Improvised music plays an important role in Dionne Brand’s 2005 novel What We All Long For, which tells the intertwined story of four ethnically and racially diverse twenty-somethings living in downtown Toronto.

In this Think Piece, Lefrense details how the musical practices of one of the four protagonists Oku, a second-generation Caribbean-Canadian, projects his “politics of being” through a personally curated soundtrack.