Project and content management for Contemporary Authors volumes
WORK TITLE: What We Lose
WORK NOTES:
PSEUDONYM(S):
BIRTHDATE:
WEBSITE: http://www.zinziclemmons.com/
CITY: Los Angeles
STATE: CA
COUNTRY:
NATIONALITY:
http://www.zinziclemmons.com/about/ * https://www.penguinrandomhouse.com/authors/2142936/zinzi-clemmons * https://www.vogue.com/article/zinzi-clemmons-what-we-lose-interview * http://www.broadstreetreview.com/books/what-we-lose-by-zinzi-clemmons * https://www.theatlantic.com/entertainment/archive/2017/08/what-we-lose-confronts-the-dilemma-of-authenticity/535065/
RESEARCHER NOTES:
PERSONAL
Born c. 1985; daughter of Michael and Dorothy Clemmons; married André Naffis-Sahely (a poet and translator).
EDUCATION:Brown University, B.A.; Columbia University, M.F.A.
ADDRESS
CAREER
Writer. Colburn Conservatory, Los Angeles, CA, faculty member; Occidental College, Los Angeles, faculty member.
AWARDS:Grants from MacDowell Colony, Bread Loaf, Provincetown Fine Arts Work Center, and Kimbilio Center for African American Fiction; 5 under 35 Honoree, National Book Awards, 2017.
WRITINGS
Contributor to periodicals, including Zoetrope: All Story, Transition, and Paris Review Daily. Cofounder and editor, Apogee Journal, 2011; contributing editor, Literary Hub; associate editor, Believer.
SIDELIGHTS
Zinzi Clemmons’s career trajectory as an aspiring novelist was suddenly disrupted when she learned that her mother had late-stage breast cancer. Clemmons had just completed an M.F.A. in fiction at Columbia University and had begun work on a traditionally structured novel about HIV/AIDS. Moving back to Philadelphia to care for her mother, she put this novel aside. Though she kept writing during the months that she tended to her dying mother, she could only manage fragmentary notes; eventually, she decided to abandon the novel and focus on “keeping those pieces and stitching them together … [into] a fictional narrative,” as quoted in an Atlantic piece by Amy Weiss-Meyer. The result was What We Lose, hailed as an extraordinarily powerful debut novel about identity and the sometimes difficult relationship between a mother and daughter.
The novel is highly autobiographical. Like the author, the book’s protagonist, Thandi, is the daughter of a mixed-race South African mother and an African American father and was raised in an upscale suburban Philadelphia neighborhood. Thandi shares the challenges that the author faced having been raised by an immigrant mother who never felt fully comfortable in her adopted country. As Clemmons explained to Vogue writer Megan O’Grady: “Mother-daughter relationships can be fraught anyway, and in our case, all of these different issues—race, gender, politics—were sort of wrapped up in her.”
In the novel, Thandi is still in college when her mother dies of cancer. She is devastated with grief; undone, she rushes into a romantic relationship and soon becomes pregnant. But motherhood—and hasty marriage to the child’s father, Peter—only worsens Thandi’s emotional state, revealing the disastrous consequences of forming her own new family without having fully dealt with the loss of her mother. Clemmons uses an unconventional narrative structure to tell Thandi’s story. Rejecting chronology, the author creates a mix of single sentences, fragments, and short paragraphs as well as diagrams, photographs, charts, snippets of articles, blog entries, and song lyrics. These offer memories and associations that build on each other and cohere into a complex picture that illuminates the subject of grief while also making comments on issues such as racial identity, apartheid, wealth, class, abortion, and cultural attitudes toward cancer—a “privileged” disease that inspires rallies and political activism while other deadly diseases do not.
Many reviewers found the novel’s collage-like structure fresh and exciting. But Anndee Hochman, writing in Broad Street Review, deemed some of the book’s juxtapositions—a section on women who fall in love with serial killers, for example—merely “perplexing.” Hochman also found the book’s exploded chronology occasionally confusing. Others, however, expressed strong admiration for Clemmons’s narrative technique. What We Lose is a “spectacular debut … written in bursts,” said Booklist contributor Terry Hong, who added that the author “performs an exceptional sleight of hand that is both affecting and illuminating.” In her Vogue article, O’Grady said that the novel is “as visceral as it is cerebral.”
London Guardian reviewer F.T. Kola described the novel’s associative form as “ambitious,” but said that What We Lose “is at its best when it simply tells the story of Thandi’s mother’s struggle with cancer, and it is here that Clemmons’s restrained prose reaches its full potential.” The author writes matter-of-factly about Thandi’s attempts to heal her mother by giving her only wholesome foods, and her frustration when well-meaning visitors bring rich, fatty comfort dishes to the house. Sitting by her mother’s hospital bed, where her mother lies in a coma, Thandi forces herself not to turn away from the terrible smell of the disease “until I couldn’t smell it anymore. The stench was nothing more than molecules moving in and out of my nostrils, the scene nothing more than light reflected off objects alive and inanimate, some dying.” Also writing in the Guardian, Marta Bausells found that the “clear emotional insight with which [Clemmons] maps Thandi’s grief is remarkable.” The author told Bausells that she wanted the novel to confront some of the paradoxes that can complicate grief, among them sex. Grief can make it seem as if everything else in life just stops, said Clemmons, and sex “is one of the areas where you feel conflicted, because it’s self-indulgent on a very basic level and you’re giving yourself pleasure when someone has just gone through a lot of pain.”
In a National Public Radio interview with Lulu Garcia-Navarro, Clemmons said that her mother’s death enabled her to see her mother from a different and more objective perspective. At the same time, she has mourned the fact that she has lost the opportunity to talk with her mother about the kinds of issues that Thandi deals with in the novel. “I do have to define myself much more strongly now,” Clemmons told Garcia-Navarro, “because I don’t have any other choice.”
BIOCRIT
BOOKS
Clemmons, Zinzi, What We Lose, Viking (New York, NY), 2017.
PERIODICALS
Booklist, July 1, 2017, Terry Hong, review of What We Lose, p. 24.
Guardian, August 5, 2017, F.T. Kola, review of What We Lose; August 10, 2017, Marta Bausells, “Zinzi Clemmons on Her First Novel: ‘I’m Proud of It, Because I Didn’t Hold Anything Back.’”
Kirkus Reviews, May 1, 2017, review of What We Lose.
New York Times, May 25, 2017, John Williams, “A Novelist’s Meditation on Loss and Identity.”
Publishers Weekly, May 15, 2017, review of What We Lose, p. 32.
Vogue, June 20, 2017, Megan O’Grady, “Zinzi Clemmons Has Written the Debut Novel of the Year,” interview with Clemmons.
