Undernarrated Emotional Landscapes in Toronto’s Scarborough:

Téa Mutonji’s Shut Up You’re Pretty

Abstract

Téa Mutonji’s short story collection, Shut Up You’re Pretty (2019), follows the coming-of-age process of Loli, a Black Canadian woman from a Congolese immigrant family living in contemporary Scarborough, a low-income, multicultural district of Toronto. Relying on the frameworks of Black feminist geography and narratology, I discuss how Loli’s racialized and gendered body interacts with the urban landscape. After tracing the significance of places and spaces of various scales—from the intimate to the global—in the stories, I demonstrate the interrelatedness of the collection’s ubiquitous narratives gaps with emotional and material landscapes in Shut Up You’re Pretty to argue that the sparseness of narration—what I term undernarration—and the volume’s conspicuous focus on places function as symptoms of the protagonist’s disrupted emotional landscape and comment on Black women’s presence in Canada.