The Giller winner explores the loss of one’s parents and what it means to be Canadian and an immigrant in his collection Other Worlds (Farrar, Straus and Giroux, May).
How did you approach this collection?
Short stories are a tradition for us Canadians: Margaret Atwood, Margaret Laurence. One of my idols, Norman Levine, is best known as a short story writer. Other Worlds, though, was unexpected. I published the story “Houyhnhnm” in the New Yorker in 2022 and the rest of the book followed. The stories stemmed from the impulse to look at my parents: the death of my father, the dementia of my mother. And so the book became a way of talking about parents in a grander sense.
In what way?
The book is extremely elegiac, and although it looks back on parents, the parents are usually dying or gone, and their examples are followed or not followed, so it was really a contemplation of what it means to lose a parent, and what it is to come to terms not only with that loss but also with the idea of parentage and where
I came from.
How important was the sense of immigration to these stories?
The idea of being an immigrant is something that is part of my childhood. I was born in Trinidad, and so the immigration thing is hugely important to my sense of the world. When you come from Trinidad to Canada, it’s a pretty huge disjunction between this Caribbean landscape and a Canadian one. That first disjunction was like trying to figure out where I was and what was going on and what were the signs and symbols of things around me. The trees were different, the birds were different. Immigration is a moment that allows you to take the world in as new. So in some ways, Other Worlds is about that. It’s trying to figure out the strangeness of the new environment.
You write of one character who is reincarnated as a Canadian that he “did and did not belong.” Do you feel this way about Canada?
I love my country. Now is a time in which the love for my country has meaning, because the idea of us being the 51st state is ludicrous. But it also is a favor to Canadians. It could be that Donald Trump does more for Canada than any other American president, by forcing Canadians to think about what they would lose and what they represent. Despite my Trinidadian origins, I think that Canada is where I come from, even though there’s an apron of consciousness between myself and Canada that keeps me from being 100% Canadian. Sometimes that’s frustrating, but I’ve come to think of it as being also really interesting, because I constantly choose Canada. My daughter was born here, so the country means something for me.
