Nostalgia the Nefarious: A Series // Simone Dalton
This November, Simone Dalton will be taking over The Town Crier as guest editor. Please join us for a month that delves into nostalgia. Dalton will be asking writers how they embrace or reject nostalgia in their work.
About three years ago, I made up my mind. I was going to write a work of creative nonfiction, rooted in memoir, which explored the complexities of patrilineal inheritance in my Black Caribbean family. Mine was a quest to examine the familial, social, and political histories that were passed down to me in spite of my father’s absence. I was born and raised in Trinidad, while my father lived in Canada.
During the process of writing and rewriting, it became clear that I was going to have to revisit the loss of my mother before I could begin dealing with the materiality of my relationship with my father. The piece that eventually became my MFA thesis at University of Guelph unearthed memories I had struggled to forget.“And it’s foolish to assume that forgetting is altogether a bad thing,” wrote David Chariandy in Soucouyant:
Memory is a bruise still tender. History is a rusted pile of blades and manacles. And forgetting can sometimes be the most creative and life-sustaining thing that we can ever hope to accomplish. The problem happens when we become too good at forgetting. When somehow we forget to forget, and we blunder into circumstances that we consciously should have avoided. This is how we awaken to the stories buried deep within our sleeping selves trafficked quietly through the touch of others. How we’re stolen by an obscure word, an undertow dragging us back and down and away.
I was stolen time and time again by my investigation of the collection of memories, events, and letters that remained after my mother’s death seven years ago. When my mother died from a massive cardiac event, sometime in the early morning hours of December 16, 2010, in Trinidad, I was asleep in Toronto. In that “ordinary instant,” as Joan Didion wrote in The Year of Magical Thinking, nothing and everything changed. This encounter with memory revealed just how much it serves nostalgia. As the storyteller, I held the pen to the lives of my parents. My mother was the woman I loved the most, while my father was the man whose love I wanted the most. As Kabu Okai-Davies, author of Evidence of Nostalgia and Other Stories wrote, it was my “way to envisioning a future that resembles the ideal past, reinvented, redefined and reframed.”
I wondered how often this happens to other writers, especially those who may be faced with fractured identities, or who are simply now creating an identity in the Canadian literary landscape.
As guest editor for The Town Crier, I have asked November’s contributors, who each fit into one of categories above, among others, to explore how they embrace or reject nostalgia in their own work. Does it serve their writing or is it a nuisance? All the contributors work across genres, and I have asked each writer to write in the genre that the theme naturally draws from them. First up this week, you will see posts from Oubah Osman and Radha S. Menon. Oubah’s poetry apprehends notions of place and home, identity, and culture. Radha reminds us how pain sometimes lurks beneath the stories we choose to tell. Look forward to Sheung-King (Aaron Tang), Sanchari Sur, Erin Kang, Chris Bailey, Fiona Raye Clarke, Derek Mascarenhas, and Ana Machado. Each deals with the theme of nostalgia in new ways that, at times, show its nefarious side.
Simone Dalton is a writer and social change communicator. She holds an MFA from the University of Guelph, where she received the Constance Rooke and Board of Graduate Studies Research Scholarships. A work of creative nonfiction, her thesis explores themes of grief, sense of belonging and place, race, class, and inherited histories. Her work has been published in The Unpublished City: Volume I, a 2018 Toronto Book Awards finalist curated by Dionne Brand, and is forthcoming in the anthology, Black Writing Matters. For two years, she was the co-host of Guelph's Speakeasy Reading Series and recently completed a residency with Firefly Creative Writing studio. She is currently working on her first play for production with Rare Theatre. Simone lives in Toronto and was born and raised in Trinidad and Tobago.
