Battles lost, battles won
Hide and Sikh: Letters from a Life in Brown Skin
by Sunny Dhillon
Hamilton: Wolsak & Wynn, 2025
$20.00 / 9781998408320
Reviewed by Brett Josef Grubisic
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“It was the single-most destructive lie that I was ever told,” exclaims Sunny Dhillon in “Brown,” the eleventh and final essay of his first book, Hide and Sikh: Letters from a Life in Brown Skin.
Like all the book’s essays, Dhillon begins “Brown” by addressing Jaya, his young daughter. With an approach that recalls I’ve Been Meaning to Tell You: A Letter to My Daughter by former SFU professor David Chariandy, Hide and Sikh shares episodes from Dhillon’s decades in Metro Vancouver (and, later, his adopted home Ottawa). All the while, he ponders cultural evolution and wonders, with understandable concern, what kind of world his child will inhabit and necessarily navigate. A loving parent, Dhillon advises and alerts his daughter to the way of things; with “Forewarned is forearmed” seemingly active in his head, he draws illustrations from his years in order to prepare his daughter for future eventualities.
Watchful, reflective, and warily making projections based on educated guesses, Dhillon isn’t exactly hopeful. “Progress is not always linear,” he writes in the same essay. “There will, Jaya, be moments in your life when you take a step back…. There are starts and stops and leaps forward and dramatic reversals. Racial progress is the same way. It can go backwards.”
A roving but far-from-directionless essay, “Brown” recounts a visit to India (Dhillon’s first) and his subsequent up-close experiences of the “Freedom Convoy” in 2022 before it turns to the author’s childhood. “When I was a child,” he confides, “I struggled with the assertion that people did not see colour. It was completely at odds with my experience as a Brown person.” “From a very early age, I was subjected to racism. I could sometimes feel it coming,” Dhillon adds, “the same way Spider-Man can sense when danger is afoot, but if his superpower was instead geared toward yet another person calling him ‘dirty.’”
He remarks too:
To be White in this country has been to exist as a unique individual whose complex motivations cannot be captured by phases like “identity politics,” whereas to be radicalized has been to exist as part of an unthinking monolith. I capitalize the word “White” in this book for the same reasons that others might capitalize on ”Black” or “Brown” — it is a shared identity with shared experiences. To suggest otherwise, to continue with the lower case, is to perpetuate a myth around who is an individual and who cannot be.
That “single-most destructive lie”? Implicit in the claim (“People don’t see colour”) the author often heard in childhood is that Canadians had evolved; post-racial Canada, then, was a place characterized by the absence of the racial discord, discrimination, or prejudice that had once defined the status quo. Dhillon continues, “Instead, after continually hearing that people did not see colour I, well, bought it, or at least stopped fighting it. I took it at face value even as my gut, to say little of my memory bank, warned me otherwise.”
The complexity and seriousness of “Brown” might suggest that Hide and Sikh is heavy-going, angry, and accusatory. Or, a lengthy airing of grievances and complaints. Or else, a litany of episodes that document how Canadians have done Dhillon wrong. Certainly, a fraction of Canada’s White ethnic majority (that hovers at about 70% of the population, currently) might receive Dhillon’s book as a jeremiad that can’t see the forest for the trees—meaning that Dhillon’s experiences are either exceptions to the post-racial rule or else profound misunderstandings on Dhillon’s part. A pie-slice of that same demographic might counter with its own finding: that everyone experiences racism—always have, always will, such is the world.
Those hypothetical reading of Dhillon discount and denigrate him, of course. They dismiss him as delusional, as mistaken, as overly sensitive and over-reacting. When in “Prologue” the author discusses an initially friendly interaction with a man in a park that escalates rapidly and then concludes with the stranger arguing that immigrants and people of colour are “taking the place of White Canadians” (and, regrettably, tries to buttress that specious claim with “White replacement theory” ‘facts’), only willful obtuseness and deeply wishful thinking can explain away Dhillon’s point of view as a misunderstanding.
