“The advantage of being an outsider is seeing things a little more clearly,” says Zinzi Clemmons, over coffee at the Culver City apartment she shares with her husband, poet and translator André Naffis-Sahely, and their rescue puppy, Misty. Clemmons’ potent debut, What We Lose (Viking), depicts a young woman, Thandi, caught between cultures and identities, at home neither in her outspoken mother’s native Johannesburg, where she often visits with her parents, nor in their upscale Philadelphia suburb, where a white classmate informs her that she’s not, like, “a real black person.” As her mother falls to breast cancer, Thandi disintegrates, and what follows is a loosely autobiographical exorcism of grief. Boldly innovative and frankly sexual, the collage-like novel mixes hand-drawn charts, archival photographs, rap lyrics, sharp disquisitions on the Mandelas and Oscar Pistorius, and singular meditations on racism’s brutal intimacies. “I’ve often thought that being a light-skinned black woman is like being a well-dressed person who is also homeless,” reflects Thandi, recalling her mother’s warnings that darker girls will be jealous of her.
“From the time I first started writing, I was writing about my mom, and about the experience of having an immigrant parent who was very much at odds with the culture that I grew up in,” says the 32-year-old author, who is as appealingly direct as her novel, with piercing hazel eyes and a cloud of bronze hair. “Mother-daughter relationships can be fraught anyway, and in our case, all of these different issues—race, gender, politics—were sort of were wrapped up in her.” Growing up in Swarthmore, Pennsylvania with Dorothy, her mother, and Michael, her father, who is African-American—“we were the only black family, and foreign”—with occasional summers with her Dorothy’s upper middle-class family in post-apartheid South Africa, she felt a constant sense of cognitive dissonance, eerily insulated in the former and exposed in the latter.
As Clemmons tells it, having the double vision of someone who is never fully an insider or an outsider but always a little bit of both was an asset to her writing, if understandably destabilizing as a young woman trying to find a toehold in the world. She mentions Zadie Smith’s landmark essay on Obama and code-switching, a skill Zinzi developed long before we had a term for it. “That's very true of who I am, and that informs my point of view in writing and travel,” she reflects. “Empathy is a complex term, but I think that I can approach white people and whiteness in a way that some other black people with different experience from me cannot, because of their background. The same thing for being in foreign countries. Even here, I find it very easy to get up and move across the country, because I'm not that attached to any idea of home. I think that comes through in the book, that I don't feel like I have any fixed allegiance or identity.”
After studying critical theory at Brown, Clemmons got her MFA in fiction at Columbia, where she found a mentor in Paul Beatty and co-founded the landmark Apogee journal (she’s now a contributing editor at Lithub, writing on subjects including the African-American avant-garde). Dorothy was diagnosed with breast cancer while Clemmons was still in graduate school, and she moved home in 2012 to help care for her. Clemmons abandoned the novel that had formed her MFA thesis at the advice of her agent, Jin Auh, expanding instead upon a thread of emotionally-charged writing about loss. “When the brain goes through trauma, it tends to fragment memory,” she recalls. Later, she cut the manuscript apart and arranged it on the floor. The result is a novel as visceral as it is cerebral, never letting us forget, over the course of its improbably expansive 200 pages, the feeling of untameable grief in the body. “I realized that was how heartbreak occurred. Your heart wants something, but reality resists it,” thinks Thandi. But Clemmons can be as provocative as she is elegiac: early in the novel, a still of mixed-race actress Susan Kohner in Douglas Sirk’s Imitation of Life is juxtaposed with a single line of text: “I see you looking at me. I know how you see me.”
It works, because Clemmons has so thoroughly implicated herself. “I was aware when writing it that I was being transgressive,” she says. “I want people to consider why they might not think of me in certain ways, and who they would lump me with.” Toni Morrison’s The Bluest Eye was a major influence, she says, and one detects a whiff of Karl Ove Knausgaard. At the same time, the novel would be at home amid the great memoirs about coming of age unmothered, to use Meghan O’Rourke’s term. One can’t help but think of Clemmons as in the running to be the next-generation Claudia Rankine, coming into her own by pushing against conventions of form and self, staking out the in-between spaces as place to call her own. “Any writer who is worth anything is outside for some reason,” says Clemmons. “Often, those things that you're the most ashamed of when you're younger become your best gifts.”