David Chariandy > Quotes

“Memory’s the muscle sting of now.”
― David Chariandy, Brother

“But of course, you can’t ever really flee. You’ll forever run the risk of being spotted, if only for a second.”
― David Chariandy, Brother: A Novel

“Doesn’t matter how poor you are. You can always turn up the edge of a collar to style a bit, little things like that. You can always do things to let the world know you’re not nobody. You never know when your break is coming.”
― David Chariandy, Brother

“But, really, Aisha was only herself. That chicken pox scar on her nose. Or that tiny dot with a tail at the edge of her pupil, a tadpole near a whirlpool of black.”
― David Chariandy, Brother

“We were nobodies, or else, somehow, a city.”
― David Chariandy, Brother

“A great lookout, my brother told me. One of the best in the neighbourhood, but step badly on a line, touch your hand to the wrong metal part while you're brushing up against another, and you'd burn,”
― David Chariandy

“But now I glimpsed in him not only a strange and dangerous hope but also something else. There is a thing that sometimes happens between certain neighbourhood boys. It shows itself, this thing, in touched hands, in certain glances and embraces, its truth deep, undeniable, but rarely spoken or explained. Sometimes never even truly spotted. Although now, in the midst of my own thing, I could see.”
― David Chariandy, Brother

“Since your birth, especially, I've wanted to believe that people of many backgrounds can find points of commonality in a world of hardened divisions, previous moments of recognition and intimacy across differences, and so begin the necessarily hard work of authentically seeing and hearing one another. Of course, I want to believe that reading and discussing books can play a part in this. But I also want to avoid imagining easy answers to the intricacies of the world, or being blind to persistent hierarchies of power. I want to understand the unspoken sources of wealth, and our often-unacknowledged implication in history. Today, I am someone who can find himself in contexts unfamiliar to many people of my background. But I am also someone who cannot allow such inclusion to blind me to deeper truths.”
― David Chariandy, I've Been Meaning to Tell You: A Letter to My Daughter

“The world around us was named Scarborough. It had once been called “Scarberia,” a wasteland on the outskirts of a sprawling city. But now, as we were growing up in the early ’80s, in the heated language of a changing nation, we heard it called other names: Scarlem, Scarbistan. We lived in Scarbro, a suburb that had mushroomed up and yellowed, browned, and blackened into life.”
― David Chariandy, Brother

“Now you speak your own truths and you will continue to find the scripts that honour your body and experience and history, each of the scripts a gift, and none of them fully adequate to the holy force of you.”
― David Chariandy, I've Been Meaning to Tell You: A Letter to My Daughter

“She's carrying a backpack, not a suitcase, and this really is how she becomes Aisha.”
― David Chariandy, Brother

“The future I yearn for is not one in which we will all be clothed in sameness, but one in which we will finally learn to both read and respectfully discuss our differences.”
― David Chariandy, I've Been Meaning to Tell You: A Letter to My Daughter

“You did not create the inequalities and injustices of this world, daughter. You are neither solely nor uniquely responsible to fix them. If there is anything to learn from the story of our ancestry, it is that you should respect and protect yourself; that you should demand not only justice but joy; that you should see, truly see, the vulnerability and the creativity and the enduring beauty of others. Today, many years after indenture and especially slavery, there are many who continue to live painfully in wakes of historical violence. And there are current terrible circumstances whereby others, in the desperate hope for a better life, either migrate or are pushed across the hardened borders of nations and find themselves stranded in unwelcoming lands. We live in a time, dearest daughter, when the callous and ignorant in wealthy nations have made it their business to loudly proclaim who are the deserving "us" (those really "us") and who are the alien and undeserving "them." But the story of our origins offers us a different insight. The people we imagine most apart from "us" are, oftentimes, our own forgotten kin.”
― David Chariandy, I've Been Meaning to Tell You: A Letter to My Daughter

“I supposed that I have imagined, at times, that you, as such completely mixed children, might have the opportunity to choose and declare your own identity. I had forgotten that racial identity is so rarely a matter of personal choice. That it is always, in origin, a falsehood and violence, though it can become, all the same, a necessary tool for acknowledging the enduring life and creativity of a persistently maligned people.”
― David Chariandy, I've Been Meaning to Tell You: A Letter to My Daughter

“We live in a time, dearest daughter, when the callous and ignorant in wealthy nations have made it their business to loudly proclaim who are the deserving "us" (those really "us") and who are the alien and undeserving "them.”
― David Chariandy, I've Been Meaning to Tell You: A Letter to My Daughter