Floating In a Most Peculiar Way

November 16, 2020
In this intricate memoir, Boston University English professor Chude-Sokei (The Sound of Culture: Diaspora and Black Technopoetics) chronicles a peripatetic youth that took him from the Jamaican halfway house where his mother, traumatized by her marriage to a murdered Biafran revolutionary, left him, to reuniting with her in Washington, D.C., as a preteen, and later striking out on his own as a young teenager in a rough Los Angeles neighborhood. Chude-Sokei writes of feeling like a stranger in his own land, whether it’s for his accent, his background, or his love of learning. Adding to this sense of unrest is an extended network of aunts, uncles, and cousins who come from different places and countries, leading Chude-Sokei to wonder how he fits into America as a Black person who is not culturally African American. Chude-Sokei’s understated, lyrical prose propels the memoir through action (his stay in a chaotic Kingston hospital after he is attacked during a visit) and the insights of a young man finding his identity when he’s too free-thinking for his traditionally minded African family and out of place in a post–Rodney King L.A. What emerges is a beautiful, plainspoken work in which Chude-Sokei concludes that the cacophonous diaspora he comes from is his actual culture. This hard-to-put-down memoir both enlightens and inspires.

December 1, 2020
This absorbing memoir from Chude-Sokei, director of Boston University's African American studies program, chronicles his personal journey through the African diaspora. Chude-Sokei's first memories are from Jamaica, where he lived in a sort of foster home, but he was born in Biafra, a short-lived country seceded from Nigeria, and was the son of a famous Biafran revolutionary killed during the civil war. His mother (the Jackie O of Biafra) ultimately retrieves him to settle with her in Washington, D.C. and later in a downtrodden area of Los Angeles. Through all of it there is a great web of African aunts and uncles consistently telling him that he is African, not Jamaican, and certainly not Black like those descended from slavery. Yet Chude-Sokei wants nothing more than to be a part of Black culture, both out of admiration and survival, although his love of David Bowie is just one of many things he feels set him apart from both cultures. He explores this dichotomy in clear, engaging writing, making this book highly recommended for all memoir readers.

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December 15, 2020
A distinguished literary scholar delivers an affecting memoir of life as an exile, with a David Bowie soundtrack in the background. "We were from Biafra, mind you. Not Nigeria." So writes Boston University professor Chude-Sokei, who left his homeland after what has been called "Africa's first televised war." His father, a major, died in the conflict--assassinated, it was said--whereupon his mother, a Jamaican, returned to her native country with her young son. "All I had with me when I arrived in Jamaica," writes the author, "was a song, not an Igbo song but a Western one played on the radio about floating in space and choosing never to come down. It was a song about someone named Major Tom, and it eventually became my only memory of my origins in Africa." Early on, as he shows in this forthright, deftly profound narrative, he stood as a definitive outsider, given to reading what an aunt called "foolish space books," among the many things left behind when his mother moved her family to America. In the U.S., Chude-Sokei discovered further mysteries, including something he'd never heard before--the N-word--and something he'd never encountered before: an odd sort of racism that came at him from both sides, from Whites and from Blacks, such as a teacher who informed his schoolmates that "Africans were backward and spent all their time killing one another, like in Uganda and Biafra, and were an embarrassment to real black people." With Bowie's "Space Oddity" as his madeleine, the author grew up to explore both his adopted country and his native one. Just as Major Tom died along with his creator, so Chude-Sokei's old world was eventually foreclosed as his cancer-stricken mother extracted a promise from him to bury her in Nigeria. And so he did, "placing my mother's remains next to my father's grave near the house he'd built for her before the war scattered us." A beautifully written contribution to recent work of the African diaspora.

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