Biography & Autobiography Personal Memoirs
Saga Boy
My Life of Blackness and Becoming
- Publisher
- Penguin Group Canada
- Initial publish date
- Jan 2021
- Category
- Personal Memoirs, Artists, Architects, Photographers, Entertainment & Performing Arts
-
Paperback / softback
- ISBN
- 9780735237308
- Publish Date
- Jan 2021
- List Price
- $26.95
-
Paperback / softback
- ISBN
- 9780735237322
- Publish Date
- Jan 2024
- List Price
- $23.00
Classroom Resources
Where to buy it
Description
SHORTLISTED for the 2021 Speaker's Book Award
LONGLISTED for the 2021 Toronto Book Award
The triumph of Saga Boy is the triumph of Blackness everywhere--the irrepressible instinct for survival in a world where Blacks are prey."
--Ian Williams, Giller Prize-winning author of Reproduction
An enthralling, deeply personal account of a young immigrant's search for belonging and Black identity amid the long-lasting effects of cultural dislocation.
Antonio Michael Downing's memoir of creativity and transformation is a startling mash-up of memories and mythology, told in gripping, lyrical prose. Raised by his indomitable grandmother in the lush rainforest of southern Trinidad, Downing, at age 11, is uprooted to Canada when she dies. But to a very unusual part of Canada: he and his older brother are sent to live with his stern, evangelical Aunt Joan, in Wabigoon, a tiny northern Ontario community where they are the only Black children in the town. In this wilderness, he begins his journey as an immigrant minority, using music and performance to dramatically transform himself. At the heart of his odyssey is the longing for a home. He is re-united with his birth parents who he has known only through stories. But this proves disappointing: Al is a womanizing con man and drug addict, and Gloria, twice abandoned by Al, seems to regard her sons as cash machines.
He tries to flee his messy family life by transforming into a series of extravagant musical personalities: "Mic Dainjah," a punk rock rapper, "Molasses," a soul music crooner and finally "John Orpheus," a gold chained, sequin- and leather-clad pop star. Yet, like his father and grandfather, he has become a "Saga Boy," a Trinidadian playboy, addicted to escapism, attention, and sex. When the inevitable crash happens, he finds himself in a cold, stone jail cell. He has become everything he was trying to escape and must finally face himself.
Richly evocative, Saga Boy is a heart-wrenching but uplifting story of a lonely immigrant boy who overcomes adversity and abandonment to reclaim his Black identity and embrace a rich heritage.
About the author
Awards
- Short-listed, Legislative Assembly of Ontario Speaker's Book Award
- Long-listed, Toronto Book Award
Contributor Notes
ANTONIO MICHAEL DOWNING grew up in southern Trinidad, northern Ontario, Scarborough, and Kitchener. He is an author, musician, and public speaker based in Toronto. His 2010 novella, Molasses (Blaurock Press), was published to critical acclaim. In 2017, he was named by the RBC Taylor Prize as one of Canada’s top Emerging Authors for non-fiction. He composes and performs music as John Orpheus.
Excerpt: Saga Boy: My Life of Blackness and Becoming (by (author) Antonio Michael Downing)
Overture
THE QUEEN DESIGNED MY BRAIN
I
The Queen designed my brain.
Almost everyone I knew as a child was born at a time when Trinidad was her property. With no right to vote or make their own laws, they were all perfect British subjects in training. This meant Anglican hymns, little schoolboy uniforms, and the single greatest sanitizer of our savagery: the King James Bible.
I learned how to read by studying the King James Bible. My grandmother taught me on a veranda in the jungle when I was four. Her eyes were bad, but she still needed her salvation. She still needed her proverbs and her psalms. “The Lord is the strength of my life, of whom shall I be afraid?” I learned how to read so I could become her eyes. In this way, Her Majesty the Queen designed the framework of my very first thoughts.
As a scrawny Trini-child, I wore khaki short pants and carried a cloth satchel full of books. In my bookbag was a red Nelson’s West Indian Reader—the colonialist’s handbook. Into my studies, I poured all the devotion I had for my grandmother, whose dark vibrant eyes and cunning smile were my whole universe.
I learned the Queen’s lessons a little too well. And the greatest lesson was this: if you could name a thing—commonwealth, colony, savages, subjects—it could become real. “In the beginning was the Word, and the Word was with God, and the Word was God.”
In 1986, I landed in Canada, a shiny-faced black boy thrust into the tiny northwestern Ontario town of Wabigoon, near Dryden. From a jungle to a blizzard within a few head-spinning days. Wolf packs howled in the trees and black bears rummaged at the trash dump. My beloved grandma was dead, and eleven-year-old me stared, perplexed, into the wilderness. This was my first encounter with transformation: the art of letting go and becoming something new. It was an art I would become all too familiar with in the coming decades.