ONLINE
Atlantic Online, https://www.theatlantic.com/ (August 1, 2017), Amy Weiss-Meyer, review of What We Lose.
Broad Street Review, http://www.broadstreetreview.com/ (July 18, 2017), Anndee Hochman, review of What We Lose.
Independent Online, http://www.independent.co.uk/ (July 12, 2017), Lucy Scholes, review of What We Lose.
National Public Radio Website, https://www.npr.org/ (July 16, 2017), Lulu Garcia-Navarro, “New Novel Explores ‘What We Lose’ When We Lose a Parent,” interview with Clemmons.
Washington Independent Review of Books, http://www.washingtonindependentreviewofbooks.com/ (August 4, 2017), Ellen Prentiss Campbell, review of What We Lose.
Zinzi Clemmons Website, http://www.zinziclemmons.com (February 6, 2018).
Zinzi Clemmons
Photo of Zinzi Clemmons
Photo: © Nina Subin
ABOUT THE AUTHOR
Zinzi Clemmons was raised in Philadelphia by a South African mother and an American father. A graduate of Brown and Columbia, her writing has appeared in Zoetrope: All-Story, The Paris Review Daily, Transition, and elsewhere. She is a cofounder and former publisher of Apogee Journal and a contributing editor to Literary Hub. She has been in residence at the MacDowell Colony, Bread Loaf, the Fine Arts Work Center in Provincetown, and Dar al-Ma’mûn in Marrakech, Morocco. Clemmons lives in Los Angeles with her husband, where she teaches at The Colburn Conservatory and Occidental College.
SEE LESS
About Me
[photo by Nina Subin]
[photo by Nina Subin]
I am a writer and editor raised in Philadelphia, with roots in South Africa and Trinidad. I received my BA in Critical Theory and Literary Arts from Brown, and my MFA in Fiction from Columbia. My writing has appeared in Zoetrope: All-Story, Transition, The Paris Review Daily, and elsewhere. I have received fellowships and support from The MacDowell Colony, Bread Loaf, the Fine Arts Work Center in Provincetown, and the Kimbilio Center for African American Fiction. I am co-founder and former Publisher of Apogee Journal, and I am a Contributing Editor to LitHub.com. I teach literature and creative writing at The Colburn Conservatory and Occidental College. My debut novel, What We Lose, as well as a second title, are forthcoming from Viking.
I am represented by Jin Auh at The Wylie Agency.
New Novel Explores 'What We Lose' When We Lose A Parent
Listen· 5:53
Toggle more options
July 16, 20176:35 AM ET
Heard on Weekend Edition Sunday
LULU GARCIA-NAVARRO
Facebook
Twitter
Instagram
What We Lose
What We Lose
by Zinzi Clemmons
Hardcover, 213 pages purchase
Who do we become when we lose a parent? That transformation and the loss of identity and the security that surrounds it is at the heart of Zinzi Clemmons' novel What We Lose. The main character Thandi struggles with the illness and death of her mother and her place in the world as the daughter of an African-American father and a mixed-race South African mother.
Thandi does not handle her mother's death well, Clemmons says. "She internalizes a lot of it, but kind of puts a lid on it, and I think what you kind of see happening over time is this sort of dislocated grief kind of manifests in various different decisions that are maybe not the best for her future."
Interview Highlights
On her relationship with her mother and the beginnings of her book
I had always written about my mother ... some of the first stories I wrote were talking about different disagreements that we had. But what was important was the kind of larger struggles that were embodied in those arguments. ... So I had always written about my mother as a way to write about these larger issues, about immigration and gender and motherhood.
And during the time that my mother's health took a turn for the worse, I was a grad student at Columbia, in their MFA program, and actually, it was the last day of school, and we had our graduation ceremony. And I found out that my mom had a few months to live. So I pretty immediately, because I was done with school, packed my things up. I quit the job that I had and moved back to Philadelphia and basically spent the last six months with her.
It's an around-the-clock job, it's very draining, and at the end of the day, the only thing I had time to write were basically one-paragraph, or sometimes a sentence, reflections. And I just started collecting them in this folder, and I didn't intend to do anything with them. But they all started to fit together in this large story.
On writing about her feeling of rootlessness as a light-skinned black woman
I've never had, or maybe never felt that I've had, a group that I could belong to without question to it. And even though that statement is absolutely true, and being someone like me feels lonely, I do want to say that loneliness is very different from being harassed or being dismissed or abused because of the color of your skin.
And I think what I would like people to take away from this book ... [is] that I don't ever mean to engage in oppression Olympics. But I think that that has unfortunately been the conversation when we talk about colorism in black communities — so it's just a statement of what that feels like, but it's not an effort to place it above anyone else's struggle.
On defining yourself after a parent has gone
I think that the loss of a parent sort of forced that definition, right? Because your parents are almost like a physical embodiment of your genetics and all of your roots. At the same time, it's very hard, when you have a really long relationship with your parents, to see them from the outside and to see them as people. And so I think when you have a parent pass away, you bookend their life, and you're able to see them from a different perspective, and to separate yourself from those visible roots.
And it's also something that you're forced to do, because as a woman, especially, I've sort of found out in my own life that, especially when it comes to questions of family, and of whether I want to become a mother myself ... all of those things are things that I would have loved to be able to talk to my mother about, but I have to figure them out on my own. So I do have to define myself much more strongly now, because I don't have another choice, really.
Samantha Balaban and Barrie Hardymon produced and edited the audio of this interview. Petra Mayer adapted it for the Web.
What We Lose
Terry Hong
Booklist.
113.21 (July 1, 2017): p24.
COPYRIGHT 2017 American Library Association
http://www.ala.org/ala/aboutala/offices/publishing/booklist_publications/booklist/booklist.cfm
Full Text:
* What We Lose.
By Zinzi Clemmons.
July 2017.224p. illus. Viking, $22 (9780735221710).
Clemmons' spectacular debut is written in bursts, from single-sentence pages to sparse paragraphs, and
combines photographs, diagrams, charts, articles, and blog posts to amplify an intimate story of personal
loss into a larger narrative of identity, family, race, and socioeconomic access. Thandi is the daughter of a
New York-born mathematics-professor father and Johannesburg-born-nurse mother. She grows up
privileged as a "light" African American in Philadelphia. Her lifelong best friend is Aminah, their bond
cemented by their parents' friendship, which resulted from their fathers being two of the only five African
American faculty at their university. Thandi's mother dies of cancer while Thandi is in college, leaving her
with a gaping emotional void that only intensifies when she, too, becomes a mother. Clemmons creates
haunting authenticity by imbuing Thandi with autobiographical elements--parentage, life in Philadelphia,
attending Columbia, her mother's death--but through enhanced fiction, she pushes Thandi into global
citizenry, shows her skin color to be a barometer of fraught relationships and race politics, explores motherchild
bonds with brutal honesty, and even reveals cancer to be "a disease of privilege" elevated with ribbons
and campaigns. Clemmons performs an exceptional sleight of hand that is both affecting and illuminating.--
Terry Hong
Source Citation (MLA 8th
Edition)
Hong, Terry. "What We Lose." Booklist, 1 July 2017, p. 24. General OneFile,
http://link.galegroup.com/apps/doc/A499862710/ITOF?u=schlager&sid=ITOF&xid=ec26fc06.
