![]() ![]() ![]() Boldly innovative and frankly sexual, the collage-like novel mixes hand-drawn charts, archival photographs, rap lyrics, sharp disquisitions on the Mandelas and Oscar Pistorius, and singular meditations on racism’s brutal intimacies. Clemmons’ potent debut, What We Lose (Viking), depicts a young woman, Thandi, caught between cultures and identities, at home neither in her outspoken mother’s native Johannesburg, where she often visits with her parents, nor in their upscale Philadelphia suburb, where a white classmate informs her that she’s not, like, “a real black person.” As her mother falls to breast cancer, Thandi disintegrates, and what follows is a loosely autobiographical exorcism of grief. “The advantage of being an outsider is seeing things a little more clearly,” says Zinzi Clemmons, over coffee at the Culver City apartment she shares with her husband, poet and translator André Naffis-Sahely, and their rescue puppy, Misty. ![]()
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