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Indicatively, Why We Write is dedicated to three individuals—Harold Head, Ann Wallace, and Lorris Elliot—who usually aren’t the first to be invoked when African Canadian writing is discussed today, but who, as editor H. Nigel Thomas aptly observes, were “crucial in establishing a foundation for African Canadian literature.” Each of these individuals was active in the ’seventies and ’eighties, when Black Canadian writing was almost solely a small-press and “community-based” phenomenon, and each would appear to function as the inspiration for some discussion of developments since the early ’nineties, when a handful of Black authors began publishing with larger presses and attracting significant attention throughout Canada and, indeed, the world. H. Nigel Thomas is himself a writer of significant accomplishment, and in his introduction entitled “Facing the Challenge,” as well as in his interviews, he highlights the uneasy relationship of Black Canadian writing to the broader print-culture market. Thomas interviews Ayanna Black, Austin Clarke, George Elliott Clarke, Wayde Compton, Afua Cooper, Bernadette Dyer, Cecil Foster, Claire Harris, Lawrence Hill, Nalo Hopkinson, Suzette Mayr, Pamela Mordecai, M. NourbeSe Philip, Althea Prince, and Robert Sandiford.

What emerges most strikingly is that, despite the genuine accomplishments of some of the mature writers in the book, most of the interviewees are profoundly concerned about the future for Black writing in Canada. The redoubtable Austin Clarke, for instance, speculates that his own relatively early success with larger presses might actually have discouraged certain publishers from taking on additional Black Canadian writers—“We already have Austin Clarke,” as Clarke himself puts it. Cecil Foster observes that the “hefty state subsidy for publishing” of the 1960s has dried up; and George Elliott Clarke agrees, acknowledging that there is “general contraction in the publishing industry in Canada,” but noting that, despite the higher visibility of Blacks in Canada, the number of “books [of poetry] by Black authors has certainly not gone up.” Afua Cooper notes that today “we have no Black publishers”; and M. NourbeSe Philip describes this apparent situation as a “tragedy.” Among the interviewees, only Lawrence Hill suggests (after considerable qualifications) that “[i]t’s somewhat easier now [for Black writers] than let’s say twenty years ago”; but he also suggests that this is at least partly because publishers have “seen that books exploring the minority experience can sell.” However, a bit later in the book, Suzette Mayr appears to suggest that only particular forms of “minority experience” are likely to be deemed sellable and/or broadly consumable. Mayr refers to a Western-Canadian student who considered some of her writing difficult to appreciate because, ironically enough, it was about people born here, and not about “a first-generation immigrant from somewhere else.”

There are moments of optimism, though. Wayde Compton, one of the youngest writers interviewed, joins his elders in voicing concern for the future of Black writing in Canada, but he also describes his profound sympathy for the British Columbia-based Black writers of the ’seventies “who self-published” and were overlooked because, in that particular time and place, “there [were] no readerships and reviews.” Recently, Compton co-founded Commodore Books, a small (if not micro) press dedicated to publishing Black Canadian literature—proving, of course, that there is now at least one active Black-focused press in English Canada. Evidently, things are still happening; and Thomas’ interviews do a lot to suggest why.

— David Chariandy

That it isn't reveals something both of Canada's cultural politics and of Thomas's own concerns, which include the stubborn racism of the "Canadian literary superstructure", the unfriendliness of mainstream publishers to black Canadian writers, "a book-buying public . . . conditioned to devalue Blackness", and the notion of black literature as "victim art". Thomas—who has published three novels, a collection of short fiction, and a book of literary criticism—begins by questioning the idea of an "African Canadian aesthetic". Does it exist? Does it help us understand the work of black Canadian writers, or insidiously trap them in an essentialized concept of ethnicity? He decides to investigate by asking a cross-section of "African Canadian" writers what they think of all these issues.

Some of these writers will be familiar to Caribbean readers, who may never have ceased thinking of them as "Caribbean", no matter that they now live in the wintry north: Barbadian(-Canadian) Austin Clarke, Jamaican(-Canadian) Pamela Mordecai, Trinidadian(-Canadian) M NourbeSe Philip. Others, like Ayanna Black, Afua Cooper, and Bernadette Dyer (all born in Jamaica), are hardly known in their places of birth. Thomas begins each interview by talking specifics, probing personal histories and asking opinionated questions about particular works. But eventually he comes round to his preoccupations: institutional racism, the need for black publishers and magazines, the role of the "black voice" in challenging Canada's "national myths".

Almost all the writers agree with him, whether enthusiastically or dutifully, but of course the most revealing moments are flashes of unpredictable individualism. And by insisting, in their various styles, on their very Caribbean-ness, a thoroughly hybrid state of being, they undermine the monolithic African Canadian-ness the book sets out to explore. Even Thomas finds himself asking, "I am African Canadian: right? Identity isn't so simple. At least mine isn't." Why We Write turns out to be a multi-strand narrative about what happens when people exchange one home, one passport, for another, juggling nouns and adjectives and trying to find the names for what they are and what they will become

— Nicholas Laughlin

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