Saga Boy: My Life of Blackness and Becoming
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Saga Boy: My Life of Blackness and Becoming
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Description
In his new home, he was still a Black boy conforming to the norms of White classmates who “were dumbstruck that I didn’t listen to rap music and talk slick ghetto jive like the Black people on TV.
SAGA BOY | Kirkus Reviews
The triumph of Saga Boy is the triumph of Blackness everywhere—the irrepressible instinct for survival in a world where Blacks are prey. Throughout Saga Boy, Downing draws the reader deep into every place he inhabits, especially Trinidad. Discovered on a Manhattan street in 2020 and introduced on Stanton’s Humans of New York Instagram page, Johnson, then 76, shares her dynamic history as a “fiercely independent” Black burlesque dancer who used the stage name Tanqueray and became a celebrated fixture in midtown adult theaters.
Tony: the scrawny youngster roving the bush country of Trinidad, learning to read from the King James Bible, singing and quoting holy verses to emulate and impress the loving yet stern grandmother who raised him. Yes I've rated my own book because it is like my child and though I see all its flaws I love it intensely. But to a very unusual part of Canada: he and his older brother are sent to live with his stern, evangelical Aunt Joan, in Wabigoon, a tiny northern Ontario community where they are the only black children in the town. Even through catastrophe, the fevered scale of Downing’s story is testament to how actions—against all odds, and again, against the follies of the self—are made from the elegant and jagged spaces where generations hold each other, even in unlikely places.
Saga Boy: My Life of Blackness and Becoming by REVIEW: Saga Boy: My Life of Blackness and Becoming by
Antonio Michael Downing is the name printed on the cover of Saga Boy, but the author just as easily could have used nearly half a dozen other monikers. This is unique as in Trinidad the meat is cooked on a high heat and pretty much boil it till it's soft. Hearing him read it and talk "Trini" was way better than I could have imagined it sounding had I read the words. And hip-hop also came from Gil Scott-Heron, from Muhammad Ali’s slick talk, and Jamaican toasters, because pioneers like Afrika Bambaataa were of Caribbean descent. A reunion with his birth parents, whom he has known only through story, closes more doors than it opens.Yet, like his father and grandfather, he has become a "Saga Boy", a Trinidadian playboy, addicted to escapism, attention, and sex. The song finds Downing thriving outside his comfort zone, his lyrics more concise and plot-driven than his typical avalanche abstract style, though the album is also rife with the latter. This is through the telling of his story, the varied nature of his life and through the raw depiction of a unique yet somehow universal inner struggle. By the time he retired and began writing Angela’s Ashes, those stories were so well rehearsed that they flowed right out of him.
- Fruugo ID: 258392218-563234582
- EAN: 764486781913
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