MontréaLisons: Yara El-Ghadban's favourite reads
Yara El-Ghadban is a novelist, translator, anthropologist, ethnomusicologist and editor at Mémoire d’encrier. She recommends four books that encourage dialogue on diversity and the fight against racism and discrimination.
Her favourite reads
Voyages en Afghani, by Guillaume Lavallée
Éditions Mémoire d’encrier, 2022
The author has built an incredible career as a researcher and journalist. He knows the Arab and Muslim world in depth. He speaks and reads Arabic. Shocked by the January 29, 2017 attack on the Québec City mosque, he felt the need to write this book, the one he would have wanted to read himself as a young man growing up in that city. He is convinced that if we really knew the Arab-Muslim world, we would be less prejudiced and more willing to listen. If you want to understand everything that drives the different movements, revolts and aspirations of the Arab and Muslim world, this essay on Jemal ed-Din al-Afghan, one of the great thinkers of the Arab and Muslim world, is a very good starting point. It is an excellent book to combat Islamophobia.
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Deep Diversity, by Shakil Choudhury
Greystone Books, 2021
I translated this book myself. Many people ask me how to be kinder in relationships when we have different origins or backgrounds. If there is a guide to combat racism and live together more peacefully in our personal and work environments, it is definitely this book. The author offers practical tools to help us avoid the us/them mentality. This book is a valuable read for managers, public servants, activists, faculty members, and all those who wish to better understand and successfully manage increasingly diverse work environments.
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L’esclavage raconté à ma fille, by Christiane Taubira
Éditions Philippe Rey, 2015
This book lays the foundations for anyone who would like to start a conversation about slavery. The writer and activist talks to her daughter. I love this book, in the form of a series of letters, so much because the tone is always personal, accessible and convincing with a concern for transmission and awareness. It is above all a very instructive book that addresses all the questions people ask about this inhuman practice and how it could have existed and continued for so long.
What have you done to my country? by An Antane Kapesh
Éditions Mémoire d’encrier, 2022
An Innu grandfather passes on his history and knowledge to his grandson, but he also teaches him about the arrival of the white man, dispossession and colonization. The text has a strength and scope that goes straight to the heart while informing us and raising our awareness. An excellent book to enter the Aboriginal universe and understand its struggles. The book is in English and Innu-aimun. It is essential to step back and remember that there are not only two languages spoken in Canada, and that we lose a lot by not familiarizing ourselves with the Aboriginal languages which are, after all, the first languages of this country.
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