Nestled on the back cover of Pete Kalu’s Act Normal: Joy and Despair in Postcolonial Britain, emboldened in capital letters, are the following words: “a kaleidoscopic memoir that explodes with life”. For once, I feel the blurb does justice to what the novel holds inside; the contents within are riveting, staggering incisions into the UK’s understanding of growing up in the United Kingdom as a Black person. It does not generalise to the ‘people of colour’ category that ethnic minorities are often caged within to explain their differing experiences. This set of memoirs is uniquely Black, uniquely British and uniquely Kalu’s. It covers the author’s most intimate memories of growing up in a rapidly transforming — yet starkly conservative in racial divisions — Manchester. Reading each sentence was like forcibly rewiring the lessons I had been taught in primary school, replacing them with the hard truths of cultural segregation that still permeate through society today. I say cultural because, legally speaking, the struggles Kalu describes should not have happened. But how does one change centuries of deep-rooted hatred? How do you stop others from passing snide remarks, or prove that a slur spoken should in fact be punished? The novel doesn’t directly provide you with the answer, merely emphasising the consequences that have already been inflicted on the author, such as the shame he was riddled with simply for being Black.

Often, we become bystanders in racial abuse without knowing it. Many make the mistaken assumption that racism is over, simply because you can be prosecuted over it. We imagine that the curtain is drawn when the history-writers quietly scrub racism’s existence away. This line, though early in the book, stayed ringing in my mind throughout the rest of the memoir:

Your children can never be normal because they are black and therefore unfit for full acceptance. Walk among us by all means, but walk with shame.¹

Kalu never minces his words, which is something I came to appreciate as the book progressed. There’s no sugar coating of his familiarity with racial discomfort, using blunt, pointed prose to painfully remind us of the privilege it is to live without question, without having old ladies play with your hair and speak of its “exoticism”. Sure, the gesture may have meant no harm in their minds, but it creates a sense of “otherness” which Kalu underlines over and over. He spends much time — time which I am very grateful for — explaining stereotypes surrounding Black people; how some, like playing with this ‘other’ hair, can range from mildly harmful to the racist slur included in the popular rhyme “eenie, meenie, minie, moe”.² Of course, for most children growing up now, the rhyme has been changed to include various animals rather than derogatory language. But when others like Kalu, who experienced the brunt of this abrasion, bring up that they feel an aversion towards this rhyme, we should feel more than compelled to listen. The incident should make us question how deeply ingrained racist history is within our society, begging the question of how far we can truly disassociate from history and its lingering presence today. 

An initial criticism I had with the book was the disjointed sequence of the memoirs. One chapter doesn’t necessarily flow into the next, with the focus switching back and forth from the author’s present life, then to his childhood, then to a semi-dreamland and finally back to reality. There is no clear pattern or organisation to them. However, I soon came to realise that this was part of the punchy, explosive experience of reading Kalu’s work. The metaphor of life’s unpredictability and discordant highs and lows came screaming out through the constant switching of place, time and perspective. Because this is not fiction: Kalu’s memoir is not clean and pretty with its stories tied up and trimmed for aesthetic appeal. It is raw, dreadful and enlightening all at the same time. Linear narrative progression would have actually hindered the point he was trying to make. 

The short reflection ‘On eating bananas’ is one of the most heartbreaking stories I have ever come across. 

‘Haha monkey!’ They used to shout at me in my infancy if I ate a banana. 

I have never questioned how I look while eating a fruit of any kind. I’m sure most of us haven’t. For Black people, as Kalu described, to be taunted in such a manner while simply eating is truly horrific. He doesn’t hold his punches: each sentence in this memoir is terse and jagged. He later refers to watermelons with the same kind of soreness, presenting a subtle pride in the fact that his daughters feel no shame to eat how and what they please. It’s a beautiful development, but bittersweet given what Kalu had to endure just so his daughters could enjoy a snack peacefully. But the gains are still small. He makes this known in his passage on ‘Schrodinger’s white people’’:

Schrodinger’s white people will be wheeled into a hospital by a brown orderly across a floor cleaned by a Black cleaner to be seen by a black doctor, then have a plastercast set by a brown nurse and be given a prescription processed by a Black pharmacist only to say that immigration has ruined the country.³

In such a short excerpt, Kalu perfectly summarises the social landscape of the UK today. By switching you back and forth between his past and present, perfectly interspersing the history of the nation within it, the memoir becomes an invaluable source of life-based wisdom. Though the ending of the novel seems ill-fitted with the sombre, dark-humour focused tone of the novel, it is an eye-opening read that I thoroughly encourage everyone to pick up. It’s easy to sympathise with someone’s struggles from a distance. But Kalu makes it so that you are not just providing comfort: you are seething with him for what he has gone through.