Brother

There is always a story connected to Mother and me, a story made all the more frightening through each inventive retelling among neighbours. It is a story, effectively vague, of a young man deeply “troubled”, and of a younger brother carrying “history”, and of a mother showing now the creep of “madness”.

Here's my awful confession: Whenever I hear that there's been some gang-related shooting in Scarborough, it doesn't feel like a full-blown tragedy to me; you run with gangs, you run those risks (naturally, I do empathise with the families who lose their sons; with the neighbourhoods terrorised by drive-by shootings; the unintended victims). And note: Just because the Scarborough gangs tend to be made up of young men of colour, my reaction isn't race-related; I am also emotionally unaffected by white bikers or mafiosi gunning each other down, blowing each other up; this is a them thing that feels unrelated to me. So what author David Chariandy does in Brother feels important and overdue – by giving voice to these young men of colour and exposing the reality of what a newspaper might label their “gang”, I was given that one person to identify with that removes the barrier between “them” and “me”; I felt and personalised the tragedy. This is what good books do. 

“I still think of Francis,” she says.

Brother opens ten years after an unnamed event in which the main character, Michael's, older brother Francis has apparently died. Raised by a single mother – a Trinidadian emigrant who is now confounded by “complicated grief” – Michael still lives in that same apartment in the same run-down housing complex in Scarborough, now taking care of the mother who did her best to care for her two sons. Although Michael has tried to shield his mother from the sadness of being reminded of Francis over the years, when people from their past begin showing up in the present, it's unclear which one of them is too fragile to confront the memories. In each chapter, the narrative shifts between the present, the childhood of the brothers, and the events that led directly to Francis' death in 1991; each stream adding vital information to the whole picture. 

Had I recognized it only then? We were losers and neighbourhood schemers. We were the children of the help, without futures. We were, none of us, what our parents wanted us to be. We were not what any other adults wanted us to be. We were nobodies, or else, somehow, a city.

For a rather short book, Chariandy includes just enough scenes in each time stream to show who these brothers are: Their mother locking them in the apartment as young children so she could go to cleaning jobs, hoping for double shifts and overtime just to fill the fridge; the boys sneaking out to explore the Rouge Valley (a garbage-strewn rift of green that runs through the neighbourhood); their mother stressing education (despite teachers recommending that the bright brothers be lowered from the academic level to the basic; apparently this happened to Chariandy – now a PhD and professor at Simon Fraser – at a school in the same neighbourhood). These are good boys, even if shopkeepers watch them warily; even if they must stand by raging impotently as strangers hurl racial slurs at their mother; even if the nightly news has conditioned them to be scared of “black criminals”. When, in the stream leading up to Francis' death, they witness the murder of Anton – a neighbourhood acquaintance and the kind of low-level criminal that I generally find it hard to empathise with – the brothers are cuffed and roughed up by the police in a “round up everyone and sort it out later” operation. Francis is angered by this emasculation and starts spending more time with his “gang”: a group of boys who are experimenting with vinyl and turntables, exploring the musical possibilities at the dawn of hip hop. These are good boys, but in the atmosphere following Anton's death, compounded by further injustice, Francis starts to push back.

Brother explores many issues – masculinity, race relations, police brutality, poverty – and lays bare the challenging immigrant experience. I loved the spicy meals that the boys' mother would fry up, empathised with her need to work constantly as menial help to provide her sons with the bare necessities, and respected the dignity that she brought to her life; wearing thin and never complaining. The family makes one trip back to Trinidad when the brothers are young, and they know better than to speak up when their aunt says that she is jealous of the “perfect life” her older sister had found in Canada:

Mother stayed quiet. She did not say that our father had left us years before. She did not admit that she had not had the time or money to complete her studies to become a nurse. She did not hint at the debt or struggles or the aches she often felt. As we headed to the airport, she just nodded and looked out the window at the coconut trees towering black against the evening sky, and the old untended fields of cane stretching out like a sea.

And after the racism – subtle and overt – that she experiences in Canada, the abandonment, lack of real opportunity and social mobility, and most tragically, the loss of her eldest son, I have to wonder if this stoic character thinks the move away from her large, loving family and community had been worth it. There's just so much to think about with this book.

Again, this is a short book, and if I had a complaint it would be that it could be longer – and especially in the present stream, which never felt completely developed – but Chariandy does include enough narrative to give a voice and presence to these youth of Scarborough; he makes them people and that challenges me in a good way. This is what good books do and I hope that Brother's appearance on the Giller Prize longlist gets it the readership that it deserves.

The 2017 Scotiabank Giller Prize Longlist: 

David Chariandy: Brother
Rachel Cusk: Transit
David Demchuk: The Bone Mother
Joel Thomas Hynes: We'll All Be Burned in Our Beds Some Night
Andrée A. Michaud: Boundary
Josip Novakovich: Tumbleweed
Ed O'Loughlin: Minds of Winter
Zoey Leigh Peterson: Next Year, for Sure
Michael Redhill: Bellevue Square
Eden Robinson: Son of a Trickster
Deborah Willis: The Dark and other Love Stories
Michelle Winters: I Am a Truck


After finishing reading the longlist, I'll rank the shortlist (according to my own enjoyment only):

 I Am a Truck
Minds of Winter
Son of a Trickster
Bellevue Square
Transit

*Won by Bellevue Square - a surprise, to me, but not an unwelcome one. Congrats to Michael Redhill!

**Brother won the Rogers Writers’ Trust Fiction Prize for 2017.