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Black Cake, Turtle Soup, and Other Dilemmas: Essays
A diasporic quest to find belonging and a way home.
In her collection of essays, Black Cake, Turtle Soup, and Other Dilemmas , Gloria Blizzard explores the deep waters of dislocation in the spaces where art, music, spirit, ecology, race and culture collide. Using traditional narrative essays, hybrid structures and the tools of poetry, she negotiates the complexities of culture, geography and language in an international diasporic quest.
These essays of wayfinding are relevant to anyone exploring issues of belonging ― to a family, to a neighbourhood, a group or a country. Within them, the small is profound, the intimate universal, the questions are all relevant and the answers of our times require simultaneous multiple perspectives.
Through the exploration of her own cultural complexities and the universal quest for integration and harmony, this collection will appeal to anyone who has ever tried to find their way home.
In her collection of essays, Black Cake, Turtle Soup, and Other Dilemmas , Gloria Blizzard explores the deep waters of dislocation in the spaces where art, music, spirit, ecology, race and culture collide. Using traditional narrative essays, hybrid structures and the tools of poetry, she negotiates the complexities of culture, geography and language in an international diasporic quest.
These essays of wayfinding are relevant to anyone exploring issues of belonging ― to a family, to a neighbourhood, a group or a country. Within them, the small is profound, the intimate universal, the questions are all relevant and the answers of our times require simultaneous multiple perspectives.
Through the exploration of her own cultural complexities and the universal quest for integration and harmony, this collection will appeal to anyone who has ever tried to find their way home.
- GenresEssaysNonfiction
208 pages, Paperback
Published July 2, 2024
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Displaying 1 - 11 of 11 reviews
December 23, 2024
Wow! This collection is absolutely brilliant! The writer does an amazing job of taking us into her world. I loved this one.
June 21, 2024
|| BLACK CAKE, TURTLE SOUP, and other dilemas ||
#gifted @dundurnpress
•
5☆
"A haunting can be a repeated story. Every time you run a tail in your head, the body experience is it in real time and creates the hormones of flight. Neurons from dedicated pathways and even seek to relieve familiar discomforts. By 1976, we were back in Canada the land of my birth. And over the next 10 years, my father debriefed at home, his trauma Landing in the ears and bodies of his interlockutors, the children still at home, and his wife would quickly slept with a gun pointed at her head."
•
"My partner and I've been together for two years. He is still not used to it. In the beginning, he'd ask, what is going on? Do you always get this much attention? Does this always happen to you? And then finally, how do you manage? Welcome to my world of constant visibility, I said sit tight. We're going to walk from here to there a distance of about six blocks. Can you cope? I ask. He walks with me and feel stares, my body perused despite his presence or perhaps because of it as well, by whomever."
•
"One day, without notice to myself, or lessons of any kind, suddenly, I could swim. I was seven. It was as if a memory of some internal amniotic instruction had arisen within me. That day, I went to a party in the hills at the home of a very rich person, or rather the party of a child whose parents had a grand Trinidad mountainside home. I remember that among the clatter and the laughter and the splashing around the other girls, I calmly entered the slight chill of blue chlorinated water, floated and then paddled, head held high above the surface. I was fully at ease with myself, immersed and comfortable, please and smiling. Within a year or so, after my parents provided formal swimming lessons, I had joined a competitive swim team, swam my first mile, and saved my baby brother from drowning."
✍🏻
I loved this one! Books by poets are my jam and Blizzard's person essay collection was such a beautiful and captivating read. On belonging, diaspora, identity, feminism, art, food, culture, family. Blizzard a descendant of Africa, born in Canada weaves us through her life with purpose and meaning.
For more of my book content check out instagram.com/bookalong
#gifted @dundurnpress
•
5☆
"A haunting can be a repeated story. Every time you run a tail in your head, the body experience is it in real time and creates the hormones of flight. Neurons from dedicated pathways and even seek to relieve familiar discomforts. By 1976, we were back in Canada the land of my birth. And over the next 10 years, my father debriefed at home, his trauma Landing in the ears and bodies of his interlockutors, the children still at home, and his wife would quickly slept with a gun pointed at her head."
