Slammin' Tar by Cecil Foster (Author) Hardcover - 434 pages (March 10, 1998) Editorial Reviews Amazon.ca In his novel Slammin' Tar, Cecil Foster, himself a migrant from his native Barbados to the fertile snow cover of Canada, unearths the raw deal migrant workers harvest both at home and abroad. Foster is an esteemed educator and a journalist who has left his footprints on all the important Canadian media soapboxes. In Tar his message is succinctly slammed home by Brer Anancy, a.k.a. 'Nancy--a chaffing, resilient, defiant narrating madman who has been cursed by Mother Nyame, the possessor of all stories, to tell the tale of humble Barbadian exiles at work for 10 months a year on the lowly Edgecliff farm, near Toronto. For an astounding "twenty-five friggin years on the job" 'Nancy shadows the Edgecliff crew's stoic leader, Johnny Franklin, who secretly reviles Canada as "an alien soil in so many ways." This "gift of being able to read minds... can be a real curse, for true," 'Nancy whimpers, but he is bound by his talent to impart the longing he sees beneath the bluster of the workers, and the seething steeped in their years of self-preservation. Between his tear-jerking, haranguing, and resignation, though, 'Nancy is split-gut funny: "As everybody done know, my mouth ain't have no cover." Foster's already conjured a lush rendering of a Jamaican woman's immigrant odyssey in the novel Sleep On, Beloved, and this wild treatise on the diasporic black man is a sweet debunking of the clichéd pandering about the redemption to be wrought from misery. --Sigcino Moyo About the Author Cecil Foster is the author of several other works, including the critically acclaimed No Man in the House and Sleep On, Beloved. A Place Called Heaven, his study on racism in Canada, won the Gordon Montador Award for Best Canadian Non-Fiction Book on Social Issues. Mr. Foster's latest work is a memoir, Island Wing. He also writes for leading Canadian magazines such as Maclean's, Report on Business and Toronto Life. He lives in Toronto.