Inspiring Older Readers

posted on 30 Dec 2019

That Reminds Me by Derek Owusu

In its review of Derek Owusu’s ‘That Reminds Me’, The Guardian refers to this as ‘the first novel to be published by Stormzy’s publishing imprint, Merky Books’. This description of the book as a ‘novel’ might actually give you the completely wrong impression of what you’re getting here because it’s actually a piece of writing that challenges, even defies, easy categorisation based on form. Is it a ‘novel’ or a series of prose poems or maybe a collection of impressionistic detail that just happens to coalesce into a whole? Having read it, I’m still not sure I could tell you. You’ll have to make do with it being a hybrid of all of those and probably more.

In this semi-autobiography (just how ‘semi’?) we follow the coming-of-age story of K, a boy of Ghanaian heritage who moves from a family fostering him in the English countryside to a life in the heart of London back with his mother and an ambivalent father. K’s world and his experiences – often troublesome and troubling – come to us on a mainline from his mind and emotions and are reflected as if by multiple shards of glass, with the images captured in a poetry-infused prose style.

Owusu reminds us by the way he structures the book that he is a storyteller - he prefaces each of the development stages of K’s journey around thematic new sections introduced by a quotation from the grandparent of all African storytellers, Anansi. What becomes clear is that this is not just an exploration but a quest for identity and whatever that means. Michael Donkor, reviewing the book in The Guardian puts it this way:

“In rhythmic, slippery prose, this slim Bildungsroman aims to capture the growing K’s ever-shifting attitude towards his blackness and heritage, his multifaceted relationships with his parents, battles with alcoholism and fluctuating mental health.”

Barely over a hundred pages long, this is a brave and daring book in many ways – it plays with form or style and handles hard to reach emotional material in a way that both encourages involvement but also, at times, alienates and obfuscates. In truth I found the writing style quite hard to get into and at times the rhythm eluded me and I was left wondering whether that was a problem with me or with the unevenness of the writing. That’s maybe something I’ll need to think about for when I revisit the book at some point.

What I am sure about is that voices like this would, in the past, have struggled to be heard and it’s a matter for celebration that there are routes through that are beginning to emerge. The experiences of the marginalised and the dispossessed are not all about brutal social realism or the dreaded ‘misery memoirs’ and Owusu’s book reminds us that those who have found themselves unrecognised or unvalued sometimes have poetry in their souls.

 

Terry Potter

December 2019