Disorientation: Being Black in The World

by Ian Williams

Overview

A BOSTON GLOBE BEST BOOK OF 2021

Bestselling Scotiabank Giller Award-winning writer Ian Williams brings a fresh point of view and new insights to the urgent conversation on race and racism in these illuminating essays born from his own experience as a Black man in the world.

With that one eloquent word, disorientation, Ian Williams captures the impact of racial encounters on racialized people—the whiplash of race that occurs while minding one's own business. Sometimes the consequences are only irritating, but sometimes they are deadly. Spurred by the police killings and street protests of 2020, Williams offers a perspective that is distinct from that of U.S. writers addressing similar themes. Williams has lived in Trinidad (where he was never the only Black person in the room), in Canada (where he often was), and in the United States (where as a Black man from the Caribbean, he was a different kind of "only"). He brings these formative experiences fruitfully to bear on his theme in Disorientation.

Inspired by the essays of James Baldwin, in which the personal becomes the gateway to larger ideas, Williams explores such matters as the unmistakable moment when a child realizes they are Black; the ten characteristics of institutional whiteness; how friendship forms a bulwark against being a target of racism; the meaning and uses of a Black person's smile; and blame culture—or how do we make meaningful change when no one feels responsible for the systemic structures of the past.

Disorientation is a book for all readers who believe that civil conversation on even the most charged subjects is possible. Employing his vast and astonishing gift for language, Ian Williams gives readers an open, honest, and personal perspective on an undeniably important subject.

“Disorientation is so honest, vulnerable, courageous and funny that it left me dying to sit down over a long coffee with Ian Williams. Make that two lattes, and I’m buying!”—Lawrence Hill, author of The Book of Negroes

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9781609457396
Publisher:	Europa Compass
Publication date:	11/30/2021
Pages:	224
Sales rank:	1,161,543
Product dimensions:	7.00(w) x 5.30(h) x 0.90(d)

About the Author

Ian Williams’ debut novel Reproduction won the 2019 Scotiabank Giller Prize and his debut nonfiction work, Disorientation, was a finalist for the Hilary Weston Writers’ Trust Award. His poetry collection, Personals, was shortlisted for the Griffin Poetry Prize and his new collection, Word Problems, won the Raymond Souster Award. His short story collection, Not Anyone’s Anything, won the Danuta Gleed Literary Award and his first book, You Know Who You Are, was a finalist for the ReLit Poetry Prize. He is a trustee for the Griffin Poetry Prize and was recently inducted into the City of Brampton Arts Walk of Fame. A tenured professor of English at the University of Toronto, Williams will be the Visiting Fellow at the American Library in Paris in 2022.

Editorial Reviews

11/22/2021

Novelist and poet Williams (Reproduction) delivers a probing if uneven study of racialized consciousness and the challenges of talking about race. Expressing discomfort with the “extremity of rhetoric” around the topic, Williams notes that when he tries to categorize his experiences of racism, “they come waddling back to me, shedding labels, dishevelled and unruly.” Interweaving autobiographical anecdotes with discussions of 18th-century slave narratives and contemporary works by Claudia Rankine and others, Williams describes the disorientation Black people feel when they’re made aware of “white dominance” in an unsuspecting moment (like the time a pair of white men repeatedly used the n-word while walking behind him on a San Antonio street), and the defensive strategies they adopt to regain a sense of equilibrium after such encounters. He also calls on white people to “habitually recognize the negative impact of their behaviour rather than excusing themselves for having neutral intentions,” and draws on his experiences growing up in Trinidad and living in Korea to examine how race operates when “whiteness is decentered.” In other instances, such as a discussion of ancestry and identity interwoven with details of his difficulties moving from Vancouver to Toronto, Williams’s point of view seems more half-baked than fully honed. Readers will savor the flashes of insight, but wish for more consistency. (Nov.)

Publishers Weekly

Praise for Disorientation

“In this pithy, kaleidoscopic book, Williams interrogates moments when Black people have their personal identities challenged by the powerful misperceptions of others. Williams turns these scenes of intimate and public disorientation into subtle, radical essays on self-realization.”—Boston Globe, A Best Book of 2021

“The poet, professor, and Giller-winning novelist turns his substantial creative skill to the topic of anti-Black racism... Writing from his perspective as a Trinidadian Canadian, Williams extrapolates universal insight into the experience of living under white supremacy.”—Quill & Quire, A Fall 2021 Most Ancitiped Book

“A lyrical, closely observed contribution to the literature of race and social justice.”—Kirkus Reviews

“He writes lyrically of his experiences as a Black person, using literature to guide his point.”—Bookriot

Praise for Ian Williams’s Reproduction

Winner of the 2020 Giller Prize for Fiction 

“William’s imaginative, intricate tapestries are dazzling.”―The New York Times Book Review

