What We Lose

Description

A National Book Foundation 5 Under 35 Honoree
NBCC John Leonard First Book Prize Finalist
Aspen Words Literary Prize Finalist

Named a Best Book of the Year by Vogue, NPR, Elle, Esquire, Buzzfeed, San Francisco Chronicle, Cosmopolitan, The Huffington Post, The A.V. Club, The Root, Harper’s Bazaar, Paste, Bustle, Kirkus Reviews, Electric Literature, LitHub, New York Post, Los Angeles Review of Books, and Bust

“The debut novel of the year.” —Vogue

“Like so many stories of the black diaspora, What We Lose is an examination of haunting.” —Doreen St. Félix, The New Yorker

“Raw and ravishing, this novel pulses with vulnerability and shimmering anger.” —Nicole Dennis-Benn, O, the Oprah Magazine

“Stunning. . . . Powerfully moving and beautifully wrought, What We Lose reflects on family, love, loss, race, womanhood, and the places we feel home.” —Buzzfeed

“Remember this name: Zinzi Clemmons. Long may she thrill us with exquisite works like What We Lose. . . . The book is a remarkable journey.” —Essence

From an author of rare, haunting power, a stunning novel about a young African-American woman coming of age—a deeply felt meditation on race, sex, family, and country

Raised in Pennsylvania, Thandi views the world of her mother’s childhood in Johannesburg as both impossibly distant and ever present. She is an outsider wherever she goes, caught between being black and white, American and not. She tries to connect these dislocated pieces of her life, and as her mother succumbs to cancer, Thandi searches for an anchor—someone, or something, to love.

In arresting and unsettling prose, we watch Thandi’s life unfold, from losing her mother and learning to live without the person who has most profoundly shaped her existence, to her own encounters with romance and unexpected motherhood. Through exquisite and emotional vignettes, Clemmons creates a stunning portrayal of what it means to choose to live, after loss. An elegiac distillation, at once intellectual and visceral, of a young woman’s understanding of absence and identity that spans continents and decades, What We Lose heralds the arrival of a virtuosic new voice in fiction.A National Book Foundation 5 Under 35 Honoree
NBCC John Leonard First Book Prize Finalist
Aspen Words Literary Prize Finalist
California Book Award First Fiction Finalist
Hurston/Wright Legacy Award Debut Novel Nominee
Longlisted for the Andrew Carnegie Medal for Excellence in Fiction & the Brooklyn Public Library Literary Prize

“A startling, poignant debut.” 
—The Atlantic

“A richly volatile study of grief, wonderment and love.”
—Sam Sacks, The Wall Street Journal

“Potent . . .  A loosely autobiographical exorcism of grief. Boldly innovative and frankly sexual, the collage-like novel mixes hand-drawn charts, archival photographs, rap lyrics, sharp disquisitions on the Mandelas and Oscar Pistorius, and singular meditations on racism’s brutal intimacies. . . . A novel as visceral as it is cerebral, never letting us forget, over the course of its improbably expansive 200 pages, the feeling of untameable grief in the body. . . . One can’t help but think of Clemmons as in the running to be the next-generation Claudia Rankine.”
—Megan O’Grady, Vogue

“Like so many stories of the black diaspora, What We Lose is an examination of haunting. . . . Thandi, Clemmons’s narrator, carefully reeling after the death of her mother, occupies a voice so clear that she, and her grief, feel immediately tangible.”
—Doreen St. Félix, The New Yorker

“In stark prose, Clemmons’s narrator, Thandi, grieves the agonizing loss of her difficult and loving immigrant mother to cancer. Searing vignettes describe her life before and after her mother’s death. . . . The book’s distinctive form and voice give it an unusual capacity to show how individuals connect deep feeling to broad political understanding—an experience too rarely rendered in fiction.”
—The New York Times Book Review

“Contrasting what it means to be black in America with being black in Johannesburg, where her mother’s relatives still live, Clemmons presents a brutally honest yet nuanced view of contemporary identity. . . . Raw and ravishing, this novel pulses with vulnerability and shimmering anger.”
—Nicole Dennis-Benn, O, the Oprah Magazine
 
