Families, on the other hand…

The 1970s were a tumultuous time to be growing up in Montreal, with the rise of the Quebec independence movement, the coming to power of the Parti Québécois, many Montrealers migrating to Toronto, the 1976 Olympics. Disco, free love, and counter-culture revolutions combined with more women entering the workforce and easier access to divorce. Oren Safdie saw his parents break up and get back together again before parting ways for good, but Ken Dryden and the Montreal Canadiens remained steadfast in his life, lifting his and everyone else’s spirits by winning six Stanley Cups in nine years.

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What is the past? How can we let it speak on its own terms, without forcing it into the categories of history? In The Third Solitude, Benjamin Libman gathers and weaves the threads of multiple pasts — of his community, of his family, and of himself — in an attempt to escape the inadequate narratives around Zionism that he grew up with, and to create nothing short of a new paradigm.

Across a series of interconnected memories, Libman leads us through the many fragments that make a life, unafraid to question deeply cherished beliefs about Jewish identity, and seeks to reconcile his own values with those inculcated in him. Along the way, he casts aside tired tropes and shores together the pieces of a new way of looking toward the future.

The Third Solitude is a paean to the art of losing, and to the visions of the past that persist in the present.

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Their alternating narratives—raw, poetic, and unflinchingly honest—weave together moments of piercing beauty (the scent of jasmine in Gaza’s streets, the taste of warm knafeh from Abu Al-Soud) with the horror of drone strikes, forced displacement, and the systematic erasure of their home.

This is not just a book about war. It’s about what it means to love a place the world is trying to destroy.

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The Darkest Night Brings Longer Days is Houshmand’s eyewitness testimony of tumultuous times and of living in two dissimilar countries. Born in Iran, Houshmand grew up in the United States. Following graduate studies and partly driven by the political fervour of the 1960s – the war in Vietnam, the Kent State shootings, the drift towards a consumerist society and conformist pressures – he returned home. There he was a follower of the revolution, worked as a medical aide in the Iran-Iraq War, and was eventually imprisoned in a widespread assault against the opposition. Houshmand shares the brutal realities of incarceration, prompting reflection on today’s political prisoners and asylum seekers while offering insight into the differences and similarities between the United States and Iran, enhancing our understanding of their complex relationship today.

After the horrific executions of his friends, Houshmand vowed to honour their sacrifice. In The Darkest Night Brings Longer Days he brings their passionate aspirations for social and economic justice to the fore, reminding us that hope is a powerful force.

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In 1961, James Baldwin spent several months in William Styron’s guest house. The two wrote during the day, then spent evenings confiding in each other and talking about race in America. During one of those conversations, Baldwin is said to have convinced his friend to write, in first person, the story of the 1831 slave rebellion led by Nat Turner. The Confessions of Nat Turner was published to critical acclaim, winning the Pulitzer Prize in 1968, and also creating outrage in part of the African American community.

Decades later, the controversy around cultural appropriation, identity, and the rights and responsibilities of the writer still resonates. In Baldwin, Styron, and Me, Mélikah Abdelmoumen considers the writers’ surprising yet vital friendship from her standpoint as a racialized woman torn by the often unidimensional versions of her identity put forth by today’s politics and media. Considering questions of identity, race, equity, and the often contentious public debates about these topics, Abdelmoumen works to create a space where the answers are found by first learning how to listen—even in disagreement.

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“Little did I know that the internal and public outcomes of the waning Mississippi Freedom Summer and my personal fate would collide with my ancestral struggles and hurl me into the narrative of runaway fugitives seeking exile in Canada.”

It is also a story of exile, of living under the assumed name of Clifford Gaston from 1966 until 1977 when amnesty was granted to draft dodgers, of dodging arrest and deportation, of forging a new home in another country so far away from family and friends.

Fred Anderson was born in Hattiesburg, Mississippi. He left home at an early age to join the Civil Rights Movement,  becoming a field secretary for the Student Non-Violent Coordinating Committee (SNCC) in the Mississippi Delta, Alabama, and Southwest Georgia. He fled in the winter of 1966, to Montreal as a Vietnam war resister. He attended Sir George Williams University and was awarded the 1973 Board of Governors Medal for Creative Expression in Literary Arts. Fred was instrumental in co-founding two black research institutes and a Black literary forum and is a member of the Quebec Writers’ Federation. He was employed as program manager, overseeing gender-specific therapeutic interventions for several English-speaking rehabilitation centres for adolescent girls. Later, he would assume the same responsibility in Northern Quebec in the service of Inuit and Cree adolescent girls. Fred Anderson lives in Montreal.

Learn more about this book:

One Year After Eyes Have Seen by Fred Anderson

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