Accessed 27 Jan. 2018.
Gale Document Number: GALE|A499862710
1/27/2018 General OneFile - Saved Articles
http://go.galegroup.com/ps/marklist.do?actionCmd=GET_MARK_LIST&userGroupName=schlager&inPS=true&prodId=ITOF&ts=1517092585702 2/3
What We Lose
Publishers Weekly.
264.20 (May 15, 2017): p32.
COPYRIGHT 2017 PWxyz, LLC
http://www.publishersweekly.com/
Full Text:
What We Lose
Zinzi Clemmons. Viking, $22 (224p) ISBN 978-0-7352-2171-0
Exacting reflections on race, mourning, and family are at the center of this novel about a college student
whose mother dies of cancer. Born to an American father and a South African mother, Thandi is a character
defined by conflicting conceptions of identity, belonging, and class, divisions that only deepen in the wake
of her mother's death. Early chapters establish these dichotomies in content and form, contrasting Thandi's
charged visits to Johannesburg with her Philadelphia coming of age by way of photographs, articles, graphs,
and song lyrics. The first third of the novel culminates with Thandi discovering that she is pregnant, before
then detailing her mother's illness and how the resulting heartbreak ushered Thandi into an ill-fated long
distance relationship with Peter, the child's father. Peter moves to New York to marry Thandi and raise their
child, Mahpee, but all parties soon glean the untenability of Thandi's building a new family without
processing the grief of her original one. Though too restrained, there are some inspired moments, and
Clemmons admirably balances the story's myriad complicated themes. (July)
Source Citation (MLA 8th
Edition)
"What We Lose." Publishers Weekly, 15 May 2017, p. 32. General OneFile,
http://link.galegroup.com/apps/doc/A492435594/ITOF?u=schlager&sid=ITOF&xid=4e45dee5.
Accessed 27 Jan. 2018.
Gale Document Number: GALE|A492435594
1/27/2018 General OneFile - Saved Articles
http://go.galegroup.com/ps/marklist.do?actionCmd=GET_MARK_LIST&userGroupName=schlager&inPS=true&prodId=ITOF&ts=1517092585702 3/3
Clemmons, Zinzi: WHAT WE LOSE
Kirkus Reviews.
(May 1, 2017):
COPYRIGHT 2017 Kirkus Media LLC
http://www.kirkusreviews.com/
Full Text:
Clemmons, Zinzi WHAT WE LOSE Viking (Adult Fiction) $22.00 7, 11 ISBN: 978-0-7352-2171-0
In this inventive debut novel, a young woman writes her way out of grief.As a "strange in-betweener" with
two mixed-race parents--a South African mother and an American father--Thandi must navigate the
majority-white suburbs of Philadelphia, where she's "often mistaken for Hispanic or Asian, sometimes
Jewish." "But you're not, like, a real black person," she's told as a young student, confirming her feeling that
she was "never fully accepted by any race." When her mother dies of cancer, Thandi must come to terms
with the loss--including her strongest link to family in Johannesburg. Caught between two continents--
between American blackness and South Africa's legacy of apartheid--she sets out to discover what makes
life worth living after tragedy hits. In the process, she produces an honest, propulsive account of grief,
interrogating the relationship among death, sex, motherhood, and culture. Written in compact episodes that
collage autofiction with '90s rap lyrics, hand-drawn graphs, blog entries, and photographs, the novel pushes
restlessly against its own boundaries--like Thandi herself. Clemmons manages to write with economy
without ever making her book feel small, and with humor and frankness, so the novel is not overly steeped
in grief. This is a big, brainy drama told by a fearless, funny young woman--part philosophy, part sociology,
and part ghost story. "My theory is that loneliness creates the feeling of haunting," Thandi confesses during
a rough patch. Whether or not you believe in ghosts, prepare for Thandi's voice to follow you from room to
room long after you put this book away. A compelling exploration of race, migration, and womanhood in
contemporary America.
Source Citation (MLA 8th
Edition)
"Clemmons, Zinzi: WHAT WE LOSE." Kirkus Reviews, 1 May 2017. General OneFile,
http://link.galegroup.com/apps/doc/A491002967/ITOF?u=schlager&sid=ITOF&xid=7e01481b.
Accessed 27 Jan. 2018.
Gale Document Number: GALE|A491002967
What We Lose: A Striking Novel About Filial Grief
Zinzi Clemmons’s debut tangles with familiar questions, using a propulsive experimentalism in lieu of linear narrative.
Zinzi Clemmons
Nina Subin
AMY WEISS-MEYER AUG 1, 2017 CULTURE
Share Tweet …
LinkedIn
Email
Print
TEXT SIZE
Like The Atlantic? Subscribe to The Atlantic Daily, our free weekday email newsletter.
Email
SIGN UP
When Zinzi Clemmons was a graduate student at Columbia, at work on her MFA, her mother was diagnosed with breast cancer. Clemmons had been writing a novel with a more or less linear narrative structure. She moved back home to Philadelphia and kept writing, but differently now, taking notes and collecting fragments of text as she cared for her mother. “The only time and energy I could muster resulted in that very short form,” she said recently. “I just ended up keeping those pieces and stitching them together, and a fictional narrative arose.” The novel she had been working on no longer felt worth her while; she’d been trying to use it, she said, to “avoid what was going on with my mom.”
The new novel that emerged, What We Lose, is a startling, poignant debut, released to no shortage of fanfare (Vogue called it “the debut novel of the year”). It tells a story based loosely on the author’s own. The protagonist is Thandi, who, like Clemmons herself, is the daughter of a “coloured” South African mother and an African American father. Thandi, like Clemmons, was raised in a wealthy, mostly white suburb of Philadelphia. Thandi’s self-proclaimed status as a “strange in-betweener”—she has “light skin and foreign roots,” and feels neither fully black American nor fully African—is a defining preoccupation of her young adulthood. Her relationship with her mother is loving but difficult. And in the wake of her death, as Thandi unexpectedly confronts the possibility of becoming a parent herself, she struggles to come to terms with what her mother’s life was, and what hers should be.
