Michael grew up in the Park, a concrete ghetto in Scarborough, a suburb of Toronto, also called “Scarlem”, “Scarbistan” and “Scar-bro”, “a suburb that had developed rapidly, whose life had flourished in yellow, brown and black.
With his older brother Francis, who takes him under his wing, Michael wanders around a large strip mall, imagines a better world in the Red River Valley — this green scar that runs through the neighborhood — and seeks to create community with the gang from Desirae’s, a hair salon that flirts with a nightclub.
However, the naivety and beauty of childhood are mistreated. Every day, violence, prejudice and derogatory comments cross the path of the two brothers. In front of them, the strangers change sidewalks, the police appear intimidating and the shop owners suspicious.
Francis, determined for Michael to escape this misery, teaches him to hide his weaknesses, to defend himself, to act “like a man”. Over time, the precariousness against which their Trinidadian mother fights every day, like the absence of a way out, reinforces the distrust, anger and despair that simmers in the heart of the eldest child.
In this accomplished second novel, David Chariandy summons the universality of adolescence and its aspirations and the strength of fraternity and maternal love, and imbues everything with an evocative experience of poverty, vulnerability and of ostracization.
He thus leads the reader to perceive from the inside the violence of a judgment, the fear that grips the guts in front of an authority figure, the concern of a son towards his mother in a constant state of exhaustion, of deprivation , of mourning.
By the same token, the Ontario writer tells a story that everyone knows well enough to guess the ending, but that few have explored in such an intimate relationship; the story of those who must be content to dream.
Leading his story with surgical precision, he punctuates what has the air of a classic emancipation novel with a myriad of clues that fit together to form a wheel that turns tirelessly towards tragedy, without we can change its course. “There were always stories on television and in the newspapers of gangs, of murders in bad neighborhoods, of predators on the lookout. One morning, Francis and I looked into a newspaper vending machine to read the headline reporting the latest act of terror and saw our faces reflected in the glass. »
David Chariandy thus examines the part of inevitability in the destiny of those who are deprived of a future, and in the violence and excesses which are perpetuated within a community which is built at the junction of despair, of impossibility of belonging to the norm and a one-sided vision of masculinity. Sensitive and intelligent.