Ideas - The Multiple Lives of CBC Massey Lecturer Ian Williams

Episode Date: November 15, 2024

2024 CBC Massey lecturer Ian Williams speaks with IDEAS host Nahlah Ayed about the forces that have shaped him as a thinker and writer, from the encyclopedias he read as a child in Trinidad to his years as a dancer to the poetry of Margaret Atwood. 'I believe in multiplicity,' he says. The 2024 Massey Lectures, What I Mean to Say: Remaking Conversation in Our Time, begin this coming Monday.

My name is Graham Isidor. I have a progressive eye disease called keratoconus. Unmaying I'm losing my vision has been hard, but explaining it to other people has been harder. Lately, I've been trying to talk about it. Short Sighted is an attempt to explain what vision loss feels like by exploring how it sounds. By sharing my story, we get into all the things you don't see

about hidden disabilities. Short Sighted, from CBC's Personally, available now. This is a CBC Podcast. Welcome to Ideas. I'm Nala Ayed. I don't think I'm at the center of even my own story, though. I don't believe that I'm a solid being, even in the middle of my own life. 2024 CBC Massey lecturer Ian Williams has long been fascinated with the multiple selves that live inside each one of us. It's a realization he came to early, when as a child, he and his family immigrated to Canada from Trinidad.

It's like you will always going forward have at least two selves. Since that move, Ian has inhabited many different ways of being. It was really a bit of a contradiction, right? So towards the end of high school, I was both like dancing hours a day and then playing like rugby on the school team, right? And he became an acclaimed novelist and poet, landing the Giller Prize for his first novel, Reproduction. His work reflects his obsession with representing multiple voices and multiple points of view on the page.

Although I try to do this thing to keep many sort of balls in the air at the same time, many perspectives and positions alive simultaneously, I think most readers want to choose, right? They want a hero. In his massy lectures called What I Mean to Say, Remaking Conversation in Our Time, Ian tries again to bring multiple voices together and to imagine other ways of relating to one another. imagine other ways of relating to one another. What if we had a kind of mode of being, which was, I will not even alter your words, right? I'm going to engage with you, but I'm going to represent you so accurately that it might do damage to the consistency of my position, but at least I'm trying to get you right. I sat down with Ian Williams on stage at the Victoria Festival of Authors the day before he delivered his fourth Massey lecture.

We're calling this episode The Multiple Lives of Ian Williams. Ian Williams. It's a real honor to be here and for us to have the Massey Lecture here as well. And it's a real honor to sit with you, Ian. Oh, you too, Nala. Thank you for the opportunity to chat with you ahead of your lecture here. So the topic you've chosen is conversation, which couldn't be more relevant to the times that we're in. And so I wanted to take you to the beginning of your life and your experiences and ask you just what your earliest memories of conversations are.

Well, I was two years old and it was my earliest conversation. It's true, like I don't actually remember the content of a lot of these things right like it's hard to actually know what they were about but you remember the voices in your house and you remember the phone ringing and you remember who talked more and you remember like squabbling with your brother and all of those things um and so just like i think we're not aware like how we come into language exactly like i don't remember learning english right um it's the same thing with conversations you don't remember learning English, right? It's the same thing with conversations. You don't remember the aboutness.

It was just a tool to, like, now I'm playing with my brother kind of thing. Yeah, but my house was, I have, like, two houses, right? There's this sort of, like, division in my life there. And the first part of my childhood was a very different kind of talk from the last part of my childhood. So who was the dominant voice in the first part of my childhood was a very different kind of talk from the last part of my childhood. So who was the dominant voice in the first part of your childhood? You know, there was like a lot of noise from, I think it's easy to say my mother, right?

That's easy to say. All of our mothers just talked us into existence, right? Very true. But I think more it was something like from the outside, right? It's this pulsing, like, cultural noise of, like, calypso and music and the news at 6 p.m. every day. Like, people just stopped what they were doing and went to watch the news at 6 o'clock. Or, in my grandparents' case, to listen to it on the radio, right? Not even to watch it. So always this information coming in,

and then people would talk to each other about the news afterwards, right? So yeah, this kind of buzzing from the outside. Where were you in the buzzing? What was your role? To be seen and not heard, right? I think that was my role as a kid. And was that by choice or by instruction? No, I think sort of by cultural understanding, you know, it's that kind of thing.

But so always sort of like somewhat on the periphery, like listening to adult conversations. It's a comfortable space. Yeah, it's a comfortable space for sure. And it's also a necessary space to kind of learn about what's happening around you. I'm curious what that being in that space or inhabiting that space for that long shapes you as a writer and a thinker. Yeah, you become very observant, right? Like from an early age, I could pick up on different voices and the messages under those voices. And you knew when adults were talking, although you're not paying hard attention necessarily, you knew, oh, this is juicy. Or this is not to be repeated to anyone else or like they must have

forgotten I'm here kind of thing right like you do remember those kinds of things does it cultivate more of an imagination too yeah well I think you're always living in the lives of other people right like as a kid you're imagining what it's like, what your friends' parents are like. Maybe it's not typical, I don't know. But yeah, definitely, because I was a quiet kid, my world was internal, and there were various levels of external stimulation, right? There was like the parental and family circle, then there were the friends and external family, and then this kind of culture. But at the hub of it was my own interiority, right? So when you talk about the culture, your first years you spent in Trinidad. Yeah.

