I've Been Meaning to Tell You by David Chariandy.
Title: I've Been Meaning to Tell You.
Author: David Chariandy.
Genre: Non-fiction, autobiographical, race, social criticism.
Country: Canada.
Language: English.
Publication Date: 2018.
Summary: When a moment of quietly ignored bigotry prompted his three-year-old daughter to ask "What happened?", the author began wondering how to discuss with his children the politics of race. A decade later, in a newly heated era of both struggle and divisions, he writes a letter to his now thirteen-year-old daughter. David is the son of Black and South Asian migrants from Trinidad, and he draws upon his personal and ancestral past, including the legacies of slavery, indenture, and immigration, as well as the experiences of growing up a visible minority within the land of one's birth. In sharing with his daughter his own story, he hopes to help cultivate within her a sense of identity and responsibility that balances the painful truths of the past and present with hopeful possibilities for the future.
My rating: 7.5/10.
My review:
♥ There is a song entitled "On Children" by the group Sweet Honey in the Rock. It's not a a song you'd ordinarily come across, I know. It's based on a poem by Kahlil Gibran, who was born in what we now call Lebanon and who migrated to the United States. Long after his death the words of his poem have been animated with new feeling and meaning by the Black women singing them. "Your children are not your children," Sweet Honey in the Rock sing. "They are the sons and daughters of Life's longing for itself. They come through you but they are not from you, and though they are with you, they belong not to you... For their souls dwell in a place of tomorrow, which you cannot visit, not even in your dreams." It is a beautiful and very humbling song for any father who imagines that he might pass on to his daughter wisdom born of experience, of a personal or familiar past.
♥ There were speeches being made by people standing at the doors of the mosque, but there was no amplification system, and we weren't close enough to hear. A white city councillor started to cry before she finished speaking, and the man who seemed to be representing the mosque comforted her. He smiled throughout the ceremony. And I wondered if that smile said something about resilience, or about the mysterious power of faith, or perhaps about the masks that men of so many backgrounds feel compelled to wear in moments like these.
♥ But as you had reminded me over a slice of chocolate cake ten years ago, children always sense more than what their parents are willing to say. Children read stories in pauses and silences, from irritation and sadness, from the grief and fear behind brave faces. And children sometimes choose silence. A child will not always readily tell, for instance, how, growing up as a working-class Black boy in a white middle-class suburb, he comes to embody what is feared about a changing city and nation. He hesitates to convey his experiences because he wishes to be seen as tough. Or because it is the special nature of the hurt to feel shameful in reporting it. Or perhaps a child will not discuss the matter with his parents because, tragically, he has come to believe that it is not history but they who are to blame for the legacies of race.
♥ You clicked again, and we looked at the "heat maps" of my ancestry, my "parental line" lighting up in orange and yellow almost all of Asia and Europe, and my "maternal line" lighting with concentrated colour only the continent of Africa. I remember feeling chilled at that last image. But I remember, also, watching quietly the outline of the Americas, where generations of my ancestors had been born into lives of bondage and toil. Not a hint of colour there. Not even the weakest indication of belonging.
♥ I did, in the end, learn how to pronounce "th." Like others, I have made a concerted effort to speak in a way indistinguishable from other Canadians born here, although I do understand, of course, that many times it isn't my voice or what I say with it, but the outer silence of my body that suggests to others I am from elsewhere. I do sometimes wonder if you, of a very different generation and upbringing than me, have had similar experiences. If even now a girl like you can be asked, "Where are you really< from?" or that worse question: "What are you?" Do you know, dearest daughter, that you also had a Trinidadian accent when you were younger?
♥ Your grandparents politely asked my parents about the Caribbean. What was Trinidad like in particular, they asked. Was this coleslaw Trinidadian cuisine? What were the native languages, the native customs? My mother tried, haltingly, to explain that she and her ancestors weren't really native to the Caribbean, that they had come... been brought... from elsewhere. The conversation shifted to your grandparents' parents, and the fact that your grandfather's mother had been a doctor, a remarkable achievement for a woman of the time. "And are there any doctors among your ancestors?" your grandmother asked politely. My mother looked quickly to her husband. My father finished chewing, neatly wiped his mouth with his White Swan napkin. "No," he answered. "No doctors. We were enslaved."
