A Particular Kind of Black Man, a novel that reads more like a memoir, will have you worried about that question, will pay out with a big and satisfying answer and then question whether or not you were told the truth.
I know that’s a confusing bit to chew on along with your Choco Taco, but let me try to explain. This book is the story of Tunde, whose family relocates to Utah from Nigeria. There aren’t any other black people in Hartville, the small town where they live and Tunde’s mother is schizophrenic. It tells the story of his childhood, on into his adulthood when he attends Morehouse College in Atlanta and becomes a writer.
Tunde’s been through a lot of stuff, and even though he tries to create himself just like his father taught him as a particular type of black man like Bryant Gumbel who could be free from the abuses of racism and xenophobia, it doesn’t work.
As an adult writer, he is no longer certain about what actually happened to him and what is part of his secondary memories that seem even clearer but may not have actually happened. Here’s what I have to say about that. I like this book. It is very readable. You will like Tunde’s voice. It’s a quick read, and I finished it in a few hours. The questioning of reality that takes place did not engage me in a narrative way…..what I mean by that is I didn’t really care to find out what is real or not nor did I care to find out what was the nature of what was happening to the narrator, and he never resolves that. However, I also didn’t find this questioning to be overdone or distracting from a nice read. Although it didn’t enhance my reading of the book, it did enhance my thinking about the book after the fact. I find his questions about self, memory, and reality to be compelling as thoughts, not as story.
If that’s too heady for you, let’s play a game. One of these three things is false about my life and the other two are true. Guess which one is false.
- When I was the only girl who lived on the campus of a male boarding school in a house with my parents, the day after I graduated from high school, my friends and I stumbled into someone’s drug fields by accident and they shot at us from the cab of an enormous black truck.
2. When I was in the sixth grade, waiting by a canal at 6:30 am in the morning in Fort Lauderdale, Florida for my dad to start and finish his staff meeting, my friend and I started throwing these coconut looking things at something floating in the water which turned out to be a dead body. An elderly resident of a retirement home across the way had had a heart attack and fallen in.
Wow, these are really not cheery to read during a quarantine, are they? Let’s make the last one a nicer memory.
3. When I was waiting outside backstage after a Hall and Oates concert, John Oates came up to me as I was leaning against the parking lot fence, reached up, took a blossom of honeysuckle down off the vine and taught me how to lick the drop of nectar off of the stem.
Congratulations to my two friends who won the contest in the “to be a lesbian nun in Iceland!” post who did guess correctly the item in my house that I named Lizzo and whom I am supposed to be sending a video of myself twerking in a nun’s habit. I don’t know if I will actually have time to turn an choir robe into a scapular and cowl, so I don’t want to make any false promises here.
If you guess this game correctly, you just win my undying respect and I will throw in a bag of Takis when the quarantine is over. And remember, in keeping with Folarin’s novel, if you ask me which one never really happened, I can’t reliably tell you anyway.
Inspiration and Information for Immigrant Advocacy 