Contemporary Authors

• Heads of the Colored People ( short stories) Atria/37 INK (New York, NY), 2018

1. Heads of the colored people : stories LCCN 2017050727 Type of material Book Personal name Thompson-Spires, Nafissa, author. Uniform title Short stories. Selections Main title Heads of the colored people : stories / Nafissa Thompson-Spires. Edition First 37 INK/Atria Books hardcover edition. Published/Produced New York : Atria/37 INK, 2018. Description 209 pages ; 23 cm ISBN 9781501167997 (hardback) CALL NUMBER PS3620.H6885 A6 2018 Copy 1 Request in Jefferson or Adams Building Reading Rooms

• Electric Literature - https://electricliterature.com/nafissa-thompson-spires-is-taking-black-literature-in-a-whole-new-direction-b19309c5acf4

  Nafissa Thompson-Spires Is Taking Black Literature in a Whole New Direction
  If you’re ready to move on from the expected narratives, her debut collection is the book you’ve been waiting for

  Nafissa Thompson-Spires

  Many Black writers remain tethered to retelling what feels like the same tale, one that overtly centers racial injustice and relies on the past instead of looking out toward the future. So, when Kiese Laymon tweeted, “Nafissa Thompson-Spires wrote what we been waiting for in Heads of the Colored People. Goodness gracious,” I knew exactly what he meant. Heads of the Colored People, Nafissa Thompson-Spires debut collection of short fiction sketches (think along the lines of vignettes but longer), is a new narrative in the canon of Black literature, one rooted in the lives we lead right now. From bickering bougie Black mothers passing notes to one another inside their kids’ backpacks to a young girl contemplating how to best notify her Facebook friends of her impending suicide, Thompson-Spires’ collection overtly fights against the belief that Black literature has to reflect a certain narrative of racial oppression and suffering. Heads of the Colored People is a forward-looking mosaic portraying the unique lives of modern Black characters.

  Thompson-Spires earned a Ph.D. in English from Vanderbilt University and a Master of Fine Arts in Creative Writing from the University of Illinois. Her work has appeared or is forthcoming in The White Review, Los Angeles Review of Books Quarterly, StoryQuarterly, Lunch Ticket, The Feminist Wire, and elsewhere. Heads of the Colored People publishes in April with Simon and Schuster’s Atria/37 Ink imprints.

  I got to know Thompson-Spires when we both attended the Tin House Summer Workshop this past June. We chatted on the phone about this new nexus of Black identity, how her book introduces a unique way of examining race in fiction, and 1980s Canadian television.

  Tyrese L. Coleman: I agree with Kiese that your book is what we have been waiting for, especially Black Gen Xers, Millennials, and Xennials. The stories aren’t dependent on race, but feel incidental to it. I see how race informs the lives of your characters, but does not define them.

  Nafissa Thompson-Spires: In some ways, I agree with you completely and in other ways I’m not sure. I feel like the book is hyper-racial, but maybe hyper-racial in a surprising way. All the stories are really about race, or at least they could be interpreted that way. But, I think, first and foremost, they’re about these unique characters. So, maybe they’re about race in ways we just haven’t seen before — about intersections between upper-middle class identity and race, or disability and chronic illness and race. But the racial part is important.

  One of the things I was trying hard to do is write about contemporary Black people. It’s important for us to be looking back because that history undergirds all the problems we’re having now, and always will. But it’s equally important for us to see stories about Black people today. I wanted to write about Black people today, at least from the ‘90s to the present, and the kind of unique struggles they deal with. Because we are one of the first generations post-integration living out everyday problems.

  It’s important for us to be looking back. But it’s equally important for us to see stories about Black people today.
  TLC: Your characters are a natural progression or the children of the people Margo Jefferson wrote about in Negroland. I related to some of the stories on a personal level. The characters are my age, I knew the references, and their outlook on life. And some of the stories, I couldn’t relate to because I didn’t come from a middle-class upbringing…or the West Coast. It reminded me of Paul Beatty and the very Los Angeles feel of The Sellout.

  NTS: I like that you said you identified with some of it, and did not identify with other parts of it because I really appreciate that honesty.

  When I was young, it seemed like whenever I read a Black book, it was almost always about some deep, tragic suffering, like people were having crosses burned on their lawn, and they were usually working-class families. I didn’t see anything about a Black girl who was stuck in a white school, which is what I was dealing with, and how to deal with being different at that level, and on being middle class or upper-middle class and not really fitting in anywhere. Now there are lots of those books, but there weren’t for me as a kid.

  In some ways, I was just trying to write the stories I felt like I hadn’t seen and the characters I felt like I wanted to see more of when I was younger. Definitely, people like Paul Beatty and Colson Whitehead have represented those kind of families and individuals in recent years. Even though different contexts, Chimimanda [Ngozi Adichie] and ZZ Packer have done a little more with middle-class Black characters. But, I still felt like there were specific kinds of characters, characters who were really weird and nerdy, that I hadn’t quite seen.

  When I was young, it seemed like whenever I read a Black book, it was almost always about some deep, tragic suffering.
  TLC: I feel like these are the type of individuals that exist and are part of who we are that people don’t associate with Black culture. My favorite piece is the very first set of vignettes that the book gets its title from. Everyone has their own personal outlook. They are joined by their blackness but how they respond to their blackness is totally different.

  NTS: All the stories in some way are trying to deal with the pressure of respectability, and the characters are either working with respectability or against it. So, somebody like Fatima in “Fatima, the Biloquist: A Transformation Story” is really burdened by her image, and so is Randolph in “The Necessary Changes Have Been Made.” They’re both hyper-aware of how people perceive them and worried about fitting in with White people and looking a certain way. Someone like Riley has all these interests in common with white people but is doing his own thing no matter what they think, and so does his girlfriend Paris in “Heads of the Colored People.” In some ways, I think the collection is trying to deal with the pressures of all that baggage, which I think we inherited from the generation before us, and to think about new ways of trying to be Black in spite of that pressure.

  But I think these people have always existed. There’s always been this huge spectrum of Black people but we don’t tend to read about the ones who are marginalized within a marginalized group. Growing up, my immediate family were the only people who were upper middle class in my extended family. The rest of the family would call us the “bougie” ones or make fun of us for being like the Huxtables. It was always derogatory because they weren’t living that way. Even though we were already Black, we were perceived as the “wrong” Black. We all know that person who gets made fun of for not being “Black enough” or for hanging out with white people too much, and I wanted to talk about what it feels like to be in that situation. But also, to be in that situation and navigate it, not just to suffer.

  We all know that person who gets made fun of for not being “Black enough” or for hanging out with white people too much, and I wanted to talk about what it feels like to be in that situation.
  TLC: Why sketches? The stories aren’t traditional narratives with a beginning, middle and end.

  NTS: I started thinking about a theme. The theme was “The Heads of the Colored People,” which is a collection of literary sketches by James McCune Smith, a Black abolitionist writer who used the sketch form to write about citizenship. Initially, I was trying to hold on to this framework…make my book in conversation with his. But it was too much of a constraint. So, I decided to tell the stories I wanted to tell and keep the title and think about heads more broadly, in terms of leadership, psychology, and literary, physical heads in the form of a concussion story. But the titular story and overarching theme came from trying to write back to James McCune Smith’s work. I would like to think of these as full stories that begin and end in medias res.

  TLC: That’s interesting. The ending in medias res made me think these people were going to continue on…as if we dropped in on them in the middle of turmoil.

  NTS: I’m obsessed with two things: the ‘80s and Canadian TV, and especially ‘80s Canadian TV. And Canadian TV has this thing where the kids always end in peril. There is never a nice tidy ending. It’s “I’m bawling my eyes out,” then credits. Maybe that aesthetic has influenced my writing in some unconscious way.

  Art Must Engage With Black Vitality, Not Just Black Pain

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  to a reflection of Blackness in America
  electricliterature.com
  TLC: With such a forward-facing collection, what are you hoping to see for the future of Black literature?

  NTS: I’m really proud of all the people who are writing. I love Kiese’s work. Long Division is one of the best novels I’ve ever read. I like Mat Johnson’s work. I like what I am starting to read of Jesmyn Ward’s work. I like that there’s a lot more variety now. I just read Stay With Me by Ayobami Adebayo and it’s one of my favorite books that I’ve read this year. I like that there’s variety and there is space for what everyone is doing.

  I think what I want is not so much from Black writers themselves, but from the literary gatekeepers. I want them to recognize us all and not pit us against each other. There can’t only be this narrative of the one “anointed Black writer” who gets the attention at a time. People can get equal attention and an equal playing field. I also want them to recognize that Black writing is art in the same way other writing is. That we can take risks that other writers can take. I would like to see more space for all of us and more recognition of the many things we can be, which is what my collection is about.

• Simon and Schuster - http://www.simonandschuster.com/authors/Nafissa-Thompson-Spires/2125430166

  Nafissa Thompson-Spires
  Nafissa Thompson-Spires earned a doctorate in English from Vanderbilt University and a Master of Fine Arts in Creative Writing from the University of Illinois. Her work has appeared in Story Quarterly, Lunch Ticket, and The Feminist Wire, among other publications. She was a 2016 fellow of the Callaloo Writer’s Workshop.

• University of Illinois - https://www.english.illinois.edu/people/thmpsns2

  Nafissa D Thompson-Spires
  Visiting Assistant Professor of English and African American Studies

  African-American Studies 302
  thmpsns2@illinois.edu
  SPECIALIZATIONS / RESEARCH INTEREST(S)
  Creative Writing: Fiction
  Television Studies: Youth Culture and Sitcoms
  20th Century American Literature
  RESEARCH DESCRIPTION
  In my fiction, I consider what it means to be a (black)subject in an era of alleged postracialism, particularly when gender,technology, and disability intersect with racial identity.

  In my research, I examine how television series--especially youth series--circulate internationally and come to define cultural aesthetics, approaches to multiculturalism, and models of didacticism.

