Shame on Me
An Anatomy of Race and Belonging
-
-
5.0 • 1 Rating
-
-
- $14.99
Publisher Description
FINALIST FOR THE GOVERNOR GENERAL'S AWARD FOR NON-FICTION
Interrogating our ideas of race through the lens of her own multi-racial identity, critically acclaimed novelist Tessa McWatt turns her eye on herself, her body and this world in a powerful new work of non-fiction.
Tessa McWatt has been called Susie Wong, Pocahontas and "black bitch," and has been judged not black enough by people who assume she straightens her hair. Now, through a close examination of her own body--nose, lips, hair, skin, eyes, ass, bones and blood--which holds up a mirror to the way culture reads all bodies, she asks why we persist in thinking in terms of race today when racism is killing us.
Her grandmother's family fled southern China for British Guiana after her great uncle was shot in his own dentist's chair during the First Sino-Japanese War. McWatt is made of this woman and more: those who arrived in British Guiana from India as indentured labour and those who were brought from Africa as cargo to work on the sugar plantations; colonists and those whom colonialism displaced. How do you tick a box on a census form or job application when your ancestry is Scottish, English, French, Portuguese, Indian, Amerindian, African and Chinese? How do you finally answer a question first posed to you in grade school: "What are you?" And where do you find a sense of belonging in a supposedly "post-racial" world where shadism, fear of blackness, identity politics and call-out culture vie with each other noisily, relentlessly and still lethally?
Shame on Me is a personal and powerful exploration of history and identity, colour and desire from a writer who, having been plagued with confusion about her race all her life, has at last found kinship and solidarity in story.
APPLE BOOKS REVIEW
At this point, it’s a familiar concept that race is a construct, but in this fascinating memoir, multiracial Canadian novelist Tessa McWatt explores just how powerful and arbitrary that construct can be. McWatt’s ethnic background is white, Jewish, Indigenous South American, Black via the African slave trade, and Chinese by way of British Guyana—not something she can neatly summarize in a sound bite. Using commonly racialized parts of the human body as her chapter headings (“Nose,” “Lips,” “Hair,” etc.), McWatt reflects on the family history behind each segment of her racial background when she knows it—and imagines the ancestor responsible for those strands of her DNA when she doesn’t. This gives her space to tell deeply compelling stories about everything from the horrors of the First Sino-Japanese War to her own firsthand accounts of colorism in Black spaces. Shame on Me is a must-read for everyone in our ongoing conversations on race.