RELATED STORY
The Story of a Revolution, Told in Real Time
The arc sounds conventional enough, distinctive though the specifics may be. The book’s force comes as much from its form as from its content. Clemmons has been an outspoken proponent of experimental fiction and a critic of the ways in which the category is often presented as distinct from “black writing.” “To be denied status as an innovator based on race is terrifying,” Clemmons wrote in a 2016 essay entitled “Where Is Our Black Avant Garde?” Her own experiment, an exercise in autofiction, is anything but linear. Instead, it’s composed of fragments: single paragraphs and sentences, as well as more conventional chapters, of first-person narration by Thandi; photos of public figures; academic blog posts; rap lyrics; an email. After writing a draft, Clemmons printed the manuscript, then laid all its pages out on the floor and rearranged them, disrupting continuity and chronological order.
The resulting collage pulls you in and propels you onward, if not always forward, inviting you into Thandi’s world and her mind, which are both somewhat perplexing places. “In the weeks after my mother died,” she says, “my sex drive was merciless.” She occasionally thinks in mathematical terms and includes hand-drawn graphs charting emotion as a function of time. (“Death and pleasure we experience asymptotically,” she muses.) She dreams of her mother often, not always happily.
Her mother’s own complex in-betweenness collided with Thandi’s well before she fell ill. Unashamed of her origins in a family of “middle-to upper-class coloureds—mixed race, not black” and condescending toward American blacks, she infuriated a daughter unafraid to challenge her. “Weren’t we all sisters?” Thandi wondered in the face of her mother’s “racist views” of darker-skinned women. Her mother had no time for such alliances. “That’s just how it is,” she replied. Her imminent death, and then absence, adds urgency to Thandi’s need to think for herself about race, family, and suffering—and the limits of sisterhood and solidarity.
Mourning evades prescriptions, this book reminds us.
Even as she watches her mother deteriorate and does her best to care for her, Thandi also looks away, trying to make sense of a bigger picture. She feels conflicted about what she sees as cancer’s aura of privilege: “Dirty and inconvenient, AIDS was a disease of the people, I thought. Cancer, to me, was the opposite. Its cause was endorsed and healthily sponsored.” The notion makes her “extremely uncomfortable,” Thandi says. She can’t shake the feeling, as her mother’s health declines, that “As much as she suffered, many other people were suffering worse.” Here, and elsewhere, Clemmons leaves readers to puzzle over the guilt that lies at the heart of Thandi’s search for self.
Thandi is trying to answer a big question that has become familiar to readers of a certain kind of fiction in recent years. Sheila Heti put it most clearly in the title of her memoiristic 2010 novel, How Should a Person Be? Clemmons’s novel features another in a line of mostly young women for whom the quest for identity presents itself as a dilemma of authenticity, a challenge to make meaning in the face of existential drift and pain. How should a mother be?, this novel asks. How should a daughter be? How should a person mourn? How should a South-African-American woman honor her inheritance, and transcend it?
Clemmons’s collage offers a prismatic portrait of that search for authenticity. Thandi thinks about Kevin Carter, the Pulitzer Prize-winning photographer known for his “Starving Child and Vulture.” “Haunted by the vivid memories of killings & corpses & anger & pain,” he wrote, Carter took his own life. She reflects on the allegations of fraud and murder surrounding Winnie Mandela, who “bore a strong physical resemblance to my mother.” Ann Dunham, Barack Obama’s late mother, makes an appearance, too, in a scene in which Thandi pictures her responding to his victory in 2008. Dunham is “looking on from whatever heaven she’s chosen, utterly surprised, satisfied beyond comprehension. This is the orphan’s ultimate fantasy.”
The sentiment verges on the maudlin, and some of the fragments have a too predictably iconic feel about them. Yet Thandi herself is well aware that no fantasy awaits her, that her tour of public reckonings yields no clear lessons. Clemmons’s unusual exploration of filial grief occasionally feels like an evasion of grief. At the same time, Thandi’s odyssey is shot through with genuine sadness. Mourning evades prescriptions, this book reminds us. “I have only persisted,” Thandi says. She manages to do that not because she thinks she should, but because she finds she can.
‘What We Lose,’ by Zinzi Clemmons
What got lost
Anndee Hochman
July 18, 2017in BooksShare:faxEmailTwitterFacebookPinterestGoogle+
It’s not a spoiler if I tell you that the mother dies.
Author Zinzi Clemmons. (Photo by Nina Subin)
Especially not when the author herself, Philadelphia-area native Zinzi Clemmons, disclosed this at the start of her Philadelphia Free Library reading. “The reason this is not a spoiler is that this is not a chronological book,” explained Clemmons, back on home turf to promote her debut novel, What We Lose. “The way I wrote this book was to make it based on topical associations… This mimics the way memory works, especially when we go through a traumatic experience. Smells jog memories. Songs jog memories. They take us from one place to the next.”
Unusual structure
In the case of What We Lose, those associations are both broad and loose. The book consists of short vignettes narrated in the voice of Thandi, the daughter (like Clemmons) of a mixed-race South African mother and a black father. Interspersed with Thandi’s memories and musings are blog excerpts, archival photographs, rap lyrics (unattributed, but from the Notorious B.I.G.), passages from Barack Obama’s Dreams from My Father and Nelson Mandela’s Long Walk to Freedom, a 2011 chart of life expectancies in the United States for people of different ethnic groups, and graphs of a geometrical concept called an asymptote.
Some pages contain just a single line: “Sex is kicking death in the ass while singing,” or “I buy a pregnancy test and it says yes.” (Once again, no spoiler here: Thandi vomits at the smell of Chinese takeout in the opening passage.)
“It’s just my style,” Clemmons said, explaining that the novel’s unorthodox structure was influenced by her study of graphic design, visual art, and modern media. “I started from a place of experimentation and freedom… I had a difficult time writing a novel in this form; I had an idea a novel should have a beginning, middle, and end, and I had to really fight against that.”
Mixed metaphors
Sometimes the collaged structure works; a blog post by someone from the Nordic Africa Institute about the perception and reality of crime in post-apartheid South Africa serves to amplify Thandi’s observations about her security-obsessed Johannesburg relatives, whose fancy homes are ringed by razor wire. Later in the book, quotes from a hospice pamphlet defining grief, mourning, and bereavement place the coolly pragmatic terminology at odds with Thandi’s roil of emotions following her mother’s death.
But other times, the juxtapositions are simply perplexing. Why does the novel include several pages (including a photograph) about women who fall in love with serial killers? What are we to make of the abrupt intrusion of a paragraph about a planned Johannesburg high-rise designed by a Ghanaian “celebritect"?
