Maybe I Don't Belong Here: A Memoir of Race, Identity, Breakdown and Recovery

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Hearing about the time he went to Liverpool only to be met with a horribly racist crowd made me wince. A groundbreaking account of the effects of everyday racism on the identity and mental health of Black British men, explored through the lens of Homeland and Supergirl actor David Harewood’s personal experience. The book takes on the trajectory of his life but focuses on his psychotic breakdown where he was hospitalized twice within short intervals. He was the first black actor to play the title role in Othello – making history at the National Theatre in 1997.

Looking back on it, I was absorbing whiteness without truly understanding what it was doing to me and how it was subtly altering the image of self. Last month I got to sit down with the wonderful David Harewood to discuss his book Maybe I Don't Belong Here: A Memoir of Race, Identity, Breakdown and Recovery, which is out in paperback form tomorrow (October 13th). In September 2023, a portrait of Harewood, commissioned by Lascelles, was put on display at Harewood House as an acknowledgement of their families' connected history.David Harewood is an actor, and relatively well-known (many would know him 'off something', most recently I've seen him in Supergirl). The description of his sectioning is gruelling and like in his own TV documentary (My Psychosis and Me), shows how issues of identity and self can easily lead to mental health breakdowns in our very own if not openly discussed and not dealt with from the very beginning, in primary schools right up to the workplace.

It hurts to know that such a gifted man had to leave Blighty to find work and seems to have now settled in Canada. Maybe I Don’t Belong Here is a harrowing read and one I’ll never forget, not least because in the wake of the race report by the Commission on Race and Ethnic Disparities, a shared story is a lifeline for my people. see a picture of a black person that they may recognise from the television, they will enquire as to why his picture is there, and then they'll understand… all of the unpaid work that my ancestors did, and the brutality of what they suffered… helped build this house.An open and honest memoir by David Harewood of being a black and British man and struggling with psychosis. But at the same time it's important not to pull up the drawbridge and think that my experiences aren't the same as other people's experiences. I didn’t know the word racism till later when I had to work out how the Specials are skinheads and yet they have Black people in the band. Strange to be doing it all on Zoom again, it would be nice to be sitting down somewhere drinking alcohol but it's good.