Floating in a Most Peculiar Way

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. (Feb.)