I wonder if you could talk about what were some of the first books that you were in conversation with in those first few years when you were in Trinidad. Right. It's interesting, right? Because in Trinidad in school, every year you would get like a book list, like a reading list. And then your parents would have to go to like the bookstore with this list. And then the bookseller would like give you all of your books. And sometimes

they'd be out and it would come in three weeks. It was a very exciting time for a nerdy child, right? You're getting your books for the school year. But in our house, I mean, we had like encyclopedias and children's encyclopedias as well. And those were like pride of ownership kinds of things. My parents were incredibly proud of those Collier's 24 volume encyclopedia set, you know? Absolutely, yeah. It's kind of an early internet kind of idea.

It totally was, right? It was the internet before the internet. And so we would browse those, my brother and I, we had our favorite volumes. Like there was a flag volume which was in color and you had like you could see all the flags of the different countries and then my mother had like some medical textbooks from her previous life which had like those transparencies of the body so you could see the systems kind of like mapping onto each other

and so I mean that's probably not childhood reading material right with like gross boils and diseases that you're looking at but really really fascinating and the way like a fairy tale is kind of horrific too but those encyclopedias love them yeah we really love them yeah well I mean I think many of us have those memories of encyclopedias and I'm just curious what I mean to me they open doors that I never thought would be possible to be open. What did they do for you? Yeah, well, kind of like the internet. It shows you what's in the world and what's available to you to a degree.

And it also shows you this kind of like magic or mystery of what's locked in between pages. So how can, I don't know, Cameroon, the whole country, like fit into these words? And where's this kind of magical place? So, yeah, it made me want to sort of like imagine things for sure but also like just this hunger to learn right like maybe i could read this whole like encyclopedia set um and yeah i didn't i didn't quite get that far though at the age of nine a big change happens for you. Uh-huh. And you migrate, you immigrate to Canada. Uh-huh. Could you talk about what that, I mean, you know, there have been so many descriptions of what that does to one's imagination.

One of them is Salman Rushdie saying, migration unleashes a radical questioning of the self. Yeah. Was that the same for you? That's precise, right? Yeah, so nine years old, you're old enough to kind of know what's going on in the world, right? You can remember that.

And so I do think that the story of my family is really defined by that migration, right, from one country to the next. And so it's like you will always going forward have at least two selves. And to have that transformation happen there as just kind of a fact of what it means to be alive like there are multiple ways of being and so you're constantly adjusting to this new information coming in so i mean like our accents in trinidad is different from our accents here and so even that the very shape of like how you form a word is shifting over time and i remember being very anxious about like accents and things like that because it somehow marked me.

And to know who's the insider and who's the outsider from listening to how they spoke. All of that was really, really critical. It's a lot to download on a nine-year-old, right? For sure. At that age, is the balance sheet a sense of loss or a sense of gain? Yeah, it's mostly you follow your parents anywhere in the world right and this absolute trust in your parents and so that your world is not really about trinidad or canada your world is like these two people that are sitting in the front seat of a car are everything

yeah and i think when that dissolves and that too is like really shattering right because then the world is a completely unstable place. But yeah, there's actually something more intimate than nationality and more protective than what our allegiances are politically. You had other refuges, I guess for lack of a better word, in reading books. Yeah. Can you talk about what you read in those early years? Ooh, so after the encyclopedias, which we shipped to Canada. You did ship them. Yeah. Can you talk about what you read in those early years? Ooh.

So after the encyclopedias, which we shipped to Canada, you don't still have them. Do you know? My mom recycled them all like two years ago. Like it, but it took her a very long time, right?

It took her 30 something years, right. To like recycle these. Oh, I would have been quite upset. I, yeah, it was disappointing.

Right. And the way she recycled them was like two volumes at a time. Right. She didn't want to like load up the bin. And so she would tell me like, I'm about halfway through. But I know the tragedies, right? Like, I mean, but okay, so those came with us. There's the usual school reading that you do. I had a fantastic teacher that introduced us to poetry, like in grade seven, or so and read to us in grade six. And then my mom went back to university. And so I read her books when she like brought them home, her anthologies and stuff, English major and psych major.

And so you can read about abnormal psych. Oh, that was like my favorite book. It was like a blue abnormal psych book that she had. And what was the biggest lesson you learned there? Oh, really this kind of like extremity of human experience, right? Like, oh, this person, to be in this person's head, who's paranoid. And then of course, you're like 13 and you're self-diagnosing. And that was the same time that like Silence of the Lambs came out in the early 90s. And I really, really loved Hannibal Lecter. He was like my hero for a while.

