by Ashleigh Nugent - £8.99 Rise Up (2020)
paperback
ISBN 13: 9781838109004 | ISBN 10: 1838109005
LOCKS is a book and one-man show about a mixed-race English boy in a Jamaican prison. Based on a true story.
"1993 was the year that Stephen Lawrence got murdered by racists, and I became an angry Black lad with a ‘chip on his shoulder’."
27 years later, has anything changed?
Aeon is a mixed-race teenager from an English suburb. He is desperate to understand the Black identity foisted on him by racist teachers, police and 'friends'. For want of Black role models, Aoen has immersed himself in gangsta rap, he's trying to grow dreadlocks and he's bought himself some big red boots.
And now he's in Jamaica.
Within days of being in Jamaica, Aeon has been mugged and stabbed, arrested and banged up.
Aeon has to fight for survival, fight for respect, and fight for his big red boots. And he has to fight for his identity because here, Aeon is the White boy.
By the time he was sixteen, Ashleigh Nugent, author of LOCKS, had been arrested three times. Each incident was a case racial profiling on the part of the police. Growing up as a mixed-race boy in a leafy village on the outskirts of Liverpool in the 1980s, Ashleigh faced racism on a regular basis. It was this that took him to Jamaica.
Winner of the CommonWord
Memoir Competition
You can find out more about LOCKS - and the one-man show that accompanies it - here: https://www.riseupcic.co.uk/locks/
(Price & availability last checked: November 2020)
Featured book: New Fiction, New - Local Books, New Books - Black, Asian & Other Diasporas, News from Nowhere recommends..., Recommended Fiction & Poetry for Yuletide 2020!,
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In categories: Anti-Racism, Black, Asian & Other Diasporas, Fiction, Local Interest,
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