Good Life Project - Louis Chude-Sokei | Floating Between Worlds

Episode Date: February 8, 2021

Born in the short-lived West African country of Biafra, Louis Chude-Sokei and his mom fled the country during the war that would take the life of his father, a figure of such great reverence in the country that it would create a set of expectations about who Louis was and should be that would follow him well into his adult life. Landing first in Jamaica, where his mother was from, then eventually making their way through DC, to LA, he spent his life, as the line from the Bowie song, Space Oddity, goes, “floating in a most peculiar way.” That song, in fact, has been a bit of a lifelong obsession for Louis, along with Bowie and his music and, in fact, it’s the name of his moving new memoir, Floating in a Most Peculiar Way (https://amzn.to/36NqRZh), his evolving exploration of everything from identity and race to science fiction and music. Louis is now Professor of English at Boston University where he directs the African American Studies Program. He is also the author of influential and award-winning scholarly work and his writing appears in national and international venues, and he is the Editor in Chief of The Black Scholar, the premier journal of Black Studies in America.You can find Louis Chude-Sokei at:Website : https://www.bu.edu/afam/profile/louis-chude-sokei/-------------Have you discovered your Sparketype yet? Take the Sparketype Assessment™ now. IT’S FREE (https://sparketype.com/) and takes about 7-minutes to complete. At a minimum, it’ll open your eyes in a big way. It also just might change your life.If you enjoyed the show, please share it with a friend. Thank you to our super cool brand partners. If you like the show, please support them - they help make the podcast possible. Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

So born in the short-lived West African country of Biafra, Louis Chodosuke and his mom fled the country during the war that would take the life of his father, who was also a figure of great reverence and prominence in the country. And it would create a set of expectations about who Louis was and should be that would end up following him well into his adult life, landing first in Jamaica, where his mother was actually from, and then eventually making their way through DC to LA. He spent his life, as the line from the Bowie song Space Oddity goes, floating in a most peculiar way. And that song, in fact, has been a bit of a lifelong obsession for Lewis, along with Bowie and his music. And in fact, it's the name of his really moving new memoir about this evolving exploration of everything from identity and race to science

fiction and music. Lewis is now a professor of English at Boston University, where he directs the African American Studies program. He's also the author of influential and award-winning scholarly work, and his writing appears in international and national venues. And he's the editor-in-chief of The Black Scholar, the premier journal of Black Studies in America. So excited to dive deep into this conversation with him and share it with you. I'm Jonathan Fields, and you is? You're going to die. Don't shoot him. We need him.

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charging Apple Watch, getting you eight hours of charge in just 15 minutes. The Apple Watch Series 10, available for the first time in glossy jet black aluminum. Compared to previous generations, iPhone XS or later required, charge time and actual results will vary. so you and i both share what sounds like a lifelong obsession with the same song which one bowie's space oddity i thought it was that but i wanted to confirm yeah yeah yeah which which clearly you know that you've pulled the line from it to name the new book which is fantastic um and also you know we'll'll dive into very descriptive in a lot of different ways. But I remember that song comes out, I believe it was 69. I was four or five years old. So I probably didn't hear it for another couple of years. But even though it was only

single digits in age, I can almost tell you where I was the first time I heard it. And that song has never let go of me now in my, now in my fifties. Yeah. Yeah. Same here. It's so funny because, you know, when you go through so many iterations of a book project, it becomes so many different things. But at the end, it turned out to be exactly what I set out to so many years ago, which is a book that tells the stories of my life through the lens of Bowie songs, or at least through the chapter headings of Bowie songs and my experience of space oddity from the, I won't say I can remember where I first heard it. I can remember being told where I first heard it, which is exactly how the book begins.

Yeah. So, I mean, it is an interesting sort of like jumping off point. I know, you know, for you also, and I want to circle back to this later in the conversation, sound and music and technology is also sort of like a big part of you and your exploration. The book jumps off and really, if we take a step back in time, your dad was Biafran, Igbo people, which I knew very little about. So I went back and actually did a little bit of discovery and my eyes were really open to so much of what had been going on. I guess Biafra was a country that existed before Nigeria became independent in 60, but then sort of was subsumed and then redeclared its independence for three or four years just as a state. But that ended in a civil war. So you have this country effectively that

only existed for a relatively short period of time as an actual independent entity. Yes. Yeah. The impact of Biafra, that almost country or that brief country, continues. I think it's much more definitive of contemporary Nigeria and contemporary Nigerians in the diaspora than most people acknowledge. In many ways, Biafra is the engine. The civil war and the almost genocide is the engine that drove so many Nigerians, particularly Igbos, internationally. They've always been traveling internationally, but Biafra was a really important reason for exile and migration or escape. Absolutely. Yeah. And I know there was, you know, it sounds like the region was sort of divided in this almost North, South, East and West way.

Nigeria, you mean? Yeah, Nigeria. Yeah, the greater Nigeria. You had the Hausa and Fulani up north and Yoruba in the west, Igbo in the east. And almost 200 others. Right, right. And those are only the major, major, and then all sorts of others. And it sounds like there were really, even though I think a lot of people focus on sort of what happened in the 60s and 70s on, it does sound like there is this decades long, if not longer, ethnic tension that leads to violence over and over and over in the

region? Most recently with Boko Haram and other such eruptions which continue. Yeah, yeah. And a lot of it tends to be the, at least the most deadly of the experiences of violence are the North-South tension, right? Particularly the extremely fundamentalist North and the arguably excessively cosmopolitan East and West. Yeah. Your dad in the conflict, probably not appropriate to call it conflict, in the war, was a major figure. And I guess a major figure in the country, in Biafra and in the Igbo community. And I guess it was a long time until you would know a lot of the story. Yeah. But tell me a bit about who he actually was.

