I've Been Meaning to Tell You: A Letter To My Daughter

By David Chariandy

"Quite simply, one of the most beautiful books I have ever read." --Aminatta Forna

"Stunning. A precise puncturing of the post-racial bubble." --Nafkote Tamirat

In the tradition of Ta-Nehisi Coates's Between the World and Me, acclaimed novelist David Chariandy's latest is an intimate and profoundly beautiful meditation on the politics of race today.

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.

When a moment of quietly ignored bigotry prompted his three-year-old daughter to ask, "What happened?" David Chariandy 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.

The son of Black and South Asian migrants from Trinidad, David draws upon his personal and ancestral past, including the legacies of slavery, indenture, and immigration, as well as the experience of growing up as a visible minority in the land of his 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 a better future.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Bloomsbury Publishing
• Release date: Mar 5, 2019
• ISBN: 9781635572889

David Chariandy

David Chariandy grew up in Toronto and lives and teaches in Vancouver. He is the author of the novels Soucouyant, which received nominations from eleven literary awards juries, and Brother, which won the Rogers Writers' Trust Fiction Prize, the Ethel Wilson Fiction Prize and the Toronto Book Award, was longlisted for the Scotiabank Giller Prize and the Aspen Words Literary Prize and nominated for the 2019 Dublin Literary Award.

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THE OCCASION

Once, when you were three, we made a trip out for lunch. We bussed west in our city, to one of those grocery-store buffets serving the type of food my own parents would scorn. Those overpriced organics laid out thinly in brushed-steel trays, the glass sneeze guard just high enough for you, dearest daughter, to dip your head beneath it in assessing, suspiciously, the browned rice and free-range carrots. And in that moment, I could imagine myself a father long beyond the grip of history, and now caring for his loved one through kale and quinoa and a soda boasting real cane sugar.

But we’re both dessert people, a soda won’t cut it, and so we shared a big piece of chocolate cake. It’s good for you, you giggled. Chocolate cake is very, very good for you. You squirmed away as I tried to wipe your mouth, laughing at all of my best efforts. It was an ordinary moment. And an ordinary thirst was brought on by the thick sweet of the cake, and so I stood and moved towards the nearby tap to get us both a glass of water, encountering a woman on her way to do the same thing. She was nicely dressed, a light summer cream suit, little makeup, tasteful. We reached the tap at roughly the same time. I hesitated out of a politeness, and this very gesture seemed only to irritate her. She shouldered herself in front of me, and when filling her glass of water, she half turned to explain, I was born here. I belong here.

Her voice was loud. She meant to be overheard, to provoke agreement, maybe, although the people lunching around us reacted only by focusing harder upon their own bowls and plates. And you, my daughter, sitting closest, didn’t understand, or else you didn’t even hear. You were still in a moment of joy, your own laughter filling your ears, the dark frosting between your teeth, and so I decided. I waited patiently to fill our glasses. I walked carefully back to you, never spilling a drop. I sat. I might have tried to match your smile. I might have attempted once more to wipe your mouth, or asked you to take a sip of water to prevent dehydration, the latest foolish fear of parents like me. I don’t remember. I sometimes find myself in this state during the course of an ordinary day. I was lost in thought and quiet, even after I caught your hand waving before my eyes. Your face now cross and confused. Hey, you asked, what happened?

Today, a decade later, we still find occasions to go out, just the two of us, although I know that what you sometimes need is space. Under your direction, we fixed up a room for you in the basement, painting the walls a specific shade of seafoam, adding better lighting, a twin bed with your first real mattress, and a door that, when the mood requires, can softly close. Against your brother, with whom you used to share a room. Against your parents. Against an intruding and perplexing world. It’s normal for a girl at this age, this desire for privacy, some parents have told me, although I’ve spent my whole life never taking for granted what is normal. You’re thirteen years old, this much is certain. This is your last year of elementary school, and this is also the 150th anniversary of the country in which we both were born.

You are a girl, but this again offers me little I can take for granted. When very small, you decided that you hated pink and also princesses, even the ostensibly modern ones with their conventional prettiness now super-powered. You refused to wear a dress, arguing it was a nuisance when cartwheeling and somersaulting. And today you remain a blur of motion, pure fierceness at the dojo where you train and spar with adults who tower over you. Recently, when we were in the kitchen together, a news story came on the radio about a man whose criminal charge was reduced from murder to manslaughter. Manslaughter? you said. But that sounds way worse than murder! I tried to explain that manslaughter involved someone being killed, but without conscious intent. Suppose a man tried to assault you, I began, but in defending yourself you punched him so hard that he fell back and cracked his head on the pavement and died. You weren’t deliberately trying to kill him, right? But that might be considered manslaughter even though it was an accident. You thought for a moment, nodding. I see your point, you said. That would be awful. But I wouldn’t exactly call my punch an accident. I would call it forceful and correct technique.

