In part one of the book Heavy, there is a section called Be. In this section Laymon encounters a Mumford boy. The boy offers Kiese to shoot squirrels with him but Kiese tells him how he’s not allowed to shoot. After Kiese told his grandma about what the Mumford boy had told him she said to him “These white folk, they liable to have us locked up under the jail Kie.”(Laymon 52). This is a significant part in the book because his grandma explains the power of the Mumford’s and other people like them. This helps Kiese understand what place he’s in and how he could be seen by these people which is nothing more than a threat. He leads on by talking about stealing their food and he has to be reminded of why he can’t do that. This part of the section caught my eye because it was the first piece of writing I had read by Laymon in the beginning of the year which gravitated me towards reading Heavy.
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Class 19
We’ll start class with a freewrite–an actually free one–in which you review your notes on today’s pages. Some guiding questions: What passages are still interesting to you after Tuesday’s work? What did the replies you posted generate in terms of new questions and reactions? What’s proving true about your reading experience based on what you thought you might have when you picked the book? About book clubs? In short, where do you want to start today in your book clubs? Write until 9:45.
After you talk in groups for a while, we’ll approach two topics in mini-lessons. One is using personal experience as evidence. The other is something I call “thinking in circles.” It’s something some of you are doing naturally, and that all of us will do as we start moving slowly towards Essay 4 and the portfolio.
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Like I said in class Tuesday. I do want to introduce a little “series” of lessons we’ll run for the balance of book clubs. One is about “the basics” of blog posts and how we can use some “features” of that genre to focus our ideas more. Those features are the ones I use to see if your posts are “complete”: title, tags, images/links, quotes, and citations. We started this Tuesday with titles (THANKS ROSALIO!)
Now for a little “next step” lesson. These, again, will be a secret series of little lectures that will run through book clubs, and they’ll basically be about ways to take blog posts and other informal genres of writing to the next level up. (Note: there are a ton of levels.) Today we’ll be talking about using personal experience in an academic essay. I’m sure this is a topic that will come up again.
Here are the instructions for a thing I had to write. (I’m getting a PhD in English, blah).
I go on for about a page or so–you can read the whole thing here if you’re so inclined–before dropping in the personal experience.
Note that this paragraph functions the same way an argumentative paragraph normally does. There’s a claim at the outset — “knowing” is suspicious to me, which you’d think wouldn’t the case for a “scholar.” But it is, because of a range of personal experience all related to disability, embodiment, etc. That evidence is organized using patterns (all those parentheses). Then, the key term — “knowing” — appears again (with italics just for overkill). The reputable source of another more senior scholar in a relevant field (in this case, disability studies) is cited and quoted. Audience gets engaged (prodded, really) with the “we?” and then a very different source, a postmodernist creative writer, is cited defining the very act I’m engaged in from a non-scholarly point of view. So by the numbers, we have one key term mentioned at the beginning, middle, and end; a single personal example in three parts; and two quotes from divergent sources developing that idea. The “I” is present at the outset and the end; importantly (“now”) there is a change over time. That’s crucial for any evidence you want to prove using story.
The Reality
““This that black abundance. Y’all don’t even know.” (Laymon 66) In this section of Heavy by Kiese Laymon called “Black Abundance” we learn about the journey of eighth grade in a new catholic school where the majority of the students were white with his friend LaThon.
Throughout this section we follow Laymon as he begins to realize a lot more things. For instance, in this school he begins to date a white girl named Abby, to which Laymon’s mom, grandma, and even some friends do not agree with. Not to mention the family of Abby. This section, we gain insight and learn about the interracial relationship Laymon has. We realize some hardships and differences there are between the two especially when Laymon realizes that the reality is that Abby might never understand what he feels when he sees the police brutality against men like him. To add on, Laymon begins to also realize the reality of what his mother has been telling him the whole time how the white folks will never want to see them win, especially when we begins to see that the police in Mississippi begins to follow him a lot more.
Am I a sellout?
When going to a new school which is predominately white Kiese and some of his friends from Jackson go through multiple struggles. Its at this school where Kiese gets his first girlfriend who was a white girl named Abby Claremont. Their relationship was one that was not approved by either his or her family and friends. Kiese’s friend Lathon called him a “sellout” and a “sucker” for dating a white girl. And Abby’s parents did not approve their daughter dating a black boy. What I find interesting is that I believe Kiese knows deep down that their relationship will end badly however, he still wants to be with her since she is his first girlfriend. He knows this because he even stated on page 103 that since the time he started dating her he has become a liar, a cheater, and a manipulator.
