The Poetry of Truth

A teaching assignment to the Bahamas is the beginning of a profound life-changing journey for White Canadian Ray Sunstrum. The journey continues when he begins pursuing a degree in Social Work at Ottawa’s Carleton University and meets the love of his life, Dora, a Black woman from Trinidad and Tobago. But it is when their daughter Janik is confronted with naked, unrelenting racism in the Quebec school system that Sunstrum’s odyssey becomes a quest that leads him back to his roots and the wisdom of the Elders through participation in a healing Circle. Seeking help and restoration, he finds them both with the support of a wide variety of kindred spirits, recognizes the change in himself, and then sets out to tell his story to the world. The result, The Poetry of Truth, is the outpouring of a soul deeply engaged in living a true life in which racism has no place. In prose and poetry, and in both official Canadian languages, Sunstrum identifies the grappling tentacles of colonialism as the enduring villain and wrenchingly relates the agony and pain of his daughter and her parents as they grapple with unmoving bureaucracies in which the official mechanisms, supposedly designed to prevent racism and to protect people from racial harm, fail in those tasks at every step of the way. - Ewart Walters