Shame On Me

'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.

'Poignant, provocative, beautifully written, Tessa McWatt's new memoir Shame on Me is an important, original and deeply thoughtful book. McWatt asks the toughest, most searching of questions about race and belonging and offers answers that surprise and challenge us. I loved it.' -Jill Dawson, author of The Language of Birds 'There have been many books about race and identity in recent years, but none quite like this one. Shame On Me is part memoir, part essay, and partly a challenge to think beyond the current parameters of identity in our contemporary world. Told from the perspective of a writer whose own inheritance confounds established identities at every turn, it is a perceptive, poignant and deeply profound meditation on how the race-thinking of the plantation continues to structure our sense of ourselves all the way down . It is an essential intervention on behalf of those of us who wish to confront and overcome the resurgence of racism today.' -Anshuman Mondal, Professor of Modern Literature at UEA '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, author of We That Are Young

By:   Tessa McWatt
Imprint:   Scribe Publications
Country of Publication:   Australia
Dimensions:   Height: 208mm,  Width: 149mm,  Spine: 20mm
Weight:   313g
ISBN:   9781925849011
ISBN 10:   1925849015
Publication Date:   August 2019
Audience:   General/trade ,  ELT Advanced
Format:   Paperback
Publisher's Status:   Active

Tessa McWatt is the author of six novels and two books for young people. Her fiction has been nominated for the Governor General's Award, the City of Toronto Book Awards, and the OCM Bocas Prize. Her most recent novel is Higher Ed (Scribe/Random House Canada), and she is the co-editor, along with Dionne Brand and Rabindranath Maharaj, of Luminous Ink- writers on writing in Canada (Cormorant). Her forthcoming books include Where Are You Agnes? (Groundwood Books), a picture book for children based on the life of abstract expressionist painter Agnes Martin. She is one of the winners of the Eccles British Library Award 2018, for her forthcoming memoir- Shame on Me- an anatomy of race and belonging. She is also a librettist, most recently working with British composer Hannah Kendall. McWatt is a Professor of Creative Writing at the University of East Anglia.