Esi Edugyan, 44, is a Canadian author who was born and raised in Calgary, Alberta. She wrote her debut novel, The Second Life of Samuel Tyne, in 2004 when she was just 24. In 2011, she won the Scotiabank Giller prize for her novel Half Blood Blues and in 2018 she was shortlisted for the Booker prize with Washington Black. Out of the Sun: Essays at the Crossroads of Race is her first nonfiction work and interweaves personal narrative with discussions on racism, the slave trade in Canada, art history in the west and ghosts.
You open with an essay on black sitters in western portraiture…
The first [piece] is very much about 18th- and 19th-century portraiture and how depictions of black people have changed throughout history and how what we see is often predicated on the prejudices that the artist has brought to bear on their own paintings. A work I considered was Johann Gottfried Haid’s painting of Viennese courtier Angelo Soliman, an enslaved man who was taken captive as a child and arrived in Marseille in the 1700s. One of the most interesting takeaways, looking at both his portrait and also at David Martin’s portrait of Dido Elizabeth Belle Lindsay, a British heiress born into slavery, is the fact that details specifically included to elucidate certain elements of their lives are paradoxically obscuring. Their turbans, for instance, speak to exoticised notions of the “Orient” and yet neither had actual connections to what would then have been considered the Orient.
You expose many little-known histories and facts regarding slavery in Canada. In what ways did it differ to America and the Caribbean?
I was born and raised in Calgary. In all of my school years, slavery in Canada was never mentioned. This was not something that was in the curriculum in the 1980s. That’s quite striking. The underground railroads [the network of secret routes and safe houses established in the US during the early to mid-19th century to help enslaved African Americans reach Canada] seems to have been our central Canadian story. That we were a place of refuge and very welcoming. That’s not quite the full story. Afua Cooper is a tremendous Canadian historian and has done so much work in this realm. From the 1600s into the 1800s, we had slavery on our territory. There were people who were enslaved, mainly working as domestics in households. That is something that is very much a part of our history, but we don’t discuss it. So I really wanted to draw attention to [stories] like the hanging of Marie-Joseph Angélique. She was a slave born in Portugal in 1705 and was sold to a businessman in Montreal. At the age 29, she was accused of starting a fire that destroyed 46 buildings. She was hanged and her corpse was burned.
You also write, with some ambivalence, about Rachel Dolezal and Jessica Krug, two white women who fraudulently claimed black identities. How do you see the discourse around being “transracial” developing?
Even though these controversies happened four or five years apart, the more recent response to Krug was just as vehement. It seemed to suggest that not only had things not progressed – where we feel like there’s a possibility to cross racial lines in a way that’s benign – but that there’s been a hardening.
As I say [in the book], for me it felt unfair to deny this woman [Dolezal], who very much feels herself to be a black woman, her blackness. But on a visceral and emotional level, it feels like an encroachment. Having done some research into it, people expressed this feeling of them being caricatures. That isn’t her natural hair texture, this isn’t her natural skin colour. I understand that sensibility. Maybe in 10 years, we’ll feel differently about it all. Or maybe we’ll be more entrenched in the sense of the fixity of racial identities.
Do you feel a pressure or duty to write about race?
I did start this book soon after the murder of George Floyd, [so] I felt deeply compelled, rather than obligated, to write about race. Race and racism play their part in my life. Washington Black, for instance, is a book about race and racism, but it’s also very much a book about a young boy finding his feet and establishing his place in the world and discovering that he’s gifted. Character, for me, will always trump ideological explorations of race. I want to explore the lives of people.
How important is travel to your writing practice?
I spent almost a year and a half living in Germany and that prompted me to write Half Blood Blues. Travel has been the backbone of my writing. Looking back, I feel like if I never went anywhere ever again, I would have enough material to write for the rest of my days. Having said that, I think moving around a lot impedes your writing. These past two years have been so hard for so many. One of the more positive things that’s happened for me personally is being forced to stay still. Connecting with my work and also reconnecting with my children. I think I was away too much.
Are you a disciplined writer?
Before I had children, I would start writing at 10 at night and finish at six in the morning. For the past 10 years, I have written during school hours. It’s a much more truncated and prescribed schedule.
Which writers to do you admire?
I recently read The Transit of Venus by Shirley Hazzard. It just completely opened me up. It’s so pristine and just beautifully written and so intellectually alive. In some ways, it’s a perfect novel. As soon as I finished it, I started rereading it. Toni Morrison will always be a guiding star for me. I read her at a moment where she just made this enormous impression. I really enjoyed Rachel Cusk’s trilogy. The poetry of Dionne Brand, Patrick Lane, Lorna Crozier – all of these Canadian poets were so formative.
Your husband is the poet and novelist Steven Price. What is it like to write with another writer in the house?
We read each other’s work. He reads all of my first drafts and I read his. It’s been really crucial. He really gets his hands in there. It wouldn’t look like it does without his editing.
• Out of the Sun: Essays at the Crossroads of Race by Esi Edugyan is published by Profile (£16.99). To support the Guardian and Observer order your copy at guardianbookshop.com. Delivery charges may apply
