HISTORY LESSONS
A Letter to My Daughter...
I’ve Been Meaning to Tell You: A Letter to My Daughter David Chariandy McClelland & Stewart
Award-winning Vancouver author David Chariandy has laid his history out in the open in his new book, I’ve Been Meaning to Tell You: A Letter to My Daughter. Along the lines of Ta-Nehisi Coates’s Between the World and Me and James Baldwin’s My Dungeon Shook: A Letter to My Nephew, Chariandy’s latest work is a personal survey of race.
The touching and transparent missive to his 13-year-old daughter has Chariandy telling his child what it’s like to grow up a kid of colour with Trinidadian immigrants as parents, to marry an upper-middle-class white woman and to then become a father.
Despite being a non-fiction work, I’ve Been Meaning to Tell You sits perfectly alongside Chariandy’s previous novels Soucouyant and Brother. Both acclaimed books are set in his hometown of Scarborough, Ont., and both touch on issues that face working-class immigrant families. While racism, poverty and the divide between kids and their immigrant parents play prominently in those fictional works, Chariandy — an associate professor in Simon Fraser University ’s English Department — struggled with how much of his family ’s actual experiences he should share with his children (he has a son as well).
But then the U.S. went crazy and Donald Trump came down that golden escalator armed with racist policies and a penchant for denigrating women. Trump’s take on things may have been a dog whistle for many in the U.S., but in Vancouver it was a loud alarm for a 12-year-old girl. The U.S. presidential race became the first campaign Chariandy’s daughter followed in any detail. Just days after he took the oath of office, talk of Trump overtook his daughter’s 13th-birthday celebrations.
In the book, Chariandy describes that dinner being overshadowed by his son asking about bullies, his wife talking about protests and his father weighing in with his own “strong words.”
His mother was quiet he thinks maybe in a bid to continue to honour the event they were gathered for.
It was at this milestone birthday dinner that Chariandy decided it was time to tell his daughter “the quieter story,” of her grandparents, “a story of migration and struggle and also of love between races taught to distrust one another.”
By giving in to the past, he realized he could help his daughter on her way to a better future and also hopefully his family’s backstory could help to inspire others to avoid the dreaded repeating of history.
“It is difficult, but I think it is also necessary. We have to acknowledge these truths,” said Chariandy, referring to the genocidal aspect of slavery that permeates Trinidad’s history.
“Not only because that happens to be part of my heritage and heritage I identify with very strongly, but it is also my daughter’s heritage. I think there is an importance in doing that in and of itself,” he said.
“There’s also a second importance in that perhaps grappling with those painful histories, histories of injustice and the kind of lingering affects of those injustices, we can perhaps be sensitive to other injustices that actually don’t touch me.”
There’s also the idea of helping children understand that heritage will play a role in how they are in the world, how they navigate the contemporary injustices of today ’s racism.
Writing a published letter to your teenager is fraught with potential teen drama and of course eye rolls. Chariandy said his daughter is no different from the others in the teen species. She too can be impatient with his “uncoolness.”
But happily for him, his daughter was OK with the project.
“She wanted to hear my story of the past. How I understood things,” said Chariandy. “I’m pretty sure my daughter would not have, any more than any other teenage daughter, appreciated someone authoritatively explaining our sociological or historical condition. But, I did not set out to explain in broad terms life, never mind the profound mystery of what it is to be a young girl of colour or a teenager of colour.
“I think by confining the story to my own personal story, it could then be something that is not actually that threatening. ‘OK, Dad, tell me your story. I’ll read it and I’ll figure out my own way.’”
I’ve Been Meaning to Tell You is at heart a personal piece of family history shared between a father and his daughter, but pull back a little and the book and Chariandy ’s story speak to the larger population about how history shapes people.
“I hope (readers) will be aware of the effects of history, how we are all people who live in the wake of history and for certain people that is the wake of historical violence,” said Chariandy, when asked what he hopes is the takeaway of this new book.
“That doesn’t mean we then shut ourselves off into neat little groups. It means we are all the more open to others who are not connected with us who remain vulnerable.”
I’ve Been Meaning to Tell You: A Letter to My Daughter is out now. Chariandy is back working on a new novel and is thinking about writing the screenplay for Brother, which has been optioned by Conquering Lion Pictures.