The gloriously titled (and equally gloriously executed) How to Slowly Kill Yourself and Others in America is African-American writer and academic Kiese Laymon’s second book – his first was the outstanding, arguably Young Adult, novel Long Division. We’d have glibly referred to HTSKYAOIA as a collection of essays had Laymon himself not provided, in the Author’s Note, the key to unlocking its structural genius:
I wanted to produce a book with a Mississippi blues and gospel ethos. And I wanted to shape the book in the form of some of my favourite albums. I thought of the essays as tracks. I thought of some of the pieces in the book as songs with multiple voices and layered musicality. I thought of ways to bring in the ad lib, riff, collaboration and necessary digression to the page. I wanted a book that could be read front to back in one setting. I wanted to explore the benefits and burdens of being born a black boy in America without the predictable literary rigidity.
And indeed, perhaps because he draws his forms more from popular music (whether soul or hiphop) than from stodgy literary models (while growing up his mother made him read “classics” every single day, before he was allowed to go out and play – and none of these classics spoke to him the way contemporary music produced by black artistes did), and because his contexts are more the robust sounds and smells of his native Mississippi than the pale pastels of the uber-posh, uber-liberal Vassar College in upstate New York where he lived and taught while writing the book, this book is like no other you would have encountered.
Together, these tracks will open your senses to a sharply original and supremely powerful voice, an angry yet oddly poetic voice, inventing, as it goes along, the language to write simultaneously “to folks (or sensibilities) who don’t read for a living and those folks (or sensibilities) who are paid to read for a living”, as well as to write back to a jagged, damaged, and ultimately surreal American reality, that in its bald truth tends more towards the “American nightmare” that Malcolm X had talked about way back in the early 1960s than towards the triumphalist rhetoric of the American Dream that still measures itself against the dollar, and deigns to distributes democratic lifestyles to other parts of the world.
“Contours of Slow Death and Life … for One American Teenager Under Central Mississippi Skies”
Laymon was born in Jackson, Mississippi, in many ways the nerve centre of America’s racial politics, to two scholars. His father was a young radical, a member of the Republic of New Afrika, and working in Zaire when he was born, while his mother was a student at Jackson State University, and Laymon remembers her carrying him on her shoulders to class while a sophomore. Later on, she was to become a professor of political science at Jackson State University.
“My mother had me when she was pretty young,” Laymon says in an interview that is appended to my edition of his first novel, “and I was sent to my grandmother’s house in rural Mississippi whenever I was too much for her to handle.” It is the double-edged energy and lassitude of this rural Mississippi, the defeats and victories, the many lives and deaths of the grandmamas and mamas and aunts and uncles, that animates Laymon’s writing. (As I read him, I was transported, again and again, to Jharkhand, where my parents had grown up, and the small-towns, poised now between beauty and violence, where I spent summer after summer after summer.)
The woods he played in as a child, by his grandmother’s house, became the woods in which the teenagers of Long Division find a time-travelling hole. Long Division, Laymon’s debut novel, is a bizarre, beautiful book that is as much about complex politics of race in 1963, 1985 and 2013, as it is about the angst of being teenagers – chiefly, being Citoyen (who goes by “City”), a prickly Salingerian protagonist, as he discovers identity, love and sex for the very first time, and in the process also engages with America’s multi-culti mask. The 2013 City participates in the “Can You Use That Word In a Sentence” finals with his arch-nemesis and frenemy LaVander Peeler, both boys representing, in City’s mother’s words, “not only black folks today, but black folks yet to be born”:
They’d already decided before the contest began that one of us needed to win. The only way they could feel good about themselves was if they let us win against the Mexican kids, because they didn’t believe any of us could really compete. Yeah, we were all decoration in a way. But it was like LaVander Peeler, specifically, was being thrown a surprise birthday party by a group of white people who didn’t actually know his real name or when his birthday actually was.
— “Long Division”
Oh, and this is only one slender angle in the semi-epic. There is also a book called Long Division within the book, which the 2013 City pores over, which also has a Citoyen as its (anti-)hero. The self-reflexivity would have been dizzying if it wasn’t so darkly fun and memorable, the prose raw and edgy. The book kept me up nights, only to leave a yawning hole after it ended.
The origins of HTSKYAOIA is, in some ways, closely entwined with the complicated lot of Long Division.
