“Race doesn’t really exist for you because it has never been a barrier. Black folks don’t have that choice.”
― Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie, Americanah

“My hope is that learning something about our lives and the lives of the people in my community will mean that when I get to the heart…I’ll understand a bit better why this epidemic happened, about how the history of racism and economic inequality and lapsed public and personal responsibility festered and turned sour and spread here. Hopefully, I’ll understand why my brother died while I live, and why I’ve been saddled with this rotten fucking story.” ― Jesmyn Ward, Men We Reaped

In a recent conversation with bell hooks about how feminism encourages transgression (or not), Gloria Steinem said: “Those in positions of power need to listen more than talk, and those in positions outside power need to talk more than listen.”

Nigerian novelist Chimamanda Adichie’s TED talk “The danger of a single story” has gotten 7.5 million views. The crux of her talk is that if you only know a culture through a very narrow perspective, a single story, you don’t really know the culture at all. In a society where the majority of published voices are white and male, the predominant “single story” does not accurately represent women’s experience, or the non-white experience, or the immigrant experience. Thus the need for urgent, unheard stories like Adichie’s latest novel, Americanah, and Jesmyn Ward’s memoir, Men We Reaped. I borrow this phrase from the writer Roxane Gay, who advises: “Write urgent, unheard stories. Read urgent, unheard stories.”

Let’s get this out of the way first. I’m going to talk about privilege (a set of unearned benefits given to people who fit into a specific social group). The term “privilege” sounds snooty and superior, and can easily put people on the defensive. I’m not privileged, I have suffered, I don’t own a mansion or a Mercedes Benz, I was picked on in high school, too. But privilege is not about the individual, it is about society. What we call privilege is, in actuality, basic human rights and freedoms. As a white person, I have more daily experience of basic human rights and freedoms than a black person. As a woman, I have less daily experience of basic human rights and freedoms than a man. By opening up a space in the American narrative for voices like Adichie’s and Ward’s, we are expanding the story. And stories are what make us human to each other, what make us empathetic.

Jesmyn Ward’s memoir spans a period of four years and five deaths of men close to her. It is gutting, each new chapter bringing the reader closer to the inevitable death of her younger brother; you know what is coming, but with each page turn you think, as does Ward–oh please no, not again, don’t let another one die. As Roxane Gay puts it, “The Men We Reaped is not merely a memoir of grief; this book reads like an open wound.”

The deaths are due to various causes: drugs, accidents, murder, suicide; but Ward places these stories into the larger context of what it means to grow up black and southern; what it means to grow up in a very economically depressed but close-knit community; what it means that most of the people she knew (herself included) grew up with absent fathers; what it means to escape that place, but to constantly be pulled back by the force of home; what it means to bear witness, over and over again, to death, the exhaustion and hopelessness of it all; what it means, as a writer, to be tasked with telling “this rotten fucking story” because to not tell it would be to live in collusion with the forces tearing apart the fabric of her community.

Because black lives matter. Because racism, because poverty, because depression, because economic injustice, because prejudice, because inequality in our justice system, because drug abuse. Because Mike Brown, because Kalief Browder, because Ward has her brother Joshua Adam Dedeaux‘s signature tattooed across her wrist, in the spot she would be tempted to slice open if she gave in to suicidal thoughts.

Because there are no simple solutions, but in telling our stories we are heard, and to be heard is one way of reclaiming power.

There is a war on black men in this country, and Ward is right there in the trenches. After her friend Rog dies of a drug overdose, her ex-boyfriend says, “They picking us off, one by one.” Driving home from the funeral, Ward wonders about who they were:

“Rog had died by his own hand, by his own heart; were they us? Or was there a larger story that I was missing as all these deaths accumulated, as those I loved died? Were they even human? My headlights lit a slim sliver in the darkness, and suddenly they seemed as immense as the darkness, as deep, as pressing. I turned off my music and rode home without the narrative of song, with only the bug’s shrill cry and hot wind whipping past my window. I tried to hear the narrative in that, to figure out who the they that wrote our story might be.”

She, of course, also experiences her own Blackness:

“I looked at myself and saw a walking embodiment of everything the world around me seemed to despise: an unattractive, poor, Black woman. Undervalued by her family, a perpetual workhorse. Undervalued by society regarding her labor and her beauty. The seed buried itself in my stomach and bore fruit. I hated myself.”

Where Ward’s added value is as an insider to Black American culture, Adichie’s is as an outsider–to use Adichie’s terms, Ward is an African American and Adichie is an American African, or NAB (Non-American Black).

Contemporary American fiction seldom deals with big, difficult, serious issues. For a long time I avoided it for this reason, though in recent years I have attempted to give it another go–Jonathan Franzen’s Freedom, Jennifer Eagen’s A Visit From the Good Squad, A.M. Homes’ May We Be Forgiven. Here’s the plot of all of them: A white, middle class, liberal “typical” American family self-destructs. I can’t. I’m so over it.

By attempting to write The Great (Non-American) American Novel, Adichie does fall into all of its traps–her characters, a la Franzen, Eagen and Homes, are navel-gazing and self-involved, and many of them, in particular the American characters, are written very flatly. While the Nigerian characters are more fleshed out, complex and vibrant, Americanah lacks the depth and passion of her earlier work, Half of a Yellow Sun, set before and during the Nigerian Civil War and based in part on the experiences of her father and grandfather.

Where Americanah succeeds, however, quite brilliantly, is as a critique of America and the contemporary American novel–in this sense, it is utterly refreshing. To see America from the perspective of a NAB is to see America through a new lens.

