Bookworm, no. 81
Titilola Aiyegbusi on Chika Stacy Oriuwa’s “Unlike the Rest.” Caroline Noël on Emily Austin’s “We Could Be Rats.” Springsteen goes to Winnipeg. Inside the March issue.
The Antidote
Unlike the Rest: A Doctor’s Story
Chika Stacy Oriuwa
HarperCollins
320 pages, hardcover, ebook, and audiobook
When Chika Oriuwa accepted an admission offer from the University of Toronto’s Temerty Faculty of Medicine, for the fall 2016 semester, she did not know that she would be the lone Black student in a class of 259. Nor did she know that her experience would differ vastly from that of her classmates. Unlike the Rest documents her journey and her advocacy work to ensure that no other Black student has to brave medical school alone.
In 2017, Oriuwa joined the Black Student Application Program, which introduced equity into the admissions process, and was soon made the face of its campaigns. That March, when her interview with the Toronto Star made the front page, vicious online trolls reminded her that people like her did not belong in the medical field. Still, their vitriol fuelled her advocacy. She did more interviews, delivered keynote addresses at major conferences, and wrote poetry about representation in health care. When the university admitted fourteen Black medical students in 2018, she wept.
This thought-provoking memoir does more than capture the barriers Oriuwa has faced as a Black female doctor in Canada. It delivers a polemic about Black erasure and marginalization, one that refutes the long-standing racist notion that brands Black professionals as underachievers and “less intelligent.” It challenges the systemic biases that normalize the absence of Black students from medical schools. And it disrupts the silence around their experiences at post-secondary institutions, a disruption Oriuwa captures in her closing verse: “I am woman / I am black / I am doctor / and I am here.”
—Titilola Aiyegbusi
Notes from the Underground
We Could Be Rats
Emily Austin
Simon & Schuster
256 pages, softcover, ebook, and audiobook
Twenty-year-old Sigrid plans on taking her own life, and her suicide notes—rewritten twenty-one times—comprise most of Emily Austin’s solemn yet quirky novel. However unreliable its narrator, We Could Be Rats is an honest plea for sympathy in our age of isolation.
Sigrid, who never finished high school, grew apart from her best friend, Greta, and now works a dead-end job at Dollar Pal. She feels rejected by her homophobic parents and envies her older sister, Margit, an English major who has long left their sleepy hometown of Drysdale. Yet Sigrid claims that “I don’t intend to kill myself because I’m unhappy. This has nothing to do with that.” Besides recounting childhood memories of skating on frozen ponds with Margit and slurping slushies with Greta, she invents a laundry list of excuses to justify her decision, including that she expects an aneurysm or brain cancer. The more she reworks her notes, the more she elaborates on her circumstances and contradicts them. Readers are left wondering what happened to her loved ones and why she’s giving up.
Initially, Sigrid comes across as comically ambivalent about her demise. In her first confession, she admits that she nearly ended it all over Christmas. Then she pulled her Aunt Jerry’s name in the family Secret Santa draw and “couldn’t stomach the idea of everyone unwrapping their gifts while Jerry got squat.” Her vulnerable side comes later: “I was cracked by the trauma of losing my friend, I felt isolated and resentful, and I couldn’t picture any future for myself.” Through candid depictions of her protagonist’s complex emotions, Austin challenges readers to engage with uncomfortable but necessary discussions around suicide.
—Caroline Noël
From the Archives: The Superpower Next Door
Though a trade war with the United States has been put off—for now—it remains as good a time as any to revisit Krzysztof Pelc’s “The Superpower Next Door,” from April 2019. “Canada was not under siege in 2018,” he writes, with reference to the first Trump administration’s tariffs on Canadian steel and aluminum. “But, confronted with an economy twelve times our size, what could we do?”
Springsteen goes to Winnipeg
To borrow a line from Bon Jovi, Bruce Springsteen and the E Street Band have seen a million faces and rocked them all. They did just about everything in their first fifty years together—apart from play Winnipeg. When they announced their 2023 tour, fans in Manitoba campaigned for a show. But the concert got postponed when Springsteen required treatment for peptic ulcer disease. One year and many rescheduled dates later, the gang rode into the Canada Life Centre on November 13, 2024.
Winnipeg could have inspired some of Springsteen’s darkest lyrics. Arriving at my hotel, I wondered why I’d travelled from my hometown of Birmingham, England, to look out at a similar post-industrial landscape. But I revelled in the city’s unique charm. The vinyl store Into the Music, on McDermot Avenue, ranks among the world’s best stocked and friendliest, and the Peg has a reputation for great rock crowds (the Pixies kicked off their reunion tour there for a reason). I had a date free between lectures on my own North American tour, and the Springsteen ticket cost a fraction of the price for his other Canadian shows.
Almost everyone stood and danced for the nearly three-hour set; attendees later complained that a lacklustre crowd in Ottawa four days prior were to blame for the relatively short show. Backup gospel singers and a horn section underlined the E Street Band’s roots in soul, while slowing the tempo to support the septuagenarian rocker’s aging vocals. (Although “Badlands” no longer delivers the same punch, the Boss remains peerless.) As he has throughout the tour, Springsteen introduced the band, and they kicked in to “Tenth Avenue Freeze-Out.” His call to the enraptured Winnipeggers was electric—likely the only time he would utter the city’s name from a stage. On that cold Wednesday evening, there was a spirit in the night, and Winnipeg was inarguably the place to be.
—Duncan Wheeler
Inside the March Issue
“If an event is unspeakable, the general rule is that people can’t shut up about it. War, genocide, divine mystery, sexual taboo—all crowded subjects with libraries devoted to the hopeless inability of words to describe them. Covid is unspeakable another way. Nobody speaks about it. No other catastrophe during my lifetime has generated such a stark contrast between the scope of its impact and the poverty of its discourse.” Stephen Marche reflects on the pandemic.
Enter Thetford Mines, Quebec, with Amanda Perry’s review of Sébastien Dulude’s debut novel, Amiante (Asbestos).
Lessons on environmental stewardship with Lorne Fitch’s Travels up the Creek: A Biologist’s Search for a Paddle, reviewed by Barbara Sibbald.
And much more!