Chelene Knight Reviews Annahid Dashtgard's Breaking the Ocean
Annahid Dashtgard. Breaking the Ocean: A Memoir of Race, Rebellion, and Reconciliation. House of Anansi. $22.95. 280 pp. ISBN 9781487006471
Annahid Dashtgard’s book Breaking the Ocean: A Memoir of Race, Rebellion, and Reconciliation is an incredibly rich personal reflection on how the intersection of being mixed race can dictate how much space we can have and what can happen once we have it. It speaks boldly about identity, reinvention, trauma, burnout, and a continuous journey towards healing. From her father’s family’s experience living in and leaving Iran, to her white mother’s family’s life in England, we the readers are invited across continents to witness the chance meeting of her mother and father and the start of a very personal yet political experience.
Divided into three parts – Race, Rebellion, and Reconciliation – the three weave seamlessly into one another creating an intense ocean-like movement I’ve not experienced before with memoir. Following young Annahid is a privilege. As I read, so many questions arise, but one that stands out as magnetic is, how does an immigrant of mixed race navigate the world in a body that is always under scrutiny? Dashtgard is a surgeon at work as she helps us to construct our own answer to this question. As we make our way through the Rebellion section of the book, we are welcomed to walk Dashtgard’s path as she finds her footing in politics. Looking back, this excavation of a new world is mirrored in the Race section. Dashtgard carefully peels back the thin and delicate layers of race, so that we can see and feel the hurt that can come from schoolyard ridicule, immigrant familial expectations and standards, and the added battles a young girl who is entering into womanhood must navigate.
In this case, the linear narrative works well to gently pull the reader along. We are invited into a reflection that speaks to how racism has been upheld for too long and how classism and rejection will inevitably leave long-lasting scars that permeate the skin, the family, and the future.
From mentions of her father not wanting to show any “visible signs of foreignness,” juxtaposed with her mother’s whiteness as an “invisible cloak of power,” we then begin to see what these adult conflicts of culture mean for the children. What, as a result, do they miss out on?
I found the real magic and clarity in this book in the following passage:
How do we create inclusive communities in which everyone experiences belonging as a fundamental right? It turns out I would discover an answer to those questions, but not for a couple more decades. Being of mixed race had implicitly taught me that multiple frameworks, or ways of looking at the world, could exist simultaneously, and the work—the magic—was to be found in the overlap.
The overlap. I had to think about this for a while. What does this overlap look like? Does it reside in the residual trauma of existing between two worlds? This I cannot say for sure, but when Dashtgard writes about how “unnamed trauma can often block access to the past,” and memories can be “held hostage,” we are forced to consider what we can learn just from the way we literally look at each other.
In this powerful book, Dashtgard is resilient. In fighting for change and belonging she recognizes what was given up in return. She tells us honestly and bluntly that it is okay to reinvent oneself, but to be careful about the way unhealed trauma can invite in the beast of being retriggered, leaving us vulnerable to relive the trauma over and over again.
Chelene Knight is the author of the poetry collection Braided Skin and the memoir Dear Current Occupant, winner of the 2018 Vancouver Book Award, and long-listed for the George Ryga Award for Social Awareness in Literature. Her essays have appeared in multiple Canadian and American literary journals, plus the Globe and Mail, the Walrus, and the Toronto Star. Her work is anthologized in Making Room, Love Me True, Sustenance, The Summer Book, and Black Writers Matter. The Toronto Star called Knight, “one of the storytellers we need most right now.” Knight was the previous managing editor at Room (2016- June 2019), and programming director for the Growing Room Festival (2018, 2019), and now CEO of #LearnWritingEssentials and Breathing Space Creative. She often gives talks about home, belonging and belief, inclusivity, and community building through authentic storytelling. Knight is currently working on Junie, a novel set in Vancouver’s Hogan’s Alley, forthcoming in 2020. She was selected as a 2019 Writers' Trust Rising Star by David Chariandy.