The question usually arrives disguised as small talk.
Where are you from?
Scarborough, I say.
But where are you really from?
It is a familiar exchange for many first-generation Canadians, but for me, the question has always carried a deeper resonance. Beneath it sits another question I’ve been circling for most of my life: where, exactly, do I belong?
I’ve spent years thinking about that question as a writer.
It surfaces in my work on Black identity in Canada, in my essays on wilderness and landscape, and in my memories of arriving at Trent University, searching for a way to start again.
Writing became the way I tried to explore this question.
My forthcoming collection of essays, scheduled for publication in 2027, gathers that work. It moves through memory, race, and the natural world. It’s the culmination of decades spent living in between identities and experiences that many others take for granted.
Some of my earliest memories of school are marked by distrust.
On my first day of grade one, my teacher asked me which language I spoke at home. I said “Jamaican.” and, with that, she had received enough information to relegate me down the hall to the ESL class despite English being my first language. My mother had to advocate for me–playful, precocious six-year-old me–to get me out of that class. I spent all of one day in ESL.
This story is mine but not mine alone. When I tell it now, it is often met with recognition. For many Black students in Canada, misplacement and lowered expectations are part of a shared experience.
When I remember those early days, I recall small acts of kindness from school yard friends and a few beloved teachers sprinkled amongst regular trips down polished school hallways toward the principal’s office and the many subtle signals that told a young Black boy he was somehow out of step with the expectations around him.
One of my grade four report cards contained a sentence that has stayed with me for decades. It notes that while I seemed knowledgeable when speaking, Phillip “requires a great deal of individual attention” and “has difficulty putting his ideas in writing.”
At the time, I absorbed those words the way children often absorb authority: as truth. The idea that I was somehow inadequate with language became part of the story I told myself about who I was.
When my father died two days before my 14th birthday, that narrative of not quite being enough became my autobiography. I was grieving, struggling in school, and drifting toward a future that felt increasingly uncertain.
"In that chapter of my life, obtaining a university degree did not seem like part of the script. Yet when I applied to three schools, Trent was the one that took a chance on me."
Arriving in Peterborough felt like stepping into unfamiliar territory in more ways than one.
I didn’t know anyone there. No one from my neighbourhood in Scarborough had come with me. That anonymity offered something I hadn’t realized I needed: the possibility of reinvention.
For the first few years, I drifted academically. I studied mathematics for two and a half years, unsure whether it was truly my path.
But alongside those courses, I found myself drawn toward history classes. My professors began noticing something in my work that I hadn’t yet recognized in myself.
One of them was the late Professor Emerita Carolyn Kay.
At critical points in my life, I have been blessed to encounter people who offered me alternatives to the stories that others had projected onto me in the past and that I eventually internalized. Carolyn told me that she saw potential in my thinking but also recognized that I needed to improve the clarity of my writing to better communicate my ideas. I remember her telling me, quite plainly, that I was capable of more. Then she did something more important: she showed me how to improve it. She invited me to her office hours and made a list of books for me to take out of the library. She introduced me to style guides like Strunk & White. She challenged me to think more carefully about how ideas move across a page. She expected better sentences.
What I remember from that time is the immense pride that I felt knowing that someone of Carolyn’s stature, a leader in her field, educated at some of the most prestigious universities in the world, saw potential in me and took my intellect seriously.
Whenever I visited Peterborough from time-to-time during the almost twenty years since I graduated, I would reach out to Carolyn to see if she was available to grab a coffee. When Carolyn retired in 2023, I drove to Peterborough with flowers in tow to celebrate an important mentor and friend. I was pleasantly surprised to see my face in the slideshow playing behind her as she reflected on her 32-year career at Trent.
Somewhere in a box of memories tucked away at my mother’s house in Scarborough, I still have that list from Carolyn, along with all the essays that I wrote not only for her classes but for myself.
The Language of the Land
Trent also introduced me to a different relationship to the natural world.
Growing up in Scarborough, nature as I understood it existed mostly at the edges of my life; it felt like a luxury, almost like a vacation, but certainly not part of regular, daily life. Wilderness belonged to documentaries, to distant provincial parks, to landscapes that seemed both beautiful and vaguely threatening.
At Trent, that distance collapsed almost immediately. Students around me spoke about backcountry camping and canoe portages. They spoke of the fruit-bearing and flower trees near the villages and hamlets where they grew up. Conversations drifted easily from Thoreau to the Group of Seven to favourite lakes in Algonquin Park.
"I listened. Realizing how foreign this kind of relationship to nature was to me."
When classmates discovered that I had only been in a canoe once before, during a grade-six trip, they reacted with disbelief. For so many of them, the Canadian outdoors represented familiarity and nostalgia. For me, it felt like an inherited mythology that I had somehow missed.
The experience forced me to confront a larger reality.
Canada often presents nature as a shared national inheritance. But the questions of where that inheritance originated and who feels entitled to claim it are seldom discussed. For many Black Canadians, that sense of belonging has historically been fragile.
In a class that I took with former professor, Stephen Bocking, he took us on a walk around campus and highlighted some of the ways that with time and care and attention, we could learn to read the land. Along the drumlin, he pointed out the root system of a tree that had fallen over. Its roots had spread outward rather than downward because the species wasn’t native to the region; the soil was too difficult for it to penetrate, so the tree adapted by growing its roots laterally.
Years later, I would attempt to confront that distance directly. In 2012, a friend and I cycled across Canada, travelling 7,708 kilometres from Vancouver to St. John’s. The journey was exhausting, exhilarating, and at times
unsettling.
We encountered extraordinary kindness from strangers who opened their homes to us. Locals in small towns offered food, conversation, and encouragement. But the trip also contained moments that reminded me how precarious belonging can feel. There were places where my presence seemed to raise quiet questions, places where, as my mother taught me to recognize, “not every smile is a grin.”
With each passing year, I’ve reflected more deeply on that journey. What began as an adventure gradually revealed itself as something else: a search. Not just for scenery or accomplishment, but for a place in Canada where I might feel ease and comfort and safety.
My path into journalism began almost accidentally.
In 2016, I wrote a journal entry about how Black Lives Matter protesters, disrupting Toronto’s Pride Parade, were being portrayed in the media. When I finished, I sent the piece to the independent news outlet Rabble. They published it, and suddenly I was writing publicly.
Since then, my work has appeared in outlets including The Walrus, CBC News, and Maclean’s.
Much of my writing focused on politics, activism, and media representation. But over time, I found myself returning to another subject: our relationship with nature and the wilderness.
Today, many of my essays explore the intersection of Black identity and the Canadian landscape.
Nature can be deeply restorative. But it can also expose the complicated histories that shape who feels welcome in certain spaces and who feels like a visitor.
In 2025, my essay about visiting Point Pelee received the RBC Bronwen Wallace Award for Emerging Writers, recognition that affirmed the importance of telling these stories.
Yet the deeper motivation remains personal. I am still trying to understand my relationship with this country’s landscapes.
I often think back to those early report cards that suggested my writing might not be my strength. The irony is not lost on me.
Today, writing is the tool I use to examine the question that has followed me my entire life: Where do I belong?
I don’t yet have a final answer. But I have learned that the act of writing, much like cycling across a vast country or paddling across unfamiliar water, is itself a way of moving through uncertainty.
