Mawenzi House: 55 books

In Bodymap, Lambda Award-winner Leah Lakshmi Piepzna-Samarasinha sings a queer disabled femme-of-colour love song filled with hard femme poetics and disability justice. The first book of the author to examine disability from a queer femme-of-colour lens,Bodymap contains work created and...

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,...

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...

In this volume, African Canadian novelists and poets discuss the complexities of the writing experience. Most of the writers interviewed here are humanists; i.e., they see their work as serious depictions of the human condition, admit that their works are informed by an African Canadian ontology,...

Translated from French by Howard Scott In this, her third volume of poetry, this Aboriginal writer from Quebec again confronts the loss of her landscape and language. On my left hip a face I walk I walk upright like a shadow a people on my hip a boatload of fruit and the...

This book captures the history of the South African Ismaili families and some of the people among whom they lived from 1894, when the first Ismaili, Jeevan Keshavjee, left Kathiawad (Gujarat) and arrived in South Africa, up to 1994, when the country attained its multiparty democracy following the...

After the Russian invasion of the Japanese puppet state of Manchuria (Manchukuo) in 1945, fourteen-year-old Akihisa Takayama escapes with his family to their ancestral Taiwan. Here they find themselves under the brutal Chinese dictatorship of the Kuomintang. In the 1960s, now a physician calling himself...

In this brilliant and provocative first collection, Yaya Yao confronts her inherited fragmented self and her hunger for a home, using scraps of personal and communal memory to bridge languages, worldviews, and physical distance from her ancestoral homeland. Bits of Cantonese, Mandarin, Hokkien, and...

These twenty-one personal stories are told by women from practically all backgrounds and persuasions—devout and not-so devout, professionals and housewives, westernized and traditional, wearing jeans, hijab, or niqab, straight and gay, and originally from Africa, North America, South Asia, the Middle...

Born in Lahore in present-day Pakistan, Balwant Bhaneja grew up in the exiled Sindhi Hindu community of Delhi, before emigrating to Canada. Troubled Pilgrimage is his account of a journey to his ancestral Sindh in Pakistan. Struggling against the preconceptions nurtured in post-1947 India,...

In these thoughtful essays, Sheema Khan—Canadian hockey mom and Harvard PhD—gives us her pointed insights on being a modern and liberal, yet practising, Muslim, especially in Canada. Tackling a host of issues, such as terrorism and fanaticism, human rights post 9/11, Islamic law, women’s rights,...

Born in the Year of the Tiger, Hu Nu, unwanted female child, is nearly given away as a one-year-old bride in a Chinese village. She grows up during the turmoil of the Cultural Revolution, when traditional values are challenged by the politicized young, and nonconformity is repressed with brutal humiliation,...

These haunting stories beautifully evoke the oppressive lives of modern women in the Islamic Republic of Iran. Anis, a computer programmer, is at the end of her rope, putting up with the bullying criticism of a no-good, unemployed lout of a husband; Azar is a young divorcee, and the only person she...

Meet Mary Fellows, a sex-worker organizing a demonstration on St Catherine Street; how can she make the Anglican dean support it? . . . Disappointment follows disappointment as Margaret tries to find a suitable man; her latest folly is the suave younger man she brought over from Jamaica; . . . Greta,...