In Charles Baxter’s collection of essays on contemporary fiction and the art of storytelling, Burning Down the House, he talks about the concept of defamiliarization, to make the strange familiar and the familiar strange: “The moderately strange in the middle of ordinary is the lens for focusing the ordinary. Without it, the ordinary has nothing against which to define itself.”

Defamiliarization excites me. I crave it. I don’t want to read about my own experience, I want to read about experiences of people who are not like me, I want to expand my understanding of the human experience.

This is what Americanah does: it defamiliarizes the American experience by telling it through the lens of a narrator who is neither American nor a member of a “privileged” social group. Everything is at once familiar to an American audience, yet, to the main character Ifemelu, all that we take for granted or accept as the white (pun intended) noise of American culture must be newly absorbed and understood as an outsider.

Americanah is a novel about race and racism. ”You can’t write an honest novel about race in this country,” says one of the characters, and I don’t think Adichie has, whether she intended to or not. The book is refreshingly honest and blunt about racism, but as a novel it fails. The sections that are excerpts from Ifemelu’s blog, Raceteenth or Various Observations About American Blacks (Those Formerly Known as Negros) by a Non-American Black, ring the most true, and many of the characters happen to be intellectuals, which makes it a little too easy to have them spout out eloquent diatribes soaked in academia-ese.

The frame of the story, how it begins and ends, is the love story of Ifemelu and Obinze. But for most of Americanah‘s hefty 588 pages, these two characters are living separate lives on different continents with other romantic partners, and by the time they reconnect, my interest in their future together is tepid at best. I rather resent Adichie’s framing the story in this way because it does seem dishonest, and on that point I call sour grapes.

The expectation that this narrative framework sets up is that the love story is the novel’s Great Thing. It is not. The novel’s Great Thing is race. How race is experienced in Nigeria (“I came from a country where race was not an issue; I did not think of myself as black and I only became black when I came to America.”) versus America (“Dear Non-American Black, when you make the choice to come to America, you become black. Stop arguing. Stop saying I’m Jamaican or I’m Ghanaian. America doesn’t care.”); white privilege (“Today, many Americans say that skin color cannot be part of the solution. Otherwise it is referred to as a curiosity called ‘reverse racism.'”) and controlling the narrative (“If you’re telling a non-black person about something racist that happened to you, make sure you are not bitter. Don’t complain. Be forgiving. If possible, make it funny. Most of all, do not be angry. Black people are not supposed to be angry about racism.”).

And this is why I desperately love this novel, for being able to say all of these things. It is really hard to talk about race in this country. It is exceptionally hard to talk about race in this country–or more to the point, to understand race in this country–as a white person.

I appreciate the eye of the outsider. Kathryn Schulz praises Americanah‘s “outsider acuity” which she defines thus: “In a 1973 essay called ‘Approaches to What?,’ the French writer Georges Perec coined an excellent word: endotic. The opposite of exotic, it refers to anything so familiar that we fail to register it—paper towels, say, or the kinds of beds we sleep in, or the fact that, unto others, we have accents. Generally speaking, only outsiders notice these particulars, which produces something of a paradox: Those who are least at home in a culture often perceive it best.”

For better or worse, I am at home in my culture, and frankly, I would like not to be. I don’t want my hand held, I don’t want deference or politeness or oversensitivity–I want the brutal, honest truth so that I can become less of an asshole. So that I can recognize and question my own privilege. So that I can find ways to be more inclusive and supportive of other social groups. And the simplest way to do this is to shut the fuck up and listen. To seek out voices like Adichie and Ward and so many others.

Ward says, in an interview about writing Men We Reaped:

“When society tells you that your life means nothing, that you’re less than human, that you’re going to die young, maybe tomorrow, it doesn’t encourage you to act in sensible ways — and that’s the message that poor black people get every day of their lives. We’re the valueless trash that white people can ignore without taking responsibility for their part in the situation. For them, it’s a matter of black people pulling up bootstraps, but they don’t want to acknowledge all the privileges – the white privileges – that insulate them from consequences.”

Ward doesn’t want to write the story she writes. She doesn’t want to live this story. But she has no choice. In the same way, Adichie may not want to speak to racism, but she has no choice because it is her lived experience as a NAB. Whites have the privilege of choosing to bow out of the conversation, or ignore it all together, because we can.

But we mustn’t. Because whether we like it or not we represent the dominant power structure in this country (at least for the time being), and real change is only likely to come from within that power structure. We cannot close our ears. We must listen, and we must hear. We must be willing to feel uncomfortable in our privilege. We must ask about what we don’t know. If we truly want to engage in the narrative of racism, we must follow the advice of Ifemelu:

“If you don’t understand, ask questions. If you’re uncomfortable about asking questions, say you are uncomfortable about asking questions and then ask anyway. It’s easy to tell when a question is coming from a good place. Then listen some more. Sometimes people just want to feel heard. Here’s to possibilities of friendship and connection and understanding.”

To return to the conversation I was listening to between bell hooks and Gloria Steinem, bell asked Gloria: “What is the most profound thing that has happened to you in your many years in the feminist movement?” and Gloria looked at her and responded, simply: “You.”

The impact of another person’s story is profound. The act of listening is profound. As writers and readers, we choose the dominant narrative; we choose which stories get heard. People want to be the they that write their own stories. To listen to their stories is a gift, and I am grateful to Jesmyn Ward and Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie and so many others for allowing me that.