Shana's Reviews > Black Boy Out of Time: A Memoir

For someone relatively young, Hari Ziyad has written an incredibly complex and comprehensive memoir, and with stunning beauty. They coin terms like "misafropedia" and "carceral dissonance" to explore their experience of growing up and existing as a Black and queer person within multiple systems. Their therapist suggests inner child work, and the letters to their younger self are simultaneously heartbreaking and hopeful. Ziyad shows tremendous vulnerability and takes responsibility for the hurt they have caused others, all while extending grace and understanding to those who have hurt them. Rather than focusing on the individuals, they look at the anti-Black, anti-queer society as a whole to understand both their history and present. At the same time, to understand their experience is to also investigate and consider what so many others have gone through in the attempt to simply exist in a society that tries to shut them down at every turn and wants to make them hate themselves and those like them. In putting this memoir out there, Ziyad does us a great favor. Selfishly, I hope they continue to share their excellence with us.