Asante memoir has moments of brilliance
Near the end of MK Asante’s frequently brilliant and always engaging new memoir, “Buck” (Speigel & Grau, $25), the author has an epiphany.
Asante is a teenager growing up in various Philadelphia neighborhoods, and his life is, by just about any measure, a mess. He’s got a stepbrother in jail, a sister in a mental institution, and a circle of friends whose lives have been touched too often by violence, chaos and death.
“Do I contradict myself?” he reads in Walt Whitman’s epic poem “Leaves of Grass.” “Very well, then I contradict myself, I am large, I contain multitudes.”
Much in Asante’s life is contradictory. And his memoir contains multitudes: the rich and varied people of 1980s black Philadelphia. He’s a smart kid, growing up in a town he and his friends call “Killadelphia, Pistolvania,” for its drug- and gang-caused violence. His university professor father is known outside the home as “the father of Afrocentrism,” but he enrolls Asante in a private and predominantly white prep school.
He does this even while professing in an interview on “60 Minutes,” “I can honestly say that I have never found a school in the United States run by whites that adequately prepares black children to enter the world as sane human beings.”
Asante is now a filmmaker and author of three previous books, including “It’s Bigger Than Hip-Hop: The Rise of the Post Hip- Hop Generation.” “Buck” is his coming-of-age story, opening when he is 12. He goes by the name Malo, short for Khumalo.
Young Malo is something of a disciple to the two strong personalities who shape the book’s early chapters. The first is his larger-than-life father: MK Sr., known in this book as Pops.
Pops fights with Malo’s other role model, Uzi, the older brother he reveres. “Uzi is the color of walnuts and has a long, sharp face like the African masks my dad hangs up everywhere,” Asante writes. He’s an angry man-child, and doomed, but Malo idolizes him so much, “I even duck like him under doorways, even though he’s way taller and I don’t need to duck.”
The wordplay in these early pages is often extraordinary, with one original turn of phrase after another. The dawn sky is “the color of corn bread and blood.” When Uzi heads off with friends for a ride in a stolen car, he is “jailbreak joyful.” Uzi starts a new crew which adopts the ac- ronym N.A.M., letters that stand for as many different names as its members can think of: “New Age Militia ... Nubian Apocalyptic Military ... Niggaz Anglos and Mexicans ... Narcotics and Money.”
After Uzi gets thrown out of the house he winds up in the criminal justice system. Pops leaves home, too. With their big personalities suddenly off stage, “Buck” begins to lose some of its energy.
It takes skill to render the variety of characters, male and female, young and old, that populate a memoir like “Buck.” Asante seems more confident depicting maleness, and he’s at his best when he sets out into the city of Philadelphia itself. Skateboarders, street-corner philosophers and tattoo artists are all brought vividly to life.
Malo’s own path to redemption goes through great works of literature. Asante has largely succeeded in finding the words that give voice to Malo’s “mad” desire to live, and that makes “Buck” a powerful and captivating book.