Books I Read: April 2019

Heads of the Colored People by Nafissa Thompson-Spires (37Ink/Atria, 2018)

★★★★☆

Each book I've read this month has shared some essential capacity with the one preceding it. In Heads, it's Thompson-Spires interrogating the perils of black embodiment—the same fear Adjei-Brenyah unspools in Friday Black—through the lens of middle-class anxiety, discontent, and self-sabotage. As she tells us in the titular story: 

What is a black network narrative but the story of one degree of separation, of sketching the same pain over and over, wading through so much flesh trying to draw new conclusions, knowing that wishing would not make them so?

I loved the structure of this book: taking hammer and chisel to "the black monolithic narrative," each stroke coming from a wildly different direction, but delivering the same sledgehammer force and unerring follow-through. The author's dry, self-aware voice is masterful and frequently hilarious. My favorite story: "Fatima, the Biloquist: A Transformation Story," one of the more relatable for this nonblack reader—about code-switching, stereotypes, and what you cut off to fit in.

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Friday Black by Nana Kwame Adjei-Brenyah (Houghton Mifflin Harcourt, 2018)

★★★★☆

An urgent short story collection, examining racism, consumerism, parent/child relationships, loneliness, and more. Adjei-Brenyah turns an unflinching eye on some of the worst ills plaguing America, but treats his characters, even his "villains," tenderly. Most memorable, though, are the silent pains a poor mother takes to feed her son; a son's oblique yearning for an absent father. (Friday Black makes an interesting companion piece to Evicted: both center their struggling subjects' quiet dignity.) Overall, I enjoyed and empathized with the narratives these characters craft to make sense of the world; my favorite pieces, perhaps followingly, were "The Hospital Where" and "Through the Flash."

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Evicted: Poverty and Profit in the American City by Matthew Desmond (Crown, 2016)

★★★★☆

A devastating account of eviction and forced displacement in highly segregated Milwaukee, depicted as a multivalent threat that is both cause and effect of grinding poverty.

We have failed to fully appreciate how deeply housing is implicated in the creation of poverty. Not everyone living in a distressed neighborhood is associated with gang members, parole officers, employers, social workers, or pastors. But nearly all of them have a landlord.

Desmond centers his story around a handful of tenants as they attempt to get by, and maintain their humanity, within a power system that is shockingly asymmetric. The characters are depicted with tenderness and empathy; he includes details that communicate their “resilience and spunk and brilliance,” often focusing on the sometimes unexpected ways they attempt to reclaim dignity.

He also shows, with conviction, their pain. This is not a happy book, but a necessary one. By giving us pages and pages of bleak, exhaustive research, he makes a compelling closing argument for a universal housing voucher program and expanded tenants’ counsel.

While the brunt of the book is sympathetic to renters, he gives at least one landlord a fair shake, detailing Sherrena’s entrepreneurial history and her complex relationships with tenants (including her frustrations with destructive ones).

I was surprised Desmond did not pay any of his interviewees. In his afterword, he describes how he embedded himself in the two communities he studied and provided transportation or participated in gift economies. I expect he wanted to maintain scholarly distance and not “contaminate” his findings with monetary influence. Still, it seems like a problematic continuation of the age-old scenario of white people profiting from the mental and emotional labor of BIPOC.