Between the Lines: A Non-Traditional Book Review Series | Volume 1 (The Upcycled Self)
Tariq "Black Thought" Trotter's memoir, The Upcycled Self, is the story of a brilliant creative that survived great trauma, and lived to tell as much of it as memory and grief would allow.
“It’s hard to explain to anyone how heavy these memories are. It’s hard to recall them. I both repress those memories and gloss over them. The fine details are too disturbing.” – Tariq “Black Thought” Trotter, The Upcycled Self
I was sitting in a classroom at my alma mater, celebrating a milestone anniversary of its creative writing program, my minor study. At a time when the program was so new, we had to double up on courses just to meet the credit requirement. After an introductory class, I took screenwriting twice, two poetry levels, and one fiction and creative non-fiction course each. I was a mass communication major who felt all I ever knew was writing, but in my minor courses, I got a resounding amount of Cs, just high enough to pass but low enough to make me question my ability as an aspiring professional writer. I was creative enough, but every note left on my papers encouraged me to tap in more.
Tap into what, I questioned. More, I was only ever told.
I felt like my stories peeled back the layers of trauma I had already experienced. Growing up impoverished, reared by a medically disabled former foster child of a mother and a semi-absentee father who would give me the world every six weeks or so when he visited. I was physically, mentally, and emotionally abused. My mom inadvertently left me with the most scars, internal and external. I suffered through undiagnosed illnesses as I navigated a concrete jungle of uncertainty at every block.
This is the girl who sat in that classroom armed with a pen, ready to write.
I was a 19-year-old sophomore whose mother had died two semesters before. The pain was so fresh that I couldn’t believe I was untapped. Yet, my emotions were at a stagnant standstill, and I would begin to make the choices of an unhealed and unguided teenager wanting to explore the world as an adult might, armed with the inability to feel since my emotions mimicked a pipe frozen by too many unwrapped winter nights. The layers of trauma that followed were also dead-end stories that I’d later be encouraged to tell from a more personal perspective.
I can tell you now that I would recant my stories as if I had just read them in someone’s fiction novel. Telling them from the perspective of a character once removed. I hovered above the plotline, narrating from the darkness, but never brought myself into the light.
As I sat, two sizes too big for the desk-chair combo in the small classroom at my alma mater, a crooked crucifix stared into my soul from one wall and a semi-restored black and white image of a saint looked over my head from another. I listened to the professors of my past encourage their students.
“This is a new technique I’m exploring,” one processor claimed. “It’s one where the narrator is also a character.”
The short story allowed the writer to live fully in the plot while giving an emotional retelling as a narrator. A perspective from which an unhealed person cannot write. I realized then just how unhealed I was while attempting to heal others through stories I was not yet ready to tell.
As I read Black Thought’s recent book release, The Upcycled Self, I was immediately transported to that classroom, to the day I had my breakthrough, and back to all of those years that I had self-numbed my writing blank.
The mind is a beautiful place. The heart gets a lot of acclaim, but the brain is certainly the organ that loves you most. It will erase the most traumatic experiences from the crevices that carry memories. It will tell the rest of your organs to freeze themselves at the thought of digging too deep into something that might break you down. It will stall emotions and stagnate processes if it so much as believes you will not recover, all in the name of protecting you.
But just because you are loved doesn’t mean you are safe.
Black Thought is one of the most prolific rhyme-writers this universe has ever experienced, but hiding behind those punchlines, wit, and streams of consciousness is a broken boy who was forced to grow up because bodies don’t just get to stay young. I recognized a writer armed with a co-writer who wanted to share his journey via memoir but was not mentally prepared to remember things in a way that allowed him to tap into the story.
Trauma locks us out of our healing process, and the only way to the other side of it all is through the trauma. I can’t think of a single person who wants to willingly sit with the discourse of years of compressed hurt underscoring their existence with only the hope that it will deliver them to the other side.
While I felt The Upcycled Self glossed over trauma, a note even made by the author in the epilogue, I still found the book to be a good journey that I hope the talented Mr. Trotter will continue to explore. In its completeness, it’s a story that I would love to find in the hands of pre-teen and teen boys in the hood, boys who might see themselves in the retelling of the unhealed and somehow figure out the road to upcycling the pieces of their own stories.
It’s something I want for its author as well.
Because we are often never truly healed – the end result remains a present participle, but we may get to the point when we can speak about it like we were actually there because we were.
Leslie D. Rose is a journalist, creative writer, and communications strategist. She often lends an advocacy lens to her cultural pieces, giving a charge to the audience while presenting a new view. She interviews your favorite celebrities, uncovers deep issues affecting Black folks, and has written extensively about the negative impact of using rap lyrics as evidence on trial. Leslie is a proud Xavier University of Louisiana graduate.