By Sheree L. Greer
Sheree Greer: “You are the Second Person” was our first date, and I knew before you walked me to my door that I wanted to marry you. I wish I was bullshitting. In that piece, you discuss the very real, extremely frustrating process of trying to get your novel, Long Division, published and on the shelves. Long Division, an incredibly imaginative and experimental novel that compels you to follow Citoyen “City” Coldson as he traverses the past, the present, and the future through a hole in a small town in Mississippi, was batted around a lot until it found a home at Agate Bolden. Your essay talks about some of your challenges, one in particular being that you wanted your grandma to know you’re a “real writer,” as the tool of an agent says you have the makings of “a black writer.” What does being a “black writer” mean to you? And is it important to say it, to claim it?
Kiese Laymon: Being a black writer means that I have the wonderfully huge responsibility of building on the black literary traditions before me while writing to the next generation of courageous black readers and writers. We must claim it. I want everything I write to be honest and in the real and imaginative service of black folks, particularly Mississippi black folks.
SG: In an article worthy of the Don Lemon Journalism Award, Ben Okri essentially wrote that Black and African writing is stymied by our subject matter, our work relegated to slave narratives and tales of past and current oppressions. Dude said what Black and African writers produce is “less varied, less enjoyable, and, fatally, less enduring.” He cited work from the “literary canon,” and switched out myopic for magic in his description of the work found there. When you write, do you think about where or how your work will be situated in the literary landscape? How it will or won’t be identified by the publishing and literary world?
KL: Ben Okri was just wrong. He’s exposing himself and I want to say that I’m sorry that white folks and white racial supremacy have his work and imagination in a stranglehold. Black storytelling can get him out of that stranglehold. Just not sure he wants out. Being a willful victim of white racial supremacy as a black artist is lucrative. I don’t really think of the literary landscape as much as I think about whether the folks who artistically created me will be excited about the work.
SG: So it’s probably obvious at this point that I’m trying too hard. I want you to like me. I want you to think I’m smart. Plus I feel like I got you on the line, so it’s like, reading your work and getting a chance to talk to you about it got me all giddy and nervous. I’m being all “motor-mouf” like my Mama used to call me for telling my Jama what was going on in our house any time she asked me. And now I’m being wack and sensitive and needy.
Let’s start over, but you should totally answer those previous questions, and I’mma just stop writing a damn thesis before I start each one. Okay. Here we go.
Your essay “My Vassar College Faculty ID Makes Everything OK” calls out the rabid racial profiling, and worse, that takes place on your college campus, and, because a college campus is most times a microcosm of the town, or city, or state that the college campus resides, the piece inevitably calls out the racial profiling that is a matter of course in America. You write this piece without flinching, or at least it reads that way, yet I have to beg the question, did you flinch? Did you, or do you, have Jacob-Gabriel MMA fights with yourself about how honest to be, how open and raw to be on the page?
KL: This is the best interview ever, Sheree. I didn’t flinch but I revised it about 102 times. At first, I think I went too hard at the President and Dean of my college. Then I realized that though they have been completely negligent, they don’t deserve to be at the end of my ink. So I broadened the piece and spoke to us about what we’re dealing with and about how we go forward and inward in these sick institutions. I’m a really insecure dude in a lot of ways, but not in this writing thing. I know Vassar College is lucky to have me. They just are. There are few folks on earth doing what I can do with fiction and the essay. That’s just true. Jesmyn and Roxane can do things I can’t do. But I’m steadily learning and getting better. It’s all love. All work.
SG: I caught Jesmyn Ward on NPR, The Diane Rehm Show to be exact, “Race Relations and the Search for Justice in Ferguson, Missouri,” and she was introduced as exactly what she is, a novelist, among other amazing things, I’m certain. Couple that with Chimamanda Adichie getting the Beyhive buzzing about feminism, plus countless other intersections of politics and fiction, social responsibility and fiction, and I’m reminded of Baldwin, Lorde, Sanchez, and Giovanni, and the tradition of artist-activists. Do you consider yourself an activist? Why or why not?
KL: Great question. I am an activist. And I am an artist whose work has influenced some of the most committed social activists in our country. And yes, I do consider it my responsibility to actively fight for the world I want to see. So yes, writing is part of my activism, but it’s not the same as the organizing, strategizing, and executing. I want my work on the page and every other place to do its part to ensure good love, healthy choices, and second chances for our people.
SG: And now my damn questions are too long. Unfortunately, or fortunately, only you can decide that, there ain’t nothing to be done about that. So please, bear with me. I do, after all, have you on the line.
On “Left of Black” with Mark Anthony Neal, you talked about the “performative” aspect of your writing, an idea of “changing audiences” within a piece. That sounds like breaking the rules, but you go O-Dog on everything you write; it’s like you don’t care, but you do care. More than most. But about whom most specifically? Who is your audience?
KL: You are my primary audience. You’re right there at the front. I know a lot of people are watching, but they don’t get to be in front unless I want them to be. My teachers, my 16-year-old self, my little cousin, Baldwin, Lorde, Badu are front and center of everything I write. But I change audiences sometimes in a piece. I think we have to.