“Who do we become when we lose a parent? That transformation and the loss of identity . . . is at the heart of Zinzi Clemmons’ novel What We Lose.”
—NPR

“This affecting novel combines autobiographical vignettes with photos and pertinent charts—one tracks longevity by race—as the narrator reckons with her loss.”
—People

“Illness, race, and heartbreak collide in this beautiful debut about a college student who’s trying to come to terms with the death of her vivacious South African-born mother.”
—Entertainment Weekly

“An episodic novel about a young woman struggling with issues of grief, romance and racial identity after her mother’s death.”
—John Williams, The New York Times

“What We Lose is about a young woman enduring the loss of her mother. Structured innovatively in precise vignettes, it stares down questions of emotional inheritance, belonging, grief and race. . . . The sense of experimentation in What We Lose includes excerpts from other writers and a number of illustrations. . . . The nontraditional structure of the book, which is not chronological but thematic, mimics loss itself—the fragmentation and persistence of memory in the face of what comes next, like having a child or falling in love.”
—Agatha French, The Los Angeles Times

“A debut of haunting fragments. . . . The novel sets out to do important work: to explore the contours of race, class and gender and the legacy of apartheid; and it succeeds best when exploring these ideas through the delicately drawn and profoundly moving portrait it offers of a relationship between mother and daughter.”
—The Guardian

“Remember this name: Zinzi Clemmons. Long may she thrill us with exquisite works like What We Lose, her debut. Young Thandi, our heroine, grows up in Pennsylvania feeling like a fish on a bicycle. Why? As a biracial woman whose mother hails from Johannesburg, South Africa, she struggles to define home. In Clemmons’s hands the book is a remarkable journey.”
—Patrick Henry Bass, Essence

“Debut novelist Zinzi Clemmons weaves an autobiographically inspired tapestry with What We Lose. In a moving series of vignettes that combine South Africa, Main Line Philadelphia, and bloody headlines, this intimate narrative tells the story of a mixed-race girl and her struggle to fit in—not so much with the outside world as with herself when her life is colonized by calamity.”
—Vanity Fair
 
“A gorgeous, taut narrative about grief, identity, race, and sexuality enhanced by rap lyrics, archival photos, drawings, graphs, and charts. . . . A beautiful example of self-reflexive postmodern fiction.”
—The Philadelphia Inquirer

“This intimate novel from a talented new writer follows Thandi, a Philadelphia girl with a South African mom, who has a complicated relationship with her place in the world. Through prose, text messages, photos, and book excerpts, this cornucopia of storytelling activates all the feels.”
—Steph Opitz, Marie Claire

“Clemmons’s debut novel could be described as a coming-of-age saga without the fluff. . . . But from another perspective, her linear mosaic is a way of rescuing autofiction—that trendy blend of essay, memoir, and make believe—from its own tendency toward shapelessness, because it’s anchored firmly in both a character and a story.”
—Vulture.com

“Stunning . . .  The debut novel examines the complicated, strange proximity of love, grief, and loss, and how this manifests in the body . . . Clemmons skillfully draws on the humor that stems from the duality of conflicting cultures. Her prose is funny, fragile, and unflinchingly candid. Her characters are as flawed as they are honest, confronting their own fragmented relationships and identities.”
—BOMB

“Clemmons’ debut novel is a stunning work about growing up, losing your parents, and being an outsider. Perfect for fans of tangled immigrant stories like Americanah.”
—Glamour.com
 
“Stunning . . . What We Lose doesn’t attempt to answer any of the questions it raises. Instead, it dwells in them—in ways that are sad, sometimes funny—and gives readers a sense of what it’s like to be constantly haunted in that headspace.”
—Kevin Nguyen, GQ.com

“Zinzi Clemmons’ powerful debut novel tells the story of Thandi, a woman raised in Philadelphia who’s struggling to come to terms with the death of her mother, who left behind a complicated legacy of her own.”
—Cosmopolitan.com

