The award-winning writer on feeling compelled to write about race, the benefits of staying put and swapping first drafts with her husband, poet Steven Price
Esi Edugyan, 44, is a Canadian author who was born and raised in Calgary, Alberta. She wrote her debut novel, The Second Life of Samuel Tyne, in 2004 when she was just 24. In 2011, she won the Scotiabank Giller prize for her novel Half Blood Blues and in 2018 she was shortlisted for the Booker prize with Washington Black. Out of the Sun: Essays at the Crossroads of Race is her first nonfiction work and interweaves personal narrative with discussions on racism, the slave trade in Canada, art history in the west and ghosts.
You open with an essay on black sitters in western portraiture…
The first [piece] is very much about 18th- and 19th-century portraiture and how depictions of black people have changed throughout history and how what we see is often predicated on the prejudices that the artist has brought to bear on their own paintings. A work I considered was Johann Gottfried Haid’s painting of Viennese courtier Angelo Soliman, an enslaved man who was taken captive as a child and arrived in Marseille in the 1700s. One of the most interesting takeaways, looking at both his portrait and also at David Martin’s portrait of Dido Elizabeth Belle Lindsay, a British heiress born into slavery, is the fact that details specifically included to elucidate certain elements of their lives are paradoxically obscuring. Their turbans, for instance, speak to exoticised notions of the “Orient” and yet neither had actual connections to what would then have been considered the Orient.
