Review by Emillion Adekoya, Stony Brook University
Publisher: Duke University Press, 2024
Length: 130 pages
Black mothers are the public face and embodiment of loss. They constantly live on the edge, anticipating the sudden but not unexpected loss of their Black sons and men at the hands of the state’s legal system. Since the Black Lives Matter Movement, Black feminists have sharpened theorizing of loss as an intense Black aesthetic concerning predictable forms of anti-Black state violence.
In How We Write Now: Living with Black Feminist Theory, Jennifer C. Nash reinvigorates this Black feminist framing of loss. She challenges readers to examine the invisible, ordinary, and less political forms of Black loss, those that happen outside of relations to anti-Black violence, and with this, she demonstrates the need to understand loss meta-temporarily, that is, decentering the event of loss itself, and instead focusing on the quotidian affect and experience that opens up the space for “sitting with and living with loss” (p.3). Nash produces a new paradigm for understanding loss that deconstructs the personification of Black women as the movement’s widows and creates the space to, in her words, understand and beautifully write care into the story of loss.
How We Write Now consists of a preface, an introduction, four chapters, and a coda. In the preface, Nash vulnerably invites us into her personal life, introducing readers to her mother, Carolyn Eastmond Nash. She describes the book as “a dense set of desire for her mother to live in a form, to immortalize and memorize” (p. xi). Nash uses her relationship with her ill mother to show the ordinary forms of Black loss that are very personal and also not political, inviting readers to sit with and be at the scene of loss.
Chapter One recounts her mother’s life and later Alzheimer’s diagnosis. The chapter explores what Nash characterizes as “Beautiful Writing” (p. 6). Beautiful writing refers to an ethical method of writing that aspires for proximity and intimacy, and it is used by a cadre of contemporary Black feminists, including Christina Sharpe, Elizabeth Alexander, Jesmyn Ward, and others, to bring their readers closer to the truth of loss. According to Nash, this form of writing disrupts the prevailing conception of Black loss as solely connected to anti-Black violence, and it “changes the notion of Black women’s writing as a repository of pain and trauma” (p.16). Nash argues that contemporary Black feminists’ beautiful writing serves as a critical rejoinder to Afropessimism, providing a way to understand Blackness and loss outside of pessimism.
Chapter Two offers staying at the bone as a framework for honoring the memories of our deep intimacy with loved ones, regardless of the imperfections of those moments, and how this provides a materiality that opens the possibility of respair. Once again, paying homage to other Black feminists such as Jesmyn Ward, Natasha Trethway, and Chimamanda Adiche, Nash explores how memory provides a commitment to the material details of loss– a strategy to stay close to it and feel it, using memory to live with, rather than outliving loss.
Dovetailing poetically with Chapter Two’s material detail of loss, Chapter Three critically explores how Black feminists have used the letter to articulate Black loss and engross readers, making them feel like what she calls eavesdroppers. Nash eloquently communicates the need to break away from the political and unethical use of the letter to hustle the intimacy of Black death for public consumption as the hustle “produces its own set of losses” (p. 60), which includes the commodification of Black death and the public performance of Black privacy. Nash emphasizes that Black feminist letters can demonstrate loss as slow rather than spectacular—in ways that runs counter to how Black loss and death have been politicized in this current landscape.
Chapter Four explores the potential of the photographs of lost loved ones as extremely affective objects that can unearth the felt life of Black loss. Nash convincingly establishes that beautiful writing is both discursive and visual, explaining that the image or photograph can be used to make the act of coping with loss visible. Nash posits that the image can be a tool to analytically repair or ameliorate loss by “humanizing the ‘ghosts’ and making them into people with specific lives and histories” (p. 85). Meaning that through the image, we can give life to memories and legacies.
Finally, the coda explores the theoretical possibilities that open up when Black loss is examined in its ordinariness, and one such possibility includes the figure and role of the Black paternal. The politicization of Black death has taught audiences much about the Black maternal’s perspective, including perspectives of the Black paternal as “instigators of violence, pathology, and absence” (p. 93). Nash posits that the Black paternal also bears the weight of loss, displayed in the tenderness that comes with Black men’s devotion, caregiving, and attention in the face of loss.
Nash’s focus on Black loss shortly before and after the Black Lives Matter Movement and her call to examine the ordinary and less political forms of Black loss should not be misinterpreted as a conflation of Black loss with ordinariness. Rather, readers should understand this as a continuation of Nash’s academic investment in departing from Afropessimistic traditions invested in Black precarity and pain.
How We Write Now will undoubtedly appeal to feminists across disciplines. Nash’s insightful and succinct work has critical implications for feminists writing about the global political economies that have risen in the face of the many attempts to hustle Black death and Black loss following the Black Lives Matter Movement. Others might consider using Nash’s interventions to interrogate the rhetorics that have been produced from the historical associations of Afropessimism with Black women’s bodies or examine how the controlling image of the angry Black woman has changed or remained unchanged in the face of the global intensification of Black surveillance and Black deaths. Those in the social sciences can investigate what data and statistics might be generated to show the connection that the deaths of Black sons and Black men have on the emotional and mental health of Black women in the U.S. or what patterns of medical racism might be made visible when we begin to probe the “ordinary” Black deaths across the U.S? These are but a few implications. Still, Nash’s newest book is a testimony to her academic commitment to generating new ways of looking and writing.
Emillion Adekoya is a Doctoral Candidate in the Women’s, Gender, and Sexuality Studies program at Stony Brook University.