Tọ́pẹ́ Fọlárìn’s debut novel A Particular Kind of Black Man, previously titled The Proximity of Distance, was very easy to read. Crisp sentences and accessible language. The novel, which is a kind of meditation on identity, memory, and the definition of home, continues the conversation started with his two previous short stories Miracle (2013) and Genesis (2016), both nominated for the prestigious Caine Prize for African Writing (the former winning the top prize in 2013). The writer is fascinated with this subject — many would say because he has lived it — telling me in an interview after his first short story was shortlisted that “I’d love to inaugurate—or at least continue—a conversation about identity, and how we all share an essential desire to ‘place’ people.”
This is a fair place to begin, and — as he stubbornly, inexplicably, continues to insist — the best point from which to interrogate this book. This context was not always welcomed in the past.
The novel begins, like Genesis did, with “the elderly white woman with frizzled gray hair” who looked at a young black boy in Utah and dangled to him what she thought was hope: the chance to serve her in heaven. This, as the boy, Túndé Akíntọ́lá, realized later, was taken from Mormon teachings that reserved a place in heaven “if you’re a good boy here on earth” for black children only as servants to the white ones. From there, it takes the reader deeper into the life of the child, his family, and the mental health issues that affected his mother, endangered his father’s life, traumatized his childhood innocence as the firstborn son, and eventually broke his parents’ marriage.
Those who have read Genesis are already familiar with this part of the character’s story. What follows, what is new, and what moves the novel forward is an exploration of the character’s own journey, maturity, and memory. And of his father, and mother, and the sacrifices made to give children a good and decent life in a new environment. Túndé’s father had a thick accent which he attributes to the many setbacks he had at work. At some point, he bought an ice cream truck with which to make ends meet. Túndé saw the truck instead as his chance to become popular within an all-white neighbourhood, a dream that also faced eventual setback.
The novel journeys through these moments and others, with affection and honesty, loss and longing. It also examines how we judge what is real and what is merely imagined, while leading us sometimes to experience it ourselves. The character, for instance, began at some point to experience something he called “double memory” where he started becoming unsure of his own sense of recall. How much can we rely on our own memories, and even things we have seen and touched, if it continues to change? In the book, this explains why the character began to set things down, for his own sanity, so he can tell the truth apart from what his mind is making up. But it also becomes the author’s literary trick to carry us along on this narrative unreliability, cleverly deployed in a show-than-tell style. When Túndé tells us earlier in the book about his younger brother, Táyọ̀’s, easy break from the family, from their stern but loving father, when he insisted on staying back in a city while the rest of the family moved on to another vicinity, and we find out later that it may not have been totally true, we discover that we may have become victim to this same deficit, or trick, of recollection that bedeviled the character — deployed to keep us on our toes, keep us from pretending to know more than is shown to us.
But by bringing the novel back into the conversation around the Caine Prize and the alleged controversy around the Fọlárìn’s heritage when he was first shortlisted for the Prize (for the record, I was attentive to that particular process, and any insinuation — if at all — that the author wasn’t “African enough” was not by any notable critic as was alleged in this review at the LA Review of Books. Maybe internet trolls, at best), Fọlárìn wants us to look at him anew and give him his due as just an authentic African as any. It is not necessary; no work of art will do that anyway. He is African in every way one can possibly be an African — and in every way the Caine Prize describes it for the purpose of their prize. It was never in doubt, and we did not need the novel to realize it.
What the work does — if he had allowed us to enjoy it on its own merit — is show us one person’s story, and journey, through an immigrant experience he did not choose nor have much of a say in, to a place of peace and satisfaction — or some closure. The question of the extent of fiction in the work has been rendered moot by his tacit embrace of the label, if only as a point of departure. (Sana Goyal’s aforementioned review calls it “an autobiographical coming-of-age, immigrant novel”), perhaps in the traditions set by Angelou and Ṣóyínká and other memoirists. The category does not diminish the work, but it doesn’t totally capture it either.
There’s a way in which parts of the book remind me of Bassey Ikpi’s recent book which nods to a similar idea of the unreliable narrator challenged by bipolar or schizophrenic disorder. Even Ikpi’s title I’m Telling the Truth But I’m Lying makes an explicit case for a wary consumer. Where Fọlárìn’s work differs — more than just the label (one is called a “novel” while the other is called “essays”) — is that the exploration of mental illness in the latter exists as a running thread under layers of other family issues than a most dominant narrative. This is arguable of course. Both are different explorations of life as a Nigerian in an all-white environment, and in America — not always the same thing.
A Particular Kind of Black Man is an immigrant story. It is a coming of age autobiography. It is a story of love and forgiveness and a search for home. It is both a public testament to survival and discovery as a personal record of the journey that took him there. It is also a well-written book, raw at times, and moving. Its tender and thoughtful meditation on displacement, loss, memory, and belonging is universal, as is its exposure of the pain of finding home in a new place. For many people — and it was for me as well — the novel is also a kind of tragedy. Not just for Túndé and his brother this time, but for their parents. This review will not do enough in capturing the pain and vulnerability of how lives get irrevocably changed by migrating to a new place; the effect on marriage, on personal growth, on the sense of self. In that way, the most memorable character, in the end, was his mom — in what she struggled through, and survived — if only barely — with the scars and losses that came with it.
The angle of the quest for personal faith, brilliantly recounted in Miracle, was notably absent in this book — and it was never quite promised — but it might be just as well. In the place of this or other examples of Túndé’s wandering towards what is true, we have family — his distant grandmother’s voice on the phone — and a romantic encounter, both adding a tender element to the journey that took him from Utah through Texas to Lagos, and through his own mind and doubts, to a place where home finds him, or — we’d rather believe — he finds himself.
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A Particular Kind of Black Man was published in August 2019 by Simon & Schuster. Get it on Amazon.