“A real black writer”
When Long Division was still called My Name is City, it was picked up by a boutique publisher that specialised in African American titles. About the time the book was to be published, the editor who’d acquired the book moved to one of the biggest publishing houses in the world (Laymon calls it “Duck Duck Goose Publishing Company”), to look after their YA list. He convinced Laymon to move with him – big advance, bigger promises, the works.
Afterwards, however, the editor quickly instigated a nerve-wracking game of hopscotch – demanding rewrites and dilutions while engineering long silences, delays and dismemberments with clinical precision. In one of the final tracks of HTSKYAOIA, a piece titled “You Are The Second Person”, Laymon traces this process over five devastating years:
You finally got your first edit letter from Brandon Farley the following July. In addition to telling you that the tone of the piece was too dark and that you needed an obvious redemptive ending, Brandon wrote, “There’s way too much racial politics in this piece, bro. You’re writing to a multicultural society, but you’re not writing multiculturally.”
You wondered aloud what writing “multiculturally” actually meant and what kind of black man would write the word “bro” in an email.
“Bro, we need this book to come down from 284 pages to 150,” he said. “We’re going to have to push the pub date back again, too. I’m thinking June 2012. Remember,” he wrote, “It’s business. I think you should start from scratch but keep the spirit. Does the narrator really need to be a black boy? Does the story really need to take place in Mississippi? The Percy Jackson demographic,” he wrote. “That’s a big part of the audience for your novel. Read it over the weekend. Real black writers adjust to the market, bro, at least for their first novels.”
By the time you found out Percy Jackson wasn’t the name of a conflicted black boy from Birmingham, but a fake-ass Harry Potter who saved the gods of Mount Olympus, you were already broken. Meanwhile, someone you claimed to love told you that you were letting your publishing failure turn you into a monster…Later that night, you couldn’t sleep, and instead of diving back into fiction, for the first time in your life, you wrote the sentence, “I’ve been slowly killing myself and others close to me, just like my uncle.”
“You Are the Second Person”
Unfolding this collapsible truth, letting it stand in the parlour/backyard (I can’t imagine Laymon’s flat in Poughkeepsie from my attic in Delhi) and sitting down to write at it, is where this book begins. The raw material has many echoes with that of Long Division, which was ultimately published to great critical acclaim though not by Brandon Farley – the excerpted bit is actually not the worst of Brandon Farley, there’s more if you can believe me – but it is a working theory that the provenance of memory can distil complex truths perhaps even more laceratingly than fiction can.
From this moment in the book we can cycle back to the very beginning, the Prologue that begins with these haunting lines (especially if, like me, you’ve had an Uncle Jimmy in your life that your mother always held you up against.)
DEAR UNCLE JIMMY,
As a black boy growing up in Mississippi, I learned that there was a rickety bridge between right and wrong. And I learned that I would be disciplined more harshly than white boys for even slightly leaning toward the wrong side. But, like you, Uncle Jimmy, I sadly didn’t give a fuck. I broke bets I made with myself, got kicked out of high school a number of times, was suspended from college, and had run-ins with the police that broke Mama and Grandma’s heart. Unlike you, though, I did all of this in close proximity to a lanky, living, breathing warning.
Uncle Jimmy, that warning was you.
— “We Will Never Know: Letters to Uncle Jimmy”
“Born a black boy on parole”
I remember first reading the letter to Uncle Jimmy in a flight – I’d picked up the book from the “New Arrivals” pile at the Delhi airport – and feeling electrified. My neighbour was munching oversalted cashews. Around me people were chattering ceaselessly. I looked around me, disconnected and amazed, and suddenly, extremely hungry myself. After I finished the first few essays, I realised I would have to get my hands on Long Division as soon as the flight landed and I was allowed to switch on the damn internet. And then, after Long Division, I sought out Laymon’s more recent writings via his Twitter page and website.
Last Saturday, as I recovered from a pernickety viral I began re-reading How to Slowly Kill Yourself and Others in America. Once again, the prose branded my bones, the fever began to sweat off.
Later that week, I learn that on the evening of September 16, in Tulsa, Oklahoma, a 40-year-old unarmed black man was fatally shot by a police officer, seconds after a video camera recorded him standing against his car with his hands up in the air. His name was Terence Crutcher.
The police officer was accompanied by three others, and after the shooting – for which there is not one shred of justification, even by the trigger-happy standards of America’s police departments – not one of them attempted to offer him any help. The happy-go-lucky father of four who had recently signed up for a music appreciation course at the local community college “to make his family proud”, bled to death on the road, a criminal, unequivocally punished for the seriousness of his crime – that of being a black man, idling by his own stalled car, in his own country.
