Disorientation

Being Black in the World

by Ian Williams

THE 2019 SCOTIABANK GILLER PRIZE WINNER IAN WILLIAMS REVEALS THE DIVERSITY OF THE BLACK EXPERIENCE THE WORLD OVER IN A CAPTIVATING NEW BOOK

SHORTLISTED FOR THE 2021 HILARY WESTON WRITERS' TRUST PRIZE FOR NONFICTION

“Williams, a Canadian poet, novelist, and essayist, describes his North American Black experience as dizzying. In this pithy, kaleidoscopic book, Williams interrogates moments when Black people have their personal identities challenged by the powerful misperceptions of others. Williams turns these scenes of intimate and public disorientation into subtle, radical essays on self-realization.”
 — THE BOSTON GLOBE

“A lyrical, closely observed contribution to the literature of race and social justice.” — KIRKUS REVIEWS

“Disorientation is a formally inventive and searing meditation on race and Blackness. Both topical and literary, Williams’ essay collection juxtaposes personal stories about racial profiling and microaggressions alongside discussions about the murders of George Floyd and Eric Garner and readings of Black writers like Audre Lorde and James Baldwin. His writing moves, by turn, from tenderness to despair to anger, yet remains clear-eyed and intellectually rigorous throughout. In an age of hot takes and condemnation, Williams’ essays reflect, explore, and illuminate.”— JURY, Hilary Weston Writers' Trust Prize for Nonfiction

“Disorientation is so honest, vulnerable, courageous and funny that it left me dying to sit down over a long coffee with Ian Williams. Make that two lattes, and I’m buying!” — LAWRENCE HILL, author of The Book of Negroes

“In Disorientation, Ian Williams captures the impact of racial encounters on racialized people, especially when one's minding their own business. Sometimes, the consequences are only irritating, but sometimes they are deadly. Driven by the police killings and street protests of 2020, Williams realized he could offer a Canadian perspective on race. He explores things such as, the unmistakable moment when a child realizes they're Black, the ten characteristics of institutional whiteness, how friendship helps protect against being a target of racism and blame culture.”— CBC BOOKS, top non-fiction pick for fall 2021

Disorientation: a sudden, life-changing realization of one’s own race and its implications.

“Disorientation” refers to the effect of racial encounters on racialized people, the whiplash of race that occurs while minding one’s business (while, say, driving, or playing music), sometimes with irritating consequences, sometimes with deadly ones.

Growing up, Ian Williams had the opportunity to not only experience Blackness in the eyes of Americans, but to also get fragments of what being Black is like in the world through living in Trinidad and Canada as well. Now the time has come to try to make sense of this picture society has painted and to explain to people what it means to be a person of colour.

Disorientation reveals the diversity of Black lives not covered in existing books, such as the significance of Black faces and bodies in fomenting division and classification; how the politicization of religion affects race relations; the ten characteristics of institutional whiteness; what it means to be the only Black person in a room, or a Black person who is not American; and the disorienting moment in childhood when one realizes one is Black.

In his characteristic writing style, Williams shares the story of how his niece and her family had to start thinking about the N word when it was abruptly thrown at her. First solution: tell the authorities, says mom. Second solution: deal with it yourself, says dad. And in the end, as always and no matter which option they choose, nothing happens.

“It disrupts your reality. It is enacted on you—it interrupts. It stalls the forward momentum of your life. You can’t prepare for disorientation. You can try walking around in an armoured suit.”

With Disorientation: Being Black in the World, Ian Williams pens a book that is meant to act more as a conversational piece than a confrontational one. It is a book that does not derive its energy from anger at whiteness, nor does it aim to offer inspirational platitudes on Blackness. Rather, Disorientation sheds new light on the issues that dominate social discourse today in a book deliberately aimed at the world of tomorrow.

Read an excerpt
See all author's titles
The Career of Ian Williams

See also
ianwilliams.ca
facebook.com
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50,000 words
Manuscript available January 2021

RIGHTS SOLD

US: Europa Editions (November 2021)
Canada: Random House (September 2021)
Italy: Keller Editore (June 2024)

(Photo: Justin Morris)

ABOUT IAN WILLIAMS

Ian Williams is the author of the novel Reproduction, which was the winner of the 2019 Scotiabank Giller Prize and was published in the U.S., U.K., and Italy; Personals which was shortlisted for the Griffin Poetry Prize and the Robert Kroetsch Poetry Book Award; Not Anyone’s Anything, winner of the Danuta Gleed Literary Award for the best first collection of short fiction in Canada, and You Know Who You Are, a finalist for the ReLit Prize for poetry. In 2020 he published his latest poetry collection, Word Problems. In fall 2021 he released Disorientation: The Experience of Being Black in the World, which was shortlisted for the Hilary Weston Writers Trust Prize for Non-Fiction and the BC Book Prize for Non-Fiction. He has been named the 2024 CBC Massey Lecturer.

