Again and again in his new memoir Be Not Afraid of My Body (Belt Publishing, February 2024), Darius Stewart manipulates language, takes topics that are otherwise coated with stigma and hushed tones and makes them plain, reinvents form and expectations and insists that poets are taking over prose.
Somehow, without maintaining any strict chronology or style, a full story is revealed. In a crude summary, I’d say this book discusses the narrator growing into his identity as a gay Black man through vignettes about childhood, family, drug use, sex and dating. But I don’t think that’s a fair or accurate summary of the book at all.
Be Not Afraid of My Body is an exploration of an individual life — its peaks and twists and valleys. There is no interest in cultural studies or revelations. And in being so hyper-personal, Stewart’s story is much more impactful than it might be if he tried to speak for any population or phenomena. Instead, the deeply personal nature of the book sneaks up on the reader — the story wends itself into you such that you forget there is a page separating you from the subject.
Much more intriguing than the movement of a “plot” is Stewart’s use of language and subversion of structure. The book opens with a series of scenes depicting young Stewart being stalked by an older white man, adrenaline everywhere in the pacing: “Whatever routes you think you can take to get home, it doesn’t matter. He is there.” Stewart develops his voice easily in this introduction, one of a few sections written in second person. “Blackboy” and “whitemen” are single words, landmarks are stated and not explained. In this way, Stewart builds a universe without betraying the brevity inherent to poetry.
Early in the book, he manipulates the structure of a spelling bee (in a section called “Etymologies”) to discuss the discomfort of assumed failure and a childhood living inside strict expectations. One section calls attention to its structure by being titled “Picaresque.” I want to underscore that the structure here is not jarring or clunky. A more traditional format for this story would almost certainly come off as disingenuous — and that, I think, is a mark of incredible skill: to know the right format for the story you’re telling. The thesis of this project comes a little under halfway through the book in a set of passages so vulnerable they almost drip from the page, “You won’t tell folks what you fear any of this says about you, what it might have to do with how you want people to feel about you, which is that you’ve always wanted people to like you, that you don’t know the limits you’ll go to to make sure that people will always like you, and you can’t see how there’s anything wrong with that.”
If literature is about honesty and exploration, or if writing is meant to inspire and highlight felicity, this is the new standard.
This article was originally published in Little Village’s March 2024 issue.
