I've Been Meaning to Tell You Quotes

“The future I yearn for is not one in which we will all be clothed in sameness, but one in which we will finally learn to both read and respectfully discuss our differences.”
― David Chariandy, I've Been Meaning to Tell You: A Letter to My Daughter

“Since your birth, especially, I've wanted to believe that people of many backgrounds can find points of commonality in a world of hardened divisions, previous moments of recognition and intimacy across differences, and so begin the necessarily hard work of authentically seeing and hearing one another. Of course, I want to believe that reading and discussing books can play a part in this. But I also want to avoid imagining easy answers to the intricacies of the world, or being blind to persistent hierarchies of power. I want to understand the unspoken sources of wealth, and our often-unacknowledged implication in history. Today, I am someone who can find himself in contexts unfamiliar to many people of my background. But I am also someone who cannot allow such inclusion to blind me to deeper truths.”
― David Chariandy, I've Been Meaning to Tell You: A Letter to My Daughter

“We live in a time, dearest daughter, when the callous and ignorant in wealthy nations have made it their business to loudly proclaim who are the deserving "us" (those really "us") and who are the alien and undeserving "them.”
― David Chariandy, I've Been Meaning to Tell You: A Letter to My Daughter

“Now you speak your own truths and you will continue to find the scripts that honour your body and experience and history, each of the scripts a gift, and none of them fully adequate to the holy force of you.”
― David Chariandy, I've Been Meaning to Tell You: A Letter to My Daughter

“I supposed that I have imagined, at times, that you, as such completely mixed children, might have the opportunity to choose and declare your own identity. I had forgotten that racial identity is so rarely a matter of personal choice. That it is always, in origin, a falsehood and violence, though it can become, all the same, a necessary tool for acknowledging the enduring life and creativity of a persistently maligned people.”
― David Chariandy, I've Been Meaning to Tell You: A Letter to My Daughter

“You did not create the inequalities and injustices of this world, daughter. You are neither solely nor uniquely responsible to fix them. If there is anything to learn from the story of our ancestry, it is that you should respect and protect yourself; that you should demand not only justice but joy; that you should see, truly see, the vulnerability and the creativity and the enduring beauty of others. Today, many years after indenture and especially slavery, there are many who continue to live painfully in wakes of historical violence. And there are current terrible circumstances whereby others, in the desperate hope for a better life, either migrate or are pushed across the hardened borders of nations and find themselves stranded in unwelcoming lands. We live in a time, dearest daughter, when the callous and ignorant in wealthy nations have made it their business to loudly proclaim who are the deserving "us" (those really "us") and who are the alien and undeserving "them." But the story of our origins offers us a different insight. The people we imagine most apart from "us" are, oftentimes, our own forgotten kin.”
― David Chariandy, I've Been Meaning to Tell You: A Letter to My Daughter