Zinzi Clemmons - What We Lose

Rookie Season: Debuts | Week 44º

Sep 05, 2024

Extra seasoning for your everyday food for thought

Genre: Coming-of-Age, Experimental Fiction

“You don’t see me when you pass me in the hallways,
Not the real me,
I’m just a black girl to you, with
Tough nails and
Tough voice.
I’m here.”
— Zinzi Clemmons, What We Lose

Back Cover (Penguin Books):

“Raised in Pennsylvania, Thandi views the world of her mother’s childhood in Johannesburg as both impossibly distant and ever present. She is an outsider wherever she goes, caught between being black and white, American and not. She tries to connect these dislocated pieces of her life, but as her mother succumbs to cancer, Thandi searches for an anchor—someone, or something, to love.”

What We Lose, the 2017 debut by American author Zinzi Clemmons, is based loosely on her experience of caring for her mother dying of cancer. The novel’s protagonist, Thandi (like the author herself), is mixed-race (the daughter of a “coloured” South African mother and a dark-skinned, African American father) so as readers, we quickly perceive that Thandi—having grownup in an affluent Philadelphia suburb—struggles mightily not only with the imminent news of her mother’s invasive cancer, but also with her own biracial identity and its complicated, cultural cache within high society.

The novel packs a heavy punch, with powerful themes of death and loss, race, motherhood, identity, belonging, and the not-so-perfect legacies that we seem destined to leave behind to our loved ones—no matter how hard we try not to. “This was the paradox; how could I ever heal from losing the person who healed me? The question was so enormous1 that I could see only my entire life, everything I know, filling it.”

“She comes to me in snatches—I remember pieces of her laugh, the look she gave when she was upset. Sometimes I sniff the bottle of perfume of hers that I saved, but it doesn’t come close to the robustness of her smell. It is her, flattened. This is what it’s really like to lose. It is complete and irreversible.”
— Zinzi Clemmons, What We Lose

Did You Know?

Did you know that a large part of what makes Zinzi Clemmon’s What We Lose so unique and haunting is its experimental prose?

Presented in a series of fragments, photographs, rap lyrics, emails, and vignettes, Clemmons, an outspoken proponent of experimental fiction, wrote in a 2016 essay entitled “Where Is Our Black Avant Garde?”2 — “I’ve always been drawn to books with odd arrangements of words.”

Tell Me More . . .

It’s been a couple of years since my own father passed away in 2022. The fragments I try to piece together most these days are answers to the questions I didn’t ask: his recipe for making collard greens, his version of how he met in a San Francisco bus station the woman who would ultimately raise me and my sibling as our grandmother, his experience as a Black man enlisting in the US Navy, whether or not he regretted leaving his stable job to start his own computer company in the early 1980s in Silicon Valley (which failed), or—how it felt to be vindicated a decade later when technology erupted in that same region.