Zinzi Clemmons will be appearing with Bekezela Mguni at 7PM on Thursday July 9th at PRoB media sponsor White Whale Bookstore on Liberty Avenue in Bloomfield.
Grow up not fitting in. You’re a newcomer in a town with families that go back generations; or you’re the wrong skin color; or you have too much education, or too little; you’re too poor or too rich. Poor social adjustment, Friday evenings spent alone in the company of your stereo, collection of obscure novels, and/or chat room are required. You cannot be normal, well-adjusted or popular, because you will believe all too readily the lies your hometown tells about itself.
You will want to leave that place with a scorned fury you don’t quite understand at eighteen. Your first day away cannot come soon enough, and after your parents deposit you at your college dorm you’ll feel no longing, no anxiety, just the sense that your life has finally begun. You will sense all the world’s possibility and, finally, the potential for acceptance that you never found in your hometown.
Never return to your hometown except for brief visits. Travel. You will be endowed with a wanderlust that you should satisfy to your greatest ability. Stay in touch with a couple friends from your hometown. Not too many. You need to put that place behind you, make a new life which serves as a vantage point from which to observe it.
The people you stay in touch with will also have scorn for your hometown; many of them will be much older than you, your friends’ parents and other writers you meet along the way. They will write disaffected and probing articles unearthing your town’s racist history for the local paper; they will be amateur historians; prolific Facebook posters; authorities of the arcane and underdiscussed. You will reach out to them and they will reply in an instant, eager to speak with someone they correctly ascertain to be a kindred. Meet them in a coffee shop the next town over (not the franchise, the independent café where they are a regular). They will list all the people that stopped speaking to them after they published the article; after they made a pointed observation in person; when they had the nerve not to carry the racism that is your hometown’s silent currency.
Publish your first book, a novel based on your life, complete with a thinly veiled version of your hometown. Hint gently in its pages at the deep alienation you felt, the routine harms you witnessed. The ones like you will recognize these allusions; they will show up at your reading begging for you to say more. You say little, carefully, the room is filled with your classmates’ parents, former teachers; they are all so proud of you and you are not ready to pierce the veil of their kindness.
After becoming accustomed to loss, you lose someone from your hometown in heinous circumstances, someone you knew from the first moment you arrived there and recognized their disaffection as akin to your own, as similar as the coffee shades of your skin. Their death will break you open like no other has. Their life was potential, their death a cruel disappointment that deepens your sense of injustice.
You will be surprised by the particular character of your grief. Go to a writer’s residency in the mountains. Cry all the tears you have. You see him in the clouds, the trees, the lakes. When you go to the page he emerges as you remember him. Writing about him and your hometown is the only way to touch him again.
Spend years questioning your vocation. Ruminate on the disappointments of your profession. Consider never coming back. Run through a depressive episode, then fine-tune your meds. You will return to writing with a renewed purpose and almost nothing to lose. Your style will have evolved. You will become serious about learning history because it’s filled with people who confronted the abyss, and you take strength from those who overcame it. Take a serious grown-up job, have a child, move states.
Read everything you can find about your hometown, though there won’t be much published on its history because you are from a small town in Pennsylvania, and the story you are looking for has not been written. In fact, as you learn from your older friends and in between the lines of the things you read, it’s been studiously avoided.
Find the misfits and interview them. These are the people most fucked over. They will be waiting for you. “I’ve been waiting for someone to write this story,” they will tell you. They will give you everything you need. Don’t be afraid to sit down with people who, years ago, avoided you. You will be animated with the courage of your story, which will bring you together.
Let yourself be fueled by the thought of the well-adjusted people reading what you’ve written. Don’t feel guilty in seeking revenge. Remind yourself that they have earned it. Steel your nerve. Banish from your mind the thought of criticism from those you love and respect.
The story will take years to write. No one will want to publish it because it’s about a small town in Pennsylvania, not New York, not California. It is overlong and digressive, but you think it is close to perfect. The story keeps you going, past the disappointment and rejection that you first learned in your hometown. Your hometown, your first injury, is your greatest gift. It’s made you a misfit and taught you to ask questions. It is important that you keep asking them.
