What We Lose
I’m going to South Africa in three weeks, and I picked up Zinzi Clemmons’ What We Lose as some sort of preparation. As a bridge between places.
A sense of place figures heavily here. Philly is where the protagonist, Thandi, grows up. Where she’s a “strange in-betweener:” wealthy, black, light-skinned, eclectic, envious. Philly is where she's excellence embodied. Philly is where tragedy strikes.
New York is where she ends up. Deep in Queens, in a vinyl-sided home, with long commutes to a Manhattan desk that she alternately cries and naps at. In New York, she grows into motherhood, marveling at the softness of her baby’s skin: “it is impossible, this feeling of his newness against my coarse fingers.”
And South Africa, all the while, studs her childhood. It’s where her mother is from, where her family spends each holiday, where her mind roams randomly – she's fascinated by serial killers’ wives, by Oscar Pistorius, by Winnie Mandela, by Kevin Carter’s suicide.
That ‘everywhere but nowhere’ feeling – the sense of disorientation I feel after a month of business travel or several successive airport connections – rings strongly here. From a distance, Thandi observes, every city looks alike:
“As we flew along the highway back towards the suburbs, only lit-up billboards and the distant lights of the city were visible. I thought about how similar Johannesburg looked to where I live. Save for the occasional pedestrian walking on the side of the highway, we could have been in New York or Los Angeles. I thought about how every place on earth contained its tragedies, love stories, people surviving and others failing, and for this reason, from far enough of a distance and under enough darkness, they were all essentially the same.”
The force of this book lies in its fragments. It is 200 pages of non-linear bits and pieces of a life – a pastiche of the good, the bad, the stuff that happened to someone else. And coursing through everything is grief. Her mother dies, and nothing is the same. The details of the decline are at once matter-of-fact and moving; crippling sadness coming in snatches between normal events. Just as Thandi is an in-betweener, grief is an in-between space. She writes of her father, “I envy the flatness in his voice, the feeling that he has steadily moved uphill away from our tragedy while I have managed to slide myself back down into a pit.”
My own aunt died a month ago, of a sickeningly swift cancer, and I couldn’t read a page, a paragraph, even a word of What We Lose without thinking of her daughter. How the grief my cousin feels must pervade everything. How everything must look the same but feel different. How the feeling must be, as Nelson Mandela once put it, of being cut adrift. At least that’s how it feels to read it here.