Third Culture Kids (TCKs) have the distinction of growing up between worlds—those of their parents and the country they have grown up in. While globalization is more popularly viewed as a catalyst for economic failure or success, it’s also partially responsible for imparting a sense of confusion for TCKs created by a sense of belonging neither here nor there.
Trinidadian Canadian author Gloria Blizzard, the well-travelled daughter of Trinidadian parents with passport stamps and multiple schools to prove it, finds a way to unravel these feelings in her debut work of nonfiction, Black Cake, Turtle Soup, and Other Dilemmas published by Dundurn Press. Blizzard holds an MFA in creative nonfiction from the University of King’s College and her writing has been published by The Humber Literary Review, The Globe and Mail, and The Conversation, among others. She has also accumulated accolades for her essay “The Year of Jazz,” which was shortlisted by World Literature Today for the Pushcart Prize, and was the winner of The Malahat Review’s 2023 Open Season Award for her essay “Passage,” which reappears as a chapter in her recent book.
Through personal musings that incorporate food, science, history, and art, Blizzard tackles complex notions of personhood—race, gender, culture, parenting—in a way that is equally astute as it is at times comical. Her work often questions the concept of “Blackness” as an identity from a diasporic perspective and what that means for Black and non-Black people under different circumstances. In an interview with the author, we discussed how her upbringing between the Caribbean and North America influenced her essays while gaining insight into her writing process. We also talked about how the book unpacks the complexity of cultural identity by exploring the intersections of food, higher education, racial dynamics, and immigration.
Byron Armstrong (BA): Can you tell me about your process of turning to nonfiction?
Gloria Blizzard (GB): I’ve always written music and poetry. Then, I started to write essays and reviews about music, and that expanded what I was doing. Next, in 2017, I was invited to write an essay for the Canadian Broadcasting Corporation (CBC) on harmonizing identities through music. So that was my first major publication of an essay. When that was published, I realized, this is the form for me.
I don’t write songs anymore. I play in various ensembles. The poetry continues. But I realized the essay form, this is where it’s at.
BA: Why did essay writing feel like the next natural step in your evolution?
GB: Because it allowed the weaving together of multiple strands of information, including life experience. You can weave them together. You can put complex timelines together somehow. And so I found that really exciting, and that’s what I was able to do in my collection.
BA: Have you heard the term “third culture kid”?
GB: I’ve heard it, but explain it again.
BA: It’s somebody who’s born in one place, comes to another place, and, thus, is in between cultures in a physical sense. In an emotional and psychological sense, it also applies to children raised in a culture outside of their parent’s culture, while still having ties to that culture within the home. So this becomes like a third culture: You are neither really here nor there.
GB: Yes, that’s definitely been my experience. I was born in Canada, and then raised in Trinidad for a time, and then I came back to Canada as an early teen.
In that context, I look at myself as a place of intersections. Like, there’s this intersectionality that I exist with, and many of us who’ve had these experiences are able to see multiple truths at the same time. That’s how you function in all these different societies and all these different environments, so you learn to do that really fast. Because you have to. That’s how you survive.
BA: I want to talk about what deeper role food plays in your observances around power dynamics. Gender, race, culture, as well as your struggle for belonging in and outside the childhood home.
GB: There’s so much connected to food. As you say, it can be gendered in terms of preparation and so on. Then I had experiences where that was flipped around: where it was the male in the partnership taking care of that, but still pining for the woman to take it over.
There’s also the cultural aspect as well. I discussed in the book the role of black cake in the Caribbean—it would have been prepared by the enslaved people for the colonizers, and at a certain point, they took it over for themselves. Black cake is made up of all these disparate ingredients that come from elsewhere in the world, none of which are indigenous to the islands. They’re all imported ingredients. It’s also a sweet treat, but there’s something about it that’s very bitter.
BA: There’s a contradiction or conflict of sorts.
GB: Oh, for sure. It’s in the taste, too, because one of the major ingredients is burnt sugar—or it was originally. Now they use browning, but burnt sugar adds a bitterness to this very sweet, dense treat. So the complexity exists in the food itself. The historical complexity is in the food.
BA: How do your past experiences—as a university student studying science and being a touring musician—speak to the complexities of having this Caribbean background, and of just being Black in a white dominant culture? How does the initial conflict between those two disciplines represent the cultural and internal conflicts expressed in the book?
GB: Okay, so I was a daughter of a doctor and a nurse. I got a biology degree because my family thought that I should.
BA: In the book, you did mention that your parents ran a medical clinic in Trinidad.
GB: And that was a quandary that I ran into early in my life, quite early, because I was able to do both science and music. I remember going to a guidance counselor and asking for some advice as to what I should do; the answer was, “You’re good at both. I can’t help you.” So I’ve always lived with the understanding that these two things exist for me, but it took a long time to accept that it’s fine to be that way.
