Part 1

Somewhere around eleven o’clock in the evening, the party my parents were throwing for one of my aunts hit its euphoric high: King Sunny Ade boomed out; the Africans pounced onto the dance floor like Olympic athletes, everyone chasing a medal, everyone confident in their ability to win a medal, everyone glorying in the rhythm of summer that pulsed through these Games.

I know it is a stereotype to describe Africans dancing in joy, but I truly grew up with this particular stereotype. There might be a tendency for white North Americans not to take Africans seriously; that is, there might be a tendency for them to see Africans as either harmless and happy, or self-harming and tragic. The truth is, dance is just one of the many aspects of their human dimensionality. They inherited it like we in Canada inherit an understanding of hockey’s importance. We may not play it. We may not even like it. But we understand the centrality it holds, and we can access that understanding at the drop of a hat. As it was, my parents and the unique Prairie African community they belonged to — indeed, that they helped to shape — had that same instantaneous access to dance. North Americans are always at least a little self-conscious when they dance, but there was nothing like that in the psyche of the Prairie Africans I grew up with. Dancing was like casual conversation for them. They hardly gave it a second thought, but it was unusual if they went more than a few days without it.

I used to watch them. It was the late seventies/early eighties. I remember their joy in dance so clearly. My dad, always eager for others to be having a good time, was often slow to get to the dance floor himself. As the host, it would fall to him to get the music started, or flip the record, or cue up the next cassette. He wasn’t a music head and didn’t get precious over his tech or anything like that; he just knew what his people liked to hear. And once it was on, he too joined the fray, adding his bouncing step to it, his eyes fixed on his partner, a dance-happy grin on his face; sometimes he would pause his light bob to snap suddenly, or clap once — loudly — at some shift in rhythm or swoop of melody, as though emphasizing to the room — that’s the point of this song — before goose-necking and skipping back into action. My mother, on the other hand, was a no-nonsense dancer. She took to the floor like she took to all of her projects: with the seriousness of someone intent on doing an excellent job. Make no mistake, excellence in this context means having a good time, so there was smiling involved. But her smiles were intermittent as she regularly focused on getting down to business. Don’t let this quirk fool you, though; if there was a moment in which the energy could instinctively ratchet up a notch, my mother was most likely to sense it. She would be the one to let loose a shout of pure happiness, inspiring the others to gear up to that next level.

Paul and Mary, the husband-and-wife team from Trinidad, were our token Africans. There was always something slightly languid in their dance moves, as though they were trying to minimize some of the rhythmic changes that perhaps had been lost between Africa and the Caribbean. They did this regardless of who they danced with, making the Africans appear all the more frenetic and urgent in their moves than they otherwise were. My Uncle Modu and his wife Molly always danced together. Switching partners was a regular affair at these events; in fact, it was often hard to tell who was dancing with whom, so strong was the communal vibe on the dance floor. But Modu and Molly stuck to each other like newlyweds, his eyes soft and dew-filled, her hand always in contact with him, briefly touching an arm or chin or shoulder.

At the centre of it all was Uncle Biola, a large man who loved mixing rum and coke with highlife and soca. I remember him moving in lumbering glee at the centre of the dance floor, his eyes half closed, the sweat pouring from his head. I watched Uncle Biola carefully. Of all the grown-ups he had the least patience with us kids, especially as we entered our teen years. He seemed always exasperated or frustrated with something we did or didn’t do, said or didn’t say. He was never quite satisfied. If he had a certain look about him — if he had been drinking, say, and was “relaxed” — we had to watch ourselves in his presence. He wasn’t a mean man. Far from it. He was actually generous and gregarious. He was simply uncompromising when it came to things that didn’t meet his expectations. And one of the things that tested his expectations sorely was the new adolescent attitudes that my age group was adopting.

I was twelve or thirteen at the time, a stifling and impossible age whose impossibility rests precariously on the fact that we can sense some sort of freedom exists somewhere out there, nearby, maybe just around the next corner, but we can’t see it yet. It is a freedom that beckons from the landscape of our identity. We know there is something that we can become, and that knowledge settles on us like an acrylic sweater, irritating the skin in a way that is impossible to ignore. We experience something similar when we are newly adulted, during our college years, but now we do have the freedom to explore that landscape, to try on that sweater and get settled in, to discover style. There is still the awkwardness because we are young and have not mastered so much about ourselves. But this awkwardness is different: when we are in college, we are made awkward by too many choices of who to become; when we are adolescents, we are made awkward by too many impositions of who not to become. In adolescence this phase is preceded by the innocence of ignorance. But as teenagers, we become aware of ourselves in the world. The sweater we have on was bought by our parents; it doesn’t fit. It chafes. It itches. But we have no power of choice to exercise. We can only use our newfound awareness to witness. We become watchers. We watch with a quality that becomes more and more attuned throughout adolescence, eventually turning its scrutinizing energies on itself and culminating in high school, where we become our own incessant police.

To some extent, this policing has never left me. I have never stopped monitoring myself, never stopped finding shortcomings, infractions. It is, perhaps, one of the reasons why I ended up being a poet. Poetry has been my adult self’s way of reconciling the contradictions of those internal police I’ve carried around inside me all of these years. Yes, we all have a version of this police, undoubtedly. But is yours an idiot? Is yours woefully ignorant of the law, but extremely confident of his authority, his decision-making, his judgements? Mine is. Mine is a shameless exemplar of the Dunning–Kruger effect, in which a person’s confidence of their competence is inversely proportional to their knowledge of that competency. The less they know about it, the more confidently they rate their expertise in it.

This is my internal police. Officer B. He can make my life miserable, or difficult, but he doesn’t care because he doesn’t know how little he knows. He is this way because he trained at the academy of Dunning–Kruger. When I was growing up, I was surrounded by white people who unblinkingly claimed to have a greater awareness and a deeper understanding of my racialized experiences than I did. Common occurrences involved white people adamantly claiming that they could detect I was blushing (I wasn’t) or that I had an American accent (I didn’t), or that I had misinterpreted the nature of a very innocent joke I happened to be the butt of (I hadn’t). These corrections were sometimes delivered as biting remonstrations, sometimes as cheerful cajoling. I could never predict which end of the scale I would be tossed on, or which bus I might be tossed under.

