Book - Maybe I Don't Belong Here? by David Harewood

A memoir of race, identity, breakdown and recovery.

After deciding to read fewer memoirs this year because they take me longer to read, I raced through this.

Granted it’s a short book (235 pages) but I still stopped to look up some of the - OK all of the Birmingham places mentioned, and a few London ones. I was wrong to leave this sitting on the TBR pile for so long fearing the heavy content. The book was triggered after the Psychosis and Me documentary that came out a couple of years ago but it was a far less challenging read than the one I had coupled it with, My Name is Why by Lemn Sissay. That one was such a tough read it was thrown across the room at one point after which I sat sobbing at the injustice in our society. 

Maybe I Don’t Belong Here is a sentence repeated several times in the book. Harewood is able to pinpoint the moment he received verbal abuse from an old man as a 5-year-old which triggered these feelings. And later when the two halves of me split.

We have more in common than I thought. I know the injustice served to Black people is far worse than to Brown people but being of a similar age, however, I also stiffen at the sight of a union jack. (Thre is no black in the union jack) I didn’t do that as a child; then I just related it to the Queen's Jubilee. Only later when I was also confronted with National Front skinheads carrying the flag did I learn that prejudices against my people existed. I didn’t know the word racism till later when I had to work out how the Specials are skinheads and yet they have Black people in the band. 

I like that Harewood didn't think his ethnicity was going to hold him back career-wise (until it did and he realised (sadly)  that was just in Britain, not in America. I too never expected my ethnicity - or gender - to hold me back. I will never know if it did.

The reason the book isn’t as heavier read as I thought is there are so many lighter and funny moments. The way he describes the risky games he played with his siblings when very young you’d think we were bought up in the same household. Nowadays social services would be involved for far less than being shoved on top of the wardrobe in the dark for the sake of hide and seek (me) or hurling yourself down the stairs (Harewood). (I still dislike heights and the dark today).

For all the mental anxiety and being horrifically institutionalised twice after coming through RADA and starting his acting career, Harewood mentions many times about having the time of his life. Back then drugs were given to control not treat mental health patients. I hope that has completely changed now. His excitement and enthusiasm for acting is so wonderfully infectious throughout from the descriptions of watching actors on the Michael Parkinson show to being on stage.

I learnt more about society from this book - and many others covering the same theme - than I could hope to from a training course.

Maybe I Don’t Belong Here is poetic. The epilogue is a poem.  I was stumbling through sentences throughout the book as I couldn’t wait to reach the end of them. The detailed description of trying to brush teeth when drugged up is brilliant. It shouldn't be funny but it is. And I resonate with a detailed assessment of new surroundings each time he found himself in a hotel. I often wonder why there are no drawers in some hotel rooms.

So many times my heart paces as I race to get to the end of the sentience, paragraph or section. This is not a page-turner, it's a speed read. The book compelled me to read as fast as the author's mind whizzing when in those states of mental chaos. 

The best memoir I have read in years. Possibly ever.