I'VE BEEN MEANING TO TELL YOU

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 liveable future.
– From I've Been Meaning to Tell You

In the tradition of Ta-Nehisi Coates's Between the World and Me and Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie's Dear Ijeawele, or a Feminist Manifesto in Fifteen Suggestions, acclaimed novelist David Chariandy's latest is an intimate and profoundly beautiful meditation on the politics of race today.

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.

Today, in a newly heated era of both struggle and divisions, he has completed 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. He connects his personal experiences of being named and read with those of his children (“What are you? Where are you really from?”); he ponders the painful truths behind the modern science of ancestry; and he reflects upon the disenfranchised today in distant ancestral homelands, or else caught helplessly between countries as refugees, or else right here, upon often unacknowledged Indigenous lands. In sharing with his daughter his own story of “race,” he hopes to help cultivate within her, as a child of Black, Brown, and white ancestry, a sense of identity and responsibility that balances the painful truths of the past and present with hopeful possibilities for a more equitable and just future.

With intimacy, sensitivity, and care, Chariandy shares the questions he is addressing to his daughter--and these are questions of immense importance and resonance for us all.

DAVID CHARIANDY grew up in Toronto and lives and teaches in Vancouver. His debut novel, Soucouyant (published in Canada by Arsenal Pulp Press, Germany by Suhrkamp Verlag, Macedonia by SHKUPI, and in France by Editions Zoe) , received stunning reviews and nominations from eleven literary awards juries, including a Governor General's Literary Award shortlisting, a Gold Independent Publisher Award for Best Novel, and the Scotiabank Giller Prize longlist. His second novel, Brother, published in 2017 to rave reviews and won the Rogers Writers' Trust Fiction Prize and was longlisted for the Scotiabank Giller Prize. So far, international rights to Brother have been sold in Canada (McClelland & Stewart/PRHC), the US (Bloomsbury), the UK (Bloomsbury), China (CITIC), Spain (Catalan – publisher name to come), and France (Editions Zoe).