“One of the most energetic, lively, funny, and sad novels of the year.”―Quill & Quire, Book of the Year

“Williams’s compassion for his characters transforms them from ordinary beings into uncommon souls. We know these people: their flaws, their foibles and their fuck ups. We recognize them because we share the same vagaries of living, wherever we are born.”―Aminatta Forna, author of The Memory of Love

“Williams’s unsparing view on the past’s repetition is heartrending. This ambitious experiment yields worthwhile results.”―Publishers Weekly

“Witty, playful, and disarmingly offbeat―even as it hums with serious themes.”―The Toronto Star

“Williams creatively and masterfully intersperses poetry, dialog, humor, pregnant asides, music lyrics, and descriptive passages to reveal what is going on inside the characters’ heads and outside in the world around them.”―Library Journal (Starred Review)

“Polyphonic and big-hearted.”―Electric Literature

“A witty, formally thrilling family saga.”―Kirkus Reviews

“A family saga like no other, with vivid characters and spectacular narrative twists . . . What makes it all work is Williams’s exquisite writing and his willingness to take risk with form. This is a fresh and exciting literary voice.”―NOW Toronto, Book of the Year

“Williams brings the characters’ struggles and flaws to life with compassion and intelligence, and the novel deftly explores themes of inheritance, race, money, sex, and love.”―BookRiot

“Both funny and poignant, powerful and playful.”―The Calgary Herald

“Reproduction is an inventive and tender portrait of family life in all its forms.”―Rabble

“Reproduction’s genius is its weaponized empathy, the precision-etched intensity of Williams’ gritty, witty, wholly unsentimental exploration of the collision of human hearts and the messy aftermath.”―Eden Robinson, author of Monkey Beach and Son of a Trickster

“Reminiscent of Miriam Toews’s novel All My Puny Sorrows in its balance between grief and humour.”―Quill & Quire

“The startling brilliance of Ian Williams stems from his restlessness with form. His ceaseless creativity in sussing out the right patterning of story, the right vernacular nuance, the right diagram and deftly dropped reference―all in service of vividly illuminating the intermingled comedy and trauma of family.”―David Chariandy, author of Brother

“Reproduction is a brilliant modernist symphony, a truly unique blend of character, voice, sound, and style that shows the many different ways family can be made, and what the concept of family actually means in diverse contexts. A surprising, intriguing, and moving novel by a proven talent.”―Marion Abbott, Mrs. Dalloway's Bookstore, Berkeley CA

“A daring and funny intergenerational family saga . . . Williams, a poet, brings a thrilling linguistic verve to this already-gripping story, and his restless experimental prose makes Reproduction fly off the page.”―Danny Caine, Raven Bookstore, Lawrence KS

“Williams’ Reproduction contains examples of the compromises and mutually agreed upon lies that bind families together. The ability of humans to wilfully ignore past misdeeds, to keep secrets for decades and forge on despite human frailty and failings are all clearly depicted in Williams’ story.”―Winnipeg Free Press

“In this novel about fathers who vanish and the families that spring up in their place, the Vancouver-based poet deftly weaves together the voices of a 14-year-old Black boy, a 16-year-old white girl and a motley crew of middle-aged parents who are all struggling to do right by their children―with mixed results.”―Chatelaine Magazine

From the Publisher

2021-10-13
Toronto-based poet and short story writer Williams contemplates race and racism in this thoughtful narrative.

Even though Canadians are generally less confrontational than Americans, there are still plenty of issues to contend with. “In Canada,” writes the author, “there’s still a sense that a Black Canadian is from elsewhere—not Canada. Maybe the Caribbean or Africa. White Canadians keep looking for a source of that Blackness, whereas white Americans know that Black people are as much a historical part of their country as white people are.” As a Black man, he writes, “You’re not going to say anything whatsoeverabout race, because you’re not stupid.” The narrative is a potent thinking-aloud exercise that helps Williams sort out his thoughts on race and privilege, and he hits on many provocative points where in at least one sense he has the upper hand: “Race is one of the few places where white people actually defer to Black people without challenge.” Many of his lodestar points are literary, as when he dissects an exchange that David Foster Wallace once had with a Black student, demanding that she produce work in Standard Written—read White—English, which “is perceived as the dialect of education and intelligence.” Wallace’s position may have evolved—or not; in any event, Williams allows for that evolution since a person is entitled to exchange opinions. There are matters beyond opinion, though—e.g., the prevalence, still, of the N-word, the “ubiquity of evidence and cases of violence against Black people,” and the fact that “both America and Canada are created on white power.” In every regard, sensitive to nuance and history, Williams writes searchingly of matters such as the murder of George Floyd, the travails of biracial children, and the daily injustices Black people face, no matter what side of the border they call home.

A lyrical, closely observed contribution to the literature of race and social justice.

Kirkus Reviews