Piri Thomas’ Nuyorican memoir serves as an intriguing counterpoint to Arenas’ Before Night Falls. Although Thomas’ memoir ends before he becomes a writer, both address the way in which their conflict with the state grew out of a romantic vision of the self which couldn’t find a home within their society. Thomas, like Arenas, ends up in prison, albeit for more explicit criminal behaviour. Thomas’ romantic struggle has to do with race. A child of Puerto Ricans, he is mixed race, and finds himself caught between the twin poles of whiteness and blackness. Another accompanying text would be Baldwin’s Another Country. Thomas is haunted by his identity vacio, even going so far as to go on a mission to the south of the USA to see what life is like as a black man there, a journey which only serves to confirm the prejudice he has always felt, in spite of the fact he is not ‘black’, in the same way as his Harlem friends are. The melting pot of NY is the perfect arena for Thomas to play out this crisis, but seemingly inevitably it leads to addiction, crime and prison. This is a heart-on-sleeve memoir, and the reader finds him or herself curious about all that must have come after the book ends, the journey towards poetry and literature which would become another home for Piri Thomas.
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