Tag Archives: black bodies

Heavy, by Kiese Laymon

cover of Heavy, all text

Debbie says:

Kiese Laymon published Heavy: An American Memoir in 2018, but I only got to it last month. Fair warning: this book is not for the faint of heart. Laymon is trying just as hard as an author can try to tell the whole truth as he sees it, to pull no punches, to let no one off the hook: not himself, not his mother (the book is framed as a letter to her), not the other people in his life, and most certainly not the white world which is ultimately responsible for most if not all of the miseries he recounts. Not that the book is all misery–it is much too rich for that.

The title of the book tells us right away why I would review it here. Laymon experienced himself as fat from early childhood. He describes teenage eating as self-medication, a deep fear of what the scale would say, a dislike to be seen other than fully clothed. These feelings are familiar to most fat people, and yet this book (along with Roxane Gay’s Hunger, which I reviewed here in 2018) never fail to remind us that being fat is different in a black body than in a white body. (Gay is quoted on the front cover of Laymon’s book.)  Fat bodies are frequently singled out for oppression; black bodies in America are effectively always in danger of being oppressed. One way to frame this book is as an example of intersectional oppression–and an example of a strong man’s complex and rich response to the world’s desire to keep him down.

When I imagined the insides of rich-white-folk houses, I imagined stealing all their food while they were asleep. I wanted to gobble up palms full of Crunch ‘n Munch and fill up their thirty-two-ounce glasses with name-brand ginger ale and crushed ice tumbling out of their silver refrigerators. I wanted to leave the empty glasses and Crunch ‘n Munch crumbs on the counter so the white folk would know I had been there and they’d have something to clean up when I left.

Laymon was always fat … until he shifted from eating to obsessive exercise, and took to anorexia as self-medication. To echo one of the book’s common refrains, he ate and ate and ate and ate until he didn’t. And when he didn’t, he stopped eating dramatically and exercised unceasingly, with eventual tragic results to his Black body.

I will forget how the insides of my thighs feel when rubbed raw. I will play on the basketball team. I will think 190 pounds is too heavy so I will jog three miles before every practice and game. I will sit in saunas for hours draped in thermals, sweatpants, and sweatshirts. I will make a family of people who cannot believe I was ever heavy. I will become a handsome, fine, together brother with lots of secrets. I will realize there is no limit to the amount of harm handsome, fine, together brothers with lots of secrets can do.

His relationship with his body is not the only relationship in the book; it may not even be the most central one. His relationship with his mother encapsulates the complexities of the book: love, admiration, fear, shame, disgust and appreciation are all there all the time–and we come away with a picture of a woman about whom all of those feelings make sense, and we understand how he can hold them all simultaneously.

In a simplified arc of author-in-a-fat-body, author-in-an-anorexic-over-  exercising-body, the third portion is author-in-a-gambling-body.  The gambling narrative illuminates many of the previously opaque issues his mother was having, and is as raw and insightful as the rest of the book.

I kept coming back to the casino because I felt emptier and heavier when I lost than when I won. I couldn’t win, because if I didn’t have enough to begin with, I could never win enough to stop. And if I won, I came back to win more. And if I came back to win more, I would eventually lose. And after I eventually lost, I would remember the thrill o fwinning. No matter what, I would always come back with the stated intention of winning and the unstated intention of harming myself.

Throughout his own self-examined journey, Laymon never fails to talk about who his friends and lovers were, what his life with them was like, and how much he loves them. With the keen eye of the observant lover, he brings them to life on the page. He also came very early to a realization of how women are treated, and a gut-level unwillingness to be part of that pattern … and the ways in which his refusal also made him a participant. He never lets us forget for a moment that we are all complicit, all the time, and that there are very few paths to escape complicity.

Books like Heavy and Hunger show us something that no theoretical books–about race, about fat oppression, about human pain–can ever fill. Laymon is incomprehensibly generous to let strangers so far into his own life, a journey no reader can or should come back from unscathed.

The work of bending, breaking, and building the nation we deserve will not start or end with you or me, but that work will necessitate loving black family, however oddly shaped, however many queer, trans, cis, and gender-nonconforming mamas, daddies, aunties, comrades, nieces, nephews, granddaddies and grandmamas–learning how to talk, listen, organize, imagine, strategize, and fight fight fight for and with black children.

