YouSaid · the spoken record

Esi Edugyan

lines on the record: 37
first: 2022-02-22
most recent: 2022-02-22
sittings or episodes: 1
sources: podcast

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“View onto another's way of being. And paradoxically, I think that that's something that creates a sense of universality when we can see the experience of another and think of the ways in which we ourselves have been mistreated or made to feel small, undervalued. every human being on the planet has those feelings and those experiences and to be able to see how it's a little bit happening maybe in a different iteration in somebody else's life but to understand at your core what that bad feeling felt like you know i think that this is the beginning of understanding and yeah i guess rapprochement and a sense of us all being bound together in our experience of being human”
2022-02-22 · Intelligence Squared · Essays at the Crossroads of Race, with Esi Edugyan · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“in Texas in the school board meeting to have this book taken out of the, I don't know if it was on the curriculum or if it was simply in the library, but the book was not something that was, you know, my daughter has read it several times. She loves it. And it's simply a book about a young black man's experience entering a new school, which is a school that's mainly filled with white students. The parents were taking issue with this idea of microaggressions and why should my child have to read something that makes them feel bad. And we're not racists and all of this. And I think that that is such a limited view and so misses the point. You know, I think a child having to confront what it's like to encounter these microaggressions and to live in another's skin and to maybe have some thought about that. This is something that could change the actions of that child, just this empathetic.”
2022-02-22 · Intelligence Squared · Essays at the Crossroads of Race, with Esi Edugyan · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Yeah, I mean, first of all, I would say that people seem very uncomfortable with ambiguity these days. We sort of want definitive opinions and definitive answers, and then we can sort of clash about them. But I think that any kind of reconciliation is to be found within those ambiguities, the understanding that not everything is settled and established. When you get to those hardened places, that's when you have those clashes. History is a living thing and is constantly shifting and changing and our points of view are changing and our points of reference are changing, that this isn't something to fear or to fight against, but to embrace. I think I was listening to a podcast the other day about these parents fighting to keep graphic novel about a young black man entering a new school in this kind of class.”
2022-02-22 · Intelligence Squared · Essays at the Crossroads of Race, with Esi Edugyan · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“You never know. But at present, it remains a very contentious and controversial thing. But in that piece, I wasn't sort of interested in coming to any solid conclusions because I personally don't have any. I understand what's in my heart, and this is conflicted by what's in my head. And so it's just something that falls in a kind of gray area. But I like that we're having these conversations because I think they have to be had.”
2022-02-22 · Intelligence Squared · Essays at the Crossroads of Race, with Esi Edugyan · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“You know, not living, I guess, living out the legacy of that, that that's something that is very offensive, I think, to a lot of people who have, I guess, seen her transformation as something transgressive and also, you know, there's also a sense of people have spoken about as being caricatured. In the darkening of her skin and the changing of her hairstyle, that there's a sense of caricature or even black face that emerges from that. But these are all kind of evolving discussions that we're having. I mean, who will know, you know, we can't, we can't say that in 50 years this won't be something that is in very much a part of contemporary society. I mean...”
2022-02-22 · Intelligence Squared · Essays at the Crossroads of Race, with Esi Edugyan · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Yeah, and it is a privilege that's basically in the hands of those who can more authentically make that change, or not authentically, but who can sort of, I guess, who phenotypically look a certain way. You know, this is a privilege that's confined to those who can maybe convincingly is the word, cross that racial line. And so it feels like another expression of agency and power that's maybe within the hands of those who can most convincingly pass. And so that, you know, that's also something interesting to look at. But also, I think this idea with a figure like Dolajal that she has not sort of come out of black histories, you know, her family sort of doesn't come out of a kind of middle passage history and therefore the arguments maybe against her transracialism are rooted in this explicit idea of her”
2022-02-22 · Intelligence Squared · Essays at the Crossroads of Race, with Esi Edugyan · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Something a little bit opportunistic in the way that she went about that and the way that she went about occupying spaces and really being a strong, strong voice for anti-racism, which is obviously allyship is a wonderful thing, but her kind of belligerent way of going about things and also occupying spaces that would likely have gone to academics of color. You know, these are very problematic things, you know, things that I think, yeah, are really problematic and really kind of go against this idea of transracialism.”
