The Life and Loves of Mr. Jive Ass Nigger by Cecil Brown

I read this book quite a while ago, and meant to post a review. Librarything is now saying, no freebie books if I don’t, and anyway, I do want to review it. But this is a bit from memory. Anyway, here’s what I posted on the Librarything website:


This is, as someone else put it, a novel of a time and place. But it’s an interesting and somewhat alien time and place, even though it’s not so very long ago.

Maybe it’s just because I’m projecting onto this text, but some other books that came to mind when one reads this: Ralph Ellison’s Invisible Man, Frantz Fanon’s Black Skin, White Masks, and Neil Strauss’s The Game. Regardless of that latter reference, the book is a novel, not a dated guide to playing pickup as a black man in Denmark (though it could have been many places in Europe) back in the late 60s.

That said, the book is dripping with sex, and a lot of it is multiple-birds-with-one-stone sex, too. The protagonist (“George Washington”, he calls himself) tells the stories of his (constant) encounters with white women not only because he likes to talk about sex, but also because there are other things he wants to talk about. Anger. Humiliation. Being used. Using. Hypocrisy. Power.

Being a white man in Korea at the start of the 21st century is radically different from being a black man in Copenhagen in the 60s, I’m certain, but I can say as an expatriate that Brown certainly hits the nail on the head in terms of the feel of an expat’s mindset, the dynamics of expat communities, the sense of interactions based more on using a convenient foreigner than on any human interaction, and also the sexual charge that seems to drive so many expats, and even to infuse a relatively homogenous society when it comes to how it regards its “exotic” foreigners. Things do get weird; deeply weird, in this book, and that’s no surprise, but the specific weirdnesses do indeed surprise, even as they feel strangely familiar.

I found the book quite interesting, even though there were times when I found myself slightly discomfited at being reminded just how crappily human beings can treat one another. Jive: the crudity of life distorted by all the ridiculousnesses one can imagine, and the sad ridiculousness that one becomes by living within it. And the abyss that gazes into our protagonist…

This is, in the end, a powerful, discomfiting book. My discomfort with it makes me want to say something limiting it, but I’m going to resist that and say I was both fascinated and somehow sobered by it at once.

6 thoughts on “The Life and Loves of Mr. Jive Ass Nigger by Cecil Brown

  1. You can get free books from library thing for reviewing them? How? I’ve been a paid member for almost 2 years now and would love to get freebies to review.

    1. Sean,

      You need to have an address in the USA for most of them. I have a shipping company locker there, so I can receive books at that mailing address. It’s a workaround for an antiquated residency requirement.

      If you have such an address, look around carefully and you’ll see a reviewers giveaway thing you can join, and request books through.

    1. Oh, wow, thank you for clarifying that this book is about one thing and one thing only, as well as how I ought to read and understand it. My goodness, without a towering genius like you to guide me, how shall I ever read anything again?

      Oh, wait, that’s not right. Did you not notice that all the black men in the novel are expats? (As, indeed, are some of the whites?) When you’re an expat in a relatively racially homogenous place, then race and expathood do and can intersect, and certainly would have for black Americans in Scandinavia at this time.

      As for it being an attack on white men, aw, are you hurt? Sobbing in your bedroom? White people are always crying about attacks on their race, whilst when I look about, it looks to me like white folks are relatively the least oppressed humans on the planet. (Nearly nobody is free from oppression on some level, sure, but white people have significant advantages all over.)

      Also, you may want to review the rules of punctuation and capitalization. Nice try, but this earns you a D+. Don’t give up.

  2. This is a relatively minor work of fiction, and it appears that it got Mr. Brown a ticket back to the United States, and a career. It doesn’t dwell into the expatriate life, but only touches it. I lived in Sweden and Denmark for 20 years. It is a sad reality for African Americans, and most of them died off. I have now attempted to clarify some of this life with my new book, “Mad Black Men And Swedes.” This is being published in July, 2015. Amazon.com Padma Press, San Francisco.

    1. Jerry,

      It’s been a long time (six years!) since I read Mr. Brown’s book, and I suppose you’re right about it being a minor work: I really don’t remember much about it except that it seems to juxtapose the benefits and the costs of the weird way black men were fetishized by some Scandinavian women, as well as more generally talking about the contrast with life back in the States. You’re right that I didn’t dig very deep into the expat experience: I think I saw more because I recognized so much as part and parcel of the (mostly) white-expat English-teaching world over here in Asia. Despite the vast differences in racial privilege and (I assume) socioeconomic circumstances enjoyed by those English teachers here, there were still many things that struck a familiar chord for me, if not from my own experiences than from things I’ve seen others go through.

      I’ll add your book to my (ever-growing!) list, though: I’d like to know more about the lives of African American expats in Scandinavia. All I’ve really picked up beyond Brown’s novel is the tidbits one encounters in discussions of various jazz musicians who sojourned there: Don Cherry, Eric Dolphy, Dexter Gordon, as well as those who passed through (Coltrane, Ornette, and so many others). I’m guessing by the titles of your sculptures that you must have been lucky enough to see some of them play over in Sweden or Denmark, if you were there in the right time period?

      (At least, you seem to be a fan of jazz… “Miles Davis Digging Charlie Parker” pretty much captures… er, it’s hard to articulate, but, I guess I’d say it captures the strangeness, the chimerical quality of having your voice on one instrument be influenced by a musical exemplar who is playing on a very different kind of instrument. That’s what it was like for me as a kid, being totally fascinated by Miles’ approach when I started out on the saxophone, until I found myself some sax players to try and emulate. Nice work… a lot of your stuff is, actually, not that I know anything about visual art.)

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