Tales of Other Tongues

An anthology of mixed-race women's experiences is seeking new voices

BY: Adebe D.A.

Being biracial in Canada is about crossing borders: some imaginary and some rigidly imposed. It is also about juggling hyphens and margins, and struggling to carve out a place in Canada's proclaimed multicultural landscape — a space that many might argue is largely make-believe, as we're led to think that it's better to evade than to create meaningful discussions about race and racial differences.

Working with a team of supporters, Canadian poet Andrea Thompson is attempting to carve out a new space for mixed-race populations by presenting critical questions and creative strategies for thinking about race through her anthology, Other Tongues: Mixed-Race Women Speak Out. The anthology, currently being compiled, focuses on creative pieces that engage, document and explore the experiences of being of mixed race by placing interracial analysis at the centre.

"When I was younger, I saw myself as existing in an in-between limbo sort of land," says Thompson. "But as I've gotten older, I've really begun to see being of mixed race as an identity unto itself. People of mixed race share a commonality of perspective and experience. This to me is the basis of that sense of belonging or identity."

Canada is part of the growing and changing interracial literary and cultural landscape of the Western Hemisphere. This shifting landscape is fundamentally a product of recent investigations by authors and artists into the largely buried history of miscegenation in this nation.

Other Tongues represents a collective effort to dismantle and detour hegemonic notions of race that serve to discount the existence of multiracial identities and histories. While many of these histories date back to the 19th century, it was not until the mid-1920s that the number of works on the mixed-race experience increased, and biracial artists were provided with a platform for critical and creative exchange. Since the years of praise that followed the publication of Carol Camper's acclaimed Miscegenation Blues: Voices of Mixed Race Women in 1994, there has been little written on the continued constraints surrounding mixed-race identification — and the possibility of seeing mixed race as an identity category of its own. Although picking apart the socially constructed elements of race will not end the effects of racism, Thompson says creativity can be a way to work through feelings of oppression. "

Being creative gives us a way to explore race and identity without having to be too dogmatic about it. A creative project doubling as a political program is precisely what Other Tongues hopes to be: a collection of poems, stories and other creative works that tell a different story about whose voice gets heard, by featuring voices that demand a readership that will listen with an open mind."

- Other Tongues will be released in fall 2010 by Inanna Publications, and is accepting submissions of unpublished work until April 15, 2010. To request full submission guidelines, email: othertongues [email protected]