2022-02-22 · Intelligence Squared · Essays at the Crossroads of Race, with Esi Edugyan · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Yeah, I agree. I mean, we're constantly, I guess, reestablishing our relationship to certain fixed ideas that we have. I mean, this idea of, I guess, transnationalism, you know, I understand on an intellectual level, just on a level of pure thought, that this is absolutely something that does exist, that there are people who are born into one race that feel that it doesn't express who they are inside. When I think of a figure like Rachel Dolajol, you know, I feel a sense of maybe a sense of encroachment. She's perhaps sort of a less apt figure to talk about when I talk about my issues with friends racialism. Maybe the other figure who I discuss in the essay, Jessica Krug, might be a better example in that there feels something, or they seem to be.”
2022-02-22 · Intelligence Squared · Essays at the Crossroads of Race, with Esi Edugyan · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“You know, we were not, in fact, of them. We weren't actual Ghanaians. And so there was this kind of sense of confronting, I guess, an imagined home that had, the parameters had shifted in that confrontation. But even having said that, it didn't feel, you know, I didn't walk away with any less a sense of connection to Ghana. It just was maybe a changed connection.”
2022-02-22 · Intelligence Squared · Essays at the Crossroads of Race, with Esi Edugyan · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“And so, but you know, we still have this intense connection to this place that was, you know, almost a place of the imagination. You could kind of imbue it with, I guess, with your own sense of whatever it is you wanted it to be. And so to actually travel there and to feel in some sense, in a lot of ways, profoundly at home because there was so much that was just instantly recognizable about the cultures, whether it was the food or the language or the clothing and to feel very much connected to those things, there was also a kind of, I guess, sense of alienation or unlootedness. And there were ways in which we were constantly being told, not in words, but being told by the locals that”
2022-02-22 · Intelligence Squared · Essays at the Crossroads of Race, with Esi Edugyan · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“And so, you know, to have this sense of well across so many miles away, there is this kind of ancestral home in which I might visit and feel at ease that this was something that was very powerful to me. And it was something that I did really want to feel a deeper connection to and learn those histories, even while we were never taught to speak any Ghanaian languages within our home. We would sort of hear our parents speaking and it was a kind of secret language between them as we grew up as, you know, we”
2022-02-22 · Intelligence Squared · Essays at the Crossroads of Race, with Esi Edugyan · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“There is this kind of sense of homecoming or does feel, especially growing up through my childhood in which we, you know, I didn't get a chance to visit Ghana until I was well into my 20s, we simply didn't have the money to travel as a family back to Ghana, but I did always have this sense of it as being a kind of home, you know, especially in those times where you felt a little bit alienated from, you know, I grew up on the Canadian prairie in the 1980s and there weren't a lot of people who looked like me.”
2022-02-22 · Intelligence Squared · Essays at the Crossroads of Race, with Esi Edugyan · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Interesting to think about ghost stories as being sort of a kind of secret history of any kind of given region or even within a city. And this idea of not telling certain ghost stories or living with the understanding or the knowledge that certain communities had existed in a certain region, but we know nothing of, you know, we don't tell ghost stories out of those cultures. That was very interesting to me. And it was yet another kind of way that we're sort of marginalizing, in this case, kind of secret histories. What does that say about history?”