Oh, wow. That could take us down a whole other road. But we'll stay on this one. Right, right. Okay, so like her textbooks and whatnot. And then, yeah, there was a used bookstore in Brampton that we would browse through. And I would buy things, bought my first Atwood there.

And I love her to this day for that reason. What was that first book? Which market? Oh, it was the circle game, pink cover, her face right in the middle. What did you love about it? Oh my gosh, it's ripped to shreds right now. But I never heard someone like speak so directly about their feelings. And I know we don't think about Atwood typically as that, right? But she seemed to be like working this interior world that was as fascinating as this migration from Trinidad to Canada, right?

Like the territory inside of Atwood at that time, even as a teenager, I felt it and I couldn't articulate it. But yeah, she adopted me or I adopted her at that moment. And then the public library, right? Where I read everything that I could in certain sections of the library. So I read lots of dance biographies. That was my thing.

And art books. And every week we went back and I'd get a fresh sack. Amazing. And then read a lot of Stephen King. And then my mother took some books away from me that were too adult. But none of that really is surprising. But let's go to the dance books that you mentioned.

One thing that people don't know about you, and I only learned literally yesterday, is that you have a former life as a dancer. Can you talk about what drew you to dance? I mean, tell me about that life. Preface that with ballet dancing. Yes, let's say ballet dancing. Other kind of dancing involving poles.

But no. Yeah, so this was a fascination somehow, like in my early teen years to the end. It was really a bit of a contradiction, right? So towards the end of high school, I was both like dancing hours a day and then playing like rugby on the school team right so you got like this ultra macho thing going on and then you've got something that's not typically like a very very macho thing

absolutely loved it absolutely loved the discipline of it and it was something that i found on my own right do you remember like tvo would have like and bravo when they first started off they'd have like monday was dance night tuesday was like music wednesday have like, and Bravo, when they first started off, they'd have like Monday was dance night, Tuesday was like music, Wednesday was theater, and so forth. And so like Monday night, like I would be watching whatever, they'd have documentaries of Martha Graham or Balanchine or Evelyn Hart or Karen Kane or the founding of the National Ballet School. And it's not something you think, right, a black boy in Brampton

is really watching, but he is just obsessed because he's exposed to it. So I danced five days a week for several years after school, ended up at the Royal Winnipeg Ballet School, summer intensive, the year between high school and university, and got into the school for the full year and decided to go to university instead. Many people know I'm from Winnipeg, so I'm super proud proud but the royal of winnipeg ballet is a world-class institution i mean it's not easy to get into that it's fantastic how do you what how do you make the decision to walk away from something so um what's the word i mean you're so accomplished already you were quite young still yeah i was

thinking we could just talk about dance for the next to the rest of this just literally in a bookstore this morning I saw like the Karen Kane book that was in the library this big sort of white cover book um and I just nostalgia nostalgia but why why leave Nala because I think it was the right decision right ultimately because there's like the intellectual parts of me really do need satisfaction and while the artistic parts are important there's a limit to the body right but is there any relationship between I'm trying to draw the link between the dancing

and the writing what is the relationship between the language of the body and the language of the mind yeah I'm thinking about that. Yeah. In ballet, there's definitely like a clear vocabulary, right?

There's a really precise kind of, your body needs to be in this position exactly. There's a right way to sort of like turn your ankle so you don't sickle it, right? It's a very, very sort of precise vocabulary. And that's comforting, right? To know that there's a place for your head to be inclined, right? Also, like I love words, right?

I love language generally. But the things I got from ballet are probably not so mechanical. There's things about like discipline. There are things about most of the work that you do will just be unseen. So also at the library, I used to borrow a version of Swan Lake. It was with Natalia Makarova and Anthony Dowell. And I just, this was in the old VHS days, right? Where I was probably almost chewed up that tape actually. And I would watch this and there's a second act of Swan Lake. Odette comes out and she just does these pas de bourrée across the stage and her arms are fluttering. And we're drawing so

much attention to the arms, right? Which seem like wings moving, but below her legs are working incredibly hard to give this illusion of her gliding and just kind of like floating across the stage. And so ballet becomes this kind of like metaphoric thing where for writing, so much of the work goes unseen. So much of the drafts, this morning, draft 12A of the novel that comes out next year, and nobody's going to read draft 7B, nobody's going to read draft 4C, right? But they're only going to read the final version of it going to read draft 4c right but they're only going to read the final version of it so this sense that there's so much work that happens without anybody knowing and if you don't have the love for the thing you're doing then i think you're toast right forget it i love this idea of you being a young you know teenager and discovering dance as you

say on your own and i i'm just curious what question you were trying to answer when you decided to take that up on your own. Yeah. What void were you filling? Oh, Nala, this is like therapy now. Oh, my gosh. You can put your feet up. You can put your feet up.

