Saga Boy: My Life of Blackness and Becoming

A memoir about growing up in the sweltering heat of Trinidad, the island patois singing in my ear. Little does our narrator know that in the short time left to him there his beloved grandmother would be arming him with the tools he'd need to survive and flourish in this life - music and storytelling.

At 11 he finds himself in the frozen and completely foreign tundra of northern Canada in the care of a God-fearing, Aboriginal-aiding aunt, in what could barely be considered a hamlet. From that frigid introduction to Canada, Antonio Michael Downing would eventually find himself in my hometown of Kitchener Ontario.

Along the way he adopts a series of personas to better understand the world around him and his place in it from Tony to Mic Dainjah, Molasses to John Orpheus. These names both a refuge and an escape.

It's a raw and moving memoir about survival, starting over again and again and finding your own path through trauma.