Brother: A Novel

“His was a name a toughened kid might boast of knowing, or a name a parent might pronounce in warning. But before all of this, he was the shoulder pressed against me bare and warm, that body always just a skin away.”

Chariandy characterizes Francis as both a loving older brother and an intimidating but respected figure in the gang culture of the Park. This paradoxical characterization emphasizes the complexity of human identity and experience. Francis is not just one expression of one identity—he is multilayered and multifaceted.

“A month later, an enveloping heat arrived, a physical oppression from which none could escape. Nature carrying on like the sort of thug you only hear about. In the early morning it was a menacing red haze. By the afternoon it was a syrup misery in the air, suffocating your will, making even breathing difficult.”

The heat in this quote is a symbol of the tension brewing between Ruth and Francis as he becomes more disillusioned and begins getting in trouble. The heat of nature—which is amplified in a concrete-covered urban environment—echoes and parallels the frustrations, resentments, and anger developing in Michael’s household. While the air outside is difficult to breathe because of the heat, the air in Michael’s home is also tense and suffocating.

“I do not blame my neighbours for avoiding Mother and me. They carry their own histories and their own hopes of genuine arrival. They are marked by language and religion and skin, and their jobs are often temporary and fragile.”

The Park has little community spirit because each family unit or individual in the Park is struggling to survive. Life as an immigrant is already fragile without getting too involved in other peoples’ griefs and problems. This quote characterizes the Park as a neighborhood of conflict and also emphasizes the immigrant experience in Canada as grinding and isolating.

“Some neighbours, I’ve heard, have taken up the old practice of writing fake addresses on job applications, out of fear that acknowledging a connection to the Park will further jeopardize their already complicated lives.”

Here, Chariandy emphasizes the difficulties of being an immigrant. Associations with certain neighborhoods could trigger stereotypical assumptions about poverty or violence on the part of potential employers. The reality is that without job stability, some people have no choice but to live in neighborhoods marked by poverty and violence. This is a societal paradox that emphasizes the difficulties of climbing above one’s socioeconomic strata.

“There are losses that mire a person in mourning, that prevent them from moving forward by making sense of the past. You become disoriented, assailed by loops of memory, by waking dreams and hallucinations.”

This quote identifies the symptoms of complicated grief that oppress Michael’s mother in the decade following Francis’s death. Michael and his mother are both stuck because they are so traumatized by the memories of their past. The loss of Francis is too difficult to bear, which leads to serious mental health complications and an inability to move forward with their lives. This quote therefore highlights the pain of losing a loved one and the toll such pain takes on the development of identity. This is a major obstacle for both Michael and his mother to overcome throughout the novel.

“In and out of the spot we went until he cut the engine, the car still more than a bit crooked, and with little etches on the bumper of the neighbouring car that we hoped nobody would notice.”

The scratches on the car caused by Francis bumping his own car are a symbol of conflict in the novel. While Francis attempts to navigate the world around him (literally in the car but also metaphorically), there are many obstacles in his way. This quote represents those obstacles and emphasizes the necessity for resilience and courage in the face of adversity.

“You’ve got to carry yourself better and think about your look. Doesn’t matter how poor you are. You can always turn up the edge of a collar to style a bit, little things like that. You can always do things to let the world know you’re not nobody. You never know when your break is coming.”

Francis’s advice is meant to build up Michael’s confidence and help him begin to consider how to establish his sense of self. Without a male role model, Francis and Michael must figure out on their own how to present themselves to the world. This quote also highlights the difference between Francis and Michael: Francis is confident that the world will receive him, while Michael hides from that world.

“But she would tell Francis about our father’s struggles when he first came to this country. Going to school during the day and washing dishes at night was not easy. Some people wouldn’t rent their places to people like him. Some people wouldn’t hire men like him, or fairly pay or promote them. There were countless indignities a man like him had to face, and there had been tolls, she explained.”

In this quote, Chariandy provides context for Michael and Francis’s father, which helps develop empathy for an otherwise antagonistic character. The absence and abandonment of their father is traumatic for Michael and Francis. Here, Chariandy explores how society can be responsible for battering a man’s sense of self down so much that he loses the confidence to embrace his responsibilities as a father. Implicit in this quote—particularly the repetition of “like him”—is that one of the reasons why Michael’s father was marginalized by society is because of racism.

“I’ve seen her chat casually with teenagers in the neighbourhood, really talk with them, not fish for information. She gets things, I know. She’s a good cop, but none of this helps me right now. Every nerve in my body is alert. I can smell leather and a strong underarm deodorant from her partner, standing a few feet away.”

This quote characterizes Michael’s relationship with the police. He fears the police even when he knows that this particular officer is kind. This emphasizes the persecution of the Black community at the hands of police forces; poor and Black communities can’t trust the police to help them because of systemic abuse and widespread racism. The imagery Chariandy uses here to depict Michael’s fear highlights the physical and emotional toll marginalization can have on an individual.

“But criminals weren’t the only target. Every day, neighbourhood kids were stopped by the cops, the questions about their actions and whereabouts more probing. We were being watched by everyone, shopkeepers, neighbours, passersby.”

Michael and his neighbors experience constant surveillance. This emphasizes that they are marginalized by their society because their society doesn’t trust them. This becomes a self-fulfilling prophecy—the more that people are treated with the expectation that they are violent or criminals, the more pushed to the margins people become, often leading to the life of crime they wanted to avoid. This also emphasizes that Michael has not been able to develop a sense of belonging within any community, which prevents his character development.

“In Desirea’s, you postured but you also played. You showed up every one of your dictated roles and fates. Our parents had come from Trinidad and Jamaica and Barbados, from Sri Lanka and Poland and Somalia and Vietnam. They worked shit jobs, struggled with rent, were chronically tired, and often pushed just as chronically tired notions about identity and respectability.”

This quote characterizes the barbershop Desirea’s as a setting of communion. In Desirea’s, people can construct identity and community based on shared experiences, even if their cultural backgrounds differ. They can also be free to be themselves. The liberty of finding an environment in which they can reveal their most authentic selves is crucial to one’s development of self. That even this space isn’t safe from unjustified police intrusion is what sparks Francis’s fatal interaction with the police.

“There is a thing that sometimes happens between certain neighbourhood boys. It shows itself, this thing, in touched hands, in certain glances and embraces, its truth deep, undeniable, but rarely spoken or explained. Sometimes never even truly spotted. Although now, in the midst of my own thing, I could see.”

While Francis’s sexuality is not addressed explicitly in the novel, Chariandy implies that his relationship with Jelly is not only intimate but also sexual. Michael does not realize the nature of his brother’s relationship with Jelly until his own “thing”—his relationship with Aisha—is budding and about to become sexual. This quote highlights Michael’s inability to express what he suspects about Francis’s sexuality in part because being gay is “rarely spoken or explained.” That Francis must hide, or at least cannot openly express, this part of himself adds another layer to his characterization and disillusionment with society.

“They entered our space and the shop suddenly became small, the air changed. The music was cut, the faces of the crowd once glowing now expressionless.”

This quote highlights the police as an antagonist in the novel. The language in this quote evokes that of an invasion and intrusion upon joy. The police enter into space that is sacred to the Black and immigrant community and shifts the energy in that setting. The reference to the air changing is reminiscent of Chariandy’s imagery of the stifling heat wave earlier in the novel.

“Even with his clear advantage of grip, Scatter had let go of the knife, and this display of weakness cost him, regardless of his efforts, through increasing postures and acts of aggression, to correct it.”

Scatter’s loss in the fight with Francis is a loss of masculinity in terms of his neighborhood culture. This forces Scatter to save face by becoming even more aggressive. This quote highlights the external pressures boys and men in the Park are under to fit into stereotypical and toxic masculine roles.

“But others travelling ‘back’ to that mysterious place that some—but never our mother—called home.”

This quote reveals a break in Ruth’s ties with Trinidad. She no longer calls Trinidad home, which implies that she has to consider Canada her only home in order to commit to making it work. This quote also characterizes Trinidad as mysterious, which is important because Michael’s lack of connection to Trinidad disrupts his sense of self and identity.

“The living room window framed a full moon that shone like a cool white sun, and billions of stars, a universe we had never even imagined.”

As city dwellers, Michael and Francis rarely see a full, clear night sky due to light pollution, but they witness the peace of a starry sky during their visit to Trinidad. The stars in this quote symbolize the untapped potential and possibilities of Francis’s and Michael’s lives, while the universe symbolizes a nation of Black people celebrating Black culture and history. This instance emphasizes that Michael and Francis are only living one part of their lives and identities in Canada.

“What was this place of origins we had we come to? In the years to come, Francis and I would hear the words slavery and indenture. We’d learn that the Caribbean was named after people who’d been pushed by murder and disease to the very brink of oblivion. But what of these histories could we read in the land we saw as children?”

This quote captures Michael’s confusion about his identity. He learns about Black history but can’t connect to it. In some ways, Black history feels irrelevant to his lived experience, but in other ways, he is very much the product of that history. Michael struggles to reconcile that a place that feels far less oppressive than his home in Scarborough could itself be rooted in oppression.

“All around us in the Park were mothers who had journeyed far beyond what they knew, who took day courses and worked nights, who dreamed of raising children who might have just a little more than they did, children who might reward sacrifice and redeem a past. And there were victories, you must know.”

Chariandy celebrates Ruth’s experience as one that many hard-working and compassionate women have undergone. This quote characterizes Michael as empathetic to his mother’s struggles and resilience. The nod to “victories” suggests that some children, such as Aisha, do indeed find success after growing up in the Park.

“Our mother, like others, wasn’t just bare endurance and sacrifice. There was always more to her, pleasures and thoughts we could only glimpse.”

Michael recognizes that his mother is not just hard-working and self-sacrificing but that there are many layers to her that Michael doesn’t have access to. This celebration of Ruth’s individuality and interiority humanizes her and prevents her characterization from falling into a stereotype.

“We were losers and neighbourhood schemers. We were the children of the help, without futures. We were, none of us, what our parents wanted us to be. We were not what any other adults wanted us to be. We were nobodies, or else, somehow, a city.”

Chariandy emphasizes how easy it is for children of marginalized socioeconomic statuses to internalize society’s judgment of them. This quote highlights the low self-esteem that can come with marginalization. Michael repeats the dehumanizing and stereotypical assumptions people have not only about people like himself and Francis but also about much of their city to highlight the layers and depth of oppression they face.

“Jelly didn’t answer my brother in words. He didn’t argue. He just touched him, stroked his back and neck. He held my brother’s face and rested his forehead on his.”

This quotation highlights the intimacy between Jelly and Francis, who often touch hands and otherwise connect in a way that defies stereotypes of masculinity. If the other men in the barbershop notice, they never draw attention to it, highlighting both the safety of the space and the way that relationships like theirs are “rarely spoken [about] or explained” in their community (104). He and Jelly share experiences and an intimacy that helps make their chaotic and unstable lives feel safer.

“And it’s true, for this family at least. Sure as day, there’ll be scolding and punishment, but no funeral. No ‘complicated grief,’ no greater meaning in this everyday accident. Just two boys hoping to see.”

The parallelism between the boys Michael meets at the hospital and the novel’s eponymous brothers is symbolic of the cyclical nature of life and representative of the enduring power of brotherhood. Michael and Francis once climbed utility poles to see their neighborhood from a different vantage point, just like these two boys climbed on a roof. Strangers are connected through shared experiences and desires, which develops a sense of community.

“She had moved to hug me, and I’d flinched so strongly that it startled us both. I’d told her it wasn’t a good time, and I’d closed the door and didn’t open it the second and third time she knocked. Now I felt her eyes upon me, and it became convenient for me to look elsewhere in the room.”

This quote captures an important moment in Michael’s character development. Rather than embrace his friends, like Aisha, during his time of need, Michael isolates himself from his community. Just as his mother turns away from the world and into her grief, so too does Michael reject community, replacing it with a more insular and lonelier life.