I'm just a stubborn wear on a couch, right? I mean, I can totally lie down. We've talked about my mother. We're talking about my childhood. What drive was dance really satisfying? It's just fascinating that you discovered it on your own and you decided to follow it. No one told you, go take a dance lesson.

You did it on your own. I had to clip these out of the newspaper and I had to work on my parents little by little because the money's coming from them. I was like, do you have 50 bucks that I could take this? Yeah, right? But I think maybe two things. First is something expressive.

I needed to have some kind of outlet and I wasn't probably sure about words yet. But the body is the thing you've been schlepping around for a long time. So definitely an expressive component there but also if i'm to be like honest with you i think i was pursuing something oh this is a bit of a breakthrough no i think i was pursuing something like mastery, and even more than that, like perfection, right? It was not like modern dance that I went to, right? It was ballet, with its extreme precision and its extreme demand, and the sense that you could be a bit better every day, and you needed to be, otherwise you were not going anywhere. And that desire to get things absolutely right

for no one else's satisfaction but your own. You knew how many pirouettes you turned yesterday, and you know how many you did today. And you are the own keeper of your record and your measure. Yeah, that's it. I would assume that it's the same desire that drives you to write the way you write. Yeah, it's a little bit obsessive and a little bit finicky,

and it seems quite technical, actually. But over the surface of it, there's this beautiful art. There's the arms fluttering up top, but underneath it, there's all of these pas de bourrées moving through the work, just kind of like relentlessly and obsessively um yeah thank you for that actually thank you for that i mean we're done right that's the end of the conversation i can go i can think about this for the whole afternoon

actually right but i mean i i don't want to take it too far but is is there is there a dance going on with the writing that you do and the words that you use? Yeah. Maybe I should have done the Massys on dance. You could do them again. What would you do the Massys on? I'm coming back to your question. Oh, God, it's far more depressing than dance.

Let's stay with dance. Let's stay with dance. Yeah, so what's going on there artistically with the writing? Yeah, i think definitely there's you know in the past i've thought about myself more musically than as a dancer writer right like the music is probably an easier way to sort of help people see what i'm trying to do and do you mean it has a rhythm do you it has a yeah mean, there's a kind of... When you listen to it, it seems like there are no notes there, right?

Like it seems the technical thing disappears and you're lost in the emotional sweep of the piece. And I think with the writing too, I hope for all the technical stuff to be buried and you just see, oh, this is a great story of a 40-year love story or something. So music is an easier way to sort of talk about how I play with the page and all these kinds of effects.

But no, there's something really graphic and designed and physically aesthetic about how I think about the page as if the words have a body themselves, right? And yeah, there's a link there. All your writing from what I've observed, whether it's poetry or fiction or nonfiction, there are multiple voices kind of overlapping. There's interaction, there's interjection,

and there are footnotes, there are lines of poetry kind of running in the margins and fingerprints on the page. I wonder how much of that is a way of resisting having a single voice or a single narrative. Yeah, for sure, right? And if you link it to the childhood, the sense of you're always at least two things all the time, right?

Yeah, I really believe in multiplicity. I really believe in a variety of perspectives and in a way that is not prescriptive, right? Like I don't have a sleight of hand thing saying like, this is the right way. Like in a novel, I really do think, say, Edgar, who most women despise in reproduction, has something redeeming about him, right? I think you could actually tell a whole story from that point of view. And so to sort of get out of the way and just kind of leave the voices intact, right? And sometimes to even strip away everything else that distracts you from the voices so that you just have a real balance of two people talking.

But what it exposes to is that although I try to do this thing to keep many sort of balls in the air at the same time, many perspectives and positions alive simultaneously, I think most readers want to choose, right? They want a hero and i mean we've been trained to sort of read for a hero and to follow identify with a single person as a protagonist going forward but i hope to sort of disrupt that at times and i think maybe people get frustrated in the non-fiction say like you need to be more militant about let's say what what it means to be black in 2022 and i'm like well there isn't a single way right right and i'm not going to put forward one way as if this is a pattern to go forward with uh so the multiplicity really is to allow other people to do the same kind of thing rather than to narrow their options to just one here's what what Ian says about this, instead to open it up, hear all of the

possibilities for life. Why resist the single narrative from a personal perspective? So you explained why from the reader's perspective, but for you, Ian Williams, why is it important to resist the one voice? Yeah, I don't think I'm the center of even my own story though, right? I don't think I'm the center of even my own story though right I don't believe that I'm a solid being even in the middle of my own life I really do think about myself more as more as like an absent figure in my own life right that is sort of formed in silhouette right like cast in relief to other things And so for me to sort of like assert like a really strong identity when that's always been slippery for me, right? Oh, you saw the body language tighten up here. You're going for the jugular today, I feel. Oh, it's supposed to be like a happy little talk about this.

