Eternity Martis never found the toga party she was looking for
Winner of the 2021 Kobo Emerging Writer Prize for Non-Fiction
"I felt like if they don't want me I'll just go somewhere else. But then as my friends started to actually act on that and leave and transfer out, I thought you know what? I'm in my third and fourth year now -- what's to say that the next place I go won't be worse?"
Eternity Martis, Toronto journalist and winner of the 2021 Kobo Emerging Writer Prize for Non-Fiction, is grateful to her younger self for writing down her experiences at Western University. If she hadn't, she might have gaslit herself into believing that she'd imagined every macro and micro-aggression aimed at her as one of a handful of Black students on campus.
But she did write it all down and it's all in her book, They Said This Would Be Fun. It's a memoir of her time away at university, but it's also a broader look at anti-Black racism in society and her own family.
She spoke with us about her book, her literary influences, and honing her craft with My Chemical Romance fan fiction.
Books Eternity mentions in this conversation:
- Feminism is for Everybody: Passionate Politics by bell hooks
- Sister Outsider: Essays and Speeches by Audre Lorde
- Women, Race, & Class by Angela Y. Davis
- The Portable Kristeva by Julia Kristeva
- One Day We'll All Be Dead and None of This Will Matter: Essays by Scaachi Koul
- How We Fight for Our Lives: A Memoir by Saeed Jones
- Bad Feminist: Essays by Roxane Gay
- Sex Object: A Memoir by Jessica Valenti
- Between the World and Me by Ta-Nehisi Coates
They Said This Would Be Fun: Race, Campus Life, and Growing Up
A booksmart kid from Toronto, Eternity Martis was excited to move away to Western University for her undergraduate degree. But as one of the few Black students there, she soon discovered that the campus experiences she'd seen in movies were far more complex in reality.
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