2022-02-22 · Intelligence Squared · Essays at the Crossroads of Race, with Esi Edugyan · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Yeah, and I think you mentioned this idea of the discomfort that is attendant with this project of enlarging our sense of, I guess, history. And I think that that's absolutely it. That's absolutely where this kind of turning away begins to happen is because there is that discomfort of being made to confront kind of less savory parts of one's history that maybe were sort of shoved into a dark corner or remained unaired until now or that one didn't have to confront. One knew that it was there, but one didn't have to look directly at it. And so I think there is a lot of discomfort inherent in that. And so I think we can see in some respects a kind of turning away. But to, I mean, to talk about the ghost stories that you brought up, I think for me it was just”
2022-02-22 · Intelligence Squared · Essays at the Crossroads of Race, with Esi Edugyan · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“It's of the moment and it will be kind of passing. You know, I say this because I've been having so many conversations with black writers who saw themselves as very sought out in 2020 that suddenly they had sort of these platforms to speak but who were finding themselves in 2022 as not being sort of as sought out. The interest is they felt was not sort of as lasting. And so you”
2022-02-22 · Intelligence Squared · Essays at the Crossroads of Race, with Esi Edugyan · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Yeah, and just to pick up on something that you mentioned though, you know, I think this idea of this interest in seeing these black histories and black art, black writing, I think that it's absolutely apt what you've said. I do wonder if this is something that will be more lasting. You know, if now that we have kind of opened this door and there's this interest, will the interest be something that's kind of seen as something novel in the moment? Or have we opened the door in a more meaningful and lasting way? You know, is this something where we've now enlarged our sense of what art is by including voices that have been sort of othered, you know, or is this just something where”
2022-02-22 · Intelligence Squared · Essays at the Crossroads of Race, with Esi Edugyan · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“And black artists, but maybe you can speak more about that in a contemporary sense, just what you're seeing and what you think.”
2022-02-22 · Intelligence Squared · Essays at the Crossroads of Race, with Esi Edugyan · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“I would love to hear your perspective on that because you are somebody who's very much rooted in art history and curation. And so I would like to hear what you think has changed. I certainly think this sort of global, I guess, for lack of a better word, reckoning, although I don't know that that's quite accurate, but a global reckoning on race, it's kind of global convulsion that we all sort of awoke to after the death of George Floyd. You know, I feel like people were very interested to know more intimately about black lives and black histories. And so I think there is that, you know, I think we might be finding ourselves in a place of backlash in certain ways right now. But I do feel like that was something that very much broke open this discussion about black visibility and wanting to know more about black writers.”
2022-02-22 · Intelligence Squared · Essays at the Crossroads of Race, with Esi Edugyan · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Of black people, particularly in Europe from the Renaissance onwards. It's a very kind of, I guess, maybe contemporary expression of black agency that comes through as well.”
2022-02-22 · Intelligence Squared · Essays at the Crossroads of Race, with Esi Edugyan · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“And this was a very contentious thing that created, I guess, a bit of an uproar. But, you know, I really feel like it's not a kind of literal, I guess, a literal rewriting of history, if we're going to speak about it like that. There's really this sort of works in the realm of supposition and also in shattering our ideas of blackness at that time or even in just getting us to think about the improbability of certain images. And then that sort of forcing us to think of, well, what were black lives like at that time in that era in this nation? So I really feel like painters like Rosales and Wiley are, as you say, this very bombastic way kind of forcing us to look in a new way at Black history and forcing us into a confrontation about the historical place of”
2022-02-22 · Intelligence Squared · Essays at the Crossroads of Race, with Esi Edugyan · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“this mode where she's presenting black figures in her case very similar to Wiley's taking paintings of the Renaissance and right up until the 19th century and sort of putting black figures within these contexts her most controversial piece was one in which she painted the figure of God as a black woman.”
2022-02-22 · Intelligence Squared · Essays at the Crossroads of Race, with Esi Edugyan · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“What I love about the work of Kindiwile, and also other painters who are working in a similar mode, I write a little bit about Harmonia Rosalis, who's also an American painter who”
2022-02-22 · Intelligence Squared · Essays at the Crossroads of Race, with Esi Edugyan · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Dominated by all of these very dramatic statues, but they weren't left to stand. And to me, it was a real history lesson, getting to go to Statue Park and walking through it and having that sense of history. So I thought, well, maybe that's something that other societies can consider. If you're going to remove the statuary, is putting it into a place where it's recontextualized. And that could even be maybe not an art museum, but just within a Yeah, exactly”
2022-02-22 · Intelligence Squared · Essays at the Crossroads of Race, with Esi Edugyan · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Which I tend to do, so you can stop me anytime. But one of the things that I was so interested in when I spent some time living in Europe and a bit of my time was spent living in Budapest, I just remember, you know, traveling with a friend outside of Budapest to, I think it was called Statue Park, I could be wrong, but it was basically a kind of resting place for all of the statuary that had been erected during the Stalinist era, which had been pulled down and then carted outside of the city and then put into this park where you could go and view all of these statues of all of these Stalinist figures. But, you know, within a certain context. And so they weren't destroyed, but they were recontextualized, and it gave you a real sense of the era and also what the city would have looked like, you know, maybe.”
