Review: Anakana Schofield on Zito Madu
Last week, writing about independent publishing houses and the constraints they face with distribution, we mentioned Belt Publishing of Cleveland, Ohio, as an example of an important American publisher that is striving to make it work in the existing dynamic. By total coincidence this week we received from our old friend Anakana Schofield a review of what she considers a major new work from none other than Belt, proving our point about the cultural importance of independent publishing.
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In 2024, memoir, or “autobiography of the living,” finds itself at a curious crossroads, since potential readers can become hyped, aghast, and in a heap within twelve seconds watching a testimonial on TikTok or Instagram. Off the page, memoir is being created and transmitted all day long like one ongoing, recycled blood transfusion. On the page, over the past twenty years, the eruption of (often style-less) memoirs and essays has been so busy out-confessing each other that a mandate has arisen for me that a memoir must supply something beyond woe-is-me-alas, or at least frame it in a distinct form.
Zito Madu’s quiet but mammoth The Minotaur at Calle Lanza beautifully eschews the woe-is-me platter. In an arresting prose style, he draws us through a merciless undulation of migration, paternal violence, class despair, and mental breakdown, while molding these into the stages of an inner reckoning and an expanding awareness of others. Born in a village in Imo State, South Eastern Nigeria, Madu at age eight moved with his family to Detroit. His parents, previously teachers, were rendered, as many migrants are, low-wage workers. It’s cold in Detroit and Madu needed a very large coat. Grown Madu obsessively posts about expensive jackets; those wanting to follow his ongoing jacket trajectory can find it on Twitter.
The memoir opens with Madu arriving in Venice on a writer’s residency during the covid pandemic. “The CEO of Venezia FC, a soccer team in Serie B, had started an artists’ residency as part of his efforts to turn the team into a global entity of fashion, culture, and sports.” Even in Venice he’s providing daily enabling, largely in the form of tech support, to his once-again educator parents now grappling with conducting classes online. Interludes of observant wandering are punctuatedwith heading back to his place to log on lest his parents back in Detroit need help. As he walks, memories are revisited of the family’s difficult transition from rural Nigerian to hard new American urban: eight of them in one room, where previously he’d rambled village to village like a capering goat. We return with him through some of the worst humiliations that immigrants suffer in displacement. It’s a curious conundrum, how the performance of opportunity is automatically inherited by the children of parents, who sacrifice all to provide it. You are someone’s hope for the someone else they cannot be right now because they are evaporating trying to feed and shelter you. Life is lived forward towards what you’ll become, because of that sacrifice, rather than in the present. It’s a situation ripe for demonizing any child who doesn’t leap to and dance a jig over it.
Madu becomes the target of his father’s rage and disappointment, possibly because he wasn’t grateful enough for all his father had given up, including his lost status as a much respected man in his village and his dormant soccer-player dreams. No matter what Madu does, he’s the glycogen to igniting that rage and the belt that accompanies it. Young Zito fights, he doesn’t take efficiently or obediently to education, he’s chronically in trouble at school whilst ironically being the transcriptionist for the night school classes that will ultimately (a) return his parents to working in the classroom and (b) provide the family with a home and (c) make Madu the autodidact he is today. You are the devil incarnate, while you are typing up your parents’ final papers. This emotional interweaving of the generations gets reinforcement from the Igbo understanding that you are literally inhabited by ancestors.
The père-fils fury cycle sees each demeaning episode of the father’s cruelty cement an ever more defiant Zito, more unreachable, withdrawn, and estranged. In an incredibly cinematic but unfortunate section, Madu ends up stuck—silent and seething—inside an ice cream truck for three summers with dad, yet as the years climb he assumes ever more responsibility for his younger siblings and the family. He leaves and he returns. It’s not an unusual combination: the secretly resentful caregiver, who can’t stop caring. He says, “I loved them, and I loved him, and this was embarrassing. To love and not be loved in return. To be dismissed and punished for most of my young life and then to find myself still at his feet.” Elsewhere: “I hated him because he hated me first. Because he showed me how to hate someone.”