SG: You wrote an essay about a $169.75 pair of red Kangs, an essay indicative of your complexity as a writer. How do you do that? Write about a pair of sneakers with a contemplative flair that considers poverty, hopes, dreams, giving back, privilege, and sweatshops? Do you start with an object or experience and just follow it where it goes until you arrive in downtown Brilliant, or is your approach to essay-writing more calculated?
KL: You’re just being nice. That essay was not good at all. I needed more space and time to do what I wanted to do. It’s full of ambition but not so full of precision. I hate when I have to turn something in that’s just not dope. That one wasn’t dope.
SG: In your novel, Long Division, you take on the issue of propriety in a lot of ways: City is always thinking about how people want him to act, how black people are supposed to act or behave, and balks when watching his grandmother, one of the strongest women he knows, if not the strongest, turn it on for the white folks. How intentional was this theme of propriety? How important was it for City to not only notice the way people act and the way people want him to act, but to basically, at every turn, do whatever the hell he wanted to?
KL: That question is the core of City. How can this young City, this young Citizen, engage in the act of becoming imaginatively human when so many folks are telling him that he’s going to be punished for being too black, for being too free. He’s really questioning how the greatest people in his life can also be so afraid. That’s really what he’s saying over and over again. “Why y’all scared?” By the end (or the beginning) he understands, but his response is not to give folks what they want. He goes back under the ground [to] heal, love, and get ready to come out again.
SG: Roxane Gay called Long Division “raw and flawed” while calling it “the most exciting book she’s read all year.” Do you agree? Is your novel raw? Is it flawed? Is there anything you would change if you could?
KL: Yeah, every novel is flawed. Every piece of art is flawed. I’ve revised portions of LD since it has come out, but I’d hope that every author has done that with their work. There were really important scenes where black women characters were talking to black women characters when they didn’t know City was listening. Those were important scenes in terms of plot, but also in terms of what I’m trying to explore about race and gender in that book. We need more scenes in books written by black men where women are talking to women about shit other than black men. It’s crucial. So yeah, in my revisions, scenes with Grandma, Mama Lara, Baize, and Shalaya Crump are back in there. Other than that, I hope folks understand that even though it’s written in a voice we rarely consider hyper-literate or intentionally mysterious, LD is a complicated book. It’s not easy. And there’s this thin line between flawed and intentionally rigorous. You gotta work a little to really get what’s happening at the end and the beginning. My hope is that even if you don’t really “get it” there might be enough for you to go back and reread and enjoy other parts.
SG: In the title essay of your collection, “How to Slowly Kill Yourself and Others in America,” you wrote:
“I think I want to hurt myself more than I’m already hurting. I’m not the smartest boy in the world by a long shot, but even in my funk I know that easy remedies like eating your way out of sad, or fucking your way out of sad, or lying your way out of sad, or slanging your way out of sad, or robbing your way out of sad, or gambling your way out of sad, or shooting your way out of sad, are just slower, more acceptable ways for desperate folks, and especially paroled black boys in our country, to kill ourselves and others close to us in America.”
You write about feelings, talk about them and share them, that ain’t what men do, especially not black men. How important is emotion to your work? To writing in general?
KL: Emotion, like race, is in every sentence ever created. It’s important that we own that and explore that. Folk who identity as men in this country are encouraged often to be cold and not regretful. That’s the hallmark of evil. We have all hurt ourselves, and more importantly, hurt other folks who we should not have hurt. If we say we don’t regret anything, we’re saying that we don’t give a fuck for hurting folks who should not have been hurt. If I was the God of classes and relationships, I’d start every class and relationship on earth with the questions “What do you regret?,” “How do you want to be loved?,” “How do you deserve to be loved?,” “How do you imagine your most loving self would be different from who you are today?”
SG: If you could make a mixtape for every writer out there taking you up on your call to practice, what five songs would absolutely have to be on it?
KL: Wow. Best interview ever. Okay, today I’d go with Mahalia Jackson’s “How I Got Over” and Halona King’s “Monster in the Night” and Jigga’s “Public Service Announcement” and Outkast’s “Ova da Wudz” and Jill Scott’s “Hate on Me.” Thank you for being way beyond wonderful.
Kiese Laymon is a black southern writer, born and raised in Jackson, Mississippi. Laymon attended Millsaps College and Jackson State University before graduating from Oberlin College. He earned an MFA from Indiana University and is currently an Associate Professor of English at Vassar College. Laymon is the author of the novel, Long Division, and a collection of essays, How to Slowly Kill Yourself and Others in America. Laymon has written essays and stories for numerous publications including Esquire, ESPN, Colorlines, NPR, Gawker, The Los Angeles Times, PEN Journal, Truthout, Longman’s Hip Hop Reader, The Best American Series, Guernica, Mythium, and Politics and Culture. He was selected as a member of the Root 100 in 2013 and 2014. Laymon is the recipient of the 2015-2016 Grisham Writer in Residence Fellowship at the University of Mississippi.
A Milwaukee, Wisconsin native, Sheree L. Greer hosts Oral Fixation, the only LGBTQ Open Mic series in Tampa Bay, teaches writing and literature at St. Petersburg College, and started The Kitchen Table Literary Arts Center to showcase and support the work of ancestor, elder, and contemporary women writers of color. Her debut novel, Let the Lover Be is available from Bold Strokes Books. Learn more about Sheree and her work at Sheree L. Greer