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Biography & Autobiography African American & Black

What the Oceans Remember

Searching for Belonging and Home

by (author) Sonja Boon

Publisher
Wilfrid Laurier University Press
Initial publish date
Sep 2019
Category
African American & Black, Emigration & Immigration, Women's Studies
  • Hardback

    ISBN
    9781771124232
    Publish Date
    Sep 2019
    List Price
    $29.99
  • eBook

    ISBN
    9781771124256
    Publish Date
    Sep 2019
    List Price
    $19.99
  • Downloadable audio file

    ISBN
    9781771124881
    Publish Date
    Oct 2020
    List Price
    $29.99
  • Paperback / softback

    ISBN
    9781771125536
    Publish Date
    Mar 2022
    List Price
    $22.99

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Description

Sonja Boon’s heritage is complicated. Although she has lived in Canada for more than 30 years, she was born in the UK to a Surinamese mother and a Dutch father. An invitation to join a family tree project inspired a journey to the heart of the histories that have shaped her identity, as she sought to answer two questions that have dogged her over the years: Where does she belong? And who does she belong to?
Boon’s archival research—in Suriname, the Netherlands, the UK, and Canada—brings her opportunities to reflect on the possibilities and limitations of the archives themselves, the tangliness of oceanic migration, histories, the meaning of legacy, music, love, freedom, memory, ruin, and imagination. Ultimately, she reflected on the relevance of our past to understanding our present.
Deeply informed by archival research and current scholarship, but written as a reflective and intimate memoir, What the Oceans Remember addresses current issues in migration, identity, belonging, and history through an interrogation of race, ethnicity, gender, archives and memory. More importantly, it addresses the relevance of our past to understanding our present. It shows the multiplicity of identities and origins that can shape the way we understand our histories and our own selves.

About the author

Sonja Boon is an award-winning writer, researcher and teacher. Her creative non-fiction has appeared in Geist, The Ethnic Aisle and donttalktomeaboutlove.org, and is forthcoming in two edited collections. In 2018, she received the Marina Nemat Award for Creative Writing from the University of Toronto School of Continuing Studies. Her critical memoir, titled What the Oceans Remember: Searching for Belonging and Home, will be published in September 2019 by Wilfrid Laurier University Press.

Sonja Boon's profile page

Awards

  • Short-listed, Foreword INDIES (Multicultural)
  • Long-listed, BMO Winterset Award
  • Short-listed, Foreword INDIES (Autobiography & Memoir)

Editorial Reviews

“What the Oceans Remember addresses the complex and complicit question ‘Where are you from?’ by taking readers on an extraordinary trip through continents and countries, and to cities and their archives, to help us understand how the stories of our ancestors tell us something about ourselves. Boon’s exploration of the seductive spaces of the archives and the crossing of various kinds of borders brings to mind the work of Saidiya Hartman (Lose Your Mother), Maggie Nelson (The Argonauts), and complements the work of writers like Sara Ahmed as well.” – Minelle Mahtani, University of British Columbia, author of Mixed Race Amnesia: Resisting the Romanticization of Multiraciality, host and creator of Acknowledgements and Sense of Place

Minelle Mahtani

“Timely, compelling and illuminating in equal measure, What the Oceans Remember, which scrutinizes the lives and legacies of several generations of slaves and indentured labourers in Suriname, also confronts the rights and responsibilities we bear in relation to our ancestors. In this ever-questioning memoir, Sonja Boon maps emotional registers and bureaucratic statistics as honestly as she navigates theoretical currents and ethical anxiety. Weaving desire, dreams, and personal memory into the historical record, Boon succeeds admirably in making silences speak and fragments cohere in a fine example of creative non-fiction.” – Lydia Syson, author of Mr Peacock’s Possessions

Lydia Syson

“What the Oceans Remember is breathtaking in scope. Reaching across continents, oceans and histories, it shows us what it means to live in the shadow of freedom while unfree; how the colour of a person’s skin can determine if they are seen or invisible; how the word home can exclude; how the beauty of music can be a balm; how the invaluable quiet of an archive can quake with unearthed voices. Unrelentingly honest, sometimes harrowing, steeped in rich and startling insight, and conveyed in transparent prose – elegant as silk, tough as steel.

Lisa Moore, author of the story collection Something for Everyone

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