“Intelligent and deeply visceral, What We Lose has been hailed as the debut novel of the year with good reason: the melancholic prose is so razor sharp, you think you come away bleeding.”
—Harper’s Bazaar

“This hauntingly honest novel celebrates the coming-of-age tale of a young African-American woman who chooses to live vibrantly in the face of loss, adversity, and devastation. Promised to be one of the most influential new voices in fiction, Zinzi Clemmons is a must for any serious beach reader. This is 2017’s most raw literary display of female emotions.”
—Redbook

“The buzz around this debut is more like a roar.”
—The Millions
 
“What We Lose sustains a light touch while feeling out the weightiest parts of life and loss.”
—Estelle Tang, Elle.com’s The Best Books of 2017 (So Far)
 
“Zinzi Clemmons uses a poetic style, rich imagery, and fervent introspection to delve deep into the heart of racial divides, economic guilt, and the severe desperation of loss in her debut novel. . . . What We Lose innovates the story of grief.”
—AV Club (A-)
 
“On family, mourning, and being mixed race.”
—New York magazine’s “Approval Matrix” (Highbrow/Brilliant)
 
“A moving coming of age story. . . Through beautiful prose, Clemmons addresses loss and the impact of our identities.”
—Real Simple

“Electric. . . . Fiercely intimate.”
—St. Louis Post-Dispatch

“An experimental fiction masterpiece. . . . A tour de force and an intelligent and stormy debut.”
—Bitch magazine

“A stunning coming-of-age story. . . . Clemmons deftly explores this problem of feeling in-between, and how an absence of any distinct identity is its own difficult category of being. With lyrical prose, Clemmons offers up one of the best meditations on love, grief, and what it means to find yourself that we’ve come across in ages.”
—Nylon

“The best debut of the year thus far. . . . The kind of novel you might find yourself marking up as you underline a sentence on every other page. Clemmons’s prose is sharp, and though the book is slim, it’s a rich novel with more depth and innovation than many novels double its length.”
—The Chicago Review of Books

“A stunning debut novel about a young African American woman and the kaleidoscope of identity.”
—Los Angeles Daily News

“[A] poetic coming-of-age debut about the black experience, told in vignettes. You’ll feel like you’ve climbed into the narrator’s head—in the best way.”
—Glamour

“One of the most anticipated literary debuts of the year.”
—Men’s Journal.com

“In the tradition of fiercely intelligent writers like Zadie Smith and Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie, Clemmons’ writing is an act of resistance and capacious grace.”
—Kirkus Reviews
 
“A lyrical and hip meditation on grief, identity, family and romance that almost reads like a memoir.”
—Newsday
 
“A short stunner that can be read in a single sitting, What We Lose is an elegy for the self that dies alongside a beloved parent.”
—Ploughshares.com
 
“What We Lose may be Clemmons’ first book, but it’s clear she’s a powerful new voice who is just getting started.”
—The Gazette (Iowa)

“Perfect for fans of Americanah, the much-anticipated debut from Clemmons unfolds through poignant vignettes and centers on the daughter of an immigrant. Raised in Philadelphia, Thandi is the daughter of a South African mother and an American father. Her identity is split, and when her mother dies, Thandi begins a moving, multidimensional exploration of grief and loss.”
—BookPage

“A big, brainy drama told by a fearless, funny young woman. . . . Prepare for Thandi’s voice to follow you from room to room long after you put this book away. A compelling exploration of race, migration, and womanhood in contemporary America.”
—Kirkus Reviews (starred review)

“Spectacular. . . . Clemmons performs an exceptional sleight of hand that is both affecting and illuminating.”
—Booklist (starred review)

“Like debut author Clemmons, narrator Thandi is the Pennsylvania-grown daughter of a South African mother and an American father. In the novel, constructed of precise, charged vignettes, Thandi traces her parents’ history and her own upbringing; meanwhile, her strong-willed mother is dying of cancer. Thandi is left searching for meaning, and sorting through her scattered internal collage of experiences to piece together a cohesive racial and personal identity.”
—The Huffington Post

