Me Thinks

David Chariandy writes a letter to his daughter explaining some of the things he has been through in his life regarding race, and some of the background and experiences of his parents. Here are a couple of excerpts:

We made it here (referring to him having made it to college along with another black student). 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.” (pg. 62)

The story I have tried to share with you is of people who were violently exploited and never offered the illusion of automatic belonging here, but who have survived all the same, and have come to sing and love profoundly and to contribute immeasurable to the very nations that have failed to see them. It is a story that relates, in complex ways, to the struggles of Indigenous peoples throughout the world, and also to the desperate migrations of denigrated and “undesirable” people, past and present. It is a story that is unashamedly about Black people and South Asian labourers; and it is a story that, precisely thereby, affirms a broader humanity (pg. 84).