SAGA BOY

From the musician known as John Orpheus, a debut memoir about rootlessness and metamorphoses “across continents and calamities.”

Growing up in post-colonial Trinidad, Downing witnessed the daily Whitewashing of his Blackness by school and church. Early on, he also suffered personal rejection when his parents left him to live with his paternal grandmother. The fracturing of his world grew deeper when his grandmother died and he was sent to live with his aunt in Canada. In his new home, he was still a Black boy conforming to the norms of White classmates who “were dumbstruck that I didn’t listen to rap music and talk slick ghetto jive like the Black people on TV.” As consolation, Downing cultivated a love of the transformative possibilities of the stage not long before he went to live with his father and girlfriend, both drug addicts, in Toronto. Neglected and abused by both, Downing took solace in music. He returned once again to live in relative stability with his aunt only to find himself put out for unruly behavior. The rootlessness of the author’s early life later manifested in the many identities he assumed—Michael Downing, corporate employee; Mic Dainjah; “soul preacher” Molasses; and John Orpheus, musician—and the peripatetic life that kept him moving among the U.S., Europe, and Canada. He craved “redemption” from “the patchwork of broken things [and people] that had spawned me,” but only after he looked to the island home he had left behind and accepted the Trinidadian culture he had never fully appreciated did he finally achieve a measure of peace. With its overly detailed reminiscences of boyhood and a storyline that delves into the many complex people, events, and situations that have comprised Downing’s life, the narrative suffers from pacing issues. However, the author compensates for these problems with an engaging narrative about the search for home, belonging, and identity.

Not without flaws, this book is nonetheless intriguing, passionate, and often moving.