A frank and hopeful memoir about race, migration and identity

MEMOIR
Stolen Man on Stolen Land
Tyree Barnette
Affirm Press, $36.99

When Tyree Barnette first moved to Australia from the United States and attended a concert, another black man asked him where he was from. It was a loaded query, Barnette thought, layered with deeper questions like “How’d you get here?”, “Who are your people?” and “Do you even still consider yourself ‘African’?”

These questions and more are at the heart of his debut book, a memoir titled Stolen Man on Stolen Land. In it, Barnette contextualises his move from North Carolina – where, even in the time of a black president, African Americans still faced an array of disadvantages – to Sydney, where, thanks to a celebration of American culture and celebrity across food, music and sport, he is somewhat fetishised.

While literary explorations of “who am I?” and “where do I fit in?” are nothing new, especially in a place like Australia, where settlement and migration are woven into the country’s very fabric, Stolen Man on Stolen Land adds a unique perspective, and considers the way that racial privileges and stereotypes can shift with border crossings. When a new neighbour calls the police on him (because the neighbour is unaware he has permission to use a particular-sized truck to move his belongings), the tension emanates from the page as Barnette’s mind races through a catalogue of names of black American men who lost their lives to police brutality, or a justice system that fails to dignify them as it ought.

But this encounter passes with no issue. Australia surprises him, even as he’s aware of its explicitly racist history, and the struggles of First Nations children who were stolen from their families in decades not far gone. He is “enraptured” by the harbour city’s beauty and bustle, the multiculturalism on its streets and in its restaurants, and the privileges of paid paternity leave and Medicare, but he does not let his new country off the hook. Mirrors and contrasts of the history of black Americans and the treatment of Indigenous people on what became Australia is a common theme throughout his memoir.

Barnette and his wife make considerable effort to understand the experiences of the original owners of their new home. They join a Black Lives Matter protest where speakers condemn Aboriginal deaths in custody and the use of spit hoods, restraint chairs and tear gas against Indigenous youth; they attend an exhibition where a defiant artist claims: “I belong to this land. Always have”. The sentiments are “foreign to [him]”, further blurred by the fact that he’s “separated” from his past “by an ocean, by ships, slave auctions and generations of history lost in the American South”.

This approach is particularly insightful, and it is through deeper knowledge of such complex histories that Barnette is better able to understand his present. The reader is part of this journey too: seeing the merits and shortcomings of this nation through the eyes of a migrant who personally understands the weight of otherness on a person’s trajectory.

Barnette’s writing reflects the specificity that is advocated by the Sweatshop Literacy Movement that mentored him, and the book is strong for it. He writes of languages “beaten from [his] ancestors, stolen and lost … in the slave trade”, of a Sydney summer breeze as something that “seared against the skin … like steam from a kettle” and of Indigenous culture and its languages and artefacts as “sacrosanct”. I felt like I was in the room as his wife birthed their first child, and I cried.

This is a memoir that is both frank and hopeful. Although his ancestral practices died with his grandmother, Barnette recognises that his identity is now a mixture of things taken from African and American cultures to “create a new whole”. He’s open to what the land Down Under will add to the mix, and his explorations of race and place leave no stone unturned.

Stolen Man on Stolen Land is a laudable debut that invites contemplation, gratitude and action, reminding us that where we are from still holds a lot of weight, especially if we’re not paying close enough attention to where we are going.

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