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A review by crabbygirl
I've Been Meaning to Tell You: A Letter to My Daughter by David Chariandy
2.0
it was interesting to read a pre-Robin-DiAngelo book where concepts like white women tears and Black bodies were being still being developed and hadn't yet landed on standard phrasing - made it seem more organic, more sincere, certainly not empty the way the the now-rote terminology rings: we've created new ways to speak about the problems we face but to no one's surprise, no real progress has been made. books like this (now four and a half years old) would not still be published. but they are.
using a letter to his daughter as a framing device was a real miss for me: much like The Last Lecture, it's ostensibly about his daughter but is really about him (and lots of him) and like The Last Lecture is more about wanting his daughter to know HIM than the other way around. but I will given him credit at his willingness to admit the unavoidable conflict: his daughter is a product of both the oppressor colonist and the oppressed coolie - her reaction is not only allowed to be more complex than her father, it's very much an experience he can know nothing about. (in the same vein he admits his luxuriating in the beauty of a foreign locale without knowing it's dark history or having his experience marred by it. in all, a very nuanced approach to a subject that tends to be framed today as obvious moral choice)
lastly, this slim book (that really should have been a magazine article if not for his connections to a publisher) is worth it alone for the re-introduction of Countee Cullen's poem Incident. I cannot write it out here as it contains the very word it's trying to illuminate, but the power in that poem demonstrates the need to confront what happens when we outlaw language, and what is lost in the process.
using a letter to his daughter as a framing device was a real miss for me: much like The Last Lecture, it's ostensibly about his daughter but is really about him (and lots of him) and like The Last Lecture is more about wanting his daughter to know HIM than the other way around. but I will given him credit at his willingness to admit the unavoidable conflict: his daughter is a product of both the oppressor colonist and the oppressed coolie - her reaction is not only allowed to be more complex than her father, it's very much an experience he can know nothing about. (in the same vein he admits his luxuriating in the beauty of a foreign locale without knowing it's dark history or having his experience marred by it. in all, a very nuanced approach to a subject that tends to be framed today as obvious moral choice)
lastly, this slim book (that really should have been a magazine article if not for his connections to a publisher) is worth it alone for the re-introduction of Countee Cullen's poem Incident. I cannot write it out here as it contains the very word it's trying to illuminate, but the power in that poem demonstrates the need to confront what happens when we outlaw language, and what is lost in the process.