Esi Edugyan on the beautiful chaos of the room where she wrote Washington Black
'Messes are like storms — they keep their own rhythms, difficult to predict and impossible to ward off'
Leading up to Canada Reads, CBC Arts is bringing you daily essays about where this year's authors write for our series Where I Write. This edition features Washington Black author Esi Edugyan.
The place where I write can be summed up in one word: chaos.
Books lie tossed in sloppy piles, edging the walls; the surfaces of my two desks are strewn with pens and children's bright drawings and feathered masks bought in a quiet shop off a dark passageway in Venice, the afternoon light glowing coldly on the nearby canal. I remember so clearly that Italian city in winter: wandering the winding, near-empty streets late in the evening. The shops gave way to apartments, so that I found myself in an almost soundless neighborhood, a metal latch creaking weakly in the distance, a cat's shadow flitting like exhaust across the grey cobblestones. Preoccupied, I walked toward a cross street only to stop abruptly and cry out. Before me, like a sinkhole parting the earth, lay a vast stretch of water, a canal open and with no barrier, the walkway suddenly gone. I wore a thick wool coat and black winter boots and one more step would have put me into the water. This, I'm afraid, set the tone of my time there.
Not every object in my office is charged with stories, but many are. There are the vintage travel posters from Polish cities I've never visited: Cisna; Dunajec; Rybna; Gliwice. Each was hand-printed by a local artist, and each, I think, seeks to convey the mood of the places rather than concrete reality. I do not believe, for instance, that the sky above Rybna is filled with flying salmon and hot air balloons (though I deeply wish it was, at least sometimes). My husband bought these posters for me shortly before I began writing Washington Black, and it is from the image of Rybna, I'm sure, that I first began to dream of hot air flight.
And the mess is endless: there is the stuffed octopus from the Vancouver Aquarium and the blown-glass octopus given me as a gift by my mother-in-law; there is the tall mirror exiled from a bedroom and rehabilitated across from my couch; there is the French desk made with reclaimed 19th century wood and its backless chair only tolerable for the length of a Zoom meeting. There is the ring light and the microphone, the fake heirloom clock with its obnoxious ticking, the boxes of papers chewed at by silverfish that I cannot bring myself to sort.
Am I ashamed of this mess? Definitely. Does a disorganized room give way to disorganized thoughts? Quite possibly. Why don't I clean it? I do, occasionally. But to no avail. Messes are like storms — they keep their own rhythms, difficult to predict and impossible to ward off.
Of course, I'm just grateful to have my own four walls and a door to close. I have the privilege of my own space. What's interesting is the idea that there must be some significant correlation between art and the places in which it's created. And it does have some bearing, though how much varies by person of course. What amazes me is that books get written under the roughest of conditions — awful, life-risking ones — and emerge still whole, bearing their truths. The places we write matter most for what they make possible or impossible, in what they allow us.
Read this year's Where I Write essays every day this week on CBC Arts.
ABOUT THE AUTHOR
