By Geena Lee

Anyone who keeps a diary will tell you that writing is incredibly cathartic. It’s an effective way to express emotions and purge the pain of the past.

This is the case for Joyce Johnson, who finds strength in telling stories of survival. “I went through a lot of stuff 30 years ago and used writing as my therapy,” she says. “I just wrote whatever was in my head.”

Having emigrated from Jamaica more than 40 years ago, Johnson had much to write about. “I’d write about my daily life. But also about what was happening in our community, issues affecting our children in the school system and discrimination in the workforce,” she says.

Upon completing creative writing classes at Seneca College in Toronto, Johnson’s love of writing took a decidedly more professional turn. What started out as thoughts in a journal became refined into two novellas, Waiting For The World To Change and Henrietha.

Waiting For The World To Change tells the story of a friendship between African-Canadian characters Susan Ottawa, a law student, and Anita Kingsley, a domestic worker. Both women face racial discrimination and harassment in their respective professions, yet find support in each other through the common ground that they share.

Henrietha features a female protagonist of the same name who was drawn from Johnson’s own memory bank, allowing her to create a story she calls “factual fiction. It’s partly autobiographical,” she explains. “It’s a story of surviving childhood abuse as well as domestic violence.” Peppered with patois, fights and flights that stretch from Jamaica to Montreal, and New York to Toronto, Henrietha is a heroic story that portrays the strength of a Black woman in crisis.

Due to her visual style of writing, Johnson was encouraged by a friend to bring Henrietha to the stage, where it was adapted into a play that has, so far, seen three theatre engagements. A portion of Henrietha was also re-enacted for CBC Radio in a dramatic audio production.

Johnson has now published both her novellas together under the title Henrietha. She hopes readers will come away feeling empowered and educated in recognizing the signs of an abusive relationship. “If you know that you are in that kind of situation, you have to get out of it because it’ll just pull you down and make you feel like you’re worth nothing. Nobody should ever make you feel that way.”

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