Have you ever thought that the past has nothing to do with you? You weren’t alive when slavery, residential schools, Japanese internment camps or any other atrocity against a people occurred and therefore you have no skin in the game. In Sonja Boon’s critical memoir, What the Oceans Remember: Searching for Home and Belonging, she offers another mind set that fuses the past and the present. She submits that no matter what your background, the present is shaped by difficult pasts and we’re all in it together. Dr. Boon has published three academic books and several essays on a range of topics such as the history of breastfeeding, infanticide and embodied memories. Her creative non-fiction has appeared in Geist and is forthcoming in Room Magazine. In addition to her award-winning work as a researcher, writer and educator she was the principal flutist with the Portland Baroque Orchestra in Oregon for six years, and attributes her love of music to her Dutch grandfather. Her memoir takes an auto-ethnography approach as she reflects on issues of belonging, oceanic migration, music, love, histories, memory, and ruin. This memoir opens with a warning. “Archives are places where a seeker’s dreams can come true, but also where they can be shattered.” (p. i) Dr. Boon accessed the archives of Suriname, the Netherlands, the UK, and Canada as she unearths her family stories. She takes us on a journey back in time, from 1621 to present day and introduces us to: a talented musician, a goldsmith, a business man, an indentured worker with her toddler son, and men and women ripped from their roots and transported across an ocean to the Dutch colony of Suriname where they lived as slaves. Likewise, we meet her sons, her husband, get a glimpse of her childhood on the Canadian Prairies and her adult life of living in many locations such as Vancouver, Toronto, the Hague and now, St. John’s, Newfoundland. Her quest for belonging is a complicated one in that she isn’t necessarily looking for that one location to hang her hat and say, “I’ve arrived.” Sonja’s quest is far greater than that. By digging up the past she gains insight into where and from whom she comes from. She demonstrates great courage when facing her family’s history and shares with her readers the profound impact it has had on her. Upon discovering the names of her great-great-great-uncles, Philip and Edward, listed as field slaves in a 1863-1868 accounting declaration for the Sarah Plantation in Suriname, she writes: This family history of enslavement was real. The pain of knowing was acute. And as if pursuing some ritual form of self-flagellation, I kept coming back for more that day, returning over and over to the records for Sarah plantation. There was a rhythm to the names, and typing them out, one after another, became a meditation. Letters into sounds into words into names into communities. Letters lay under my fingers; names settled on my tongue. Speaking their names brought them into existence, made their lives tangible, material, real. (p. 85) Her search for her great-great-grandmother Joorayee Rahda, an indentured worker from British India who arrived in Suriname in 1874, resulted in nothing more than the basic facts. Joorayee was twenty-five, Hindu, dark brown skin, 1.513 metres tall, hailed from the village of Aburpore in Northern India and travelled with her toddler son named, Sahatoo. With so little information to go on, Boon places herself in her great-great-grandmother’s skin: I imagined Joorayee at the train station, head veiled, eyes downcast, hand holding tightly to her small son’s arm as she shuffled forward, her body jostling against those of others around her. I imagined the ripe smell of bodies too long in close quarters, of steam and coal. … Was she afraid? (p. 204, 205) And, with equal passion, she unearths evidence of her grandfather, Leo Heinemann’s rich music career and asks, “Did Opa feel the agony of music, the way it wenches you at your core, pulling and tearing at your ligaments and bones? Did he, like me, allow music to sear his flesh?” (p. 69). Sonja Boon’s memoir asks not just, where do I belong and where is home, but rather what history and people do I belong to? As she answers these questions for herself, her memoir has the added gift of challenging her readers to ask the same of themselves. She submits that we are all living in a world shaped by violent and oppressive histories and only by accepting what happened can we move past racism and oppression and reconcile the past with the present. And she is equally as passionate when acknowledging that positive histories have shaped our existence as well. She has lived many places and describes home for someone like her as “… a collage of scattered experiences and memories. More than this, it’s a mirage, something intangible and inscrutable that we can never quite touch, always just out of reach.” (p. 19) Sonja came to Canada with her family in 1975 during the early years of the “… great Canadian experiment in multiculturalism.” (p. 20) For her, multiculturalism was a refuge, an ideology that said she could belong, yet she’s never felt like she belongs anywhere. Her family moved around a lot and she describes herself as “… brown—that-not-quite-white that obscures what might otherwise be seen as an apparently unambiguous ethnic heritage.” (p. 22) People have asked her if she’s Maltese, Pakistani, Middle Eastern, Chinese, Japanese and what her treaty number is. She points out that Canada’s multiculturalism is structured on the idea of two: Home, it says, can be in two places. After all, that’s how a hyphenated self works: I could pledge allegiance to a hybrid identity. In Canada, I could be Japanese-Canadian. Greek-Canadian. Or that double barrel that I eventually claimed as my own: Dutch-Canadian. (p. 20) The more she stuck to her script and said she was Dutch-Canadian the more Dutch she became, while her mother’s Surinamese heritage fell by the wayside, “… victim(s) of circumstance and confusion, details trotted out only when asked to explain my “exotic” features.” (p. 37) She states that “… multiculturalism can’t acknowledge the complexity of multiple belongings. The mosaic assumes a singular origin story.” (p. 21) Boon moved to St. John’s Newfoundland in 2008 to teach at Memorial University, in Gender Studies and accepts that she will always be someone who comes from away, yet that doesn’t diminish her appreciation for her new home. She writes: … it is here, among the polished stones of Middle Cove Beach, that I first began to grapple with questions of origin, here that I started thinking about the meaning of home, here that I began to work through my own desires for belonging. (p. 6) At times, What the Oceans Remember is heavy with facts about plantation owners, Suriname history and the workings of the Dutch West India Company. Just when I felt a strong urge to skim, I was pulled into a personal moment where Dr. Boon’s intelligent reflections coaxed me to keep going, and to bare witness with her. The dehumanizing treatment many of her ancestors experienced is tough to digest. I had to take breaks to allow the facts to percolate and I could accept how deeply events of the past have imprinted the present. Nevertheless, What the Oceans Remember: Searching for Belonging and Home is not without its lighter moments. While describing her Dutch heritage, Boon recalls a visit to the Van Gogh museum: One minute I was admiring Wheatfield with Crows, and the next, I was looking at my nose. Four of them, actually. Four bulbous protrusions on four dark faces illuminated by the glow of a small oil lamp. Hunched over a table, rough-hewn clothes against their skin, the painted family was sharing a pot of coffee and a single platter of lumpy potatoes whose contours matched the noses on their faces. The Potato Eaters was like looking in a funhouse mirror, everything slightly distorted but still recognizably me. (p. 29) By sharing herself and her family with her readers, this memoirist helps us see that our world is shaped by everything, the good and the bad that has come before us. It speaks of hope, our undeniable connectedness to each other through our overlapping, multiple histories. The ideas put forth in this book challenge preconceived notions, stereotypes and comfortable thinking. It encourages us to look at the past as we struggle to navigate our future.