Prince Shakur

This was an extraordinarily challenging book to read. The chapters follow an asynchronous timeline and switches dramatically from theme to theme. Shakur’s writing style feels forced and his descriptions are often hard to believe.

Admittedly, memoirs are not a genre with which I am particularly familiar. Prince Shakur is a personification of intersectionality – black, immigrant, homosexual – and is a very recent attendee at Ohio University in Athens, Ohio. I was concerned that I lacked the necessary perspective to understand this person’s memoir. It was chaotic and often seemed to lack direction but, perhaps, that is an accurate portrayal of this young man’s life.

The importance of Shakur’s title, When They Tell You to Be Good, is not always apparent. He explains that, “It seemed like older men had been given some set kind of list of rules. Maybe one day when I was old enough, I would do the right set of things to finally be given these rules. Until then, it was just my job to be a good boy. (80) His memoir seems to be a demonstration of this process. This is not always clear. In fact, his efforts at being a good boy may take some explication.

He closes this notion of being a good boy by showing that such a call is a trap. He says, “When they tell you to be good, to be well-mannered, and to follow the rules because this is how America will let you live, they do not tell you that even with your college degree, America will place the barrel of its gun in your tooth-torn mouth. . . We do not survive what we don’t even begin to confront. Silences can kill us when we give them too much power. (247) In this way, he realizes that it is not assimilation that is necessary for survival, let alone success, but confrontation.

The book revolves around a series of themes. First, his relationship with father figures – his murdered biological father and his imprisoned stepfather – shows a connection to Jamaican principles of masculinity. These are challenging for a young gay man whose worldview is dramatically different. Shakur explains that the “men of my family and of the Afro-Caribbean diaspora are products of masculinities crafted by an unjust society. They lived and died in a world that could have saved them, but didn’t. They are survived by many people who struggle to make sense of their violence. (37)

Second, he follows a serendipitous path through friends, lovers, and family that serves equally to frustrate and edify him. Generally, he discusses these periods using the concept of love. He says that, “You don’t have to lie to be some other person to be my friend or anyone else’s. . . Don’t give up any of that because there’s parts of our life that you wish were different. You are who you are for a reason and that’s nothing to be ashamed of.” (104) His recollections of friends can often be quite poignant. He further explains that “There was so much hate in the world, but there was also so much love as long as I could find it. Beneath the tattoo on my back read the words, “For the ones I love, I will sacrifice.” (31) These recollections seem the strongest part of the book.

Finally, the idea of protest resonates strongly with him. He expands on college protests around a range of topics to working as a union organizer. In addition, he appears in New York, Paris, and in Standing Rock at some of the most well-known protest events of recent years.

It is here that I become incredulous. He frequently discusses his poverty and portrays himself as living hand-to-mouth throughout most of the book. This, however, is no real impediment to him traveling to the western United States, the Philippines, and France. He lives off the generosity of others more often than not. All of this is possible but somehow seems a bit too contrived for my liking.

Later sections of the book are filled with references to important literary figures. Most important, is James Baldwin. He is particularly connected to Baldwin as a black, homosexual man living in Paris at a nebulous time in his life. I can see the connection but the method feels forced.

Perhaps the most questionable device is the inclusion of journal entries from a murdered Jamaican criminal. It seems completely silly and I struggled to see the value.
Submitted by S. West 6/6/23… (mehr)

The Publisher Says: After immigrating from Jamaica to the United States, Prince Shakur’s family is rocked by the murder of Prince’s biological father in 1995. Behind the murder is a sordid family truth, scripted in the lines of a diary by an outlawed uncle hell-bent on avenging the murder of Prince’s father. As Shakur begins to unravel his family’s secrets, he must navigate the strenuous terrain of conquering one’s inner self while confronting the steeped complexities of the Afro-diaspora.

When They Tell You to Be Good charts Prince Shakur’s political coming of age from closeted queer kid in a Jamaican family to radicalized adult traveler, writer, and anarchist in Obama and Trump’s America. Shakur journeys from France, the Philippines, South Korea, and more to discover the depths of the Black experience, and engages in deep political questions while participating in movements like Black Lives Matter and Standing Rock. By the end, Shakur reckons with his identity, his Jamaican family’s immigration to the US before his birth, and the intergenerational impacts of patriarchal and colonial violence.

A profoundly composed narrative parallel in identity to that of George M. Johnson’s All Boys Aren’t Blue and Eddie S. Glaude Jr.’s Begin Again: James Baldwin’s America and its Urgent Lessons for Our Own, Shakur compels the reader to consume the political world of young, Black, queer, and radical millennials today.

I RECEIVED A DRC FROM THE PUBLISHER VIA NETGALLEY. THANK YOU.

My Review: Introspection is part and parcel of getting old. But, and this is relatively new to my consciousness, that's because it's part and parcel of the Othering that US/capitalist society perpetuates, perpetrates even, daily. Old people are Othered, queer people are Othered, Black people, Asian people, female people: All are Othered by the depressing, repressive regime of normalizing cis-white male-straightness.

I'm sure that condition suits some people, but it gives me the shuddering horrors. Sounds more like something Cthulhu uses to torment victims than a desirable identity.

Author Shakur decides, early on, that "...if I was going to be lost and swallowed alive out in the world, then I’d at least get something for myself out of it," and he definitely makes good on that promise to himself. He is a generous soul and shares pieces of his journey to living authentically as an out, gay Jamaican-American man. He sees through structures at twenty-seven that took me another decade to understand as designed systems of repression, so of course I'm jealous as well as impressed. In about equal measure.

His mother, the one who chose his father, doesn't really know what to do about her wild, ungovernable son. Of course she sees his dad in him and, as the man was murdered for being his own resistant, wild self, she's got to be scared witless for her baby boy. His gayness seems to her an unnecessary provocation of the people who already hate her son for being. Being Black, being Jamaican, just (when you boil away the froth) being is his unatonable sin, his unwittingly committed crime.

The issues between mother and son don't stop; they are my own favorite moments in the book. After all, I'm old, and I'm thinking about the awful patterns of my own family that I've repeated ad infinitum. Reckoning with family damage will always command my attention. But Author Shakur, decades behind my age and out front of my life experience, is going through his travails for hisownself. That meant I got more of his politics than I, ideally, would've had. Not that I disagree with him! Just that I can already see where this truck is headed and am, therefore, not confident he'll get off voluntarily.

I realized that taking our history seriously and the fact that we are a part of shaping it is important. If we don’t engage with and protect our history, it will be mutilated or erased.

Very true, Author Shakur; but your mother's "don't be gay when you're here" is, in spite of being the antithesis of this truthful moment, excellent survival advice. While the two aren't from the same passage in the book, both represent the passage of Author Prince Shakur from angry kid to dangerously committed-to-action young adult.

What makes this first-ever book from Editor Hanif Abdurraqib less than a five-star read for me is the very thing that makes it a pleasure to read: The digressive and conversational writing of a talented young man. A bit of pruning of dangling participants, mentioned once and never again; a few smoothings of filler description when talking about places he's been to set a scene for us; minor, and understandable lapses from a tyro team. (Authors aren't always the most helpful editors...they already know where their fellow creator is headed, where we-the-readers don't always.)

I'll make a prediction: We will, if we are lucky, hear more from Author Prince Shakur. And it will get better and better. When it starts out this good, that's a wonderful future to look for.… (mehr)