Dionne Brand’s What We All Long For (2005) tests out the viability of a multicultural Toronto rooted in racial, ethnic, and national differences. On some level, the novel is a hopeful account of cross-cultural and interracial connections in its portrayal of four twenty-something second-generation immigrant protagonists who form close affective bonds. Some critical studies on the novel have thus focused on the subject of affective, affiliative, and cosmopolitan citizenship and belonging, with the city of Toronto as a backdrop to such possibility. In this paper, I seek to recalibrate the importance of affect in the novel by concentrating on a particular character: Carla, half Italian and Jamaican, who lost her Italian working-class mother to suicide when she was five, an age not young enough to forget or to not know, but old enough to remember and bear the trauma of a painful personal history. In drawing on theories by scholars who have written on affect and emotion, I will argue that the fine distinction between the two terms can helpfully illuminate Brand’s representation of the character Carla’s attempts to move beyond a traumatic past. I will thus focus on the affective relations Carla claims and transmutes, and her creative use and forging of affective encounters with both human and non-human elements available to her.