Performative Cultural Awareness

The Goodreads Choice awards list landed in my inbox, and who can resist a list of books? (I had only read one: The Vanishing Half) The best debut novel was a novel I had not heard of, Such a Fun Age, by Kiley Reid, and a few days later it came my way via the library.

Reid’s novel features Emira Tucker, a 25-year-old black graduate of Temple University in Philadelphia. Unlike her three closest friends, Emira does not have a vocation or an obvious career path. She is eking out a living via a part-time babysitting job, looking after the 3-year-old and infant children of Alix Chamberlain, a wealthy white blogger.

One night at 10 pm, Alix calls Emira for an emergency babysit. Emira and her friend Zara are out partying, but they pick up the toddler and take her to the nearby grocery store. A black woman with a white toddler? The store security guard accuses Emira of kidnapping the child. A white man videotapes the confrontation, which ends when Emira calls Alix’s husband Peter to come and verify her identity.

Shaken, Emira mostly wants to forget the incident.

Emira laughed and said ‘It’s fine’, but then she put the back of her hand to her mouth and silently started to cry.

Alix, her employer, suddenly realizes she knows virtually nothing of her babysitter’s life. She is mortified and startled.

Alix often felt that Emira saw her as a textbook rich white person.
Alix fantasized about Emira discovering things about her that shaped what Alix saw as the truest version of herself. Like the fact that one of Alix’s closest friends was also black. That Alix’s new and favorite shoes were from Payless, and only cost eighteen dollars. That Alix had read everything that Toni Morrison had ever written.

Alix wants — needs — to be seen as socially and racially aware, and her clumsy and self-absorbed efforts to demonstrate this are neatly laid out by the author, without any unnecessary explanation.

Emira starts dating Kelley, a white man who turns out to have a racially tinged history with Alix from back in high school. The chapters set in the past were not, I thought, as well done as those in the present; it would have worked better if the author had described the past entirely via the memories of the characters in their present, and perhaps not in such redundant detail.

Kelley has always had black friends, and neither Alix or Emira sees this as quite natural.

[Jodi, Emira’s friend]: “You’re saying he’s the opposite of racist? That he likes black people too much?”
“Alix is saying” — Tamra stepped in — that Kelley is one of those white guys who not only goes out of his way to date black women, but only wants to date black women. […] It completely fetishizes black people.”

[Emira] “You have a weirdly large amount of black friends, you saw Kendrick Lamar in concert, and now you have a black girlfriend…great. But I need you to get that being angry and yelling in a store means something different for me than it would for you. […]I don’t want anyone seeing [the video], especially as I start to look for a job.

Emira and Alix are at the heart of this book, though, and the incidents that occur are just complicated enough to avoid simplistic judgement. Is Alix being helpful when she provide Tshirts for Emira to wear while working, or is it a racially loaded ‘uniform’? In high school, Alix had called the police on some fellow students who came to her house to party; one black kid therefore lost his scholarship. Was Alix’s subsequent social ostracism justified? Is Kelley really fetishizing black women, or does he just happen to be interested in and comfortable with cultures other than his own? This novel deals with the gray shades in racial relationships.

Along with food for the reader’s thought, unfortunately, the novel also contains quite a bit of poor writing. For example:

Alix sat back and her sweaty top clung to her shoulder blades. In front of her, in her sleep, Catherine’s bootied feet ran somewhere in her dreams.

I puzzled over these sentences for a while. Did Alix sit back, suddenly fall asleep and start dreaming of her daughter Catherine? How odd, especially given that Alix is sitting in a coffee shop with friends at the time. The only logical possibility is that in the second sentence, the first ‘her’ (‘In front of her’) refers to Alix, but the second and third ‘her’ (‘in her sleep’, ‘in her dreams’) refer to baby Catherine. Shouldn’t an editor catch this sort of clunky writing?

More examples:

Emira hadn’t anticipated that the heated accusations would be favorable to the silence that followed.

She sensed those lax and wonderful feelings of decorum leaving her body.

and some leaps of thought are simply puzzling:

Behind a camel-colored Coach purse was a velour black jacket. In cursive white and pink letters on the back was written Plank Now, Wine Later. There was something about this sentiment, and the pink rhinestone letters it came in, that made Alix realize that Bella Thacker and Emira were the only people to call her Mrs Chamberlain.

(I’m still baffled by that last sentence)

The dialogue, especially between Emira and her friends, seems a bit over the top.