Tessa McWatt was born in Georgetown, Guyana, and was three years old when her family moved to Canada. Raised in Toronto in an extended family, she pursued literature, sports, and music, but knew from a very young age that she wanted to write. She studied English at Queen’s University and later at the University of Toronto, where her Master’s degree focused on post-colonial literature, exploring themes of the outsider in society and conflicting notions of belonging.

Upon completing her university studies, McWatt was employed as an editor and college instructor, living in Montreal, Paris, and Ottawa. Published in 1998, her first novel, Out of My Skin, is the story of an adopted Canadian woman trying to define her roots. Her second novel, Dragons Cry (2000), explores family relationships and love, and was shortlisted for the City of Toronto Book Award and the Governor General’s Literary Award for Fiction.

In 1999 McWatt moved to London, England, to research her third novel, This Body (2004). While working part-time teaching creative writing and helping to raise two children, she began to explore a new European angle to the themes of family, memory, migration, and post-colonialism. She also wrote a young-adult novella titled There’s No Place Like . . . (2004). Step Closer (2009), her fourth novel, was researched and written while travelling in Canada, Spain, Kenya, and Scotland.

McWatt developed and leads the MA Writing: Imaginative Practice at the University of East London, a program that fosters new writing by encouraging students to experiment with hybridity and to move beyond traditional notions of form and genre. She explores different forms of writing through collaborations with other artists. She worked with a graphic artist for her latest novel called Vital Signs. McWatt is also working with John Berger, the British novelist, painter, and art historian, to develop a film based on his novel To the Wedding.

Tessa McWatt divides her time between her two extended families in London, England, and Toronto, Canada.

SHAME ON ME

Interrogating our ideas of race through the lens of her own multi-racial identity, critically acclaimed novelist Tessa McWatt turns her eye on herself, her body, and this world in a powerful new work of non-fiction.

Tessa McWatt has been called Susie Wong, Pocahontas, and “black bitch,” and has been judged as 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 Me is 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.

DIVE DEEPER

Reviews:

• “Shame on Me by Tessa McWatt review – on race and belonging” — The Guardian
• “Review of Shame on Me by Tessa McWatt” — The Saturday Paper