I’ve Been Meaning to Tell You

When a moment of quietly ignored bigotry prompted his three-year-old daughter to ask ‘what happened?’, David Chariandy began wondering how to discuss with his children the politics of race. Today, in a newly heated era of struggle and divisions, he has completed a letter to his now thirteen-year-old daughter.

The son of Black and South Asian migrants from Trinidad, David draws upon his personal and ancestral past, including his experiences growing up as a ‘visible minority’ within the land of his birth, as well as the legacies of slavery, indenture and immigration.

In sharing with his daughter his own story of ‘race’, he hopes to cultivate within her a sense of identity that balances the painful truths of the past and present with hopeful possibilities for a better future. With intimacy, sensitivity and beauty, Chariandy shares the questions he is addressing to his daughter - questions of immense importance and resonance for us all.