I Get on the Bus

by Reginald McKnight

Book Overview

The tale of a young African-American man's desultory quest for his own identity while living amidst the mysteries of modern-day Senegal. Battling a malarial fever, Evan Norris is taken in by the family of a powerful Marabou and finds himself absorbed in a world that is both ancient and modern.

• Format: Paperback
• Language: English
• ISBN: 0316560588
• ISBN13: 9780316560580
• Release Date: January 1992
• Publisher: Little Brown and Company
• Length: 304 Pages
• Weight: 0.85 lbs.
• Dimensions: 0.9" x 7.0" x 8.0"

Customer Reviews

Literary wonder

Taught me a lot about writing. Thoughtful prose. I couldn't put this book down.

the best book I ever read

Surreal, horrifying, intense - an African-American explores the meaning of the hypen and slips into a very personal nightmare. What I like best is how the structure of the story - nonlinear, hallucinatory - mirrors what's going on in the main character's head. Despite (or because of) the obvious literary merits, the book is a page-turner in the same way a horror novel would be. Really the best book I have ever read.

Post Afrocentric Bible

For the last three centuries, black Americans, disillusioned with America, have looked to the ancestral land of Africa as a near mythical retreat. From the Anti-Bellum ramblings of David Walker, the Black Star Line rhetoric of Garvey, to the expatriate movement of the latter twentieth century, Africa has continued to hang in the distance, the supposed Utopia where melanin is master and ofays are absent. Heaven. Enter I GET ON THE BUS, and with it, despite the surrealistic ramblings of one confused and cursed Peace Corps brother, enter truth. Africa is bigger than all our romances and to stand before it is to stand before a moving train, its people have their own loyalties that don't conform to black American desires, needs. It is a land that invites a fool, then ignores it as it is devoured. And for this tale we are given a voice that is as passionate as it is dislocated, replacing unmentionable emotions with florid descriptions soaked in frustration, anger and confusion. "I get on the bus." A mantra repeated again and again from a speaker constently struggling to negotiate the world in which he's found himself trapped.