How to recover from cruelty, from being told relentlessly you are bad, especially when the message is reinforced by poverty and the saturating prejudice and fear that surround you. How usefully to redeploy the volcanic fury that results, rather than internalizing it to self-loathing, revenge, or rampant replication. Literature is a good sorting office. Words can think us through life’s emotionally distressing computations, especially when they are rendered in a lively voice, with distinctive syntax, an attentive eye, and a class perspective that’s rarely, if ever, heard coming off the page.
Madu’s major achievement in this, his first book, is how immersive it is. His resurrection from the turmoil of his familial emotions and the revelations he receives about their sources feel like they emerge from the writing itself. This work is alive! Its poetic, interrogative mind and supple narrative voice have a very honest, come here to me quality, bringing the reader wherever he invites us. It also abruptly unsettles itself and our expectations. Madu employs an unusual form of admission and omission. If he can’t remember something or describe something, he says so. He catalogues his reactions and sometimes jokingly retracts and revises them. This isn’t a charming portrait of a Venice, with endless historic digressions, where a man neatly and conveniently finds himself. It exists within both the timeless artefact and its daily laboring life, as when Madu finally visits a glassblower he had been watching near his apartment: “The man was short and heavy and he had very hard and worn hands. He looked ancient, not in outward age but in the graceful way he moved himself. He seemed like an extension of the city itself, as beautiful and grand as the basilica.”
Venice, albeit primed and aesthetically sublime, is the canvas against which Madu’s contentious self-reckonings and simmering anxieties about standing out as a Black man unfold, while the past is galloping apace on the inside lane until it all erupts in a tremendous Borgesian breakdown. Like the demeaned but dutiful transcriber, Madu splits down the middle in a terrifying, extended episode of acute dissociation. He is convinced he’s a Minotaur (see Borges’ short story, "The House of Asterion"), with an enormous head and horns, and can’t leave the temporary apartment he’s staying in because he will terrify people and is dangerous.
This section has an abrupt segmented feeling, as the reader, washed around inside the narrator’s protracted discombobulation, is for a period uncertain what’s real or imagined, and then the tone reverts right back to normal like he merely dropped a few stitches and found them again. Once you recover from the ricochet, the move has sealed the book’s episodic form. Episodes usually have an end, otherwise you’re in a permanent state of psychosis. What matters is how the organizing mind emerges to understand and deflect them. The description of the experience here is so precisely rendered and enlightening it could be used to train psychiatric residents and EMTs.
On reflection, the pandemic becomes like a crook of an arm in which the narrator’s emotionally weary head comes to rest, and explode, and, once it recovers itself, express. There’s a truly moving depiction of trust and male friendship. “Most of our conversation was about our happiness at the curse being lifted,” Madu says of talking with a local friend, who had been looking after him. “Before Simon left, he told me that maybe I shouldn’t think of the transformation as a curse so much—that there are some people who wish they could transform into a beast or a tree to express the deep pain they hold in all the time.” Madu’s passage has become, in a sense, a homecoming, hate be damned.
I had shaped my life into what I wanted it to be, and after seeing all the different kinds of my selves in the world, after leaving all the time only to return, the irony was that I wanted to be in the same position where they had started me, helping them through their days. The same child in the classroom with them, the same child in the ice cream truck with my father.
Madu becomes able to say psychologically of his father, as Samuel Beckett once wrote to Emil Cioran, “in your ruins, I am at ease.”
This is the most hopeful book I’ve read in a long while and Zito Madu is a mighty writer.
Anakana Schofield is the author of three novels, most recently Bina: A Novel in Warnings. She has written for Book Post on Fleur Jaeggy, Vivian Gornick, Jenny Diski, and Clarice Lispector, among other subjects.
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