Yasmeen Haddad Loves Joanasi Maqaittik

A 23-year-old woman enters a whole new world of attraction in a community struggling with generations of loss of land and culture. Yasmeen’s tradition-bound mother wants her to stay in Montreal, get married, and have babies. But the young Syrian-Canadian wants more. Her appetite for adventure leads her to a teaching job in the northern Quebec village of Saqijuvik. Eager to adopt her new home and its Inuit inhabitants, Yasmeen embraces every experience that comes her way: camping on the tundra, hunting for ptarmigan, sewing with the local ladies. She plunges into her northern adventure, no holds barred. But it’s 1983 and instead of the ideal, pristine Arctic Yasmeen imagined, she uncovers a contradictory world of igloos and pool halls, Sedna and Jesus, raw caribou and alcohol. In the middle of everything is Joanasi, a beautiful but volatile man who leads her into territory that is almost as unsettling as the land itself.

Carolyn Marie Souaid is the author of seven poetry collections, most recently This World We Invented (Brick Books, 2015). She has performed at festivals and literary events in Europe, Canada and the U.S. and her work has been translated into French, Arabic, Spanish and Slovenian. Blood is Blood, a videopoem written and produced with Endre Farkas, won a top prize at the 2012 Zebra Poetry Film Festival in Berlin. She has been shortlisted for the A.M. Klein Prize and the Pat Lowther Memorial Award and is the recipient of numerous arts grants, including a residency at the Banff Centre in 2013.