Concept of black identity
California-born Nafisa Thompson-Spires reveals what it means to be a black American today in her debut short-story collection, and refers to sketches and character profiles of a section of black subjects –of mid-19th century by James McCune Smith, the first African American Physician to hold a medical degree.
Thompson-Spires narrates the black life from the mundane to the obscure and span the moralistic to the cadaverous”. Race intersects with gender, class, disability and chronic illness.
“You don’t want people to see you as one of those nasty girls, do you,” a mother warns her ASMR ( Autonomous sensory meridian response), video-making teenage daughter. Two mothers exchanging snide remarks through notes in their kids’ backpacks, to the young girl contemplating how best to notify her Facebook friends of her impending suicide – and a new mother and funeral singer who is driven to madness with grief for the young black boys who have fallen victim to gun violence, or the teen who struggles between her upper middle class upbringing and her desire to fully connect with the black culture.
Her take cast some light on snobbish characters whose parents’ wealth has made them “ somehow unfit for black people.”
An eavesdropping white woman is surprised by the language used by two black graduates discussing the desirability of imitating the habits of white folk: Croissants are acceptable but they “drew the line at brioche”.
Heads of the colored people by Nafissa Thompson-Spires, Chatto & Windus £14.99, 224 pages.