Blog Assignment #4 Toure What's inside you brother

         Toure explores his identity in his piece What's behind you brother in a style that is difficult to decipher yet allows for a broader picture of his struggle to be made. Most of the story is told in third person and it is portrayed as a character study of the writer himself, as it progresses it become more difficult to distinguish the real voice of the piece. It begins with a first person narration, studying the writer himself, it then suddenly turns into a second person perspective where the reader is now Toure. The scene at the gym implies to a greater racial connotation, "You speak to yourself in the most necessary black english in america, that of the humble assimilationist, and you move around the bag, trying to hypnotize your opponent, then lashing two, three rocket shots at him, and imagine yourself, like the brown bomber, lighting the world on fire, quietly". The fight with the bag implies toure's greater fight with his black identity, another line show this, "This is the body english of the back alley, the backroom, the back corner of the prison's back cell, where liston, serious criminal, mob enforcer, learned to box and became a straight-ahead, raw and rugged, black as blue, bruiser nigga. The grandson of Nat Turner, the grandfather of Mike Tyson. He attempts to identify as several black figures to reinforce his battle with his own blackness, it comes off in some ways as denial, as a battle he will never win.