Tunde’s mother — a Beatles and Bob Dylan fan who comes to America from Lagos expecting “a country where love conquered all, where black people and white people lived together in peace and harmony” — battles both mental illness and a distinctly diasporic unhappiness that will be familiar to readers who have experienced similar scenes in their own families. Free sleep tracks . Yet, while he studies these men and makes himself in their image, Tunde knows that they “do not match what is on the inside.”Outside Tunde’s home, the world is in as much disarray. There is no stable definition of black boy, or later, black man for him to inhabit. The futuristic Lagos of Nnedi Okorafor’s sci-fi novel, ‘Lagoon.’Can an African language literature prize be inherently Pan-African? We never come to understand.It is almost as if Folarin, as author, is disinterested in the ways self-making interacts with community-making amongst the marginalized. A Particular Kind of Black Man is a straightforward story.
Yet, while he studies these men and makes himself in their image, Tunde knows that they “do not match what is on the inside.” Outside Tunde’s home, the world is in as much disarray. Well, it means that I am made up of the stuff of the universe, like everyone else. I’ve never admitted these things to myself because I always hoped that I’d figure something out, because what’s the alternative? Stream A PARTICULAR KIND OF BLACK MAN Audiobook Excerpt by Simon & Schuster Audio from desktop or your mobile device Folarin does not explicitly identify the stress of migration and racism as a factor in the emergence of her illness, but one cannot help wondering.
He does carefully lay out schizophrenia’s painful effects, the violence and upheaval it unleashes on the family.Ultimately, Tunde’s mother returns to Nigeria. Aminatta Forna, author of The Devil That Danced on the Water and Ancestor Stones "A Particular Kind of Black Man is an audacious debut, a book that is many things at once: a profound immigration narrative, a moving coming of age story, and an appraisal and defense of the novel as an essential 21st-century art form. When you purchase an independently reviewed book through our site, we earn an affiliate commission.“Task: to be where I am. Speak that truth!” my heart yells. The main currency in these conversations—the only currency, perhaps—is nostalgia. Tunde’s mother, stepmother and even his girlfriend remain characters in orbit; Tunde is the sun. It seems they are all more interested in lugging their pasts around with them than stepping into the future.Again, Folarin’s wisdom about identity shines (God knows that I have become the most obsessed with Nigerian cultural products—especially those of my childhood—since I left Nigeria).
The book closes with that reunion, and we imagine that Tunde (he has returned to writing in the first-person) has found a version of the peace/home that he has been looking for all his life.It’s a fine ending, in the way that it is committed to Tunde’s journey. “She is just too sick,” Tunde’s father says. Tunde’s lovestruck bliss is matched by his spiraling terror of connection: “It’s true, I’ve never been happier in my life,” he reflects, but then asks, “What happens after happiness?” The tragedy is that Tunde cannot even begin to come up with real answers to those questions; he would rather foreclose them with easy assumptions and easier exits. And isn’t that all that we can ask of a book? (There is also, briefly, an unhappy stepmother, but Tunde never finds her love despite his best efforts). / Even when I’m in this solemn and absurd / role: I am still the place / where creation works on itself.” This verse, from the Swedish poet Tomas Transtromer’s “Guard Duty,” provides the epigraph for Tope Folarin’s debut novel, “A Particular Kind of Black Man,” and echoes of Transtromer’s lucidly self-instructive poem ring throughout its pages.Folarin’s coming-of-age story centers on Tunde Akinola, a young Nigerian-American boy who was born in Utah and speaks English with “a solid middle-American accent.” He’s a first-generation kid, as unremarkable as so many unremarkable Americans. The fantasy of this patched-together family takes its final breath in a passage in which Tunde’s bootstrap-capitalist father, a determined disciple of the entrepreneurial dream, recruits his family to sell ice cream at the Hartville City Fair, using an old post office truck with a horn-shaped speaker jerry-built onto it, and a freezer scavenged from the junkyard.
Depending on where he looks, to Fresh Prince, to his little brother, to his friend AJ, to other black kids in a new school, what it means to be black moves and slips. What follows is, for me, one of the most poignant passages in the book, for how it weaves the disorientation of double memories with the disorientation of modern identity tasks:It’s hard to explain but I’ve always felt like I’m supposed to be somewhere else. So as I read on, I assumed Tunde is still writing about himself. Stardust and starlight and words and images and America and Nigeria and Africa and who knows what else.
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a particular kind of black man