As she tells us herself, this story isn’t about race or ‘the shame of being alive’ or any of those things. It’s about kiddos, modernism, boba tea, reporterese, dadhood, art-market networking, Tamaki, casual drivebys on Drake, on Flannery O’Connor, on the next gobshite to say craft with a straight face (and thereby risk getting set adrift in one, by me, and probably the author, too), and the limits of genre (literary and non-) for approaching the contemporary, the horror, the horror that is the contemporary, meta-ness (which is not so eighties). It’s about you – and yes, there’s some self-judgement in my deployment of that you. It’s about how the finical temperatures of critical metalanguage can be turned around into the service of a sorrowing humanity that can’t be separated from race or ‘the shame of being alive’ or any of those things. A tremendous Möbius. When Penny asks Kevan ‘What’s your name?’ you feel the deep shattering of the political all the way through the domestic, a busted lift-shaft.
First published in Story Quarterly 49, 2016. Collected in Heads of the Coloured People, Simon & Schuster / Chatto & Windus, 2018. You can read an extract of the story on the Fawcett Society website, here
A Personal Anthology 