desolate-unadapted to useful cultivation or domestic animals, and consequently, the inhabitants savage, lazy, idle, and incapable of the higher civilization and only fit for bondmen, contributing nothing to the civilized world but that which is extorted from them as slaves. Instead of this, let us prove, not only that the African race is now the principal producer of the greater part of the luxuries of enlightened countries, as various fruits, rice, sugar, coffee, chocolate, cocoa, spices, and tobacco; but that in Africa their native land, they are among the most industrious people in the world, highly cultivating the lands, and that ere long they and their country must hold the balance of commercial power by supplying as they now do as foreign bondmen in strange lands, the greatest staple commodities in demand, as rice, coffee, sugar, and especially cotton, from their own native shores, the most extensive native territory, climate, soil, and greatest number of (almost the only natural producers) inhabitants in the universe; and that race and country will at once rise to the first magnitude of importance in the estimation of the greatest nations on earth, from their dependence upon them for the great staples from which is derived their national wealth.”

In Part Two, Henry, now using the name Gilbert, travels to Cuba in the service of a party of three young white men - Captain Richard Paul, Lieutenant Augustus Seely, and Midshipman Lawrence Spencer - desirous of entering the slave trade, and Cordelia Woodward, a young woman who later becomes Seely’s wife.

Once in Cuba, Henry leaves the party to search for his wife; finding Maggie at last, he gives her the money to purchase her freedom, and arranges for Joe to be brought to Cuba by some of his friends in Canada. We now learn that Henry, who speaks both Spanish and Creole fluently, is originally from Cuba, and that his name is actually Henrico Blacus - Henry Blake. He visits his cousin, Placido, a revolutionary poet, and they agree on working toward an uprising in Cuba. Henry then takes a position as a sailing master on a slave ship carrying arms - the Vulture, commanded by Captain Paul and his associates.

Blake’s journey to Africa, where the Vulture takes on two thousand kidnapped and branded Africans, gives Delany the opportunity to enumerate the horrors of the Middle Passage, the physical and mental torture endured by the transportees, the callousness toward the health and lives of their human cargo.

On his return, Blake discovers that he has been appointed the General of the Cuban Army of Emancipation; the revolutionaries, comprising many of the free blacks and people of mixed race in Cuba as well as soaves, plan for action. The last preserved chapter offers a picture of heightened political tensions between the Spanish administrators, the American platers who seek to have Cuba annexed by the US, and the black and mixed race general population, free and slave. Conditions are ripe for a revolution; but the conclusion of the book is lost to us.

Those looking for a cohesive personal narrative in Blake will be disappointed. This is not that kind of novel. Henry’s travels and exploits are governed, not by the desire to tell a story, but to impart information and promote a cause. Its shape is also affected by the length of time taken to write the work. Delany began publishing the chapters in 1959, before the outbreak of civil war. By the time he finished writing, it was 1862, and the possibility existed that a Union victory might end the rule of slavery in the South, rendering moot his main character’s arguments for a black insurrection. The value of Blake lies in its articulation of a nationalist vision of diasporic Africans, and its contemporary account of the conditions of black people under slavery.


[1] Part One has been published online (http://utc.iath.virginia.edu/africam/blakehp.html)

Daniel José Older’s YA fantasy Shadowshaper is a rich fantasy drawing on contemporary urban mythologies commingled with older traditions with Hispanic and African roots. The protagonist, Sierra, is a mixed race young woman whose family came to New York from Puerto Rico. She’s a talented street artist who makes fantastic, monumental murals on abandoned buildings. And perhaps, she is something more.

Sierra helps her family care for her grandfather Lázaro, who is paralysed and not entirely coherent following a severe stroke, but who keeps trying to communicate a message to her, about a person called Lucera, about shadowshapers, and about the importance of a mural she’s working on. At his insistence, she recruits another street artist, a Haitian boy named Robbie, to help her complete her mural. It turns out he’s a shadowshaper himself, but is reluctant to talk about it.