For example, I grew up in this family with medical professionals, but our whole household was also surrounded by art and music. My dad was passionate about Calypso, jazz, and Cuban music. There’s art on the walls. There are books everywhere. And so in the context of this very scientific family, we’re surrounded by art. My personality led me to get the science degree because that’s what I was expected to, and then I went off and wrote poetry.
BA: You touch on this in the book as well: this idea of needing to be exceptional. Your Blackness causes you to need to be exceptional, but that also complicates your ability to do the other thing that you actually want to do that is seen as being, I suppose, what the world would expect you to do. Entertaining. Making music. These tropes are considered very “Black” because that’s what Black people, according to the dominant culture, excel at. How did you navigate that conflict?
GB: Academically, to be the best of the best in everything that you do is exhausting, especially when my natural inclinations were in a more artistic direction. In the family context, it meant being a bit perverse: such as going to do a show at the Harbourfront with dreadlocks and bare feet, which horrified my parents. I don’t know if you’re of Caribbean background, but you can imagine.
BA: Yes. My background is Jamaican, so I get it. They would be wondering what was going on with you.
GB: Exactly. I remember them saying to me at one point after I’d shaved my hair off, “Oh, that’s nice, G. When are you gonna grow it back?” Then I grew dreadlocks and they were like, “That’s nice, G. When are you gonna cut it off?” You just can’t win, so you just might as well be yourself. That’s the only option.
TK
BA: That’s the internal space. Then there’s the external space: those things that you felt were challenges in university, such as the institutional connections of enslavement and colonization. You carried this weight with you while attending university and revealed some of these hidden histories within the institutional frameworks through their effect on you. Can you talk a little bit about how that history has very real impacts on Black and indigenous populations?
GB: I would say schools have always been an issue. I remember walking through a school with my child and just feeling like it doesn’t feel right, even now. In my personal experience, it didn’t feel like a place of comfort or a place where I fit or would learn about myself. It was a place where you follow the rules and you get through it. Just get to the other side and then you’re done.
As an older adult going back to university, I had the courage to note it. I had the courage to listen and speak about it, as opposed to closing my eyes and getting to the end of it. I didn’t know if I was even going to write about it, because it feels awful even while investigating it.
BA: So as institutions and workplaces wrestle with pushback to EDI initiatives including Critical Race Theory, how does having a rounder perspective of history impact our individual and collective identities?
GB: That’s a big question. It’s very critical. I’ve just been reading about the pedagogy of teaching because I’m looking into teaching writing in the future. One of the things that one of the authors was talking about is close reading—reading things without putting your own projections into what you’re reading—and considering what the author actually says. It becomes a practice of understanding what someone else is saying from their perspective.
Currently, we don’t really do that. We just learn the main ideas from what we’re told, regurgitate it, and get a mark. There’s the practice of finding a different way of approaching texts, a different way of approaching education, and even of approaching the workplace. But those are big jobs requiring huge changes.
The issue with EDI stuff is that you also have people from marginalized groups in these EDI environments, and their needs still aren’t being addressed in that environment. That is, they’re experiencing additional harm, while other people are learning. These things aren’t being addressed.
BA: It’s like window dressing that causes additional harm.
GB: Absolutely. If you do things in a performative way where you’re trying to teach something, but the people that you’re trying to teach about are being harmed in the process of that, you’ve already failed.
BA: I want to open this up to things that are happening in public discourse now with the election of Donald Trump. There are immigration debates happening stateside and also in Canada. Both in Canada and the US there’s a growing number of people of color also saying there’s too many immigrants. Some of them are immigrants or are one or two generations removed from migratory journeys themselves.
Does this also demonstrate the complexities of identity? That is, that nationalistic impulses demonstrate the falsehood of Blackness as a monolith?
GB: One of the things that my first editor, Alison Isaac, said to me was, “Thank you for writing this book because we are not just one thing.” While I can’t really speak to solving that nationally or globally, it’s critical we share our multiplicity of voices. Within that, you’re going to find people who have extremely different political views, and we have to have some grace around that.
In terms of family, in the book I talk about speaking to a shaman or medicine man from Burkina Faso who said, “Any part that you choose to reject in favor of one thing, that’s the part you’re going to need when you get into trouble.” You’ll need the wisdom from what you’re rejecting. So it’s important to be accepting of our complexities.
We can be a race, and we can be people of multiple heritages. Anybody from the Caribbean, I’m telling you, we’re not just pure African. We’re just not. So it’s really important to acknowledge that. It’s not denying anything. It’s just acknowledging it. 
Featured image: Photograph of Gloria Blizzard by German Prieto.