Tiffanie Drayton’s book, Black American Refugee: Escaping the Narcissism of the American Dream (Viking, Feb. 15), is fittingly titled. It compares her own experience of growing up Black in America and ultimately moving to Trinidad to escape American racism with that of a refugee, one who flees their country to escape violence or persecution. Yet it is also a story of finding a sense of home after a lifetime spent searching for a place that fits.

In June 2020, Drayton wrote an op-ed for the New York Times titled “I’m a Black American. I Had To Get Out,” about fleeing the United States due to racism. In her op-ed, she talks about watching the video of George Floyd’s death on TV in Trinidad and points to the 2013 acquittal of George Zimmerman for the murder of Trayvon Martin as the moment of reckoning when she knew that she could no longer live in the United States.

On a recent Zoom call, Drayton says, “This was the defining moment when I knew that I had to write about it. There is no reason that anyone should feel like they have to flee from the richest and most powerful country in the world. That Trayvon Martin moment confirmed what I knew after being gaslit for all this time.”

The response to her op-ed was overwhelming.

“I got a response: Write a book, write a book,” Drayton recalls. “I would say as soon as I published that essay, there was a book in progress in my own head. Maybe not in reality, maybe not on paper, but in my own head there was a book in progress.”

And there was. Drayton began collecting essays that she had published over the past six years as a basis for how her book would come together. Black American Refugee tells the story of growing up in America through the stages of a relationship with a narcissistic abuser, treating the move to Trinidad as the emancipatory final stage of breaking up. Drayton initially wrote the story without the points of psychology. The theme revealed itself to her during a conversation with her sister.

“I said, ‘I didn’t know how to structure it,’ and she said, ‘Why not just use the cycle of abuse for every chapter?’ I had to go back to the story and figure out how to break down the book,” says Drayton. “It just formulated naturally, it sort of cemented my thesis or position.”

Drayton moved to the United States from Trinidad with her mother and her three siblings at age 4, living in five different states including Hawaii. One pervasive theme in the book is Drayton’s crumbling belief that racism would not personally affect her if she did all the right things. As Drayton grew up, she realized that this was not the case, and her book describes each phase of this realization through these stages: love-bombing, devaluing, lethal abuse, and, finally, breakup.

The book carefully details her relationship with the United States, from her childhood experience of being chased by White onlookers from a motel pool in West Virginia and being called racial slurs in an online game to the small glimmer of hope that Barack Obama’s election brought to Black Americans, only to be brought back to reality by the George Zimmerman verdict.

“It’s so interesting because dealing with America is just like dealing with constant multiple personalities of one country, and you never know what side you’re going to get. You go back to that love-bombing [a stage where the abuser inundates the victim with messages of love and affection], and the story that you’re experiencing is not aligning,” Drayton notes, reflecting on how her own belief in meritocracy crumbled with her lived experience of growing up Black in America. “You’re not supposed to internalize all of these messages as the path to your self-actualization and the path to your success.”

Drayton’s final decision to move back to Trinidad was a healing act, allowing her to finally breathe. The book draws parallels between Drayton’s own abuser, the father of her children, and the cycle of violence that Black Americans experience.

However, Drayton emphasized that her book is not just about struggle.

“A big part of my book is about illustrating Black freedom and the freedom to be Black and how important that is,” Drayton adds. “For me, that liberation is going to Carnival and hearing music made by people who look like me, and that beauty is so energizing. No matter how much oppression there is, we still persevere, and we’re still happy.”

Like Carnival, a festival that was initially an act of defiance by former slaves against the British colonial government in Trinidad, Drayton’s move home to Trinidad was an emancipatory act in the face of the disillusionment that came with growing up Black in the United States.

Nia Norris is a Chicago journalist who writes about books and culture. Her work has appeared in Next City and other publications.