  EDUCATION
  PhD in English--Vanderbilt University
  MFA in Creative Writing--University of Illinois, Urbana-Champaign
  DISTINCTIONS / AWARDS
  Winner, 2014 Josephine M. Bresee Memorial Award in Short Fiction
  Honorable Mention, 2013 Josephine M. Bresee Memorial Award in Short Fiction
  PUBLICATIONS
  BOOKS
  Heads of the Colored People (forthcoming). New York: Atria/ 37 Ink, 2018.
  SHORT STORIES
  "Belles-Lettres." Los Angeles Review of Books Quarterly Journal . 2017. 75-88.
  "Fatima the Biloquist: A Transformation Story." Lunch Ticket. 2016.
  "Heads of the Colored People: Four Fancy Sketches, Two Chalk Outlines, and No Apology." Story Quarterly. 2016.
  "Whisper to a Scream." East Bay Review. 2015. .
  "The Body's Defenses Against Itself ." Compose. 2015. .
  "This Todd." Blinders Literary Journal. 2015.
  "Food-Related Flashes." The Feminist Wire. 2011.
  JOURNAL ARTICLES
  "Tolerated, But Not Preferred: Troubling The Unconscious Of Televisual Multiculturalism." American Review of Canadian Studies 41.3 (2011): 293-307.
  WEBSITE ARTICLES
  "As Canadian as… Possible under the Circumstances: Canadian Youth Television in the United States ." FLOWTV. 13 Nov. 2009.
  "Degrassi’s Always Greener on the Other Side: Canadian Television, U.S. Handling.." FLOWTV. 2 Dec. 2009.

• Publishers Weekly - https://www.publishersweekly.com/pw/by-topic/authors/profiles/article/76200-nafissa-thompson-spires-finds-a-place.html

  Home > Authors > Profiles
  Editorial Supervisor - Guilford Publications - New York.NEXT JOB
  Nafissa Thompson-Spires Finds a Place
  In Nafissa Thompson-Spires’s debut story collection, Heads of the Colored People, black characters grapple with identity
  By Diane Patrick | Mar 02, 2018
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  Nafissa Thompson-Spires is a visiting assistant professor of creative writing and African-American studies at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, but, for a long time, she’s also been a prize-winning short story author. In 2013, “This Todd” won the Josephine M. Breezee Memorial Prize in Fiction, and, in 2015, “Heads of the Colored People: Four Fancy Sketches, Two Chalk Outlines, and No Apology” won the StoryQuarterly Fiction Prize.

  This April, Atria’s 37 Ink imprint will publish her first book, Heads of the Colored People, a collection of 11 stories that includes those two prize winners. The collection features an assortment of black characters, some appearing in multiple stories, who are navigating their places in what the author calls “an allegedly postracial era.”

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  “I wanted to represent black characters who are marginalized in the white world, but also even marginalized within blackness: people who are accused of sounding white because of the way they speak, people who are really nerdy—a different angle of black identity,” Thompson-Spires says. “That’s a thing I think a lot of us know well, but I haven’t read too many stories about those kinds of people.”

  The book’s title and format are based on a series of literary sketches titled “Heads of the Colored People, Done with a Whitewash Brush,” published between 1852 and 1854 in the weekly Frederick Douglass’ Paper, out of Rochester, N.Y. The author, James McCune Smith, was a surgeon—the first black American to obtain a medical degree. He was an abolitionist and a public intellectual whom Douglass had appointed as his paper’s New York correspondent. Writing under the pseudonym Communipaw, McCune Smith’s satirical sketches focused on New York’s black working class. Thompson-Spires credits her scholar husband, Derrick Spires, with introducing her to McCune Smith’s work, which, she says, “narrates black life from the mundane to the obscure and spans the didactic to the macabre.”

  Thompson-Spires’s book began its life when she was an M.F.A. student at the University of Illinois, though as a YA novel rather than as short stories. She submitted that novel to an agent, who requested that she alter the ages of the characters—which she found difficult.

  “To distract myself from doing revisions on the novel, I wrote six or seven short stories,” Thompson-Spires says. “Once I had written ‘Heads of the Colored People,’ I realized that was the theme I wanted to pursue for the rest of my stories. I was initially trying to write updated versions of McCune Smith’s stories, but they weren’t really updated because nothing had really changed. He was writing in the 1850s about black rights, and we’re dealing right now with so much police brutality, voter suppression, and lots of things that feel very much like where we were over 150 years ago. It’s kind of scary to see how much of that history repeats itself or hasn’t changed at all. So I tried to instead think about the broader theme of heads: heads as in leadership, as in psychology, as in mental illness, as in literal heads. And I think that helped me figure out the stories I wanted to tell without being so restricted.”

  Generally, Thompson-Spires’s characters are based on observations of real people—using methods she proudly attributes to the influence of Harriet the Spy. “You’re supposed to learn a lesson from Harriet the Spy: if you spy on people, keep notes about people, your friends will all turn on you and you’ll get in trouble,” she says. “But that’s not the lesson I learned from it. I’m an extremely nosy person. I actually wanted to be just like her, and I had a literal spy notebook where I would take notes on what people were doing. And I’m not just talking about as a kid—I still have a spy notebook! I still observe people, I take notes on what they’re saying, and I love doing it. But no one has ever discovered my spy notebook and turned on me like what happened to Harriet!”

  Ultimately, Thompson-Spires says, “I think there’s a little bit of me in almost all of the characters—definitely in the Fatima character.” Three of the stories feature Fatima, including “Belles Lettres,” in which Fatima is bullied (inspired, Thompson-Spires notes, by “a really nasty letter to my mom from my childhood bully’s mother, when I was in third grade, about what a bad kid I was”) and “The Body’s Defenses Against Itself,” in which Fatima deals with endometriosis. “I’m trying to figure out what it means to accept your body when you have an invisible illness that is wreaking havoc with it,” she says. “In fact, my next project is a novel about Fatima.”

  Thompson-Spires and her brother and sister had book-filled childhoods, with parents who were educators and now work in the tech industry. Her father is a former middle school history teacher who, she says, won a Reader’s Digest essay contest in the 1990s; her mother is a former English teacher who writes books for educators teaching kids of color.

  Heads of the Colored People sold at auction to Dawn Davis, of whom Thompson-Spires says, “She really understood what I was doing. She is also a Southern Californian who went to a private school, she was the only black kid in her school, and she just really got [the stories], not just on a mental level but in a kind of a visceral way.”

  Thompson-Spires says she hopes the stories help readers “rethink what’s allowed as authentically black and what isn’t—to think about how mistreated the black body is, not just from the level of government and state-sanctioned violence but on an everyday level: how do you treat your own black body, how do you treat others people’s black bodies, how can you think more carefully about those behaviors?”

  She adds, “I wrote ‘A Conversation About Bread’ so that one of the disabled characters that Kim fetishizes in ‘This Todd’ would have a chance to speak back about the fetish—because it was important to me that the satire in that story was apparent.” The most difficult story to write, she says, was “Wash Clean the Bones”: “It’s about a mother who considers drowning her baby because she’s exhausted from black deaths. It’s the only story where there’s no humor, and it’s deeply sad. And that’s atypical for me. I almost always use humor to disarm my readers, and writing something that was so intensely depressing was really difficult for me. But I wrote it because I felt like it was an important story to tell.”

  What surprised Thompson-Spires about the book is that it’s sadder than the one she set out to write. “I see myself as someone who writes a lot of humor: tongue-in-cheek work, some satire, some stories that are even absurdist,” she says. “It surprised me that I was writing about so many more aspects of blackness than I thought I ever would—about physical trauma, chronic illness, and death. Those are all things I never thought I would pursue because I found them too depressing as a reader, and so I set out to write what I thought was lighthearted and ended up doing the thing that I was trying to avoid. But I don’t regret that—I think that those were the stories I needed to tell.”

  A version of this article appeared in the 03/05/2018 issue of Publishers Weekly under the headline: Finding a Place

• Curtis Brown - https://www.curtisbrown.co.uk/client/nafissa-thompson-spires

  BIOGRAPHY
  Nafissa Thompson-Spires earned a PhD in English from Vanderbilt and an MFA in Creative Writing from the University of Illinois. Her work has appeared in Story Quarterly, Lunch Ticket, East Bay Review, Compose, Blinders, FLOW, The Feminist Wire, among other publications. She is a 2016 fellow of the Callaloo Writer’s Workshop.

• The New York Times - https://www.nytimes.com/2018/04/15/books/heads-of-the-colored-people-nafissa-thompson-spires-interview.html

  Q. & A.

  Tell Us 5 Things About Your Book: Disarming Humor in ‘Heads of the Colored People’
  By John Williams
  April 15, 2018

  Image
  CreditSonny Figueroa/The New York Times
  From the opening sentences of the opening story in Nafissa Thompson-Spires’s debut collection, “Heads of the Colored People,” we’re in a world of humor, provocation and deep reflection about cultural signifiers: “Riley wore blue contact lenses and bleached his hair — which he worked with gel and a blow-dryer and a flatiron some mornings into Sonic the Hedgehog spikes so stiff you could prick your finger on them, and sometimes into a wispy side-swooped bob with long bangs — and he was black. But this wasn’t any kind of self-hatred thing.” Ms. Thompson-Spires was inspired by James McCune Smith, a 19th-century abolitionist and doctor whose brief stories about various characters were published under the title “Heads of the Colored People, Done With a Whitewash Brush.” In an author’s note, Ms. Thompson-Spires writes that, like the work of Smith and some of his contemporaries, including William J. Wilson and Frances Ellen Watkins Harper, her stories are interested in “black U.S. citizenship, the black middle class and the future of black American life during pivotal sociopolitical moments.” Below, she discusses her surprise at the tone that has developed in her work, the way she was inspired by stand-up comedians in the 1990s and more.

  When did you first get the idea to write this book?

  There was a line that kept coming to my head: “wore blue contact lenses and bleached his hair.” I kept trying to flesh out that character. Once I realized that I wanted to be in conversation with James McCune Smith, I realized the theme that could tie together the collection, and I wrote to the theme. I wanted to update McCune Smith’s sketches, but that became too restrictive, so I ended up thinking about heads in general: phrenology, psychology, mental illness, leadership, there’s a literal head injury in one of the stories.

  This was the very end of 2015. I was writing stories that were potentially going to be sent out as individual submissions, but never thought I’d write a collection. My M.F.A. thesis was a novel. I wrote maybe five or six new stories once I realized I wanted to write a collection.

  Image
  Nafissa Thompson-Spires
  CreditAdrianne Mathiowetz Photography
  What’s the most surprising thing you learned while writing it?

  My sense of humor is a lot darker then I thought it was. I like to see myself as a goofy but pleasant-ish person with a melancholy tinge. But some of the stories are really dark. There’s police brutality, infanticide, weird stuff with fetishization of a disabled man. I kind of surprised myself that that was in me.

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  Some of it is related to the times. I certainly felt I needed to address state-sanctioned violence and all these horrible things that are going on. I read something about a funeral singer in Chicago who’s exhausted, and that’s where I got the idea for “Wash Clean the Bones.” But the others, I’m not sure where they came from.