As I show in the book, so much of who he was is wrapped up in myth and longing and nostalgia for what we could have been and what Nigeria or what Biafra was meant to be, but was prevented from becoming. But my father was one of those highly trained or highly capable young Africans during colonization who were sent to prestigious military schools in Europe, Sandhurst in his case, or in the case of him and his cohort, where they were being trained to take over the reins of government. When the British and the Europeans began to realize that colonization was formally going to end. It was best to prepare a new generation to take over on behalf of the British, or give them independence, but train them in England, you know, to make it an easier transition for the British.

In his own cultural context, he was a remarkable figure. He was an athlete. He was a military man. He was extremely popular. And he comes from a family that in eastern Nigeria was a well-reputed family from before colonization. Even though Igbos are famous for not having kings, Igbos have a history of really notable individuals who are treated as if they were. My godfather being one. And in eastern Nigeria, my father certainly, Nisha and his village. But he went to Sandhurst, along with all of these really capable and talented young Africans, young African men specifically. And in Sandhurst, at Sandhurst in England, is when he met my mother, who, on the other hand, was of a generation of Caribbean, highly capable young women sent to become nurses or to help rebuilding the mother country after World War II. So you have two highly gendered cohorts interacting or intersecting with my mother and my father. Yeah. I was curious that your mom coming from Jamaica ended up in the UK to study,

I guess it was nursing. I was curious about the choice between whether it was more common at the time to go to the US for education or to go to the UK, because it seems like the UK was sort of like the more dominant place where a lot of people went. Well, you know, waves of immigration have a lot to do with the whims and policies of the United States. During the early 20th century, Caribbean people came to the United States. It was easier then. And then after the number of really restrictive immigration acts in the 20s, it's harder to come to the United States. But because Britain is the quote-unquote mother country, folks try to get into England. But after

World War II, England actively reaches out to its colonies to help rebuild. And so South Asians, Caribbean people, and African people start being wooed by British companies and British industries, such as nursing for Caribbean women. And so when she goes to the UK, they go as British subjects. Oh, interesting. They have passports. Right, interesting. They have passports. Right, right. They go as British subjects, and they're going home. They're going to the seat of empire.

We tend to forget that that generation saw their relationship to the British and to the colonizer in quite a different way than their children, who were more the anti-colonial, decolonial generation. That earlier generation, this was home, and we were going there to help rebuild the mother country. And so, of course, once they get there, they discover many, many things that they did not imagine in terms of race and racism and et cetera. But West Indian nurses are a distinct thing in the UK. After 1965 and immigration changes a bit in the United States with a new set of acts meant to open up after those acts in the 1920s, those immigration acts, you start seeing folks come to the United States. And that's my generation start coming more to the United States. As I say, it's pointed out in the book, almost everybody, all the women in my family are nurses. And this is not a unique thing for West Indian people. That's so interesting. So did you ever talk to your mom about her intention had she not met your dad? Was her intention to stay there or to then just go

there to train for education and then come back? It was to go train, of course, while training, make some money, send money back, fairly typical. I don't know that she ever thought she would stay. There were many of her generation that just thought they were there for a while. They didn't really think they were going to stay for very long and go back at some point, especially since she had a mother and family back in Jamaica. So yeah, I don't think she ever intended to stay. In fact, all of our conversations and all of the things she wrote that I read, her notes and her letters and such, always suggested that this was just temporary,

even if temporary meant 10 years, but it was still temporary. Yeah. So she ends up there, does her training, meets her dad, they fall in love. And then they end up both going back to Africa. Six weeks after they meet. Right. And I'm like reading that three, I'm like, wait, did I just read that right? Yes.

Pretty incredible. And her family, it doesn't seem like, was the happiest about that. No, because, again, generations. That generation was taught that Africa was shameful. Africans were ignorant and primitive and savages, and they weren't Christian and that sort of thing. And so, you know, there's a whole history of this in the Black diaspora, slaves being taught that they should be grateful that they were taken away from Africa. So her generation pretty much believed that, especially her class. This is before reggae and Rastafarianism and Black pride. People have to remember this is before all that stuff. Once that stuff hits, we get this idea that it's always been that way. We were always proud to be Black. Well, no, people had to make us proud to be Black or teach us that this was a possibility.

She learned once she met my dad, and he was not what she expected. But she also learned accidentally because West Indians and West Africans in general didn't spend a whole lot of time with each other because of that prejudice that I just mentioned. The other side of that prejudice, of course, was from the Africans, for whom the West Indians, well, they had been slaves, right? And slaves have a distinct kind of shamefulness, even though it was forced in by colonization and et cetera. So there was no reason for them to have anything to do with each other. So that's the magic behind how they came together. Yeah. I mean, when they landed in West Africa, as you shared, your dad and his family were people

of prominence. So it's kind of stunning how quickly it goes from sort of arriving in one domain and state. And then as tensions rise and war breaks out, everything changes profoundly quickly. Your dad ends up passing at that time. And I guess tradition was that you would marry, if there was a surviving brother, that would be just what you did. That was custom, which I found interesting because I think that custom, I've heard that custom actually across a lot of different people and faith-based traditions also. It's an eminently practical one too. It's sort of like keep it all in the family.

Like we all know each other and like, each other and that we're already family. And nobody may want to marry a widow. Right. And on the one hand, it's very practical. On the other hand, it's just really strange. Yes, indeed. Yes, indeed. Especially to a Jamaican woman. So I guess knowing that that was her, quote, fate, your mom chose something else. Yeah, she chose to, as the stories go, take me and run or flee or escape. I don't know how to actually structure it because it's not something she ever talked about. And so I had to piece it together, talking to family members and, you know, and everyone, of course, has their own agendas and how they remember the story.

