Seeking Truth
Written By: Dylan Sams | Photos By: Ben Leeson
“I think facing the truth allows you to not be controlled by the past,”
Prince Shakur said, sitting in Columbus, Ohio’s Topiary Park early one July morning.
He’s discussing “When They Tell You To Be Good,” a memoir and his first published book. It was Shakur’s way of sorting through the murder of his father, Shakur’s political activism and his experience as a gay Black man living in the United States and traveling the world.
“A lot of it was wanting to write about my dad and growing up without a father and really having a lot of questions about what it means to grieve someone you never really knew,” Shakur said.
Shakur, 29, was back in Columbus, his old home, after moving to New York City. He was headlining the inaugural Columbus Book Festival along with three other authors, organized by the Columbus Library. He’s only a year removed from the release of the “When They Tell You To Be Good.”
The memoir’s first chapter centers on Shakur’s growing activism — a direct reaction to the 2014 killing of Michael Brown by a police officer in Ferguson. Shakur went to Ferguson in response and began to organize demonstrations at Ohio University in his final year as a student.
His activism didn’t stop there.
He took part in protests in Standing Rock to protest the construction of the Dakota Access pipeline after finishing college. It was in 2016 he felt he wanted to write what would become “When They Tell You To be Good.” He also was in Paris as the Nuit Debout demonstrations were occurring — France’s continuation of the earlier Occupy Wall Street protests.
Shakur has been fascinated by the written word ever since a middle school teacher asked his class to write short stories. He was 12.
He kept journals through middle school, high school and college, read voraciously and has worked as a freelance journalist and contributor throughout a variety of publications including Teen Vogue, Medium and The Daily Dot. He also hosts his own podcast, The Creative Hour, where he hosts other artists to discuss their views of the world and the moments that shaped them.
Shakur talked with Ephemera Magazine about how all these experiences shaped “When They Tell You To Be Good” and where he sees his activism developing in the coming years.
“I remember certain points in my life very visually. Maybe that’s the movie lover in me, maybe it’s the writer in me, the storyteller.”
Your book opens with 2015 and the shooting of Michael Brown in Ferguson. And continues with your evolution of organizing protests at school, going to the Dakota pipeline, and experiencing protests in France. Where do you see your activism now that we’re three years away from George Floyd and we’re kind of in a world where things are getting more restrictive, not less?
At the end of 2020, I took a solid organizing break where I took a break from the different organizations that I was a part of as a sort of lead member. I think I just needed time to process and make sense of everything that was happening and to work through all of the conflict that was happening in the different movements I was a part of.
I’m grateful that since publishing this book, I’ve been able to look at myself more as an educator or looking at how I can develop my perspectives on art-making and processes of colonialism and cultural erasure.
I think creatively, I’m much more invested in a political way than I ever have been before, but in terms of material organizing, I mean, I will always, like, throw down.
But now that I’m in New York City, I really want to figure out how I can get more into prison abolition and police abolition work just because I think New York City is a really clear example of the evils of the police and prison system when it comes to bail reform and Rikers Island and the very real histories of anti-black policing there and what it looks like.
I’ve been trying to figure out how to reach towards that in my journalism and do more research. But I also just want to do straight organizing work around that. So, I think that’s one of the areas that I want to dig into, but I just haven’t found the space yet necessarily.
What was the process of writing your book? Was it built from your journaling?
Yeah. Some of it was journaling. In a lot of the years in my book that are around the time of college, I kept pretty much a journal a semester. And so, I was able to kind of look back on a lot of that. I think it’s also interesting being someone born in the Internet age.
From high school onward, even if I couldn’t necessarily pull together certain memories, I at least had certain images that could kind of elicit a certain period of time and make me think, “Oh, I was kind of feeling this at this time.”
But, in terms of process, I remember certain points in my life very visually. Maybe that’s the movie lover in me, maybe it’s the writer in me, the storyteller.
I feel like I combined a lot of personal memory with journals, with a few times being able to go back to certain places and remember what things felt like.
