Its Only Success Was Making Me Mad
Warning: This is a very emotional (and therefore not the best-argumented) blog-post.
Just in case I have not been vocal enough about my opinion on What We All Long For, I will, once more, make it clear.
The book makes me incredibly angry.
The novel had aimed to challenge ideas of “labeling” and “belonging”. It attempted to make readers question the validity of classifying people due to their skin color, their cultural background, their supposed heritage, or their looks.
However, in doing so, it portrayed rather stereotypical “immigrants”/ “first-generation” individuals, and showcased predictable characters.
Due to What We All Long For, many Canadians feeling uncomfortable about immigration might assume their views are being justified. “They’re a bunch of lazy, drug-using, good-for-nothing, money-leeching, ungrateful kids,” such readers might muse. “The author clearly agrees.” (And although this might be a misrepresentation of Brand’s goal, the truth is that her book presents her characters as such).
Furthermore, to me, each of the characters felt familiar in an unpleasant way. They could have been protagonists of a badly written fiction or a clunky young-adult novel.
Tuyen was the ever confused, suffering, rebel artist, that aimed to deal with her duality through transcendent art. Her family (although well-intentioned), obviously could not understand her complexity and depth. (Disney movies have been made which contain less clichés than her attitude and story.)
Carla was the girl with a lot of deep-seeded issues, which presented themselves in unhealthy habits and manic tendencies. (She could have used a visit to Dr. Phil and a can of pepper-spray to deal with Tuyen’s leers and constant, creepy sexual advances.)
Oku was the pinning poet who dropped out of school but still feared his dad’s disapproval. Please. (Also, would Brand really have us believe this man was going to get a Master’s degree in English when he couldn’t even communicate in a half-intelligent manner during most of her book?)
Quy, was the self-proclaimed bad guy who was thrust into the big, bad world and learned to deal. (Sadly, because he was written by Dionne Brand and she clearly hated him, his ending was anti-climatic, disappointing, angering, inconclusive and offensive.)
Jackie was the outspoken fashionista who used boys and was scared of letting anyone get too close to her heart. (But apparently, she had no issues letting mostly everyone get close to her vagina.)
Due to these two reasons in particular, I was unable to care for Dionne Brand’s message or opinion on what we all really long for. Thoughts on citizenship and migration took a backseat to the constant annoyance and ire-induced nausea I felt when reading.
Finally, had I not been a student asked to read deeper into Dionne Brand’s poetic prose, I might have assumed she was in fact presenting anti-immigration advocates with the perfect example of why immigration is bad for a country.
I am amazed by your passion for What We All Long For, even if it is quiet negative. I agree with you that the characters are indeed very generic. You can consider them your typical “lower middle class kids, from a suburban migrant family.” These immigrants are indeed, as you said, “very predictable.” However, what else could the author do? After all, she is trying to present a realistic setting of globalized urban environment. While her characters are generic, they are believable. It wouldn’t make sense for her to have all these Swiss and Norwegian migrant kids struggling to make it a day in Toronto, right?
You mentioned some other things about the novel which bothered you, and this is one thing I had to confront you on. Everything else, totally agree!
Unarguably, changing the struggles each of the characters faced could have affected how realistic the portrayal of a “lower middle class kid” was.
It would be, as you point out, harder to imagine a young, white, European immigrant facing discrimination and questioning whether he belonged in a predominantly white society or not.
However, my issue with Dionne Brand’s characters was more focused on their reactions to the environment they lived in.
I can concede that many immigrants would have faced the same badly-posed dilemmas she presents in her book. But her lack of development in their personalities, although meant to portray how utterly meaningless their lives and actions are in a big city, only caused me to detest and feel condescension for Tuyen, Carla, Oku, Quy, and Jackie. Their plights could have been presented in a more humane manner, not to evoke sympathy in the reader, but to keep him/her from wanting to burn the novel.
As it stands, their pain, suffering, and questions regarding belonging were all dwarfed by the lack of character development. What could have been soul-bearing revelations or at least thought-inducing moments were reduced to eye-rolling passages due to the childish, angst-ridden presentation of each young person.
Dionne Brand made me sometimes forget the group of young adults was actually twenty-something years old and unaccomplished, since their pettiness often reminded me of being a teenager, when “ZOMG, nobody understands my depth and complexity.”