But yes, she was supposed to marry my next uncle, my father's next brother. And his resentment over my mother not marrying him and not giving him access to or fatherhood over the first son of the first son, which is what I was, or am, lasted for, it might continue now. I mean, it's certainly present when I'm in, you know, in the presence of this particular uncle, who I respect immensely, and I understand where he's coming from, but the resentment of that lasted for decades, decades, the whole length of my life. But yeah, she left, and with Ojukwu's help, Ojukwu, the head of state of Biafra, the king of all Igbos, as they called him before he died, helped my mother depart Biafra literally right before it collapsed and right before he escaped and went to the Ivory

Coast where he was in exile for some years. Yeah. Draco is your godfather also, right? Yes, my godfather. Right. Yeah. I mean, when you think about that, you use this phrase, the first son of the first son. Tell me more about what that really means. Well, if we were anthropologists, we would talk about the male primacy. And if the first son is the head of the family, the head of the clan, well, then the first son of that first son is not only heir to the title and the position of authority, it has this also powerful significance that the first and the first and the first. I mean, I'm sure if I had a grandson and he'd be the first son of the first son of the

first son, then God bless him. He's so much invested in terms of expectations and power. But that phrase has been repeated throughout my life whenever I encounter people who are old enough to be a part of the story going back to the late 50s and the 60s. But it still means something amongst Igbo culture in Eastern Nigeria and beyond. You're the head of the family, the titular head of the family, and there's a great deal of expectations placed on you. And as you might know, one of the stories within the book is how to be invested with such significance and meaning when you are also growing up in the United States and in the Caribbean is to always know you are going to fail those expectations.

Yeah. I mean, it sounds like especially that really started at a young age for you. You and your mom ended up in the Caribbean. And over time, people start to come and visit. And you're sort of like a young kid just trying to fit in, just trying to figure out where you belong. And then former soldiers or people of prominence or people who knew the family would show up and treat you in this way and use this language. It sounds like you really struggled with. Well, yes.

Not only because I'm a kid trying to fit in, in a country where being an African or being an outsider is particularly charged with negative feelings and emotions. As I said, this is pre-Black Pride. Or when I go back to Jamaica, Black Pride is really just seeping into the mainstream, you know, culture. But yes, you're growing up trying to fit into a culture that doesn't know what to do with you. You're also in a family that you're not related by blood, right? That's important there. You're African, but at the same time, occasional Nigerians are showing up saying, you are the first son of the first son. The war is not over, or we will win, or you will go back

and do these things. And I'm too young to even know about Nigeria or that I'm from there. What I know is that I'm in this place that I need to fit in because if I don't fit in, it will be dangerous. And so on the one hand, I've got these men coming. But on the other hand, I have people around me, you know, dismissing me, mocking me and making fun of me because I'm African or not a member of the authentic culture that I'm in. So that's a strange back and forth. And for me, that's the beginning of my real consciousness of self. Yeah. Takes it right back to that Bowie line, right? Floating in the most peculiar way. Floating in the most peculiar way. It's sort of like there's no tether. There's no

really solid anchor. And the goal is to make it a beautiful feeling, but it takes a very long time for that. Right, right. When all these people are showing up, your mom is there with you for a fairly short amount of time and then heads to the US, which I think was a fairly common pattern to sort of build a career and also help send money back to support different people and participate in the family. For you, that drops you sort of into this weird world of living with a lot of kids, auntie and uncle, which sounds like almost everybody is in some form or shape an auntie and uncle, but this was also a fairly brutal experience for you. There was a line that jumped out that you wrote. You said, and there was a lot of violence because corporal punishment and with or without any basis for it, there was beating. And you have this line where you say,

being beaten was like being punished for my African past and for my American future. Tell me about this more. On the one hand, you're an African. You're from that place associated with guilt and shame and primitive and ignorant. And so things you say and do as a child are going to be attributed to your African past. Not because you're a dumb kid. Other kids will do it and they'll be dumb kids. You do it while you're an African and that's how they are, right? But then on the other hand, my mother was in the United States. And in those days, having a parent in the United States or Canada or the UK meant that you would one day be going there. And so that is a kind of privilege, right? And so being beaten by either teachers or family members or other people, you always felt that it was for

one or both of those reasons, where you came from or where they assume you're going to go one day. And that's what I meant by that. And that's exactly how it felt. Yeah. I mean, it sounds like for you also, as this is unfolding, there's also a sense of abandonment. Your mom sort of left you. And I guess when you're young, it's got to be pretty hard to understand, even though if the reason in her mind is, I'm the scout who's going out to sort of find the place to be and then actually start to build some stability so that I can create a new place that will be better to bring my child to as a child, it just feels like you've been left behind. One of the things I struggled with in the book is trying to convey

a child's view versus a parent's view versus an adult's view looking back now understanding immigration procedures and the practicalities of border crossing, that kind of thing. But as a child, it is brutal. It is brutal. And it takes me years to forgive my mother for that. Yeah. It sounds like part of your refuge was books to a certain extent also. Which on the one hand is amazing to have that, but on the other hand, it also seems like it was yet another thing that made you a little bit weird or a little bit different than anybody else. Boy, have you nailed it. Exactly. You want to escape from being the oddball the States, that in Jamaica, even though you were an oddball, people respected books a lot.

So you were an oddball, but, well, he's reading books. That at least is something that we should respect. Yeah. And for you, it sounds like a lot of those books were sci-fi, which to this day I know is this lifelong passion and now scholarly fascination for you as well. Absolutely. Yeah. I can't remember, was it Robert Silverberg?

