Ottawa Writers Festival presents Race, Repression and Resilience with Chelene Knight and Robyn Maynard.

When it comes to race in Canada, there is a tendency in the national discourse to assume that this country doesn’t face the same issues as our neighbours to the south. Join us for a taste of the personal and the political and a conversation on the legacy and reality of racial discrimination in Canada.

Delving behind Canada’s veneer of multiculturalism and tolerance, Policing Black Lives: State Violence in Canada from Slavery to the Present traces the violent realities of anti-blackness from the slave ships to prisons, classrooms and beyond. Robyn Maynard provides readers with the first comprehensive account of nearly four hundred years of state-sanctioned surveillance, criminalization and punishment of Black lives in Canada. Emerging from a critical race feminist framework that insists that all Black lives matter, Maynard’s intersectional approach to anti-Black racism addresses the unique and understudied impacts of state violence as it is experienced by Black women, Black people with disabilities, as well as queer, trans, and undocumented Black communities.

From Chelene Knight, Dear Current Occupant is a memoir about home and belonging set in the 80s and 90s of Vancouver’s Downtown Eastside. She reflects on her childhood through a series of letters addressed to all of the current occupants now living in the twenty different houses she moved in and out of with her mother and brother. From blurry non-chronological memories of trying to fit in with her own family as the only mixed East Indian/Black child, to crystal clear recollections of parental drug use, she draws a vivid portrait of memory that still longs for a place and a home.