Pleasuring your mind with (mostly) fiction.
So, rather than me writing what I hope people want to know about re: the behind-the-scenes of Daughters of Silence, I asked my IG (Instagram) posse what they want to know. Here, the questions from near and far, and my responses, as well as a little behind-the-scenes action via YouTube.
I was too young to know that every country had one of those - airlines, that is, and the pretty ladies that went along with them, not to mention the dashing pilots. I was too young to even know that there were such things as other countries. There was Ethiopia, that was that. That was the world.
Early on in my writing of what became DAUGHTERS OF SILENCE, I used to call up funeral homes under the guise of being a potential customer and ask them detailed questions about exhumations and body repatriations.
All I had to do was summarize a nearly 10 year creative and personal journey into ten minutes...I remembered to breathe, feel my feet on the ground and more or less the rest of my body above, and most of all to focus on what was going on at present, not what I would have to do minutes from now.
Habesha dudes usually open with: Don’t I know you? I said, “Have you met me?”
“A story of trauma and reckoning, of flight and return, told honestly, written boldly.”
– Tessa McWatt, author of Higher Ed
Ash from the Eyjafjallajökul volcano fills the skies. Flights are grounded throughout Europe. Dessie, a cosmopolitan flight attendant from Canada, finds herself stranded in Addis Ababa — her birth place.
Grieving her mother’s recent death, Dessie heads to see her grandfather, the Shaleqa — compelled as much by duty as her own will. But Dessie’s conflicted past stands in her way. Just as the volcano’s eruption disordered Dessie’s work life, so too does her mother’s death cause seismic disruptions in the fine balance of self-deceptions and false histories that uphold her family.
As Dessie reacquaints herself with her grandfather’s house, familiar yet strangely alien to her diasporic sensibilities, she pieces together the family secrets: the trauma of dictatorship and civil war, the shame of unwed motherhood, the abuse met with silence that gives shape to the mystery of her mother’s life.
Daughters of Silence is available for purchase from my publisher Goose Lane Editions, Another Story Bookshop and other independent bookstores across Canada, Indigo Books & Music, & Amazon Canada.
UPCOMING EVENTS
February 27, 2020. Quebec City, QC. Open Book Diaspora panel
CANCELLED: March 11-15, 2020. Vancouver, B.C. Growing Room Literary & Arts Festival
CANCELLED: March 18, 2020. Vancouver, B.C. Incite: The Secret Lives of Women
CANCELLED: April 16-19, 2020. Hamilton, ON. gritLIT Readers and Writers Festival
PRESS
The Commentary: Web radio interview with Joseph Planta.
The Source: Diaspora in discussion: Rebecca Fisseha comes to Vancouver.
The Toronto Star: This week in books: happy endings for readers with disabilities, the Giller Prize is up for a prize and where Atwood goes, headlines follow.
CBC Books: 6 works of Canadian fiction to read for Black History Month 2020
CBC Books: Why Rebecca Fisseha wrote about family secrets, trauma and reckoning in her debut novel
CBC Books: Six Canadian writers of black heritage to watch in 2020
Room Magazine: On Community Silencing and Believing in Your Work #GrowingRoom2020
Lithub: Rebecca Fisseha on #Metoo in Ethiopia and Eritrea.
The Toronto Star: Daughters of Silence a powerful story of relationships in the diaspora.
Pickle Me This: Daughters of Silence by Rebecca Fisseha
Quill & Quire: Meet the breakouts of 2019: Rebecca Fisseha, Téa Mutonji, and Zalika Reid-Benta
Zora Magazine: My Complicated Feelings Toward Traditional Ethiopian Wear
Get Lit Episode 157: With Rebecca Fisseha
Winnipeg Free Press: Fall’s slate of fiction shaping up to be a bumper crop of buzz-worthy books.
The Miramichi Reader: Daughters of Silence by Rebecca Fisseha.
Atlantic Books Today: Books that explore the impulse to run away.
CBC Books: 34 works of Canadian fiction to watch for this fall.
49th Shelf: Most Anticipated: 2019 Fall Fiction Preview.