I was in the first stages of wearing that sweater, but at that point I could not find a proper fit and was struggling with it pulled over my head, unable to distinguish between the actual opening and a sleeve. I was lost in those itchy, acrylic fibres, but like my idiot Officer B., I didn’t know that I was entangled in the sleeves of a cheap sweater. This is one of the tragedies of my upbringing: I was so regularly surrounded by confident assertions of my reality that I came to accept those assertions as true. I knew I wasn’t misinterpreting a “joke,” but in the energetic concurrence of everyone around me I stifled my words and in this self-imposed silence the group felt the vindication of their framing. I knew I didn’t have an American accent, but in the seemingly random consistency of these encounters, I began to hear something foreign in my own sounds. I knew I wasn’t blushing, but the general and warm laughter around me, approving of my presence in this one context, was affirming enough to draw a sheepish smile of relief to my face. And in my sheepishness, I wondered if there wasn’t perhaps some truth in their exhortations. On one level, I was frustrated; on another level, I was rewarded. On all levels, I remained confounded, suffocating in the synthetic fibres of a sweater I was never going to find my way out of.

One escape route I tried was to become a master of brands. In the eighties, when I was a teenager, brand culture had reached a new zenith of self-awareness. We were Generation X, that generation the rest of you have completely forgotten or quietly wonder, is that an actual generation? Yes, we’re an actual generation. (Believe it or not, everyone belongs to an actual generation, even the ones that don’t have names.) And if you’re uncertain about Gen X, you might find it striking to learn that that is precisely Gen X’s brand. That is the X of Gen X. No, we weren’t just docilely wandering our way down the alphabet (have you ever heard of Gen W?); the X is meaningful; the X is symbolic. We are the lost generation, with an amorphous, floating identity. We are disaffected. We jumped off the corporate ladder willingly. Slackers. We have a natural distrust of institutions (with good reason: remember all those Boomers who hated The Man? Well, they became The Man). We have no identity, but we identify with irony, cynicism, and counter-culture (we embraced Run-DMC and The Cure). We even ditched Douglas Coupland when he became too popular. While we were busy rejecting everything, something of who we were, as well as the possibilities of who we could become, was crossed out.

When I was old enough and had read enough to think about it, I loved musing about our X as akin to that of Malcolm or Marvin. For them, there is a paradoxical history behind that X, a longstanding and ongoing story of erasure that defines them. In the case of Malcolm X, it was directly tied to American slavery. Generation X in the popular imagination has taken on its own meaning beyond Coupland’s original text. In general, the X is understood by my generation as the result of an oversized, self-absorbed generation before us having stolen all of our economic opportunities (we too came of age during recession and in the wake of exploding inflation); having changed the rules of social aspiration (the Jesus freaks and the war objectors became the paragons of corporate conquest); and, having dominated our sensibilities with the sheer excess of their numbers. While these things were true in Coupland’s formulation, back then I liked to keep the idea of slavery and historical erasure close at hand. I still do.

As a teenage Gen X-er, before the term Gen X had even been coined, I was steeped in brand culture. This is a result of the swing that Baby Boomers took from shaking their fist at “The Man” to putting their foot to the gas and driving corporate greed to new levels. It’s part of what makes cynicism and sarcasm on brand for Gen X. By the time we arrived, television was a ubiquitous fact of life; thus, we were inundated with TV marketing from the time we were children. And although today’s generations have been marketed to even more vigorously than we were, they do not experience advertising in the way we did. We could never click on “skip” after ten seconds. We couldn’t binge our favourite shows at will, free from any advertising. Nor could we have envisioned tools like adblockers, downloadable today for free to anyone who can click a mouse. By no means have the current screen-addled generations had an easier time with marketers; that is not my point. They haven’t. Our experiences have been different. Digital marketing today is keyed to the personal mobile experience. It assumes that the consumer has more independent choice about what they watch, when, and where. We, on the other hand, were locked into what broadcasters and marketers wanted to show us, and we all watched it together: hit TV shows were a communal affair. I suppose TV back then was like social media today, if social media was just four people who only posted at regularly scheduled times, and there was no way to post back or interact with them. Okay, it was nothing like social media today. Still, it was largely through television that branding entered our homes at new and heightened levels never seen before.

From my perspective as a teenager, marketing in the 1980s was a muscular, masculine affair. It was also aspirant in very particular ways. In the fifties, advertisements might encourage you to buy a home, live in the suburbs, and slowly acquire modern conveniences to fill your home, such as vacuum cleaners, dishwashers, and a sensible, American car to cart your family to weekend picnics. In the eighties, at least to my eyes at the time, ads instructed us to seize a prestige lifestyle that proved society’s successful conquests of the fifties. I watched ads filled with brands like Polo by Ralph Lauren. Sperry topsiders. Calvin Klein. Movies featured Italian sports cars. And music videos. Music videos were everywhere, and all of these brands, and more, were regularly brandished in them.

One thing I knew as a teenager was that my African family, and the Afro-Caribbean community through which they negotiated prairie culture, had no clue about the ins and outs of brands like Calvin Klein. I remember having to beg my mom to get me a pair of Levi’s 501 jeans, after she had bought me three pairs of Lee jeans because they were on sale. Lee?

“What’s the difference?” she asked, blinking. A few months later, and after an extensive round of appeals about the difference between the two brands, she came home with a pair of Levi’s. I held them up quizzically. The colour was wrong. They were too dark. They weren’t stonewashed. I flipped them around only to discover these were some obscure series of Levi’s, not the coveted 501s. I didn’t even recognize the number: four something. The tab was yellow. Yellow? My mother continued with her blank look. Today, I can only imagine the warring emotions she was experiencing beneath that surface of blankness as she looked at her ungrateful, nonsensical, and clearly unhappy Canadian son. From my teen perspective, though, the incident was one of many that confirmed my parents were not reliable when it came to certain social and cultural rules of the day. They didn’t understand the currency of brands. I had to be the one to show them. I had to become a master of these brands.