“Exacting reflections on race, mourning, and family. . . . Clemmons admirably balances the story’s myriad complicated themes.”
—Publishers Weekly

“Penetratingly good and written in vivid still life, What We Lose reads like a guided tour through a melancholic Van Gogh exhibit—wonderfully chromatic, transfixing and bursting with emotion. Zinzi Clemmons’s debut novel signals the emergence of a voice that refuses to be ignored.”
—Paul Beatty, author of The Sellout

“An intimate narrative that often makes another life as believable as your own.”
—John Edgar Wideman, author of Writing to Save a Life

“The narrator of What We Lose navigates the many registers of grief, love and injustice, moving between the death of her mother and the birth of her son, as well as an America of blacks and whites and a South Africa of Coloreds. What an intricate mapping of inner and outer geographies! Clemmons’s prose is rhythmically exact and acutely moving. No experience is left unexamined or unimagined.”
—Margo Jefferson, author of Negroland

“Zinzi Clemmons’ first book heralds the work of a new writer with a true and lasting voice—one that is just right for our complicated millennium. Bright and filled with shadows, humor, and trenchant insights into what it means to have a heart divided by different cultures, What We Lose is a win, just right for the ages.”
—Hilton Als, author of White Girls

“I love how Zinzi Clemmons complicates identity in What We Lose. Her main character is both South African and American, privileged and outsider, driven by desire and gutted by grief. This is a piercingly beautiful first novel.”
—Danzy Senna, author of New People

“It takes a rare, gifted writer to make her readers look at day-to-day aspects of the world around them anew. Zinzi Clemmons is one such writer. What We Lose immerses us in a world of complex ideas and issues with ease. Clemmons imbues each aspect of this novel with clear, nuanced thinking and emotional heft. Part meditation on loss, part examination of identity as it relates to ethnicity, nationality, gender and class, and part intimate look at one woman’s coming of age, What We Lose announces a talented new voice in fiction.”
—Angela Flournoy, author of The Turner House

“Wise and tender and possessed of a fiercely insightful intimacy, What We Lose is a lyrical ode to the complexities of race, love, illness, parenthood, and the hairline fractures they leave behind.  Zinzi Clemmons has gifted the reader a rare and thoughtful emotional topography, a map to the mirror regions of their own heart.”
—Alexandra Kleeman, author of You Too Can Have a Body Like Mine

“Zinzi Clemmons pulls something off in What We Lose that I didn’t think was possible. She creates, in so many ways, a new form or new narrative structure necessarily to explore the creases in how gendered, raced and placed identities and desire are formed. But she doesn’t stop there. What We Lose is as much about the desire to be delivered from memory and imagination as it is about love, motherhood, and death. Clemmons somehow crafts a book that feels familiar and wholly innovative. This searing novel is a marvel that might change how we write and think about love, loss, place, gender and race for decades to come.”
—Kiese Laymon, author of Long DivisionZinzi Clemmons was raised in Philadelphia by a South African mother and an American father. A graduate of Brown and Columbia, her writing has appeared in Zoetrope: All-Story, The Paris Review Daily, Transition, and elsewhere. She is a cofounder and former publisher of Apogee Journal and a contributing editor to Literary Hub. She has been in residence at the MacDowell Colony, Bread Loaf, the Fine Arts Work Center in Provincetown, and Dar al-Ma’mûn in Marrakech, Morocco. Clemmons lives in Los Angeles with her husband, where she teaches at The Colburn Conservatory and Occidental College.Prologue

My parents’ bedroom is arranged exactly the same as it always was. The big mahogany dresser sits opposite the bed, the doily still in place on the vanity. My mother’s little ring holders and perfume bottles still stand there. On top of all these old feminine relics, my father has set up his home office. His old IBM laptop sits atop the doily, a tangle of cords choking my mother’s silver makeup tray. His books are scattered around the tables, his clothes draped carelessly over the antique wing chair that my mother found on a trip to Quebec.

