I've Been Meaning to Tell You: A Letter to My Daughter
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. A decade later, in a newly heated era of both struggle and divisions, he writes 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. In sharing with his daughter his own story, he hopes to help cultivate within her a sense of identity and responsibility that balances the painful truths of the past and present with hopeful possibilities for the future.
David Chariandy is a novelist and Professor of contemporary literature at Simon Fraser University. Chariandy specializes in Canadian, Black, and Caribbean fiction as well as creative writing. In 2019, he was the winner of Yale University’s Windham-Campbell Prize.
Other publications from this author include:
- Brother (2017)
- The Reverend's Apprentice (2008)
- Soucouyant (2007)
- "'The Fiction of Belonging': On Second-Generation Black Writing in Canada" in Callaloo, 30 (3), 818-829 (2007)
- "Postcolonial Diasporas" in Postcolonial Text, 2 (1) (2006)
- "'Canada in Us Now': Locating the Criticism of Black Canadian Writing" in Essays on Canadian Writing, 75, 196-216 (2002)