WHO I ALWAYS WAS

The challenges of coming-of-age as the child of African parents in suburban Wisconsin.

Okokon’s debut essay collection gets off to a rocky start with a prologue titled “Borrowed Context” that uses extensive footnotes to elaborate on basic information about the author’s family’s geographical roots: mother from Ghana, father from Nigeria, author born in Chicago, raised in Wisconsin. The footnotes are voluminous and printed in a way that makes the essay difficult to follow. It is a relief to find that this technique is dropped in the next section, which introduces one of the major themes of the book, the author’s relationships with the opposite sex, kindergarten through early 40s (she remains single). She weaves in a second throughline, about her emerging sense of herself as Black. So, in high school, when the author is rejected by a clique of American-born Black girls and gets involved with what she calls “Ghetto Whiteboys,” she tells us, “consciously or not, their desire to date me was likely related to their fetishization of Black women or their desire to create proximity to a culture they coveted.” Elsewhere: “Playing into the unquestioned cisgender binaries and presumed straightness of the nineties, we lined up boy, girl, boy, girl.” To that, LOL, as Okokon might say. This is a very millennial book, not just in its application of an identity politics lens, but also in its use of “tbh” and “::hard shrug::” and other textisms, in thanking Facebook and Instagram in the acknowledgments, and in its frequent recourse to Google. (“I was just your average second child—and a quick scroll through Google will tell you that we are rebellious peacemakers.”) A fascinating storyline about her father’s mysterious death on a trip to Nigeria remains as frustrating to the reader as it is to the author. How can it be that with all her investigation and with her mother’s stated willingness to answer questions, “I still wonder what story she believes about his death.” We do too.

Honest, vulnerable, earnest reflections that stop somewhere short of compelling.