“Do you like being black?”
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Amid the intense global conversation sparked by the Black Lives Matter movement in 2020, Chanel Sutherland kept thinking about an incident that happened to her as a child in Montreal, and it became the starting point for your umbrella story who just won the CBC Nonfiction Award.
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“I had this story in my head, this moment that happened to me, for a long time,” Sutherland said in a telephone interview Wednesday. “I carried it with me. I wrote that first line, where they ask me ‘Do you like being black?’ I wrote it down on my phone and had it there for several years. In 2020, with COVID-19, we were all locked up and then Black Lives Matter and all these things were happening all over the world, I was reading the experiences of many people and what they went through when they were younger and even as adults. the racism and micro-aggression they faced ”.
The award was announced Wednesday.
She is part of a small group of writers with a few friends, and in the fall of last year they came up with the idea to write stories about people who are trespassing, and that made Sutherland think she was ready to write this story about the situations. uncomfortable I had. found herself as a child. She had come to Montreal from Saint Vincent and the Grenadines when she was 10 years old and tells in the story how her classmates made fun of her for looking and sounding different from them.
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“Everywhere I looked, people were talking about BLM,” said Sutherland, director of product marketing for a Montreal software company. “At work, on social media, friends come over to talk about it. … Because of that, I felt like I had to get some of the things out of my head. The experiences he had had were very similar to the things he was hearing about. So I knew I had to get this out because it was bothering me, to the point that I was experiencing some of the emotions that I had felt at the time back then. “
Sutherland will receive $ 6,000 from the Arts Council of Canada and will attend a two-week residency at the Banff Center for Arts and Creativity.
He hopes to publish a collection of stories inspired by life in the Caribbean and his experiences when he came to Montreal.
Reference-montrealgazette.com