I've Been Meaning to Tell You by David Chariandy

Author:David Chariandy
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: McClelland & Stewart
Published: 2018-05-29T04:00:00+00:00

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Of course, I wasn’t unique in the neighbourhood. There were other kids negotiating their special visibility as East Asian children, South Asian children, Arab children, Indigenous children. Two sisters lived a few doors down from me in the townhouse complex. They had a Black father but were raised by their white mother, who was a teacher. The sisters did very well in school. Both were beautiful, and I was drawn in particular to the one who would sail by me on blue roller skates.

But we always kept our distance. Certainly, there was that long stretch of time when neighbourhood boys and girls, in general, stopped playing together. And I was also, for various reasons, painfully shy about approaching girls. For much of my childhood, I would walk past that girl, matching what I felt was a certain remoteness in her eyes, watching but not looking like I was watching. I found myself wondering what she might be thinking and feeling. I did not suspect that she would one day become a writer and give me and others a powerful sense of what her own upbringing was like.

To be a person of colour is to be marked in a peculiar kind of way. You are at once highly visible—obvious, conspicuous, apparent. Yet at the same time you are virtually invisible—unseen, overlooked, transparent. Children, I think, share this strange experience—they are to be seen and not heard, they are spoken of, and spoken for, but not often spoken to. As a child of colour, I experienced this silencing effect while also enduring racial slights and slurs from strangers and family members alike. By the time I reached my teen years, I knew how to disappear in order to avoid unwanted attention, and I knew how to de-race myself in order to make “the majority” feel more at ease. I might have learned these lessons from the steady flow of books in which I immersed myself; certainly, young Black women were almost never featured in these narratives, and those who did appear were relegated to the margins or permitted to fill only the most demeaning roles.

—Zetta Elliott

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