Through personal musings that incorporate food, science, history, and art, Blizzard tackles complex notions of personhood\u2014race, gender, culture, parenting\u2014in a way that is equally astute as it is at times comical. Her work often questions the concept of \u201cBlackness\u201d as an identity from a diasporic perspective and what that means for Black and non-Black people under different circumstances. In an interview with the author, we discussed how her upbringing between the Caribbean and North America influenced her essays while gaining insight into her writing process. We also talked about how the book unpacks the complexity of cultural identity by exploring the intersections of food, higher education, racial dynamics, and immigration.<\/p>\n
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Byron Armstrong (BA)<\/strong>: Can you tell me about your process of turning to nonfiction?<\/p>\n \u00a0<\/strong><\/p>\n Gloria Blizzard (GB)<\/strong>: I\u2019ve always written music and poetry. Then, I started to write essays and reviews about music, and that expanded what I was doing. Next, in 2017, I was invited to write an essay for the Canadian Broadcasting Corporation (CBC) on harmonizing identities through music<\/a>. So that was my first major publication of an essay. When that was published, I realized, this is the form for me<\/em>.<\/p>\n I don\u2019t write songs anymore. I play in various ensembles. The poetry continues. But I realized the essay form, this is where it\u2019s at.<\/p>\n \u00a0<\/strong><\/p>\n BA<\/strong>: Why did essay writing feel like the next natural step in your evolution?<\/p>\n \u00a0<\/strong><\/p>\n GB<\/strong>: Because it allowed the weaving together of multiple strands of information, including life experience. You can weave them together. You can put complex timelines together somehow. And so I found that really exciting, and that\u2019s what I was able to do in my collection.<\/p>\n \u00a0<\/strong><\/p>\n BA<\/strong>: Have you heard the term \u201cthird culture kid\u201d?<\/p>\n \u00a0<\/strong><\/p>\n GB<\/strong>: I\u2019ve heard it, but explain it again.<\/p>\n \u00a0<\/strong><\/p>\n BA<\/strong>: It\u2019s somebody who\u2019s born in one place, comes to another place, and, thus, is in between cultures in a physical sense. In an emotional and psychological sense, it also applies to children raised in a culture outside of their parent\u2019s culture, while still having ties to that culture within the home. So this becomes like a third culture: You are neither really here nor there.<\/p>\n \u00a0<\/strong><\/p>\n GB<\/strong>: Yes, that\u2019s definitely been my experience. I was born in Canada, and then raised in Trinidad for a time, and then I came back to Canada as an early teen.<\/p>\n In that context, I look at myself as a place of intersections. Like, there\u2019s this intersectionality that I exist with, and many of us who\u2019ve had these experiences are able to see multiple truths at the same time. That\u2019s how you function in all these different societies and all these different environments, so you learn to do that really fast. Because you have to. That\u2019s how you survive.<\/p>\n\n BA<\/strong>: I want to talk about what deeper role food plays in your observances around power dynamics. Gender, race, culture, as well as your struggle for belonging in and outside the childhood home.<\/p>\n \u00a0<\/strong><\/p>\n GB<\/strong>: There\u2019s so much connected to food. As you say, it can be gendered in terms of preparation and so on. Then I had experiences where that was flipped around: where it was the male in the partnership taking care of that, but still pining for the woman to take it over.<\/p>\n There\u2019s also the cultural aspect as well. I discussed in the book the role of black cake in the Caribbean\u2014it would have been prepared by the enslaved people for the colonizers, and at a certain point, they took it over for themselves. Black cake is made up of all these disparate ingredients that come from elsewhere in the world, none of which are indigenous to the islands. They\u2019re all imported ingredients. It\u2019s also a sweet treat, but there\u2019s something about it that\u2019s very bitter.<\/p>\n \u00a0<\/strong><\/p>\n BA<\/strong>: There\u2019s a contradiction or conflict of sorts.<\/p>\n \u00a0<\/strong><\/p>\n GB:<\/strong> Oh, for sure. It\u2019s in the taste, too, because one of the major ingredients is burnt sugar\u2014or it was originally. Now they use browning, but burnt sugar adds a bitterness to this very sweet, dense treat. So the complexity exists in the food itself. The historical complexity is in the food.