At this point, Abdelmahmoud splits into perhaps his first fragment of identity: a Black, Muslim immigrant who did not speak the language, and also, an upper-middle-class boy who lived in a comfortable house in Khartoum, surrounded by cousins. “Over here, we’re Black,” he writes – that is, sharply defined in relation to another. The joy Abdelmahmoud describes in meeting his father again, years later, at Toronto’s Pearson Airport is matched by the discovery that he was, in this Canadian city, something different. No longer able to live freely, Abdelmahmoud’s Baba leaves his mother and young Elamin in Sudan to create a new home for them in Kingston. Along that sharp edge, Abdelmahmoud hones his humour, his heart, his abiding love for the country he left behind, as well as the troubled nation in which he came of age.įrom Khartoum to Kingston: A journey to becoming Blackįrom the start, we are taken into the story of a boy whose father sought refuge in Canada after his business was shut down and truck taken away overnight. “Elsewhere is not a land, but a sharp edge you inhabit,” he writes. To borrow a phrase from Twitter – on which Abdelmahmoud is a warm and reasonable presence – he is as open about his Ls as he is his Ws. And yet, along with the ups come the doleful insights that are inseparable from a truly vulnerable memoir of this nature. As a long-time fan of his thoughtful and charismatic voice, to see Abdelmahmoud go long, ostensibly making himself the focus of his lavish eye, is a joy. The prolific BuzzFeed writer and CBC Pop Chat host has made a name for himself as a culture writer of unmatched variety, humour and insight on topics ranging from limb-lengthening surgery to the artistic legacy of Shrek. Generosity is the guiding and inexhaustible hand of Abdelmahmoud’s first book. It means “generous people,” with its root word also implying similitude: “These people are like us,” he writes. Late in Elamin Abdelmahmoud’s memoir, Son of Elsewhere, Abdelmahmoud defines one of several – borderline untranslatable – Arabic terms that arise throughout the book: nas taybeen, which a Sudanese Uber driver the author meets in Nashville uses to describe Southerners.
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