Fugitive Archives

My Family and the American Myth of Belonging

De: Asale Angel-Ajani

For readers of Cathy Park Hong, Imani Perry, and Jesmyn Ward, Angel-Ajani’s raw, lyrical exploration of her family history radically overturns established American myths about race, violence, and family.

Deep in her family’s archives, Asale Angel-Ajani uncovered a story she never expected to find: a total revision of the American narrative she’d been taught. Raised by her white mother who resented her and her twin, her only two Black children, even kicking them out of the house in their teenage years, Angel-Ajani was left to navigate a country full of prejudice on her own.

When her grandmother, the family’s record keeper, passed away several years ago, Angel-Ajani decided to take up her archival work, looking for answers of her own—about her mother’s abandonment, her father’s struggles, her grandmother’s overt racism and later love story with her Black step-grandfather, and so many contradictions she witnessed growing up. Perhaps most importantly, she wanted an answer to her own inescapable anger. Branch by branch, she discovers a family tree reaching back to her earliest American ancestors, some enslaved, some native, some free and white. What she found was that the history of America was the same: it was not just series of conflicts between strangers, but a story of intimacy, of tangled family trees and deep mutual knowledge across races and ethnicities, nevertheless shot through with terror and hate.

Delving to the roots of the intimate racial terror within families and between friends and neighbors, often growing right alongside love, Angel-Ajani shows the real harm that denial of the truth—and denial of one another—can cause, and why those in power continue to manipulate the story of our belonging and our divisions. Like The Yellow House and Black in Blues, Fugitive Archives is a vital new exploration of race and class and a call to wield the truth of our history.

Reseñas de la Crítica

Praise for A Country You Can Leave:

“A master class of a bildungsroman . . . Like childhood, Angel-Ajani’s novel is alternately horrifying and spellbinding in its lessons about love, family and growing up." —The New York Times

"Angel-Ajani’s unflinching portrait of this hypernuclear family is captivating and complex, with a richly drawn supporting cast and occasional arch humor that leavens the intensely emotional backdrop." —Bookpage (starred review)

"[A] piercing debut novel . . . In perceptive prose and wry dialogue, Angel-Ajani brings to life a mother and daughter trapped by their circumstances. This is exemplary." —Publishers Weekly (starred review)

"From page one, A Country You Can Leave is a riveting, exasperating, and deeply heartbreaking tale of mother-daughter strife and resilience. Asale Angel-Ajani is an explosive talent and her story of Afro-Cuban Lara coming of age in a ruthless headlock with her survivalist Russian mother, Yevgenia, will disintegrate your strong-held emotional walls, down to her very last act of resistance." —Xochitl Gonzalez, author of Olga Dies Dreaming