Less Than What You Once Were

<p><em style=background-color: rgba(0 0 0 0); color: rgba(0 0 0 1)>Less Than What You Once Were</em><span style=background-color: rgba(0 0 0 0); color: rgba(0 0 0 1)> begins in a pivotal moment for the speaker-during the 2008 Battle of N'Djamena in Chad's capital. This destabilizing experience-in which the speaker's home is broken into-results in the family embarking on a months-long departure from the place and the narrative begins to cycle through childhood memories from the first night when Brown lands at N'Djamena's airport as an eight-year-old boy to the failed attempt at bird hunting with a slingshot. These centering memories soon give way to stories of displacement as a young adult and much later a return to the country of his youth. This fragmented memoir told in a similar episodic style to Claudia Rankine's </span><em style=background-color: rgba(0 0 0 0); color: rgba(0 0 0 1)>Citizen</em><span style=background-color: rgba(0 0 0 0); color: rgba(0 0 0 1)> is both a coming-of-age story and also a story of exile ending in a state of dislocated adulthood the speaker longing for a return to a childhood home that can't be accessed.</span></p>