  I tend to use humor to disarm people and work through difficult material. I don’t tend to approach things head-on with a serious take. The ways it’s easiest for me to deal with things is through satire and parody. It’s kind of a coping mechanism, and it’s a coping mechanism for the characters too.

  In what way is the book you wrote different from the book you set out to write?

  I love Toni Morrison’s work, I respect everything she does, she’s skillful and brilliant. But those stories are deeply, deeply disturbing. And I didn’t think I would ever write things like infanticide, which you see in Morrison’s novels. I thought I was writing away from that to something lighter-hearted, but I kept getting pulled back.

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  Originally I was thinking about writers like Colson Whitehead and Paul Beatty, Mat Johnson. I hadn’t read Kiese Laymon’s novel “Long Division” yet, but once I read it, I thought, this is exactly the kind of book I want to do. Ishmael Reed had a huge influence on me, and George Schuyler before that. Those are the people I thought I was in conversation with.

  Who is a creative person (not a writer) who has influenced you and your work?

  It’s not one person. I was really inspired by very PG and PG-13 stand-up comedians; people like Sinbad and Dave Coulier, who played Uncle Joey on “Full House.” I wasn’t allowed to watch people like Richard Pryor and George Carlin. I was staying up late to watch Arsenio Hall — my parents didn’t realize I was behind them; their backs were to me on the couch.

  I wanted to be a stand-up comedian for a long time. I would take my really pitiful jokes to school and fail. I would stand in front of a little group of my fifth-grade classmates and try to tell them jokes. I even tried to be the class clown and brought in slapstick stuff, like whoopee cushions and gum that tasted like fish. The desire to deal with humor has always been in me.

  Persuade someone to read “Heads of the Colored People” in 50 words or less.

  If you are a black nerd, or a blerd — or love or care about black nerds — then this book is for you. And even if you don’t, then you probably need to read this book so you can develop some empathy for those characters.

  This interview has been condensed and edited.

• The Paris Review - https://www.theparisreview.org/blog/2018/04/09/on-telling-ugly-stories-writing-with-a-chronic-illness/

  On Telling Ugly Stories: Writing with a Chronic Illness
  By Nafissa Thompson-Spires April 9, 2018 ON WRITING

  Google “stock images of women with excruciating menstrual cramps,” “women having nervous breakdowns,” “women on hospital gurneys.” Make several of the women black even though your Google search will not produce these results. String them together on a chic laundry line with clothespins and hang it on your mantle, or maybe paste them into a photo collage, digital or print. Splatter the collage with blood. Untwist the women’s ovaries and take them away. Sew up their vaginal openings so their private parts look like the deformed hermetic triangles of Barbie dolls. You now have a visual rendering of life with endometriosis. It is a poor approximation. Throw the collage in the trash. Maybe it is too ugly after all.

  In and out of invasive procedures to misdiagnose and then finally diagnose my symptoms—a colonoscopy, two upper endoscopies, a gastric emptying scan, an MRI, a vulvar biopsy, a dozen transvaginal ultrasounds, two mammograms before I was thirty-four, a laparoscopy, a laparotomy, a mosquito, a libido—I wrote a book. Several of its central characters are women suffering from chronic invisible illnesses, the kind of women in your collage. It means something to me to be able to produce when something is daily trying to take me out.

  A chronic illness is a multilayered cruelty, especially when it is invisible. There are trips to the emergency room, to convenient care—which never ends up being as convenient as one might think—there is a lot of waiting around, and after all that waiting, there is a lot of “you’ll have to talk to your primary care physician during regular hours.” The emergency room is kept mausoleum cold.

  Before my diagnosis, around 2014, I made my first trip to the ER in the middle of a snowstorm. My husband was out of town, and we lived on the opposite side of town from our colleagues. It was the middle of the night, and my consultation with a twenty-four-hour medical hotline confirmed that I was bleeding too much and needed medical attention. Like me, the Mustang I’d been driving since I was seventeen years old was a California native and did not like snow. Like me, it became a little skittish and tended to spin out of control in the presence of ice that wasn’t in a glass. But it delivered me safely. I waited and waited in the cold semiprivate room while a kind young resident dissected the giant clot I had passed to make sure it wasn’t the miscarriage of an unplanned pregnancy. (It was not.) The resident referred me to a gynecologist, who, after many misfires, eventually diagnosed me with endometriosis in December 2015. That is, she officially diagnosed me. But I already “knew” I had endo. I had known since six months after that first ER visit, after reading the comments section on a BuzzFeed article. The symptoms described there were so like my own, but I didn’t know where to go from there. When my doctor offered a uterine ablation for my constant bleeding, I finally asked her if there were other options. What if I had endometriosis? Casually, as if it had never occurred to her, she said, “Yes, it probably is endometriosis” and immediately scheduled me for exploratory surgery. I’m not sure why it took her so long to say that. I had my surgery on February 1, 2016.

  Every trip to a medical facility frays my nerves a little more. There is also for me, as a black woman, the elaborate process of trying to figure out just when to ask for pain medication. Others have written much more eloquently about how black women are routinely underanesthetized by doctors. In Ain’t I a Woman: Black Women and Feminism and Talking Back: Thinking Feminist, Thinking Black, bell hooks problematizes the persistent myth of the strong black woman. This myth contributes to real-life consequences in medicine and elsewhere. In his research on what he calls the racial empathy gap, Jason Silverstein finds that white people literally perceive black people as more tolerant to pain and suffering. And we need only to invoke Saartjie Baartman, the Tuskegee Airmen studies, or Henrietta Lacks for the most notorious examples in a long history of medical malpractice and racism. I am keenly aware of this when I ask for prescription painkillers, afraid a doctor will deny my request. I am equally concerned about being perceived as a doc-hopping, pill-popping part of the opioid crisis. The frantic campaigns to control widespread opioid abuse frame white addicts as victims of an illness. The war on drugs frames black addicts in terms of criminality and incurable pathology. Will a doctor, hearing my request for a refill of my medications—Tramadol, Norco—see me or see a stereotype, a druggie, a drug pusher? Will he recognize my pain at all?

  Most of the time, no one can tell I’m in pain by looking at me. I “don’t look sick,” as the narrative goes, and I’m good at masking my suffering. So stoic am I that my childhood bully made me cry every day in third grade, but she never knew because I waited until I got into my mother’s car to release hours of pent-up tears. Physical pain, however, has a way of knocking you down without your consent. I have had some near collapses in my classrooms and in other people’s classrooms. This summer, I attended two writing workshops, and no one but my friend sitting next to me knew that while Mat Johnson, one of my favorite writers in the world, led a discussion of my in-progress novel, I was nearly doubled over from pain and nausea. I popped six or seven anti-nausea tablets, swallowed more painkillers, and tried to keep my head up as the drowsy high started to kick in. I do not say this to brag about my pain tolerance or to reify the myth of black strength. What I’m trying to do is to tell you that the woman sitting next to you is suffering, even if her face doesn’t show it.

  It can take, on average, eight to twelve years to get a diagnosis for endometriosis. Along the way, many women are treated as hypochondriacs by careless providers. I have only recently gotten the courage to break up with my gynecologist, who performed my first surgery using somewhat archaic practices—cautery, when the most recent science argues that women have more long-term success with excision—and who began treating me, instead of my disease, like a problem.

  Depending on how you count, you could say it took only three years from my first endo-related ER visit until my diagnosis. I’m blessed in that regard. But if you count a different way, it took seventeen years for a diagnosis. My symptoms started when I was fifteen. I began bleeding for no apparent reason for weeks at a time. My menstrual cramps were so severe that I missed school. I writhed around on my family’s living-room floor in pain, waiting for the minimal relief of low-grade NSAIDs. My mother and younger sister looked on with empathy, brought me soup and heating pads; my aunt, grandmother, and cousin received my mom’s phone calls for advice with sadness: It just runs in our family, they said, only two uteruses left among the five of them.

  Endometriosis is idiosyncratic, and while many of its symptoms should be telltale, it can only be diagnosed via surgery. It often causes many more problems than painful periods and infertility, problems like pelvic-floor dysfunction, which makes sex difficult and at times impossible; higher rates of infections; depression; anxiety; chronic fatigue; vulvodynia; anemia; insomnia; all sorts of digestive problems; and unexplained bleeding. It often occurs alongside interstitial cystitis, which my specialist thinks I might have. Endo can grow anywhere in the body, and I have—in support groups—interacted with women who even have endo in their lungs. A few studies report rare cases of endo on the brain. The adhesions that accompany endo cause organs to fuse together (in my case, ovary to intestine; I could never get into deep twisting poses in yoga because of this). The characteristic stabbing pains often extend from the abdomen to the pelvis and legs. Sometimes endo makes it difficult to walk, let alone run or jump or dance. My legs and abdomen carry semipermanent splotches from the heating pad I sleep with most nights. They’re part of what Caroline Reilly calls “the endo look” in her essay about endometriosis for Bitch magazine.

  With one poorly done surgery under my belt and lots of scar tissue and new adhesions to show for it, I can no longer do high-impact cardio workouts. My five- or six-day-a-week workout regimen has declined to a meager one to two days, if that. It’s a great week if I work out twice. Sometimes, if I push myself in an attempt to spite my new physical limitations, I bleed. Forty minutes of Jane Fonda’s Lean Routine Workout (my favorite) = bleeding; too much kicking during Paula Abdul’s Body Sculpting Dance Workout = stabbing leg and pelvic pains; too excited while dancing to my eighties Soul Train playlist on YouTube = being out of commission for the next week. Now I mostly settle for gentle yoga, which does not suit my aggressive personality. I have gained so much weight since my surgery that I have gone up two pants sizes, so much weight that I am self-conscious about my body in new ways. Now it’s not just the fear of having an accident in public, flooding my pants or a chair with blood as I have several times—the worst of which occurred in my favorite Nashville restaurant—but also the fear of being judged. I am working on being kinder to my own body and to the bodies of other people, on releasing long-held patterns of fat shaming and replacing them with something radically new for me: acceptance, empathy.

  Many women like me require repeat surgeries until menopause—and some even beyond. After full hysterectomies, some women still find ways to grow endo—or, that is, their bodies grow it without their consent. My second surgery is scheduled for May 2018, with a specialist I drive three hours to see. As an academic, I have to schedule surgery during the summer to avoid missing too many classes. My next surgery is scheduled for exactly one month after my book tour is supposed to start. I waited until the last minute to tell my publishing house. I don’t want to get a reputation for being unable to do things. I told myself that if book-related opportunities arose, I would reschedule the surgery somehow, even though my pain has been increasingly worse for the past six months, even though my surgeon books eight months in advance.

