ROXANE GAY
HOW DO WE inhabit multiple identities? This question has long consumed me and my writing. Perhaps it still does, though I have learned to ask more rigorous questions. The first essays I published, nearly fifteen years ago, were ones where I tried to write through my conflicted feelings about identity. As the child of Haitian immigrants who was raised in the suburbs, mostly in the Midwest, I often wondered where I belonged—never Haitian enough or American enough or black enough to feel like the world had a place for me.
I grappled with being black in America and being Haitian in black America and being black American in Haiti and being middle class when that was rarely considered a possibility for someone who looked like me. I was also trying to make sense of desire and sexuality and wanting so much for myself that felt forbidden. I was trying to figure out who I was and what might be possible for me. I was trying to write toward a space where I could reveal my most authentic self to the people who knew me but did not.
My fiction has also taken on a lot of these issues. A black woman in Michigan’s Upper Peninsula tries to close herself off from grief but meets someone who makes her want to open those parts of herself she is protecting and make a home in a strange land. In a near future where the South has re-seceded from the United States, a father must decide between his wife and son and his own family whose roots run deep into Southern soil. In my novel An Untamed State, a Haitian American woman is kidnapped and has to overcome the betrayal of father and country as she tries to return to the woman she once was.
Where do we belong, I am always asking. How beholden are we to the places and people to whom we belong?
Writing requires courage, audacity. I’m not suggesting that there is something heroic about writing, but I do believe that to commit words and ideas to the page demands something of the writer. Whether fiction or nonfiction, most writers are baring some part of themselves. They are making themselves vulnerable because the writing demands it. Whenever I come across a writer who takes bold chances and exposes their vulnerability at the same time, I am in awe. Zadie Smith is one such writer. Since its release, I have marveled over her novel NW, polyphonic, messy, sly, and tender in the most unexpected places.
The energy throughout the novel holds me in its thrall. NW is a novel about place and identity and the ways people compromise themselves and the people in their lives. Smith blends narrative styles and narrative voices to tell a story about two friends growing up in a working-class neighborhood. There is a section, telling the story of Natalie Blake née Keisha Blake, offered entirely in list form. As Keisha grows up, becomes a lawyer, wife, and mother, and changes her name to Natalie, we see her grapple with identity and finding a place to belong in the life she has created for herself.
In one section, Smith depicts Keisha/Natalie’s struggle with her identities using the metaphor of drag. She tries to make sense of which of her selves is the truest.
170. In drag
Daughter drag. Sister drag. Mother drag. Wife drag. Court drag. Rich drag. Poor drag. British drag. Jamaican drag. Each required a different wardrobe. But when considering these various attitudes she struggled to think what would be the most authentic, or perhaps the least inauthentic.
By the end of the novel, Natalie Blake who is Keisha Blake who is Natalie Blake is still searching for the least inauthentic drag to wear. With her friend Leah, she calls the police to report a crime.
“I got something to tell you,” said Keisha Blake, disguising her voice with her voice.
This moment is what we are left with, such fitting and gorgeous ambiguity. It is an audacious, elegant choice Smith makes, to offer closure without offering closure, to offer answers to the question of who a woman inhabiting multiple identities is without offering answers. This is what I do when I write, or at least this is what I try to do, what I hope to do—disguising my voice with my voice as I tell some version of the truth.