We're in a safe space right now. It's supposed to be like a happy little talk about this. We're in a safe space right now. But no, I actually think, and I'm a big believer in sort of like absence and negative space as being really critical. I mean, like, you come to Canada and your identity gets kind of overrided with the very powerful and silent sense

that you must assimilate, right? That whatever you were before is somehow wrong or misfitting in this new context. And so the first mode of recourse is to be invisible and observe, right? And then reform and reshape yourself. But there's no one single thing to reshape yourself into. My brother did one way, right? He sort of followed a pattern and it's worked for him. He's happy. But I wasn't. I felt like I kept morphing and kept shifting.

And even now, right, I'm never quite 100% sure of my convictions. On Ideas, you're listening to my conversation with novelist and poet Ian Williams, the 2024 CBC Massey Lecturer. It was recorded at the Victoria Festival of Authors. Ian's Massey Lectures, What I Mean to Say, Remaking Conversation in Our Time, will be broadcast on Ideas all next week, beginning on Monday, November 18. You can hear Ideas on CBC Radio 1 in Canada, on US Public Radio, across North America, on Sirius XM, on World Radio Paris, in Australia on ABC Radio National and around the world at cbc.ca slash ideas. Find us on the CBC News app and wherever you get your podcasts.

I'm Nala Ayyad. Hey there, I'm David Common. If you're like me, there are things you love about living in the GTA and things that drive you absolutely crazy. Every day on This Is Toronto, we connect you to what matters most about life in the GTA, the news you gotta know, and the conversations your friends will be talking about. Whether you listen on a run through your neighbourhood,

or while sitting in the parking lot that is the 401, check out This Is Toronto wherever you get your podcasts. Toronto, wherever you get your podcasts. Ian Williams' 2024 CBC Massey Lectures are not like any other Massey Lectures we've had before. They're part lecture, part radio drama, interspersed with conversations both real and imagined. On the page, voices interject from the margins, and on stage, Ian argues with himself and with others, dancing with ideas without always landing on definitive answers. You can hear Ian's lectures all next week on Ideas. And ahead of the broadcast, here's my conversation with Ian, recorded on stage at the

Victoria Festival of Authors. In your poetry and your fiction, people are often battling it out. They're arguing. In fact, you're often arguing with yourself in this book, in the Massey Lectures. How does that help you find answers? Right. I think you have to know the person that you think you don't like, right? And to inhabit their position completely. I look out not at anyone in particular, right? But yeah, it's important to sort of keep their point of view alive. So I think we give a lot of lip service to this idea of empathy. But really the empathy is either A, to gain points,

like look at me, I'm such a sympathetic person, I'm so wonderful. Or it is to understand the other person so that you can then later dismantle them. And I think what if we had a kind of mode of being which was I will not even alter your words right I'm going to engage with you but I'm going to represent you so accurately that it might do damage to the consistency of my position but at least I'm trying to get you right so that requires silence yeah absolutely right it requires silence and it requires creating a kind of fictional space or non-fictional space where the reader has to kind of like agree to those terms too right to say no we're not in this to get people right we are in this to understand people, right? So to get people, I guess, differently.

In your book titled Disorientation, Being Black in the World, you write, quote, I accept that people will misinterpret or disagree with my positions. These disagreements ought to test and tune my own thinking rather than making me defensive and inhospitable. What does it mean to be hospitable to disagreement and to new ideas? Like, how do you practice it? What do you do? Right. Well, definitely to be inhospitable, you stop listening, right?

You no longer, you just allow the person to speak, but nothing is coming through, right? It's just kind of this armor that you're wearing. But to be hospitable is quite the opposite, right? Like where you are not just listening and processing them, but you are actually welcoming that difference into your worldview. You're actually sort of seeking out the person who disagrees with you and paying attention to it. So in the green room now, like we were saying,

I watched fox news yesterday for the it was like 20 minutes of it and like i've heard a lot about it but this is one of those things that maybe you don't have like a lot of direct experience with and it's just fascinating i think i just kind of sat there with like my sock in my hand saying like oh wow oh wow oh wow right um and trying to like quiet that thing in me that wants to like judge and say like no no no no and instead just saying like do they really believe this okay why do they believe this do other people who watch this believe this okay do i know someone who might believe this and then i actually thought would my brother be prey to this kind of thing?

Because there's something about it that's really like football team-like, right? And so there are many reasons why people join these kinds of movements. So that's what I mean about sort of being hospitable, right? You're in your hotel room and you're like, I could watch Seinfeld or I could watch Fox News. I don't have cable at home.

Let's watch some Fox News, right? It's not something I'm gonna do tonight or probably again in the near future, but yeah. But back to the idea of silence, there's something you've talked about called courageous silence. Can you explain what that is? I don't remember. Okay. So what, I mean, it is, we live in times where if you don't have something to say, then there's something wrong with you. And, or if you don't weigh in on a certain thing, you know, and there is, people talk about, I think you have in the past, about a courageous silence.

