Jason Diakité’s memoir is an eloquent and moving story of how the author has come to terms with his complex family history and multiple identities, including his black and white racial origins (his father is black, his mother white), and his Swedish and American nationalities. Mr. Diakité chooses to focus on his black heritage in A Drop of Midnight, because he believes that this part of him is the most consequential to his life. His blackness, his “drop of midnight,” determines the way many people react to him, often negatively or at least warily among non-blacks, and it is the part of himself that Mr. Diakité finds hardest to come to terms with, and hardest to accept.
Much of the book therefore is an examination of his black American father’s (Madubuko Diakité’s) heritage, from the “harsh and brutal” life of blacks in Harlem, to the unrelenting savagery of slavery in South Carolina (see, for example, the chapter “Whitney Plantation”). Despite celebrating the survival of his black ancestors through their cultural achievements, especially music, and himself building a successful and distinguished musical career through hip-hop, Jason Diakité makes very clear just how much of a cruel struggle it has been to be black in the United States, both historically and today. His outsider’s perspective, black but born and raised in Sweden, a country where discrimination against black people exists but in dramatically less heightened form than in the United States, gives his book invaluable insight into the life of American blacks.
A number of questions are raised by Mr. Diakité’s memoir however, the most pressing of which is why, despite everything he has said about the sustained and evil racial suppression of black people in the United States, he comes to the conclusion that he feels more at home there than in Sweden:
"I’ve realized recently that my feelings of otherness and homelessness are stronger in Sweden than in the United States. All I can think of now is when and how Amelie, Maxime, and I can move back across the Atlantic. Every inch of me is longing to reverse the migration of my parents." (p. 286)
Part of the problem is that the memoir says very little about his life in Sweden. There are some clues, for example when Mr. Diatiké makes occasional disparaging comments about Sweden:
"For the first time since arriving in New York, I wanted to go back to Lund. That safe little city in the quiet little country I’d spent my entire upbringing referring to as Legoland." (p. 190)
And on Sweden’s cooperative relationship with Nazi Germany in the Second World War:
"Accepting the truth can take time for a person and even longer for a nation. In Sweden, for example, how many history textbooks talk about Sweden’s passivity and silence during World War II?" (p. 211)
Is Sweden too conformist, too conventional, too restrictive of personal expression – especially artistic expression – for Mr. Diakite’s taste, despite his having had a successful musical career there? The reader may infer that this is so, but it may not be correct. We need to hear more from Mr. Diakité on the matter.
Mr. Diakité’s most penetrating insight into the nature of his own being comes on the last page of his final chapter:
"For most of my life, I have proclaimed myself half American, half Swedish, half white, half black. But now I choose to say I’m both white and black, both Swedish and American. German, French, Slovak, African, Cherokee. All these identities belong to me. I’ve gone from being half to double, and in that seemingly tiny semantic shift lies one of my greatest strides of identity. Doubleness is infinitely better than halfness." (p. 284)
This profound and uplifting insight and statement about the great strengths of diversity is not only of great comfort to Mr. Diakité, but also to all of us who struggle at times with our multiple identities, racial or national, or both. Thank you!
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- Thanagma (book-reader)Reviewed in the United Kingdom on February 11, 2020
The exploration of identity
- gommineReviewed in the United Kingdom on July 25, 2020
A compelling read about family, race and identity
- Kindle CustomerReviewed in the United Kingdom on February 17, 2020
A stunning, thought-provoking book
