Sock Free Hideaway

BEATS OF LOVE 

169. Act Normal: Joy and despair in Postcolonial Britain by Pete Kalu

I READ as a means of catharsis and to learn about myself and the wider world. 

I write for the same reasons despite feeling dwarfed by the many, many, many superior writers. Pete is one such writer whose vibrant and purposeful prose was in a different league from my strained observations when describing the work of Benji Reid. In person, he's self-effacing, neurotic but brimming with passion.

And in this memoir, he is too. Modesty creates a real life stutter, holding neurotic folk back, yet expressed differently, say on a written page, that same modesty creates a candour and wit which communicates an inner confidence that, in person, you can only ever sense at best, never quite grasp. A wholly unique life has become much more than the sum of its parts as told here.

Memory is fragmentary and abstract, so short stories; some only colourful vignettes, without chronology or design, make a sort of perfect sense. It conjures vivid sensation in the reader, and its only constant is the black experience. Not the clichéd black experience but a self-effacing, passionately honest one that, though making himself often the butt of his humour, also constructs observations of psychological genius. Either way, you're left in awe at his storytelling. 

I found it cathartic; it taught me about myself (I cringe to admit) and, thankfully, about the wider world.