I usually had some inkling of a strong piece of a memory, whether it’s a sound or a line of dialogue or who was there or how I felt. And I think once you can latch on to one particular piece of a scene, it can help write the rest. I did that through different processes, some of that was editing, some of that was looking at photos. Using music that I was listening to at the time was a big thing.
“I think creatively, I’m much more invested in a political way than I ever have been before,”
I know you’ve been doing a bunch of writing workshops. What has it been like for you to be able to do that — discussing your experience as a writer with others?
It’s great in the sense that I’m literally living a version of my life that 14-year-old me wanted, that 20-year-old me wanted.
The part that is weird is that I’m always aware of an underlying sense of ageism that comes with publishing a memoir before you’re 30. I mean, at every other book event, I get a question about how I wrote a memoir at my age. I think it’s fine for people to be curious, but I think it’s also emblematic of a larger structural problem where young people’s lives and opinions aren’t really valued.
Look at the U.S. today where young people are being shot down in their schools. There’s horizontal gun violence in black communities and urban epicenters.
And so what I really push for and try to deal with in my discomfort is that no matter how I’m perceived – in terms of some people thinking that I might need more years to do some of the things that I’m doing – I think that history shows us that young people and their experiences matter and some of the most important historical documents that we have are from young people, like the diary of Anne Frank.
And so that’s part of some of the cognitive dissonance that I have.
But mostly it’s really humbling to have people look at me and to respect not only my life story, but the craft I put into portraying it in literary form.
It just makes me excited that I get to experience this now and I only get to do more moving forward. That to me feels like a blessing that a younger version of myself is giving myself now because I worked so hard.
“It’s great in a sense that I’m literally living a version of my life that 14-year-old me wanted, that 20-year-old me wanted.”
You write a lot about James Baldwin as one of your big influences, but are there other writers who you either have discovered more recently or from childhood that really shaped your literary style?
I will say first on one level, I think cinema very much influences my writing. When I was five and six and seven, I was obsessed with the movie “Titanic.” I think it made me fall in love with storytelling. I think it made me fall in love with how stories could move people.
And I think as I got older and I read more books, I was definitely into adventure books and mystery books and thriller books, and I was always amazed by writers like R.L. Stein who could really fold and sustain your suspense throughout an entire series.
And then I think as I got into middle school and sort of doing short story writing and doing more of that, honestly, I really started loving a lot of online fiction and the writing of other teenagers online and fan fiction. I just mention that because I think I fell in love with the possibility of all of these communities online.
It wasn’t really a specific writer in that sense, but it was more of an approach to writing to say, it doesn’t need to be perfect. You just need to do it.
Then when I was in college, I definitely fell in love with beatnik literature and Jack Kerouac and Charles Bukowski and Edward Abbey. And I started reading a lot more essays and understanding the essay as a form.
And that’s when I kind of sort of started learning about Baldwin and Richard Wright. I think as an adult writer, post-college, some of the writers that have meant a lot to me are Jesmyn Ward, Saidiya Hartman, Ocean Vuong.
I read “Call Me by Your Name,” by André Aciman every year. I read “Giovanni’s Room” by James Baldwin every year.
I find that there’s a number of texts that I returned to because they taught me how to live as a politicized person. Some of those were ‘The Autobiography of Malcolm X” or “Panther Baby” by Jamal Joseph or “Heavy” by Kiese Laymon and I think a lot of those were books where I respected the ways that those people showed up in the world and the ways that they tried to recollect on how they could have done more, or they wish they could have done more. And they were kind of able to express their vulnerabilities in a way that I don’t know.
I appreciate that. Okay. What’s the last great thing you’ve read?
“The Song of Achilles,” I think it’s a YA book. I read that like two months ago.
I’ve been trying to read more YA because sometimes I like revisiting some of the literature that inspired me as a teenager. Or stuff that I would have liked as a teenager.
What about that one was interesting to you?
It’s gay. It’s teenagers falling in love. The language is very evocative, very sensual.
And to me, I really respect romance that’s really well written because I think really well written romance is really psychological. And so that book did express the psychology of these characters falling in love really well.
This interview has been condensed and edited for clarity. Prince Shakur’s “When They Tell You To be Good” was released in Aug. 2023 as a paperback edition.
Published December 28, 2023