A ‘poetic vision’ in heart of Scarborough
On the Giller Prize longlist, novel has plenty of sad, lovely sentences to slowly savour
The case could be made for viewing Brother as a companion piece to Soucouyant, Vancouver-based David Chariandy’s celebrated debut novel, which appeared on book shelves just over a decade ago. Or, in musical terms, it might be considered a variation. Certainly, numerous elements in the former are revisited and thoughtfully reworked in the latter.
In both slim novels, Chariandy’s often elegiac tone and stately but spare prose establish a compelling melancholic mood. In both too, there’s a reflexive mulling over of history’s significant influence. Further, the books feature a veritable life-force of a Trinidad-born mother who’s impaired in some way, an absent father, a pivotal elder son, a catalyzing young woman and a contemplative younger son whose personal development has become hampered by a stasis related to trauma, grief and guilt. Crucial too is the lovingly albeit ambivalently depicted setting: Scarborough (referred to Scar- bro in Brother: “a suburb that had mushroomed up and yellowed, browned, and blackened into life”).
Family, place and the past. From Brother’s opening pages, it’s clear that these are weighty, consequential matters for pensive narrator Michael. Chariandy’s protagonist, a su- permarket stocker, has never moved away from the Park, a “cluster of lowrises and townhomes and leaning concrete apartment towers.” He’s at the crumbling Waldorf complex, where each day he’s “exposed to the constant hiss of tires on asphalt.”
When fellow “black mongrel” and former girlfriend Aisha returns from overseas after a 10-year absence to visit her dying father, her outside perspective and impulsive actions push Michael toward recollection as well as a kind of reawakening. Over the previous decade, he acknowledges, “I’ve been careful with mother. I’ve kept to a minimum all discomforting talk about the past.” He could well be describing himself.
Aisha’s history with Michael connects the two to the death of Francis, Michael’s brother, fatally shot by a police officer at the climax of an already explosive summer day.
“There was a long pause, a moment in which all sorts of things suddenly became possible, but then a siren wailed, and just as suddenly all was lost,” Chariandy writes, and the tragic pairing of possibility and its opposite plays out provocatively within this wise, artful and understated story.
Michael initially recalls the early 1980s with delectable exuberance. Known locally as “hooligans,” he and his brother, “feral children,” spent days and nights raiding dumpsters, climbing trees and snowballing cars, while also getting homework done and picking up “life skills and facts about the world from Three’s Company and The Dukes of Hazzard.” Their special escape was the Rouge Valley, a “scar of green” running through the neighbourhood.
All the while their mother, a custodian — and “one of those black mothers,” Michael says, “unwilling to seek or accept help from others” — imparted a philosophy of hard work, seeking opportunity and socio-economic betterment.
It’s a striking portrait of “lean times,” when even a mother’s apparent threat — “I will beat you so hard your children will bear scars. Your children’s children will feel!” — points not to looming violence but fierce love and hope for her boys’ adulthood.
As the boys aged, truer hardships began. Michael eloquently describes his younger self as having “less of a proper presence” with older guys in the Park: he liked Rush and Lionel Richie, for instance, and masturbated to the wrong catalogue (“Eaton’s? ... Really?” his brother teased). That outlier status resulted in him being called “bitch” and “faggot” by Francis’s friends — youth, their alarmed mother said, “known to police.”
Francis, however, protected Michael and introduced him to Desirea’s, a strip mall barbershop where the kids of African, Caribbean and Asian immigrants created a “new language” among themselves, especially through music.
The outside world, with its sirens and shootings and routine police questions and explicit racism, soon intruded on the familial world within the Waldorf. As Francis questioned his mother’s outlook and sought a place for himself through musical ambitions, his anger at systemic injustice peaked.
With his death, the growth of the remaining family effectively ceases. Though Michael knows his family’s reputation in the neighbourhood — as a story of “a young man deeply ‘troubled,’ and of a younger brother carrying ‘history,’ and of a mother showing now the creep of ‘madness’ ” — he’s incapable of altering it. Aisha’s own efforts, though, spark change.
Just placed on the Giller Prize longlist, Chariandy’s revisitation of familiar territory pays off with its singular observations and insights. A novel with sentences to savour, Brother also rewards an unhurried reader with a poetic vision that while sad, is also lovely. Brett Josef Grubisic divides his weeks between Salt Spring Island, B.C., and Vancouver. He’s currently working on his fourth novel.