Author and musician Antonio Michael Downing sits down with TW creative director John Vogel to talk about Antonio Michael's books Black Cherokee and Saga Boy, music audience expectation regarding race and incorporating varied genres, and the disregard of the tech industry when it comes to profiting off of the work of artists without compensation.
If his memoir Saga Boy is a personal story grappling with the effects of colonialism on his psychology, his first full-length novel, Black Cherokee, is a story constructed to show the ways that everyone is living underneath unseen layers of history that they don’t understand.
The story follows Ophelia Blue Rivers, whose Black grandmother married the Cherokee Chief Trouthands, through four slices of time from 1993 to 2005. The book begins with Grandma Blue raising her on the Cherokee reservation while the disbanded tribe figures out how to handle a cattle farm that’s polluting the river. When she’s shipped off to live with her aunt in the nearby town, Ophelia has to integrate herself into typical southern society and finding temporary fellowship in a Baptist church. As she enters high school, she again has to assimilate, this time into affluent white society.
This episode is scored with the John Orpheus song, “Fela Awoke (I Will Miss You).”
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