  There is no cure. All of the therapies for endo—other than diet change, which can reduce pain but does not eliminate it—involve shutting down the reproductive organs. One off-label prescription forces women into menopause. It causes an increased risk of osteoporosis and MS-like symptoms. Nearly all the women I have seen in support groups regret this medication and say it has ruined their lives even more than the original disease. The other options are hysterectomy (see above) and the constant use of the birth-control pill, with no pauses for the placebo pills that cause a period. After trying many formulas, I’ve had to accept the fact that the pill does not agree with my brain chemistry. (It makes all my baseline depression and anxiety worse.) I would like to have a baby one day. So I manage my symptoms by taking pain medication and adhering to a very restrictive diet—vegan, gluten free, soy free, sugar free, alcohol free—a diet on which I cheat regularly because who can sustain it?

  I take two prescription NSAIDs for everyday pain and two prescription opioids for acute pain about fifteen days a month. The bright side is that the opioids have sometimes helped my chronic hormone-related insomnia. On a good day, when the meds kick in, they can feel like a heavy antianxiety blanket weighing me down into restful sleep. Other nights—and I can never predict when this will occur—the medication keeps me up with a rapid heartbeat and racing thoughts. Though the insomnia is not pleasant, I get a lot of writing done on these nights, often begrudgingly. I write on the Notes app on my cell phone, and though my husband is the heaviest sleeper I have ever known, I put the backlight on the dimmest setting and the keyboard on silent. Eventually, I fall asleep, around five or six A.M, just in time for my neighbors’ unruly foster dog to commence his daily barking fit and wake me up again.

  I am not addicted to the opioids. For me, they come with very little ecstasy or euphoria, and one of my prescriptions makes me too nauseated and paranoid for me to want to abuse it. Yet because of my fear of being denied my prescription refills, I ration my twenty pills of Norco and sixty pills of Tramadol almost obsessively. I fret over whether I should take one now or wait it out, take one now or wait it out.

  I am grateful for an extremely supportive husband, a good health-insurance policy, and my newfound assertiveness with medical practitioners who haven’t served my needs properly. I appreciate the caring bedside manner of my acupuncturist, my pelvic-floor therapist, and my primary-care physician in particular. She is the first doctor who has listened to me, really listened to me. She practices narrative medicine and dictates our discussions at length into a small digital microphone. She spends forty minutes per appointment, offering a holistic examination and new approaches to managing my pain and other symptoms—supplements and vitamins as well as prescriptions. A month ago, she sent me home with four new prescriptions. And that’s another area in which I am privileged. I could afford to break up with my bad doctor and find a new one and then an out-of-state specialist, but many women with endo don’t have access to good physicians, and let’s not get started on women’s reproductive health care more generally or health insurance.

  The other bright side of my pain is that I have all these stories to tell, and I’m telling them, though with some trepidation. I fear these admissions will inspire intrusive biographical questions from friends and family, that I will become, involuntarily, some kind of mouthpiece for something before I am ready. That something is gruesome: it involves blood and bodily dysfunction, vaginas. That something affects my writing, my productivity.

  What I am trying to do here, in this piece, is fight my anxiety—or acknowledge but work around it, as my therapist says—about coming forward with my struggles. I will continue to tell whatever stories I feel I must tell. I feel empowered by the recent and forthcoming narratives by writers like Porochista Khakpour, April Gibson, and Esmé Weijun Wang, writers who are very honest about their own struggles with different but still invisible and chronic illnesses. One in ten women suffers from endometriosis. I hope this account and the stories in my collection, Heads of the Colored People, will resonate with someone. At the very least, they will contextualize why I always cancel plans with friends.

  I’m digging your collage back out of the trash. Yes, it’s probably soiled now, and yes, it’s ugly, and yes, it’s a little embarrassing. But you can’t see us if you won’t look at us.

  Nafissa Thompson-Spires has written for StoryQuarterly, Lunch Ticket, and The Feminist Wire, among other publications. Her new book, Heads of the Colored People, will be published by Simon & Schuster this week.

• Midwestern Gothic - http://midwestgothic.com/2018/05/interview-nafissa-thompson-spires/

  INTERVIEW: NAFISSA THOMPSON-SPIRES
  Nafissa Thompson-Spires author headshot
  Photo Credit: Adrianne Mathiowetz

  Midwestern Gothic staffer Laura Dzubay talked with author Nafissa Thompson-Spires about her novel Heads of the Colored People, the necessity of empathy for characters, structuring short story collections, and more.

  **

  Laura Dzubay: What’s your connection to the Midwest?

  Nafissa Thompson-Spires: I came to Illinois when my husband took a job at the University of Illinois, and I also entered the MFA program there. Now we’re both professors at the university.

  LD: As a setting for rich relationships and interactions, the Midwest is often underestimated. Are there any qualities or features of the Midwest that you find yourself coming back to, in real life or in your writing? How does it function differently, if at all, from other regions of the U.S.?

  NTS: I haven’t really written about the Midwest at all yet. Illinois is particularly flat—geographically—which is a stark change for me as a native Californian. I may be interested in thinking about that someday.

  LD: In your forthcoming collection, Heads of the Colored People, the stories illuminate their characters in a variety of different ways, from the mothers exchanging notes via their daughters’ backpacks in “Belles Lettres” to the religious conflict in “Wash Clean the Bones.” How do you investigate the nuances of different perspectives in your work, from the research to the writing itself?

  NTS: I try to make sure that each voice I represent feels as real as possible. I’ve also found—and this something that I learned from Jacinda Townsend at Callaloo—that you can’t write well about a character without empathy. When a character feels really flat or one-note, sometimes it’s because we as writers haven’t occupied their perspective well enough and need to search for the empathy. That’s become one of my go-to strategies for revision and characterization.

  Heads of the Colored People book cover by Nafissa Thomspon-Spires

  LD: How do you go about developing an idea for a short story? Were these stories born in similar ways, or did they all grow out of very different processes?

  NTS: Often I just have a line or an image in my head. With the titular story, the first line came to me, and I pursued it, to figure out who this Riley character was. Sometimes, I have an idea of the shape of as story I want to write, but often the story reveals itself to me during the drafting. There has to be space for both the discipline and organization (outlining, etc.) and the more metaphysical, subconscious parts of writing.

  LD: Heads of the Colored People features some recurring characters, such as Fatima, as well as some that are unique to singular stories. In a series of stories that sometimes revisit familiar characters and sometimes introduce new ones, how did you make decisions regarding the structure of the collection? Did the order of the pieces come naturally, or was it something you had to think about a lot?

  NTS: The order of the stories was the most difficult thing to figure out. The Fatima stories almost work as a small novella, and ultimately, it made sense to me and my editors and agent to put them together. For other stories, we wanted to vary the tone, not putting too may sad stories next to each other or too many male voices together, etc.

  LD: How do your experiences or memories of specific places play a role in your writing?

  NTS: I have strong visceral memories of many regions in California. I grew up in the Inland Empire (an hour east of Los Angeles), but commuted half an hour to private school every weekday. So I saw and passed through several cities on the commute. California is somewhat unique in that you can drive twenty minutes to an hour and be at the ocean, the mountains, lakes, or the valleys. I feel like the many different climates and natural sights I’ve encountered are part of the California experience, and I try to capture some of that in my attention to setting—though I could do a better job of it.

  LD: In the past, you’ve written short fiction as well as essays and journal articles. How accurately does this experience reflect the types of genres you usually read? Do you prefer reading any genres over others, and do you find that what you’re reading influences your writing style?

  NTS: I was trained as a literary critic though my PhD research, and still love and value that kind of academic writing. But my preference is for fiction—both the writing and reading of it. My work is in conversation with both other fiction and criticism. But nothing moves me the way that fiction does.

  What I’m reading can influence my writing. Other writers have said this (someone recently in Lit Hub; I can’t remember who), but reading backward into older centuries can have an especially useful effect on writing style and make it more unique. If you only read other contemporaneous writers, you’ll likely sound just like them and less unique.

  LD: What is your writing routine like? Do you have any specific environments or habits you like to come back to?

  NTS: At its best, my routine is quite disciplined, and I write on the days when I’m not teaching. I believe in the importance of messy first drafts and space for revision. I try to write what I can when I can and not worry too much about how it will take shape or the order. That’s what revision is for.

  I also have to write with the television on. Music doesn’t work for me, or I will become very distracted, dancing and singing. But TV—like reruns of the original 90210 or ‘90s talk shows on Youtube—works like a charm.

  LD: What’s next for you?

  NTS: I’m working on a novel that features Fatima in her mid-thirties, so hopefully we haven’t seen the last of her.

  **

  Nafissa Thompson-Spires earned a PhD in English from Vanderbilt University and an MFA in Creative Writing at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign (UIUC). She is the author of the short story collection Heads of the Colored People (forthcoming 2018 with Atria/ 37 Ink in the United States and with Chatto and Windus in the UK) and has a novel under contract with the same publishers.

  Her work has appeared or is forthcoming in The Paris Review Daily, Dissent, Buzzfeed Books, The White Review, The Los Angeles Review of Books Quarterly Journal, StoryQuarterly, Lunch Ticket, East Bay Review, and other publications. Her short story “Heads of the Colored People…” won StoryQuarterly’s 2016 Fiction Prize, judged by Mat Johnson. She currently works as an Assistant Professor of Creative Writing at UIUC and is an alumna of Callaloo, Tin House, and a 2017 Stanley Elkin Scholar at the Sewanee Writers’ Conference.

• The Feminist Wire - http://www.thefeministwire.com/2011/07/writer-spotlight-nafissa-thompson-spires/

  Nafissa Thompson-Spires earned her Ph.D. in English from Vanderbilt University. She is the author of several articles exploring the relationship between cultural identity, racial politics and representation in United States and Canadian youth television, including the forthcoming “Tolerated, But Not Preferred: Troubling the Unconscious of Televisual Multiculturalism” (American Review of Canadian Studies, September 2011). Her current projects include a study of teaching singular voice in HBCU composition courses, forthcoming short stories on black identity and a middle-grade novel. She is an instructor of English Tennessee State University.

