BLACK BOY OUT OF TIME

Ziyad chronicles their tumultuous life experiences, many characterized by what the author terms “misafropedia,” or “the anti-Black disdain for children and childhood that Black youth experience."

One of 19 children raised by a Hindu Hare Krishna mother and Black Muslim father, Ziyad grew up queer and Black in Cleveland. Looking at their upbringing through the eyes of an "anti-Black, prison-based society" results in what the author calls "carceral dissonance." As they note, extracting their childhood from within this skewed perspective creates "space for Black children to be complex and multidimensional." Between memoir chapters, Ziyad includes heartfelt appeals to their misplaced “Inner Child,” attempting to reconnect with "my own tenderest aspects" through prayer, therapy, and ancestor communication and to be released from always having to be an "example of Black Excellence." Although Ziyad writes explicitly as a Black writer with Black readers in mind, this extension of kindness in the place of opprobrium can be applied across cultures. They bring the same righteous energy in their writing about Black experience to the chapters on awakening to a queer identity. In the final sections, it’s heartening to find Ziyad committed to a loving relationship. With eloquence and compassion, the author examines "how to manage a serodiscordant relationship"—their fiance is living with HIV, "a widely criminalized disease"—and how “to deal with the trauma from past sexual violence that refuses to stop rear­ing its hideous head from time to time.” It’s an ongoing project, one that the author tackles with grace and insight via the act of writing: “I’ve listened and learned from my elders in this craft—in­cluding James Baldwin and Toni Morrison and Kiese Laymon—who have demonstrated the immense depths a relationship might reach when one has difficult dialogues di­rectly with another on the page."

Ziyad successfully extracts the essence of being Black, queer, and full of tenderness.