'Some of my best friends' - Befriending the racialized fiction of Hiromi Goto

This essay examines Hiromi Goto's poetry and prose in terms of the position ing of a 'racialized' narrator. The narrative voices that Goto employs are engaging, humorous, and inviting yet always aware of the marginalized statu s of the 'racialized' speaker in Canada. Thus, her texts seem to be at once easily accessible and extremely challenging to the white Canadian reader. This enquiry employs her narrative personae as starting points from which t o question whether a white male reader can 'befriend' the 'racialized' text , and it discusses which reading strategies encoded in her texts might enab le the white male academic to become a 'friendly' reader.