Clemmons, 32, said she intended to write a different book, a novel about the life of a woman with HIV. But her agent encouraged her to build a book around pieces of that manuscript that dealt with loss and mourning — portions that came directly from Clemmons’s experience caring for her mother, who died of cancer in 2012.
What We Lose tackles big issues: not only the wrenching grief of losing a parent but also the stain of apartheid, the hierarchies of skin tone within black communities, the alienation of being mixed race, the politics of abortion, the “privileged” status of cancer compared with other diseases, and the guilt and paranoia that accompany wealth.
Zinzi Clemmons's 'What We Lose.' (Image via amazon.com)
Zinzi Clemmons's 'What We Lose.' (Image via amazon.com)
Show, don't tell
But Clemmons doesn’t linger long enough on any of these fraught topics. Too many times, the novel raises a provocative question and lets it drop. Even though Thandi’s voice is meant to be intimate, inviting us into her fears, lusts, and ambivalence, the prose sometimes feels crafted at arm’s length.
It’s a foundational precept of writing to “show, not tell.” So when Clemmons writes, “My mother befriended people aggressively. She was extremely opinionated and often abrasive. . . . Her favorite words were four-lettered,” I find myself yearning to hear that salty language and see the mother’s brusque manner rather than be told about them.
Though Clemmons tries to cue readers to the nonlinear timeline by using past tense for flashbacks and present for the novel’s “now,” I was lost at times in the quick cross-cuts, paging backward or forward to figure out where and when in Thandi’s life a particular scene took place.
What We Lose is a first novel, semi-autobiographical, with all of that genre’s bold reach and potential and all of its flaws. Clemmons teaches literature and creative writing at Colburn Conservatory and Occidental College, and clearly has something to say on topics of race and identity, mourning and motherhood. But her peripatetic form doesn’t allow those ideas to resonate deeply enough.
Like the character of Thandi, I wanted more from her world: more sensory details, more subtle probing of the characters’ psychology, more of an effort to lash together the political and personal, the legacy of apartheid, and loss of a mother. I hope Clemmons will persist at her writing table, pushing her way toward a less fractured, more coherent vision in whatever she crafts next.
Zinzi Clemmons Has Written the Debut Novel of the Year
Megan O'Grady's picture
JUNE 20, 2017 5:00 AM
by MEGAN O'GRADY
Zinzi Clemmons' What We Lose is the debut novel of the year.
Zinzi Clemmons, photographed in 2017.
Photo: Nina Subin
FacebookPinterest
“The advantage of being an outsider is seeing things a little more clearly,” says Zinzi Clemmons, over coffee at the Culver City apartment she shares with her husband, poet and translator André Naffis-Sahely, and their rescue puppy, Misty. Clemmons’ potent debut, What We Lose (Viking), depicts a young woman, Thandi, caught between cultures and identities, at home neither in her outspoken mother’s native Johannesburg, where she often visits with her parents, nor in their upscale Philadelphia suburb, where a white classmate informs her that she’s not, like, “a real black person.” As her mother falls to breast cancer, Thandi disintegrates, and what follows is a loosely autobiographical exorcism of grief. Boldly innovative and frankly sexual, the collage-like novel mixes hand-drawn charts, archival photographs, rap lyrics, sharp disquisitions on the Mandelas and Oscar Pistorius, and singular meditations on racism’s brutal intimacies. “I’ve often thought that being a light-skinned black woman is like being a well-dressed person who is also homeless,” reflects Thandi, recalling her mother’s warnings that darker girls will be jealous of her.
“From the time I first started writing, I was writing about my mom, and about the experience of having an immigrant parent who was very much at odds with the culture that I grew up in,” says the 32-year-old author, who is as appealingly direct as her novel, with piercing hazel eyes and a cloud of bronze hair. “Mother-daughter relationships can be fraught anyway, and in our case, all of these different issues—race, gender, politics—were sort of were wrapped up in her.” Growing up in Swarthmore, Pennsylvania with Dorothy, her mother, and Michael, her father, who is African-American—“we were the only black family, and foreign”—with occasional summers with her Dorothy’s upper middle-class family in post-apartheid South Africa, she felt a constant sense of cognitive dissonance, eerily insulated in the former and exposed in the latter.
As Clemmons tells it, having the double vision of someone who is never fully an insider or an outsider but always a little bit of both was an asset to her writing, if understandably destabilizing as a young woman trying to find a toehold in the world. She mentions Zadie Smith’s landmark essay on Obama and code-switching, a skill Zinzi developed long before we had a term for it. “That's very true of who I am, and that informs my point of view in writing and travel,” she reflects. “Empathy is a complex term, but I think that I can approach white people and whiteness in a way that some other black people with different experience from me cannot, because of their background. The same thing for being in foreign countries. Even here, I find it very easy to get up and move across the country, because I'm not that attached to any idea of home. I think that comes through in the book, that I don't feel like I have any fixed allegiance or identity.”
WhatWeLose
Photo: Courtesy of Viking/Penguin Books
FacebookPinterest
After studying critical theory at Brown, Clemmons got her MFA in fiction at Columbia, where she found a mentor in Paul Beatty and co-founded the landmark Apogee journal (she’s now a contributing editor at Lithub, writing on subjects including the African-American avant-garde). Dorothy was diagnosed with breast cancer while Clemmons was still in graduate school, and she moved home in 2012 to help care for her. Clemmons abandoned the novel that had formed her MFA thesis at the advice of her agent, Jin Auh, expanding instead upon a thread of emotionally-charged writing about loss. “When the brain goes through trauma, it tends to fragment memory,” she recalls. Later, she cut the manuscript apart and arranged it on the floor. The result is a novel as visceral as it is cerebral, never letting us forget, over the course of its improbably expansive 200 pages, the feeling of untameable grief in the body. “I realized that was how heartbreak occurred. Your heart wants something, but reality resists it,” thinks Thandi. But Clemmons can be as provocative as she is elegiac: early in the novel, a still of mixed-race actress Susan Kohner in Douglas Sirk’s Imitation of Life is juxtaposed with a single line of text: “I see you looking at me. I know how you see me.”
RELATED VIDEO
Singer Lizzo’s Beauty Secret Is Also the Name of Her New EP
It works, because Clemmons has so thoroughly implicated herself. “I was aware when writing it that I was being transgressive,” she says. “I want people to consider why they might not think of me in certain ways, and who they would lump me with.” Toni Morrison’s The Bluest Eye was a major influence, she says, and one detects a whiff of Karl Ove Knausgaard. At the same time, the novel would be at home amid the great memoirs about coming of age unmothered, to use Meghan O’Rourke’s term. One can’t help but think of Clemmons as in the running to be the next-generation Claudia Rankine, coming into her own by pushing against conventions of form and self, staking out the in-between spaces as place to call her own. “Any writer who is worth anything is outside for some reason,” says Clemmons. “Often, those things that you're the most ashamed of when you're younger become your best gifts.”