Thompson-Spires, Nafissa: HEADS OF THE
COLORED PEOPLE
Kirkus Reviews.
(Feb. 1, 2018):
COPYRIGHT 2018 Kirkus Media LLC
http://www.kirkusreviews.com/
Full Text: 
Thompson-Spires, Nafissa HEADS OF THE COLORED PEOPLE 37 Ink/Atria (Adult Fiction) $22.00 4, 10 ISBN: 978-1-5011-6799-7
A bold new voice, at once insolently sardonic and incisively compassionate, asserts itself amid a surging wave of young African-American fiction
writers.
In her debut story collection, Thompson-Spires flashes fearsome gifts for quirky characterization, irony-laden repartee, and edgy humor. All these
traits are evident in a epistolary narrative entitled "Belles Lettres," which tells its story through a series of increasingly snarky notes exchanged
between two African-American mothers via the backpacks of their young daughters, the only two black students in their class at a California
private school, who are engaged in some stressful and, at times, physical conflict with each other. The next story, "The Body's Defenses Against
Itself," follows these girls, Christinia [sic] and Fatima, through high school and into adulthood as they continue to needle each other over issues
of appearance and weight. (Yoga appears to be the answer. Or at least an answer.) The theme of self-image carries into the third story of this
cycle, "Fatima, the Biloquist: A Transformation Story," in which youthful romantic rituals, awkward as ever, are further complicated by
presumptions of racial "authenticity." In these and other stories, Thompson-Spires is attentive to telling details of speech, comportment, and
milieu, sometimes to devastating effect. The title story carries a subhead, "Four Fancy Sketches, Two Chalk Outlines, and No Apology," that only
hints at the audacity, drollness, and, in the end, desolation compressed into this account of an altercation outside a comic book convention
between two young black men, a flamboyantly costumed fan and an ill-tempered street entrepreneur. It seems difficult for even the most
experienced storyteller to achieve an appealing balance of astringency and poignancy, and yet Thompson-Spires hits that balance repeatedly,
whether in the darkly antic "Suicide, Watch," in which an especially self-conscious young woman named Jilly struggles with how best to commit
suicide (and to tell her friends about it on social media), or in the deeply affecting "Wash Clean the Bones," whose churchgoing protagonist
struggles with her soul over whether she should raise her newborn son in a racist society.
In an era when writers of color are broadening the space in which class and culture as well as race are examined, Thompson-Spires' auspicious
beginnings auger a bright future in which she could set new standards for the short story.
Source Citation   (MLA 8th
Edition)
"Thompson-Spires, Nafissa: HEADS OF THE COLORED PEOPLE." Kirkus Reviews, 1 Feb. 2018. General OneFile,
http://link.galegroup.com/apps/doc/A525461678/ITOF?u=schlager&sid=ITOF&xid=b3e68477. Accessed 4 June 2018.
Gale Document Number: GALE|A525461678
Heads of the Colored People
Amanda Winterroth
Booklist.
114.11 (Feb. 1, 2018): p23.
COPYRIGHT 2018 American Library Association
http://www.ala.org/aboutala/offices/publishing/booklist/
Full Text: 
Heads of the Colored People. By Nafissa Thompson-Spires. Apr. 2018. 224p. Atria/37INK, $23 (9781501167997).
Thompson-Spires' first collection of stories avoids archetypes by confronting them head-on. Her characters often exist within their communities
uneasily, questioning themselves and others about what it is to inhabit a particular race, class, gender, or body. Though each of the 11 stories
stands alone, many characters appear several times or have relationships with one another. Central to the collection is Fatima, whose struggles
with code-switching unfold over several stories and several decades. Thompson-Spires occasionally breaks the wall between the narrator and the
audience in a way that's unexpected and effective, and she uses perfectly timed asides and parentheticals to underline a theme or deliver a joke.
With a well-tuned ear for the cadence of comedy and dialogue, Thompson-Spires uses her characters to illustrate what real conversations about
identity can be--sometimes awkward, occasionally hilarious, but never simple.--Amanda Winterroth
Source Citation   (MLA 8th
Edition)
Winterroth, Amanda. "Heads of the Colored People." Booklist, 1 Feb. 2018, p. 23. General OneFile,
http://link.galegroup.com/apps/doc/A527771789/ITOF?u=schlager&sid=ITOF&xid=95c5c90c. Accessed 4 June 2018.
Gale Document Number: GALE|A527771789

"Thompson-Spires, Nafissa: HEADS OF THE COLORED PEOPLE." Kirkus Reviews, 1 Feb. 2018. General OneFile, http://link.galegroup.com/apps/doc/A525461678/ITOF?u=schlager&sid=ITOF. Accessed 4 June 2018. Winterroth, Amanda. "Heads of the Colored People." Booklist, 1 Feb. 2018, p. 23. General OneFile, http://link.galegroup.com/apps/doc/A527771789/ITOF?u=schlager&sid=ITOF. Accessed 4 June 2018.

• The Furious Gazelle
  http://thefuriousgazelle.com/2018/04/01/heads-of-the-colored-people/
  Word count: 484

  Book Review: Heads of the Colored People, by Nafissa Thompson-Spires
  APRIL 1, 2018 / THE FURIOUS GAZELLE EDITORS / 0 COMMENTS

  Review by Tess Tabak

  In Heads of the Colored People, Nafissa Thompson-Spires weaves a tapestry of loosely connected stories about African-American people. She explores the complex relationships African-Americans have towards their racial identity in 21st century America.

  The characters in Heads often feel like outsiders in their own world. In the first story, a simple misunderstanding sparks into a fight when one black man, dressed in anime garb, his hair dyed blonde and wearing purple contacts, inadvertently ignores another black man on the street.

  Sometimes funny, sometimes sad, always sharp, these stories bring us into a world of diverse voices. In a meta, meta move, a character in the first story is working on a piece called Heads of the Colored People, a collection of sketches that will reflect the lives of black people, a modern update on a project of the same name by Dr. James McCune Smith in 1854. She compares her own sketch to the police-drawn chalk outline of a man killed by police brutality. “I couldn’t draw the bodies while the heads talked over me, and the mosaic formed in blood, and what is a sketch but a chalk outline done in pencil or words?”

  However, the collection as a whole is less grim than you’d think. For the most part, Thompson-Spires focuses on creating sketches of the living, not mourning the dead. There’s a dark irony to many of these stories. In one, two college professors, the only black professors in their department perform a series of micro-aggressions against each other turning the lights on and off, moving each another’s lunch or papers, asserting their dominance. In another, two mothers of the only black girls at an all-white private school trade barbed quips over letters, until they realize they have more in common than they realized.

  Thompson Spires also explores characters whose lives are touched by a subtler form of racism, but who still feel a deep emptiness, a disconnect from their identities. “Nothing exciting or terrible had ever happened to her, and if there were any oppression for her to overcome, it only grazed but never lingered.” Many of the characters in this collection are middle-class, but they still present a diverse wealth of perspectives and experiences.

  Though the writing itself is quite beautiful, what struck me the most was Thompson-Spires’ knack for characterization. Every character in this book pops off the page. Even when the characters struggle to understand their own psyches, Thompson-Spires gives a sense that you’re looking inside someone’s soul, seeing their truest self.

  On sale April 10th

  The Furious Gazelle received a copy of this book in exchange for an honest review.

• Fiction Writers Review
  http://fictionwritersreview.com/review/heads-of-the-colored-people-by-nafissa-thompson-spires/
  Word count: 1834

  Heads of the Colored People, by Nafissa Thompson-Spires
  "They thrive under repeated analysis": Jennifer Audette grapples with the twelve stories that make up Nafissa Thompson-Spires's debut collection, Heads of the Colored People, out now from 37ink/Atria.

  by JENNIFER AUDETTE
  It is clear to me from the start that I might not be smart enough for Nafissa Thompson-Spires’ debut collection, Heads of the Colored People (37Ink/Atria, an imprint of Simon & Schuster); that perhaps I won’t be capable of pulling off this review. The first half page of the opening story, “Heads of the Colored People: Four Fancy Sketches, Two Chalk Outlines, and No Apology,” is thick with cultural references—some low, some high; some I know (Sonic the Hedgehog, The Bluest Eye, Drake) and some I don’t (Disgruntled, Fetty Wap). But I want the full picture; I don’t want to be left behind and so, like the nerds in Office Space looking up money-laundering in the dictionary, I’m searching for “trap music,” “Bruh-man,” and Donika Kelly online. I underline. I pencil question marks in the margins. The story is told by a narrator who floats above the action metafictionally hyper-aware and self-conscious. Within the first two-hundred words the reader gets called out with a “you” that seems, at first, like a neutral use of the second person. But it’s not; an accusation rests there, a finger points.

  “You would think with his blue contacts and unnaturally blond hair set against dark chocolate mocha-choca-latte-yaya skin—and yes, there is some judgment in the use of ‘you’—that Riley would date white or Asian women exclusively, or perhaps that he liked men.”

  It happens a second time, toward the end of the story, in a way that feels stronger in its accusation:

  “And you should fill in for yourself the details of that shooting as long as the constants (unarmed men, excessive force, another dead body, another dead body) are included in those details. Hum a few bars of ‘Say My Name,’ but in third person plural if that does something for you.”

  The sketches, the outlines, and the no apology hang together with the allusions and the hyper self-consciousness of the metafictional narrator like a sliding-tile puzzle. It’s a story that teaches me how to read it, that teaches me to pay attention, to move the parts around in my brain. It expects me to keep up and I’m thrilled at the challenge and thrilled that Thompson-Spires invites me to believe I’m up to it.

  No apology. I’m reminded of something from Toni Morrison that I read years ago after I’d read Beloved—a book that transformed my understanding of African-American history and my understanding of the power of fiction to communicate what facts, statistics, and dates alone cannot. Morrison said she wanted to write without explaining things to white readers, that she wanted to write without apology, that she was writing to and for an African-American audience. Thompson-Spires continues that effort in this collection.

  But also, of course, “no apology” has more than one interpretation. It speaks to how little has ever gone in the other direction—from white to black—for the hundreds of years of slavery, for mass incarcerations, for the lack of justice for unlawful shootings/killings of black citizens. In the opening story, anger simmers in the subtext of the fancy sketches; it rises through the two chalk outlines, and spills over in the final paragraph:

  “But I couldn’t draw the bodies while the heads talked over me, and the mosaic formed in blood, and what is a sketch but a chalk outline done in pencil or words? And 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?”

  For the past two weeks echoes from the twelve stories in Heads of the Colored People have kept me from falling asleep. I try to figure out how to explain the frisson created in my brain by the layers of meaning in these stories and all the ways they’re in conversation with each other and with American culture. They’re the kind of stories where every object, every allusion, and every reference take on secondary and tertiary importance. My brain feels like a jostled seltzer can waiting to be cracked open. It’s too much to capture in one book review.