One of the great sci-fi writers talked about the magic age, and I can't remember the magic age. I think he said, if you haven't gotten really into sci-fi by the time you're 13 or 14, you'll never really get it. And so this is happening for me before those ages, before I hit the limit of the magic age. Yeah. There's an interesting tieback also, right? Because you have this song, Space Oddity, bouncing in your head for years before you actually even know- And I'm trying to find it on the radio all the time. Right. And that song, from my understanding, is also –

Bowie wrote that song after seeing Kubrick's – I guess it was probably a 68 film, 2001, A Space Oddity. So the name of it was a riff on that, which was one of the most epic sort of sci-fi movies of the late 60s. Yeah. Absolutely. Absolutely. Yeah.

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You're surviving as best as you can, trying to figure out which way is up. Your mom eventually brings you to the US. You get put on a plane, you meet her. The first stop is DC, which it sounds like for you, on the one hand, you're dealing with so many things because you've now changed countries. Again, you're now trying to figure out who am I in this context? Who am I without any context? Now you're in the presence of a mom who you feel abandoned you for years and in a city where you feel very strange and foreign and different. And also the ethos in the house is basically you can't leave.

And it's also where I find space oddity and find out that, ah, there's this person named David Bowie who not only did that song, but a bunch of these other weird songs I heard on the radio every now and then and really loved. But yeah, DC is where I arrive and can't leave the house for a while, certainly, but it's also where the universe of aunties begins to grow even more. Aunties from all over the place, from the Caribbean and from Africa, et cetera. Yeah. Yeah. It sounds like on the one hand, that universe is different and supportive. There's also, I mean, what's interesting is the way that you write about and the way you tell stories about aunties is portraying them as really strong, fierce women. And sometimes, you know, like gruff and direct,

but underneath it, you still get the feeling that there is, you know, there's this fabric of love, even though it might not be shown in this really, you know, it's shown as strength. And, you know, like we will give you the experience and the structure to try and make you the person we want you to be in the world. Yes. And we may not have time to hug you all the time about it, but our vision of love is conveying this very harsh information and strategies for survival here. This also applies to the folks in Jamaica as well, although it was tougher and more brutal there, but there is and was love underneath it. As I talk about in the book later on, when my mother and I debate my past, she's reminding me, they were good to you. And I'm like, well, I don't

remember them being particularly good to me. But as I get older, I understand that the definition of good changes from culture to culture in terms of child rearing, right? But the women in Washington, D.C. and throughout the United States, there is a very powerful undercurrent of love. But these are also individuals who have had to overcome a lot. Multiple countries, multiple traumas, starting over again and again, right? Race, racism, being women, patriarchy, all these things they have to deal with. And they did so without the luxury of public complaint, if I can put it that way. Yeah. I mean, being surrounded by them, having them all invested in helping to raise you into the person they would love to see you become. You're also grappling simultaneously with the fact that like, okay, but here's this one woman who is my mom, who I still feel really estranged from in a lot of different ways and angry at. And yet, she is your only living parent. You have a lot of aunties around.

So there's this perpetual tension. It's fairly soon after that, you end up moving from DC to LA. Yes. At a time. To yet another country. Right. Which is, I mean,

LA at the time that you move there is an entirely different experience for you. I mean, when you drop into that community, tell me what it was like for you to sort of go, and you're sort of perpetually bouncing from here and trying to figure out how do I first survive and then thrive and then the next place and next place and next place. When you drop into LA, what's that early experience like for you?

So I'm bouncing around, and I suppose by this time in my development, my primary mode of being is what do I need to be to work and function in this place? Right? How do I assimilate? Of course, that's not a word I knew, but that's kind of what I'm thinking. How do I assimilate? Arriving in Los Angeles, what's crucial was, as I mentioned in the book, I was happy to get there because there was an uncle. After aunties and aunties and aunties, like, yes, an uncle. Right. And perhaps this uncle will teach me all the tough guy stuff that as a young boy, you think you need to know, right? But my strongest and earliest memories of LA was basically landing in gang territory. You know, yes, there are other memories of those early days. They were lovely and wonderful. And even the awareness of gang territory was lovely and

wonderful because it was a bit of an adventure, right? And I was safe from it. I was protected. I was too young to be out on the streets on my own by that time, right? But my strongest memories of arriving in LA is arriving in a place where the awareness of street violence and gang culture is everywhere. Maybe it was slightly exaggerated because we were immigrants, Black immigrants in an African-American working class community, which I talk about later on. But that was one thing that was impressed upon me. Don't go out because of this. Yeah. I guess what I'm curious about is what that's like for you. In terms of you trying to figure out which way is up, who you are, where do you belong?

Because now it's not just, you know, you've been traveling this journey where you know that you have the West African side, you know, that you have the Caribbean side, you're now in the United States and people perceive you a certain way or, or don't. And now you're trying to find belonging within those communities and also within family. And now you dropped into this place where for a lot of people, the gang is the family. The dominant gang in my neighborhood when I was growing up was the Inglewood family. That's what they were called, the Inglewood family. So yeah, that makes perfect, perfect sense.

But I also want to emphasize that a lot of these family members, in their mind, is Biafra. We're in LA now. We were in DC. We were in Jamaica. But for my mother and a lot of my aunties, especially since we reunited with many aunties that my mother met as a nurse when she was in nursing school in England, a lot of them are working in LA now. And so we arrived there. And so the community of aunties are Nigerian and Jamaican, largely nurses. And all of them are thinking about, oh, wow, you guys, when you went to the refugee camps in Gabon before we left West Africa,

we thought you were dead. We thought you were lost. And so the Biafra thing is very much what keeps my aunts psychically together, at least the West African aunts. So that's happening. And around me is the gang culture. And also around me is the larger narrative that's now clear that African-American identity and culture is Black identity and culture where you are now. In D.C., because I was sort of secluded much from it, it begins to encroach upon my consciousness in D.C. as I write about, you know, certainly in school, when I first hear the N-word and things like that.

