The Complicated Nonverbal Ways We Love Each Other: A Conversation with Kiese Laymon, Part II

On laughter, responsible love, safeness, upcoming generations, hope, boxing, prayer, and 250 pieces of cheese.

Intimate conversations with our greatest heart-centered minds.

As promised, here’s Part II of the interview with Kiese Laymon.

Part II picks up exactly where Part I left off — so if you haven’t yet read Part I, you might want to do so now.

Next week, I’ll be sharing writing advice from Kiese. He’s a master storyteller, so his insight is, of course, brilliant.

Kiese helps me to see the world and my place in it with greater clarity — and with greater hope. I believe you’ll feel the same. Let me know what you think in the comments! ❤️

xJane

It’s so beautiful. I feel like we have more access to that kind of nonverbal communication than we allow ourselves. Do you experience it much in your daily life?

Absolutely, absolutely. With the way I was raised, the laugh does so much. In the book, there’s this one point where the country boys are laughing really hard at New York. And then the text says something like…

I can tell you exactly what the text says, because it's my next question! You write about laughter so much. In Heavy, you have that refrain of “We laughed, and laughed, and laughed until we didn't.” In this book you write, “We tried to make ourselves laugh because laughing was how we worried, how we consented to love, and how we said I’d like you to love me.” Is that the line you were thinking of?

Yes, that’s as true as I can be. Every now and then you write a line and you're like, “Yeah, that one, that’s true.” And that still is true.

Sometimes we just really want to laugh with people. We want our laughs to be affirmed. New York is attractive to the country boys; they want New York to like them, but they also want New York to feel liked. We don’t talk enough about that in humans. We don’t talk enough about that in young people. And we definitely don't talk about that enough in young Black people. And definitely young Black boys.

I wanted to write a book that explored those responsibly loving, nonverbal moments between people when you really want someone to know that you love them, and you really want that person to feel love. But there's no way in the fucking world you would ever say it—like, ever, ever.

So true! You write at the end, “On the ground of that garden, covered in vegetables and dirt, coated in so much laughter. I want to say that the Mississippi and New York in our Black boy bodies were indistinguishable from each other. That would be a lie. We absolutely contrasted. But the sights, tastes, and smells of our contrasts felt like safeness. Not safety. Safeness. And safeness sounded like love.” So potent! Can you speak to the safeness in contrasts?

Growing up, safety in the eighties and nineties was, “Come in early; come in when the streetlights come on; just say no to drugs.” Safety was understood by me as a young person, as finite: “This was safe, this was not safe.”

But the process of experiencing safeness, which to me is so rooted in a communal kind of love, and in the book is rooted in a communal kind of love that also was of the land, and of these Black women who are, among other things, grandmothers, is a process. I don’t know if it has a beginning or end, but I know these characters are caught in it, and in those moments, in that space of safeness, what's going on in the world in terms of empire, what's going on in that chicken plant, which is absolute terror, what’s going on with the way the environment is necessarily shriveling around these kids, it doesn’t matter. Because they’ve had safeness created for them, and they have stepped into it.

We all do that at different times of the day or the month or the year. I wanted to put pictures and words around that. Not this facile understanding of like, “That’s safety. And that’s not.” Okay, safeness exists out here, but are we encouraging enough opportunities for people, particularly vulnerable people, to feel it? Our obsession with accumulating and destroying makes safeness less likely for everyone. Even the motherfuckers who are pushing the button on destruction, there’s no way you can tell me emotively, intellectually, spiritually, those people are occupying safeness in a way that is healthy for them, either.

As a young person growing up in Mississippi, I’m out here watching it from my grandma’s porch, being like, “Man, this is the end of the world; fucking Donald Trump is destroying the world.” And that absolutely feels true. But I’m watching these little kids in these woods that were once blooming, and they’re shriveling. But they’re still finding ways to play games off in the woods. That’s with all this technology happening in their homes that I didn’t have access to.

I’m trying to remind myself that safeness is something that exists, that we are all worthy of. It doesn’t necessarily have to be created. It has to be accepted. I just wanted to show those kids accepting it without having the words.

What role do you feel like nature plays in that?

Everything. My students write these dystopic stories now. On the other side of that are these utopic stories. But in the middle, Foucault had this idea of heterotopic: these spaces that were neither utopic and neither dystopic. They were these spaces where mirrors were, and they were safe but unsafe. So you were looking at yourself, but also looking at a distortion of yourself. The pleasure gained in these heterotopic spaces was unlike anything you could get in a utopic space or anything you could feel in a dystopic space.

For me, when I think about that, I always think about the woods. That’s why a lot of shit happens in the woods. My grandmama’s garden was an extension of the woods for us. Because I was so short and so small, when you get up in that garden, you can’t see out. You can see beans. You can see sunflowers. You see corn. You can see tomatoes. You can see okra. But you can’t see out.

You could hear a railroad, or you could hear people going by on the road in a car. You could hear somebody on a porch. You could hear somebody walking, but for all intents and purposes it was a place of safeness for a lot of us. It was a place where a lot of kids were experimenting. So much of my shit is believing that we need to create more spaces so Black kids can experiment. If they fail at those experiments—whatever we deem failure—we need to make sure that we do not punish them. Period. We need to educate, not punish.

You’re so devoted to helping other people. Loved ones, as you’ve mentioned. But also fellow writers, in particular the upcoming generation. Why is that important to you?

That's such a great question in this conversation, because I believe that wherever we are in this world, we'd be better if people shared what they have with people who don't have it.

It was hard for me to get anything published partially because the industry didn't believe in my talent, and didn't believe that the people I was writing to would buy the books. Once I got writerly respect and access, I felt like you have to share that. It does come with a price. But that's what it's supposed to come with. If I'm reading four books this week and I’ve got to blurb them, that necessarily means I'm not writing my own stuff. But it also might mean that I'm learning a lot about the craft of whatever I'm doing.

At the end of the day, it's not about do you give to people to get something back. I just think like, if I got 250 pieces of cheese, I don’t really need that many cheeses. Know what I'm saying? I'm cool with having 200 pieces of cheese, and if everybody else out there wants some of the cheese I'm not going to sit on it. No, I'm going to give the cheese away. That's one of the ways we can get out of this mess. But capitalism makes it hard for people to want to share.

You keep referencing capitalism and accumulation but what about bigotry and racism and misogyny? Do you see that as a piece of what's happening? Or do you see it as all one?

Absolutely. 100%. But I can't see capitalism outside of the way that in this country, particularly Black people have had to work disproportionately hard for a smaller piece of what they work for. Black people have been disproportionately punished, disproportionately disciplined. All of the things the Americans say they want, Black people have a disproportionate lack of that shit.

Greed is built on the backs of the vulnerable, and in this country, the vulnerable tend to be, among other people, Black American people, indigenous and native folks, Mexican and Central American folks, Arab people, and Muslim people. It’s never like people are accumulating so much and it helps those groups of people.

The same thing with gender. In my lifetime, women tend to work a lot and hard, and often get a fraction of what I would get for doing the same work.

I've always talked about race and bigotry, but they're all tied together. I can't imagine a capitalism where Black people came out on top. Do you know what I'm saying? Can you imagine a capitalism where Black people are paid fairly? A capitalism where Black people are fairly compensated for centuries of unpaid labor? That would break capitalism. That's what one of the things that needs to happen, for sure.

I agree. Are you hopeful for these young kids coming up today into this world?