Right, right, right. How would you describe that? It's so funny, yeah. I'm so glad there's a record of my thinking from the past, right? Like, you have the idea. But yeah, so I think normally we sort of mark courage by the people who are very vocal, right? Sort of the activists who are necessary,

saying a very clean and sort of loud, single-note position. And they seem very courageous, especially if they're standing against a kind of dominant point of view. But more and more I'm feeling that the courageous people in this really polarized and hostile kind of like landscape are the folks who quietly say or declare like, that's not my position and that's not my position either. And I don't have to articulate my position to you. I don't owe you that. And I'm still forming it. And when I know it, I might share it with you. But I'm under no obligation to sort of bow to the pressure

of voicing things to satisfy you. That requires a kind of courage. Easy for people to sort of point and say that's cowardice. You don't know what you think. You're uninformed. You blah blah blah and to take all of that and say no you're not talking about me right you're talking about some kind of caricature or whatever i'm just taking my time over here and letting information come in right yeah again back to being the observant listener yeah i'm also curious how you're thinking about conversation.

And of course, we don't want to give away the entire lecture series, so this is just one little sliver of it. How you're thinking about conversation changes, not only in a time of polarization that we live in now, but in a time of when difference of opinion leads to war. Yeah. I mean, it's not a far step between the kind of hostile conversations we have.

They always precede actual physical violence. And these are things we think we might not see in our lifetimes. We hear about these things from our grandparents and the Great War and things. 1930s Germany seems like, okay, a historical lesson. And then we see how quickly a society can disintegrate and have some key sort of figures globally can influence what happens domestically and shift what is an acceptable speech and codified in that kind of like hostile speech is i guess a view of the other person right a kind of shorthand

for like you are not someone who deserves respect you're not someone that i even would condescend to talk to you are not a human on my level right because you hold those political beliefs or whatever or you watch that station and so when the conversation becomes like symptomatic of like what i actually think of you that i can't even deign to sort of like interact with you it's a very short step before i your disappearance means nothing to me and you hear that in today's discourse. Yeah, right, right, right. I mean, we disappear people first in our discourse, right? And then we can disappear them physically. Yeah.

Yeah. Changing tack here a little bit. In many of your books, ideas about race and identity, as we mentioned, are central, but they're also ambiguous at the same time yeah what do you what's kind of your main exploration what are you after when you write about race i think context right for race that someone's racial identity is not their entire identity and it's a disservice to uh let. And it's a disservice to,

let's say it's a disservice for a white person to sort of view a black person as primarily a black person, right? Like that is the thing that shapes all the other information you know about them. But also a disservice for us, like racialized people, to want to be boxed, right? And to sort of... This is a very delicate thing to say, okay?

Take your time. Yeah, so we don't really want our marginalization to be definitive of all of our future decisions, right? And our place in society to constantly be defined by that. And because it is a known quantity, because we know the kind of power of victimhood these days, it's easy to kind of want to settle into that state at the expense of all of these other kinds of things

that we should put forward about ourselves. And so I love it, like, when I will see I will see a black girl at one of these events, usually a young person, and they're really kind of struggling with how to be, right? Because there are these expectations of how to be black. And what I'm more interested in from that girl is, do you like unicorns? Do you like the color blue? What do you like unicorns do you like the color blue you know

um what do you eat what do you and your parents talk about right like you don't have to sort of take this freight on you for your identity you can have the kind of freedom um to sort of be nerdy and to sort of be fascinating about all of these, these other things. Can I give you a popular culture example? Yes. So there's a rapper called Megan, the stallion who is, you know,

quite raunchy, like quite explicit and all of that. And then she dropped the song that is part in Japanese, right? And the Japanese fans are going crazy, right? Cause here's like this black american rapper now singing in like japanese um and then it turns out that our assumptions about megan the stallion

like the nails and the hair and all of that stuff she's really a bit of a nerd on the inside right and she gets to be that she gets to to explode the expectation of this kind of gangster girl. She can just be, well, I love anime. I love this. And I've always wanted to make a music video. Yeah, so we can be limitless too, right? This is not to say that race doesn't impact all these things. I'm not naive about any of that.

But I'm saying that when we foreground her in certain ways, it's really a disservice to these other kind of robust parts of her identity. Why is that such a difficult concept? I mean, it's a big question, but it was incredibly emotional what you just said, that you had to tell, to try to explain to this young girl or have this compulsion to explain to this young girl

that she liked unicorns. Yeah, you can be anything, right? And you can, right. I think because the struggle is not quite over and because there's still a need for stridency and militancy and activism. And there are people who are fighting that battle and they really do need help, right? And the help is not just the work of black people say the help is from like like white folks need to join in this right um to i want to actually sorry interrupt and just read which which is kind of the question i need to ask you which is you've written it's not that i find race in everything but that race finds me yeah so it's constantly pursuing you right it's kind of like hunting you down into this kind of target.

