Africanamerican't - by Ayokunle Falomo (Paperback)

About the Book

AFRICANAMERICAN'T is a document of attempted refusals: assimilation, forgetting, and allegiance to any one country.

Book Synopsis

If the question is America-and by extension, who is and what does it mean to be American? -AFRICANAMERICAN'T offers no answers. The CAN'T in the title suggests impossibility and that is precisely what the book is interested in. Even in the so-called land of opportunity, some things remain impossible for its speaker(s). In a way, AFRICANAMERICAN'T is a document of attempted refusals: assimilation, forgetting, and allegiance to any one country. However valid despair might be as a response to the continued failings of his two countries, Ayokunle Falomo traverses the distance between betrayal and love in an attempt to find poetry-and perhaps, something like hope-in all the places it can't be found.



Review Quotes

In AFRICANAMERICAN'T, Ayokunle Falomo deftly & tenderly tackles the nuances of African imemigration and the subsequent journey of navigating Blackness, belonging and unbecoming in the American empire. Falomo expertly takes readers across timelines and territories, allowing us to

bear witness to the consequences and contradictions of national allegiance for Black migrants in search of themselves. Yet, for the vastness of the book's subject matter, AFRICANAMERICAN'T is also an intimate text deeply rooted in the familial and the search of this thing called "home." This is not a manuscript to read through quickly or only once. Filled with stories, questions, lamentations &

celebrations, AFRICANAMERICAN'T is an invaluable and generous contribution to diasporic storytelling and an invitation for writers to recognize the urgency of telling more complete stories about our origins, journeys and selves.

-Mwende "FreeQuency" Katwiwa, author of Becoming//Black

It is impossible to read AFRICANAMERICAN'T and not think of Baldwin. Ayokunle Falomo, of course, is aware of his lineage, both blood and otherwise. The poems seem to ask: how could he not be? In this stunning collection, the Nigerian, American writer explores what it means to inherit displacement; to take the country into the body; to map the distances between family, history, Blackness, life. Though Falomo states, "I never asked for America. No, I never asked for America to be mine," he has marked a place for himself somewhere in between-in Houston, among fellow Nigerians in the U.S., in between the lines of these poems he offers as familial testimony to the realities of migration. This collection is inventive, playful, curious, smart. Anyone studying language or Blackness should read it-and everyone else too.

-Ariana Brown, author of We Are Owed.

In AFRICANAMERICAN'T, Falomo tenderly traces his body on the American political map. The exciting inventiveness of language wills Diasporic histories into poetic form. This feat of a project gives those of us tussling with the many failures of nation permission to own and fully embrace a

boundless grief, a righteous rage, and bountiful stillness.

-Loyce Gayo, author of half-note thoughts

One of the side effects of living through diasporic trauma is learning to navigate a historical-emotional past, present and future all at the same time. This paradox of Black existence is a writer's challenge... Ayokunle Falomo uses poetry to show not only how to navigate spacetime all at once, but also how to carve it into the human psyche with all its memory, weight, and breath... Falomo gives us living,

breathing memories that stretch and kick and try on new clothes through such a genuine and vulnerable speaker willing to guide us through.

-Houston Review of Books, Aris Kian in her review of African, American