by R.J. Lambert
October 3, 2022
R.J. Lambert is a queer writer whose debut poetry collection, Mind Lit in Neon, is newly available from Finishing Line Press. He was selected by Kaveh Akbar to receive the Patricia Cleary Miller Award for Poetry from New Letters and nominated for a Pushcart Prize by The Worcester Review. R.J. teaches writing at the Medical University of South Carolina and is online at rj-lambert.com or @SoyRJ on Twitter.
When They Tell You To Be Good: A Memoir by Prince Shakur; Tin House Books; 296 pages; $24.99
Prince Shakur’s debut memoir, When They Tell You To Be Good, exposes the intersections of queer Black male sexuality, family trauma, and national and international political activism in contemporary America and abroad. The fourteen chapters are organized into five sections, and each chapter is named for geographic locations and time periods in Shakur’s literal and figurative journeys as he explores his sexuality, engages political activism, and pursues familial healing. His formative life experiences illustrate the lengths to which one young man will go to overcome his family’s secrets and advocate for justice in the world.
Although each chapter is situated geographically and temporally, they do not appear in chronological order. Shakur seems to resist the usual writerly temptation to overlay a clear narrative arc on confusing experiences that stem from either rejection or escape. The opening section alternates between the homes of Shakur’s biological family in Ohio and Montenegro, Jamaica, and sets up his early exposure to structural and generational traumas which will dominate the rest of the book, including the murder of his father Prince, nicknamed “Jazzbo,” and the ongoing police murders of Black men in America. From his time visiting family in Montenegro, Shakur hears how uncles were shot point blank and his father was separately murdered and left on the side of the road in Jamaica. A later section of the book returns to the topic of Shakur’s family traumas as the looming myth of Shakur’s biological father’s murder is compounded by the secretive and mysterious loss of his stepfather, Dennis, whose secretive identity, long work trips, and separate apartment foretell eventual police and FBI investigations and prison time. Despite the family visiting Dennis regularly in prison, he ultimately leaves the family back to Jamaica, after which “it became our jobs to turn Dennis into a ghost,” leaving yet another missing father figure whose absence haunts Shakur and his family.
The chapters are tied to and grow from place, and each location is explored with its varied and conflicted histories, especially with regard to race, racism, and violence. The opening chapter relates the murders of Black men such as Emmett Till, Michael Brown, and Eric Garner that inspire Shakur to become active on his college campus and in the Ferguson protests following Michael Brown’s 2014 murder. Another chapter describes Rodney King’s beating while his mother was pregnant with his brother. Shakur imagines his mother must have thought at the time of the Rodney King demonstrations, “What horrible things does America have in store for my child?” Shakur’s family history of murders of his young father and uncles parallels the communal loss of Black men to police violence in America and perhaps indicates his interest and passion for protesting racist police violence in America. Racial oppression also pervades his international travel throughout the book, including the Philippines, which Shakur contextualizes within a history of colonization by the Spanish for nearly four hundred years before the U.S. and Japan “took control.” By describing his subjective experience of race against the backdrop of historical and ongoing racism, Shakur’s memoir shows the lived experience of a “Black man in an anti-Black world.”
The longstanding family mystery about Shakur’s father’s murder resolves with some final chapters on his father’s brother, Cedric, whose story introduces a new understanding of his father’s final years and death. The closing chapters detail the previous generation of men growing up in Jamaica and living in the U.S., including their entering into personal and political violence, which became a way of life for Cedric. A brief series of excerpts from Cedric’s diary touchingly narrate the confusion and powerlessness of his lonely life in Jamaica, and the final chapter ends in Arizona with Shakur tracing down a surprising first-hand account to finally solve the puzzle of his father’s mysterious death.
Despite the extraordinary interweaving of major political and cultural touchstones throughout his young life, Shakur’s story is, at times, devastatingly relatable. Shakur’s lack of acceptance from his mother after coming out as gay leaves him feeling unloved and even wrestling with what it might mean to be unlovable within his own family. His innocence as a 16-year-old going to the skating rink contrasts with his mother and her church friend trying to shame him into being straight after she discovers his overtly gay diary entries. After his mother forces him to come out on her terms, he wonders, “Shouldn’t love be about wanting to face the darkness together, not alone?
The ability, or even necessity, to compartmentalize and segment different experiences and parts of himself is one of the fundamental strategies Shakur develops as he matures from a young child growing up between Ohio and Jamaica to a gay teenager, college student, and activist traveling across the country and the world. He describes his shifting presentation of identity as “a game I navigated while traveling—what to reveal and what to hold back.” This seems to be intimately tied to the rejection of his mother and stepfather for being gay, as well as the general unacceptability of being a young gay black man. The second section of the book details his budding sexuality and coming to terms with being gay while working a summer job in Yellowstone and losing his virginity while overseas with friends in the Philippines. After developing a crush and experiencing a brief romantic encounter with a boy named Colt, Shakur learns that Colt has raped a young woman they both knew, after which he “hated it, how quickly the words left my mouth after having lived a lifetime of men taking advantage of the women around me.” In another chapter, Shakur describes “the irony” of losing his virginity with two men while being recorded on an Android cell phone in Manila. Even his early sexual experiences were tinged with the threat of violence and violation by men.
Shakur’s central strategy for navigating political unrest, family loss, and his queer sexuality is the healing and freeing power of literature. This manifests in Shakur’s engagement with prominent Black voices that came before and finding his own voice through writing. He describes his curiosity when learning about Anne Frank’s diary as identity formation during formative years and under very real local threat from war, after which he turns to writing to practice telling his own truth, including first admitting he is gay to himself in his diary. In the absence of steady father figures in his own life, frequent literary references belie a young writer looking to his forbears for direction, identity, and belonging, relating his own experience (travels, activism, sexuality) to those he admires. Several of the chapters incorporate summaries and quotations from the likes of James Baldwin, or this quote from Frank B. Wilderson III: “We were there to see how fiction was made, not what fiction meant or whose lives it enhanced or how it greased the wheels of death for others.” One chapter has Shakur listening to speeches from Kathleen Cleaver, Angela Davis, Malcolm X, and Martin Luther King, Jr. At times, these allusions feel a bit jarring and pedagogical, but this too could be taken as an intentional political act to educate the lay (and white) public about how his life experience and memoir extends the conversations of prior writers and activists. Through reading great writers, Shakur has “learned the honor of asking questions and seeking answers for the gaping holes in life, death, or unexplained loss, ... often the biggest catalyst for curiosity in the young mind.”
With a fearless exploration of his biological family and intentional cultivation of support systems, friends, and lovers, Shakur embodies his answer to one of his final questions, “what are we willing to face to actualize the deepest and darkest parts of ourselves.” Towards the end of When They Tell You to Be Good, Shakur writes, “Greatness, to me, equated to understanding the significance of the small and grandiose choices that we make.” Through choices large and small, Shakur confronts the traumas in his family and personal life, showing that the darkness is indeed better faced together than alone.
©2022 West Trade Review
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Facing the Darkness Together, Not Alone: Reckoning with Generational and Structural Trauma in Prince Shakur’s When They Tell You to Be Good
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