Person Unlimited

Dean Atta (Canongate, 2024)

Review by Eric Ngalle Charles

I had been trying to contact my daughter for several days to no avail, so I sent her these lines from near the opening of Dean Atta’s memoir, Person Unlimited: An Ode to My Black Queer Body. ‘This isn’t a coming-of-age story. This isn’t a coming-out story. This isn’t a chronological story. This is a story of coming to terms with what I remember. Shining a light on the memories that made me the Black queer man I am today.’

Within seconds, my daughter called and said, ‘Excuse me, Dad. What is going on? Are you finally coming out?’ I gasped for effect and told her about Dean Atta’s book. She reminded me of how I dressed like her mother for her entertainment when she was a baby and changed my name from Eric to Erica. We laughed; I am a black man from Cameroon, and her mother is a white Welsh woman. Atta’s book took us down memory lane.

‘My first word was light.’ These words in the book align with what the Sufi mystic poet Rumi says, ‘The wound is the place where the light enters you.’

Atta’s book is about place, language, and memory. Some memories are traumatic, as I will leave you to find out for yourself. But imagine the memory of being trapped in a room while your molester wanks. I prayed for Atta to make it out safely. His light shines throughout this book. His infectious laughter and, at times, gallows humour guide you.

Growing up as an ethnically mixed boy in a single-parent home in London in the 1980s, some of the things that came with it were the ‘curly and soft hair’ people desired to touch and his experience of visiting a barbershop packed with black men. ‘I didn’t wear dresses or a crown of flowers, but I did ask Mummy for a Barbie doll. I loved combing Barbie’s straight blond hair. She was an object onto which I projected my frivolous fantasy of being a white woman with long blonde hair.’

The writing is direct – the bond between Dean and his mother simplified by the way he refers to her as Mummy throughout the book. It’s a childlike love, untainted and unblemished, contrasting with his search for casual entertainment in the backstreets of London. Walking from Piccadilly Circus to Tottenham Court Road via Dean Street in Soho the other day, I wondered about some of the places mentioned in his book. As you read, your heart beats for him, cheering him on and saying, Don’t give up.

The memory of his Cypriot grandparents: Yiayia cutting Bapou’s hair in the garden. It felt like reading poetry. Watching Yiayia with her floral dress hanging the laundry and Bapou tending to his roses, I saw myself sitting on the veranda of my mother’s house. These fragments complete Atta as a writer and a human being, and he dances wearing those different masks: British, Cypriot-Greek, and Black Jamaican. Wherever Atta chooses to make a nest, that will be home. I loved Bapou and how Atta described his chain-smoking habit; I knew he was building towards a tragedy. Even so, when it happened, I cried.

As a book, Person Unlimited (perhaps an allusion to the ‘poem unlimited’ representation of human possibility in Shakespeare’s Hamlet) keeps giving.

Dean Atta describes an unlimited number of sexual positions, and you can likewise read the memoir with your legs wrapped around your neck in the kitchen, on the veranda, or the porch. But whatever you do, be careful about reading it in public. You might find out about your involuntary erectile embarrassment.

It takes guts to bare it all like this. Atta does speak plainly. In parts, I laughed, was shocked to my core, shed tears and discovered hairs on parts of my body I never knew existed.

I read Dean Atta’s book in a day. It is one of those books you cannot put down once you start reading. As a heterosexual, Person Unlimited challenged me in many ways and invaded my consciousness—some images I can never unsee. This book is not for the fainthearted; it is brutally honest, and a testimonial to the fine writer Dean Atta has become. I wish him and his partner, the Doctor, the best as he criss-crosses the country touring Person Unlimited. May the winds guide them both.

Photo by F. Holland Day

https://canongate.co.uk/books/3950-person-unlimited-an-ode-to-my-black-queer-body/