Saga Boy: My Life of Blackness and Becoming

Product Information

This memoir really leaves me speechless. I think the author perfectly encapsulated life in his memoir, by spending time focusing on the little things of life as a child would. I find that this is the reason it took some time for me to get into this book. In Saga Boy, Antonio Michael Downing offers expertise and experience, intellect and intimacy; this is a book that names the griefs and violences of colonialism and insists on the tentacular ways they reach into all facets of being. It is also a book about kinship, pleasure, celebration, and love. Saga Boy is the story of a remarkable life, one both relatable and not, told with intricacy. It charts the ways space and time shape people into many, discernible persons within a lifetime. Truly unforgettable.” PDF / EPUB File Name: Saga_Boy_-_Antonio_Michael_Downing.pdf, Saga_Boy_-_Antonio_Michael_Downing.epub

SAGA BOY | Kirkus Reviews

He also writes with an awareness that the region's own will recognize when it comes to the influence and constructed models left behind and instituted by our former colonizers. The language, schooling, religion, and social behaviours and mores. Joan tried to stop it, but when Michael was twelve, the two boys ended up going to live with their father and stepmother, Al and Hailey. Downing writes with an almost brash quality. The prose is crisp and no-nonsense even when sharing trauma, he approaches it with the vulnerability and steel that can be found existing dually in children.Yes, I wondered how you could describe those details so vividly in the book. Though, based on your ability to recite everything from The Odyssey to Biggie off the cuff, it’s obvious you have a good memory.

Saga Boy | Milkweed Editions

The story - the writing - the telling - really seemed to find itself after the death of Tony’s grandmother and his subsequent move to Canada. Perhaps this is an artefact of his being older and the memories being less speculative… the experiences being ones he truly remembered on his own? Or perhaps it was my own - unconscious - reaction to the childhood events described, how devastating they were (not that later events weren’t equally devastating…). Downing’s elegant, engaging memoir will have particular significance to readers from the Caribbean diaspora, but it will be understood by any reader who has ever had their world suddenly upended and needed to make it whole again.” Tony became Michael. His first teacher was a nightmare. Not only did she change his name, she tested him and recommended he be put ahead two grades. I gasped as I read this - already seeing the disaster this was likely to become. I remain angry thinking about how different things might have been for him had he been allowed to remain with his peers.Downing’s early childhood was filled with Anglican hymns, British-style school uniforms, and “the single greatest sanitizer of our savagery: the King James Bible.” The mysteries, rhythms, and magic of Trinidad surrounded him, too. Abandoned by both of his parents, he was raised by his grandmother. Following her death, he and his brother were sent to live with their hyper religious aunt in Wabigoon, Ontario. He was eleven; he went from going to sleep in tropics to dealing with blizzards in a matter of days. Even his name was changed: he was now called Michael, as Antonio was thought “unsuitable” to life in Canada. From the musician known as John Orpheus, a debut memoir about rootlessness and metamorphoses “across continents and calamities.”

Saga Boy by Antonio Michael Downing - Audiobook - Audible.ca

Downing seamlessly blends poetic images, music, and storytelling to create a poignant and stunningly honest memoir of a young man’s adamant determination to navigate his position and find himself despite the boundaries of colonialism, racism, and the endless sense of disbelonging.” It’s surreal, feeling the loss of Antonio’s grandmother. Us readers followed along the start of a journey for a Trinidadian child only for it to abruptly pause for relocation. That sudden twist in life is what left me speechless. Downing spends the memoir relaying how each integral moment of his life shifted and shaped the person he has become today. This memoir helped me realize how significant these events can be, how important it is to understand that everyone has their own story. Saga Boy is an eloquent memoir about Anthony Michael Downing’s experiences as an immigrant in a minority population; it centers his resilience.Lamees al Ethari, author of Waiting for the Rain: An Iraqi Memoir and From the Wounded Banks of the Tigris Downing’s narration is compelling and disturbing. He writes about longing for a home—a place where he could feel rooted. But the toxic secrets of the past had been passed down instead, and he saw himself becoming what he least wanted to be: a “saga boy,” the Trinidadian term for a “playboy,” just like his father and grandfather. An insider’s account of the rampant misconduct within the Trump administration, including the tumult surrounding the insurrection of Jan. 6, 2021.