Launching four new poetry and fiction titles from Mawenzi House!

Readings, snacks and cash bar

Admission is free

Books available at special discount

For more information contact Mawenzi House at info@mawenzihouse.com

The Greatest Films

Faizal Deen

This long poem addresses the imaginations of cultural hybridity as they are formed through passages between real and imagined homelands and host lands, be they Guyana, Canada, or India. The speaker narrates his own past through a splicing of moving pictures taken from a wide selection of twentieth-century cinema. The poem thus employs disjunctive poetic techniques that exteriorize the personal and public histories of the Indo-Guyanese Canadian diaspora. The Greatest Films refashions and revivifies these improvisational sources into a collage of repeating lines of verse that pulls readers back-and-forth; regardless of which direction the poem pushes or pulls the reader, what awaits is always an encounter with the residual nostalgia for “origins.”

Fire Walkers

Bethlehem Terrefe Gebreyohannes

It’s 1974, a coup has just installed a repressive military regime in Ethiopia. A family of five undertakes to escape from Addis Ababa to Djibouti, cross the brutal Danakil Desert on foot. Beth Gebreyohannes, a young girl at the time, describes that grim, perilous journey. Betrayed by guides and robbed by bandits, lost in the desert without food or water, they are rescued finally by a trading caravan of nomadic Afar tribesmen, complete strangers who feed and guide them on to Djibouti. In this port city, other strangers house them until—more than a year after they left—they receive their visas for Canada.

This is a story at once gripping and moving, about the endurance and courage of a family escaping to freedom against all odds; a story everyone would acknowledge as a portrait of our times, when so many everywhere run to seek safe havens.

"This extraordinary memoir captures one family’s harrowing escape from a totalitarian and brutal regime in Ethiopia. Beyond the unspeakable sadness and terror is a testament to the strength of the human spirit in face of adversity, and the amazing acts of human kindness that allowed Beth to survive and tell this story. "

—ABRAHAM VERGHESE, author of Cutting for Stone

Electric Fences

Gugu Hlongwane

These gracefully understated stories, set during and post apartheid, depict the lives of South African black women. But their calm surface is illusive, violence lurks just beneath the surface. Whether waiting for news of their husbands, forced to yield to “the man,” coping with poverty, suffering white patronage and mockery, or confronting sexual abuse, the women are still able to find dignity as mothers, daughters, students, teachers, and lovers. A moving collection.

Belief

Mayank Bhatt

An upright and modest Muslim family in Mississauga, Ontario, discovers by accident the plans to bomb public places in Toronto on their son Rafiq’s computer. Belief tells the story of the family’s escape from Bombay to Canada following the communal violence of 1993; their small success, epitomized by their proud ownership of a house; and Rafiq’s attraction to fundamentalist Islamic ideas. Rafiq, it appears, has rejected the planned act of terrorism, organized by an evil charismatic genius, but how can he explain its details found on his computer? Told simply, impartially, and with understanding and empathy, Belief describes the trauma of a family unable to understand their child as they anxiously await his fate.

"Bhatt’s illuminating, plain-spoken novel could be instrumental in generating substantive discussion about the immigrant experience in a country that is still a long way from understanding what that really entails."

—Dana Hansen, Quill & Quire