If the immigrant experience and that of minorities is a reflection of society’s values then what does it say about us when their stories never quite make it into the history books or have been hidden?
Sheila Murray’s debut novel Finding Edward is a significant literary work that gives a voice to the voiceless and infuses the present with a previously unrecorded past, bridging much of the black experience in twentieth century Canada, from Africville to the lumber camps of British Columbia.
Murray weaves together the tales of two bi-racial black men, both abandoned by a white parent, whose lives intersect: the lonely university student, Cyril, who moves from Jamaica to Canada in 2012, ends up in possession of a cardboard suitcase containing letters and photos documenting the early years of Edward, born to a white woman in 1920s Toronto.
Through the lens of parallel stories, we see a Canada of the marginalized, struggling to overcome adversity. While Edward is left to fend for himself, in a children’s workhouse in Toronto in the 1920s, Cyril arrives in the city in 2012 “immersed in grief”. His only parental figures in Jamaica, his mother and adoptive grandpa, have died, and his two younger siblings have moved in with an aunt while he is sent to stay with his “Canada-Uncle” in Mount Dennis (Toronto).
Cyril acknowledges he is “on his own. For the very first time”, and he finds “his new life strange and cold.” Although he initially stays in his uncle’s “crowded household”, Cyril believes “there is no real family here” and “his relatives are largely uninterested in him.”
Not only is Cyril having to endure crushing bouts of loneliness, he is also suffering from culture shock. He has been thrust into a world that regards him as a visible minority; a racialized young man who is viewed at times with suspicion by black and white people alike.
Central to Finding Edward is the theme of wanting to “belong" in a society that appears to be indifferent and “elusive”. Although Cyril and Edward live a century apart, they both feel like they’re outsiders and are made to feel unwelcome by the respective societies in which they find themselves.
“Much of what [Cyril] knew about Toronto, about North America, he’d learn from television … He hadn’t learned the language of social interaction, which seemed cleverly coded to the advantage of all the groups and cliques and ethnicities that did not include him.” This begs the question of whether there are barriers in place, visible or otherwise, that prevent certain immigrants or those of colour from belonging and achieving upward mobility. Murray’s characters seem to think so: Cyril’s Canada-Uncle warns him to “toughen up … This country is hard. The people are hard – they are not on your side”.
As Jamaican-Canadian dub poet Lillian Allen wrote in a poem, I Fight Back, part of which is recited by Cyril’s friend:
“I came to Canada
And Found the Doors
Of Opportunities Well Guarded.”
Like Edward before him, Cyril is a hard worker who struggles to make ends meet with a low paying menial job. “He had known it wouldn’t be easy. That jobs were hard to get and that he’d have to work even harder to make a career. That it took time. He’d known all of that. But he hadn’t known how Canada would count him out.”
Cyril is also “keenly aware of a peripheral threat of violence, a parallel possibility that is with him all of the time. They’d drummed this into him at Mount Dennis. Everyone living there brandished the warning like a weapon. Your black skin’s a target, said a cousin. Sadly, a friend feels compelled to warn him, Don’t move too fast, never run.”
After Cyril is a victim of a violent racist attack, while alone on one of his walks, he informs a friend who tells him that, “some people here are treated like shit, and most people don’t care.” The friend further adds, “you suck it up or you fight it. Fighting takes courage and lots of patience.”
Given that both Cyril and Edward are targets of systemic racism, the reader is compelled to ask whether anything has changed. In the novel’s acknowledgements Murray advises that, “Nearly ten years ago when I wrote the first draft of this novel, a central theme was that nothing changes.” However, she adds that “Canadian Black activists have always been extraordinarily brave and determined, but the events and activism of recent years really do seem to be changing the system.”
Finding Edward is about much more than the immigrant experience in Canada. Its secondary theme is about the importance of “learn[ing] for ourselves the history that is not taught to us.” It is not until Cyril researches Edward’s story and discovers fragments of Black history that had been previously hidden that he finds a meaningful connection to his own life in Toronto and eventually his footing. Cyril feels his “parents have forced [him] to this uncertain place where [he doesn’t] know how to belong, just like Edward … The glimpse he’d had of Edward was as welcome as a close friend.”
In Cyril’s mind, “Edward lived on shelves and in cubicles, hidden away in the buildings that collected and preserved Toronto’s history … the unexpected learning along the way was a gift of sorts. And as his late “grandpa said to him in his stern schoolmaster voice: This is how you know yourself ... Through history and language – this is theirs, but take what you need, make it your own.”
Despite the incredible hardships that Edward endures in twentieth century Canada as a bi-racial black man, and the challenges that Cyril faces in 2012, Finding Edward is an accomplished novel that is not without hope. Cyril admits that “Toronto sometimes surprised with fleeting moments of joy. His moments ... He found them when he was walking …” And as he explores more of the city, he discovers that, “People did make it. Lots of them. He just had to figure out how to be one of those.”
Mason Haigh is an emerging playwright/screenwriter based in Toronto. She wrote an episode of Da Kink in My Hair (season one) and is currently working on a project in development with Gritty City Theatre (Canada).