In the kitchen, my father switches on a small flat-screen TV that he’s installed on the wall opposite the stove. My mother never allowed TV in the kitchen, to encourage bonding during family dinners and focus during homework time. As a matter of fact, we never had more than one television while I was growing up-an old wood-paneled set that lived in the cold basement, carefully hidden from me and visitors in the main living areas of the house.

We order Chinese from the place around the corner, the same order that we’ve made for years: sesame chicken, vegetable fried rice, shrimp lo mein. As soon as they hear my father’s voice on the line, they put in the order; he doesn’t even have to ask for it. When he picks the order up, they ask after me. When my mother died, they started giving us extra sodas with our order, and he returns with two cans of pineapple soda, my favorite.

My father tells me that he’s been organizing at work, now that he’s the only black faculty member in the upper ranks of the administration.

I notice that he has started cutting his hair differently. It is shorter on the sides and disappearing in patches around the crown of his skull. He pulls himself up in his chair with noticeable effort. He had barely aged in the past twenty years, and suddenly, in the past year, he has inched closer to looking like his father, a stooped, lean, yellow-skinned man I’ve only seen in pictures.

“How have you been, Dad?” I say as we sit at the table.

The thought of losing my father lurks constantly in my mind now, shadowy, inexpressible, but bursting to the surface when, like now, I perceive the limits of his body. Something catches in my throat and I clench my jaw.

My father says that he has been keeping busy. He has been volunteering every month at the community garden on Christian Street, turning compost and watering kale.

“And I’m starting a petition to hire another black professor,” he says, stabbing his glazed chicken with a fire I haven’t seen in him in years.

He asks about Peter.

“I’m glad you’ve found someone you like,” he says.

“Love, Dad,” I say. “We’re in love.”

He pauses, stirring his noodles quizzically with his fork.

“Why aren’t you eating?” he asks.

I stare at the food in front of me. It’s the closest thing to comfort food since my mother has been gone. The unique flavor of her curries and stews buried, forever, with her. The sight of the food appeals to me, but the smell, suddenly, is noxious; the wisp of steam emanating from it, scorching.

“Are you all right?”

All of a sudden, I have the feeling that I am sinking. I feel the pressure of my skin holding in my organs and blood vessels and fluids; the tickle of every hair that covers it. The feeling is so disorienting and overwhelming that I can no longer hold my head up. I push my dinner away from me. I walk calmly but quickly to the powder room, lift the toilet seat, and throw up.

Part One

I was born as apartheid was dying. In South Africa, fervent national pride and multiculturalism were taking hold as the new national policy. I was born in America, my mother was born in Johannesburg, and my father in New York.

My mother’s entire family still lives within twenty minutes of each other. They are middle- to upper-class coloureds-mixed race, not black. Although my mom involved herself in some of the political unrest (she proudly saved a newspaper clipping from 1970 that has a photograph prominently featuring a handwritten sign she made), my family was quiet and generally avoided the brunt of the conflict.

My father was raised in New York and went to college in Philadelphia. In the year after his graduation, he went on a trip volunteering in Botswana. My mother was there, partying with some of her militant friends. Ostensibly, they were there collecting literature to distribute back home.

“Your mother was inescapable,” my father told me. Not that she was ravishing, or enchanting, but that he simply couldn’t get away from her. “When I went back to Philadelphia, she called me. And she called me again. When I called her back, she asked if she could come to America to live with me.”

My mother befriended people aggressively. She was extremely opinionated and often abrasive. I sometimes hated the rough manner in which she dealt with people. Her favorite words were four-lettered, and she liked to yell at waiters in restaurants and people in line at stores.

My mother’s roots were deep and strong. Her relationships with others were resilient; she had friendships that persisted over decades, oceans, breakups. Her best friends were all former boyfriends.

Most of her friends (and she had many) spoke of her offending them shortly after they met. One story my mother told often was when one of her best friends threatened to commit suicide after her boyfriend left her. She went to my mother for comfort, and my mother slapped her across the face, as hard as she could. Her friend’s face was bruised for a week. My mother used this story as an illustration of how to be a good friend.

