Shame On Me
an anatomy of race and belonging
by Tessa McWatt
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Pub Date 6 Aug 2019 | Archive Date 28 Feb 2021
Scribe UK | Scribe
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Description
SHORTLISTED FOR THE 2020 OCM BOCAS PRIZE FOR CARIBBEAN LITERATURE
‘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 view their histories through the lens of desire, aspiration, loss, and shame.
In Shame On Me she unspools all the interwoven strands of her 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.
Advance Praise
‘This remarkable meditation on beautiful, human bodies formed by the violence of slavery and by colonial shame resists categorisation, even as it shows up the ways in which categories of race and identity are no more than empty methods of social control. Reading this book I felt a profound sense of relief: that someone as wise as Tessa McWatt had the compassion and courage to write it. Though she doesn’t spare us, her ancestors or herself, as she travels from British Guiana to China, India and Scotland, we must go with her: and realise the power of recovering female lineage, and realise that there is no centre, except the one we ourselves can make with all the various stories we contain. It is a deeply moving, urgent and important book.’
Preti Taneja
‘Heartstopping and wise, exquisitely written, compellingly told, Shame on Me rises to a crescendo of such beauty and grace in its final chapter — a call to activism and resistance — that it left me breathless with the intensity of my own listening.’
Rebecca Stott
‘Eloquent and moving.’
The Guardian
Available Editions
| EDITION | Ebook |
| ISBN | 9781925693812 |
| PRICE | US$31.99 (USD) |
| PAGES | 272 |
Links
Featured Reviews
Lisa C, Reviewer
The adored this. I have been reading a lot more books like this but it still sticks out as being unique and wonderful. Loved it.
Ashita T, Reviewer
the writer did a beautiful job with this book. the writing was amazing and the fragmentation made it easier to leave the book and come back to it after a while. it was stylistically interesting.
Sophie G, Reviewer
"I desire a new language of belonging. A who-are-you space to gather in with others, rather than the biological 'what' am I. This new language finds the political in the personal, and it requires me to ask who I am and it requires me to ask who I am in the face of any new race-making that might be taking place. Who in me is the slave, who the plantation owner, who the indentured labourer, the bounty keeper, who the collaborator, who the perpetrator, who the victim? Who am I othering as I write, as I speak, as I travel, as I shop? What borders am I erecting, who am I when I don't feel I have enough"?
Timely, empowering, important; "Shame on Me" discusses the theme of race and structural racism through examining piece by piece the bodily features that are most often being used as markers of racial identity and through diving deep both into family history and also into wider historical and literary moments in a pursuit of understanding her hybrid self.