What We Lose by Zinzi Clemmons review – a debut of haunting fragments
Loss, identity and the struggles that face post-apartheid South Africa
FT Kola
Sat 5 Aug 2017 02.30 EDT Last modified on Wed 29 Nov 2017 04.21 EST
View more sharing options
Shares
224
Comments
5
Zinzi Clemmons explores the contours of race, class and gender.
American writer Zinzi Clemmons’s debut novel is about haunting. In a series of fragmented meditations and vignettes, it tells the story of Thandi, who narrates the trajectory of her life in the context of her mother’s death – a loss so great that it overwhelms her. In overt and subtle ways, the novel sets out to do important work: to explore the contours of race, class and gender and the legacy of apartheid; and it succeeds best when exploring these ideas through the delicately drawn and profoundly moving portrait it offers of a relationship between mother and daughter.
Sign up for the Bookmarks email
Read more
Like Clemmons, Thandi is half “Coloured” (a distinct ethnic group in South Africa) and half African American. She is, therefore, heir to the peculiar pain of all people who are half something and half another, caught between cultures and identities: the dilemma of inbetweeness, the struggle of almost belonging.
Thandi’s only home is her mother, the lodestar of her existence, a woman who teaches her daughter how to live in the world and whose instructions Thandi faithfully follows, trying to please her even when she is not there, in everything from how to wear her hair to roasting a chicken for a man in an attempt to seduce him. When her mother dies, Thandi is distraught. The voice of the book is thus one of stunned grief: a kind of anhedonic restlessness, disconnected and dislocated. The narrative never settles in one place, but rather, moving through Thandi’s early life, her mother’s illness and death, and then finally her own motherhood and divorce, alights from memory to memory and idea to idea, always circling back to the loss of her mother. “This was the paradox: how could I ever heal from losing the person who healed me? The question was so enormous that I could see only my entire life, everything I know, filling it.”
Clemmons is ambitious with her narrative form: the fragments of the novel make associative leaps from narrated scene to excerpts from academic studies, graphs of Thandi’s depression, song lyrics, and musings on subjects as diverse as the death of the photographer Kevin Carter and studies of cancer rates in communities of people of colour.
But the novel is best when it simply tells the story of Thandi’s mother’s struggle with cancer, and it is here that Clemmons’s restrained prose reaches its full potential. The matter-of-factness and plainness of the language heighten the emotional intensity of Thandi watching her mother die. As she sits in the hospital room where her mother is in a coma, she says: “I let the smell [of her mother’s infection] overwhelm me until I couldn’t smell it any more. The stench was nothing more than molecules moving in and out of my nostrils, the scene nothing more than light reflected off objects alive and inanimate, some dying.”
That “some dying” strikes the reader like a blow, and achieves the effect of Thandi’s own realisation that her mother is actually going to die, that this is really happening. In another scene, Thandi tries to care for her mother by healing her with food, stocking the fridge with fruit and vegetables, banishing the artificial and the unhealthy. But when family friends visit, they bring offerings of their love: big pots of comfort food, fatty and rich, and as Thandi makes way for a congealed pork roast, she weeps as she realises her powerlessness. She cannot stop her mother from dying – she cannot even dictate the contents of the salad drawer.
That sense of helplessness in the face of illness is one of the book’s great achievements and in combining it with Thandi’s rootlessness, her puzzling of her identity, Clemmons skilfully marries the themes of the novel. When Thandi’s mother, delirious from illness and painkillers, says “I want to go home”, Thandi’s inability to fulfil her mother’s wishes is also a painful testament to her own separation from “home”, South Africa, a place to which she has never really belonged.
The novel occasionally falters, in the more overt exploration of South African history and culture. When rooted in Thandi’s experiences - when she admits that she is frightened of the country, its violence and restlessness, despite never having actually been a victim of crime - her responses feel surprising and important: they undercut the “rainbow nation” narrative of a place still haunted by apartheid and still reeling in its aftermath.
But in other places the novel seems to engage with an idea only half way: at one point, there is an intriguing section about Winnie Mandela and the kidnapping and death of Stompie Moeketsi, but this – a subject of immense complexity and significance – seems only to result in an underexplored idea about women’s capacity for both violence and motherhood. At times, Clemmons’s restrained prose, so powerful when the narrative lens is up close on Thandi’s mother, distances us from characters the reader longs to know more about.
Yet What We Lose never strays too far from its central concern: how to live after the loss of those things that tether us to our identity. Searching and restless, the novel circles again and again like a mind riddled with grief to one vital question – how to survive in a world shadowed by a great absence.
• What We Lose is published by 4th Estate. To order a copy for £11.04 (RRP £12.99) go to bookshop.theguardian.com or call 0330 333 6846. Free UK p&p over £10, online orders only. Phone orders min p&p of £1.99.
What We Lose by Zinzi Clemmons, book review: a story about identity organised around the momentous loss of a parent
Lucy Scholes Wednesday 12 July 2017 09:00 BST
Click to follow
The Independent Culture
“What We Lose: A Support Guide” is the title of the pamphlet Thandi, the narrator of Zinzi Clemmons's luminescent debut novel, receives in the post a few days after her mother has passed away.
Sent by the hospice that looked after Thandi's mother at the end of her life, it provides a glossary of terms – grief, mourning, bereavement – as well as practical tips regarding diet, exercise, and what to avoid (alcohol, caffeine). Thandi lingers over the word “orphan” in the literature. She's not one, since her father is still alive. “But the condition isn't mathematical,” she thinks. “The loss is what creates the condition. It’s not the fact of one parent, but that the loss has occurred. It’s the wound, not the parts that are left untouched.”
Clemmons's novel, What We Lose, is more than just a portrait of this wound; it’s the lesion itself. Sometimes fierce and angry, other times quiet and tender, it’s a story about identity organised around this central, momentous loss – that of a parent – that expands and contracts, as with the beating of a heart, to encompass meditations on race, sex and love.
Thandi is a “strange in-betweener”. Her mother, who's a nurse, is mixed-race (“what is called colored in South Africa”, where she comes from), and her father, a mathematics professor and head of the college department where he works, is a “light-skinned black” American. Thandi grows up in Pennsylvania, spending summer holidays with family in South Africa, yet because of her “light skin and foreign roots”, she’s “never fully accepted by any race”. Her parents encourage her to feel “a strong solidarity with black people in Africa”, but in the affluent, middle-class American community in which she grows up, it’s mostly white kids who live on her block.