Kiese is afraid of ending things with Abby because she claims she loves him. That is a feeling Kiese has desperately wanted in his life. The feeling of being loved by someone other than his mother or grandmother. Kiese’s mother however, tells Kiese the truth about Abby. That being that she does not truly love him but she loves the feeling of dating a black boy and making her parents angry. Kiese continues to see Abby without telling his mom but even he begins to see the cultural differences. This being when Kiese saw on the news a black man being beat up by white officers. Kiese did not want to open up to Abby because he knew she would not be able to feel what he felt.
Class 18
Hi all–I’m excited to get you talking about your books. There were some great blog posts today and I don’t want to spend too long at the top of class doing anything other than getting you going.
Overall, you’re all doing a great job drawing out big issues:
- mental health
- police violence
- racism in/and interracial relationships
- the long tail of colonial violence and control
- the adolescent experience to this age of changing schools/social environments
So much is enmeshed in these texts and you guys do a great job addressing these from different angels . There are also big questions about care here from a few different angles. We see these care questions in Diaz, who weaves the Baby Lollipops story with the relationship between Diaz and her mother, between Diaz and the much older Chris, and between Diaz and her mostly absent father.
Laymon and Talusan also engage this idea of what care means, as often in social contexts with his peers as in family contexts with his mother. Rosalio’s blog about Jabari is a great example of that. And of course in Fairest, Meredith Talusan has to reorient herself to a new country and a new culture, namely the elite campus of Harvard. Reading Fairest alongside Laymon and Diaz, it’s easy to wonder if Nanay Coro’s hope for the US as a place where life was “better” is misplaced.
Nature vs Nurture
“I picked up the bag and without taking my eyes off my father, said, “I will never forgive you.” Then I packed some of our clothes and schoolbooks and walked out.” (Diaz, pg. 103)
The second section of our reading deals a lot with the sheer instability that came with the family beginning to break apart. With Papi having finally left Mami, and living separately, Mami fell into the beginnings of schizophrenia and began to lose her mind. She became addicted to hard drugs herself and was homeless a lot of the time. She would even taken Jaquira and Anthony with her to live in dangerous neighborhoods in extremely unstable housing, and would lash out and attack anyone who dared challenge her, but particularly her own kids.
Her father and grandmother simply watched. Her father simply passively encouraged the kids to take the pain and try to avoid “awaking the monster” so to speak, instead of taking responsibility for his kids and making sure their mother stayed the hell away. Their grandmother was simply too old to be able to fight back against Mami, and could only watch the abuse happen right before her eyes.
The instability in this environment can lead to the children themselves eventually developing mental illness. Diaz herself remarks this on page 96 – that mental illness runs in her family and this sort of behavior could potentially be her one day. She simply tried her best to just survive the torrent of rage from her mother. I think this particular comment brings up a very useful discussion. The cycle of abuse, the cycle of mental illness – how much of a child’s future is determined by nature vs nurture? What do you think?
My own family struggles with a cyclical line of mental illness / neurodiversity. On my mother’s side, bipolar I runs heavily and I am extremely lucky to have avoided it, as it is so strong that my own family has dealt with psychotic episodes and hospitalizations. I grew up surrounded by this instability, and just like Diaz I knew it could one day be me but I tried my best to avoid it as much as possible, to minimize my exposure, and to hide away as best I could. I didn’t come out perfect, but I think I managed alright – I will definitely need to think over and examine my childhood for the rest of my life. I’ll have to examine little bits of behavior here and there that I might have thought normal but in actuality were just elements of my family’s own illnesses. What can I do to prevent this from ever happening again, should I adopt kids? Diaz herself states that she has no idea whether her mother’s mental illness was caused by her mother’s collective trauma throughout her life, or whether it was simply lying dormant in her genetics. We can clearly see that up to this point she was quite unstable before. The answer will never be clear and it is just something Diaz will have to watch for the rest of her life.
I think Jaquira is very strong and lucky to have survived this environment and come out on top as a successful writer in a loving, healthy relationship. She is an example of a success story of having broken the cycle. I hope to maybe do my own research and see if she has written anything about her recovery process later in her life beyond the documentation of her childhood, adolescence, and young adulthood, and see what I can learn from that.
Díaz Jaquira. (2019). Ordinary girls: A memoir. Algonquin Books of Chapel Hill.
Unspoken reality
In the second section of heavy “black abundance” we follow an older version of laymon who seems to understand the cruel world he lives in a bit more. This Section continues to elaborate on heavy topics previously discussed in the book as well as new ones.