•
"My partner and I've been together for two years. He is still not used to it. In the beginning, he'd ask, what is going on? Do you always get this much attention? Does this always happen to you? And then finally, how do you manage? Welcome to my world of constant visibility, I said sit tight. We're going to walk from here to there a distance of about six blocks. Can you cope? I ask. He walks with me and feel stares, my body perused despite his presence or perhaps because of it as well, by whomever."
•
"One day, without notice to myself, or lessons of any kind, suddenly, I could swim. I was seven. It was as if a memory of some internal amniotic instruction had arisen within me. That day, I went to a party in the hills at the home of a very rich person, or rather the party of a child whose parents had a grand Trinidad mountainside home. I remember that among the clatter and the laughter and the splashing around the other girls, I calmly entered the slight chill of blue chlorinated water, floated and then paddled, head held high above the surface. I was fully at ease with myself, immersed and comfortable, please and smiling. Within a year or so, after my parents provided formal swimming lessons, I had joined a competitive swim team, swam my first mile, and saved my baby brother from drowning."
✍🏻
I loved this one! Books by poets are my jam and Blizzard's person essay collection was such a beautiful and captivating read. On belonging, diaspora, identity, feminism, art, food, culture, family. Blizzard a descendant of Africa, born in Canada weaves us through her life with purpose and meaning.
For more of my book content check out instagram.com/bookalong
July 26, 2026
Years ago, I attended a one-day workshop on racism. At one point, the workshop leader asked one person in the group to sit on the hotseat to learn about the experience of racism from a first-person perspective by talking about a time they’d experienced an “ism.” I volunteered.
Book cover for 'Black Cake, Turtle Soup, and other dilemmas' by Gloria Blizzard with a colorful wave pattern background. I sat in the chair, closed my eyes, and—guided by his questions—recounted my experience with a long-ago boyfriend and his abiding misogyny. As the workshop leader led me slowly through a specific memory, I dove deeper and deeper into an incident that I needed thirty-five years to understand was rape.
Before I opened my eyes, after I had dissolved into heaving sobs, the leader brought me gently back to the present and translated my pain into a new level of awareness of the parallels—NOT the sameness, but the similarities—between all kinds of “isms” and “phobias,” in this case racism and sexism.
Not a day has gone by in the thirty-some years since then that I haven’t reflected on what I learned that day. I can’t ever know the pain of the constant “othering” that must constantly wear down the resolve of the strongest of individuals. I can only try to learn more, to understand more about racism when life presents me with an opportunity.
Gloria Blizzard’s (class of 2021) book of lyric essays, Black Cake, Turtle Soup, and Other Dilemmas (Dundurn Press, 2024) presents such an opportunity. I’d like to say that once I picked it up, I couldn’t put it down, but that’s not true. Rather, after I’d read almost every essay, I needed to put the book down and take some time to process and integrate what I’d just read. Like this passage, from an essay called “The Mathematics of Rage.”
Read the rest of the review, including an excerpt from Blizzard's deeply affecting book, at my blog:
https://lynnemelcombe.com/2026/02/16/...
Book cover for 'Black Cake, Turtle Soup, and other dilemmas' by Gloria Blizzard with a colorful wave pattern background. I sat in the chair, closed my eyes, and—guided by his questions—recounted my experience with a long-ago boyfriend and his abiding misogyny. As the workshop leader led me slowly through a specific memory, I dove deeper and deeper into an incident that I needed thirty-five years to understand was rape.
Before I opened my eyes, after I had dissolved into heaving sobs, the leader brought me gently back to the present and translated my pain into a new level of awareness of the parallels—NOT the sameness, but the similarities—between all kinds of “isms” and “phobias,” in this case racism and sexism.
Not a day has gone by in the thirty-some years since then that I haven’t reflected on what I learned that day. I can’t ever know the pain of the constant “othering” that must constantly wear down the resolve of the strongest of individuals. I can only try to learn more, to understand more about racism when life presents me with an opportunity.
Gloria Blizzard’s (class of 2021) book of lyric essays, Black Cake, Turtle Soup, and Other Dilemmas (Dundurn Press, 2024) presents such an opportunity. I’d like to say that once I picked it up, I couldn’t put it down, but that’s not true. Rather, after I’d read almost every essay, I needed to put the book down and take some time to process and integrate what I’d just read. Like this passage, from an essay called “The Mathematics of Rage.”
Read the rest of the review, including an excerpt from Blizzard's deeply affecting book, at my blog:
https://lynnemelcombe.com/2026/02/16/...