Throughout the years, I would give myself many names. They called me Tony in Trinidad, Michael in the gleaming boardrooms of corporate Canada, Mic Dainjah when I toured England with my rock ’n’ roll heroes, Molasses when I crooned soul songs, and Mike D. when I plucked the banjo at folk festivals. Finally, I became John or J.O. or John Orpheus, my boldest, baddest self.
So this is a memoir, but a memoir of whom?
I want to tell you that it is about John Orpheus, but it’s not. I want to say it’s about inventing John, being John, killing John, and then watching him rise again from the ashes of the fire that destroyed all I owned. But that too would fall short.
This is a story about unbelonging, about placelessness, about leaving everything behind. This is about metamorphoses: death and rebirth. About being shattered over and over and reassembling yourself across continents and calamities. This is a story about family and forgiveness. About becoming what you always were.
Like a tree shedding its cone on the mountainside, fertilized by cold rain and deer shit, somehow growing up bold and strong, it is about creativity: that desperate act of survival. Nature’s only lesson. This book is about the manure we call art and the abyss that heals us.
These are the stories that wrote me.
Oh, and it’s about all that other stuff too.
II
There was a woman in the front they said was my mother.
She too had told me this, the few times we’d met. Her name was Gloria, and I was watching her carefully as my grandmother ascended the steps of Fifth Company Baptist Church in her casket.
Gloria was fidgeting with her handbag, in a grey dress, frowning sadness as if it were raining, but the skies were clear. The wet season in Trinidad’s tropical jungle usually meant seething black clouds and rain that made the bush ripe with mango, cocoa, and pommecythere (or “pomcetay,” as we called it) and that washed fat snakes into the road. But on that October day, the sun was streaming bright glory into our heavy hearts.
Among the mourners was the woman, Gloria; my older brother, Junior, who was fourteen; and my two aunties, Joan and Agnes, who had come from overseas for the funeral. Miss Excelly’s death had brought us together in a way nothing could when she was alive.
Where had this mother been all this time? What had she been busy doing? Gloria said, “If I had known Mama was sick, I would’ve come!” She scrunched up her mouth and cheeks and half talked, half shouted to Auntie Joan: “Why nobody ever tell me nothing?”
Auntie Joan was walking just behind the pallbearers. She was a tall, erect, handsome woman who lived in Canada, a place where everyone was rich. Next to her was her sister Agnes. Agnes was as small as a bird, flimsy as a breeze, elegant orchid-pink purse to match the hat to complement the dress. She lived in America. Both sisters had faces slick with tears—raw, puffy pools of grief.
“What will become of these two boys?” asked Auntie Agnes, nodding towards my brother and me.
“Leave it to the Lord—he will provide a way,” Joan answered.
Junior was walking behind us a bit, in a powder-blue suit just like mine, his brow crumpled into a knot. They used to think we were twins because we were always together, but now he was fourteen, while I was eleven. He was hanging out in Princes Town, taking maxi taxis and kissing girls. He was going places that I couldn’t follow.
Junior’s first memory was of Gloria leaning through our darkened door, handing a bundle of baby me to Miss Excelly, then rushing back to a waiting car and driving away.
“The young one like me better,” our grandmother used to say. This wasn’t fair; Junior remembered his mother. I didn’t. Yet as far back as anyone could recall, I clung to Grandma’s skirts always, even when she was in her sickbed, with that metallic taste of death, the smell of her chamberpot, the way her silver bracelets turned black from her clammy skin. Even then, they had to make me get out of her deathbed.
When Joan and Agnes arrived, everyone asked, “Is yuh brutha comin?” Al, their wayward younger brother—Gloria’s ex-husband and my father—was a ghost, a wisp of legend that draped itself across my childhood.
Miss Excelly’s tongue, stiff from stroke, almost useless, groaned into Joan’s ear, “Whwwwwaaaaaaaaaal.” Auntie Joan leaned in to try to make out what she was saying, and her mother gripped her arm. “Whaeeeeeeal,” she droned again, and wouldn’t let go.
“What do mean, Mama?”
“Wheeeaarrre Al?”
And Auntie Joan was crying again. It was a question: “Where is Al?” Al was not coming, but how could she break this to his dying mother?
Back at Fifth Company Baptist Church, Excelly Theodora Downing’s body lay like a monarch in her pomp. They wedding-marched her coffin through the pews and laid her down before the altar. As the mourners shuffled in, light danced off the metal rings on the pine box, the bronze wood of the organ, and the timepieces of the deacons who were watching sagely. We took our seats at the front, and the air filled with the perfume of warm bodies, starched shirts, boot polish, and lilies of the valley.