  This is what’s so marvelous about Heads of The Colored People; it’s the kind of writing that’s incredibly accessible and fun to read. Some of the satirical pieces seem almost too obvious at first and their targets too easy. Yet they withstand dissection and questioning. They thrive under repeated analysis such that even the few stories I’d dismissed at first grow in possibility the more I probe. I think of the irritated notes I scribbled at the end of “This Todd,” a piece about a grossly ignorant woman serially dating men with damaged legs. Her complete lack of self-awareness never manages to change—not one bit. I’m still struggling to puzzle through what this story is up to. Might it be read as a stylistic foil to the hyper self-conscious narrator used in the first piece? If so—why? Would that change how I feel about it or change my understanding of it? What else is going on that I’m missing?

  Nafissa Thompson-Spires (Photo by Adrianne Mathiowetz Photography)

  Thompson-Spires gracefully sweeps doubly underrepresented people in and out of these stories, both as main characters and minor—highly educated black women, black female doctors, overweight black people, black men in wheelchairs, women of color running an academic department to the peril of one story’s male protagonist, black men going to graduate school. And yet these stories never feel didactic, never feel that their sole purpose is to make broad statements about what it means to be black in America today even though they are also doing emphatically that. It’s the mode of delivery, the forms of the stories, the use of satire and humor, the meta-fictional qualities, the tone and style chosen by the author that layer the larger view over the unique nature of each story’s characters.

  “Belles Lettres” introduces us, if obliquely, to Fatima, who appears in two other stories and who, to me, feels like the bedrock of the collection. This first story takes place in 1991 and develops through snarky correspondence between well-educated, highly competitive mothers of two young girls, Fatima and Christinia. At first the conceit is entertaining and the satire delicious, but before long it becomes stale and I’m eager for the end. However—and I’m just now, as I rewrite this section for the fifteenth time, realizing this—the story that follows, “The Body’s Defenses Against Itself,” offers a subtext that’s created by what the reader carries forward from “Belles Lettres” about Fatima’s mother. When we catch up with Fatima as a 33-year-old (c. 2015) in the midst of yoga poses, she’s distracted by the new student in class, an overweight black woman. Through first person point-of-view we follow Fatima’s thoughts about her body and memories of her fraught childhood relationship with Chirstinia, the only other black girl in her elementary school. Thompson-Spires uses the bodily awareness cultivated during a yoga class as an effective boundary for exploring Fatima’s memories and self-consciousness. Late in the story Fatima pushes herself into a tricky pose, falls hard, and thinks, “I am struck by the clarity of all things. I see colors more brightly, briefly. I understand. Sometimes the enemy who looks like you is a preparation for the enemy who is you.”

  Which leads us back in time to 1998 in “Fatima, the Biloquist: A Transformation Story.” She’s in 11th grade and ready to, as she says, become fully black. In prose that I can feel on, and in, my own body, Thompson-Spires describes Fatima prior to this moment:

  “Up to that point she had existed like a sort of colorless gas, or a bit of moisture, leaving the residue of something familiar, sweat stains on a T-shirt, hot breath on the back of a neck, condensation rings on wood, but never a fullness of whatever matter had formed them.”

  Through Violet, a black albino teenager (which, for the attentive reader, is a clever within-collection reference back to the first story), Fatima learns the art of code switching. Thompson-Spires gives us another powerfully embodied description:

  “The thing about the brown top lip and the pink lower one, Fatima had pieced together after what she learned from Violet and what she had learned at school, was that you could either read them as two souls trying to merge into a better self, or you could conceal them under makeup and talk with whichever lip was convenient for the occasion. At school and with Emily she talked with her pink lip, and with Violet, she talked with her brown one, and that created tension only if she thought too much about it.”

  In Fatima’s character and the way the stories are told, we get what feels to me like a condensed, inventive bildungsroman of sorts. The moment of change might be hard to pin down and not yet finished, but Fatima’s yearning for it propels the narrative forward. Perhaps the unfinished nature of Fatima’s change can be read as commentary on how black women struggle to claim their secure and rightful space in a still not yet post-racial America.

  But there’s still so much I haven’t shown you; I don’t want you to let you go. I haven’t shown you the collection’s ultimate story, “Wash Clean the Bones,” which I’m unable to review because every time I reread it to figure out its magic, I forget to underline and I forget to analyze. I forget to do anything but be left speechless and shaken. I haven’t shown you how damn funny Thompson-Spires’ writing can be or how hard her irony hits middle- and upper-middle class culture. I haven’t shown you all the books she references—poems and poets, too; it’s fiction with a bibliography! I haven’t even shown you how, in “A Conversation about Bread,” she pointed a finger at me and how, if you’re a person who hangs out in libraries eavesdropping greedily on people who don’t look like you (I think I see a few sheepish hands raised out there in the audience), she might be pointing in your direction, too.

• NPR
  https://www.npr.org/2018/04/10/601184986/heads-of-the-colored-people-takes-on-the-pressures-of-being-the-only-one
  Word count: 1077

  'Heads Of The Colored People' Takes On The Pressures Of Being 'The Only One'
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  April 10, 20184:39 PM ET
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  AUDIE CORNISH

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  Heads of the Colored People
  Heads of the Colored People
  Stories

  by Nafissa Thompson-Spires

  Hardcover, 209 pages purchase

  America has had its first black baseball player, its first black astronaut, its first black president — but after the firsts, the world is still full of onlies. Sometimes the only-ness is existential — like the only black student in a private school. Sometimes it's incidental — the only black woman in an hour-long yoga class.

  It can be a hard role to fill, says author Nafissa Thompson-Spires, "because you are sort of a representative of what people see as black, by virtue of them not having had much exposure to it, there are all these additional pressures on top of the standard pressures of being black in a white world."

  Thompson-Spires' debut short story collection is called Heads of the Colored People, and it's full of characters coping with those pressures. Characters like Randolph, a black professor at a small college. He's exhausted from what he calls "performing his status as an anti-stereotype," as he tries to negotiate terms with a new officemate.

  "He's unsure all the time, and there's a way that his lack of assurance is very much related to his black identity and his status as a mouthpiece all the time. Having to be a representative in this space," Thompson-Spires says. Randolph is always policing himself — he can't get too angry, because then he'll be seen as a stereotypical angry black man. But he is angry, and he doesn't know how to process it. "So his friend Reggie talks about how his anger has to come out in some kind of way. And for Randolph, it comes out in these passive aggressive antics with his officemate. But for Reggie, he mentions that it comes out in through nosebleeds all the time."

  Interview Highlights
  On the story "Belles Lettres," told in letters between two mothers whose daughters — Christinia and Fatima — are bullying each other in school.

  It's basically two very highly-educated black women playing the dozens in this kind of bougie form of the letter. That story actually came from, sadly, something slightly autobiographical — my mother sent me what she called a care packet, that had a bunch of crap from my childhood in it, and there was a letter from my childhood bully's mother in there, talking about what a terrible child I was ... I called my mom immediately, like, why did you send this to me, this is a terrible letter. But with some distance, I thought this really could be funny. So I think that writing this story was somewhat cathartic.

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  I think what Christinia is dealing with, she's responding to Fatima coming into a school where she's been the only black girl, and now there are two of them, feeling some sense of competition with this other black girl. So there's something beyond the hostility that's actually sad ... I do think it's self-hatred, I do think it's being unable to kind of detach your identity from the white gaze, or defining yourself in relation to whiteness. And so she's now defining herself in relation to whiteness and against this other black girl, and it's too many things for a third-grader to deal with, or to even articulate.

  On the privilege of being an individual and not part of a group

  There is some privilege in that. There's a sense that sometimes you can even blend in to the point that people forget that you are black. But then I think that also has a very dark side, which is that white friends, or friends who are not of color find themselves saying things about black people and forgetting that we're black, too, and saying things like, "you're not like the other ones."

  On going "incognegro"

  I read a lot of humor, I read a lot of great literary fiction and satire ... but I never saw myself reflected in any of those stories, I never saw black characters like me, dealing with being the only one.

  Nafissa Thompson-Spires

  I've experienced that, in a very negative sense. If you grow up in Southern California, people don't tend to do the nod, the acknowledgement of other black people — but when I moved to the South, it was very important, it seemed like, for black people to be acknowledged by me and to acknowledge me ... You will hear about it, and you will be called uppity, bougie, all kinds of things. And I get it now. Having grown up really isolated from other black kids, I've come to really appreciate just the visibility of other black people. Seeing another black person across the road from me makes me very happy sometimes, and I will do the nod — but that's not the way I grew up.

  On whether this is the book she would have wanted to read growing up

  I do think I would have felt less alone. I read a lot of humor, I read a lot of great literary fiction and satire, which is the kind of fiction I like the most, but I never saw myself reflected in any of those stories, I never saw black characters like me, dealing with being the only one. I didn't even see a lot of black nerds, which in a lot of ways is what this collection is about — just black people who are into cosplay and into all kinds of stereotypically dorky things, and I wrote the stories I wished I could have been reading and seeing.

  This story was produced for radio by Connor Donevan and Selena Simmons-Duffin, and adapted for the Web by Petra Mayer.

• Los Angeles Review of Books
  https://lareviewofbooks.org/article/twenty-first-century-word-paintings-nafissa-thompson-spiress-heads-of-the-colored-people/#!
  Word count: 2444

  Twenty-First-Century Word Paintings: Nafissa Thompson-Spires’s “Heads of the Colored People”
  By Gabrielle Bellot

  44 0 0

  APRIL 30, 2018

  IN 1851, FOUR years after the inauguration of his anti-slavery newspaper The North Star, Frederick Douglass decided to reach out to the black man he would later say influenced him more than anyone else: James McCune Smith. In Douglass’s estimation, McCune Smith was one of the sharpest intellectuals of the era. Sometimes considered the most erudite African American prior to W. E. B. Du Bois, McCune Smith — largely forgotten despite his then-resplendent star — rose to prominence as a cosmopolitan who, upon being rejected from Columbia’s and Geneva’s medical schools in New York for being black, earned three degrees from the University of Glasgow in Scotland and thus became, upon his return to the United States, the first African-American university-trained physician to set up his own practice. He would go on to found the Radical Abolitionists and add to his fame through his criticism of Thomas Jefferson’s myopic views on race in Notes on the State of Virginia. Douglass wanted him to compose some sketches for the paper — rebranded that year simply as Frederick Douglass’ Paper after financial difficulties and a merger with the white abolitionist Gerrit Smith’s Liberty Party Paper — and McCune Smith responded with an extraordinary set of works titled “Heads of the Colored People, Done with a Whitewash Brush,” under the pseudonym “Communipaw.” Appearing between 1852 and 1854, the highly intertextual, at times even recondite articles each focused on some aspect of the black working class in New York, portraying vendors, fugitive slaves, interracial sexuality, and more. His evocations of black women’s sexuality, in particular, boldly defied the respectability politics of their time and made even Douglass — who preferred more sanitized, chaste portraits of African Americans — uneasy.

