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Maybe I Don't Belong Here: A Memoir of Race, Identity, Breakdown and Recovery

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Granted it’s a short book (235 pages) but I still stopped to look up some of the - OK all of the Birmingham places mentioned, and a few London ones. And there are issues within my journey to America that haven't quite been straightforward and simple.

For me this held both lessons and affirmations of what it means to be a Black British man and the struggles to reconcile our inherent contradictions. I will continue to recommend this book to people who I believe to be in need of it's messages, both in terms of race and of mental health- and of both, combined.Lock-ins at the Birmingham wine bar where he worked saw him reciting Shakespeare to his wide-eyed friends. I also suffer with mental illness, and I found this book so raw and emotional, I think this book is going to help so many people, and it leaves you with a lot to think about. In New York, he even meets Maya Angelou, who would “slip into poetry mid-conversation if something caught in her mind”.

I was deeply impacted by this very genuine autobiography, the issues of growing up as a black English man in a community that did not accept him as English. So I usually ask this question last - I pretty much only interview Black people on my platform and I always finish with this question.After deciding to read fewer memoirs this year because they take me longer to read, I raced through this. It's so interesting that that is how you choose to describe it, because so much of what you just described in historical terms, you've had to do in your own personal journey. A very moving book made me a grown arsed 67 years old British born BLACK Pan African of Nigerian heritage cry. Maybe I Don't Belong Here is a deeply personal exploration of the duality of growing up both Black and British, recovery from crisis and a rallying cry to examine the systems and biases that continue to shape our society. He is a contributor to the Oxford Companion to Black British History and in 2019 was awarded an OBE for services to history and community integration.

The effects of living in this country as a black person and what does that to your mental health needs to be spoken about more and I honestly believe David Harewood has sparked that conversation.So you're always going to have some people resist, you're always going to have some people have a problem with it.

Maybe I Don't Belong Here shines a light on the interplay between race, identity and mental well-being with tremendous moral courage. A friend works in mental health and the cuts from 10 years of Tories means while treatment is better understood than it has been, there is very little that can be done because of so few services remaining. Harewood's story is so insightful and holds an element of so many black people's experiences in the 'White Space'. The way he describes the risky games he played with his siblings when very young you’d think we were bought up in the same household. I've had issues with identity and belonging in the UK but those feelings came from inside me, because looking like the majority white population, I never experienced rejection such as described here and by other black British men (and to a lesser extent, women).

Still, this book is key in getting the conversation going and in showing that identity and mental health are deeply intertwined. One of the Observer 's Best Memoirs of the Year and The Times Best Film and Theatre Books of the Year. As part of a BBC Look North programme in 2007, David Harewood visited Lascelles' ancestral home, Harewood House, which was built with the profits of slavery, and interviewed Lascelles on the subject.

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