Prince Shakur's powerful memoir an unflinching portrait of gay Black man's search for self
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Prince Shakur grew up in Cleveland as the son of Jamaican immigrants, spent summers in Jamaica with his father's family, organized politically at and graduated from college at Ohio University, traveled extensively, and moved to Columbus in 2018, where he wrote a powerful memoir of what has already been an eventful life, “When They Tell You to Be Good.” This year, he moved to New York City.
Shakur's memoir, which was the first project picked up by Columbus author Hanif Abdurraqib in his position of nonfiction editor-at-large at Tin House, circles through his life, tunneling deeper into it rather than following a straight line, stopping to revisit memorable points or periods but not arranging them into chronological order.
The narrative strategy pays off.
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Rather than falling into the trap, particularly frequent among young writers, of structuring his life as leading up to one final, fixed epiphany, this memoir reveals a slow, complicated, and unfinished process of coming to terms with one's life. Shakur reaches tentative conclusions, abandons them, and then moves to integrate new knowledge and experience in a process both intellectual and deeply emotional.
And he has a lot to make sense of.
Family ties untied
For one thing, there's his mother, protective but often harsh, and disgusted by the fact that Shakur is gay, a fact that no number of trips to evangelical churches will change.
And then there are the number of violent deaths on the male side of his family. His father was murdered when Shakur was a child. So were two of his mother's brothers.
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Men in his life who didn't actually die also tended to disappear: His Jamaican stepfather, in the United States illegally, had to be hidden away from the authorities, and was eventually deported.
“My Jamaican family was littered with men who came to the United States, sold drugs, spent time in prison and were deported. It was also littered with women forced into the background, piled high with sacrifices and the responsibilities of caring for the young,” Shakur writes.
Searching for role models, he found none.
In his world, Shakur writes, “boys are raised to be providers, aggressors, defenders, and silencers of women.”
An outsider looking in
Throughout his life, he feels like an outsider. Sent to live in Jamaica for a year when he's 5, he is teased for his accent and habits. As a teenager in Cleveland, he hides his sexuality.
At Ohio University, he feels isolated because of his background and race, and though he makes gay friends, he doesn't share their ease at interacting with each other.
Working in kitchens in mountain towns in the West during summer break, he feels disconnected from his boisterous, almost uniformly white co-workers, and traveling in the Philippines or Morocco, he feels that he doesn't fit in.
This outsider status leads to some questionable behavior, including a heavy use of alcohol. But it also makes him an observer and a seeker.
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He observes and analyzes his own behavior scrupulously, but he also looks outward, crafting careful portraits of many of the people he meets during his work and travels.
And from the time he's a kid on, he reads, using books to make sense of his feelings, and he starts writing, keeping a journal.
Reading Anne Frank's diary as he crouches in front of the heating vent in his room when he's 11, he thinks, “If writing could help her, a teenage girl trapped in a hiding space in Amsterdam who was also trying to understand her family, then it could help me, a Black boy trying to do the same.”
His memories, presented her with grace and care, will likely help others caught in those same adolescent binds.
At a glance
Prince Shakur will appear at a book launch from 8 to 9 p.m. Tuesday at Two Dollar Radio Headquarters, 1124 Parsons Ave. Shakur will read from his book and have a conversation with Columbus author Hanif Abdurraqib. Admission is free; reservations are recommended. (twodollarradiohq.com)
This article originally appeared on The Columbus Dispatch: Prince Shakur: Ohio man's memoir describes growing up Black, gay