Normally, when my parents announced we were having a get-together with the Prairie Africans that made up our community, I hardly took notice of the party itself. It was simply a chance to get together with kids who shared so much with me that it was natural for us to think of each other as family. The dynamics were exactly the same. Most of our parents had known each other, or known of each other, in Sierra Leone. Common Sierra Leonean nomenclature involved elders known as “Ma” or “Sa,” which is difficult to translate in the Canadian context, but was a term of respect that could, at times, be translated as “sir” or “ma’am,” or what Canadians sometimes infer as Uncle or Aunty. It was an approximate concept for us. We didn’t use the term, but we thought of each other as cousins.

While my parents had no understanding of the significance of Carl Lewis’s flattop, or a Lacoste shirt with collar flipped up, my cousins did. A party among the Africans offered me the opportunity to have my mastery reaffirmed by people for whom it counted. It might surprise you to learn that the only trouble was that I didn’t own any of these brands. Not one.

But I didn’t care. I had a plan.

It was around this time, without any effort or intention, that I developed the power of invincibility. It didn’t have to do with superhuman strength or an unnatural impermeability to physical objects. Nor was it the usual sense of invincibility, that Nemean lion’s skin that all adolescents shrug into as the marker of youth, its disdain, its ignorance. No, this was a very specific invincibility that I only felt when I was unaccompanied in a store. The origins of this strange superpower actually did emerge in the company of someone else, my closest friend at the time, Gabriel, a wiry, enterprising boy with shaggy blonde hair and an impatient imagination. One day, we were in a drugstore. Gabriel gave me a quick wink, stuffed four bottles of cologne into his backpack and, as my eyes bulged out of my head, strode out of the store with the confidence of someone who knows they are unassailable, who knows no one would even think to stop him on his way out.

And no one did.

I found this episode educational. Gabriel was not captain of the football team or destined to be class president. He was too unorthodox for those things; as you have seen, he was not given to following rules. But he did have charisma, and he had a sort of mysterious energy about him. We nicknamed him “El Greco” for no good reason except that, to us, it seemed congruent with the brand of left-field scheming he was known for, which seemed more dimensioned, more worldly than anything we were used to. It struck us as almost foreign. My mom claimed he had a Charlton Heston chin and giggled in a way that left me stalled, buffering in confusion. (I didn’t even know who Charlton Heston was. Later I realized I had been watching him every Easter in my mother’s tradition of renting the Ten Commandments. I had to admit, there was something Moses-like about Gabriel.) Above all, he was very talkative. He was always coming up with ideas for us to pursue, ideas that seemed outlandish to me: we should get the school to pay us to paint the gym walls; we should convince the drama teacher to let us write the Christmas pageant; we should start a band and organize a battle of the bands with other schools (after we had convinced them to start bands, too). Mostly the plans fizzled out, but there was a lot of energy expelled on the conceiving, planning, and mostly talking about them. Talking was a muscle for Gabriel. It accomplished things for him. He regularly flexed it, exercised it, and like a gangster, sent it out to do his dirty work. Unlike me, Gabriel was completely undaunted by the prospect of using that muscle to rough up any adults in his way. I had been raised by immigrant parents who came from a colonial country, whose upbringing had been mired in Edwardian disciplinarianism decades after Edward VII had died. In their understanding, adults lived in a separate, higher world than children, and the two only mixed if adults either sanctioned or demanded the crossover.

As a result, I had grown up seeing adults as the other team: enemies at worst, irrelevant at best. Not only would it not occur to me to start a conversation with an adult, I spent much of my time actively avoiding talking to them at all. But not Gabriel. Gabriel, who was literally a fast talker, would regularly engage them in conversations, barraging them with words, trying to convince them of the worthiness of some scheme of his, trying to persuade them to endorse him in some way, always trying to persuade them. And the only thing that amazed me more than his front-facing hucksterism with adults was the fact that they would sometimes acquiesce. Not often, but the fact that they agreed to anything he proposed seemed an incredible feat to me. It was like he had managed to reconfigure the logic of our physical senses, as though suddenly we could now see through our ears or, more accurately, experience a sour stench as sweet. Sure, on paper it might sound positive to encounter floral instead of fart, but do I really want to prove the point by actually taking a deep breath? Of fart? How does this plan work? Despite my confusion, the worst he ever received from adults was an exhausted complaint that they had already said “no” to him and they were tired of hearing him bring it (whatever scheme he’d mentioned) up again and again.

When Gabriel popped those bottles of Polo cologne into his bag, I had a sudden insight into the workings of the world: Gabriel walked out of that store unmolested because he understood himself to be unmolestable. He strode out of the store with the same confidence he showed when he would harangue teachers, or any adult, or any of us, with his latest idea. Gabriel was always convinced that his ideas were achievable, even when they were not, even when they were proven to be unachievable. It never stopped him from trying or from developing the next idea to pursue. I had always thought of this aspect of his personality as thoughtless stubbornness, obtuseness even. But it wasn’t that. Gabriel was able to pull off even just a fraction of what he schemed because he fit a script. With his wiry energy, his radiant charisma, his golden-headed brilliance, walking and talking with confidence was exactly what the world expected of him. If he happened to stuff his bag with a few unpaid extras along the way, oh well, that was the world’s fault for not asking any questions.

The next day I decided I was going back to that same store and taking four more bottles of cologne for myself. I have no idea what crazy impulse made me fixate on going back to the same store, but, actually, that’s not true. I do know. I said that Gabriel’s shoplifting exploit had revealed something to me. It had: if you follow the right script, you will not be seen. And in my case, the right script, the one I had been following all of my life was exactly that: I am not seen. I was Black and Canadian. This double threat was like being the sidekick’s sidekick. Nobody sees you.

And nobody did. The next day, I walked out of that store with a bottle of Polo in my backpack. I didn’t have the nerve to take four, like Gabriel. But even one bottle of the green elixir bouncing in my backpack was enough to prove the theory. I made it. I wasn’t seen. I was invincible.