♥ In 1498, upon his third voyage to what he imagined were the Indies, Christopher Columbus experienced uncertainty about the prospect of safely hitting land. After frightening days staring only at a watery horizon, he purportedly spotted three mountaintops, and in thanks to the Holy Trinity named the island Trinidad. My parents, at least, don't have any idea what three mountains Columbus might have seen. And so it is possible, as with all self-proclaimed discoverers of new lands and peoples, that Columbus saw only what he himself wished to see.
♥ You have always been "a tough girl," dearest daughter. You have never wanted help lifting something heavy; you have never admitted to anything being physically taxing, even when it was. You have never wanted me to conceal hard truths. I've actually confessed to you my fear, as a father, in admitting the following to you, and your response was, "But you must, because it matters." Remember how I felt chilled when we first viewed the heat map of my "maternal line?" Only the continent of Africa was lit up with concentrated colour, although my mother also has European heritage, as does her own mother and grandmother and still more distant ancestors. In that moment with you, I feared that the heat map of my "maternal line" indicated a long historical legacy of exclusively Black mothers with the occasional possibility of white fathers, but in the decades and centuries before sexual consent was possible for Black women. I feared that I was seeing in graphic form our ancestry as a story of recurring sexual violence. Such violence is an indisputable fact; but so too is the story of Black women surviving against incredible odds. And this is why we must together remain close to the women who dance, and promise always to keep learning from them.
♥ They were at least permitted to practise their culture-and this proved a source of strength. Over generations, ancient prayers would continue to be sung, and although the meanings of the words were sometimes forgotten, the effects of the sounds and music persisted. Groups that had once been enemies, or imagined between them divisions and hierarchies, now, thorough the hardships of a strange land, grew closer to each other, becoming jahaji bhai, or "ship brothers." Despite denigration, precious ways of understanding and proclaiming one's humanity would persist. My father remembers his own father walking over hot coals, transcending all pain through an enduring faith carried over wide and bitter seas.
♥ Many decades ago, your great-grandfather on my father's side wished to send his children to a good school in Trinidad, but he was informed that, in order to receive such an education, his children would have to change their last name to a proper Christian one. Your great-grandfather faced a painful dilemma. The school offered his children the glimmer of hope for a life beyond the tough one that he and his own ancestors had endured. In the end, my grandfather agreed to the requirement and, slyly or not, chose for his children the last name Thomas, after the one disciple in the Bible who openly doubts. But when his children grew close to adulthood, he changed his mind. He officially switched back the names of his male children, spending a considerable portion of his life's savings to do so. That name, Chariandy, is the one you now carry, and like the specific beauty of your body, you should be proud of it, for both were passed on to you by our ancestors at a very unfair price.
♥ You did not create the inequalities and injustices of this world, daughter. You are neither solely nor uniquely responsible to fix them. If there is anything to learn from the story of our ancestry, it is that you should respect and protect yourself; that you should demand not only justice but joy; that you should see, truly see, the vulnerability and the creativity and the enduring beauty of others. Today, many years after indenture and especially slavery, there are many who continue to live painfully in wakes of historical violence. And there are current terrible circumstances whereby others, in the desperate hope for a better life, either migrate or are pushed across the hardened borders of nations and find themselves stranded in unwelcoming lands. We live in a time, dearest daughter, when the callous and ignorant in wealthy nations have made it their business to loudly proclaim who are the deserving "us" (those really "us") and who are the alien and undeserving "them." But the story of our origins offers us a different insight. The people we imagine most apart from "us" are, oftentimes, our own forgotten kin.
♥ But the fact is that I've never actually named you one way or the other, never told you, authoritatively, what you are, racially speaking. I suppose that I have imagined, at times, that you, as such complexly mixed children, might have the opportunity to choose and declare your own identity. I had forgotten that racial identity is so rarely a matter of personal choice. That it is always, in origin, a falsehood and violence, though it can become, all the same, a necessary tool for acknowledging the enduring life and creativity of a persistently maligned people.
♥ Your mother was very angry. It was the anger of someone who had never been named the way your brother was, but who has known, as a woman, other damaging labels. I'm happy both that she revealed her anger and that you saw it. Never let anyone tell you that as a girl, you shouldn't express how angry you are.