Even though I’m not really living at home, Mama and I fight every day over my job at Cutco and her staying with her boyfriend and her not letting me use the car to get to my second job at an HIV hospice since my licence is suspended.
Really, we’re fighting because she raised me to never ever forget I was born on parole, which means no black hoodies in wrong neighbourhoods, no jogging at night, hands in plain sight at all times in public, no intimate relationships with white women, never driving over the speed limit or doing those rolling stops at stop signs, always speaking King’s English in the presence of white folks, never being outperformed in school or in public by white students, and, most importantly, always remembering that no matter what, the worst of white folks will do anything to get you.
Mama’s antidote to being born a black boy on parole in Central Mississippi is not for us to seek freedom, but to insist on excellence at all times. Mama takes it personal when she realizes that I realize she is wrong. There ain’t no antidote to life, I tell her. How free can you be if you really accept that white folks are the traffic cops of your life? Mama tells me she is not talking about freedom. She says that she is talking about survival.
— "How To Slowly Kill Yourself and Others in America"
#BlackLivesMatter
Crutcher’s murder is not a tragic exception of course. The systemic violence meted out to African American men and, to a lesser extent, women, within America’s legal system is well-documented. There are the extrajudicial killings; often followed by retrospective character assassinations to defend the killings (even though blacks are only 13 per cent of the US population, they account for 31 per cent of police killings; black teens are 21 times more likely to be shot dead by the police than white teens; the DOJ investigation of the Philadelphia PD found that between 2007 and 2013, 80 per cent of the people Philadelphia police officers had shot were African Americans, though less than half the city’s population is African American); harsher prison sentences (black people are incarcerated at a rate six times that of whites); and, finally, the near impossibility of post-prison rehabilitation that perpetuates the vicious cycle of poverty and crime (white men with criminal records are as likely to be hired as black men with no criminal records).
As angry voices clamour for justice – for Terence Crutcher, and before him, Michael Brown, killed in Ferguson, Missouri, who became, for nearly a year, the rallying point for the “Black Lives Matter” movement and concerned people worldwide, and before him, Trayvon Martin, shot on the way back from a convenience store where he’d bought candy for his step-brother and a canned juice for himself, Eric Garner who was killed in Staten Island, New York, in a chokehold attempted on him during his arrest for selling loose cigarettes, Rekia Boyd, killed in Chicago, Illinois, by an off-duty police detective, when she was walking away from him after he had reprimanded her and her friends for talking too loudly, and Sean Bell, shot dead while leaving his bachelor party the morning of his wedding, in Queens, NYC. This tragic list is infinitely longer.
While white supremacist voices try to shush these protesting voices and call them, among other things, racist, I realise how vital Laymon’s art is, how of the moment – and how powerfully it talks of both rupture and healing.
Lifting the veil
In our MA days, we used to hate the African American academic Henry Louis Gates Jr just a little less intensely than we hated Homi K. Bhabha, both of them theoretical geniuses our professors adored. Eventually, I got over that self-limiting hate (though I still cannot claim to understand hybridity) and by the time I read Gates’s memoir Colored People, published in1995, hate had turned a little bit into love – though I am still annoyed by how upper class he ends up sounding in interviews. But that’s a digression.
When he was in the process of publishing Colored People, set in the decade between the mid-1950s and mid-1960s in Piedmont, a memoir of his mother, written in the voice of his father, he was charged by a lot of people, with “lifting the veil” – telling racial secrets, ethnic secrets “too soon”. Something that black women writers had been accused of before – by black men, including writers.
For instance, when The Color Purple was published, in 1982, writers as accomplished and brilliant as Ishmael Reed were worried about the conclusions white racists would draw about black men when confronted with the “evidence” of Walker’s fiction – Mister is a brutal, sexist black man. Responding to this business of “lifting the veil”, Gates says, “I think mine is the first generation of black people in America who can afford to be this open.” Later on, during the same interview, he goes on to say, “[m]ost black people will edit themselves for their audience. They’ll say, ‘I shouldn’t.’ They’ll ask, ‘How will my story be appropriated against the race?’”
Twenty years after Coloured People, the voices of Black writers like Kiese Laymon, who do not choose success over truth, amplified by the internet, have lifted the veil so profoundly and with such finality that there is only one question that white Americans must ask themselves – how will their truth be appropriated against the nation?