It was not such an unreasonable conclusion. At school, I had no tribe. My true tribe was poets. But I didn’t know that yet and, anyway, there was no such tribe in any school in my experience of the eighties. Besides, I didn’t know that poetry was a calling. I didn’t know who my tribe was at all. Honestly, nobody did. I’m not suggesting that I was friendless or alienated. I did feel a certain amount of alienation, but this was on a general, racialized level from society. On an individual level, I had lots of friends. I could even, to a limited extent, have been considered popular. But that was more a consequence of being friends with the kids who were truly popular. I was among the in-crowd, but I didn’t feel in it. Part of this, I think, had to do with my ambiguous tribal affiliations. I was most readily identified as a “jock.” This is because I happened to be athletic and was often encouraged and successful in my athleticism. In fact, it was a regular occurrence for me to have coaches of all sorts — but especially basketball coaches — chasing me down in the hallway to recruit me for the school team. This they did without knowing anything about me other than what they saw at face value in front of them. I can only imagine the electric thrill these coaches felt when they first saw me wandering the hallway, or glimpsed me through the open door of a class I was sitting in. There are surprisingly few vocations in which the structures of your profession are so readily available to symbolic meaning. This is why shows like Law and Order have so many franchise spinoffs: cops, lawyers, and doctors offer up symbols of good/bad and life/death with such naked readiness that Hollywood can hardly resist them. So, too, does a Black boy shine with symbolism to a basketball coach drowning in white wannabes. Too bad for them I am a terrible basketball player; eventually, the sad truth always outed itself. Too bad for me that none of my academic teachers ever thought to pursue me with even half of the enthusiasm demonstrated by every single coach I ever crossed paths with as a student. Also, too bad for me that in most other sports I did excel. Once again, Officer B., my internal police officer, directed me not to question things or he would have to punish me. Surely I could see how successful I was as an athlete? Doesn’t it follow that I was being pursued because I had a natural gift? Wasn’t it logical? Mollified, I had to concede to Officer B.’s logic. I also had to quash the feelings of dislike I had for many of the sports I competed in; I had to quash the deep despair I felt at the attention I craved from my academic teachers but hardly ever received, the invisibility that, in this case, worked against me.

Occasionally, though, other tribes of teenagers would see me. There was a brand of black-clad, eye-lined scowlers who were not quite Goths yet, but who pioneered some of their tendencies. They listened to The Cure, and The Smiths, and Depeche Mode. They cast glowering looks about them. They held disdain for everything commercial or popular. They were the first to smoke. At the time, the name we gave these proto-Goths was straightforward, self-explanatory even: Alternatives. And to many of us they were just like the Alt key on keyboards that had yet to fully make their entrance in schools: they were there; everyone saw them plainly belonging to the general environment; but no one really knew what they did or why. They seemed irritated, but it was unclear at what. They also seemed convinced of their superiority, but no one fully understood what it was based on. Occasionally, though, they actually saw me. In fact, we saw each other. For the most part, the Alt key does actually do nothing. But when you combine it with other keys, it turns out it does a lot. The proto-Goth, Alternatives’ super-combination power was England. Their love of Morrissey and Robert Smith immersed them in a particular corner of British culture and, as it turns out, when they immersed their heads below the surface line of 1980s Britain, they found me already sitting there.

My presence there was an accident of history. This accident, though, is shared by a very large number of people: whole populations that were impacted by British colonialism. Many countries were victimized by colonialism, but some countries were impacted differently than others. (Countries like Canada were colonized, but as favoured family members. Countries in Africa, Asia, and the Caribbean were colonized as unruly problems.) While Australia, New Zealand, and Canada are understood to have “shared values” with Britain, the unruly populations of Africa, Asia, and the Caribbean are understood to need a certain character stamped on them: British education, Christian religion, the English language, and many other Western cultural traditions were imposed as the standard to attain. My parents learned “God Save the King,” spoke English, and wore public school uniforms at school. None of these things would look out of place in England. Indeed, it was intentional: colonialism=clone-ialism. Colonial offshoots were viewed as (lesser) versions of the U.K. itself. My father’s undergraduate degree was earned at Fourah Bay College in Freetown, but qualified as an equivalent to Durham University, which — he never failed to point out — is England’s #3 university (or, in his words, second only to Oxbridge). After high school, my mother attended school in Bristol, where she ended up living for six years. These connections were not natural; they were colonial, but they were accessed naturally, with ease; it was actually hard to avoid them.

As the child of immigrants, I often saw my parents’ engagements with Canadian culture as awkward, sometimes nonsensical. My dad wasn’t engrossed with Hockey Night in Canada, like many of my friends’ fathers were. My mother didn’t bake chocolate chip cookies on any sunny Saturday morning: she fried plantain chips or cooked up pots of plasas and fufu. To my relief, neither of my parents had strong African accents, but white people were often eager to point out even the mildest departures of the tongue, the slightest variations. The worst, for me, was the sabotages they regularly dropped into my life in the form of words. Though I had no discernible (foreign) accent, white people were regularly trying to detect one in me. When that failed, they would exult at some of my word choices. My lexicon, quite innocently, included references to car boots (trunks), chesterfields (sofas), vests (tank tops), brollies (umbrellas), etc. When my dad wanted to encourage me, he would use words like, “good show” or “jolly good.” He often referred to my friends as “lads” or “chaps.” I knew words like “Scousers” and “Geordies” long before I ever knew what or who they referred to. I knew there was some sort of divide between North and South England, as well as North and South London, though I had never experienced nor understood their particular distinctions.

Occasionally, I would refer to these contexts or use their associated words with other Canadians. I did it unselfconsciously, unthinkingly. But the reaction was like I had set off a bomb in an empty field. Or like I had walked out in public wearing no pants. The confusion it elicited ranged from snarl-lipped disdain to open-mouthed blinking. Sometimes I was mocked, sometimes corrected. Sometimes I was harangued, sometimes lectured. In all cases, my internal response was a combination of shame, frustration, and resentment toward my parents, who had unwittingly lined the pathways of my childhood with these unexpected explosives.

