Shame On Me: an anatomy of race and belonging

About this book

What are you? Tessa McWatt knows first-hand that the answer to this question often asked of people of colour by white people is always more complicated than it seems. Is the answer English Scottish British Caribbean Portuguese Indian Amerindian French African Chinese Canadian? Like most families hers is steeped in myth and the anecdotes of grandparents and parents who recount their histories through the lens of desire aspiration loss and shame. In Shame On Me she unspools all the interwoven strands of her multicoloured inheritance and knits them back together using additional fibres from literature and history to strengthen the weave of her refabricated tale. She dismantles her own body and examines it piece by piece to build a devastating and incisively subtle analysis of the race debate as it now stands in this stunningly written exploration of who and what we truly are.