  “Word paintings,” McCune Smith declared his installments, and they were just that, anticipating William J. Wilson’s famed 1859 “Afric-American Picture Gallery,” in which Wilson, through text, “painted” ennobling portraits of black subjects, like Phillis Wheatley and Toussaint L’Ouverture. That same year, another series of groundbreaking word paintings of black Americans (and also of the African diaspora more broadly) appeared in the brief-lived Anglo-African Magazine: “Fancy Sketches,” by Jane Rustic, whose real name was Frances Ellen Watkins Harper. Like McCune Smith, Rustic remains neglected today but was a prominent intellectual of her era — a black woman who lectured across the country for abolitionism, published prolifically (including poems and serialized novels), and advocated for feminism.

  These three series are mentioned in Nafissa Thompson-Spires’s debut story collection, Heads of the Colored People, which can be read — even from its title — as a new millennium’s idiosyncratic version of McCune Smith’s installments. Thompson-Spires’s stories owe many additional debts — a number of which the author acknowledges in an endnote and even in a supplied bibliography — to a wide range of texts, from popular Japanese anime to Percival Everett to Ralph Ellison. Clever, cruel, hilarious, heartbreaking, and at times simply ingenious, Thompson-Spires’s experimental collection poses a simple, yet obviously not-simple, question: what does it mean to be a black American in this day and age?

  ¤

  Thompson-Spires’s metafictional satires, oriented around questions of blackness, join a particular tradition of African-American fiction, recalling the sardonic absurdism of Everett’s Erasure and Paul Beatty’s The Sellout, among others. The opening story’s incessant hedging about language — meant, in part, to parody, ad nauseam, the almost paranoiac way that our language about identity tends to be policed — also echoes the seemingly half-serious, half-satirical narration of Danzy Senna’s recent novel, New People, in which a light-skinned part-black woman is driven near to madness by her obsession over not appearing “black enough.” Not all of Thompson-Spires’s stories are overtly satirical, and they become progressively more serious as the collection progresses, but a thread of outrageous, glaring self-awareness runs through the collection, granting even many of the more severe tales a tone of dark comedy.

  The collection’s quick nod to Ellison’s Invisible Man belies its debt, too, to that novel, as these characters, like Ellison’s narrator, are tormented at once by being too visible and not visible enough, though these characters often wish their blackness was more visible. Unlike Ellison’s narrator, some of these characters use social media, and the addictive cost of visibility there, too, becomes a relevant leitmotif. Many exist in liminal states of blackness: black, but not, but inescapably black, but, but. The opening story, which shares part of its name with McCune Smith’s series, begins with a deadpan assurance to readers that a black otaku named Riley who “wore blue contact lenses and bleached his hair” didn’t do any of this out of

  any kind of self-hatred thing. He’d read The Bluest Eye and Invisible Man in school and even picked up Disgruntled at a book fair. […] He was not self-hating; he was even listening to Drake — though you could make it Fetty Wap if his appreciation of trap music changes something for you, because all that’s relevant here is that he wasn’t against the music of “his people.”

  In “The Subject of Consumption,” Ryan, a black fruitarian, ponders the way other African Americans might frown upon his marrying a white woman, Lisbeth, out of the assumption that he did not care for women of his own race and merely wanted “light-skinned babies.” The blackness of these characters is simultaneously stable and always in question.

  “A Conversation about Bread” revolves around Eldwin, who wishes to tell a story about growing up with a boy who defied his blackness by eating fancy croissants and brioche; another black male, Brian, is flustered by how and what Eldwin is writing, claiming that he is composing a stereotypical narrative like a “white anthropologist” that, through its “royal ‘we,’” implies all black Americans are a “monolith.” Eldwin thinks Brian is “on some respectability mess.” The story’s quietly comical drama heightens as Eldwin wonders whether or not “every story provide[d] a narrow representation at best and fetishize somebody at worst” and questions whether or not he should even risk writing his narrative at all, lest black people come off badly by him telling his version of the truth. In one of multiple interlinked stories about a black girl named Fatima, a blonde albino black girl called Violet — her albinism lending her a liminal ethnic identity — advises Fatima how to be “really” black. Fatima “had been accused of whiteness and being a traitor to the race”; Violet ironically teaches her how to be “blacker,” with the “[p]ale Violet” becoming “the arbiter of Fatima’s blackness, the purveyor of all things authentic.”

  The key idea that runs through the collection is authenticity. “Authenticity,” Salman Rushdie wrote wryly in “‘Commonwealth Literature’ Does Not Exist,” “is the respectable child of old-fashioned exoticism. It demands that sources, forms, style, language and symbol all derive from a supposedly homogeneous and unbroken tradition.” Authenticity is, in other words, a fraudulent romanticization, an oversimplification of identity, not unlike the European mythologizing of the East Edward Said famously critiqued in his famous 1978 study, Orientalism. In Heads of the Colored People, authenticity is the specter Thompson-Spires almost immediately exorcises, showing that there is no way to be “authentically” black, even as many of the characters are convinced, even fatally, that there is.

  Heads of the Colored People refers, as the author notes at the end, as much to heads as to bodies. In this metonym exists a darker, secondary image: that of the literal heads of the colored people, a gruesome evocation that made me first think of a notorious scene in Joseph Conrad’s Heart of Darkness, wherein African heads on poles surround Kurtz’s encampment. This more macabre reading of the title is apt, given how materially the specter of death hovers over the stories. Death is as frequent as it is mundane and absurd in the collection. “Suicide, Watch” follows Jilly, a validation-craved depressive who posts cryptic, suicide-suggesting messages on social media and obsessively watches and interprets the likes and comments. The story begins with a Plathian evocation:

  Jilly took her head out of the oven mainly because it was hot and the gas did not work independently of the pilot light […] she conceded that she would not go out like a poet. But she updated her status, just the same:

  A final peace out
  before I end it all.
  Treat your life like bread,
  no edge too small
  to butter.

  Her status is both serious and a test of the “1,672 Facebook friends and 997 Twitter followers […] she collected […] like so many merit badges.” The story is a perfect demonstration of the neurotic addictiveness of social media, whereby serious subjects like suicidal ideation can become little more than repetitive quests for validation of one’s supposed self-worth from “likes.” Death becomes darkly comedic — and, in the twist ending, ironic.

  After two unarmed black men are shot by police in the first story, the narrator — slipping from sardonic humor to frustration — mentions, with a casualness suggesting a banality to such evils, the “constants” of the “off-screen” shooting: “unarmed men, excessive force, another dead body, another dead body.” The repetition of the latter, and its use of “another,” speaks quiet volumes to the volumes of needless corpses.

  The macabre metafictional atmospherics go deeper still. The opening story’s reference to the mega-popular series anime and manga series Death Note is particularly revelatory. (I may have fangirled at the reference.) In Death Note, Shinigami — gods of death — control human life spans, able to cause someone to die (and even specify how and when they expire) by writing their name in their Death Note, a black notebook; the series begins with a Japanese schoolboy, Light Yagami, finding a Death Note that a perpetually grinning Shinigami named Ryuk dropped on Earth. Light, who is a solitary, rigidly scheduled, successful student, becomes drunk with power when he learns that the book allows him to kill anyone whose face and name he knows, and he assumes a pseudonymous identity, Kira, when the Japanese police — and then governments around the world — learn that someone is able to murder at will. Death Note is a study in god complexes, in the simultaneous terror and tragedy of obtaining great power. So extreme is the series’s body count that sudden, unnecessary deaths become almost quotidian, echoing Hannah Arendt’s famous idea of “the banality of evil,” immortalized in her study of Nazism in Eichmann in Jerusalem, whereby even great evil can come to seem strikingly, disturbingly normal.

  Death Note’s fleeting invocation serves as an early example of Thompson-Spires’s sepulchral leitmotif: the ubiquity of death in her stories, and the way that we — especially as nonwhite Americans — are not always in control of our lives, but can, instead, have our lives wrenched from us in a moment due to an unfair power structure. The story’s narrator becomes an ambivalent, unwilling Kira, grinning like Ryuk as they explore the absurdities of the situation even as they are also, clearly, frustrated at how quickly, pointlessly, and unsurprisingly their characters die. To be black in the United States, the stories say without saying it directly, is difficult to define, but perhaps the closest definition is to have death always near, even when there is no sensible reason we should hear her wings.

  ¤

  When McCune Smith began writing about sexuality, an affronted Douglass suggested that “the real ‘heads of the colored people’” could be found “in the way of churches, Sunday Schools, Literary Societies, intelligent ministers and respectable congregations among our people in New York”; where were the “wise and wholesome” black portraits, he mused? His respectability politics echoed how Du Bois, in the following century, would excoriate the Jamaican-born Claude McKay’s 1928 novel Home to Harlem — the first black American best seller — for its luxuriant descriptions of sexuality, drinking, and partying; depicting such things did not, the puritanical Du Bois argued, uplift African Americans. “I feel distinctly like taking a bath,” Du Bois wrote of his experience of reading the novel in a cantankerous review in The Crisis, a paper Du Bois had founded. McKay had portrayed, unrelentingly and unrepentantly, “that utter licentiousness which conventional civilization holds white folk back from enjoying — if enjoyment it can be called. […] As a picture of Harlem life or of Negro life anywhere, it is of course nonsense,” Du Bois said, channeling Douglass’s denial that such joie de vivre could — or, at least, should — be something to which impressionable readers, white ones most of all, were exposed. “Untrue,” he added with a hint of acid reluctance, “not so much on account of its facts but on account of its emphasis and glaring colors.”

  The problem was not that McCune Smith or McKay had written untruths; it was that they had written too much of human truths more conservative black intellectuals wished to suppress from mainstream viewership, lest they confirm racist stereotypes. To be black, these critics implied, one had to behave, even in literature.