♥ I'm sure that some of the people who freely spoke that word were not always consciously malicious. I played with those who canted "Eeny, meeny, miny, moe, catch a nigger by the toe" to assign roles in a game of hide-and-seek, never realizing that long ago, in a deeper way, I had already been determined "it." I cheered for football teams alongside schoolmates who might shout down players on the opposing team by calling them niggers, or else brag to others about travelling outside of the neighbourhood to "egg niggers," only then noticing, with an embarrassed smile, who was standing among them. I was invited to play along with my friends when they would imitate the jive talk and silly gestures of Black comedians they saw on television and in movies, not appreciating that these comedians were trying, at least at times, to reveal more complex and serious truths about the roles they were expected to perform both on stage and in life. And my friends would be disappointed, even puzzled, if I didn't enthusiastically join in.
But the truth, dearest daughter, is that I sometimes did play along. I didn't want them to know when I was hurt. I was afraid that if others recognized my vulnerability, the racist insults and bullying would only intensify.
♥ There is an effect in being named, whether one is a "nigger" or a "Paki," whether one is a "Chink" or a "bitch," a "faggot" or "fat" or "trash" or any other number of words that are not equivalent, not exchangeable, but nevertheless, even on the quiet of this page, and in my effort now to be honest and protective, inevitably hurt and implicate. There is a toll upon the self. It was easy for me to believe that I was indeed trouble, or a joker, that I was untrustworthy in basic ways, a predator and a pervert despite my shyness, that I really wasn't cut out for school, or for serious thought in general. I had little concept of a future, and imagined that at some fundamental level, there was something unpleasant about me, an oily smell not entirely attributable to the strange foods my parents served, but a secretion from my body, from my skin itself.
At the same time, I understood very well that the hurtful people around me were never monsters of the Hollywood-movie type. The boy who regaled us with nigger jokes might also choose me first for his team. The girl who scorned me, laughed about me with her friends, might also tell me during a chance encounter in an empty school stairwell that, actually, it wasn't true that I was ugly. I glimpsed their contradictions, their inner doubts and vulnerabilities, their brave curiosities and cowardly tribalisms, their sincere desire to be good and also their ability to be casually cruel. The truth is that before I could appreciate my own complex humanity, I was made to understand and appreciate theirs, which I saw confirmed, over and over again, on television, in films, and in books.
♥ But they take a toll, these indications in both life and culture, that you don't belong here, not really, that you are distasteful and immediately suspect, that speech and thought are not expected of you. Once, after a particularly miserable English class, my friend joked that he would someday write a poem about his hand. "This right here," he said, and he held up his fingers in a posture of outlandish reverence, so gay we might have joked stupidly then. Imagining a poem like this, about the beauty of a Black boy's hand, we laughed loudly, uncontrollably, until, suddenly, we stopped.
♥ He had been driving in his old neighbourhood when he was pulled over by the cops for a routine check. This had happened before, but this time, when the cops walked up to the window of the car, they seemed to misjudge my friend reaching to unbuckle his seatbelt to fish out his ID. "Gun!" shouted one of the cops, and both of them drew weapons and aimed at close range. "I thought I was dead," he told us. "I heard the gunshot, I smelled the gunpowder. It was real, you know? It actually happened, just not that time to me." We were quiet for a while after that. We all understood. The possibilities that were not mere possibilities. The fates that were not our fates but might easily have been so.
♥ What was so funny? "We made it here," he explained. We stared at him before realizing it was true. We had found allies. We'd found each other. We were lucky, though none of this had happened by accident. It had demanded empathetic neighbours and teachers. It had demanded the work and undaunted love of parents. It had required the persistence of a message, an old message stretching back generations to some anonymous distant ancestor who dared whisper into a child's ear, "You are not what they see and say you are. You are more." My roommate stood there with a silly smile on his face. Soon we were all wearing it.
Before the birth of both you and your brother, dearest daughter, these were the most beautiful smiles I'd ever seen.
♥ About a week after starting with her, he returned home with a handwritten prose poem, "A beautiful winter morning." "I did it all by myself," he told me proudly. He had managed to do what he hadn't before thought interesting or even possible. And, here especially, I'm tempted to believe that he accomplished even more. Being named, he found his own voice. Being sighted, he learned, nevertheless, to see.
♥ The Holocaust had begin, in fact, before the Wannsee Conference, but the conference was a turning point, when active practice and ingrained ideology became invested with newfound political authority and official language.