So there's a kind of like activism and militancy and all of that that's important to kind of move forward. But not everybody's called on to sort of advance a movement in the same way. We're not all going to be on picket lines. We're not all going to be writing angry tweets and respect to people who are doing these kinds of things but don't make your natural way of responding to the world mine and I don't expect that of you and that way on many fronts we can advance a kind of like equitable movement rather than in a single

way so yeah I think that's if people were able to sort of live and express themselves as is natural for them within the context of the kind of you know radioactive racial environment that we're living in we'll see the spreading of this kind of like equity and justice movement spreading amoeba like rather than military line like right until it's reaches many different segments of the population yeah another thing that you've written you have such amazing lines on on this topic i i categorize my experience but then i open my arms and they come waddling back to me disheveled and unruly i am not the black spurt right why don't why don't you like being an expert that's a great throwback there

no i don't think i am i'm i don't have the corner on blackness i think they're um people who would like to have that title in that role they get great fulfillment from being the expert on some kind of demographic corner i don't think that's possible or necessary. And then it also makes the person looking to you lazy, right? Like, if you are the black expert, just tell me what to do and I'll do it. Or just tell me how you feel and I'll be sensitive. But no, that's the work, too, of the people around you

to kind of figure things out. Yeah, I was not born. I was not born to be the black expert right I happened to be born in this body but yeah my mission in life is not to sort of educate folks about my body yeah um we're going back to the couch discussion yeah that's okay not that we ever left it really but I um but one thing that you you you express in so many different ways even in the conversations that you and i the few conversations we've had together is and you mentioned it already today is is that you're somebody who seems to like to spend a lot

of time alone you you've talked about you know going to japan as a way of furthering yourself away from the life we know here. You've talked about moving to France and working there. I just wonder what solitude provides for you. Yeah, and I can't even get a deep enough solitude. I have to do these extreme measures. It's not just enough to be alone in my place in Toronto. I actually need to like be outside of language, be outside of culture, to be like isolated to the degree

that my brain feels safe enough to sort of kick into gear. Yeah, it's one thing if you're kind of processing, always processing like North American information, right? And our phones make it hard to sort of get away too. But yeah, there's a kind of deep solitude that I long for. And like my best sort of creative work happens in these moments and to have it sustained. So it's not just getting away,

but it's also to be away for a long enough time that I can recall or recover myself. Yeah. Is it more generative or is it an avoidance of sorts, so a walling off? That's a good one. You can tell me that's too personal to ask. We'll move on.

No, no, I need to fight with this, right? I need to... I imagine it's probably a bit of both. Is it not? That's a cop-out though, Nala. So is it avoidant or is it generative? Yeah, it's a bit of both. You're right about that.

You are right about that. You are right about that. Definitely, yeah. I wish I could be all sort of like, all suave and say, no, I don't avoid it, and just all of that. But yeah, maybe at 50, I could say like it's not avoidant anymore.

But no, I do need to sort of annex certain things completely and have them gone in order to see other things. Yeah, yeah. You've said that this book that you've written for the Massey Lectures, which is titled What I Mean to Say, started out as a book about the deterioration of civil discourse,

which we've covered a bit tonight, today. But at its heart, you say it's actually ended up being a book about friendship. Yeah. About strangers who become friends, about how to tend friendships through friendship. Yeah. About strangers who become friends, about how to tend friendships through conversation. Yeah. Just, was that a surprise to you? Did you plan it?

How did it work out this way? Yeah, it kind of happened, right? So conversation was always the umbrella for which we could talk about many different kinds of things, right, loneliness and isolation and issues of like societal structure and hierarchy and cancelling and all of those things fall under the umbrella of conversation. But when it started stealing upon me that you know there's

a lot in here about sort of strangers and friends and that kind of dynamic between them was pretty late in the process right like this probably happens to you too like you think you're writing something else and then it becomes clear to you that when you go away and you have some real kind of time to be in the zone, that your unconscious is actually dictating a lot of what's happening. And then later on, your conscious mind kind of catches up to it. This has happened, I think, for every single book. I look back and said, like, oh, that actually predicted something that I noticed 10 years ago. So yeah, I think I realized, right, like, oh, that actually predicted something that I noticed 10 years ago. So, yeah, I think I realized, right, more than planned,

that this was like a book about friendship, right? And the place that conversation has in negotiating our relationships to each other, keeping us glued to each other as well. What does that process or that eventuality tell the rest of us about where conversations need to go or how they should go? Yeah, the conversation is kind of like a medium that we should pay attention to for sure. But maybe by looking at the conversation, we're avoiding the real thing, speaking of being avoidant, which is what are my relationships, right? Who are the people that I'm talking to? What is the quality of my relationships as seen

through my conversations? And who do I need to talk to, right? Who have I sort of cut off? Because they irritate me. And what does that say about me, right? What is that intolerance spec in me that just cannot deal with x in this person yeah what about the opposite end of of that spectrum what makes for a truly sublime conversation with a friend oh yeah that just makes me light up yeah I think truly like when you are in conversations with friends like that it's like you're in grade 3 all over again and you're walking

around the playground with your arms around each other's shoulder and it's before any of the like stuff hits you about like race and like what are you going to earn and how much are housing prices and who's the politician in power. It's before all of that stuff.