I received a different treatment from the Alternatives. These proto-Goths regarded my cultural gaffs with respect. It was as though I, as an outsider, was confirming the legitimacy of this other, yearned-for world, reflected in the music they revered. Yet, it was a world they had no direct way of accessing through the casual realities of their everyday Canadian lives. In this context, my otherness, my unbelonging and my everdayness was, paradoxically, an asset. It did no good for one of their own to affirm British culture in 1980s Western Canada, but when some rando non-Goth could hear the Sex Pistols’s “God Save the Queen” and get the reference, they were rhapsodic. For a moment, we could serve each other by looking across some unnamed teenage divide and see each other. They didn’t look that strange to me when I connected them to a world that was regularly referenced in my home, a world where I had actually spent one epic summer visiting my cousins, learning the difference between an Essex accent and a Suffolk accent. The Alternatives and I could look across the divide and see each other, but not for who we actually were; rather, we saw what we needed to see to consolidate our outsider identity. They needed me to recognize the Britishness in them; I needed them to redeem my parents’ acts of sabotage, remove the fault I felt for possessing a familiarity with something foreign. In this way, we saw each other though we saw past each other. There was an affirmation of sorts, but it didn’t answer my fundamental doubts of belonging. I was still P.D. Eastman’s hapless hatchling, circling his surroundings, wandering from group to group, never resting, never rested. “Are you my tribe? Are you my tribe?” The jocks gave me an emphatic yes because I looked the part. The preps gave me an emphatic shrug. The Alternatives gave me a distant nod. If I was able to skirt the boundaries of all of these groups it is because none of them could actually see me. Maybe it was an of advantage of sorts, a kind of power that allowed me to move between these groups. But if it was, that power, like so much of my life, was a feature of being unseen. Truthfully, I didn’t have a tribe.

“Are you my tribe?” is a question that would have confused my parents. The whole context of responses it demands would have made no sense to them. Growing up in Freetown, Sierra Leone is like growing up in the world’s largest rumour mill. If you didn’t know someone personally, you knew their family, or you knew someone who knew their family. Six degrees of separation would have struck them as overdoing it. To get beyond three degrees you had to be in another country or be dead. When I was ten, we went to Freetown for a few weeks in the summer and I came face to face with this phenomenon. During the visit, I was shuffled between my parents from place to place, visiting a myriad of relatives and family friends who were extremely keen to meet the “American” boy, but whom I only knew vaguely through stories I had heard throughout my childhood. After a particularly long afternoon of visiting, my father, looking gaunt and peeved, suggested we detour through a local market before heading to the next set of welcomers. The marketplace was pure chaos to me. It was nothing like the supermarket I was familiar with in Canada and more like a soccer game on a pitch overcrowded with fans and players alike. Everything seemed both excited and out of place. Hawkers sang out with lusty energy as we walked by their wares. I recognized one boy and his singsong melody of “ka-ro-zin-ye,” which I was getting used to hearing outside my window every morning as I woke up. But my father shook his head, “that’s someone else, not him.” Half the time there was so much going on I couldn’t tell which side was for shoppers and which side was for vendors. We struck up conversations with many different people as we ambled through, but we didn’t buy anything.

Finally, my dad said that we’d better get going or someone was going to wonder where we were. When we got to the next house, we were greeted with warm enthusiasm, when all of a sudden the mood took a sudden swing in the wrong direction.

“Eh, bo, Chini!” My dad’s childhood friend complained to him. “I hear you were in the market talking to that kerosene boy when you should have been here enjoying a nice drink with me! Why did you make me wait like that? Aren’t I your good friend?”

A little bit of that gaunt look haunted my dad’s looks again, but he is an amiable man by nature and so he shook it off with a grin and playfully begged forgiveness.

“Bertrand wanted to see the market,” he said, improvising. “I couldn’t say no to him. He just wants to see what he’s been missing all these years.”

I was shocked. First, my dad was essentially lying to his friend, right in front of my face. This was something I had never known my father to do at all. In fact, he was nearly apoplectic if he even so much as sniffed an untruth coming from my direction. The other thing that shocked me was the fact that everyone seemed to know exactly where we had been even though we had been spontaneous and had not met anyone we knew. I suspected the kerosene boy, who had been invoked by my dad’s friend. And then I wondered at the fact that my father may have lied twice to me within an hour. But the more I thought about it, the less sense it made. The kerosene seller that I heard from my bedroom window every morning had no personal relationship with our household, as far as I could tell. We didn’t even buy kerosene from him. He just wandered through the neighbourhood singing his song; he never stopped at our place. No, it wasn’t him. Somehow, through the warren of underground communication that is Krio society, word had spread about our whereabouts, and, at least to everyone who mattered to us, there was nothing secret about our secret detour. This is what happens in a community like the Krios of Freetown. This is what happens when three degrees of separation is the norm. There is no tribe because everyone is in the tribe.

But I didn’t grow up in Freetown. I didn’t experience this kind of community, marked by constant relating, a ubiquitous belonging that appeared to impact my father in a surprising way. Generally a jovial and patient man, he appeared exasperated, constricted by the pervasiveness of his Krio upbringing. Freetown, to him, was anything but free. It was more hometown helicopter-parent than supportive network. But my perspective was completely different. My yearnings were wholly governed by growing up in a place that refused to acknowledge me as a natural, normal member of the community. Nobody watched over me from afar, as they did me and my dad as we roamed the marketplace, my father feigning interest in this and that. When I was noticed, if I was noticed, it was with eye-popping horror or dehumanizing curiosity. For me, belonging was a shield against that inhumanity. It was the thing I longed for almost more than anything else. To this day, I think it marks me. At different points in my life I have consistently wanted to join bands or be on a team or form a collective or simply participate in some kind of group endeavour. I have a group chat that I’m on with some of my writer friends and I have to hold myself back from being that guy who comments all the time. For all the pain I endured in my youth for being categorized and defined in particular ways, the result is that I love being in specifically categorized company: me and my people.

Although I felt these yearnings as a teenager, I didn’t realize I had them at the time. I just felt — like most teenagers for their diversely trivial and profound reasons — painfully awkward. I received a certain recognition from the neo-Goths, but it was clear to them and me that they weren’t my tribe. If anything, I was caught between two other tribes: the jocks and the preps. I was associated with jocks for the obvious reason of my perceived athleticism, as I mentioned above. But I wasn’t really a jock. I wasn’t really into sports; I wasn’t obsessive or even competitive about them. I hardly followed any pro sports teams. I didn’t wear the gear. I really didn’t care that much. To be honest, when I got out of high school, I stopped playing sports altogether and didn’t miss them one bit. In fact, I’ve long since come to realize that for years I had been living the bizarre situation of being an athlete who didn’t enjoy athleting. This is why I say I was associated with jocks, rather than I was a jock.