Sombrely, the reverend made his entrance. The murmuring hushed. The choir members, in their cherub robes, rose to meet him. He gestured, his arms wide as if to hold us all in one embrace, as if hugging the Holy Spirit, as if inhaling the gusts of sun pouring through the stained glass. Then, signalling to the musicians with a wink, he raised his eyes to the heavens and the choir began to sing.
Editorial Reviews
Shortlisted for the 2021 Speaker's Book Award
Longlisted for the Toronto Book Award
One of:
CBC's "BEST CANADIAN NONFICTION OF 2021"
Bustle's "The Most Anticipated Books of September 2021"
Praise for Saga Boy:
“[A] deeply moving memoir . . . [and] lyrical story. . . . Suffused with poetic prose that jumps off the page, this inspiring account sings.”
—Publishers Weekly *STARRED REVIEW*
"Powerful and beautifully written."
—Toronto Star
“An engaging narrative about the search for home, belonging, and identity.… [Saga Boy is] intriguing, passionate, and often moving.”
—Kirkus Reviews
"Downing's lush language and sensory details make the fascinating events of this memoir pop. An authentic, entertaining, and timely account of a creative immigrant's experiences."
—Booklist
"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."
—Library Journal
“Downing’s heart-wrenching memoir chronicles his saga of trying on and casting off many masks, learning the dimensions of the face through which he sees the world and the world sees him.”
—BookPage
“Compelling . . . Saga Boy is an eloquent memoir about Antonio Michael Downing's experiences as an immigrant in a minority population; it centers his resilience."
―Foreword Reviews, Starred Review
“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.”
—Library Journal
“Antonio Michael Downing’s Saga Boy is a vibrant, evocative, and searing account of the lives of Black immigrants. Downing helps us understand the rage and resilience of Black boys—motherless, fatherless, itinerant—and the communities that intervene to raise them. The triumph of Saga Boy is the triumph of Blackness everywhere—the irrepressible instinct for survival in a world where Blacks are prey.”
—Ian Williams, Giller Prize–winning author of Reproduction
“Saga Boy is an emotionally captivating, heartbreaking read on one man’s journey to understand who he is, where he comes from and where he belongs. From being the only Black family in Wabigoon to moving transformatively through the music scene in the city, Saga Boy makes us all question the strength of the ties that bind and where our future lies.”
—Tanya Talaga, author of Seven Fallen Feathers and All Our Relations
“Downing transports readers to the steamy, scented jungle of Trinidad where he lived with his grandmother as a child. Miss Excelly stands with ramrod dignity, glories in the Lord’s love, and jumps off the page with her strength, her joy, and her suffering. As Faulkner created the powerful Dilsey in The Sound and the Fury, Downing has created Miss Excelly. A story of resilience and character, Saga Boy is bound to become a Canadian classic.”
—Catherine Gildiner, author of Good Morning, Monster and Too Close to the Falls
“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.”
—Jenny Heijun Wills, author of Older Sister, Not Necessarily Related
“In the bespoke tome of impossible stories, Antonio Michael Downing’s Saga Boy enters the arena through its own misshapen doorway. Downing’s liquid, deeply felt memoir thrums with the materials of a life forged in the chaotic deficiencies of the British Empire. With a hallucinatory blend of earthquake-like drama, storm-like retrospection and a dreamscape of sounds that stretch from the Caribbean to Europe to Canada, he sees the hurricanes that colonial subjugation has made into his life and raises it a boy who is held by the dissolved dimensions where Blackness is not an appeal for human identity but the resolute, world-shifting creativity and power and dream of those who live well beyond the anaemic imaginations that create such harm. Even through catastrophe, the fevered scale of Downing’s story is testament to how actions—against all odds, and again, against the follies of the self—are made from the elegant and jagged spaces where generations hold each other, even in unlikely places. Read this book and witness this particular story of a struggle for transcendent becoming.”
—Canisia Lubrin, author of The Dyzgraphxst
“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.”
—Lamees al Ethari, author of Waiting for the Rain: An Iraqi Memoir and From the Wounded Banks of the Tigris
“Singularly dazzling, Saga Boy is a brilliant collage of the twenty-first century's most incredible memoirs. Told with an unforgettable and innovative pace, this a book I will reread forever.”
—Kiese Laymon, author of Heavy
“[In Saga Boy,] Downing deploys spectacular details in describing [his] childhood years, the sights, sounds and violence of that place and time. The prose in those early passages is exalted and melodic. Even as the tremendous care in its crafting seems evident, the words also flow naturally. Downing never seems to press. We see vast and granular marvels through the eyes of a child still capable of awe.”
—Star Tribune
