Their mother tells them they are safe, begs them to believe it, but Francis refuses. In the novel’s most powerful childhood scene, just after someone is killed in a convenience store, the boys can’t sleep because they are afraid of “the black murderers”. “You all is harden,” she accuses in a melodic Trinidadian accent, warning them that despite what the world expects, no son of hers can ever become a “ crimi- nal”. Through her pain and sweat and undying belief in “arrival and opportunity”, she forces her sons to try to live by the rules. There is a moment, Michael understands, when “the limbs feel like meat, and it takes every last strength from a mother to make the two additional bus transfers home”. Her body is always on the brink of giving out, her breath stinking from a rotten tooth, and in her daily toil she exemplifies the fine line between survival and disaster. She knows they won’t listen, but she has to go, and her despairing rages become the heartbeat of the story. She warns them not to waste food, not to open the door, not to watch TV late at night. During their childhood, she travels hours each day for cleaning shifts, her guilt as she locks her young boys in for the night manifesting in threats “mined from the deepest hells of history”. Michael and Francis’s mother is from Trinidad.
When Aisha, Michael’s studious childhood girlfriend and now a writer, returns to the neighbourhood, she forces mother and son to reckon with their “complicated grief” and memories of Francis.Ĭhariandy handles some of the most emotional issues of our time with care and wisdom
In the present day, Francis is gone and Michael is left to care for their mother alone. Their feral children, “oiled creatures of mongoose cunning”, hang out in barbershops, mix music and watch The A-Team and The Dukes of Hazzard. The parents have “useless foreign degrees” framed on the walls of their corner shops, advertising “back home tastes” on hand-painted signs. Nicknamed Scarlem and Scarbistan and Scar-bro, it is a study in the cultural divide between the displaced and their offspring. Narrated by the adult Michael, Canadian author David Chariandy’s tightly crafted, gracefully elegiac second novel alternates between present-day and early 1980s Scarborough, a hopeless Toronto neighbourhood of poor immigrants and their disenfranchised children. But Francis learns early on that his break isn’t coming, that it is dangerous to hope. You never know when your break is coming,” says older brother Francis, advising Michael to relax, to be less clueless, less of a pussy. “Y ou can always do things to let the world know you’re not nobody.
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