The same can be said of the preps. I wasn’t really considered preppy, but by dint of the schools I went to in Calgary (Elboya and Western), preppiness was the dominant culture and so by default I was immersed in it. Many of my friends were preps and so, again, I was associated by default. But nobody actually saw me as legitimately preppy. Consider Alfonso Ribeiro’s character, Carlton, in The Fresh Prince of Bel-Air. He is full-on preppy. He favours cardigans and topsiders with no socks. He drapes a sweater around his shoulders and ties it kitchly in front. He uses his white voice all the time. He dances from the knees, bopping up and down, giving his fingers a vigorous snap on the beat, his head careening from side to side, his face plastered with a careless grin. He is meant to be funny, and the joke is clear. Carlton’s Blackness is an anomaly: preppiness is akin to whiteness, and a Black man jaunting about in the trappings of whiteness is a laughing matter. If wealthy Carlton, in the heart of a fashionable Los Angeles suburb, is incapable of hitting the mark without being a joke, I was never going to fly as anything authentically preppy in prairie-town Alberta. The only reason I got away with the association is because it was the default culture of my environs. As the old joke goes, it’s the fish who asks, “What the hell is water?” and preppiness was the water of my school environment. We plunged into Pretty in Pink; we washed up along Calvin Klein; we steeped in Sperry Topsiders.

To the same extent that Goths disdained brands and commercialism of all sorts, brand culture was the spine that erected preppiness. This is why my natural inclination was to become something of a brand expert. I didn’t feel seen and so I tried to counter my invisibility with the trappings of visible commercialism. All of us were susceptible to the lure of these brands, though. It wasn’t just me and my racialized inner turmoils. A national parallel was taking place that simply validated those feelings. The 1980s was an era of intense commodification because cable TV suddenly became a thing and ushered it into our unsuspecting lives. In some ways, cable TV of the eighties was like social media of the twenty-first century. It gave us access to a meaningful world so that we didn’t have to feel so backwoods, so provincial, so unseen.

The threat of Americanization is a fixture of Canadian identity, and to many this was one more avenue toward its inevitable arrival since hoards of kids seemed to be lapping it up without a second thought. Once, my social studies teacher, in an attempt to demonstrate the inherent value of our Canadianness, spontaneously polled the class as to how many of us would be okay with becoming a part of the U.S. A slight majority of us was okay with that. His eyes popped out of his head. It was the last thing he had expected. He had instinctively called for the poll as a reflexive gesture of patriotism: Canadians often struggle with expressions of patriotism, but the one thing we have all tacitly agreed on is that we are not American. As I write this, we are well into our anti-Trump, elbows-up national campaign of 2025, and it has been so wholeheartedly adopted because it scratches that most uncategorical itch on the spine of Canadian patriotism. The easiest thing a Canadian can do to get on the same page with any other Canadian is assert our moral (etc., etc.) superiority to the U.S. What my social studies teacher couldn’t have known is that cable TV imported teenage trends, popular culture, the cool of adolescence we all wanted so badly to inhabit, and it confirmed to us that none of it was located in Canada. We didn’t actually want to be Americans. We just wanted to wear Jordache and Lacoste and cut class like Ferris Bueller and live our lives like a music video. We wanted to be seen.

To a certain extent, too, Canada has always wanted to be seen. We are caught between the past of our British heritage and the present of our North American modernity. It is hard to stand out when your anchoring points feel adrift; it is hard to stand out when your drama reads like someone else’s script. So it wasn’t only naive consumerism that drove us to seek out America. It was also our desire not to be America. How strange that this world I was growing up in, so different from the one of my parents’ childhoods, created a pathway for me to understand my African identity. Even stranger that it was my African identity, in a shared rhythm with Alberta, in turn that showed me how strongly I am connected to the Prairies. It took me years to learn the intricacies of this rhythmic interplay, years to discern the grand right and left of it all. I feel a little dismayed by that. But it was impossible for me to see it back then. I was, after all, only a boy.

A few days after I stole the bottle of Polo from that same shelf Gabriel had targeted, I found myself warily watching my Uncle Biola at the party my parents were throwing for his wife. Uncle Biola was a stubborn man. In West Africa, there is a type of man that is sometimes called a “real” African man. He is traditional in an uncompromising and self-certain way. He is a man of few words, guided by his physicality. No matter how ridiculous or impossible his version of the world is, he demands acquiescence to it and punishes those who fail to uphold this vision. If you are familiar with classic African literature, then you know that Okonkwo, the protagonist of Chinua Achebe’s seminal novel, Things Fall Apart, is a “real” African man. In fact, the novel’s tragic achievement is that he is such a man in a world that is losing its hold on tradition. You are frustrated by Okonkwo’s inflexibility but also devastated at his thorough demise. A part of you wishes that he could have been more adaptable and a part of you wishes the world could have been more forgiving.

My Uncle Biola was a modern type of a “real” African man. By this I mean, he might have been the complete article had he stayed in Sierra Leone, but like so many people of my parents’ generation, he left a state of optimism and burgeoning national pride simply to further his education in the West, never suspecting the downward turn his country would tragically take. In his case, he came to Canada with my aunt, whose name is also Biola, and they started their new life, literally, in the West.

This shift in geography shifted something of what his character was capable of achieving as a “real” African man. Obviously, in Canada, you cannot smack a child over the head with a wooden crate, as happened to another uncle of mine who was too slow to respond to his teacher’s request to move the crate from a nearby table. You cannot scream at a passenger in your car — who is in your car because it is a cab and you are the cab driver — when that passenger apparently slams the car door too forcefully for your liking.

And, obviously, I have no idea if Uncle Biola would have done anything like these things if they had stayed in Sierra Leone. But I do know that he exercised his own version of African manhood in Alberta. If the fitful weather demanded we protect ourselves, he would roll up his sleeves and saunter outside into the February cold with no winter gear on at all. He would shrug at our exasperated looks, our eyes popping with frustration and devastation. He favoured seventies shirts with large collars and bold patterns in thin polyester at all times of the year. He booted up in brown suede Chelsea slip-ons with black gussets on the side, snow or no snow. Truthfully, he was dapper. He claimed not to feel the cold at all. Maybe he was too cool for the cold.

