{"id":34030,"date":"2024-01-04T18:58:28","date_gmt":"2024-01-04T23:58:28","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.newspapers-online.com\/auroran\/?p=34030"},"modified":"2024-01-04T18:58:30","modified_gmt":"2024-01-04T23:58:30","slug":"one-book-one-aurora-closes-out-decade-with-a-message-on-value-of-history","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.newspapers-online.com\/auroran\/one-book-one-aurora-closes-out-decade-with-a-message-on-value-of-history\/","title":{"rendered":"One Book One Aurora closes out decade with a message on value of history"},"content":{"rendered":"\n

One Book One Aurora might be on ice this year, but the first decade of the program that encouraged all Aurorans to quite literally read from the same page closed with a reflective author talk that encouraged all Canadians to learn from history.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

This past fall, Sheila Murray, author of 2023 One Book One Aurora (OBOA) selection Finding Edward, led an author talk and question-and-answer afternoon at the Aurora Public Library.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Finding Edward follows the journey of Cyril Rowntree who moves from Jamaica to Toronto in 2012. There, he faces the implications of being racialized in his new home, but also, after coming into the possession of scores of photos and letters from the 1920s, finds himself immersed in a different journey \u2013 that of Edward, who has a story all his own.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Speaking at APL, Murray said Finding Edward\u2019s pick as the 2023 OBOA selection was a \u201chighlight\u201d of her own experience with the book, one which began not with its 2022 publication but with its first writing more than a decade earlier.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Murray said as a brown person she \u201cthought for a long time about what it means to be Black\u201d generally-speaking and within the Canadian context.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

\u201cOne of the things I really wanted to explore with the book was that while everything has changed so much, society is so different than it was in the 1920s when Edward was born, [but] so much remains the same,\u201d she said. \u201cA big question for me is why\u2026 and I think I have an answer for that. It\u2019s complex, but it certainly has to do with things that are built into the way we live. We call that systemic racism.\u201d<\/p>\n\n\n\n

This is an area of exploration close to her heart.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Murray\u2019s father was Black-Jamaican while her mother was White-English.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Both met in the aftermath of the Second World War, where her father was helping rebuild amid the destruction in Germany while her mother was running a travellers\u2019 hostel in the heart of London.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Both became Quakers by the time they married, adopting a religion that has deep roots with social and racial justice, but Murray said it was \u201ca hard time to be in England.\u201d<\/p>\n\n\n\n

\u201cRacism was thick on the ground and I can\u2019t imagine what\u2026both of them would have gone through with three mixed-race kids,\u201d she said. \u201cI am sure some of it was pretty nasty. We never talked about it and we never thought to [ask them to] tell us about those experiences. They protected us as best they could from that very direct racism I know they must have experienced.\u201d<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Finding Edward, she noted, took a few different forms since she wrote the first draft more than a decade before it was published, but the heart of the story remained the same: Cyril finding Edward, \u201cand I guess the question is why is that so important?\u201d<\/p>\n\n\n\n

\u201cI took much inspiration from young Black friends in Jamaica,\u201d she said. \u201cI have spent a fair bit of time in Jamaica [with those] who emigrated absolutely determined to make a success of things, and they have \u2013 I am so proud of them. They come with an armour of ambition [and] just keep going. You don\u2019t look left or right, you do the school you need to do, you do the work you need to do, you build the career you need, and you get on with things. I couldn\u2019t write about someone like that because there was no time for contemplation and reflection. I needed something rather different. Cyril ends up in Toronto not because he chose to come, but because everybody said, \u2018That\u2019s what you\u2019ve got to do. You have to make a better life for yourself and you\u2019ve got to go to Canada, the US, the UK, or other places like other people do\u2026.\u2019 You think you know something (from TV, social media, newspapers, friends who live in Canada) but when he lands he discovers there\u2019s a whole new set of rules that he is going to have to uncover to figure out.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

\u201cThe Black history that is in this book is a Black history that Cyril is either told personally, lives through personally, or it is from Cyril\u2019s direct experience of library, archives, books and conversations. It is certainly limited in that way. It\u2019s a fraction of the Black history in this country, of which there is a long history of Black settlement.\u201d<\/p>\n\n\n\n

If one takes the adage of \u201cwe are our history\u201d to heart, Murray looks to racialized groups where so much history has been taken away or expunged.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

\u201cThe missing of [history] can cause terrible consequences,\u201d she said. \u201cWe all learn so much in what the Indigenous peoples have been telling us now as we sort of struggle with the truth of their experience in Canada and try to learn from ourselves what Truth & Reconciliation is.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

\u201cHow we know we belong, knowing we can live purposeful lives, make a contribution, do all of the things that make us complete human beings, these things matter and we can get there through our our belonging and through a sense of history that can inspire us.\u201d<\/p>\n\n\n\n

By Brock Weir
Editor
Local Journalism Initiative Reporter<\/strong><\/p>\n\r\n\"Facebook\"<\/a>\"twitter\"<\/a>\"mail\"<\/a>","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

One Book One Aurora might be on ice this year, but the first decade of the program that encouraged all Aurorans to quite literally read from the same page closed with a reflective author talk that encouraged all Canadians to learn from history. This past fall, Sheila Murray, author of 2023 One Book One Aurora […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":3,"featured_media":34031,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_jetpack_newsletter_access":"","_jetpack_dont_email_post_to_subs":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_tier_id":0,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paywalled_content":false,"_jetpack_feature_clip_id":0,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"footnotes":"","jetpack_publicize_message":"","jetpack_publicize_feature_enabled":true,"jetpack_social_post_already_shared":true,"jetpack_social_options":{"image_generator_settings":{"template":"highway","default_image_id":0,"font":"","enabled":false},"version":2},"jetpack_post_was_ever_published":false},"categories":[4,5],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-34030","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-general_news","category-news"],"jetpack_publicize_connections":[],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"https:\/\/www.newspapers-online.com\/auroran\/wp-content\/uploads\/2024\/01\/2024-01-04-07.jpg","jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"jetpack_shortlink":"https:\/\/wp.me\/p3D2k4-8QS","publishpress_future_action":{"enabled":false,"date":"2026-07-21 04:53:00","action":"change-status","newStatus":"draft","terms":[],"taxonomy":"category","extraData":[]},"publishpress_future_workflow_manual_trigger":{"enabledWorkflows":[]},"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newspapers-online.com\/auroran\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/34030","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newspapers-online.com\/auroran\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newspapers-online.com\/auroran\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newspapers-online.com\/auroran\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/3"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newspapers-online.com\/auroran\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=34030"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newspapers-online.com\/auroran\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/34030\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newspapers-online.com\/auroran\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/34031"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newspapers-online.com\/auroran\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=34030"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newspapers-online.com\/auroran\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=34030"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newspapers-online.com\/auroran\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=34030"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}