The astonishing journey of a bright, utterly displaced boy, from the short-lived African nation of Biafra, to Jamaica, to the harshest streets of Los Angeles—a searing memoir that adds fascinating depth to the coming-to-America story
The first time Chude-Sokei realizes that he is “first son of the first son” of a renowned leader of the bygone African nation is in Uncle Daddy and Big Auntie’s strict religious household in Jamaica, where he lives with other abandoned children. A visiting African has just fallen to his knees to shake him by the shoulders: “Is this the boy? Is this him?”
Chude-Sokei’s immersion in the politics of race and belonging across the landscape of the African diaspora takes a turn when his traumatized mother, who has her own extraordinary history as the onetime “Jackie O of Biafra,” finally sends for him to come live with her. In Inglewood, Los Angeles, on the eve of gangsta rap and the LA riots, it’s as if he’s fallen to Earth. In this world, anything alien—definitely Chude-Sokei’s secret obsession with science fiction and David Bowie—is a danger, and his yearning to become a Black American gets deeply, sometimes absurdly, complicated. Ultimately, it is a boisterous pan-African family of honorary aunts, uncles, and cousins that becomes his secret society, teaching him the redemptive skill of navigating not just Blackness, but Blacknesses, in his America.
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"Stupendous doesn't even begin to describe the extraordinary power and exhilarating beauty of Floating in a Most Peculiar Way. Here is a memoir that blazes like a star and rhymes like Paul Beatty at his best. Louis Chude-Sokei is a writer with all the gifts and then some."
—Junot Diaz, author of the Pulitzer Prize-winning The Brief Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao and of This Is How You Lose Her
"Chude-Sokei's Floating in a Most Peculiar Way is a rich, immersive coming-of-age tale from a man of eccentric, transnational upbringing. Chude-Sokei's honest and eloquent writing ultimately transforms his memoir into a superlative and unforgettable book.”
—Chigozie Obioma, author of The Fishermen and An Orchestra of Minorities (both finalist for the Booker prize)
“This is autobiography at its best. In stories of the multiple blended accents, atrocities, musics, prejudices and foods of London, Biafra, Jamaica, D.C., South Central L.A. and elsewhere, Chude-Sokei confronts the nightmare of history--along with the persistent, sometimes joyful adventure of awakening from it.”
—Robert Pinsky, Poet Laureate of the United States, 1997-2000
“Floating in a Most Peculiar Way delivers a riveting immigrant’s journey spanning the African Diaspora that is certain to refine our sense of what it means to be American, and to complicate, especially, what it means to be a Black American.”
—Charles Johnson, author of the National Book Award-winning Middle Passage and of The Way of the Writer: Reflections on the Art and Craft of Storytelling
"Absorbing...highly recommended for all memoir readers."
—Booklist
“A beautiful, plainspoken work…This hard-to-put-down memoir both enlightens and inspires.”
—Publishers Weekly