And it's just you and this kid who just one day picked you or you picked them. And then you're looking at flowers and you're looking at bees and you're playing with ants and you're doing all of these things. And it's just where you have no plan for your life. You have no plan for the conversation.

But you just go anywhere together, right? And I think that's what a really good conversation feels like. It doesn't feel like you're 45 and enmeshed in these really heavy global situations. There's a kind of freedom, like a really, really true freedom. Ah, Nala. Oh, it's such an emotional imagining of a conversation.

When's the last time you had one like that? Yeah. It's at the end of the book, yeah. we're not giving that but maybe can you look back just now here we are in victoria and think back to the last you know few weeks you've been to the caluit the first time the masses have ever been to the caluit uh and to saskatoon and you were out east as well can Can you think of a conversation? Maybe that's not approximated that perfection that you just outlined, but a good conversation. Yeah, in the last five weeks or so, four weeks or so.

Yeah. Oh, I can't even rank them, right? I don't want to say like the best conversation. But I think since writing this book too, I'm more appreciative of when those opportunities opportunities come like we were starting to have a good one just now right like in the in the green room when we were talking about a certain subject and i see like oh i want to talk to you more we were talking about our parents yeah right and like not a lot like it's the middle of the day why are we talking about our parents right we have like so many things to do.

But then something kind of latches on. I'm like, yeah, no, you are somebody I could talk to about this. And good conversations with the people we're traveling with, they come up, right? But you just kind of have to be available for them and not just kind of like using them functionally for purposes. I've had a lot of them. I've had a lot of them, actually.

Just as a last thing, well, two things. One is you are, you know, you're a thinker, you're a writer, but you're also an educator. And you meet with young people on a regular basis to talk about really important things. And I was wondering if you could just kind of writ large, give me a sense of what it is that you want this next generation i know to think about when they think about conversation what is it that you want them

to take away from your experiences and your knowledge yeah i think for that particular age like don't miss out on the conversations that you can be having in your 20s face-to-face before, like, the pressures really, really mount, right, and squeeze and, like, throttle your time. But in your 20s, in your early 20s, when you have the freedom and hopefully the means to sort of travel on a long road trip with someone or to hang out someone's house and to be, like, reckless and irresponsible in what you talk about to make bad jokes to have those things face to face with each other right like not to think that the the phone or communicating that way is a good approximation or a good substitute

but I don't know if people will regret things that they never really quite had. I think we have kind of nostalgia for those pre-phone days, where we could really sort of hang out with people. But I really wish that for them. I wish kind of for a solar flare to wipe out our telecommunication systems. Remember the blackout back in Toronto in 2000, whenever that was? And at least for an afternoon or so,

right, we had nothing and we just had to like talk to people and stuff. And it was really great. That would be good for that group. So that's about conversation. What is it that you want to leave with this next generation of writers about writing? about writing? That it's absolutely worthwhile. And it's better than a photograph of yourself. It's better than taking a selfie. Like when you go back and read the stuff that you wrote at 21,

you will be really grateful that you took the time to sort of write it down. And it doesn't have to be like autobiographical. It could be a poem about anything right but not to think that art is the domain of like the elite and specialized people but that you can go on making art in a capacity that's not professional as a way of transcribing and keeping your life to yourself yeah and that's not just for the writers. That's like keep drawing, right?

Keep singing, keep making up songs to yourself for your whole life and like amass a record of that. Yeah. Will dance ever have a place in your life again? Oh. Probably not. That's sad, yeah? No. Yeah, probably not yeah probably not probably not even in writing oh I'd love to write something big and splashy about that but um yeah I mean there's a reality

factor right with the body and the things that I know I could have, I used to be able to do and can't do anymore. That sort of mortality dance makes it really acute, right? Yeah. Thank you, Ian, for taking my questions. Thank you, Nala. That was brutal. In my days as a foreign correspondent, I would have taken that as a compliment. But not this time. Thank you. On Ideas, you've been listening to my conversation with novelist and poet Ian Williams, the 2024 CBC Massey Lecturer. Ian's lectures, What I Mean to Say, Remaking Conversation in Our Time, will be broadcast on Ideas all next week, beginning Monday, November 18.

week, beginning Monday, November 18. The book version of Ian's Lectures is also out now. It's published by House of Anansi Press, one of our partners in the Massey Lectures. Special thanks to everyone at the Victoria Festival of Authors, at Langham Court Theatre, and Monroe's Books. And at CBC, thank you to Anne Penman. and Monroe's Books. And at CBC, thank you to Anne Penman. This episode was produced by Pauline Holdsworth and Philip Coulter. Our technical producer is Danielle Duval. Our web producer is Lisa Ayuso.

Senior producer, Nikola Lukšić. Greg Kelly is the executive producer of Ideas. And I'm Nala Ayyad.