But when you're in L.A., South L.A., you know, at least in D.C., we were in an area, now looking back on it, where there were a number of white people and, you know at least in dc we were in an area now looking back on it where there were a number of white people and you know people from all over the world but in la it's just black folk and so the pressure of that particular identity the dominance of that particular identity is really strong yeah and also something that the family has to push against. Right. I mean, you write, of that time, anything that was alien to my friends and neighbors was branded white, even if it came from Jamaica or Nigeria. Yeah. That's something that really confused me when I was growing up. We'd listen to reggae. Oh, you listen to white people's stuff. We'd listen to juju or highlife music. Oh,

that's that white people's stuff. Now, looking back on it, I could say, okay, maybe there were some African-American folks who knew that white people had a greater fondness for Caribbean and African world music at the time, but not these kids. These kids are from my neighborhood. For them, anything that wasn't what they knew was branded as white, which is what introduces me to the idea that blackness and whiteness in many cases have nothing to do with skin. I mean, talk to me more about that because I think that's a really interesting context. Yeah. When they were talking about black and white, and this is me, the kid trying to figure

it out, I initially thought, okay, it's something that's about our skin color. But clearly it wasn't because when they say, okay, reading books is acting white, that old cliche, it may something that's about our skin color. But clearly it wasn't because when they say, okay, reading books is acting white, you know, that old cliche, it may be a cliche and it may be dismissed and argued about, but it actually was a thing that one encountered. But for me, it wasn't that they were saying white people were smarter because I didn't see any white people reading books either. Certainly not on television. Like, well, no. So what does whiteness mean? Or what does blackness mean? If they're saying that things that are Nigerian or Jamaican or Caribbean are white things, clearly they have a concept of whiteness and blackness that is independent

of skin color. At least that's how it seems to me as a child. Yeah. So was your experience at that age then that blackness in the area that you were was about African-American culture or American black okay, what, as a person trying to assimilate into whatever I must assimilate to, to stay safe and to profit and do well, in this context, blackness is that which I am not. And now that I know that it has nothing to do with my skin color, well, I need to figure out what this other thing is, right? But it's clearly not what I am. And for me, it reminds me, of course, of being in Jamaica, where being African, when the Rastas and all of the Black Pride people are talking about being Black and proud and there's African images and everyone's playing the drums, but they don't like Africans. At least that's the experience we had, right? So the Africa they're talking about is something different from where we came from. The Africa they're talking about is not a place that

has genocide and civil war. It's a place that has something to do with colonialism and racism, but not explicitly our experience of genocide, where my mother kept stressing, where one group of Black people are trying to kill another group of Black people, right? Certainly on the behest of larger colonial systems of power, but you're a kid, right? And even my parents, and my mother, that is, and my aunts, they weren't thinking in those abstract terms about global colonialism. So then you come to the United States, and okay, Blackness is that which you are not. And growing up as a Black immigrant in these communities, it's very common to be told you're

not Black enough. Your mood, your attitude, your take, your interpretation, it's not black enough. And that only emphasizes this idea that, okay, blackness is not your skin color. There is something else you are lacking. Yeah. And it sounds like a lot of the way that you responded to that was because you're an age where no matter what, we just want to feel okay. We want to know that-

And you don't want to get beat up. Right. You know, and there's a safety element to it, you know, because there was, when you're walking around at any given time, if you are alone, especially when you start to get a little bit older, you know, in an area where there's a lot of violence and based on affiliation or non-affiliation. Yeah. I mean, safety is a huge part of that. And it sounds like for you, you make some choices. This is really the way I'm going to be so that I can feel accepted and can walk safely through different places, including my life. Absolutely. Different kinds of performance, right? Okay, I will perform this kind of blackness,

or I will perform this kind of blackness, or this kind of Black maleness requires that I play football and play sports, or this kind of Black maleness means that I, you know, do the tough guy thing, right? This kind of Blackness means that, okay, I shouldn't walk around with my science fiction novels and try to share my obsession with the Diamond Dogs album with a lot of my peers, right? It would lead to even further expulsion from this emergent community called Black. Yeah. I mean, at that age, is any of this a conscious process for you? Or are you literally just opening your eyes every morning and trying to figure out, what do I need to be okay? You know, there is certainly an amount of instinct here and self-preservation.

But I remember thinking about these things and deliberating, right? I mean, when I started getting more involved in football and athletics and lifting weights and all of that, that was a choice. It was practical. Like, okay, I don't actually like football. You know, when I came to the United States, the only sport that I was aware of was cricket and soccer. That just didn't go over well. So I said, okay, football, basketball, I don't actually like these sports. However, they are crucial to this thing called Black manhood, at least when I was growing up. And so I mastered them, right? Okay, these kinds of books or these kinds of ideas are not really celebrated publicly. So I continued to master them, but kept it private. So there were a lot of choices being made. And I don't think I'm

unique in that way. I think a lot of us were much more thoughtful about those kinds of decisions, especially when you're entering your teenage years and there's pressure to conform as well as genuine fears of safety. Yeah, no, I completely agree. I mean, and for you, being a part of a team gives you that affiliation with a group, which also gives you a sense of belonging and a sense of safety without feeling like you have to participate in one of the gang activities or belong in that way. Exactly. And I think a lot of people make that deliberate choice. And don't forget, being a member of a team increases the possibility of sex. I mean, come on, we're 14

years old. For any teenage boy, it's like 99% of your waking thoughts. Exactly. That's what I mean. We are thinking about this stuff. Right, right, right. Going along with that also is sort of like stepping into a certain image. And it sounds like you're almost kind of living a double life as playing this one role on the outside, but you still got a passion for books and for reading and for sci-fi and for music on the inside, and you're not sharing it. And that reflects negatively in how you're doing in school. But then there are a couple of these sort of moments where people in school realize, oh, there's something else going on here. There's a moment where you randomly, you take a reading comp test, and then the teacher literally