She had close bonds with the other black nurses at her job, with whom she could affect a West Philly accent to match the best of them. And she had a coterie of South African expats from our area, as well as some from Washington, D.C., and Boston, whom she sometimes invited to our house for dinner or to watch a soccer game. They called our house at all hours and begged my mother for medical advice in Afrikaans or Zulu. Their child had a fever, or their mother-in-law was acting crazy again-was it dementia, or just moods? Many of them lacked green cards and insurance. My mother was the reliable center of their ad hoc community.

My father was a mathematics professor for many years before he was promoted to the head of the department at the college. He was flown around the country to give talks and make inflated speeches about their research. My mother migrated upward from nursing assistant to head nurse at the university hospital.

I have never personally been a victim of violence in South Africa. I remember a neighbor who was stabbed when I was little-the neighbor knocking on my grandmother’s door late at night; the enamel bowl, with water turned pink and hazy, that my grandmother used to wash his wounds. My mother was the victim of a smash-and-grab in the hills around our vacation home. The assailant broke the car window and snatched her purse from her lap. She never drove alone again.

But most of what I experience is secondhand, from my family and the news. Together, the stories and pictures constitute a vision of death and carnage that is overwhelming, incongruous to the plainspoken beauty of the country. I see no evidence of the horror, which is what makes it terrifying to me.

This is the secret I have long held from my family: South Africa terrifies me. It always has. When I am there, I am often kept awake in bed at night, imagining which combination of failed locks, security doors, and alarms will allow a burglar inside, inviting disaster. I fear that we will be involved in one of the atrocities we learn of daily.

After apartheid, crime in South Africa has been insidious and seemingly limitless. Citizens live behind locked doors, security gates, electric fencing. The more money a family has, the more advanced the methods of protection. I have seen the progression of defense methods in the years I have been visiting. When I was younger, every house, if it was large enough, had a crown of barbed wire atop its high security wall. Since then, the barbed wire has been exchanged for electric fencing. Single fortifications for each property are no longer enough; now many streets and neighborhoods are blocked off with turnstiles and patrolled twenty-four hours a day by hired guards.

The security of my hometown in Pennsylvania was way past anything my South African family could imagine. The town was populated by stately old colonial mansions, most of them worth millions of dollars. When family members visited from South Africa, they would ask, where are the security fences? Our neighbor, an old widow with a stubborn streak, slept with the front door wide open through the night. Is she mad? my aunts and uncles would ask. She may have been, but in that town it barely raised an eyebrow.

In winter, the houses were adorned by twinkling Christmas lights. My relatives asked if they could take pictures on our neighbors’ lawns. We spent hours driving around to find the brightest displays, in neighborhoods miles away from ours. They would never have done this at home, my relatives said, because people would steal the lights. Robbers would climb up on the fences and the roofs and cut them down, then sell them on the black market for the copper wiring.

In South Africa, there was little rhyme or reason to the tragedies of daily life, but there was social order of an old-world type and magnitude. I didn’t respect her, my mother would often say, because I didn’t speak to her like a child should. But I wasn’t any ruder than my school friends, who treated their parents as older companions or siblings. This type of equality was at the root of my mother’s feelings of insecurity. In South Africa, elders were treated with extreme dignity that, in my eyes, bordered on the comical. My cousins never addressed their parents with pronouns face-to-face. Instead, even my middle-aged aunts and uncles with grown children of their own referred to my grandfather as “Da” or “Daddy” instead of “you.” Thus, a casual request turned into an awkward and foreign-sounding statement, as they were forced to say, “Can Daddy please pass the salt?” I could never imagine such a sentence falling from my American lips.

One of my school friends called both her parents by their first names. My mother found her so novel and strange that she actually liked her. She called this friend her favorite, with heavy sarcasm. Whenever I spoke my friend’s name, my mother would chuckle and shake her head, as if delighted at the thought that this girl actually existed.