READ MORE
McGlue by Ottessa Moshfegh, book review: one evil hangover
The Concierge by Gerard Gilbert review: A topical summer thriller
Madame Zero Sarah Hall review: A stunning new collection
“I’ve often thought that being a light-skinned black woman is like being a well-dressed person who is also homeless,” she muses. “You may be able to pass in mainstream society ... But in reality you have nowhere to rest, nowhere to feel safe.” Shelter appears in the form of a romantic relationship, into which the recently bereaved Thandi hurls herself headfirst, from which she hurtles, in a strange mixture of zombie-like sleepwalking and wild desperation, into marriage and motherhood.
The frank candour of Thandi's voice gives What We Lose the intimate feeling of a memoir. It’s not, but it is that tricksy, ever increasingly popular half-sibling: autofiction. Written in short, lyrical chapters that initially have the feel of loosely connected vignettes – interspersed, collage-style, with photos, diagrams, blog posts, and Nineties rap lyrics – the shape of the larger narrative is first slow in appearing, as if shrouded by mist.
Rather than detracting from the novel's cohesion though, this only speaks to how conscientiously and persuasively Clemmons represents her protagonist's fractured subjectivity and sense of “rootlessness”. Intelligently and impressively conceived, and beautifully told, it's easy to see why What We Lose has already been included on so many of the best books of the year lists.
What We Lose by Zinzi Clemmons is published by Fourth Estate, £12.99
What We Lose: A Novel
By Zinzi Clemmons Viking 224 pp.
Reviewed by Ellen Prentiss Campbell
August 4, 2017
An emotionally charged tale of grief, rage, and the resilience of the human spirit
Zinzi Clemmons’ debut novel reads more like memoir than fiction. “Write what you know” goes the old adage. Clemmons clearly is writing of what she knows firsthand, from the inside — a confluence of personal, sociological, historical, and medical experience. She tells protagonist Thandi’s story from both the perspective of a marginalized outsider and an insider.
Thandi has a foot in two countries — the United States and South Africa — two cultures, and two races. She, like Clemmons, is the child of a white American academic and a South African woman. She belongs and doesn’t belong in a white suburban school outside of Philadelphia, in an Ivy League college, and in the Johannesburg suburb where her mother’s family lives.
Clemmons knows and vividly evokes what it is to grieve and to claw your way through. She knows the tension between adversity, discrimination, and privilege. She knows what she writes, and the reader believes her.
Thandi, like Clemmons, has lost her mother to breast cancer. She grieves and she rages. Anger is part of every grief: anger at the beloved for leaving, anger at the self for surviving. Thandi rages at herself for not being a better daughter, her father for beginning to live again.
She grieves and rages that breast cancer remains a disease disproportionately fatal to black women. She grieves and rages over her personal loss and experience, and at racism, sexism, epidemiology, sociology, and history. Thandi jumps off the page: intelligent, sexy, desperate, and determined. She emerges from despair to throw herself at life with a vengeance.
Does that sound like a lot to pack into 200 pages? It is. This spare, concentrated book is, like its protagonist, difficult, brave, and honest. The author, in her acknowledgement, accurately terms this “a weird little book.” Yes, What We Lose is unusual. A novel, but really a hybrid genre: a fictionalized memoir; a heartfelt, heart-rending rant; an abstract of a longer thesis.
Here, indeed, the personal is also very much political and sociological. And sprinkled throughout the pages are footnoted quotations from diverse sources: Nelson Mandela, Adrienne Rich, and others — like excerpts from a personal anthology.
The thin, blurred line between author and character can be distracting. I paused sometimes in my reading, in believing the story, to puzzle over the possible convergence or divergence in the author and her character’s lifelines.
This may be, as Clemmons says, a “weird little book.” But it’s also strong and honest. As a psychotherapist and writer, I know it will be a meaningful addition to hospice and biblio-therapy reading lists. Fittingly, the title comes from a pamphlet Thandi’s family receives from hospice.
With What We Lose, Clemmons contributes something new, contemporary, and relevant to the literature of mourning and enduring. Like other books in this cross-genre class, it’s not a eulogy — not a recollection of the deceased — but a chronicle of the survivor’s journey.
Though very different, What We Lose reminds me most of H Is for Hawk by Helen MacDonald — another weird, wonderful book that explores grief, love, and saving graces. Clemmons’ novel will be a certain kind of guide and companion, like C.S. Lewis’ memoir, A Grief Observed, and Anne Morrow Lindbergh’s post-kidnapping diary, Hour of Gold, Hour of Lead.
What We Lose may even find a place on the shelf that includes William Maxwell’s closely autobiographical novel, They Came Like Swallows, which brilliantly captures a child’s experience of maternal loss, and Tove Jansson’s quiet, remarkable The Summer Book, about a young child living with her grandmother after losing her mother.
All of these books are different, yet all are related. Loss is a universal leveling experience. Write what you know. Clemmons has known it, gets it, and writes it. As Thandi says, “I am acquainted with fear. If I stay inside it long enough, root my heels in deeper, it doesn’t feel scary anymore. It feels like home.”
Ellen Prentiss Campbell’s debut novel, The Bowl with Gold Seams (Apprentice House Press), was inspired by the detainment of Japanese diplomats at a Pennsylvania hotel in 1945. Her story collection, Contents Under Pressure (Broadkill River Press), was nominated for the National Book Award.
A Novelist’s
Meditation on Loss
and Identity
By JOHN WILLIAMS MAY 25, 2017
When Zinzi Clemmons was in third grade, her family moved from West Philadelphia
to Swarthmore, Pa., drawn by the quality of its public schools.
“We existed in this bubble in this town because we were so different,” Ms.
Clemmons said. Her father, Michael, who grew up in Jamaica, Queens, is black; her
mother, Dorothy, who grew up in Johannesburg, was of mixed race. “People weren’t
mean to us, they were nice. But we were always very aware of the fact that we were
different. It made me hyperaware of race from a very young age.”
Growing up, Ms. Clemmons, now 32, and her mother, a schoolteacher, would
travel every two or three years to spend the summer in South Africa.
Around the time Ms. Clemmons began studying for a master’s degree in fine arts
at Columbia in 2010, Dorothy learned she had cancer. In 2012, Ms. Clemmons
moved home to help care for her mother, whose health was worsening. During that
time, relying on what she calls a “somewhat worrying ability to compartmentalize,”
she worked on the novel that served as her thesis, about the life of a woman with
H.I.V.
Ms. Clemmons will publish her first novel, “What We Lose,” on July 11. It is not
the novel previously described.
