Handed Down

In Chantal Braganza’s Story of Your Mother, the mother of the title is the author herself. Through a series of unnamed and unnumbered essays, some not much more than a few lines long, the Chatelaine deputy editor explores parenthood in tender and evocative scenes that grapple with larger ideas about identity and belonging.

Braganza dips in and out of the second person. On some pages, she addresses her eldest child directly, anticipating a question he has yet to ask: “Where am I from?” She shares stories from his life, from her life before him, and from the lives of his grandparents: “I can tell you this one day, when you haven’t asked, precisely because you aren’t likely to. I often think about the ways your life may have indirectly answered the question for you already.” By weaving together intergenerational experiences, Braganza reiterates how the circumstances of those who come before help to shape the person one becomes. With reference to the works of Dionne Brand and Lee Maracle, among others, she also reflects on the iterative creative process — repetition is a kind of fashioning. “I have been thinking about return as a form of reproduction,” she writes early in the book. “One story, told many times over, each one a little true.”

Story of Your Mother opens with memories of Braganza’s parents. Here the repetition of a small biographical detail about her dad creates deeper meaning. As a young man, he briefly worked two jobs: an administrative position with the City of Toronto by day and takeout delivery at night. “By day he is treated with respect,” Braganza writes, “but something happens in the evenings, something not unexpected but still life-changing in his experience of the world afterwards.” After hours, he was “more aware than ever of his status of not being born to a place, of non-inheritance, of seeking varying levels of either approval or respect from people who can be at turns patronizing, kind, or cruel for reasons that have more to do with their own discomfort with the feelings his presence gives rise to than anything he’s actually done.”

Born in Mombasa, Kenya, Braganza’s father was sent to boarding school in western India before leaving to join an older brother in England and then, ultimately, immigrating to Toronto. At first, reference to his moonlighting serves as an aside — a footnote in the life of a young man saving money for a trip to Greece that unexpectedly ended in Mexico, where he met the woman who would become Braganza’s mother. Later, in addressing her son, Braganza draws a link between the COVID‑19 pandemic and her father’s early years in Canada. After ordering a pizza one night — a weekly ritual during Toronto’s fourth lockdown — Braganza shared “an offhand story” about how her dad once delivered food from Swiss Chalet. Her son drew a more literal connection in his mind, as children often do, and later asked his grandfather if he was still a “pizza man.” The broken-telephone exchange between generations was not well received. “I was not prepared for how much this would bother him,” Braganza writes of her father. “Not because he felt it in any way embarrassing or undignified, but because, despite telling me his own versions of origin stories for years, it was the first time he had been materially presented with the fact that such tellings could be relayed differently, understood in a way he did not expect — that they took on a life of their own after they were given.”

Elsewhere, Braganza returns to her father’s story once more, wondering whether her son would have interpreted it differently if she had told it with a different intention. Ultimately, she includes an email her father sent to clarify the record: for about a year, he worked a delivery gig with Swiss Chalet, so that he could afford to take six months away from his job at city hall. “The toughest part was when some called me ‘the chicken man,’ ” he wrote. “I was clandestine about this job as many at that time did not look kindly on this type of work.”

Presented four different ways, the repeated family anecdote becomes a kind of “transcendent art,” a term Braganza uses to describe the work of the Spanish filmmaker Pedro Almodóvar. As a second-generation Canadian, Braganza embodies the inherent gulfs and miscommunications known to those whose families were partly shaped in disparate places and in different languages: “Transcendent art often comes from repetition, turning one idea over and over many times in your mind, returning to it, examining each facet and cut. Its retelling is what makes the story whole, legible, real.”

Often intergenerational conversations about belonging are little more than whispers. With this book, filled with memories like her father’s, Braganza is having them out loud — and writing not about how motherhood makes her feel but about how it can be “understood as structure, an organizing principle, infinitely interpretable.” Although a slim volume, Story of Your Mother is a thoughtful exploration of the fact that we are — all of us — a product of stories: the ones we tell ourselves, and the ones that were told for us before we were old enough to realize what stories were.