Saga Boy by Antonio Michael Downing Review by Carol Mitchell

Saga Boy, a heart-warming memoir by Antonio Michael Downing, is a story of the impact of unaddressed generational trauma on a family. In four acts and an epilogue, Downing chronicles his life from his childhood in Trinidad through his teen and adult years in Canada, a life marked by abandonment, rape, alcoholism, and drug use that still manages to end on an optimistic note. Saga Boy will be familiar to many, yet Downing’s lyrical prose and his eye for rich details will pull readers into his narrative and keep them captive until its hopeful end. 

Act One is set in Trinidad. Abandoned by both parents, Downing and his brother are raised by their grandmother, Miss Excelly Theodora Downing, a Bible-wielding, unassailable matriarch who struggles to control a rambunctious and unpredictable Downing. His father is a con man and drug addict but, as Miss Excelly’s only son, held the status of a “legend” who haunted Downing’s childhood “like a ghost with no resting place.” His mother skittles in and out of Downing’s life, leaving a trail of excuses in her wake.

I spent my formative years in Trinidad, and so I speak with some authority when I describe the backdrop of Downing’s recollections of his eleven years in Trinidad as authentic. The stream of children who pass through Miss Excelly’s care; the barrels of goodies arriving from aunts living overseas; the richness of the landscape, food, and language; the strict one-size-fits-all approach to education; the way the community unites to survive economic struggles; the ethnic diversity; the religious fervor and all of its contradictions; and sadly, the incidences of rape; all ring very true to the experience growing up in rural Caribbean. 

In this first act of Saga Boy, Downing is strongest in his depictions of the landscape. He describes his favorite spot as “a stand of slim tall trees with branches that embraced at the top like arches of a cathedral… [where he] got lost in the symphony of the forest… [and] . . . heard the constant shhhhhhh of the wind whipping at the leaves, the heavy music of a hundred thousand birds thriving, and the electric hum of infinite insects.” On the other hand, he maintains an emotional distance from his traumatic experiences. He gives short shrift to the incidents of rape, describing them in a clinical voice that contrasts sharply with the detailed painting of the landscape. When Downing and his brother are leaving for Canada, their mother, Gloria, shows up and makes a scene, refusing to release their passports, declaring—after being absent from their lives for eleven years—that “dey not goin!” and that they “only have one muddah.” The tension builds to hysteria with all parties, adults, children, airline staff screaming and crying, then dissipates somewhat unsatisfactorily in summary: “somehow Viv convinced Gloria to give in.”

This pattern is pervasive in the first section: apparently important scenes are given slight attention and I kept waiting for him to discuss and analyze the impact of these events on his adult life. This is the reason we write memoirs, right? I acknowledge that this distance allows Downing to avoid sentimentality and may reflect an authentic telling of his journey because in those years he did not understand how “losing all the things that gave children their bearings: parents, language, community” tied him to his childhood in a way that made him difficult for him to let go and love himself and other people who came into his life. And so, while he does a great job of mining these experiences for meaning in the third and fourth acts, as I read act one, I found it difficult not to feel frustration at the lack of introspection.

In Act Two, Downing migrates to Canada at age eleven, falling “asleep in a tropical jungle, and a few days later, … [waking] up in a blizzard.” He lives with his aunt Joan in Northern Ontario and, neither white nor Ojibwe, he becomes an outsider—“not black enough for the whites. . . [or] for the Blacks”—in a tiny hamlet where there was already enough outsiderness to go around. He leaves behind “Trinidad Tony” who he begins to speak of in the third person, and becomes Michael.

Once again, readers are treated to strong lyrical descriptions of the landscape as we follow Downing on a difficult journey through six schools, six cities, and six guardians over an eight-year period. He also offers a brief but scathing commentary on race relations between whites and Indigenous Canadians and offers parallels to the history of Caribbean people. 

His parents’ absence from his childhood leaves a hole in his life which he subconsciously but constantly tries to fill with basketball, music, anger, alcohol, and sex. He reconnects with his parents in a series of problematic encounters; each time he is hopeful for a successful reunion and each time it ends in disaster. It takes his parents swindling him out of thousands of dollars for him to recognize that “they were as broken as [he] was.”  Downing’s disengagement from his parents is an important step in his journey towards healing and an important lesson about letting go of people who are destructive forces in your life. This realization unlocks a flood of introspection.

As we enter the third and fourth acts, Downing’s struggle to outrun his demons morphs into a penchant for transforming himself into different personalities. He first performs as “Mic Dainjah,” a punk rock rapper, then “Molasses,” who delves into soul music, and finally; in Act Four, his grand finale, as “John Orpheus,” a “hyper-masculine… grimy punk rapper who preferred sequins and glitter.” In discussing his transformations, Downing makes connections between the freedom he feels when he dons his characters and the origin of Trinidad’s carnival as an outlet during which enslaved persons were able to “forget the master’s rules, the insecurity, the struggle to fit in, the ghosts calling from the cemetery.” This comparison resonates as it evokes the reality of generational trauma, a line of family members each doing their best, yet passing on the hurt they endured, “the burden of the Crown’s dreadful legacy.”

As Downing closes in on self-realization, his writing loosens into a flow of prose that pulses with repetition, rhythm, and raw reality. He is approaching a crossroad where he seems poised to take a road that will lead him towards healing. He has been in therapy, uncovered some of the hurt he had been hiding, reunited with his inner child, and found forgiveness. He has looked at his parents objectively and seen them as terribly flawed individuals he can love without having them infect his life. He has also returned home, successfully to face the demons of his childhood, something many immigrants do not have the opportunity to do. Nothing is certain, but the fire that happens at the end and his discovery of a family Bible harken towards a renewal and the closing of a circle that will leave readers feeling encouraged and hopeful for their own salvation.

Carol Mitchell is a Caribbean immigrant in the United States. She has published eighteen books for children, three with HarperCollins UK, and fifteen with CaribbeanReads Publishing. She writes, reviews, and teaches in Virginia.

12 January 2021