Esi Edugyan

History is a construction. What happens when we bring stories consigned to the margins up to the light? How does that complicate our certainties about who we are, as individuals, as nations, as human beings? As in her fiction, the essays in Out of the Sun demonstrate Esi Edugyan's commitment to seeking out the stories of Black lives that history has failed to record. Written with the death of George Floyd and the rise of the Black Lives Matter movement in the background, in five wide-ranging essays Edugyan reflects on her own identity and experiences as the daughter of Ghanaian immigrants. She delves into the history of Western Art and the truths about Black lives that it fails to reveal, and the ways contemporary Black artists are reclaiming and reimagining those lives. She explores and celebrates the legacy of Afrofuturism, the complex and problematic practice of racial passing, the place of ghosts and haunting in the imagination, and the fascinating relationship between Africa and Asia dating back to the 6th Century. With calm, piercing intelligence, and a refusal to think on anyone's terms but her own, Edugyan asks difficult questions about how we reckon with the past and imagine the future, and invites the reader to think alongside her in working out what the answers to these may be.

Essays at the Crossroads of Race

Out of The Sun

Huiting

Under the painter's gaze, we dissolve into a kind of boundlessness. All of our attempts to assert our identity, through clothes, objects, expressions, get shattered. We are taken out of ourselves, become open to every outward interpretation - first by the painter, then by the viewer- until we become another being entirely. 

To look at a portrait is to be forced to build a human life out of our own inmaginations. That is what makes it a fundamentally hopeful act. Every portrait is a plea, at its heart, for empathy. When we sideline or hide awav images of certain people, what we are cutting ourselves off from is some sense of their possible history and daily lives, their humanity. The lingering fascination of art, its power, lies in our ability to make whole what is lost, through dreaming. A fixed image can be an entire life, a flowing story. We ask, who were they-or in the case of invented people, what were their possible lives? And in the answering, we wade back towards them, to their essential mystery, which is the same mystery we each of us are now living out, the morality of our choices, the worth of how we’ve spent our limited hours.

Out of The Sun quotes

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