I was grateful to have learned all this. I believe that however much catastrophic histories are unique, they have far-reaching and at times painfully urgent implications. The fact remains, however, that in that hauntingly beautiful setting in Berlin, where I had come, against considerable odds, to feel comfortable, and where I withdrew from personal responsibilities in order to make art capturing hard truths, I had failed to read the landscape. Possessing an ancestral history of violence whose full severity and impact are oftentimes not acknowledged, I had nevertheless, in that moment, failed to see another.
♥ Since your birth, especially, I've wanted to believe that people of many backfrounds can find points of commobnality in a world of hardened vivisions, precious moments of recognition and intimacy across differences, and so begin the necessarily hard work of authentically seeing and hearing one another. Of course, I want to believe that reading and discussing books can play a part in this. But I also want to avoid imagining easy answers to the intricacies of the world, or being blind to persistent hierarchies of power. I want to understand the unspoken sources of wealth, and our often-unacknowledged implication in history. Today, I am someone who can find himself in contexts unfamiliar to many people of my background. But I am also someone who cannot allow such inclination to blind me to deeper truths.
Among the earlier generation of Canadian poets your mother and I studied together was E.J. Pratt, who wrote an epic poem entitled "Towards the Last Spike," which celebrates in grand, heroic terms the building of the national railway, the very enterprise your distant ancestor profited from. But Pratt's poem does not mention what your mother has pointed out to me-that railway enterprises functioned like weapons against Indigenous peoples, cutting through ancestral lands, violating treaties, and decimating the ecosystems that Indigenous peoples relied upon. Pratt's poem likewise does not mention the indentured Asian workers, sometimes derogatorily called coolies, many of whom died violently when blasting tunnels for the railways, and others both directly and systemically denied citizenship. Such facts are for everyone to learn and remember, and certainly no less for you, being the extremely unlikely descendant of a railway king, but also of Asian coolies, just of a different oceanic journey and of a different bitter and anonymous toil.
♥ Of course, as you prove abundantly, there is beauty in being mixed; and I have heard some well-wishing folk proclaim people like you the happy future for humankind, imagining that racial prejudice will come to an end when everyone, through countless inter-mixings, achieves the same features and tone of brown. The future I yearn for is not one in which we will all be clothed in sameness, but one in which we will finally learn to both read and respectfully discuss our differences.
♥ I cannot truly understand the sorrow and echoing violence of the residential schools, or the profundity of the cultural and spiritual resurgence through which Indigenous peoples have reasserted their values and bonds with one another. But I can glimpse, through the lens of my own experience, how a parent or grandparent, encouraged to remain silent and feel ashamed of themselves, may nevertheless find the strength to voice directly to a child a truer story of ancestry, and, in the closeness of voice and breath and chosen language, pass on a legacy of sorrow and power and luminous specificity that honours the past and reveals to the listener a livable future.
♥ On the drive this morning, I try, fumblingly, to tell you how struck I was by your beauty, but you shrug impatiently and look outside at the streets floating by.
You are complex. There is your sadness, and there is your wildness. There are the mysteries of your joy-the way you allow chocolate to melt in your fingers while eating it, the little dance you do before pressing an elevator button. There is your silence too, on display today during the car ride, the radio off, nothing but the squeak of the wipers and the patter of rain. In this silence we have arrived at your school, and I pull over and shift into park, but you do not move. You sit still and stare through the windshield. Are you tired? Are you a teenager bored with the prospect of yet another school day? Or is there something you want to say to me about yourself, about the world? "Hey," I ask softly, and you smile and shake your head and open the door, hurry away without looking back.
♥ People talk about the wonder of first seeing a newborn, of an indescribable moment of joy. And although you have brought endless joy and love into my life, I need to admit that I didn't then feel these things. I felt instead pure fear. I felt the sudden amplification of every doubt I'd ever experienced, every vulnerability. I felt helpless, entirely unable to protect life and imagine freedom. I wasn't ready. I might never be.
You were so small. You weren't crying. Weren't you supposed to be crying? Would you announce yourself? "Boy or girl?" the doctor had asked me. Now you speak your own truths and you will continue to find the scripts that honour your body and experience and history, each of the scripts a gift, and none of them fully adequate to the holy force of you.
But in that moment, you were just a wet little thing with staring eyes. Achingly human. And in that moment, I did the only thing a father could do. I held you and listened.