He was a headstrong man, tall, but thickly built with an enormous belly. He had an insatiable energy. Like many Africans, our parents loved to get together, drink a little and dance a lot. Uncle Biola was ever present, shouting stories at the top of his lungs, drinking a lot, and dancing even more. When Jheri curls became a thing in the eighties, he was first to jump on the bandwagon and the last to reluctantly step off of it a couple of decades later. I have a lasting image of him in the centre of the dance floor (our living room), holding a rum and coke aloft, singing loudly to Debbie Harry’s “The Tide is High,” his Jheri curls collapsed against his forehead, sweat pouring down his face, the world spinning in helpless rhythm around his gravitational glee.

But he was diabetic and he was careless with his medication, especially if he was having a good time. At times, my Aunty Biola (who went by Sarah in the wider world) was at her wits’ end with him. No pushover herself, her urgings for him to take his medication would escalate to desperation and then, quickly, from there, all-out explosion. It was during these times that I would get glimpses of what Uncle Biola, as a “real” African man, might have been like. His eyes, already red, narrowed and his breath came out stertorously, painfully loud. Aunty Biola was like a welterweight boxer circling him with her words, lighter than his, but with insistent, relentless jabbing. Uncle Biola absorbed it all, like the heavyweight he was, until he could tolerate it no longer. Then a low moan, the sound of agitated cattle, would rumble from his depths. Something in his features would change, and the whole evening’s atmosphere, which had been compelled to circle his luminous energy, would shift to some unknown, precarious territory.

I was about twelve years old. This sight of my uncle and the transformation it demanded of the room struck me in an unexpected way: I wanted the shift. I wanted my Uncle to complete his transformation. I wanted to see him explode from his body and emerge as a “real” African man. Far from sensing anything dangerous or unhinged in the encounter, I saw it as an opportunity to look into a window that had been closed to me all my life.

Although I was born in Sierra Leone, I was raised here and had no lived memories of the community I was meant to be from. This was a double-edged sword for me as, on the one hand, I was always susceptible to white Canadians denying the legitimacy of my Canadianness, and, on the other, I was teased by my parents for being, what they called, “Canada Boy.” Though I was too young to understand it, let alone do anything about it, asserting the validity of one side of my identity always risked jeopardizing the other in a push and pull that left me feeling adrift between two cultural masses, unable to lock into orbit around either one. In this suspended uncertainty, I was unconsciously drawn to moments that were both capable of confirming my identity and ruthlessly tearing apart its fabric at the same time.

Uncle Biola’s cornered look, his animal growl, promised me a view into my African background that I knew was an authentic version I otherwise had no access to. It would confirm all of the stories that I had heard from my parents’ generation, stories that were, I see now, meant as warnings of what was possible for an “authentically” Sierra Leonean lived experience. In my parents’ view, a world that allowed you to punish a child because they were too loud or too slow or too brash or too hasty or too quiet was wrong. I didn’t hear their warning. Maybe I thought there was an “authentic” possibility for me to live out as well. Maybe I felt a “real” African man could counter the denials from white Canadians who, it seemed to me, were denying my right to occupy the same spaces as them, with the same legitimacy. I don’t know. I only know that I wasn’t afraid or uncertain of Uncle Biola’s simmering gaze. I only know that I wanted to stoke the fire.

At that moment, the rest of the party-goers intervened, circling Uncle Biola, gripping him and chastising him in Krio, trying to laugh it off. “Bo,” they said, “come on, just take your medicine and let’s dance!” They cajoled him until a sheepish smile crept onto his face. He downed his pills with a gulp whiskey and shouted for Boney M. The party roared back to life. The dancing lasted all night long.

In Krio, bo is a complex word. In one sense, it has roots with and is very similar to the English word boy. To my Canadian ears it sounded like the diminutive of the word bɔbɔ, which can literally mean boy. This turns out not to be true. When Uncle Biola was being entreated by the other party-goers to calm down and take his medicine, he was not being called a “boy.” When bo is being deployed in this sense, “Eh bo, take your medicine so we can all dance again,” it is somewhere between a gesture of familiarity and a rhetorical expletive. In English, we might say something like, “Hey man, chill,” or “C’mon, bro,” and the “man” or “bro” in this context evokes a familiarity (“C’mon man/bro, we’re on the same team here” ) but it can also simply be an expletive, empty of true grammatical meaning. And for me, as a youngster, floating behind the meanings and non-meaning of bo, somewhere in the distance, was the historical spectre of “boy.” One of the tools of empowerment I stumbled on when I was younger was challenging white people who addressed me using the term “boy.” At some point, I discovered that this would unbalance them from their usual perch of confidence and control over my status in what they perceived of as their world. Without warning, I would lash out with “Who you calling ‘boy’?” and they would be startled into slack-jawed stammering or wide-eyed silence. No matter that it had been said to me in innocence or endearment even, they felt the electricity of my reprimand and they were knocked from their perch. Truthfully, I didn’t fully understand why this phrase held the power it did. But like anyone whose general situation makes them feel hungry for power, when I found this tool of power, I honed and wielded it without hesitation. I didn’t care that I didn’t fully understand it.

The same could be said for me and the word bo. My inclination to see “boy” in bo was a miscue. The word can be a tricky invocation for the uninitiated, non-Krio speaker, and I was a halfling Krio speaker at best. But for Uncle Biola and the rest of my parents’ generation, even displaced as they were in Canada’s English, all of these complexities were expressed and understood effortlessly. So, when Uncle Biola was called bo, he knew what company he was in. And, actually, whatever precarity I might have picked up on as a twelve-year-old, whatever doubts I may have had about Uncle Biola’s potential transformation into a true, “real” African man, more likely had to do with my Canadian clumsiness with the language and with the culture as a whole. He knew how to respond. Maybe there was never a danger of anything else happening.