Fear of flying is most often an indirect combination of one or more other phobias related to air travel, such as claustrophobia (a fear of enclosed spaces), acrophobia (a fear of heights), or agoraphobia (especially the type that has to do with having a panic attack in a place you can’t escape from). Flight anxiety can also be linked to one’s feelings about the destination. It is a symptom rather than a disease, and different causes may spur anxiety in different individuals.

There are many Web sites offering courses or information that treat flight anxiety, many written by pilots or ex-air transportation professionals. One of the sites, promising a meditation-based approach to aerophobia, lists an example of destination-associated flight anxiety.

A woman in Maryland is in a long-distance relationship with a man in California. The relationship has recently turned bad, and the woman decides that on the next planned visit she is going to break up with the man. She has preexisting flight anxiety, but the anticipation of the breakup compounds her symptoms. She is unable to sleep for weeks before the trip, and dreams of the plane she is on falling out of the sky and crashing into the Rocky Mountains. Her anxiety is so severe that she almost decides she isn’t well enough to make the flight, but on further consideration, she decides that the relationship needs to end. Breaking up wouldn’t be right over the phone. So she takes the flight and is nervous the whole time, even though she takes a Xanax just before liftoff, as prescribed by her psychiatrist. She breaks up with the man, which turns out to be difficult but necessary, and notices that her anxiety is much less severe on the returning plane ride.

We were on our way to Johannesburg from Cape Town, where we had just switched planes for the two-hour flight. It was twilight. A rainstorm had been going for the past few hours and thunder was just beginning to rumble far off in the distance. We left the earth moments ago; the plane finished its ascent and was beginning to level off. We were starting to relax in our seats, ready for the flight attendants to return to the aisles with their drink carts. All of a sudden, the plane jumped into the air, as if an invisible hand had pushed us higher. We rocketed upward, our bodies whipped against our seat belts. People screamed. Two people fell into the aisle. One lay there groaning; the other, a young woman of about twenty, screamed, “Mama, Mama!”

Outside the windows, bright light flashed, and inside, the cabin was whitewashed for an instant.

My parents, sitting on either side of me, each grabbed one of my arms. I heard my mother start to pray.

Then the plane righted itself. The passengers around me slowly relaxed, first shakily fixing their hair, tightening their belts, murmuring. Then their voices returned to normal and, smiling at each other, they began pressing the buttons for the flight attendants. “Close call,” I heard someone near me say with a sigh.

The pilot came on the loudspeaker to tell us we had been hit by lightning. Despite our fright, no damage had been done to the plane. The rest of the passengers, including my parents, all seemed to forget the incident after this, but I was frozen in my seat, terrified. My mother noticed and called for an attendant to bring me a glass of red wine. The alcohol soothed the circling thoughts of danger and fear, and soon I fell asleep, though something of this moment never left me.

Most of my family lives in or around Sandton, known as the richest square kilometer in Africa. It is a suburb of Johannesburg, home to luxury malls and complexes of mansions so heavily guarded you can’t even see their street signs unless you’re granted access. Sandton lies a forty-minute drive from some of the poorest townships in the country, where many of the gardeners, housekeepers, and security guards who tend these opulent homes and businesses live. This situation-the close proximity and daily interaction of the ever-stratifying classes-has led to the country’s new postapartheid violence.US

Additional information

Dimensions	0.6000 × 5.0600 × 6.7000 in
Imprint	Penguin Books
ISBN-13	09780735221734
ISBN-10	0735221731
Author	Zinzi Clemmons
Audience	General / adult
BISAC	FIC044000, FIC049000
Subjects	black authors, Apartheid, What We Lose, What We Lose by Zinzi Clemmons, books about mothers, zinzi clemmons, anti racism, best book club books, breast cancer, best friend gifts, african american authors, award winning fiction, african american books, books on race, race in america, women writers, philadelphia, book club recommendations, books for women, anti-racism, gardening gifts, nelson mandela, antiracism, south africa, anti-racist, books about race, experimental, women's fiction, FIC049000, award winning books, FIC044000, coming of age