  We are both beyond these respectability debates and not beyond them at all. Thompson-Spires, thankfully, depicts a wide range of people, not seeking either overwhelmingly positive or negative images of a race but capturing diversity — reality — in much of its multifarious beauty and terror: the validation-seeking suicidal teen, the ungainly college professor transplant, the unarmed black men murdered by the police, the fearful single mother, the unapologetic otaku, the hypocritical judgmental churchgoer, the young ASMR YouTuber who performs so much she begins to be trapped by her persona, the pettily feuding parents, the awkward black girl who has an uneasy relationship with blackness, the students writing about blackness who still worry that revealing too much, in too real a way, will be dangerous. The real heads, of course, as this brilliant collection of word paintings displays, can be on anybody’s bodies.

  ¤

  Gabrielle Bellot is a staff writer for Literary Hub. Her work has appeared in The New Yorker, The Atlantic, Tin House, The New York Times, Electric Literature, New York Magazine’s The Cut, Vice, Guernica, Slate, HuffPost, and many other places. She is the recipient of a Poynter Fellowship from Yale and holds both an MFA and a PhD in Creative Writing from Florida State University. She lives in Brooklyn.

• The Rumpus
  http://therumpus.net/2018/04/heads-of-the-colored-people-by-nafissa-thompson-spires/
  Word count: 1742

  A HEART-CENTERED ENGAGEMENT: HEADS OF THE COLORED PEOPLE BY NAFISSA THOMPSON-SPIRES
  REVIEWED BY ALLISON NOELLE CONNER

  April 18th, 2018

  In her author’s note, Nafissa Thompson-Spires explains that the initial spark for her debut collection came out of a desire “to write back” to the literary sketches of James McCune Smith, a Black abolitionist writer and surgeon. Adopting the pseudonym “Communipaw,” Smith’s sketches appeared in Frederick Douglass’s Paper under the title “Heads of the Colored People Done with a Whitewashed Brush,” and featured washerwomen, news vendors, and gravediggers. Thompson-Spires was drawn to the exercise of updating Smith’s 19th century glimpses of black citizenship to our contemporary times, but found the actual process of “hold[ing] on to his framework” limiting. Instead, the eleven stories found in Heads of the Colored People gesture toward and depart from the inspiring source material. Rather than focusing on what has changed (“…nothing had really changed”), the stories share an examination, rearrangement, and satirization of the complex valences connected to the word head: literal, psychological, jurisdictional, scholarly, macabre.

  Most of the stories take place in Southern California and involve characters from middle-class to upper-middle class backgrounds. Concerns around the pressures of respectability, authenticity, and self-definition bubble to the surface—sometimes popping with revelation, other times floating back into the depths to settle among unknowns. We meet anime fanatics, an ASMRtist, fruitarians attempting to capitalize on fame via reality television, academics navigating white spaces as the “only ones,” and sensitive, prickly teens grappling with body image, sexuality, and friendship. The stories can be heavy in mood but the prose cackles with puckering humor and a heart-centered engagement in the idiosyncratic pulses of consciousness and feeling. Thompson-Spires has mentioned an affinity for ’80s Canadian TV, which lends the collection a televisual layer. The stories behave like scenes from a longer show or movie. (“This Todd,” an unhinged satire involving a disability fetishist has echoes of Get Out.) The experience of reading this collection overlaps with the act of TV channel surfing: we arrive in the middle of, must get acclimated and settled in before an abrupt change to something new. The dialogue is bubbly and sardonic, full of sly twists and dramatic reveals.

  The forms tend to mutate to the needs of the story at hand: epistolary, referential, meta. “Suicide, Watch,” “The Subject of Consumption,” and “Whisper to a Scream” blend the digital through their focus on characters invested in charged relationships with various social media platforms. In the third, Raina is a high-schooler who makes ASMR videos. Her frustrations are both mundane and particular: a protective but critical mother, a preoccupied father, alienating classmates, an unrequited crush on a friend she met through YouTube comments. Carmen, Raina’s chic mother, fears people will “see [her] as one of those nasty girls” and wishes she would at least get into plus-size modeling or hair and makeup tutorials. Raina doesn’t show her face in the videos, a precaution arising from previous and continuing sexual and racist harassment from the boys in her class. In the frame, she is headless, all torso and hands and sotto voce. Her routine includes stroking a feather and a children’s book while whispering fairy tales. She provides healing (though energy is spent filtering her trolls and perverts), and gains a dull buzz from the attention, but cannot shake a complicity in her own careless consumption, content only viewed as collection of keywords and parts.

  Like most of the characters in the collection, Raina is a knot of circling thoughts, her emotional stimulus incisive and searching but starkly circumspect. Overexposure and hypervisibility return as themes with a spectrum of reactions and vacillations. For some, the constant dissonance between who you are and what society sees worms its way into an hyperactive anxiety, at times veering into surreal paranoia. Other characters do not give weight to the opinions of others unless it directly impacts their well-being or loved ones. Usually they possess an intimate and unrestricted view of themselves, a mutable quality standing in contrast to the rigid and boxed in perceptions held by characters like Fatima or Randolph, who contort themselves into misguided armors against real and imagined aggressions. Randolph narrates “The Necessary Changes Have Been Made,” while Fatima appears in three stories, including “The Body’s Defenses Against Itself,” and “Fatima, the Biloquist: A Transformation Story.” To them, their overthinking reveals a mind attentive to their precarious social presence, how easy it is to slip into a threat or erasure or punchline.

  After leaving a prestigious liberal college and its “tyranny of whiteness,” Randolph, an assistant professor at an HBCU, is dismayed to find the school “run almost entirely by women,” calling them “an unholy sisterhood of pseudo-feminists,” and complaining to his friend that he feels as tokenized here as at the last school. Before long, he is caught up in escalating microaggressive power plays, knotted along the woozy intersections of gender, race, language, and borders with his colleague and officemate Isabel, newly arrived from Venezuela. Randolph’s misogyny and his willful lack of awareness forms a barricade against women, especially women who make “something shrink” despite his tall frame. When listing the sources of his irritations before Isabel, all, unsurprisingly, are women (Fatima is mentioned, making it hard not to place these characters within the same universe). He suffers from migraines, which he blames equally on the constant performance of unassumingness and his sensitivity to fluorescent overhead lights. This aversion to being under harsh lights makes sense, but it also expands to perfectly capture Randolph’s compulsion to dwell within emotional shadows, his presence to be felt but his motives to remain unseen. His headaches express what he refuses to, though he remains too entangled in the warped logic of his self-consciousness to realize the cage he has sprung.

  In a similar fashion, Fatima’s ideas around blackness and girlhood sag under the weight of compartmentalization and self-policing. Thompson-Spires presents us with flashes of Fatima’s life from elementary-age (one of the only two black girls at an exclusive private school) to adulthood (as she reflects on bullying, self-image as tied to self-worth, eating disorders, repression, endometriosis). Like Randolph, Fatima has a tendency for entrapment, falling into the physical and mental pitfalls organized by the systems of heteronormative whiteness. As a teenager navigating friendships and dating during the ’90s where “you could be whatever you wanted,” Fatima decides to embrace her blackness, “if only someone would teach her.” A comedy of errors built around assimilation and code-switching gone wrong, “Fatima, the Biloquist…” tickles with its ironic edges before slicing you to the bone. In her strict adherence to the fabricated laws dictating appropriate racial behavior, Fatima shrinks herself to a haze, an imitation replacing boundless potential, the promise of the ’90s proving to be another unimaginative rebooting of old harassments. By the time she reaches her thirties, her taste for purging and punishment results in a concussion that offers clarity while also ringing in muted confusion. Fatima and Randolph try to locate themselves in phantasmal figures rather than their own bodies, memories, futures. Raina creates an outlet where she at least can block out the negative comments, if only temporarily. Despite pressure to, she isn’t concerned with altering herself to appease a certain gaze—her desires stem from a need to be seen in her vicissitudes, not as a body in need of change or bullying. Her story balances an aching vulnerability with a learned suppression: “Editing was the easiest part, anyway; she worked best in short frames, quiet slivers, fragments. Everyone said so.”

  Thompson-Spires’s collection brings to mind the work of Kathleen Collins, Danzy Senna, and Renee Simms. Their writing shares a tactile reverence for the emotional, spiritual, and psychic experiences of precocious black woman. They also contain uproarious one-liners, a fearless dive into the core of the moment (attended by an ironic sense of what has come before), and a tender patience given to the unruly desires of flawed, eccentric characters. The social frustrations of the particular time (’60s, ’90s, now) are rendered both acutely and ambivalently, with a deftness that allows for relief and unsettledness. The nuances of oppression and marginalization are addressed but not in the usual, well-trodden ways. Collins—film director and author of the posthumously released collection Whatever Happened to Interracial Love?—had no time for caricatures or ciphers. She found the habitual mythologization of black people a noxious and vampirish distraction. It’s a trap of confinement and phrenological display, removing individuals from the context, presence, and rhythms of their being.

  Heads of the Colored People casts suspicion on our contemporary myths of colorblindness and being “post-racial” as mirages used to sanitize our prickly historical residues and existential dilemmas, leading towards a tendency to mistake the fog for reality. Both Collins and Thompson-Spires illustrate the psychic traps set when myths take precedence over lived experience, when “the monstrous head deforms the face.” This line comes from a Charles Brockden Brown story Fatima recites before her class and it speaks to the irrationality lurking beneath our lopsided interactions and impressions. This deforming monstrosity brings me to the social structures that obstruct our senses, infusing life with currents of distrust and captivity. By tunneling into the messy subjectivities of people pushing against and being pushed upon, the stories and vignettes address the everyday contradictions braided into questions around belonging and citizenship in the US.

  Thompson-Spires quotes a line by poet Donika Kelly in the titular story: “the way a body makes a road.” The writing takes its cue from felt and quashed journeys. That is, the body is more than a collection of nightmares and mirages, content and labor. The teasing duets between a myriad of impulses (physical, emotional, ancestral, intellectual) point back to Thompson-Spires’s bitingly playful reworking of “heads.” In popular imagination the head occupies logic, leadership, and appearance. Here, heads are negligible, overdetermined, peculiar, collaborative—always in the process of reimagining paths towards being.

  Allison Noelle Conner's writing has appeared in Bitch, Full Stop, Jacket2, and elsewhere. Her essay on the short film The Kitchen by Alile Sharon Larkin and the fiction of Gayl Jones will appear in the forthcoming anthology Rockhaven: A History of Interiors. She lives in Los Angeles. More from this author →

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