Connecting Histories by Romain

Author:Romain [Romain]
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9780415760225
Barnesnoble:
Publisher: Taylor & Francis
Published: 2014-08-15T00:00:00+00:00

5.3 Gary Younge

Gary Younge’s travel memoir, No Place Like Home is a recording of his greyhound bus journey through the Southern states of the USA following the journey of the historic Freedom Riders. The Freedom Riders were a group of black and white civil rights activists who travelled throughout the south implementing the law arising from the Boynton vs. the Commonwealth of Virginia case of December 1960, which made racial segregation illegal on facilities for passengers carrying out interstate travel. The riders were subjected to extreme physical assaults and their trips met with international news coverage.

Gary Younge’s work is far more autobiographical than the other travelogues studied in this chapter. His exploration of the USA is always related to and juxtaposed to his life story in Britain. Melenie Mcgrath viewed that the book was more than a travel book, that ‘Younge’s Greyhound bus is the vehicle for a compelling exploration of racial identity and the problems of growing up clever, black and angry in small-town Stevenage.’29 Additionally his work focused on the recollected life story in terms of his childhood and teenage years, everyday life and the formation of identity and ethnicity in a mainly white working class area. All of these experiences have created his adult self and are significant to the type of experiences he had in the USA. The autobiographical nature of Younge’s work is clearly evident when juxtaposed with Phillips’ The Atlantic Sound. Phillips and Younge, as already stated, had similarities in their formative years in terms of family and the environment they grew up in. Yet, the stresses and internal self-reflective questioning carried out by Younge is not evident in Phillips’ recollections. However, the similarities between Younge’s and Phillips’ autobiographical memories are striking in that aspects of their experiences led them to explore not only their Black British but also their trans-national identities. Additionally, both felt a part of Britain and yet excluded from it.

Gary Younge performs only one diasporic trip, as opposed to the other writers’ travels around several continents (and Chaim Bermant’s multiple life-history migrations). This diasporic trip represents Black contemporary identity, rather than symbolic historical conceptualisations. His work shows the importance of African-American culture to the formulation of Black British identity, particularly identities like Phillips’ and Younge’s where there were limited Black British cultural references geographically nearby when growing up to provide a positive sense of identity.

Both Phillips and Younge, unlike as we shall see Jacobson, questioned their national identity throughout their early life. Younge’s confusion regarding his sense of national identity was challenged when he went on a ‘gap year’ to the Sudan; at the same time four Black MPs were elected in the 1987 British general election. One of his Sudanese friends congratulated him on the election of his ‘compatriots’. Younge recalled that ‘identities suffocate if trapped in the narrow confines of a definition for too long. But everyone needs a working title. From then on I decided I could be black and British and anyone who wanted to challenge my claim to either of these could expect a ferocious response.

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