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Deconstructing the Ballet Body

Black ballet dancer Misty Copeland in a mid-air split
Black ballerina Misty Copeland, photo by Marty Sohl

Debbie says:

Once upon a time, I was a ballet fan. I still think the art form is beautiful, but I stopped being able to tolerate what it does to dancers’ bodies (especially women’s bodies), and I switched my allegiance to other forms of dance that don’t eat their performers alive.

It has never been possible to pay attention to ballet without noticing how extremely, unforgivingly white the ballet world is. Journalist Chloe Angyal has just written Turning Pointe: How a New Generation of Dancers Is Saving Ballet from Itself. Marie Claire published an excerpt from the book last week, with the perfect title “The Unbearable Whiteness of Ballet.”  The excerpt opens with some stories from the experience of Wilmara Manuel, a Black woman from Haiti and her biracial ballet student daughter Sasha.

Sasha grew up in a suburb of Indianapolis and is now 16. She trains at the Royal Ballet School in London, an exclusive training ground that serves as a feeder school for the Royal Ballet. It’s widely acknowledged to be one of the best ballet schools in the world.

Wilmara says that people often express their surprise at the quality of Sasha’s training and technique. “Oh wow, you’re really good,” Wilmara says by way of example. “Where do you train? Have you been dancing for a long time?” She says that while she tries to give these white people the benefit of the doubt, she knows what they usually mean, and she’d prefer they just come out and say it: “I’m surprised you’re that good. You’re Black and you’re dancing and you’re good.”

Now that Sasha is a little older, Wilmara talks to her about the racist assumptions embedded in those surprised comments. “You know she’s asking because she doesn’t think a person of your color can do this,” she’s told Sasha, who now “gets it when she hears that tone of voice.” …

This emotional labor, the work of helping young dancers understand what “that tone of voice” means and why it’s being used—or the work of deciding whether to tell your child about the racist remark you just overheard or absorb it yourself and shield them from it—is a part of parenting not demanded of mothers of white dancers.

Angyal then pans out from individuals to a more generalized analysis of ballet dancers of color:

Discipline, order, adherence to strict and unquestioned rules. That’s what ballet is. When dance scholar Brenda Dixon Gottschild (author of ) asked Seán Curran, a white dancer and choreographer who performed with the Bill T. Jones/Arnie Zane Company, what he pictured when he thought of white dance or white dancing bodies, he said, “Upright. . . . For some reason, ‘proper’ stuck in the head a bit, something that is built and made and constructed rather than is free or flows.” A body that is rigid, obedient, and disciplined, remade from something natural and unruly into something refined and well behaved. Proper. “Whiteness,” Curran said, “values precision and unison.”

Curran’s assessment identifies a central underlying prejudice of white supremacy: the belief that people of color, and their bodies, are wild. Uncivilized, animalistic, subhuman. That white people—who, by contrast, are assumed to be organized and civilized—have both a right and a responsibility to tame that which is untamed and impose order, precision, and unison on it. To suppress and control that which is savage; to press it into something that approaches whiteness but will never be truly white and thus never truly equal.

To follow this thread about wildness in Black and Brown bodies out of ballet and into a wider context, Laurie and I recommend Nell Irvin Painter’s A History of White PeopleAngyal, in keeping with the subject of her work, goes deeper.

it is easy to see how the ideal ballet body—so controlled, so upright—is everything that white supremacy imagines a Black body is not. And because of deeply ingrained American cultural associations with musculature, loose movement, brute force, and untamed sexuality, the Black body is believed to be everything a ballet body is not permitted to be.

“When we talk about the ballerina,” says Theresa Ruth Howard, a former dancer and a teacher, diversity strategist, and the founder and curator of the digital ballet history archive Memoirs of Blacks in Ballet (MoBBallet), “we’re talking about the ideal, our stereotype of the desirable woman, and that is reserved for white women.”

Howard has made a career of helping the people who run ballet companies and schools to examine their ideas about what makes for a “good” ballet body, asking them to question their biases about the inherent fitness of white bodies and unfitness of other bodies, especially Black bodies. She says that long-standing racist tropes about Black women’s bodies make Blackness and ballerinas seem antithetical.

“You have the trope of either the jezebel, the mammy, or the workhorse of the Black woman,” which are incompatible with desirability, fragility, and sexual purity, the ideal of white womanhood at the heart of the ballerina’s appeal.

The subtitle of the book implies that other chapters shine some light into a less white, less supremacist future for ballet. I find that encouraging and simultaneously wonder if such a transformation is possible. Angyal seems like a fine guide into that territory.

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