I have always struggled, in my writing, with a tendency to think in terms of questions (as a friend lovingly put it once in comments on a draft: “By now you should have some answers!”), so I really really loved that Jennifer Nash also has lots of questions, and a willingness to leave many of them open.* This is a really interesting book; an intimate and moving chronicle of thinking with and through Black feminist theory to try to understand loss and ways of writing about it. Nash is specifically interested in what she describes as ordinary loss — durational, extended, and embedded in daily life. In her case, witnessing the progression of her mother’s Alzheimer’s. Part of the argument in this book is that an emphasis on more spectacular, violent forms of loss (the death of Black men as a result of state violence, especially) has occluded what we could call, with a nod to Kevin Quashie, quieter versions of Black loss. In each chapter, she focuses on different techniques — close description, the letter form, the photograph — and often juxtaposes how they are deployed in these two different ways. You can sense, sometimes, a frustration with the gravitational pull of the spectacular; the struggle to stay focused on the ordinary as its own particular form. It’s a short book, and a meditative one — it’s clear that she’s still figuring this stuff out. But it doesn’t feel underdeveloped. Rather, it’s a work-in-progress, a step in the process that is also a meta-investigation of that process, as she is thinking about how these texts help her understand and feeling out the limits of that understanding. A beautiful book.
* One craft thing I learned from this book is to try to formulate them in the form of: “What I want to know is ___________.” This is harder to do than you might think, ie, it helps you get a better purchase on the thing you want to understand.