<\/p>\n BA:<\/strong> How do your past experiences\u2014as a university student studying science and being a touring musician\u2014speak to the complexities of having this Caribbean background, and of just being Black in a white dominant culture? How does the initial conflict between those two disciplines represent the cultural and internal conflicts expressed in the book?<\/p>\n \u00a0<\/strong><\/p>\n GB: <\/strong>Okay, so I was a daughter of a doctor and a nurse. I got a biology degree because my family thought that I should.<\/p>\n \u00a0<\/strong><\/p>\n BA<\/strong>: In the book, you did mention that your parents ran a medical clinic in Trinidad.<\/p>\n \u00a0<\/strong><\/p>\n GB:<\/strong> And that was a quandary that I ran into early in my life, quite early, because I was able to do both science and <\/em>music. I remember going to a guidance counselor and asking for some advice as to what I should do; the answer was, \u201cYou\u2019re good at both. I can\u2019t help you.\u201d So I\u2019ve always lived with the understanding that these two things exist for me, but it took a long time to accept that it\u2019s fine to be that way.<\/p>\n For example, I grew up in this family with medical professionals, but our whole household was also surrounded by art and music. My dad was passionate about Calypso, jazz, and Cuban music. There\u2019s art on the walls. There are books everywhere. And so in the context of this very scientific family, we\u2019re surrounded by art. My personality led me to get the science degree because that\u2019s what I was expected to, and then I went off and wrote poetry.<\/p>\n \u00a0<\/strong><\/p>\n BA:<\/strong> You touch on this in the book as well: this idea of needing to be exceptional. Your Blackness causes you to need to be exceptional, but that also complicates your ability to do the other thing that you actually want to do that is seen as being, I suppose, what the world would expect you to do. Entertaining. Making music. These tropes are considered very \u201cBlack\u201d because that\u2019s what Black people, according to the dominant culture, excel at. How did you navigate that conflict?<\/p>\n \u00a0<\/strong><\/p>\n GB:<\/strong> Academically, to be the best of the best in everything that you do is exhausting, especially when my natural inclinations were in a more artistic direction. In the family context, it meant being a bit perverse: such as going to do a show at the Harbourfront with dreadlocks and bare feet, which horrified my parents. I don\u2019t know if you\u2019re of Caribbean background, but you can imagine.<\/p>\n \u00a0<\/strong><\/p>\n BA: <\/strong>Yes. My background is Jamaican, so I get it. They would be wondering what was going on with you.<\/p>\n \u00a0<\/strong><\/p>\n GB:<\/strong> Exactly. I remember them saying to me at one point after I\u2019d shaved my hair off, \u201cOh, that\u2019s nice, G. When are you gonna grow it back?\u201d Then I grew dreadlocks and they were like, \u201cThat\u2019s nice, G. When are you gonna cut it off?\u201d You just can\u2019t win, so you just might as well be yourself. That\u2019s the only option.<\/p>\n <\/p>\n TK<\/p>\n<\/blockquote>\n<\/figure>\n BA: <\/strong>That\u2019s the internal space. Then there\u2019s the external space: those things that you felt were challenges in university, such as the institutional connections of enslavement and colonization. You carried this weight with you while attending university and revealed some of these hidden histories within the institutional frameworks through their effect on you. Can you talk a little bit about how that history has very real impacts on Black and indigenous populations?<\/p>\n \u00a0<\/strong><\/p>\n GB:<\/strong> I would say schools have always been an issue. I remember walking through a school with my child and just feeling like it doesn\u2019t feel right, even now. In my personal experience, it didn\u2019t feel like a place of comfort or a place where I fit or would learn about myself. It was a place where you follow the rules and you get through it. Just get to the other side and then you\u2019re done.<\/p>\n As an older adult going back to university, I had the courage to note it. I had the courage to listen and speak about it, as opposed to closing my eyes and getting to the end of it. I didn\u2019t know if I was even going to write about it, because it feels awful even while investigating it.