Derek Owusu: ‘Mental health issues that people find scary aren’t being talked about’

an article by Anita Sethi published in the Guardian

With a new book out on Stormzy’s imprint, the writer discusses men’s emotions, Ghanaian families and paying his brother £50 for each novel he reads


‘The NHS have been amazing. They saved my life a couple of times’: Derek Owusu. Photograph: Suki Dhanda/The Observer

Derek Owusu was born in London in 1988. His new book, That Reminds Me, is published by Stormzy’s #Merky Books and is a novel-in-verse that explores identity, belonging, his experience of growing up in foster care, and his mental breakdown last year. Owusu edited the anthology Safe: On Black British Men Reclaiming Space (2019) and is a marketing executive for audio at Penguin Books.

How did That Reminds Me come about?
I started writing it when I was in a mental health facility last year and I created the character of K to try to understand going through a breakdown. I started writing fragments of memory and initially it was going to be a poetry collection, and then it turned into something different. I sent it to Stormzy’s manager and she loved it. I wanted to convey the symptoms of borderline personality disorder (BPD). Before my BPD diagnosis, I just thought I was strange. My emotions were always fluctuating. I was often angry. When I was diagnosed it was a relief. It’s important to share awareness with the people around you so they know what you’re going through. The NHS have been amazing. They saved my life a couple of times.

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Terrorist Masculinities: Political Masculinity between Fiction, Facts, and Their Mediation

an article by Rainer Emig (Johannes Gutenberg-Universität Mainz, Germany) published in Men and Masculinities Volume 22 Issue 3 (August 2019)

Abstract

This essay proposes that terrorism manifests itself in a relation that encompasses masculinity as well as the media. The origin of this relationship is the joint performativity of gender and acts of terror. This makes terrorism an instrument of social and political change. But in order to legitimize themselves, terrorism as well as masculinity require authorization by a phantasmagorical power.

Drawing on the dominance of males among terrorists, this essay will look at an early depiction of terrorism in Conrad’s The Secret Agent, a contemporary representation in Sahota’s novel Ours Are the Streets and terrorism’s real manifestation in the Paris carnage of November 2015.

It will show that in the desire to satisfy an imagined “higher authority” and thereby assert an individual as well as political identity, masculinity and terrorism share a performative root. This also suggests a possible way of exposing and exploding terrorism and masculinity from within, by feeding into the mediated stream of its representations images and ideas of inferiority, ridicule, and failure.

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