Weaving seemingly disjointed aspects of human history into a coherent exploration of the mechanics of race and racism is no small task. Yet in her new essay collection, Canadian novelist Esi Edugyan does it with apparent ease. In a class beyond the now popular “race 101” genre, Out of the Sun is concerned with coming to terms with the fictions we create about ourselves, and asking why we do so. It explores race, identity and Blackness in their ever-shifting contexts, asking uncomfortable questions about our framing of the past and our desires for the future.
Edugyan’s travels around the world serve as a vivid backdrop to her explorations in the various essays, which include Europe and the Art of Seeing; America and the Art of Empathy; Africa and the Art of the Future; Asia and the Art of Storytelling. The first looks at what 18th- and 19th-century European art betrays not just about its subjects, but also the artists, the galleries that house their works and the societies that revere them. The theme of who is and who is not seen is threaded throughout the book, and the title plays on Sun Tzu’s advice in The Art of War that armies should use the sun’s light to their advantage. “I have always liked this image, of the hidden rushing suddenly into view,” Edugyan writes in the introduction, using the analogy to explain how “a world of shadows edges our written histories”, keeping us from observing their full scope.
What, for example, is the message of 21st-century artist Kehinde Wiley’s paintings – which have become famous for using black people in re-creations of some classic works? For Edugyan, it’s clear: “In the grandeur of every expression and every pose that evoked Velázquez, Gauguin, Caravaggio, what I was really seeing was a plea to have an essential humanity acknowledged.”
This is the essence of Essays at the Crossroads of Race, a haunting project in more ways than one. In Canada and the Art of Ghosts, she illustrates, via a series of forgotten, doctored or misrepresented ghost stories, the fascinating ways in which humans assert and record their own biases. More broadly, the collection boldly stares down a range of accepted narratives – in film, art, folklore and even in ourselves – and asks, how did these stories survive, who among us were allowed to tell their stories, and why.
Edugyan’s exploration of identity isn’t confined to race. It takes in the human inclination to use stories to comfort ourselves, to romanticise or demonise, based on our fears and desires. The passages on Edward Nkoloso, creator of the 1960s Zambian space programme, a simultaneously impressive and gimmicky endeavour with an equally perplexing backstory, ask fascinating questions. Was Nkoloso’s obsessive desire to colonise Mars satire or sincere? A reaction to the trauma he and his people had endured through colonial rule, anxiety about the enormous potential of newly independent Zambia’s future, or none of the above? The “shadow narratives”, Edugyan seems to suggest, are where we should look for answers.
In its breadth, beauty and candour, this is a beguiling collection. And if, after reading it you leave with more questions than you started – which might be a complaint in a lesser book – then I suspect it has achieved its aim.
• Out of The Sun is published by Profile (£16.99). To support The Guardian and Observer, order your copy at guardianbookshop.com
