Award-Winning Author of books like Confetti and Only on the Weekends, Dean Atta, recently released Person Unlimited: An Ode to My Black Queer Body. The book is a memoir of his life through the parts of the body, starting with the crown and working down. It is a beautiful book that is both honest and moving. The lens that Person Unlimited looks through as the author takes you through his life and healing encourages you, intentionally or unintentionally, to reflect on your own body and the ways that you and the wider world could be kinder to it.
If you read his most well known book Black Flamingo, you may notice similarities in certain events. As Atta put it himself while at a book reading I reported on, the YA novel is a fictionalised journey he really lived: a gay teenage boy of Greek-Cypriot and Jamaican heritage exploring his identity through the power of drag. It’s uplifting, empowering and suitable for its age range. Person Unlimited is the mature, non-fiction counterpart that is clearly for adults, the reality with all its warts, and if you think that means you’ll be reading the same story twice, you’re wrong. Having read both, they are night and day.
Person Unlimited feels like a coming-to-terms instead of a coming-of-age story, not in any negative sense, but in the holistic bittersweet way that you often do when taking stock of your life up til now and navigating past trauma. It really is a love letter that feels written as much for himself and his healing process as it is for us. It is daring in its vulnerability. At some points I felt like I was reading a personal diary, as Atta was so open not just about things that happened, but also his thoughts, feelings and flaws, even when talking about his current relationship.
It is now widely understood that trauma is stored in the body, even when we may not consciously recognise it, making the body-lens feel particularly apt as a way to recount lived memories. Focusing on both the good and the bad in terms of the bodily experiences as opposed to just the thoughts and feelings of the time encourages grounding: a reminder of the natural state of being. It encourages viewing the world with that same lens for you, too, to reconsider how much you have thought about your body, its needs, who gets access to it and so on. It made perfect sense seeing The Body Keeps the Score by Bessel Van Der Volk and The Body is Not an Apology: The Power of Radical Self Love By Sonya Renne Taylor in the recommendations at the end. Both are excellent.
In the same way that often happens in real life, as we go through the book and Atta’s experiences, events that we understood in one context become better understood in others. As we move through his life, we learn as he did, rather than being told the events with all possible information available in hindsight. This means you don’t just understand specifics of what happened: you understand how the author internalised them. When he makes a revelation, you feel it too, and start looking over the previous parts of the book in a new way, like we do when new information changes how we think about past events.
The most emotionally intense parts of the book are in regards Dean’s experiences of sexual assault. Descriptions are not graphic in a true crime sense, but some readers may be understandably sensitive to such themes in a story, and struggle to engage with works that feature it. This includes me. I’m so glad I read Person Unlimited, though. Yes, some parts are uncomfortable, however sometimes discomfort helps growth. There is a solidarity to be found in Atta’s words as he reflects on not just those events and the psychological effect of them, but on the culture of ignoring our bodies that can inhibit our ability to honour what boundaries we really are comfortable with. It’s a needed conversation we shouldn’t shy away from.
This book is by no means just about sexual assault. There are many other insights that are discussed, from the way his hair is politicised, to feelings about his family, and of course there is a discussion of drag as a vehicle for self expression and freedom. Each of these is treated with a depth and honestly that is admirable. Memoirs are the least likely type of book for me personally to read, but this one I cannot recommend enough.