2022-02-22 · Intelligence Squared · Essays at the Crossroads of Race, with Esi Edugyan · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Difficult thing. He was so central to the founding of the Nation of Canada that this was somebody who was so central, that it seems it's a difficult thing to sort of say we're going to expunge this person entirely from the record. And so, you know, but I really don't feel that we can just leave these statutes to stand without some kind of recontextualization. That was one thought. Another thing that occurs to me and that I was sort of discussing with somebody was a kind of counter statuary. So to erect the statue of a marginalized figure whose history we don't know much about, perhaps a figure of color, somewhere within the vicinity of the statue and have that stand as a kind of, I guess, enlargement of our sense of history from that era. I'm giving a very long fulsome answer.”
2022-02-22 · Intelligence Squared · Essays at the Crossroads of Race, with Esi Edugyan · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“The city of Victoria, where I live, there was a removal of the statue of Sir John A. MacDonald, who was one of our founding fathers, and his statue was taken out of this word because obviously his record with the indigenous people was quite shameful, among other things. But as I discuss in the essays in terms of how do we approach art that his labels that maybe to a contemporary ear that are just offensive to us, you know, it's very difficult. There are just so many different responses that we could have to this. So one of them would be to keep the statue of, for instance, Sir John A. McDonald's standing, but erect a kind of plaque or something on it that explains the contentiousness of his perspective, you know, because it's very difficult.”
2022-02-22 · Intelligence Squared · Essays at the Crossroads of Race, with Esi Edugyan · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Men who were on their knees kind of looking pleadingly up at them. And every time you passed it, we just felt just this profound shock and discomfort. And we sort of started asking people about it. And this was about 15 years ago before we were having deeper conversations about the removal of statuary. But it was very interesting. People had sort of just absorbed it. And I think because we came from abroad as Canadians, we were very sensitive to it. But it sort of establishes a kind of narrative of dominance, right? And this is something that can't help but play upon the psyches of anybody who is having to move past it on a daily basis. It's really uncomfortable. And we in Canada obviously over the last few years, we've been having our own conversations about removing statues and in fact in the”
2022-02-22 · Intelligence Squared · Essays at the Crossroads of Race, with Esi Edugyan · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Statuary seems like something rooted in the past, or because we're not sort of always erecting in our current day statuary to prominent figures, but there is something, you know, as you're moving through certain spaces, to have these kind of bold figures looming over you as you're moving through, say, the central square of a given city, that's a very powerful thing. And that's a very powerful statement. And, you know, I remember my partner, he did his graduate work in Charlottesville, in Virginia, and we lived a bit of a distance from the campus. I lived there with him in the summertime, and we would take the bus from his apartment to downtown Charlottesville, and we would always pass by this statue standing very boldly looking sort of very upright and dignified, and they were surrounded by indigenous.”
2022-02-22 · Intelligence Squared · Essays at the Crossroads of Race, with Esi Edugyan · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Histories that have maybe been marginalized or sidelined is to expunge the existing record or to somehow damage it. I think that that's something that we need to change our thinking on collectively. It's not to, I guess, shed light or include or recognize these kind of, I guess, hidden figures for lack of a better term is not to erase what we all can already see and have already seen. You know, history is a living thing. I mean, there's a study of history, historiography, which is looking at the shifting patterns of how we view past events and past figures. I mean, this is not something that is settled and established, and we come to a bedrock decision on, and then we never speak of it again, you know, that this is...”
