Art of the Sentence: Zinzi Clemmons

“I’ve often thought that being a light-skinned black woman is like being a well-dressed person who is also homeless” (p.31). So responds Zinzi Clemmons’ narrator Thandi in What We Lose: A Novel (2018) to her “mother’s views” on the previous page, which, she writes, “imbued my friendship with political importance–if I could maintain a relationship with a darker-skinned woman, I would prove her wrong. And so I pursued these relationships with fervor” (p. 30).

When Clemmons/Thandi compares “being a light-skinned black woman” to “being a well-dressed person who is also homeless,” she is doing multiple things simultaneously. First, she is taking the verb “being” and drawing the comparison between two forms of being: the physical and the political. “Light-skinned” and “well-dressed” are set up in a parallel construction with “black woman” and “homeless”; light-skinned is to well-dressed what black woman is to homeless person. In this regard, being “light-skinned” is a manner of being dressed–and being dressed well; being a black woman is a form of inhabiting, living–without a home, without a body to inhabit, black constituting a form of negation or lack. To be a “well-dressed” person who is also homeless is to defy expectations. Judged one way, why would this homeless person have nice clothes? Why not spend money on a house or car and not clothes? The appearance is deceiving. Another way to look at this simile is that when homeless people are given too-nice clothes–say, a designer fur coat that is “worth” thousands–this gift can be a deficit, which can set up the person for violence, for others to rob her of that nice coat. Clemmons’ language is so rich in implications, inviting the reader to look through the skin, through the clothes into the substance within; what is that substance, that self? Who are the people who would, perhaps, rob her of her clothes, take advantage of her homelessness?

The context of this sentence–that it comes after her reaction to her perceived prejudices of her mother–gives it power. Clemmons has set the reader up for confrontation between her character’s and her mom’s varying ideals, and sets up the forthcoming narrative tension that lies in Clemmons’ befriending of darker-skinned women. The tension between her and her mother sets up the reader to attain a richer meaning of the “well-dressed” and “homeless” light-skinned black woman, and for the reader to see her character’s struggle in political and personal terms. Being clothed and having a place to live are political concerns but for individuals like Thandi, they are also personal–not just personal, mind you, because Thandi, born of two politically active parents; politics comprise (part of) her personal background.