Books — Heavy

As part of my sabbatical, I read widely and by choice, dipping into books I’ve wanted to get to but could not as well as several that came out recently. As part of my post-sabbatical reflections, I’ve written several short but specifically focused responses to some of what I read. These responses, like the one below, focus on one element each from a select list of readings and represent the best of what I encountered. 

Heavy

Kiese Laymon, Scribner (2018)

Find this book here. Check out Laymon’s website here.

I spend my time—writing, reading, and teaching—moving between the ways we consider some stories true and some invention, most often left in the uncomfortable in-between where neither of those descriptors fit because they both apply.

This is likely why Kiese Laymon’s Heavy was such a powerful read when I encountered it. Laymon lays bare his life in a stunning fashion, wrestling with the truths and fictions of growing up Black and male and large in America. Constructed, in some ways, as a letter to his mother, the author frames the entire work in the midst of that contested space, as can be seen in the last lines of the introductory chapter. 

“I wanted to write a lie.

You wanted to read that lie.

I wrote this to you instead” (10).

The constant metaphor of the book is weight: physical, spiritual, emotional, and cultural. Sometimes those burdens were visible and others so embedded in his experiences it took years to identify all the ways he’d been carrying them. In some instances they led to stark truth, while in others they birthed inventions required to survive, even as those inventions ate away at him.

Truly, this is a stunning work that lays bare the effort required to endure the shadowy spaces where we either make our stories concrete truth in order to preserve a fundamentalist’s certainty of our self-perception or shade our truths with self-preserving fictions because the rawest parts of ourselves are most difficult to look at.

Resisting both of those impulses, though, is exactly central to Laymon’s efforts in writing Heavy and the dominant preoccupation I carried throughout my reading of his work.

“For the first time in my life, I realized telling the truth was way different from finding the truth, and finding the truth had everything to do with revisiting and rearranging words. Revisiting and rearranging words didn’t only require a vocabulary; it required will, and maybe courage. Revised word patterns were revised thought patterns. Revised thought patterns shaped memory” (86). 

This is the benefit of a work like Heavy. It holds us in a posture of attention, both to the weight Laymon carries and our own burdens. But, if we’re attentive and willing, it also forces us to consider the ways we may have weighed on others, intentionally or not. And that is work we all must do.

Books — An American Marriage

As part of my sabbatical, I read widely and by choice, dipping into books I’ve wanted to get to but could not as well as several that came out recently. As part of my post-sabbatical reflections, I’ve written several short but specifically focused responses to some of what I read. These responses, like the one below, focus on one element each from a select list of readings and represent the best of what I encountered. 

An American Marriage

Tayari Jones, Algonquin Books (2018)

Find the book here. Check out Jones’s website here.

There is a moment early in An American Marriage that frames the entire tragedy of this great novel.

Roy Hamilton, one of the book’s three main characters, has been accused of raping a woman at a motel near his small hometown. Celestial, his wife, knows he could not have committed the crime as they were together in their own room when it happened.

At Roy’s trial, she is called as an eyewitness for the defense and testifies to this effect. Regardless of this, Roy is convicted despite the fact that there is no physical evidence he committed the crime and an eyewitness who could vouch for where he was when the crime occurred.

But none of this truth matters in the opinion of the jury. Reflecting back on the trial, Celestial remembers the moment this way:

“What I know is this: they didn’t believe me. Twelve people and not one of them took me at my word….Even before I stepped down from the witness stand, I knew that I had failed him” (38).

This is the power of An American Marriage, the story of three lives torn apart by the pervasive racial bias and violence against black bodies perpetrated by the American legal system. By all accounts, Roy should have been found innocent and returned to his life of middle class striving in Atlanta.

But, because he is black, the presumption of his guilt supersedes any advantages he may have had and he is sentenced to 12 years in prison. Torn apart, their marriage strains more and more at the seams until Celestial forms a new relationship with her childhood friend Andre (who introduced her to Roy), and all three are forced to weather various ways America is still constructed to destroy black families.

Against this backdrop and in a shared narrative between these three voices, Jones weaves a masterwork of fear and longing and strength and failure. I could spend an entire post on the way she merges a traditional novel format with the epistolary mode of storytelling and a multi-voiced construction so seamlessly and with singular power.

But what I am more interested in here is the way in which the setting of this novel is a mute but never voiceless fourth main character. The world is a force bent on the destruction of relationships, forcing Roy, Celestial, and Andre to bear up under its constant, crushing weight.

Their efforts are imperfect and the ending is anything but neat as Roy is released and tries to reconcile with Celestial—the hope of which kept him alive in prison—only to discover she and Andre have grown together in his absence. But they are real humans in the face of great inhumanities.

The fact that they survive is a testament to their strength. The fact that they have to is a testament to our great weakness as a society.       

This novel is an open question regarding whether or not we will ever look long enough at the stories that could show us how badly we need to change.

Books — I’m Still Here: Black Dignity in a World Still Made for Whiteness

As part of my sabbatical, I read widely and by choice, dipping into books I’ve wanted to get to but could not as well as several that came out recently. As part of my post-sabbatical reflections, I’ve written several short but specifically focused responses to some of what I read. These responses, like the one below, focus on one element each from a select list of readings and represent the best of what I encountered. 

I’m Still Here: Black Dignity in a World Still Made for Whiteness

Austin Channing Brown, Convergent Books (2018) 

Find the book here. Visit Brown’s website here. And check out her show The Next Question here.

Before I read I’m Still Here, I caught an interview with author Austin Channing Brown on the Seminary Dropout podcast that opened with her recounting how her parents named her Austin as a way of preventing people from responding to her out of their prejudices before they’d actually met her.

This, of course, collapsed for her when a librarian looked at her name on a library card and said it couldn’t be hers. And there it was: regardless of how Black people attempt to engage or adopt dominant, normalized notions of white culture, they end up excluded because that is the nature of white supremacy.

Sadly, as Brown’s book describes in various settings, this is exactly the way that Evangelical organizations end up treating Black people who have been invited in, ostensibly, to address the very issue of lacking diversity. This sad irony is distilled in the following passage: 

In this way whiteness reveals its true desire for people of color. Whiteness wants us to be empty, malleable, so that it can shape Blackness into whatever is necessary for the white organization’s own success. It sees potential, possibility, a future where Black people could share some of the benefits of whiteness if only we try hard enough to mimic it….Rare is the ministry praying that they would be worthy of the giftedness of Black minds and hearts (79). 

This insight, in my opinion, is critical both in Brown’s decision to stop playing the diversity game by rules that maintain the status quo and for reshaping the issue for those of us who may not understand how our choices are exactly what keep those rules in place in the first place.

The starkest racial divides often exist in spaces so deeply ingrained in the systems and thinking operating so seamlessly in white culture that they’ve been rendered invisible. They manifest only in the erasure of Black people.

By nature, this erasure of others also sweeps away the very traces of its existence in the eyes of those who benefit from it. This requires marginalized people to choose: do they continue to conform or do they resist in an attempt to be rendered visible despite all the potential costs that come with that resistance?

I’m Still Here, then, is the story of Brown’s path to claiming her own space by stepping outside environments that made her have to ask to be seen in the first place. It’s also her moment of pivoting away from trying to create messages for a predominantly white audience who aren’t listening in ways that enable hearing they’re being told.

That makes this a book a service and gift to white readers Brown was not obligated to provide us. To read it as anything else is a vestige of a power structure that demands every message must protect the sensibilities of a group that actually needs to see and feel the pain we cause others—as much as it is possible for us to do so—in order to understand our need to change.

Note: This book made the New York Times Bestseller List this week, and rightfully so.