Gutter Child
By Jael Richardson
HarperCollins Canada
Woah. If you can handle it, stop what you’re doing right now and read this book. It won’t be easy, but it will open your eyes, your heart and your mind.
Gutter Child may take place in an imagined world, but there are echoes of this imagined world in Canada, in the United States and probably every other country. It’s the story of a child, born into a marginalized, racialized community, who is adopted out into a different community, a different racial family. Elimina, the child, was adopted by a single mother and raised in her adopted community, even though she was visibly different. Her skin was a different colour, and, as if that wasn’t enough, one of her hands is branded with an X to mark her as forever different. Although she’s raised in privilege, there are challenges. Her mere presence causes her mother to be shunned; she can’t go to school, doctors won’t treat her, they mostly stay inside their house.
When Elimina is a teenager, her mother dies. She’s sent to live in an “academy,” where she will work to pay off her “debt” to society. But that’s better than being sent back to the gutter – the place she was born. Everything she’s heard about the gutter is negative. According to her community’s newspapers, it’s riddled with crime, poverty and disease. Her dream is to one day make it to the hill, a halcyon place where people like her live in relative ease, having either been born to it or having worked off their entire debt.
Canadian author Jael Richardson is the artistic director of the Festival of Literary Diversity and a books columnist for CBC. She also wrote the award-winning memoir The Stone Thrower: A Daughter’s Lesson, a Father’s Life, a memoir based on her relationship with her father, CFL quarterback Chuck Ealey.
After reading the first 50 pages or so of The Gutter Child, I was strongly reminded of Margaret Atwood’s The Handmaid’s Tale, another dystopian novel. While Handmaid focuses on the lives of women, Gutter Child shines a light on racism, in all of its forms. You will recognize your own community in this novel, and it won’t be pretty. Think of residential schools, the Sixties Scoop or in the United States, segregation, slavery or racist police violence and you will see this imagined world is not far from reality.
As a white person, I don’t feel fully equipped to understand all of the nuances in this novel, but what I do understand is that the stories we tell matter, sometimes for generations. Be careful with those you choose to believe, tell yourself and perpetuate.
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