Lawrencia’s Last Parang: A Memoir of Loss and Belonging as a Black Woman in Canada

A multi-layered memoir tackling issues of race, identity, and loss

LAWRENCIA’S LAST PARANG: A MEMOIR ON LOSS AND BELONGING AS BLACK IN CANADA is a snapshot of the author’s life immediately after the passing of her grandmother Lawrencia, the woman who raised her. Written in the style of patchwork quilt that takes the reader back and forth between the present and the past, she examines her grief from the perspective of a Canadian-born Black woman of Caribbean descent, and she begins to question her identity and what it means to be a Black Canadian in new ways. This means exploring her childhood in Trinidad and her adult life in Kingston, Ontario, a predominantly white city, her experience of raising a mixed-raced child, and the meaning of her interracial marriage. Simultaneously a memoir and a eulogy, the book offers an insightful exploration of race in Canada, one that complicates these issues through the lens of identity and loss, but also through a prism of privilege.

Literary Nonfiction. African & African American Studies. Women’s Studies.