I think laymons view on the world has become a lot a larger in this section. He states “no one ever taught me to write to or for my people.”( P 98) Although he was referring to writing this quote is much deeper than it may seem. He is stating that he was never taught to have a voice to speak up on issues people of color went through and in ways to empower the people dealing with those struggles. Not only that, but “no one taught me” goes along with a lot of the section. This is reinforced when he states, “they never said the words: ‘economic inequality,’ ‘housing discrimination,’ ‘sexual violence.’ ‘Mass incarceration,’ ‘homophobia,’ ‘empire,’ ‘mass eviction,’ ‘post-traumatic stress disorder,’ ‘white supremacy,’ ‘patriarchy,’ ‘neo-confederacy,’ ‘mental health,’ or ‘parental abuse’ yet every student and teacher at the school lived in a world shaped by those words.” (p114) Since he has constantly lived thought this and is now older he slowly becoming more aware of it and becoming angry, unfortunately at this point of the book he is punishing himself over this. This also goes back to wanting to write a lie, since the world was ignoring all these problems and not putting this labels to them, it would have been much easier for him to do the same.
Laymon, Kiese. (2018). Heavy. New York, NY: Scribne
Heavy: Identity & Social Expectations
In the second part of the book, black abundance, readers can see Laymon’s character development. We see his development as a writer when he began to use writing as a way to make sense of his life and what is going on around him. As he is revising, he is forced to sit down and reflect on those events.
Laymon is constantly surrounded by social expectations. As a black person in a predominately white private school, teachers and students expected him to be dumb. Laymon and his black friends would play into this by making up contractions and purposely saying them out loud. Laymon also faces social expectations as a black man to date a black girl instead of a white girl. His relationship with Abby Claremont was disapproved on both sides of the family and most likely race. It was interesting to see that Laymon was called a “sellout” by his friend as if his race was defined by who he dates and how he acts. Similarly, Taulsan also struggles with her social expectations as a male. As mentioned in Kevin’s Post on gender expectations, Taulsan was expected to be masculine. Hence, she would work out in the gym to have that idealized muscular body shape. Both Laymon and Taulsan tried to follow their social expectations but they are miserable as a result.
Grits
“When I saw your face so close to his gun, I wanted to snatch it and melt it into black grits. Ever since police started approaching me more often in Mississippi, I wanted the power to melt every gun in the world into black grits.” (Heavy, Kiese Laymon p. 81)
In this second section of the memoir Heavy, Kiese Laymon details his experience with Maryland police while he and his mother were there for a basketball game. Immediately after getting pulled over, Laymon recalls his mother demanding him to comply with the police and give them no room to have reason to cause any harm. When the officer kneels down, Laymon is not only fear stricken, but angered as well because of how close the gun is to his mother’s face. He’s had an increasing number of run-ins with police, most likely due to the suspicion surrounding tall, husky, black men. But he also knows from his teachings that any wrong move can be justification for some officers to shoot, which is why he wishes to have the power to turn all guns into disintegrated black grits so that they no longer have the power to kill or inflict harm onto black bodies.
Police brutality is a major issue on the forefront of the nation especially in more recent years, with more media coverage being given to the black lives matter movement which began to protest the use of unnecessary force against black people in America. Failure to comply with law enforcement, or in some cases, even complying with law enforcement can still result in being a victim of police brutality as those in power often abuse their power and privilege. Due to this problem, Black Americans are taught from a young age to proceed with extreme caution, and always make their intentions clear when dealing with law enforcement, as even just the slightest moves can truly mean the difference between life or death.
Rough Transition To A New School
Kiese Laymon narrates his experience of becoming a new eighth grade student at St. Richard Catholic School in his hometown of Jackson, MS. The classrooms in his new school were filled predominantly with white students/teachers, unlike his old school. This change of environment brought many challenges and obstacles that affected Kiese Laymon and his former classmates. Initially I was expecting Kiese Laymon to write about the common difficulties any middle schooler would experience when transferring to a new school. This would include writing about how much the new school isn’t the same, making new friends, etc. Which is something Laymon wrote about to a certain extent at the beginning of “Meager”. Similarly I found the conversation/thoughts shared among Kiese Laymon and Ms.Stockard relating to Jabari very interesting. Ms.Stockard approached Laymon with a growing concern for his friend Jabari’s well being. Admitting that several students and teachers were “bothered with his odor and grossed out” (page-74) . Kiese and Lathon were both highly encouraged to speak with him regarding improving his personal hygiene. Kiese later elaborated that his friend has always “stank and how the death of his mother affected the scent in his home”(pg-75). Laymon took into consideration how much being accepted by his white peers meant to Jabari and decided to hide this from him. Laymon added if someone smelt bad it would normally be laughed about and controlled (pg-75). Ultimately demonstrating how ignorant individuals can be and gave perspective on how a concept as simple as bad hygiene can be perceived differently.