2022-02-22 · Intelligence Squared · Essays at the Crossroads of Race, with Esi Edugyan · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“I mean, it's so fraught, isn't it? I think to, yeah, it's such a large question. I mean, we could speak about that single question, I think, you know, for the entire interview and never come to a set conclusion. But this idea that to include”
2022-02-22 · Intelligence Squared · Essays at the Crossroads of Race, with Esi Edugyan · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“In favor of other narratives. But I really do see it as an enlargement that these hidden histories of figures who were perhaps figures of color, these are part of our collective idea of history. And we should be speaking about these people.”
2022-02-22 · Intelligence Squared · Essays at the Crossroads of Race, with Esi Edugyan · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Yeah, I like that phrase that you just used, this idea of expanding history, because I think right now we seem to be going through a time where there's, you know, it's quite a contentious thing. People are very nervous about this idea of having what they viewed as established settled histories kind of uprooted or displaced. But if I look at it as this idea of expanding our notions of stories or facts that we all know, but where we haven't kind of really looked at certain hidden aspects or certain figures who may be featured in a story but aren't sort of collectively remembered socially. So it's something where I feel like this has been a very interesting time where we are having these conversations about stories that have been maybe I guess”
2022-02-22 · Intelligence Squared · Essays at the Crossroads of Race, with Esi Edugyan · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Yeah, exactly. But, you know, I think my mother of I was heartened by the idea, or she was at least maybe reassured a bit by the idea that I could study journalism alongside studying creative writing. And so I went into the writing program, which had this kind of journalism component. And I believe I took one journalism class and that was it. I was done with that and I was studying poetry and fiction and playwriting. And then that took over.”
2022-02-22 · Intelligence Squared · Essays at the Crossroads of Race, with Esi Edugyan · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“I am somebody who is a child, I was a great reader. I read everything I could get my hands on. And when I was graduating, I guess from high school and knowing that I wanted to attend university, I had to settle on something to study. It was either going to be visual arts or it was going to be writing. And simply because I think I settled on writing because I had told my parents about my choices and I think they were a little bit alarmed, but they were reassured.”
2022-02-22 · Intelligence Squared · Essays at the Crossroads of Race, with Esi Edugyan · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“This book actually came about because I was approached by the Canadian Broadcasting Corporation and asked to do their massey lecture for the year, which is a series of five lectures on any topic of your choosing. But understanding that I was a writer who wrote primarily about sort of hidden black histories, I understood that that would be the topic I would take on. And this project really allowed me to do that in a much more sort of, I guess, direct and sharpened way than in a novel. You know, I could really tackle these marginalized histories that I probably wouldn't get to writing about in novel form simply because I won't live to be 200 and there are so many to write about to do it in a very direct way also in which I could kind of give my own perspective or opinion.”
2022-02-22 · Intelligence Squared · Essays at the Crossroads of Race, with Esi Edugyan · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Canadian novelist and writer Azi Adugians' previous books have taken creative paths into complex subjects. They include 2014's Half-Blood Blues, which used mid-20th century jazz musicians as its inspiration to highlight lost cultural narratives, and 2018's Washington Black, a historical tale tinged with fantasy, but one with its roots set in the brutal realities of the 19th century slave trade. The latter is now being adapted for an upcoming TV show, and both books won Canada's Giller Prize, while also being shortlisted for the Mann Booker Prize too. In her new book, Out of the Sun, Ezie brings us a selection of non-fiction writing, thought pieces reflecting on black identity within the arts throughout the past few centuries. The book's five essays visit the cultural landscapes of Canada and the US, plus locations across Europe, Africa and Asia, while also reflecting on the author's own sense of place as a creative with an ongoing story, as she reflects in the book, Who You Are Is Not Who Others See.”
2022-02-22 · Intelligence Squared · Essays at the Crossroads of Race, with Esi Edugyan · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Welcome to Intelligence Squared. I'm Connor Boyle. Our guest today is Ezie Edugian. The author joins us to discuss her latest book, A Collection of Non-Fiction Writing Out of the Sun, Essays at the Crossroads of Race.”
2022-02-22 · Intelligence Squared · Essays at the Crossroads of Race, with Esi Edugyan · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT