Shame on Me: An Anatomy of Race and Belonging

FINALIST FOR THE GOVERNOR GENERAL’S AWARD FOR NON-FICTION

Interrogating our ideas of race through the lens of her own multi-racial identity, critically acclaimed novelist Tessa McWatt turns her eye on herself, her body and this world in a powerful new work of non-fiction.

Tessa McWatt has been called Susie Wong, Pocahontas and black bitch, and has been judged not black enough by people who assume she straightens her hair. Now, through a close examination of her own body–nose, lips, hair, skin, eyes, ass, bones and blood–which holds up a mirror to the way culture reads all bodies, she asks why we persist in thinking in terms of race today when racism is killing us.

Her grandmother’s family fled southern China for British Guiana after her great uncle was shot in his own dentist’s chair during the First Sino-Japanese War. McWatt is made of this woman and more: those who arrived in British Guiana from India as indentured labour and those who were brought from Africa as cargo to work on the sugar plantations; colonists and those whom colonialism displaced. How do you tick a box on a census form or job application when your ancestry is Scottish, English, French, Portuguese, Indian, Amerindian, African and Chinese? How do you finally answer a question first posed to you in grade school: What are you? And where do you find a sense of belonging in a supposedly post-racial world where shadism, fear of blackness, identity politics and call-out culture vie with each other noisily, relentlessly and still lethally?

Shame on Me is a personal and powerful exploration of history and identity, colour and desire from a writer who, having been plagued with confusion about her race all her life, has at last found kinship and solidarity in story.