Louis Chude-Sokei

In this engrossing memoir, Louis Chude-Sokei explores what it means to be a Black man who's lived in—or sometimes on the outside of—various different African diasporic communities. Born during the Biafra War to an Igbo father and a Jamaican mother, Chude-Sokei spent time in a refugee camp in Gabon as a child before being raised by grandparents in Jamaica, reunited with his mother in the United States, and eventually returning to visit Nigeria as an adult. In none of these places does he feel that he quite fits, or that his sense of who he is as a Black man quite matches the expectations of those around him—he's too African for Jamaicans, too Jamaican for Black Americans, too American for his Nigerian kin.

Chude-Sokei writes in a understated way that eschews a lot of editorialising or setting out lessons learned—even when he's talking about some experiences that the reader has to imagine were personally upsetting, if not traumatising. He also forgoes tangents into, say, the specific histories of Black neighbourhoods in Los Angeles or a timeline of the Biafra War. While this means that some readers may not grasp the full import or context of certain events, as a narrative choice I thought it worked, allowing Chude-Sokei to focus on the immediacy of his personal experiences.… (meer)