You don’t even have to lie because the shit they do to us is enough. You can write about the supernatural and the surreal. We use Google reCaptcha to protect our website and the Google Privacy Policy and Terms of Service apply. For more information see our Privacy Policy. Privacy Notice: Newsletters may contain info about charities, online ads, and content funded by outside parties. There’s a moment in the book, where a repairman shows up to fix something in an apartment. … While his dad was out of the house a lot, and that absence felt, I was interested in what if you take a woman out of that house, leaving him to fend for himself. I was thinking about who was keeping the house intact. He was a construction worker at the time, but before that, he was in the streets. … The men in my life, the dudes in my life were engaged. Oftentimes, my mother was the primary breadwinner. You don’t want to make a statement about a group of people like “the women”.
It was a daring move to start your first chapter with the line, “There are mostly women in housing court” because it’s butting right against ideas epitomized in the Moynihan report of 1965, which argued that there was a crisis in the Black family, largely caused by woman-headed households. So even trying to form some sort of narrative or plot, it was hard – because how can I tell this story without telling all the stories?Īnd the story involves so much: the Great Migration and a kind of future space where my project is now half-owned by a private realty group. You’re taken to a different Caribbean island, down south. Then you go to the next floor, it smells completely different. Like being transported, going downstairs and that floor smelling like whatever is cooking that night, whoever’s throwing down that night. It always just occupied this space for me. In my imagination, I’ve always had this mystical element in my thinking about an apartment building or a tenement. Typically, these spaces are depicted with a lot of trauma porn or stereotypes … I wanted to be honest about what I’ve been through and what so many others have been through.īut how does one exist more deeply than the traumas or victimhood? … I wanted to hopefully depict people who aren’t flat characters that things just kind of happen to, but are autonomous, who are grounded, and at the same time knocked down by normal realities.
Photograph: Courtesy Astra Publishing House How did you engage with those narratives without letting them determine what the book would be? In the United States, we have so many narratives about public housing and the people who live in it – and few of them are good. And that idea that what you write, however specific it is, can be universal. It’s very particular: The Boulevard Houses, New York, Brooklyn. The book is very much rooted, and to keep it a hundred, in that I wanted to write a story about my neighborhood. It’s made a splash, earning spots on “must-read” lists, a star in Publishers Weekly and a Kirkus review that praised its ambition “to capture and to celebrate not just these characters, this family, but the community and the city they emerge from, serve, and love”.Ĭan you talk to me about how where you’ve lived shaped your life and maybe this book? The Guardian talked to White, 32, from his home in Oxford, Mississippi, where he completed an MFA. Contrary to dominant narratives about the supposed dysfunction of the “projects”, their care proves the hyperconnectivity of the hood. Neighbors invite him to sleepovers or give him bowls of beef-and-pumpkin stew when his mourning father wanders. When Key loses her battle with cancer, that sets them adrift grief creates its own mini-diasporas. Eviction, school expulsion, job searches and loss, desire to experience life and art, and finally death scatter them. In their own way, each feels stuck yet is moving, often against their will. And indeed dislocation is the norm for the characters in White’s saga of an African American family in New York City. Audrey can see spirits, a sometimes unwelcome ability she passed on to her daughter, Key.īlack women like Audrey have long been the most likely tenants to face eviction in the US. Nineteenth-century ghosts look for freedom. Audrey’s lover parks himself in a chair in her apartment as if he hadn’t left her – or died – long before. A woman in a nightgown watches over her young son outside a Brooklyn strip mall. As the reader travels in time with Audrey, her daughter and her grandson, spirits keep returning or flat-out refuse to leave. But the supernatural jostles with the ordinary in We Are a Haunting, a much-anticipated debut novel from the Mississippi-by-way-of-New York author Tyriek White.
Eviction is a quotidian kind of bureaucratic violence.
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