Brother by David Chariandy
Book Discussion of Brother by David Chariandy
The Urban Life Experience Book Discussion Series continued on Saturday September 12. Thirteen of us met over Zoom to discuss Brother by Canadian author David Chariandy.
We all were struck so much with the poetic and multi-sensory language of the book, while telling a story that’s so heartbreaking. Two brothers, Michael and Francis are growing up in a housing complex with their single mom in Toronto. It’s implied that their father still lives in the same city but has nothing to do with them. The mother regularly strings together three jobs just so they can have groceries. Their mom is a Trinidadian immigrant who warns her sons repeatedly to take advantage of education and not become “hardened” so that they can be able to have a better life.
Michael is in love with a girl from his school named Aisha who is extremely smart. She actually wins a university scholarship. But Michael finds that Aisha has another side.
p.60:
“A cop car pulled up beside a group of young men who had
been walking down the sidewalk. The siren was quickly cut, but it triggered
every one of us…The fragile peace was broken, nerves flayed again, but could
this really explain what Aisha did next? She looked down and spotted a broken chunk
of asphalt that she loosened further with the heel of her sneaker. She picked
it up, stepped back for balance, and hurled. It hit a window of the empty
police car, making a sharp sound like the breaking of hard candy in your mouth,
spider-webbing the glass into a pattern of pale blue without breaking."
Michael, who narrates the story, is extremely sensitive yet looks to his older brother, Francis, who appears to have become “hardened” already. Francis hangs out a barbershop called Desirea’s where his friend Jelly mixes music on turntables. Jelly is extremely talented, yet extremely impoverished. The author leaves Francis’s feelings for Jelly up to us to figure out, even as Michael observes the way they stand facing each other and their hardly perceptible touches.
One of our book club members, Stacy, observed that Michael seemed somewhat fragile and uncomfortable in his own skin. In the story, Francis is frustrated by his younger brother’s timid ways.
p. 81:
Francis shook his head. “You know,” he said, ”You’ve got to
work on things.”
“What do you mean? What things?”
“Like all sorts of things. Like stepping into Desirea’s the
way you did. Like always looking so unsure. You’ve got to be cooler about
things, and not put everything out on your face all the time. You’ve got to
carry yourself better and think about your look. Doesn’t matter how poor you
are…You can always do things to let the world know you’re not nobody. You never
know when your break is coming.”
All the guys at Desirea’s believe Jelly’s (and therefore
their) big break is coming when Jelly performs at a DJ competition.
p. 127
“…A drum and bass line was added, and then, seamlessly, relentlessly, other music was layered in. Soul, rocksteady, even calypso and Congolese rhumba. Francis was passing and grabbing records when needed. I heard artists that the Professa had already named for me: Gladys Knight, Smokey Robinson, Etta James. I heard tabla and the silly of disco. I heard a guitar lick from Hendrix. A blues rift sped up into a digital future. He overlaid voices on top of one another, messed with time, and made a man sound like a woman and a woman like a man, the truer feeling and meaning of a song suddenly emerging through the work of his hands.It was more than we had imagined, bigger and wilder. Weirder, even for Jelly.”
Brother is a tender portrayal of love between two brothers, love for their mom, and her fierce love for them. In that fierce love, there’s a lack of affection but as Stacy, a regular member of our group said, "that’s old fashioned West Indian Stoicism."
There was however, more revealed about the boy's mom than just her working herself to death and constantly reprimanding Francis and Michael. Wendy pointed out for us the hope this mother had for her sons, the same hope other parents had for their children in this community as well.
p.146
"It wasn't just 'she alone' All around us in the Park were mothers who had journeyed far beyond what they knew, who took day courses and worked nights, who dreamed of raising children who might have just a little more than they did, children who might reward sacrifice and redeem a past. And there were victories, you must know... p.147 'Examples' raised."
Beyond the "community hope" described above, the boy's mother also knew how to eke out a little peace in her own life as well. Again, our book club member Wendy called our attention to:
p.147
"Our mother, like others, wasn't just bare endurance and sacrifice. There was always more to her, pleasures and thoughts we could only glimpse...The time we watched her spend a day on the couch with an amazingly thick library book. That whole day never once driving herself frantic with duty, just reading. Whole chapters of time spent in quiet aloneness..."
Our member Kay remarked on the passage further down on p.147
"And the Rouge. It was Mother, really, who introduced Francis and me to this place...p.148 And that magic spring, I still remember it, when the creek rushed extra fast and high with the winter melts. When there was everywhere the fluff of some plant in the air. White spores, millions of them, each of them a memory, a dream waiting to land and bloom."
One of our group, Debbie, asked why we thought Michael was so resistant to allowing Aisha and Jelly to make a connection to his mom. Judy followed up with, "With Aisha, the mother becomes so much more herself. Aisha's father, on the other hand made a connection with Francis through music." We all had made this observation as well and conceded that many times parents can only reveal themselves as "the parent" to their own children and yet become friends to their children's peers.
I felt that this possessive smothering love for his mom was the one thing that gave Michael an identity after Francis was gone. Because Michael always referred to his mother as Mother, we as readers were hard pressed to recall that she had a name. His mother's name was Ruth Joseph and she was the only person Michael had left.
Comments
Post a Comment