Whether in “Brown Outdoors,” “Brown Name,” or “Brown Food,” Dhillon, a veteran journalist at the Globe and Mail’s Vancouver office before he quit in 2018 (the details of which he recounts in “Brown Professional”), is revelatory. Likeable and flecked with humour, his essays are also smart and well-crafted; and the politics of them are entwined with personal vignettes that are poignant as well as and immediate.
The ostensible audience for his book, his daughter, will come to know her father’s outlook through his stories. The rest of audience, current adults who may buy or borrow the book, will learn about the daily reality of another person and understand the effects of an accretion of episodes that the author’s gut correctly understood as “People do see colour.” As with Kamal Al-Solaylee Brown’s What Being Brown in the World Today Means (to Everyone) and Desmond Cole’s The Skin We’re In: A Year of Black Resistance and Power, Hide and Sikh is educative—deeply so if, like me, you’re White and the only concern you’ve ever had with your skin colour is that it looks a bit too ghostly in winter.
And if you’re a casual follower of racial politics and believe “You’ve come a long way, baby” (to quote a ad circa 1968 for Virginia Slims that celebrated a liberated woman’s freedom—to smoke cigarettes sized for the slim fingers of lady consumers), then, finishing just one of eleven Dhillon’s essay may have you reconsidering how far we’ve in fact come, culturally-speaking, and how much further we need to go.
What would I have like to see more of in Hide and Sikh? Some of the essays would benefit from greater length—and research content. In “Brown Name,” for instance, when Dhillon discusses Ravneet, his given name, which he had “largely excised” from his life; or in “Brown Talk,” where he recalls “feeling an immense sense of pride” at being able to understand a paath, a Punjabi prayer, when he was a boy. At his grandmother’s funeral he delivers “the entire eulogy in English,” and later ponders, “How do you lose a language? Slowly, over a significant period of time. You neglect it, take it for granted along with so many aspects of your culture. Some of the words will, of course, remain committed to memory. Many others will fall from your brain.” Running well under ten pages each, the essays are too insubstantial for such heady topics. In contrast, “Brown Professional,” though generally interesting in itself, is overwhelmingly about the numerous hardships of being a fledgling journalist in a “country with a crumbling media sector.” As such, it seems a bit out of place in the book. And while Dhillon refers to the relationship between his wife (“an attractive White woman”) and himself (“a less attractive Brown man”), the very topic of being a Brown man in a relationship with a White woman is relegated to the book’s margins. Granted, the material might too personal to share with the public. And yet, Dhillon introduces the subject only to steer clear of it.
As criticisms go, asking for more isn’t much at all. In it own way, it’s really a compliment: Please, tell me more.
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Whenever he finishes it, Cull will be Brett Josef Grubisic‘s sixth novel. He assigns, edits, and posts fiction, poetry, and children’s lit reviews for BCR; occasionally, he contributes reviews as well. [He’s recently written about books by Wanda John-Kehewin, Ryan O’Dowd, Michael V. Smith, David Bouchard, Alice Turski, Louise Sidley, K.J. Denny (ed.), Sonali Zohra, Carrie Anne Vanderhoop, Kristen Pendreigh, Sam Wiebe, Maureen Young, Daniel Anctil, and Adam Welch for BCR.]
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The British Columbia Review
Interim Editors: Trevor Marc Hughes (nonfiction), Brett Josef Grubisic (fiction and poetry)
Publisher: Richard Mackie
Formerly The Ormsby Review, The British Columbia Review is an on-line book review and journal service for BC writers and readers. The Advisory Board now consists of Jean Barman, Wade Davis, Robin Fisher, Barry Gough, Hugh Johnston, Kathy Mezei, Patricia Roy, and Graeme Wynn. Provincial Government Patron (since September 2018): Creative BC. Honorary Patron: Yosef Wosk. Scholarly Patron: SFU Graduate Liberal Studies. The British Columbia Review was founded in 2016 by Richard Mackie and Alan Twigg.
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