A multi-layered memoir tackling issues of race, identity, and loss
LAWRENCIA'S LAST PARANG: A MEMOIR ON LOSS AND BELONGING AS BLACK IN
CANADA is a snapshot of the author's life immediately after the passing
of her grandmother Lawrencia, the woman who raised her. Written in the
style of patchwork quilt that takes the reader back and forth between
the present and the past, she examines her grief from the perspective of
a Canadian-born Black woman of Caribbean descent, and she begins to
question her identity and what it means to be a Black Canadian in new
ways. This means exploring her childhood in Trinidad and her adult life
in Kingston, Ontario, a predominantly white city, her experience of
raising a mixed-raced child, and the meaning of her interracial
marriage. Simultaneously a memoir and a eulogy, the book offers an
insightful exploration of race in Canada, one that complicates these
issues through the lens of identity and loss, but also through a prism
of privilege.
Literary Nonfiction. African & African American Studies. Women's
Studies.