Reflecting on his youth in a city at risk

EMINEM fans will be disappointed. Paul Clemens’ “Made in Detroit,” a memoir of growing up south of the city’s 8 Mile Road border, has nothing to do with the famed rapper of the 2002 film “8 Mile,” nor anything to do with the expletive-spewing performer himself. But the terrain covered by Clemens, a first-time author, is not so far removed from that of Marshall Mathers: a white man coming of age in a city in decline, where whites are the minority population, where issues of crime, racism and poverty stir tension and resentment.

Born in 1973 to a working-class, Roman Catholic family, Clemens establishes in the book’s opening paragraph what his childhood environment was like: His mother shakes him from sleep one night to tell him, “Some guys just shot out the windows to our truck.” This act of violence is neither surprising nor uncommon. “I sleepily grabbed for the baseball bat that leaned against my bedpost for just such a purpose,” Clemens writes.

In a place where stolen cars, street fights and gunplay are part of the daily goings-on, the only thing the city seems to inspire is the urge to get out -- an urge that strikes the 17-year-old Clemens, though he is convinced that living there will not have been for nothing: “To hell with this place, I remember thinking. Accompanying this, however, was another thought, this one hinting at the dawning of what I now realize to be a stage-one literary sensibility: I’ve got material.”

Clemens reflects on his youth with tenderness and anger. His personal experiences prove, at various moments, amusing, outrageous and downright sad. Yet it is the observations he makes about the city as a whole that prove sharpest and most compelling. For starters, he notes that Detroit was a city of interesting contradictions: The people usually referred to as minorities were actually the majority population, due to white flight, and those similarly referred to as “disempowered” were in fact the powerful. Clemens describes the paradox as the “powers that be’be black.” The year of his birth coincided with the election of Detroit’s first black mayor, the legendary Coleman Young, whose 20-year reign was riddled with corruption and grievous decisions. “There was, too,” Clemens writes, “the disconnect of being white in a society in which this is seen as an ‘entitled’ status,” yet living in a city “where whiteness entitled one to nothing at all.”

As a memoir, “Made in Detroit” is satisfying enough, but Clemens is wise to tuck his own story into a larger context, both historical and literary (including wide-ranging references to Louis-Ferdinand Celine, William Faulkner, James Baldwin, Flannery O’Connor and “The Autobiography of Malcolm X”). Clemens’ insights into these prove highly relevant and edifying. Some are personal: Clemens reveals that he set out to write a novel involving the decline and fall of Detroit and ruptured race relations, with autobiographical elements thrown in. But the project became unworkable (“Dear reader, I was losing my mind”), evolving into memoir instead.

Though Clemens writes that it is easy to look at the city’s history and find a number of sources for its troubles -- race riots, the decline of the auto industry, the packing-up of Motown for Hollywood -- but solutions seem more elusive. And the population flow has yet to be staunched. The author speculates that whites may “some decades hence become a national minority -- not to the same extent, or with the same stark dichotomy as Detroit, but still. The Motor City, as ever, remains ahead of the racial curve -- a case study, or cautionary tale.”

Clemens isn’t out to offer theories on how or why his hometown got where it is, or how things can be improved. (He acknowledges that efforts are being made, but the process will be slow going.) Instead, he studies how Detroit’s decline has shaped his own education, his own ideas on race. He questions the racist undertones of the term “white flight” and its influence on so-called urban decay. He is unflinchingly candid when it comes to his own struggles with race. It’s apparent that his relationship to Detroit is rich and complex, brimming with experiences both hurtful and redemptive. Thanks to his enlightened upbringing, he seems to have transcended narrow-mindedness.

Ultimately, the book’s title says it all: “Made in Detroit” indicates, above all, that this is the city that made him, for better or worse. Clemens seems to have maintained, if not nostalgia, a sense of allegiance to his hometown, and perhaps even a complicated kind of gratitude.*

Carmela Ciuraru is the editor of six anthologies of poetry and is a regular contributor to Book Review.