Shame on Me

"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 Meis 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." (From Random House Canada)

Shame on Mewas on the shortlist for the 2020Hilary Weston Writers' Trust Prize for Nonfiction.

Shame on Meisa finalistfor the 2020 Governor General's Literary Prize for nonfiction.

McWatt is the author of several works of fiction. Her novels includeDragons Cry,Vital SignsandHigher Ed. She is also the co-editor of the anthologyLuminous Ink: Writers on Writing in Canada.Shame on Meis her first work of nonfiction.

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Why Tessa McWatt wrote Shame on Me

"In 2016, Trump got elected, Brexit happened, and the whole world seemed dominated by people who wanted more division, more cages, more refugee camps. I've been writing about race and belonging my whole career. That was through fiction.

"I decided that I had to bring myself into [writing nonfiction]as a way of managing my own anger. So I decided to talk about myself through my body;the structure of the book is through body parts. Then I decided that I wanted to unpack what race was through body parts.

Race is a construct whereas racism is the reality every day on the street, in the classroom, within the boardroom et cetera.- Tessa McWatt

"I was looking at my own multiracial heritage and trying to understand racism. as opposed to race. Race is a construct whereas racism is the reality every day on the street, in the classroom, within the boardroom et cetera.I wanted to break it down so that I could undermine the biological notion ofwhat race is because I have a body that conforms and doesn't conform to stereotypes of all my multiracial backgrounds.

"It became a science experiment: I was going to dissect what race was and dissect my body in order to bring upthese other issues."

Read more in her interview with CBC Books.

Interviews with Tessa McWatt

The Next Chapter21:03Tessa McWatt on Shame on Me

The novelist Tessa McWatt on her award-winning memoir Shame on Me: An Anatomy of Race and Belonging