January 13, 2026
Gloria Blizzard examines her relationships with movement, relocation, racism and identity, family and religion in this thoughtful and thought-provoking collection of personal essays. I love the way this poetic, critical and musical collection takes you around the world, from the realities of travelling in remote and rural Brazil to living along the subway line in Toronto. She presents intimate musings on finding your creative voice at any time in life, and recognizing how difficult it can be for some to have time to themselves, then advice on how to create art as a single mother.
One of the most interesting essays for me, The Mathematics of Rage, examines how in being a black woman in Canada, at any age, you are seen, fetishized and also judged in a “world of constant visibility” where you are continuously negotiating safe passage in the world, part of an inequitable equation where others get to pass unseen, unbothered, and others are assessed and denied access.
My favourite line is “A haunting can be a repeated story” which is so true. A story you repeat in your mind, or to others, one you keep hearing as someone’s way to relive or process the trauma, or just sit in it, a violent nostalgia to consider out loud.
One of the most interesting essays for me, The Mathematics of Rage, examines how in being a black woman in Canada, at any age, you are seen, fetishized and also judged in a “world of constant visibility” where you are continuously negotiating safe passage in the world, part of an inequitable equation where others get to pass unseen, unbothered, and others are assessed and denied access.
My favourite line is “A haunting can be a repeated story” which is so true. A story you repeat in your mind, or to others, one you keep hearing as someone’s way to relive or process the trauma, or just sit in it, a violent nostalgia to consider out loud.
September 15, 2024
I bought this book yesterday, and read it all at once, basically in one sitting. A series of essays (memoir), and while each one could be read on its own, the flow of reading all of them is lovely, creating a feeling like immersing yourself in the flow of Gloria Blizzard's multi-faceted life. She was born in Canada, raised in her formative years in Trinidad, as her family was back and forth between Canada and Trinidad several times. The story about the attempts on her father's life which led to the family leaving Trinidad in 1976 left me wanting to know more. She writes about both of her parents and her brothers, her dog named Jazz, food and its cultural histories, anti-Black racism in Canada, balancing art and science in life, and more.
March 10, 2025
The first book I finished reading in 2025 was a real treat.
Thank you #GloriaBlizzard for your thoughtful, relatable, and nourishing read.
I felt so seen— music of #CesariaEvora and #JohnColtrane (I have stories about both), multidisciplinary artist, dredlocks, and navigating white spaces in #Canada. Thank you for this generous offering, Gloria.
#BlackCake, #TurtleSoup, and other dilemmas was a delight.
I was happy to attend this book launch too.
@dundurnpress @gloriawrites #caribcanlit #cancariblit #caribbeanauthors #caribbeancanadianauthor
Thank you #GloriaBlizzard for your thoughtful, relatable, and nourishing read.
I felt so seen— music of #CesariaEvora and #JohnColtrane (I have stories about both), multidisciplinary artist, dredlocks, and navigating white spaces in #Canada. Thank you for this generous offering, Gloria.
#BlackCake, #TurtleSoup, and other dilemmas was a delight.
I was happy to attend this book launch too.
@dundurnpress @gloriawrites #caribcanlit #cancariblit #caribbeanauthors #caribbeancanadianauthor
October 10, 2024
Enjoyed this read. It was lyrical, varied and had many intriguing observations. There were small moments of repetition but makes sense in this sort of debut collection, with pieces originally published solo. Got to moderate a lovely convo with the author as well.
July 20, 2024
This collection of essays is an interesting view into the life of a Black Canadian woman of multiple heritages. I enjoyed the deep dive into family traditions, culture, and music.
August 1, 2024
Absolutely loved this book. Beautiful writing, wonderful stories, lots of ground covered. Bravo.
May 15, 2026
Loved this. What a wonderful writer. As with any collection, some essays resonated more than others. Loved the reflections on her life and on Toronto
April 20, 2025
A memoir told in short essays, Blizzard is a Canadian, who grew up in the Caribbean. Coming back to Canada afterwards she felt out of place and her stories document her process of finding herself. Covers topics on Music, cooking, guitar playing, Brazilian music, white Canadian Universities and their history with slaves, living in many different places along the Bloor subway line. I really felt drawn to the parts speaking about Ancestors and spirituality. Take your time reading this to appreciate her beautiful writing.
Displaying 1 - 11 of 11 reviews