Working with Archway Community Services, a non-profit social service agency that aims to bring social justice and programming to the community, Darien Johnsen and Sumaiyyah Adam collaborated to create and develop the curriculum of Diversity Reads Book Club.
The reading group is an open club with a maximum of 12 participants meeting biweekly on Thursdays from 6:30 to 8:00 p.m. They are part of the Fraser Valley Regional Library (FVRL) book club, so the selected books are provided by the library while each session is online.
Johnsen works as the community developer of Archway in the diversity education program, and Adam functions as the community coordinator.
“A lot of our work has to do with anti-racism and discrimination, and providing workshops to create an inclusive environment,” said Adam. “We’re really passionate about equality and inclusiveness.”
And so, the Diversity Reads Book Club bloomed in response to this desire for social justice.
“It was kind of my brainchild,” Johnsen said. “I started at Archway in January. I love organizing spaces for people to gather and do fun things, so that was something I really wanted to do right away. This really came out from the BLM movement in 2020. Abbotsford was super vocal and responsive to the activism.
“What came out of the movement was a list from the FVRL of anti-racist books from Black authors. I thought, ‘how cool it would be for us to read these books that the FVRL had for us to offer?’
“Reading books from diverse authors gives us a glimpse into this person’s perspective. It’s a good way to understand other people, and it’s also a cultural thing too. People’s culture shines into their writing, even just the style of writing; you see authors from Latin America, Australia — all these different authors have certain ways of speaking, certain traditions that shine through in the narrative and the way they write.”
Not only does the book club focus on the novels alone, but they contextualize the given themes while applying them to historical and contemporary efforts. When asked what book they first started with, Johnsen said, “Sonny’s Blues by James Baldwin. He’s significant because he worked alongside Malcolm X and Martin Luther King in the States during the civil rights movement. He was immersed in that culture. It sparked conversation in our group. We have eight people so far, so it’s quite intimate, and we meet biweekly.”
James Baldwin was the brother of nine children and was born in Harlem in 1924. He was a writer who published various pieces of poetry, plays, and novels. He utilized complex narratives to navigate sexuality, racism, classism and segregation. With his clear vocal support for the civil rights movement, Baldwin won several awards, including the Commandeur de la Légion d’honneur in 1986, a year before his death.
Currently, the group is reading A Delhi Obsession by M.G Vassanji published in 2019. The novel centers on the recently widowed character Munir Khan, who experiences a clash of worldviews when visiting his ancestry in Delhi. Living exclusively in Toronto his entire life, he has very few ties to his original roots.
In addition to promoting diverse voices, this idea sparked from an absence of own-voices as well, Johnsen said. “We’re new. We’re on our second book right now, and it stemmed from the FVRL. I looked at my bookshelf and wondered how many diverse authors there were.”
“We’ve all created a space where we come from different backgrounds,” Adam said, “but we’re becoming more proximate from the things we’ve learned from each other and our different lives. It’s self-reflective, and we’re internalizing the things that we’re talking about, and we’re able to make each other comfortable without harming each other, and that’s a learning opportunity that not a lot of people have, especially with the intense material that we’re discovering.”
Adam joined Archway Community Services in February, and that’s how she met Johnsen.
“Our learning outcomes are really trying to reveal a different understanding of the material we’re engaging with,” Adam expressed, giving insight into the group’s educational opportunities. “With James Baldwin, he’s writing from a perspective of segregation, where communities are experiencing what it’s like to be marginalized and Black in that time in Harlem — we obviously can’t put ourselves into that predicament because we live in a different time, but we’re seeing that overlap in our time.”
“Even if it’s 20 years ago from now, we can still find an intersection in material, how we can understand that and bring it into modern-day society.”
For those who are interested in social justice, the Diversity Reads Book club provides open-access education in a non-judgmental environment, where people of all walks of life are welcomed to sit down, read, and discuss several ways of inclusive thinking. Contact darien.johnsen@archway.ca to get involved.
