American blacks were my precarious homeland-because of my light skin and foreign roots, I was never fully accepted by any face.”īut Thandi’s awareness and conflict about belonging is mostly internal, even when precipitated by external events. I looked just like my relatives, but calling myself black was wrong to them…. They are what is called coloured in South Africa-mixed race-and my father is light-skinned black.
“But when I call myself black, my cousins look at me askance. Though its handling of race is often more subtle than direct, Thandi acknowledges her race: Race is one theme to which a novel can often find something new to add, despite how frequently it’s revisited in literature. Like Reed’s Mumbo Jumbo, Clemmons supplements her witty prose with images, and like Brooks’s underappreciated novella, What We Lose is made up of poetic vignettes that combine to create an unforgettable portrait of a young woman’s search for identity. Though Clemmons has noted Toni Morrison’s The Bluest Eye as an influence, it’s easy to pick up hints of Ishmael Reed’s Mumbo Jumboand Gwendolyn Brooks’s Maud Martha, too. The themes explored in What We Lose-race, identity, family, and loss-are familiar, but their presentation here feels entirely fresh and new.
In her novel, a woman named Thandi is pulled between different worlds-black and white, American and African-and her struggles with identity are at the heart of this coming of age story.
Like her protagonist in the semi-autobiographical What We Lose, Zinzi Clemmons is the Pennsylvania-raised daughter of a South African immigrant mother and an American father.
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