[reviews]
[masthead]
Paul Clemens, Made in Detroit
reviewed by Bison Collins Messink
Things that are honest are often said to be refreshingly honest. Yet Paul Clemens shows in his memoir Made in Detroit (released fall 2005) that honesty, as it relates to race, is rarely refreshing; instead, it is startling.
Clemens tells the story of growing up in a backwards world: where motorists must first turn right in order to turn left, where the population (an "inverted frontier," he calls it) dwindles so quickly the decline can be noticed in months instead of decades, and where, most importantly to Clemens's experience, "those frequently identified as 'minorities' [are], in fact, the majority inhabitants ... [where] those often described as 'disempowered' [are], in fact, in power."
Born in 1973—the year Detroit elects its first black mayor, officially marking the city's shift in racial power—on the east side of Detroit to white Catholic parents, Clemens provides a complex, longsuffering look into his upbringing in a city where he and his family don't feel they belong, as well as his ongoing relationship with that place and the race of men that inhabit it.
Clemens offers no politeness in his narration—either to himself or to the black race with which he often finds himself at odds—but with this honestly Clemens shows just how wide the schism between white and black remains to be in America: larger than most ever imagined. Though hardly neutral, Clemens offers a perspective on race that is neither right nor left nor simple, which is rare, and also a bit unnerving. The book is, as Clemens once says about himself, "racist, perhaps, but probably not full of shit."
Readers who are less interested in Detroit and more interested in hearing a good story may be distracted by Clemens's occasional digressions into the history and textures of Detroit and its politics, which is a shame because Clemens shows an admirable feel for narration, knowing when to zoom in, when to flashback, and knowing, above all, that his subjects cannot be simplified—thus the digressions.
Impressively educated and immaculately well-read, Clemens intended (and attempted) for years to write his story of Detroit in a novel, but found he was "lousy at making things up." But there is no better form for this story to take than unabashed non-fiction—this is not a life, a city, a conclusion that could be tightly wrapped up and nailed down into a shapely arc of fiction, but is instead a bittersweet struggle of conflicting life lessons on how to live the right way.
___
Bison Collins Messink is an undergraduate in the Writing Department at GVSU.
FEATURED:
An Interview with Peter Ho Davies