Why does the novel include several pages (including a photograph) about women who fall in love with serial killers? What are we to make of the abrupt intrusion of a paragraph about a planned Johannesburg high-rise designed by a Ghanaian “celebritect"?Ĭlemmons, 32, said she intended to write a different book, a novel about the life of a woman with HIV. Later in the book, quotes from a hospice pamphlet defining grief, mourning, and bereavement place the coolly pragmatic terminology at odds with Thandi’s roil of emotions following her mother’s death.īut other times, the juxtapositions are simply perplexing.
Sometimes the collaged structure works a blog post by someone from the Nordic Africa Institute about the perception and reality of crime in post-apartheid South Africa serves to amplify Thandi’s observations about her security-obsessed Johannesburg relatives, whose fancy homes are ringed by razor wire.
“I started from a place of experimentation and freedom… I had a difficult time writing a novel in this form I had an idea a novel should have a beginning, middle, and end, and I had to really fight against that.” “It’s just my style,” Clemmons said, explaining that the novel’s unorthodox structure was influenced by her study of graphic design, visual art, and modern media. Some pages contain just a single line: “Sex is kicking death in the ass while singing,” or “I buy a pregnancy test and it says yes.” (Once again, no spoiler here: Thandi vomits at the smell of Chinese takeout in the opening passage.) Interspersed with Thandi’s memories and musings are blog excerpts, archival photographs, rap lyrics (unattributed, but from the Notorious B.I.G.), passages from Barack Obama’s Dreams from My Father and Nelson Mandela’s Long Walk to Freedom, a 2011 chart of life expectancies in the United States for people of different ethnic groups, and graphs of a geometrical concept called an asymptote. The book consists of short vignettes narrated in the voice of Thandi, the daughter (like Clemmons) of a mixed-race South African mother and a black father. In the case of What We Lose, those associations are both broad and loose. They take us from one place to the next.” “The way I wrote this book was to make it based on topical associations… This mimics the way memory works, especially when we go through a traumatic experience. “The reason this is not a spoiler is that this is not a chronological book,” explained Clemmons, back on home turf to promote her debut novel, What We Lose. Especially not when the author herself, Philadelphia-area native Zinzi Clemmons, disclosed this at the start of her Philadelphia Free Library reading.
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