From a Trinidad rainforest to an Ontario blizzard
Punk rapper and Kitchener resident explores storytelling, memory and home in powerful book
One day, 11-year-old Antonio Michael Downing is in Trinidad, being raised in the bush, which “is really a rainforest, and it spread its wings everywhere,” the cherished grandson of Miss Excelly.
A few days later, after her sudden death, he is sent, along with his older brother Junior, to live with his Aunt Joan in Wabigoon, a tiny community in Northern Ontario where “this new bush was as barren as the surface of the moon — a silent blanket of whiteness.”
It’s where the young Tony’s name was changed to Michael; where he tried to learn to speak “Canadian.”
Now living in Kitchener, the musical writer and artist — you might know him as punk rapper Mic Dainjah or performer John Orpheus — has been shape-shifting his identity ever since.
With the publication of his first novel, “Molasses,” that identity included author. Now he’s out with a memoir, “Saga Boy.” It’s literary, powerful and beautifully written.
We spoke to Downing, about memories, his plethora of identities and where, exactly, he calls home.
The book starts off with a very visceral memory — of poulourie, “a fluffy, golden, deep-fired ball of dough.” It really sets the scene of a time and place.
When I when I left Trinidad at the age of 11, I literally went from the jungle to the blizzard in the course of a few hours. But also everything I knew about the world and how to see the world and who I was in the world was just suddenly ripped out from underneath me. All I had left were the stories of my childhood. I didn’t have my grandmother … the village, the culture of Trinidad, the people: gone. But I had those memories and those stories. And so my whole life, I just kept telling them, like polishing the family jewels. I always felt at some point I would have to write them down.
So you decided to write them down in “Saga Boy.” How long have you been working on this one?
The only way I know how to deal with any emotional thing like this is to create something. And so most of my life that had meant music. In about late 2018, I rolled out of bed and had this stuck feeling like I didn’t know what the future should be, like I was trying on different ideas for what was next, like jackets that didn’t fit. And I hit upon it: that until I made peace with my past, I couldn’t really plot a course for my future.
There are so many stories about your grandmother, this is also partly an homage to her.
She taught me how to sing, and she taught me how to read and write when I was little. Her great gifts to me were the way she coped with being born in a colonial landscape in the year 1904. For her entire life (she had) no agency, no vote, no laws, no member of parliament representing her district, none of that.
The country was just a chattel of the Queen … they were expected to deliver revenue. But she always had a wonderful generosity and loving kindness to her. And the way she could do that, regardless of the strain of it, was through songs. She was always singing because the song helped her spin the lead into gold, like it was a kind of alchemy.
There’s a wonderful line in the book. “The summer of writing had been electrifying. But just reaching for metaphors about my inner life wasn’t enough. I needed to taste it in the food, hear the music in its voices, look it in the eye and call it by its name.” That seems to say an awful lot about the balance between the inner life and the outer life. How do you navigate that balance?
Through art. If I’ve done my job, this particular story about me becomes a more universal story about us and about being human. And that’s how I navigate that inner and outer world; you create something that touches, that connects you to everyone.
The book is subtitled “My Life of Blackness and Becoming.” A search for identity seems to have informed a whole range of your creative pursuits, not just writing.
But I also believe that is the way of life. All living things are always reaching. You know, our skin sheds itself after seven years and we have a completely new (skin). There is actually nothing about us that is rooted and fixed except the human experience is playing against that transitory nature of our existence. Within that we’re trying to stake our claim: “My family, that’s who I am. My country, that’s who I am.” Who knows what creates artists like this? But, you know, I certainly had the predisposition.
Of all the different personas, who is the most you?
I’m always me. Would you ask Denzel (Washington), “Of all the characters you’ve played, which one is the most you?” Well, they’re all, they’re just roles that I play. If we’re going to work — back when we actually went to places — we would dress for work. We would talk a certain way, we would act a certain way. If we were out for a night on the town with our friends, we’d probably dress a different way; you talk a different way, act a different way. And so it is the most human thing to change our clothes and change our personalities over and over and over again.
You went back to Trinidad after 24 years away. Did you find home at that point?
The place I had in my head was of course not the place I went back to. Some of the physical structures were there, but the little street that used to take me, like, years to walk up? I seemed to stride over it with one step. So I didn’t find the sense of home there.
Where have you found home?
I think that home is an emotion, a feeling of belonging in your own skin. And if you can belong in your own skin, anywhere you go can be your home. And anything you do can be home, and anyone you love and take into your heart can be your family. I’d always been at home.
That’s what I found. Home is an idea. The feeling’s not attached to place or people or specifics. It’s attached to your heart and the way you remember things and how you remember it. In fact, it is simply a story that we tell ourselves about who we are.