What I’m Reading: Black Cake, Turtle Soup, and Other Dilemmas by Gloria Blizzard

I’ve known of Gloria Blizzard for years.

She’s the author of the fantastic essay collection Black Cake, Turtle Soup, And Other Dilemmas. Our books hit the market within a few months of each other in 2024, and we share a long list of social media mutuals. The Black Canadian literary scene might have several circles, but they’re small, and they tend to overlap, so Gloria and I have been on each other’s radars for a couple of summers.

But we never actually met until this past August, when we both dropped in on First Fridays, that staple of Toronto’s Black professional networking scene. Gloria showed up as an audience member and I made a presentation, and afterward we commiserated about life as non-famous authors of outstanding books.

Of course, we talked about the drawbacks. My long-running struggle with the unpaid labour that nobody warns you about, and the unforgiving slog of post-publication book marketing. I do it gladly, but if I’d known how much of the heavy lifting I’d have to do myself, I’d have started hyping my book six months before I submitted my manuscript.

For Gloria, it was the blurbs. We can’t quantify how much an endorsement from an established author boosts book sales, but we know they help if you can secure them. But, as Gloria pointed out, collecting blurbs is a headache.

That’s not anybody’s fault. Show me a working author and I’ll show you somebody with 17 projects on the go and 12 more deadlines pending. If your favourite author can’t blurb your new book, don’t take it personally. Unless they’re Colson Whitehead famous, they’re probably waiting on blurbs, too.

As for me, if I like the book, I try find the time to help. If you’ve glanced a the cover of Integration at Second Base, Peter Eisenstadt’s book about Jackie Robinson, you know that. And if I had known Gloria back in 2023 I’d have devoured a review copy of Black Cake and left her with a blurb to remember.

That night we exchanged signed copies of our books, then headed back to our regular lives. I added Black Cake to my TBR pile and it sat for weeks, as books often do. For a lot of people, acquiring books and reading them are separate pursuits, like working out and eating right. In both these senses, I Am a Lot of People.

But I finally retrieved it a few weeks back, and I finished it in three days. I’m a slow reader but I finish books quickly when I don’t put them down.

Or can’t.

In Black Cake, Blizzard gives us a jewel of a book that’s part travelogue, part memoir, and part meditation on the threads holding her life together. Music. Family. Her Blackness, which itself is a tightly-wound braid of heritage, history, time, place, and phenotype.

Let’s start with time and place.

Blizzard was born in Canada to Trinidadian parents, moved with her family back to Trinidad as a child, and was raised there until the start of high school, when the Blizzards returned to Canada. So she’s both citizen immigrant; a native-born newcomer. And she’s hopeful high school graduate turned cynical grown-up as she grasps the size of the gap between the multicultural utopia Canada promises and the entrenched racism it often delivers. Habitual discrimination that, over the years, hardens into systems.

Education in Empire had created for me the belief in reward for good work. Instead, however, in the world of work that followed, this naiveté did not translate well. I found myself languishing in low-level jobs, watching young white women parachuted over me into positions that I wanted. in the midst of this persistent debacle, however, I managed to maintain my somewhat contrarian nature, and this is what held me.

And let’s follow up. with music, because it informs the structure of every essay and shines through in the writing.

Back at First Fridays, Gloria told me specializes in the cuatro, a four-stringed descendant of the Spanish guitar that shows up in acoustic ensembles in just about every country with both hispanophone roots and a coast on the Caribbean Sea. Cuba and Puerto Rico, of course. But also Colombia, Venezuela, and neighbouring Trinidad, where Gloria first took cuatro lessons in her parents’ living room.

The musicianship comes through in the writing, and not just in the ways Blizzard explores the ways music shapes her life. Music functions in this book the way the bass line does in your favourite R&B song, running from beginning to end, bridging rhythm and melody. From those first guitar lessons to touring with her band to learning new instruments alongside her kid to owning a dog named Jazz — music informs the way Blizzard both structures this book and crafts her sentences.

Blizzard’s writing is its own form of jazz, flowing freely within the framework of each essay. If making great jazz means choosing the right note, in real time, every time, in rhythm and on key, that’s how Blizzard manages her words. I won’t call it a knack because, like mastering the piano or the cuarto, it’s a hard-won skill.

You could pick passages at random, but here’s one I loved. Two paragraphs from the end of the book, about recovering from a concussion during the pandemic, and taking daily walks with Jazz, an adorable dog and cherished companion who doesn’t always do as she’s told.

Today we walk the silent streets. Jazz is deliriously happy to be outdoors. We cross the road to avoid the droplets of breath in a jogger’s slipstream. Sirens careen around us. I hold the red leash. She pulls suddenly to throw herself enthusiastically onto a patch of grass that holds molecules of shit and urine left by others of her kind. She still does not fetch.

Blizzard doesn’t try to write like a jazz musician. She just does it. There’s a vast distance between the two. She makes no tradeoffs between substance and style. She delivers both, the same way your favourite jazz musician can riff and extemporize and rephrase a melody, but always winds up playing the song. Blizzard does it with little apparent effort, the way Miles Davis played the trumpet or Bill Evans did piano.

I don’t bestow those compliments lightly, but Black Cake, Turtle Soup, and Other Dilemmas is a heavy book. I’m stronger for having picked it up.

As for that blurb?

If I’m lucky enough to receive an advance copy of the next one, I’ll say something like this:

Writing this well isn’t easy. Gloria Blizzard just makes it seem that way.