Williams is Professor of English at the University of Toronto, where he is Director of the Creative Writing Program and Academic Advisor. He completed his doctorate in English there and spent four years teaching poetry in the Creative Writing Department at the University of British Columbia. In 2014-2015 he was the Writer-in-Residence for the University of Calgary's Distinguished Writers Program. He has held fellowships or residencies from Vermont Studio Center, the Banff Center, Cave Canem, the William Southam Journalism Fellowship, and the National Humanities Center. In the summer of 2022 he was a Visiting Fellow at the American Library in Paris. He is currently on the board of the Griffin Poetry Prize.

Williams writes book reviews for The Guardian and has written articles for The Globe and Mail, Maclean’s, The Toronto Star, Hazlitt, Sportsnet.ca, Publishers Weekly, The Walrus, Lithub, Granta, and the Italian journals Sotto Il Vulcano (Feltrinelli), and Civlità delle Macchine (Fondazione Leonardo). Born in Trinidad, Williams grew up in Brampton, Ontario, and has worked in Massachusetts and Ontario.

Click here for a summary of awards and titles.

Ian Williams on the front of the Canadian supplement
of Publishers Weekly, October 2020

Ian Williams is the newest inductee into the Brampton Arts Walk of Fame

PRAISE FOR IAN WILLIAMS' NOVEL REPRODUCTION

“Vastly enjoyable…. Top-notch comic dialogue makes this light-footed navigation of race and gender politics fizz on the page, as the steady dopamine hit of Williams's deliciously juicy phrasemaking works in tandem with typographical high-jinks that look gimmicky but earn their keep.” — DAILY MAIL UK

“Captivating…. The consequences of procreation between unsuited partners—a lifetime of misery and the likelihood of subsequent generations repeating the same mistakes—are explored with subtlety and wit over the novel’s four decades….There’s a fluidity and zest to Williams’s insightful writing, underpinned by numerous experiments with form and style: a flow-chart illustrating a character’s thought process; absent-minded asides embedded in a smaller font within sentences; and short paragraphs, sometimes just a couple of lines, that read as distilled prose poems…. Williams has a penchant for juggling multiple perspectives…. A finely balanced novel.” — THE GUARDIAN

“Williams’s imaginative, intricate tapestries are dazzling […] In his rich probes of language and intimacy, legacy and inheritance, he slyly shows that reproduction is consequential, but so is everything else.” — THE NEW YORK TIMES

“Ian Williams’s Reproduction is many things at once. It’s an engrossing story of disparate people brought together and also a masterful unfolding of unexpected connections and collisions between and across lives otherwise separated by race, class, gender and geography. It’s a pointed and often playful plotting out of individual and shared stories in the close spaces of hospital rooms, garages, mansions and apartments, and a symphonic performance of resonant and dissonant voices, those of persons wanting to impress persuade, deny, or beguile others, and always trying again.” — JURY CITATION, Scotiabank Giller Prize

“…This work successfully examines major themes of empathy, responsibility, secrecy, race, multiculturalism, misogyny, and honesty.” — LIBRARY JOURNAL, starred review

“Williams’s unsparing view on the past’s repetition is heartrending. This ambitious experiment yields worthwhile results.” — PUBLISHERS WEEKLY

“Driven as much by its relationships as its characters, and is intensified and enriched by an inventive style that borrows from Williams’s giant poet’s brain.”
 — THE GLOBE AND MAIL

“Reproduction’s genius is its weaponized empathy, the precision-etched intensity of Williams’ gritty, witty, wholly unsentimental exploration of the collision of human hearts and the messy aftermath. Love, and its lack, form a spectrum that the characters bounce between, searching for connections, redemption and meaning.”— EDEN ROBINSON, author of Son of a Trickster and Trickster Drift

Ian as jury chair of the 2023 Scotiabank Giller Prize