Meditations on Static After Loss- “What We Lose” by Zinzi Clemmons
Review by Elena Negron
"I see you looking at me. I know how you see me."
I was sent this book by the UC Davis English department. This is a short but incredibly poignant story with themes of loss, motherhood, daughterhood, and racial otherness. The book is composed of short sections, almost vignettes, along with photos and statistical images as well as historical recitations. Clemmons wades through the life of Thandi, a mixed-race woman with South African heritage, after Thandi’s mother’s death. I use the word wade specifically because that is how Thandi seems to go about her own life: slowly, as if moving through water. She navigates relationships and the in-betweens of being mixed and eventually, her own motherhood.
Praise
Clemmons’s writing is that of a person who feels the world very deeply and observes it very carefully. It is not insignificant that she wrote this after losing her own mother, so the novel is heavily influenced by her own life. Her writing is aware and beautiful. She hits on sincere and intense themes with a complexity that she lays out so precisely, that it feels digestible and easy. These are the kinds of novels that I enjoy, so perhaps I am biased. But Clemmons weaves us in and out of Thandi’s life, creating intricate patterns between loss and race and what it means to be a daughter, to be a mixed daughter, to have lost a mother and have a connection to a place so far away.
An Argument For the Static Character
A major criticism in this book is that Thandi doesn’t change— or that the reader doesn’t know her well enough by the end to know if she has changed. I think that we see Thandi after the major change takes place. The death of her mother, so clearly traumatic to her, has left her changed and we read the long-lasting fallout. This book is so much more nuanced than a beginning, middle, and end for the character. We go back and forth, we contemplate time and failure and mistakes just as Thandi does in her life. Clemmons is arguing that healing after loss is not linear. We will not see Thandi get progressively better after the death of her mother because that is not how grief works. Even ten years on, it will hurt some days worse than others. Thandi does change. She becomes a mother, she experiences a failed relationship, and perhaps for someone, this would be a life-changing event for them. But Thandi has already had her life-changing event and the readers simply witness what becomes of her when she has to spend the rest of her life coming to terms with that.
Final Thoughts
I don’t want to sound pretentious, but this book is incredibly stylized and deserves a bit of afterthought when considering all the aspects at play in this book. It’s a book best served if you have time to sit with it for a while afterward and think. Many people have taken a liking to the quote on page 31— “Being a light-skinned black woman is like being a well-dressed person who is homeless.” And many of these people are white, and when it’s the same people who found the book to be flat, or Thandi to be distant and unchanged, it makes me think. Do they like this quote because it has moved something in them, because they want it to have moved something in them, or simply because it’s a great analogy? This quote specifies a major theme in the book, but to say that the quote sums up the book entirely is not true and in fact incredibly flattening of the main character.
I will say that in their defense, it was a passage that I also marked as a favorite. “There is nowhere safe for you, no place to call your own.” That was the heart of the passage. As a child of mixed white and Latino heritages, all I could think was, Yes. That’s right. I will hopefully have the opportunity to take Clemmons’s fiction class at UC Davis in the winter quarter, and this book has made me all the more eager.