I’ve told this story to other parents, receiving smiles both real and markedly awkward, sometimes the laugh one gives when something is cute, but I know I’ve never been successful in conveying its true meaning for me. When I was a boy your age, I’m not sure if I could have expressed so easily my right to defend my body from harm—not only my right to physical safety but my right to acknowledge and push back against denigration of any sort, great or small. To witness you, my daughter, so physically confident in your body, is to be awed and also to wonder at how much your childhood differs from mine. Certainly you possess a worldliness that was unthinkable to me at your age. You’ve had the opportunity to visit Europe and countries throughout North America, and you wish to see much more; you seem to have little of the anxiety I often feel about crossing borders and encountering new people in different spaces. You go to a French immersion school, not only because your mother, raised and educated in Quebec, wished this for you, but because I too hoped that you would not be trapped, as I am, in a single language. And yet the irony is that your very success has turned me into the imaginary immigrant parent I never thought I would be, proud of his daughter’s accomplishments in school, yet unable to help her with even her grade seven homework.

Maybe the differences between our childhoods are

Reviews for I've Been Meaning to Tell You

[lindsay_w_2 · Rating: 5 out of 5 stars]

A DNA test can tell you beyond a doubt where your ancestors came from, but the story of your ancestry is something else entirely. The story Chariandy shares with his 13year old daughter is one of struggle and resilience. It includes all the injustices the African/South Asian side of her family has endured as a result of more often being on the “them” side of “us and them.” To be proud of who you are you need to know who you are. Just you - not the whole world, unfortunately, some people seem unable to quell the need to ask: “What are you?” Where are you from? (Even Ellen, this week, asked actor Constance Wu where she was from “originally.”)This book makes me want to be even more vigilant about calling out racism and racist acts. I wish I had been there ten years ago at the scene of the salad bar incident, I like to think I would have thrown shade at that woman. Next time, and sadly there will be a next time, I will be a “Bawse” and let her have it.

[detailmuse · Rating: 4 out of 5 stars]

This novella-length collection of gentle essays about race and belonging is written in epistolary style by novelist Chariandy to his 13-year-old daughter. In the opening essay, he recounts being in a café with her at age three, where a woman tells him he doesn’t belong there, in Canada, the country of his birth. And though his daughter doesn’t hear the words, she notices the effect they have on her father.In the remaining essays, Chariandy, still disheartened ten years later by the state of race relations, delves into history -- world history itself; and the history of his African and South Asian ancestors; and his own experience, including the family he has created with his European-ancestry wife.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.My parents wrote a history of their lives and our family, and I treasure it, as I’m sure Chariandy’s daughter will treasure hers. Yet Chariandy's has relevance beyond his family, and I'm grateful he opened it for me and the world to treasure and learn from, too.(Review based on an advance reading copy provided by the publisher.)

[jessibud2 · Rating: 4 out of 5 stars]

David Chariandy is an eloquent and thoughtful writer and this book was easily read in practically one sitting. Although the incident that precipitated his thinking about writing it happened a decade earlier, it has taken him all these years to formulate what he wanted to say, when talking to his daughter about growing up and living in our world as a person of mixed heritage. He does so by relating some of his own experiences, while acknowledging that hers will, on many levels, be very different. There is the matter of gender, the fact that his parents were immigrants and hers are not, and the country and even the world she is growing up in is in many ways, not the one he grew up in. Without ever mentioning her name (she is always *dearest daughter*), or the names of others, for that matter, Chariandy fleshes out the book with stories, anecdotes and insights from his own life, the lives of his parents, his son and daughter, his wife and her family, and history in general. A lot is packed into 120 pages but it never felt heavy-handed or forced. I really enjoyed getting to know this wonderful author and look forward to reading his 2 previous books (novels).

[beamis12 · Rating: 4 out of 5 stars]

Lately there seems to be quite a few books out by authors writing to their children. Chariandy writes here to his daughter, a daughter who is of mixed race, African Asian and white. They live in Canada and an unexpected act of bigotry prompts him to try to explain to his daughter what she might face in this world. Also explains his own background and how his life was shaped by similiarities acts.He is in awe of his daughter, the way she goes through life, handling things, in one case protecting her younger brother. His love for her is apparent on every page of this poignant and beautifully written book. It is a book of truth, of experiences learned, of an uncertain future, and a look at how people judge others just by what's on the surface. Never bothering to look beneath, and see what is hidden. It is a timely read, with so many injustices once again or should I say always rearing their ugly head."You did not create the inequalities and injustices of the world, daughter. You are neither solely nor uniquely responsible to fix them. If their is anything to learn about 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.""Being named, he found his own voice. Being sighted, he learned, nevertheless, to see."ARC from Netgalley.