By opening the Racines bookstore, specializing in literature of diversity, Gabriella Kinté Garbeau took her place. First in Montreal North, then on rue Saint-Hubert, where the bookstore moved some time ago. “I’m just someone who wanted to open a bookstore. And this bookstore reflects my interests,” she says. This is one of the reasons why the book Don’t stay where you are! by the French journalist, author and activist Rokhaya Diallo, is one of the ten reading recommendations that the bookseller gave us, as part of Black History Month.
“I am not where my birth should have taken me, writes Rokhaya Diallo, a black woman from a working class background. Yet, I feel more in my place than ever. »
And for Gabriella Kinté Garbeau, taking her place also means proudly displaying Mohamed Mbougar Sarr’s book, The most secret memory of men. With this title, Mohamed Mbougar Sarr became, in 2021, the first writer from sub-Saharan Africa to receive the Goncourt Prize.
“It was a source of pride to learn that an author from the black community had won the Goncourt. And in the context of Black History Month, it is a pride to say that this man has been rewarded for his storytelling skills,” says the bookseller.
A terrible story
Teenagers are not left out in the selection that Gabriella Kinté Garbeau offers us. My blows will be my words, by Ibi Zoboi and Yusef Salaam, tells the terrible story of Amal, one of the teenagers wrongfully locked up during the “Central Park Five” affair, following the rape of a jogger, in the late 1980s. In fact, it is the story of Yusef Salaam himself that the book is inspired by.
Like four other teenagers, Yusef Salaam was wrongfully convicted and served seven years in prison, until a serial rapist confessed to the crime, corroborated by DNA tests, and a court granted them their freedom. to five young people. Refusing to be bitter, Yusef Salaam said in an interview broadcast on CBC that he found courage in the poetry and words of Maya Angelou. “Use your anger, dance it, walk it, vote it. And then say it. Never stop saying it [TDLR]. His book is part of this magnificent project.
The youngest will perhaps recognize themselves in Like a million black butterflies, by Laura Nsafou, who tackles the issue of tight curly hair that is too often subject to ridicule.
“Two of the things that set us apart in black identity are our hair, the texture of our hair, and the color of our skin. [..] Everyone is affected by beauty standards, especially young girls, says Gabriella Kinté Garbeau. Young white girls are closer to the ideal beauty standard. It is more difficult for us to achieve. Often, long hair is part of the standard of beauty. But children don’t straighten their hair. And when we make fun of them, they are victims of the texture of their hair. »
Taking his place was also surely the fight of Toussaint Louverture, this Haitian born a slave who became the head of the movement of the Haitian revolution, whose biography Gabriella Kinté Garbeau suggests: The legendary life of Toussaint Louverture by Sudhir Hazareesingh. “I wanted something like a major figure who talks about black emancipation. I wanted something that speaks of this Republic. The French occupied the island and the Haitians sacked them outside. »
In America…
Closer to us in time, the bookseller also offers comics Miss Davis. The Life and Struggles of Angela Davis, signed by Amazing Ameziane and Sybille Titeux de la Croix. “I chose her partly because Davis is still alive. When you read books about people who were part of the civil rights movement, and who were confronted with people from the Ku Klux Klan, you realize that it hasn’t been that long. The fact that Angela Davis is still alive and active illustrates that. »
Among Quebec authors, Gabriella Kinté Garbeau chose the essay Racists don’t have never seen the sea, by Rodney Saint-Éloi and Yara El-Ghadban. “Racism is a delicate subject, she says, you have to dare to approach it. »
“The problem with racism right now is that people don’t recognize that it’s systemic, and one of the strategies to deal with it is to always say that the problem is the other, not recognizing oneself in the mirror. To think, for example, that racism is the result of a few bad apples, that these are isolated cases. […] When racialized authors talk about their experience and their experiences as they do, a person with the slightest critical sense will say “it’s racism”, there is no other word to describe it. »
In the poetry department, Gabriella Kinté Garbeau chose Saint Chloe of love by Chloé Savoie-Bernard, to put a touch of Montreal in her selection, and because her book reads very well for people in a hurry. She also offers The hill we climb, by Amanda Gorman, which she discovered, like all of America, when reading her poem on the day of Joe Biden’s swearing-in. “What she’s doing brings hope,” she says. She talks about a diverse people, and uses key words, like reconcile and stand up. »
His selection ends with Wake up Americaa, a comic strip in which John Lewis recounts his own fight for the emancipation of blacks in American society, with the complicity of Andrew Aydin and Nate Powell.
“It’s an accessible book about the struggle for civil rights. And that gives a way of seeing that there is a chronology in the events, that the Black Lives Matter movement is a continuity of its struggles. It’s not Quebec, it’s something American. Very often, we say that it is not the same thing, but there are still parallels to be drawn, ”she says.