Sahar Golshan
Jennilee Austria-Bonifacio, REUNITING WITH STRANGERS: A NOVEL.
Madeira Park: Douglas & McIntyre, 2023. $22.95.
On the day following the publication of her novel, Reuniting with Strangers, Jennilee Austria-Bonifacio participated in a panel at the Eden Mills Writers’ Festival. Host and author Ann Y.K. Choi asked Jennilee what food or drink would pair best with her book. “Kapeng barako,” she said. Kapeng barako is the strong coffee that grows in the Tagaytay highlands surrounding San Marco del Mudo, the town her characters call home. This pairing is now so poignant to me, as the charming heart of this book had me reading in a super-charged frenzy. The beauty of this novel, told in a series of incisive character studies, had me reading while walking.
Pairing reading and motion is my suggestion, given the book’s expansive geography. This story travels from San Marco del Mudo to the Canadian towns and cities where the characters migrate to find work and reconnect with kin. Filipino diasporic life is contemplated in its great wingspan, from Ontario to Quebec, Nunavut, British Columbia, Saskatchewan, and Manitoba.
One micro-scene guts me in just half a page of prose. Monolith, the little boy who links all these stories together, has just reunited with his mother in Canada. At an outlet store in Halton Hills, his mother tries to put the emblematic Roots sweater on him. Monolith refuses. In this deftly expressed rejection of the uncomfortable fabric of his new surroundings, Monolith communicates the distress tied to his displacement from his aunt Sora and from the Philippines—the only mother and land he’s ever known.
The novel itself moves in different vessels. Its stories are told through emails, resumes, a manual, and the reverent love song to nation called the kundiman. The story of Reynaldo and his reunion with his wife in Osoyoos, BC is told with various iterations of a resume. The writer’s use of the CV as a shell is skillful. A resume is familiar and concrete, yet a wholly inadequate distillation of a life. It conveys the emotional distance created by nine years of separation since his wedding day, and the way that Filipino immigrants are often read at first glance: first and foremost as their work.
There is a striking conversation about parenting in this novel. While Ginette advocates for her mother’s support with the unique mental health challenges she faces as an immigrant teenager in Waterloo, another young person named Jermayne receives unwavering affirmation from their mother as they settle in Toronto. Jermayne’s mom centres her child’s agency as Jermayne slowly explores their identity. The intricate intratextual dialogue that Austria-Bonifacio weaves is informed by years of working closely with Filipino newcomer youth as a school settlement worker and educator.
Reuniting with Strangers plays like a kundiman. It is an epic, loving ode to families in affective oscillation between the Philippines and Turtle Island.
Sahar golshan
is the author of the picture book So Loud! (Annick Press, 2024). So Loud! is illustrated by Shiva Delsooz. Golshan is a writer, a language learner, and the director of the short documentary KAR (2019). She is a winner of the Marina Nemat Award for Creative Writing in Non-Fiction and a recipient of the Air Canada Short Film Award. Her writing has appeared in Room, Taclanese, Shameless, The Ex-Puritan, and Tongues: On Longing and Belonging Through Language. She enjoys teaching and facilitating workshops in academic and community spaces like the University of Guelph and the Toronto Public Library.