43 pages • 1 hour read
David ChariandyBrother: A Novel
Fiction | Novel | YA | Published in 2017A modern alternative to SparkNotes and CliffsNotes, SuperSummary offers high-quality Study Guides with detailed chapter summaries and analysis of major themes, characters, and more.
Symbols & Motifs
Grief
Content Warning: This section of the guide discusses police brutality, murder, and racism.
Grief is a motif in Brother that helps develop the overall mood of sorrowfulness throughout the novel. Ruth and Michael both experience prolonged grief over Francis’s death. Ruth is diagnosed with complicated grief, which results in lapses of memory and hallucinations. Michael’s grief results in stagnation and isolation as he focuses on caring for his mother, claiming to protect her but also protecting himself. However, their specific grief expands to encompass grief about their circumstances, Michael’s lack of identity, and life’s promises being unfulfilled. Francis’s death represents the culmination of the racism, lack of compassion, institutionalized apathy, and toxic stereotypes of the society the boys inhabit. Therefore, mourning Francis’s loss is also mourning all these societal factors that contributed to Francis’s death. Michael and his mother’s character arcs are defined by striving to move through the grief they have been unable to reconcile.
Racism
Racism is a motif that informs the themes, plot, and character development in Brother. Racism is an antagonistic force against Francis and Michael, as the novel details the ways both individual and institutionalized racism impacts their educations, opportunities, and, ultimately, their abilities to stay alive. A formative moment that informs their character development occurs at the movie theater, where three white boys assault Ruth and hurl misogynist and racist slurs at her, highlighting the ways that racism motivates strangers to attack them in public. These forms of racist aggression by individuals appear frequently in the novel, but Chariandy also draws attention to the ways racism is systemic and baked into social institutions. Francis experiences this at school, where he is moved to a program beneath his skill level, contributing to his disinterest in school despite his love of learning. Furthermore, the repeated raids the police conduct on Desirea’s emphasize the systemic nature of racism and its most fatal consequences. Despite consistently finding no evidence of wrongdoing at Desirea’s, the police surveil the shop constantly, including the night they kill Francis. Their raids on the barbershop reflect a racist idea: that a group of Black men mingling in the same place are inherently up to something nefarious.
Trinidad
In this novel, Trinidad symbolizes identity. Because Michael and Francis didn’t grow up in Trinidad like their mother, they lack a strong foundation of Black identity, culture, and history, which is not reflected in majority-white Canada. In Trinidad, however, Francis and Michael see the celebration of Black lives everywhere, even finding it difficult to reconcile the history of enslavement and indentured servitude with the beauty and liberation they experience there. In their family’s village, they admire the vast sky of stars and appreciate the silence, two things they don’t experience in their city. Furthermore, Trinidad is also a symbol of everything Ruth left behind. Trinidad represents community, which she lacks in Scarborough.
Music
Music is a frequent motif in Brother. Music not only represents identity, such as Michael’s self-conscious reference to playing air drums to Rush, but it also serves as a form of community and a tie to one’s cultural roots. Jelly, a DJ known for blending contemporary hip-hop with traditional music from Trinidad and West Africa, best represents this motif. His name is similar to the term djeli, which refers to a traditional West African storyteller who uses music, poetry, and other forms of oral storytelling to keep culture and history alive. As an adult, he takes on this spelling, referring to himself as DJ Djeli on a flyer. Music brings together not only different genres but also generations. In the barbershop, the boys hear “as if with new ears, the music of [their] parents, the lost arts of funk especially, but also ska and soul, blues and jazz” (102). Notably, at the end of the novel, Ruth asks Jelly to turn up the volume on the music he’s playing, signaling a shift in her character as she is finally ready to embrace joy.
