{"id":61134,"date":"2021-07-21T00:47:19","date_gmt":"2021-07-21T00:47:19","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.mixedracestudies.org\/?p=61134"},"modified":"2021-07-21T00:47:20","modified_gmt":"2021-07-21T00:47:20","slug":"the-wig-maker","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/mixedracestudies.org\/wp\/?p=61134","title":{"rendered":"The Wig-Maker"},"content":{"rendered":"

The Wig-Maker<\/strong><\/em><\/a><\/p>\n

New Star Books<\/a>
\n2021-03-11
\n128 pages
\n6\u00d79 inches
\nPaperback ISBN: 9781554201716<\/p>\n

Janet Gallant<\/strong> and Sharon Thesen<\/strong><\/a><\/p>\n

<\/a><\/p>\n

A powerful tale of violence, grief, resilience, and transformation, told in the voice of Janet Gallant, transcribed and lineated as a long poem by Sharon Thesen, The Wig-Maker<\/em> gathers and weaves together themes and incidents that accumulate toward \u201cthe moan\u201d of racism, sexual abuse, maternal abandonment, suicide, mental illness, and addiction.<\/p>\n

Though the subject-matter ranges from a lengthy first-person account of sufferings both personal and cultural, historic and current, the pulse of the telling ultimately led to healing and reconciliation. Almost by magic \u2014 certainly with the assistance of the uncanny \u2014 the 18-month long process of Gallant’s telling\/Thesen’s listening-writing resulted in Gallant’s discovery of her true genetic, and social, identity. In the early part of her story Janet longs to know the reasons that her mother abandoned the family when Gallant was three years old, leaving four young children with their abusive father. She also wants to know what turned her father into \u201cthe monster\u201d he had become. Her mother, Valerie Johnson, is Black and grew up in the Black community of Wildwood, Alberta<\/a>; her Canadian serviceman father, Tom McCrate, grew up in Irish-Catholic poverty in Nova Scotia<\/a>. As a biracial child, Janet was unaware until she was eleven years old that her mother was Black; nor did she know until very recently that Tom McCrate was not her biological father.<\/p>\n

The twists and turns of the narrative gather a range of topics and incidents; the human hair industry, Black immigration to Alberta<\/a> and Saskatchewan<\/a> in the early 1900’s, maternal abandonment, the stresses of military life, adoption search websites, the suicide of Gallant’s teenage brother, the sudden death of her young husband, the stress-disorder of alopecia, and the loneliness of surviving all this but never finding answers. But some important answers have been given and received as a result of Gallant’s research being inspired by the mysteriously healing process of the telling itself.<\/p>\n

\u201cThe Wig-Maker\u201d is Janet Gallant’s song; her story comes to life in Sharon Thesen’s poem.<\/p>\n