<\/p>\n \u00a0<\/strong><\/p>\n BA:<\/strong> So as institutions and workplaces wrestle with pushback to EDI initiatives including Critical Race Theory, how does having a rounder perspective of history impact our individual and collective identities?<\/p>\n \u00a0<\/strong><\/p>\n GB:<\/strong> That\u2019s a big question. It\u2019s very critical. I\u2019ve just been reading about the pedagogy of teaching because I\u2019m looking into teaching writing in the future. One of the things that one of the authors was talking about is close reading\u2014reading things without putting your own projections into what you\u2019re reading\u2014and considering what the author actually says. It becomes a practice of understanding what someone else is saying from their perspective.<\/p>\n Currently, we don\u2019t really do that. We just learn the main ideas from what we\u2019re told, regurgitate it, and get a mark. There\u2019s the practice of finding a different way of approaching texts, a different way of approaching education, and even of approaching the workplace. But those are big jobs requiring huge changes.<\/p>\n The issue with EDI stuff is that you also have people from marginalized groups in these EDI environments, and their needs still aren\u2019t being addressed in that environment. That is, they\u2019re experiencing additional harm, while other people are learning. These things aren\u2019t being addressed.<\/p>\n \u00a0<\/strong><\/p>\n BA:<\/strong> It\u2019s like window dressing that causes additional harm.<\/p>\n \u00a0<\/strong><\/p>\n GB: <\/strong>Absolutely. If you do things in a performative way where you\u2019re trying to teach something, but the people that you\u2019re trying to teach about are being harmed in the process of that, you\u2019ve already failed.<\/p>\n BA: <\/strong>I want to open this up to things that are happening in public discourse now with the election of Donald Trump. There are immigration debates happening stateside and also in Canada. Both in Canada and the US there\u2019s a growing number of people of color also saying there\u2019s too many immigrants. Some of them are immigrants or are one or two generations removed from migratory journeys themselves.<\/p>\n Does this also demonstrate the complexities of identity? That is, that nationalistic impulses demonstrate the falsehood of Blackness as a monolith?<\/p>\n \u00a0<\/strong><\/p>\n GB:<\/strong> One of the things that my first editor, Alison Isaac, said to me was, \u201cThank you for writing this book because we are not just one thing.\u201d While I can\u2019t really speak to solving that nationally or globally, it\u2019s critical we share our multiplicity of voices. Within that, you\u2019re going to find people who have extremely different political views, and we have to have some grace around that.<\/p>\n In terms of family, in the book I talk about speaking to a shaman or medicine man from Burkina Faso who said, \u201cAny part that you choose to reject in favor of one thing, that\u2019s the part you\u2019re going to need when you get into trouble.\u201d You\u2019ll need the wisdom from what you\u2019re rejecting. So it\u2019s important to be accepting of our complexities.<\/p>\n We can be a race, and we can be people of multiple heritages. Anybody from the Caribbean, I\u2019m telling you, we\u2019re not just pure African. We\u2019re just not. So it\u2019s really important to acknowledge that. It\u2019s not denying anything. It\u2019s just acknowledging it.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" \u201cI look at myself as a place of intersections.\u201d<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":31,"featured_media":59656,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_acf_changed":false,"footnotes":""},"categories":[1193],"tags":[648,54,286,2442,611,206,33],"pbpartner":[],"section":[],"pbseries":[],"class_list":["post-59649","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-interviews","tag-black-diaspora","tag-caribbean","tag-creative-writing","tag-dundurn-press","tag-essays","tag-interview","tag-nonfiction"],"acf":[],"yoast_head":"\n![\"\"](\"https:\/\/www.publicbooks.org\/wp-content\/uploads\/2025\/04\/Siddhartha-Deb-2-copy-993x600.jpeg\")
<\/a> <\/figure>\n <\/div>\n\n \n Wings, Angels, Tentacles: Talking with Siddhartha Deb<\/a>\n <\/h5>\n\n
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<\/a>\n \n Amit Baishya <\/a>\n <\/div>\n \n <\/div>\n <\/div>\n <\/div>\n\n \n
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