Apogee Journal

Margo Jefferson’s Negroland: A Memoir Elisabeth Sherman Literature is experiencing a renaissance in the memoir genre. Women especially dominate this field. But critic Margo Jefferson has created a staggering hybrid work in Negroland, combining historical research with autobiography with lyric essay to elevate memoir beyond the confines of internal thought processes and solipsistic reflections on an individual experience. Jefferson opens Negroland with a history of America’s post-slavery landscape in brief profiles and letters of this country’s first black elite: James Forten, “abolitionist and entrepreneur,” Cyprian Clamorgan, author of The Colored Aristocracy of St. Louis, and Charlotte Forten, teacher and activist. This opening serves as the first hint that Jefferson’s book will be an act of preservation, a new historical record of “colored society.” Historical context becomes crucial when the narrative turns to Jefferson’s life. Her memoir transcends the current popular modes of first person writing. It’s not a diary, chronicling the minutiae of an author’s life, nor is it personal essay pegged on a current event. Playing with a sly academic tone, Negroland is reminiscent of a brilliant college lecture, during which the professor occasionally interrupts herself with personal anecdotes. Jefferson interweaves her personal story with that of her cultural...

Nonfiction

NONFICTION: Losing My Father by Ola Osaze

Apogee Journal

03 Nov 2015

Losing my father Ola Osaze I crossed the threshold of the American border on a sunny Fall day in 1991, not too long after yet another military-backed coup rocked Nigeria. The riots and subsequent government-sanctioned reprisals meant more school closures, curfews, harassment, and abuse at the hands of police for indeterminate lengths of time. It also meant more killings. As we walked through the tarmac of the Greensboro, North Carolina airport, my mother clutched my 15-year-old sweaty hand in her cold dry one. Approaching the queue for customs where we would declare our possessions for inspection, a prominent sign on display caught our attention. The bright green and white colors of my country’s flag read, “Beware of Nigerian Drug Smugglers.” And just like that, we were placed crudely into the reality of racism in America. Many of us leave our African homes with our hearts brimming with optimism and our heads filled with delusions about what these American places will make possible. What we find instead, as Africans in America, are deep struggles for economic survival in the midst of an ever-evolving and complicated sense of racial and ethnic identity. For queer and transgender Africans living in the...

Nonfiction

NONFICTION: Take, Eat by RJ Eldridge

Apogee Journal

14 Oct 2015

Take, Eat RJ Eldridge The Corrector in my mind tells me Just be straightforward. Tell about how the big things we don’t earn make the little things distant. Lately, I can’t feel what my words gesture to. Lately, I don’t know what’s real. I’m supposed to look at what’s right in front of me. Stand before my own reflection and say I am. What does it matter what I say I am? Say I’m a writer. Say I’m an artist. Say I’m a black, a man. Say I’m a mouse, a dog. I don’t know if I want to be human. If human is enough. I dream. I go to sleep and the images come. Same as all men, and all mice. I am nothing new. What’s new, or at least what seems new, is the gap between me and my self. Between what light does with a form I call mine, and my body’s pure vernacular. Between the me I am, and the me I believed I’d be. I’m in a dark that feels cold to my skin. I’m supposed to be here. I suppose I am here. I may be another, in another place. You want...

BOOK REVIEW: Margo Jefferson's 'Negroland: A Memoir,' by Elisabeth Sherman

NONFICTION: Losing My Father by Ola Osaze

NONFICTION: Take, Eat by RJ Eldridge

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