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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