In Yvonne Vera's "A Woman Is a Child" a young African girl comes to Canada and does the unspeakable, shattering an ancient taboo. Her audacity leaves her father (whose authoritarian words had become stones) literally speechless. Pauline Peters ("Dryland: In My Village") is more explicit in recounting a mythic ancestral past where the collectivity ("And there was no word for I") is first empowered, then shattered, by the coming of the Word. Kuwee Kumsaa in "Lamentations: A Letter to My Mother" recounts how her people, the Oromo, are erased not just by conquest but by the conquerors inscribing their own version of history by renaming everything.

The power of names and naming reveberates in this book. In Paul Tiyambe Zeleza's "Foggy Seasons," the white Canadian teacher of the African child Shanisa refuses to learn to pronounce her name the very first day of school and rechristens her: " 'Would you mind if I called you Shany?' she said as she tried to smile." Soon, the children convert this to "Shiny" and the girl, identifying naming with power, creates a shell to hide in by rechristening herself as the westernized "Shelly."

Yet those who immigrate to Canada carry within themselves the flame of hope and a belief injustice. This, after all, is the meeting place. To the newly arrived Shanisa/Shelly, Toronto "looked as if the whole world was there." Also there, as she and others discover, in this land of "many solitudes," is death, racism, and cold indifference. Politeness is sometimes perceived as nothing more than a failure to communicate. As Shelly (who marries a white Canadian) discovers when they move to her husband's small Ontario town, "It was all so polite, so cold, this silence that greeted their visibility."

Silence -- and silencing -- is a feature in many of the pieces, such as Kumsaa's multi-layered lament for the lost Mother/Motherland, in which the pain of the Ethiopian refugee suddenly implodes into the Canadian silence, into "the land where there is freedom to scream when you are in pain." But she, too, finds it is not to be, for ... They say they want silence, perfect silence, over here. Their peace is not to be disturbed as ours was." She cries out to tell her story but nobody listens. Perhaps submerged in the noise of TV versions, "Yours is a very marginal scream, for them. Very trivial."

Even if the home left behind is peaceful (and many are described as Edenic), the very crossing itself opens one up to dangerous new knowledge. But there isn't much in this multicultural Canada, it seems, to assist one to take that final step across the cultural divide; to "become Canadian" (as in Archibald J. Crail's "Affirmative Action"). The loss of one's shadow, or its ominous erasure by winter darkness, is used more than once as a metaphor for the loss of one's soul in Canada. And yet many undoubtedly bring their solitudes with them, and in learning new languages, shifting into new spaces, they deliberately try to sever themselves from the past, perpetuating a silence about origins. This applies not just to Black people. In Zeleza's story, the immigrant gains insight into her own past and her children's present pain when she observes a similarity between her own parents who came from Kenya and her white husband's parents who came from Germany during the war. Neither couple had explained to their children their true reasons for leaving home, thus failing to assuage a psychic yearning that is passed on generationally. As the heroine (and others in these stories and poems) finds, one can only break free of the past by embracing it.

Words, then, also function as a tool for survival. Many writers in this book bravely confront other types of silence and the need to verbalize. One can at least maintain one's dignity by open acknowledgement of one's true condition, whether it is imminent death (in Minister Faust's "The Brown Moth") or being HIV positive (Stafan Collins's "Why"). There are also those who choose to affirm themselves by being outrageously, highly visible and loudly heard, as gays, drag queens, or feisty women (in, for example, the contributions from Collins, Courtnay McFarlane, and Sylvia Henderson). It is by learning to strike the spark between words and silence and breathing it into life that "fiery spirits" empower themselves and others, especially those suffering from multiple marginalizations due to race, ethnicity, gender, poverty, illness, or the loss of one's country/tongue. Dionne Brand eloquently expresses this in "Three Passages for Elizaet":

-- until one day she hears this revolutionary young woman breathe a magical word into life.