calls you a cheater because you can't believe the score that you got. And what's interesting is, that could have gone on in any number of different ways, including getting you expelled from school. But the teacher, I guess, sensed that there was something else happening here and actually calls your mom into school for what you think is going to be this terrible meeting and really to sort of let her know there's something extraordinary happening here. And then a coach who I guess sees a manuscript that you had turned into or can't believe that you wrote it, and then has the sort of prescience to understand how to treat you one way privately while still, quote, honoring the reputation that you've been building. Yes. As I talk about in the book, there are a number of moments, including bad ones. There are a couple of bad moments

with teachers that I mentioned, but those are also formative. But the one you're referring to, yeah, the teacher discovering that this kid who is always in trouble, always getting into fights because he's assimilating and he's discovered or he thinks he's discovered the key to Black manhood and who's avoiding, you know, education and evading whatever talents he might have in that direction, right? And loving being in the back of the class and all of that and loving scaring people because I'm lifting weights and I'm big now. This teacher discovers that my

reading comprehension skills are beyond anything that she had ever seen. And you're right, it could have gone a different way. I also talk about how I didn't tell my mother because I didn't know what to make of it. But then I also have a coach who accidentally discovers that I'm writing a novel, and this is sixth, seventh grade. And I expect that the coach is going to either laugh at me or out me as a guy who's not only writing novels. You know, it's so funny. Just the other day, I actually found that manuscript. Oh, no kidding. It's in my mother's files.

Oh, that's amazing. I'm thinking it would be so terrifying for the kids I grew up with to not only know that I tried to write a novel, but the novel is about swords and dragons and demons and spaceships. Right? Right. That would have been like the final straw, just like the ultimate. You know, anyway, the coach discovers that I did do that. And I guess the coach turns out to also have been a hardcore fan of science fiction. And surprising surprises me by one day giving me a box of books that, you know, we couldn't really afford that many. My mother would get them every now and then, but this was a whole box of really great, well-known classic. Now that I look back on it, science fiction, but what's crucial about it is that coach realized that, okay, I must not publicly treat him like someone who loves these books and is aspiring to write them because I I understand, it's a white coach.

I understand the community that I'm in. He is a young black man and he is respected on the field of sport, but also just broadly. He's a tough guy. Or he gets involved in these scrapes, right? And so the coach, I think I wrote, I forgot the actual sentence, that the fact that she continued to treat me

like a thug in public was surprisingly generous. And it was. She understood. Yeah. She let you keep the reputation that allowed you to feel a sense of belonging and safety around you while still honoring that side that was deeper down. It sounds like really such an essential part of who you were then and who you would continue to become. And she gave me books, a bunch of great books, books, some of which, you know, have really informed, you know, who I am and what I do. Yeah. Whether you're in your running era, Pilates era, or yoga era,

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The Apple Watch Series 10 is here. It has the biggest display ever. It's also the thinnest Apple Watch ever, making it even more comfortable on your wrist, whether you're running, swimming, or sleeping. And it's the fastest-charging Apple Watch, getting you 8 hours of charge in just 15 minutes.

The Apple Watch Series 10. Available for the first time in glossy jet black aluminum. Compared to previous generations, iPhone XS or later required, charge time and actual results will vary. Mayday, mayday. We've been compromised. The pilot's a hitman. I knew you were gonna be fun. On January 24th.

Tell me how to fly this thing. Mark Wahlberg. You know what the difference between me and you is? You're going to die. Don't shoot him. We need him. Y'all need a pilot. Flight risk. You also wrote of that time, my body was becoming less and less my own property and more the product of everyone's assumptions. Yes.

This is the period of growing, puberty, young black man. We're talking the 1970s in LA, South LA. And I'm working out. I'm working out because you want to look capable of the kind of violence you may not be willing to do. You want to look peace through strength, as it were. Look like you could do violence, but you don't actually have to do anything. And so that, of course, feeds into, okay, you're this big Black guy, right? And so for people to then assume positive things of you, even Black people, it becomes less and less the case yeah I mean that for you are you aware of that perception also and and simultaneously

the fact that you're doing these things to appear a certain way but underneath it if called to act in the way that that you know was may have been expected it wasn't in you well it was in me for a time. There was a time when it was in me. I think I frame it in the context of having gone back to Jamaica after I was attacked. I mean, where I was attacked, but having gone back to Jamaica because I'd been getting into fights, right? Getting into fights. One thing I didn't talk about in detail, though, in the book, but that had something to do with it, was I got beat up a lot. It's one thing to talk about fights and then people assume that, oh, that means you did well. No, no, I got beat up a lot,

right? Quite a few scars, even before I was sent back to Jamaica as punishment, right? But then on top of that, as I do mention in the book, guns started to appear. In terms of generational shifts, I was at that period of time when getting beat up was okay, but then suddenly people started dying. And that

had a lot to do with me backing off from actual, actual violence. And my cousin went to jail, you know, and a couple of my friends got killed. Yeah. I mean, it sounds like for you also, this repeated refuge in books,

it just keeps coming back and keep coming back, keep coming back. Not just sci-fi, but also time in the library. Books didn't fail. Yeah. For you, I mean, it sounds like also high school was probably the time where the family used to regularly gather after church and not just the immediate family, but friends from all different places and all different backgrounds. And you're really exposed in a regular way to

all of these rich conversations and stories about where people came from and also debating all these different things and the way that people behave, the way people perceive, the identities that they step into, or they should or shouldn't be certain ways. It sounds like that was an experience for you, sort of like this season, that really piqued curiosity in the notion of diaspora. Yeah. And as I said, I discovered that word around the dining table with family or my mother. These are terms that they used, right? Those after church meetings, dinners, or events, because it could have been Box you know, Boxing Day or Crop Over or Independence,

Nigerian Independence or whatever, right? They also served a policing function. It was the elders trying to make sure we young people realized that we were not like these people around us. We were different. You may be Trinidadian, you may be Jamaican, you may be Igbo, you may be Yoruba, but we are a new identity, which is Black immigrant. We are not like the other folks around us, right?

