Debut novelist Todd Craig is a writer, educator, deejay and Hip Hop purist. Raised in the Ravenswood and Queensbridge Housing Projects in Queens, NY, in a family haunted by poverty and violence, Craig miraculously went on to score a private prep-school education in New England followed by a Bachelor’s Degree from Williams College and a Masters in Education from Harvard University. A published author by the age of 34, Craig is currently finishing his Doctor of Arts Degree in English Composition and Rhetoric at St. John’s University in New York.
Nevertheless, this purist remains intimately connected, committed and devoted to his home turf and its people, and his cutting-edge new multimedia novel, tor’cha reaffirms this in a literary effort that can best be described as a walking tour of the hood, complete with audio guide.
tor’cha tells the not-so-simple story of three young men coming of age in the Projects in a novel consisting of 10 separate and non-chronological stories revolving around the three characters. The book comes with a CD of 21 songs by over 30 contmeporary Hip Hop artists and producers. These include Mobb Deep, G3, Big Twins and Chinky of Infamous Mobb, Philly rapper and Roots affiliate Truck North, Kice of Course and Sal Diesel (aka Mental Case), and Dinny Bananaz of Dirty Hartz, with production by the likes of Havoc, Bear-One, Mr.LeN, Sid Roams and several others, including the author himself. In other words, quite an earful.
Granted, Craig may not be the first writer in this multimedia age to include a CD with his book. However, this particular CD serves specifically as a soundtrack, designed to round out the experience of reading the novel. In other words, the artists performing on the CD wrote lyrics based on the book itself; there are quotes and references directly from the text in certain songs, and snippets of other sound bytes designed to embellish the reader’s multisensory experience while reading the novel.
The CD presents a layered soundscape akin to one’s inner voice, as a commentary on the psychic torture of each character. Voicemail notes, clips from the news, intimate conversations, and the tactile sounds of modern-day urban life round out the music and poetic slam to create a cohesive audio environment that perfectly reproduces the emotional and psychic landscape in which the characters’ lives are unfolding.
The symbiotic relationship between the book and CD opens the reader up to an entirely new experience in fiction. This brilliant stories-with-soundtrack format creates a similar experience to that of watching a movie, except that this experience allows the reader to provide their own visual content, driven by the printed text, the soundtrack, and the combination of both.
It remains inevitable that the multilayered effect may not be for all of us, and some will prefer the experience of listening to the CD in between reading the chapters. Still, this work is targeted at audiences raised in the digital age, as Craig points out: “Kids who are doing their homework while chatting online, texting, watching TV, eating dinner, and downloading music all at once.”
In addition to the use of multimedia, the writing itself stacks up layers of meaning. The moral and spiritual implications of each chapter/story are denoted by the fact that each is named after one of the Biblical Ten Commandments, while simultaneously bearing a moral derived from Supreme Mathematics as practiced by the Nation of Gods and Earths, known also as the Five Percent Nation of Islam. For instance, the story/chapter named after Commandment 6: Thou Shalt Not Kill carries the subtitle drawn from Supreme Mathematics regarding the number 6: equality.
By breaking down everyday situations into lowest common spiritual denominators based on the overlap between Biblical Scriptures and Supreme Mathematics, Craig springs forth as a sort of urban prophet illuminating the underbelly of Queens as a microcosm for global society.
It is essential to begin reading this book from the very first page of the Preface, which comes packed with information, background, author’s personal confessions, and the code to Supreme Mathematics that is going to help you understand this work.
The writing, at times as grammatically startling as if one were reading in a foreign language, often bleeds through distinctions of genre to become outright unabashed poetry, and drifts unpredictably into confessional stream-of-consciousness, blurring the line between fiction and journal entry, all the while winding itself around the linguistic and rhythmic pillars of Hip Hop. These poetic and journalistic digressions happen so smoothly, however, that by the time the reader takes notice of each, the story has aptly resumed its course as a rap narrative.
Craig’s language and characters spring from the seeds of his own life. The character of Christian uncannily resembles Craig himself, the boy from the hood who somehow got educated, became a writer, and will one day redeem his people through literacy. And, though all the characters are in some way inspired by real people, Craig notes: “The characters are loosely based on real-life people. I do have a cousin who happens to be a famous rapper. and my other cousin did become a Muslim while in prison. But the actual stories themselves are purely fictional.”
Still the autobiographical influence weighs a lot here, empowering the author to bare the skeletal integrity of a culture that he knows intimately. Though the stories themselves may be fictitious, the scenarios portrayed in them are all too real for kids like Craig who grew up as eyewitnesses to the routine of crime, drugs and violent death that are an everyday occurrence in neighborhoods like QB. For any middle-class kid lured by the music video glamourization of gangstas, this book serves as a wake-up call louder than a neighbor’s car alarm going off at 4:30 in the morning. This author holds back no emotional punches, and fearlessly pulls back the darkest layer of his skin to reveal the tender and vulnerable flesh that lines the inside of the Black urban masculine bravado.
Craig’s uncompromising verbal technique takes readers on a visceral roller coaster ride through the bosom and bowels of the Projects, only to emerge from the dark tunnel awestruck, like a pair of eyes encountering the blinding clarity of daylight after a long subway ride.
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