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Floating In a Most Peculiar Way

A Memoir

ebook
1 of 1 copy available
1 of 1 copy available

The astonishing journey of a bright, utterly displaced boy, from the short-lived African nation of Biafra, to Jamaica, to the harshest streets of Los Angeles—a searing memoir that adds fascinating depth to the coming-to-America story

The first time Chude-Sokei realizes that he is “first son of the first son” of a renowned leader of the bygone African nation is in Uncle Daddy and Big Auntie’s strict religious household in Jamaica, where he lives with other abandoned children. A visiting African has just fallen to his knees to shake him by the shoulders: “Is this the boy? Is this him?”

Chude-Sokei’s immersion in the politics of race and belonging across the landscape of the African diaspora takes a turn when his traumatized mother, who has her own extraordinary history as the onetime “Jackie O of Biafra,” finally sends for him to come live with her. In Inglewood, Los Angeles, on the eve of gangsta rap and the LA riots, it’s as if he’s fallen to Earth. In this world, anything alien—definitely Chude-Sokei’s secret obsession with science fiction and David Bowie—is a danger, and his yearning to become a Black American gets deeply, sometimes absurdly, complicated. Ultimately, it is a boisterous pan-African family of honorary aunts, uncles, and cousins that becomes his secret society, teaching him the redemptive skill of navigating not just Blackness, but Blacknesses, in his America.

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    • Publisher's Weekly

      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.

    • Booklist

      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.

      COPYRIGHT(2020) Booklist, ALL RIGHTS RESERVED.

    • Kirkus

      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.

      COPYRIGHT(2020) Kirkus Reviews, ALL RIGHTS RESERVED.

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