Those forms of Blackness and whiteness are not for us, right? It may or may not have worked, but it certainly was the intent of these dinners. But this is also when I start discovering that there's a prejudice against science fiction in the intellectual world. I begin to realize, oh, it's not seen as serious books. They're not seen as serious books. It's not serious literature. And so I'm thinking, well, what is serious literature? And then I start reading up on some of the things that I hear people talking around at the dining table. You know, diaspora, or they're talking about Flight Lieutenant Jerry Rawlings in Ghana. And they're talking about Namdi Ezekiewe and all of these important figures. And my uncles, some of them, and aunties, my mom included, had some of these

books on the shelves. My mom had copies of my godfather's memoirs, which I'd never paid any attention to. And so I start reading that stuff, right? And as I get closer and closer to the end of high school, I mean, I've never heard of anything called African American literature or African literature or whatever, but I start paying more attention to books about Black people from different parts of the world and in the United States. And so that really prepares me for college, even though I didn't know it. Yeah. I mean, it sounds like it lights a flame that it's interesting from the outside looking in. I'm curious whether this is how you perceived it. You've got this deep impulse for learning, for reading and for learning and for discovery. And this is sort of like a way where the impulse to read, the impulse to learn and discover

and to uncover, the impulse to try and figure out a sense of identity and belonging, it all comes together for you. And then you have the ability to then say say, well, academically, here's this invitation for me to actually just pour myself into this. seen in my past or have experienced in my past. I'm researching that as in fact, the emotional core of this thing called diaspora, things start to make sense. Things don't get easier. They just start making sense. Yeah. It occurs to me, we haven't actually described, but when we're talking about diaspora, what are we actually talking about? What is the sort of the general understanding of what we're talking about? Basically, the scattering of seeds, right? It comes from that etymological origin, but

it's the scattering or spreading of a particular group of people across a global landscape internationally. The Jewish diaspora, the Armenian diaspora, etc. Of course, now the term now means people use it to mean everything, you know, anything spread out, there's a diaspora to it. But in my case, it certainly is about the African diaspora, but understood in a way that I think most of my colleagues and scholars do not understand it. In America, the dominant understanding of diaspora is through the slave trade. That's a part of my legacy too, certainly on my mother's side. But it's also true that the diaspora includes voluntary migration. It also includes labor

migration. It also includes back and forth motions and movements. So the spread is much more convoluted than the one that I started to discover as a scholar, which is really Africa, the Middle Passage, and then the so-called New World. But for me, it's like, well, you know, frequent flyer miles, people are going back and forth. And people, you know, the modern and contemporary diaspora is a lot more complicated. And the old diaspora model assumes a kind of congruence or continuity of solidarities and connections. The diaspora as I encounter it includes a lot of hostility and misapprehension and confusion and distortion and static, right? It's not the smooth movement of one group of people. For me, as you move from place to place, not only do you change, who your people are changes, right? Yeah, that makes a lot of sense. I mean, interestingly, it sounds like that perspective also leads to some tension when you're in grad school. You end up doing a dissertation, which effectively is contrasting Black immigrants with the experience of African-Americans, like Black immigrants more broadly with what you just described. So that lens though, when you're trying to find an advisor to sponsor your dissertation, it sounds like nobody wants to get on board with that exploration. And it remains thus. There is a deep anxiety and discomfort

dealing with the tensions and differences within the Black world in America. Outside of America, folks are much more comfortable dealing with it, right? Trinidadians will go on and on and on about those damn Jamaicans, right? And Jamaicans, I mean, this is comfortable for Black folk outside of the United States. But within the context of white supremacy, I mean, white supremacy is a global phenomenon, clearly. But within the context of being a marginalized minority within the United States, there is the expectation or the hope that solidarity or unity is central to how you describe the experiences of Black people in the States. And so work that wants to threaten it or question it or problematize it, or that is comfortable arguing against it, right, tends to be less celebrated.

And it tends to create a lot of hostility and resentment. There's times when at the dining table when we would get together and it seemed that we're meant to say that the great tension is black and white, but from the black immigrant's perspective, the greater tension is black and black. It is interesting. Everybody's got a different context. Everybody's got a different lens and different experience. And we also want to hold onto certain things and let go of certain things. And what I find kind of fascinating is that I feel like we're sort of like in this moment in time now, and maybe it's not a current, present tense phenomenon where we just want to make everything binary. That's exactly so.

You know, we just, because it's easier for us to understand who we are, what to get behind, what to believe, what not to believe, and what to say yes and no to, and how to live our lives. But yet it's not reality. Yes, it's not reality. But it becomes our social and political realities, especially in as divisive a moment as we're in now. Right. political realities, especially in as divisive a moment as we're in now, right? But the complexity and the contradictions and the sweet daily hypocrisies, right? That's reality, right? That's reality. And so the dissertation proposal or the dissertation for me was my first official salvo in an attempt to expand these

conversations about Blackness and race beyond the binary. It hasn't always gone well, but one of the reasons this book I felt was, if not timely, but whatever, this is where I'm at. It's to open that conversation outside of an academic world that is often hostile to having. But it's clear to me that the broader community of readers is eager to have this conversation. I believe that politically and socially, we might be sort of trapped in these binary identities and might act that way. But whenever we're trapped into something, we're always looking for a way out. And we're always looking for a way out. And we're always looking for something that allows us to escape those binaries in the right way.

