Derek Owusu’s That Reminds Me is not quite poetry. It defies categorisation: neither, strictly speaking, a memoir nor, as advance publicity would have it, a novel in verse – although it includes casual rhymes. Without forcing a label on it, this is a moving, semi-autobiographical story about a vulnerable young black man – a one-off. Owusu, who edited Safe: On Black British Men Reclaiming Space, rises above the “misery” memoir and does his best to overcome pain. The book began as poetry and was written “to interrogate and come to terms with my own mental collapse and the events that potentially led to it”. Although it describes poverty, betrayal, addiction, self-harm and sorrow, it is leavened by love for a mother, a brother and for language itself.
We follow the life of a boy called K in slabs of text, as though across stepping stones. Owusu is Ghanaian but grew up in the UK. He was fostered until the age of eight before returning to his mother and a father – who, in this account, is intermittently, erratically and violently on the scene – in London. Most of us duck asking our parents leading questions. But not K. He challenges his father, asking why he never showed his family any love.
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