What he does tell her, and what she manages to glean from remarks by some of her abuelo’s old friends - and in one case, the notes of one old friend gone missing who was an anthropologist studying urban mythology and magic systems - is that something is going wrong, some evil force is possessing the dead body of one of her abuelo’s friends, and Lucera, a spirit woman, may be the key if she can be found.

Sierra slowly learns that shadowshapers are people gifted with the ability to make alliances with spirits, to create shapes that spirits can inhabit. Most shadowshapers draw forms for the spirits they work with, but some, like her abuelo, could tell stories so vividly that the shadows, or spirits, could manifest in his words. For real shadowshapers, this is a cooperative thing, they invite the shadows to come into their work, and the shadows, in return, agree to help the shadowshaper. But there are shadowshapers who are corrupted by power, and these can force the spirits into doing their bidding, turn them into corrupted haints, used them to animate the dead. And it seems that one such corrupted shadowshaper is waging war against Sierra, her abuelo, and his friends.

As Sierra learns more about her family and her abilities, the dangers grow stronger, but her friends band around her for the final showdown between the evil that seeks to destroy her family and the other remaining shadowshapers, and take the gifts of shadowshaping for itself.

Sierra is a wonderfully realised character. Strong, talented, she is at once an ordinary teenaged girl dealing with body image and first boyfriend, and the inheritor of a powerful mystical tradition. She’s a warrior on many levels - she fights for her family’s mystical heritage, but she also fights as best she can against the day-to-day issues she faces as a yiung woman of mixed race - street harassment, casual racism, colourism among her own relatives, some of whom disapprove of her “nappy hair” and hanging out with a boy darker skinned than she is. Sierra’s worlds are both fantastic, and very real, and that’s a big part of what makes her such a pleasure to read about. Representation matters, and this is representation at its best.

Shadowhouse Fall, the sequel to Shadowshaper, takes place several months after the first book. Sierra, as the new Lucera, or central focus of the spiritual powers that allow her and others like her to work with the spirits, is rebuilding the shadowshaper community with a new generation of practitioners, including her own mother, finally reconciled to their family legacy.

Sierra is waiting for trouble. Back when she was first discovering her abilities and tracking down Wicks, the corrupt power-seeker who was responsible for the deaths of so many of her grandfather’s shadowshapers friends, she crossed paths with powers called the Sorrows, who were using Wicks for their own purposes, and wanted to use her, too.

Now the Sorrows have sent her a message, through one of her schoolmates, a white girl named Mina, who tries to give her a card that looks like a Tarot card, but not one from any deck she’s every heard of. All Mina can tell her is that something known as The Deck is now “in play” and that the Sorrows are trying to connect the cards of the deck with the people each card represents. And that it means trouble for those of the Shadowhouse. While she doesn’t know much about what it means, or how to use it, she does know that whoever holds the deck will have an advantage in whatever is coming. And right now, that advantage is hers - if she can figure out how to use it before the Sorrows and their allies destroy her house and her people.

In addition to the things like plot, characters, worldbuilding, use of language, description, dialogue, and all those other things that can make or break a book, and which are all good in these two books, what is wonderful about Shadowshaper and Shadowhouse Fall is the way that Older works real life issues into his created world. This is a universe that acknowledges things like police brutality, racism, colourism ablism, sexism, and shows the little everyday things that wear away at anyone who is marginalised. Dealing with the metal detectors every day at school. Learning your friend is dealing with a mental health issue and trying not to say the stupid ableist things. Coping with your aunt’s colourism. Not trusting a white teacher to get it right when they teach about slavery. Wolfwhistles and catcalls on the street when all you want is to be left to your own business in peace. This is more than a fantasy about young people gaining their powers and coming of age. It’s also a realistic story about living in an unjust world and coping with the daily assaults and microagressions. That’s a huge part of what makes these books not just good, but special.