When you don’t actually deal with the mess, or if you think you dealt with it just because you named it, what happens is that stuff metastasizes and gets more violent, more unhealthy. I think the nation is proof of the danger of pushing these narratives. What’s the dark side of progress narratives? The progress narrative, the American memoir, has always been about resolution, deliverance, and artfully, I just didn’t want to do that. When I gained a ton of weight, everything wasn’t good. When I lost a ton of weight, everything wasn’t good. I’m drawn to that story, too, but that story is bullshit. We are obsessed with the idea of the individual overcoming the odds. I don’t know if critics would have loved that book, but it would have made a lot of money, because people love to read those books.
At the end, it would have been self-help it would have been weight loss. I was going to lose 150 pounds, and I was going to talk to my family about their relationship to food and weight. I wanted to write a lie.” You call American memoirs “progress narratives.” What is a progress narrative, and why do they ring false to you?Ī “progress narrative” would have been the book that I sold to publishers. In the opening of your book, you write, “I wanted to write an American memoir. Your mother’s idea was that, if you become successful enough, you’ll be protected from the dangers of being black in America. But I’m saying my momma was an example of excellence, my grandma was an example of excellence, but they never were like, I want you to be twice as good as me.
So I was like, Why do you want me to be twice as good as people who seem mediocre? I’m not saying all white people are mediocre at all. But I just didn’t see excellent white people. They would always tell me to try to be twice as good as white people. But on a psychological level, I also saw it through how my family talked to me. So on a very personal level, I saw early on how whiteness and white power materially allowed white people to have things we didn’t. But I knew I couldn’t step up to him, because if I stepped up to him, I would impact my grandma and her ability to not just feed herself, but to feed me and our family.
I remember when my grandmother was washing the underwear and the clothes of a white family, the boy in that family said some stuff to me that was wholly disrespectful.
0 kommentar(er)