This, too, I like to think of as Uncle Biola’s brand. He was as much at home at the centre of an African party, teetering on some edge, as he was gossiping about the Calgary Flames’s latest travail with a random stranger at the bus stop. It was as though he didn’t notice the change of setting. This was part of the modern character of him being a “real” African man. He was stubbornly, exactly the same man whether he was walking through a street market on Kroo Town Road in Freetown or helping to jump start someone’s car in the heart of an Albertan February. Even his outfits remained the same. World be damned.

Nothing marks my parents’ generation as transitional more than where they gave birth to my generation. Some, who came to Canada just before my parents, had all of their children in Freetown and then moved. Some, like my Uncle Biola, came to Canada and then had all of their children. But most split their children’s birthplaces between the two countries. My parents, who only managed to eke out two kids, are exemplary of this. I was born in Sierra Leone while my younger sister was born in Edmonton.

My sister is the same age as Uncle Biola’s kids. Because I am older, I remember when Uncle Biola’s middle child was born. I was maybe eleven years old, so my perspective is limited, but I have one clear memory. Uncle Biola, ever full of impulsive, original ideas, had decided to order a cake for his wife to celebrate the birth she had just laboured through. He placed a phone order with Woodwards bakery for the cake to be iced with his new son’s name.

There was a pause over the phone and you could almost see a quizzical eyebrow being raised: “Happy Birthday Jersey?” she asked, confused.

“No, no,” Uncle Biola shouted, “Happy Birthday Georgie.”

Another pause: “Jody?”

“Georgie,” my uncle roared, “Georgie!”

I don’t know how the entire conversation went. I’m quite sure that if Uncle Biola was tentatively asked to spell Georgie, he would have categorically refused. After all, in his world, if you don’t know how to spell Georgie, that’s your problem. In Uncle Biola’s world, there was very little need for questions at all. The sun rose in the east and set in the west. Pademba Road was as logical a place to buy cassava leaves as West Edmonton Mall. Wide-collared, pattern-splayed polyester shirts wore as well in the middle of summer as in the middle of winter. If you can’t spell Georgie, you’re an idiot.

I wasn’t there, but I remember hearing stories of my Aunty Biola, waking up harried and exhausted in her hospital bed, my uncle’s wide-toothed smile, holding out a cake with a single candle: “Happy Birthday Judgy.” This story garnered widespread hilarity from the Sierra Leonean community. But it peeved me. In part, this difference in our responses was a demonstration of a distance between us. A distance I hated. For so much of my life I was lost in space, drifting in orbit between the gravitational pull of my Sierra Leonean and Canadian twin stars. I would approach one, suddenly finding myself careening out of control as the force of its mass slingshot me right past it headlong toward the other star, only to be flung right back to the first in a dizzying star dusted-loop of infinity.

Something as innocuous as a shared joke could demonstrate me to be flailing farther and farther away from the group I wanted to be attached to. Because I was always trying to stay in the orbit of one of the stars, being rejected by its gravity inevitably evinced feelings of rejection. And the closer I approached my teen years, the more my go-to emotion for coping was courting with anger.

It is with some shame that I admit that many of the sources of anger in my life at the time were the very things from which I sought a sense of belonging. Uncle Biola was one such source. I loved many things about him: his maverick sense of fashion; his inflexible expectations; his unfaltering joy at parties. But one thing I could not stomach was his persistent, impenetrable accent. Worse, I felt burdened and embarrassed by it. Even after decades of living in Canada, Uncle Biola sounded like he had just arrived and was doggedly, if still gamefully, attending part-time weekend lessons in English.

It pained me to hear him talking to white Canadians, especially those I knew, especially my friends. It felt akin to having something very personal, very private exposed to the world for ridicule. He sounded reduced and boyish to me. In those moments, I was hyper-aware of how he was being perceived, how his unflinching character was reduced to an animalness, how his maverick impulses seemed to betray us all. It never occurred to me to question my own feelings. It never occurred to me that I might be the one who was the betrayer.

Really, it was insane: I wanted him to be a “real” African man and I was proud of all the ways in which he stood out from the common crowd; at the same time, when it came to his speech anyway, I was ashamed that this very same Africanness was on display. The boyishness in the etymology of bɔbɔ seemed emphasized to me in these moments. His mouth’s hopeless contortions around simple words were in my mind not just the public sign of incompetency, but of immaturity, an unfinished intelligence, an underdeveloped understanding of certain basics.

When I was older, he took me to his favourite car wash to show me the ropes of caring for my first car. Today, this is one of my fondest memories of him. He loved cars and he loved caring for them. It is no coincidence that his many and sudden jaunts into wild winter weather, without appropriate clothing, were to rescue someone having a car “situation,” like a flat tire or a dead battery. On this hot summer day, he took me to the Bubble Mart like it was a rite of passage. He led me through the ceremony of hand-washing, drying and waxing. I learned all of the magic tricks of various kinds of chamois. He introduced me to his moustached, muscle-car friends. Throughout it all, just like our family parties, full of drink and dance, Uncle Biola was the magnet at the centre of the day’s energy. Everyone swirled around him, indulging in greetings, sharing stories, asking his advice. He absorbed it all, smoothly stepping toward and turning from person to person, swirling in graceful veronicas, like an age-old matador calmly deflecting the charging bull, using its energy as a source of creativity, his dance, his art.

Today, I cherish this memory. But for years, it raised my ire, especially as a teenager, for the simple reason that when he introduced me, he called me “Bat.” When I was younger and being buffeted about by the opposing gravitational wells of the twin stars that raised me, I was self-conscious about the name Bertrand. No sooner had I expelled its two syllables than people scrunched their eyes and raised a lip in a snarl of confusion: “Burr — what?” I very quickly developed the habit of shortening my name to Bert, a simple and single syllable that was, I was sure, as harmless and familiar as the cone-headed, yellow Muppet everyone knew. But in my Uncle Biola’s mouth, this simple syllable was transformed into a simplistic shadow, a caricature of itself. For all of my inward contortions over these varying expressions of my name — of who I was — it turns out that even this embarrassment over my beloved uncle’s way with words was yet another pathway, another trail, that would eventually lead me to connect my African family history with the Prairies’ historical legacy.