Yeah, I so agree with that. And I feel like a lot of times we default to the binary because we think it makes the day-to-day existence easier. And yet it also locks in a certain amount of baseline and persistent suffering. Exactly. Exactly. And it also locks in a certain amount of baseline and persistent suffering. Exactly. Exactly. And it also locks us into old methods that have not borne fruit, but they're comfortable. Yeah. Rather than having the more complicated, nuanced conversation that says, can we sort of have a conversation where we can get as close to objective reality, granted, I don't know if there is anyone, and then work with that. You see, that's why I think immigrants matter so much,

not just in terms of labor, not just in terms of religion and family structure and all of these things that used to be considered American verities, right? But immigrants, their perspective on race, identity, culture, and politics as outsiders is so valuable. However, I think that as immigrants, we get seen as, well, you're not really a part of this conversation. You don't quite understand what's going on here in the United States. As you know from my personal story and my scholarship, that's always been where I'm at. I'm the person who, okay, you don't quite understand. Okay, your interpretation of race and racism is quite different, and it's cute and nice, but it's not what we're doing here.

My argument is that we need those other perspectives right now more than ever just to free us from our binaries. Yeah. And coming full circle, back to that line, that start of conversation that's the title of your book, floating in the most peculiar way. And what you offered was that, well, maybe it's not actually about finding the tether, but actually finding comfort in the fact that there is this floating sensation, that there is a groundlessness, like a constant moving around. There's a dynamic state that is not lockdownable nor necessarily desirable to lock down. And rather than doing everything we can to lock it down and to make it certain, maybe the answer is let's acknowledge the reality and see if we can get comfortable there. You too can be an immigrant. I'm thinking of some of my intellectual heroes, Caribbean writers like George Lamming and C.L.R. James.

They would always argue back in the 50s when they arrived in England around the same time as my mom. They thought of Caribbean immigrants and African immigrants to the UK as not Jamaican or Trinidadian or even British. They saw these immigrants as a new type of creature never created before in modern times. And the sensibility that these creatures had should not be marginalized and seen as strange, but they should be seen as prophetic versions of what we all should become. And that's something I still very much hold to, certainly in my writing. Yeah. You, over the years, have built a career as a scholar, an academic professor, right now a director of BU African American Studies program, Black Scholar Journal. I'm actually curious. So the name of the program is African American Studies.

For now. Right. How are you with that? Because it feels like that has been your tension for this whole time. Well, another conversation would be about the ironies of me becoming A, the director of an African American Studies program, and the editor in chief of a Black Studies journal that's primarily connected to African American political history. Without getting into that conversation, just know that there is much laughter and bemusement around those facts. But I took over a program in African American studies, but that was actually always transnational, international, and diasporic in its focus,

right? For a lot of my peers, at least the people before me, that term African American was seen as capacious enough. I don't think so. And so as we expand from a minor to a major and from a program to hopefully a department, the name is going to be changed within the next year or so to African American and Black Diaspora Studies. Interesting. There's one other thing I want to sneak in before we sort of bring it home, which is you've also developed an interest in a scholarly allocation of energy to sort of like the exploration of Black people, music, and technology. Yes. Talk to me about this. I think it's fascinating.

Well, science fiction certainly has a lot to do with my interest in technology. And before the birth of this thing that's called Afrofuturism now, you know, I've always been reading science fiction as about minorities and marginalized people and immigrants and aliens, right, and machines. And that history of science fiction led me to research the history of science fiction only to discover that the first articulations of artificial intelligence as a very notion was, you know, in the mid-19th century, these speculative books about machines evolving according to Darwinian evolution, consciousness and identities. But they're, of course, they're called slaves, and they rise up against their masters in what's called a

civil war. And I started to read more and more, and I discovered that some of these early writers of what would then become science fiction years later were obsessed with slavery and industrialization and colonialism. And so, so much of the genre actually emerges, like H.G. Wells and people like that, as they imagine, what if we got colonized just as we colonized other people, right? Or what if we discover these other races that have different technologies and different powers? And so, in discovering how deep race has been embedded into the history of science fiction, it led me to look at how race is deeply embedded in the history of technology. And I found it there in some powerful, powerful ways.

The music aspect was, as the book tells you, I've been obsessed with not just Bowie, but music my whole life and sound. And it became clear to me as someone who also played music and became obsessed with the knobs and the buttons more so than the melodies and the performances, that there's this whole culture of Black people in Jamaica, in West Africa, and in Black America who are obsessed with knobs and buttons, right? Producers and DJs and sound engineers. And so I decided to tell the story of Black music, not as music, but as a way of interacting with accessible domestic technologies. And then that exploded in terms of my research. What if we read Black people as always having been involved in technology? And so I provided my work a history going all the way back to the 19th century. So those are the intellectual frameworks for how that all comes together.

So interesting. And it's all sci-fi. Thank you, science fiction. I know. It all comes back to that early seed to which you were drawn at the youngest of ages and for which you always felt a sense of othering to a certain extent in addition to whatever other sources you may have felt of that. And yet it is this thing that keeps weaving its way into nearly every part of your personal life, your professional life, your academic life. It is like the red thread to a certain extent. Which has made more and more sense to me after writing the memoir,

because it is a thread, you pursue it, or a scene that you mine. And then at a moment when you can stop and look back, you will see that something has been charted out that can be represented in a story. I think of the memoir as, for those interested in the fairly unusual scholarly work that I've done, the book will tell the story of the kind of mind that arrived at those kinds of academic explorations. It feels like a good place for us to come full circle as well. So sitting here in this container of Good Life Project, if I offer up the phrase to live a good life, what comes up? To live in such a way as to be able to tell a story of that life that is of use to yourself and those around you. Thank you.

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