1/27/2018 A Novelist’s Meditation on Loss and Identity - The New York Times
https://www.nytimes.com/2017/05/25/books/what-we-lose-zinzi-clemmons.html 2/2
Her agent encouraged Ms. Clemmons to pursue the thread of a few pages in the
M.F.A. manuscript — emotionally charged passages about loss. She pushed further
in that direction, resulting in an episodic novel about a young woman struggling with
issues of grief, romance and racial identity after her mother’s death.
The book’s particulars echo many of those in Ms. Clemmons’s life, but she had no
interest in writing a memoir.
“I see fiction as having more possibilities than memoir,” she said. “I wanted to
be able to tell this emotional story, and that's what is true. The fact that some of the
facts line up with my life I almost see as incidental.”
Near the end of 2012, Dorothy died. Ms. Clemmons has been back to South
Africa twice since then, first for a memorial service held by her family, and then
when her grandfather died three years ago. She doesn’t know whether her next book
will be another novel, but she does know it won’t be long before she returns to her
mother’s home country. “I hope to go under happier circumstances soon,” she said.
A version of this article appears in print on May 26, 2017, on Page C18 of the New York edition with the
headline: Zinzi Clemmons.
Zinzi Clemmons on her first novel: 'I’m proud of it, because I didn’t hold anything back'
What We Lose is a startlingly experimental and intimate debut, about a character whose complicated cultural identity reflects the author’s own
Marta Bausells Marta Bausells @martabausells
Thu 10 Aug 2017 07.44 EDT Last modified on Wed 20 Sep 2017 05.27 EDT
View more sharing options
Shares
208
Comments
29
Zinzi Clemmons
About five years ago, Zinzi Clemmons’s mother’s health worsened dramatically, and doctors told her she didn’t have much longer to live. Clemmons, who was away studying, returned home to Philadelphia – a detail she says “is highly relevant because of what’s going on right now [with healthcare in the US]”, as it was partly an economic decision: “I acted as her primary caretaker, and my family wouldn’t have been able to afford that unless I had done it. And we’re not badly off in any way.”
Sign up for the Bookmarks email
Read more
At that point, Clemmons was working on a story about HIV, exploring illness and its politicisation – themes that remain in her mesmerising debut novel What We Lose – but she didn’t have “enough direct experience”, and it wasn’t working. At the same time, she had started writing vignettes about illness and anticipatory grief, born from “the idea that I would have to go through this process very soon”. At the encouragement of her agent, she turned them into the skeleton of her first novel.
What resulted was a transgressive and moving study of grief. Centred on a young woman, Thandi, who is dealing with the illness and subsequent death of her mother from cancer, What We Lose is highly experimental, told in intimate vignettes including blogposts, photos, hand-drawn charts and hip-hop lyrics. Jumping from Philadelphia to Johannesburg, Portland and New York, Clemmons’s debut is also a meditation on identity, race, politics, family and love.
Clemmons’s mother died around the time she started writing it. “I think it’s maybe better that way,” she says. “It’s a difficult thing writing about your family – I probably would have held back … and I think that’s why I’m proud of it, because I didn’t hold anything back.”
I’ve always written about sex. I think I’m kind of gonzo in that way.
The clear emotional insight with which she maps Thandi’s grief is remarkable. She says she wanted to focus on the surprising complications that come with grief – as, for instance, with sex: “You think, when you’re going through grief, that everything else in your life stops. And [sex] is one of the areas where you feel conflicted, because it’s self-indulgent on a very basic level and you’re giving yourself pleasure when someone has just gone through a lot of pain.” She says she gets asked about this “almost uniformly” by women journalists: “I think it’s because a lot of the bad writing we read about sex is written by men, but when women can talk about sex honestly, it tends to look much less objectionable.” She laughs. “I’ve always written about sex. I think I’m kind of gonzo in that way.”
Advertisement
Thandi has been raised in an upper-middle class, majority white neighbourhood in Philadelphia by a South African mother and an African American father. She often goes back to the affluent Johannesburg suburb where most of her family lives (and Oscar Pistorius attended school down the hill). Much like Clemmons’s experiences growing up as mixed race and between cultures, she doesn’t feel as if she belongs in South Africa – where the violence terrifies her – nor in the US, where she is trying to fit in but is reminded by her peers that she isn’t “like, a real black person”. In the book, Thandi muses: “I’ve often thought that being a light-skinned black woman is like being a well-dressed person who is also homeless.”
Growing up in a similar suburb of Philadelphia to Thandi, Clemmons spent many summers in South Africa. “I never felt like I had a tribe that I could belong to without some qualification – ‘you are this, but’.” But this cultural situation has turned out to be useful for her fiction: “That kind of experience is what makes you a writer … I think all writers are outsiders, for some reason … They’re the people who kind of stand off to one side, they’re not participating, they’re observing.”
What We Lose distils how racism pervades relationships between women, in ways that can often be hard to articulate. Thandi has a conflicted relationship with her mother, who forces her to have her hair chemically straightened and cautions “that I would never have true relationships with darker-skinned women. These women would always be jealous of me.” Clemmons wanted to fictionalise her own complicated relationship with her mother; the last few years have been a “journey, through writing and otherwise, to understand my mother more.”
The novel’s experimental form works as a kind of stream-of-consciousness, almost as if the reader were reading her journal. Clemmons began writing “with very few ideas about what I should be doing, which allowed me a lot of freedom to approach it in my own terms. I didn’t see books as gospel.” Inspired by an index-card method she had read Jenny Offill used for Dept. of Speculation, she printed out the manuscript, cut it up and took it with her to residencies, spreading it on the floor and “moving the pieces around”. Much like Offill’s book, the fragmentary form works to concentrate the emotional potency. Best read in immersive, long sittings, What We Lose has a lingering, almost hypnotic effect.
What We Lose by Zinzi Clemmons review – a debut of haunting fragments
Read more
Clemmons cites Claudia Rankine’s Don’t Let Me Be Lonely as a big influence, alongside Toni Morrison’s The Bluest Eye – two fellow debuts. Of the latter, Clemmons says: “It works as a first novel because it is limited in scope and achieves a lot of what it sets out to do in a pretty innovative way; I wanted to do something manageable but also that I felt like it could let my talents shine.” She’s not afraid to sell those talents: just before the book came out in the US, Clemmons wrote an essay about how America’s concept of the literary avant garde omits black artists. “I wrote it to put it on people’s radars and to sort of clear room for myself, and say: this is a problem, and hopefully by the time of reading my book they’ve changed their minds!” She laughs. “Perhaps that’s Machiavellian of me, but I also think it’s cool and subversive, in a way.”