It’s funny but it’s not the same kind of funny.īlack people have had to deal with shit for years and years and years, and have had to find ways to cope. So that’s where the Mal/Nella relationship is-I wanted to have that organic, jokey relationship because Nella’s job is so . . . I definitely pulled from the jokes I’ve made with my Black friends that haven’t made it into my conversations with white people present, and not on purpose, you know? This is just me code switching, plain and simple. Anybody I’ve spoken to in these environments. I heard conversations I’ve had with other Black folks, with you . . . All of the conversations between Nella and Malaika happened in my head. In one spot, Malaika says, “ Leave it to one of the only white people at this event to show up on CP Time.” How important was it for you to have humor in a story like this? ZDH There are moments when I lost my spot on a page because I’d been laughing. I really appreciate that because I wrote this for us. It spoke to my soul and the soul of the book that reminded me that it’s more than just me now. I got a really amazing letter from a bookseller-a Black woman-who works at a bookstore in California. You know this as a writer, too: when you’re so deep into something, stepping back is so hard. of who we’ve promised ourselves to be but have yet to become. The Other Black Girl does this while leaving room for readers to walk the line of curiosity: curiosity in the boundaries of fiction, in the bond between realism and surrealism, and in the possibility that maybe we’re all walking shells of ourselves . . . Using humor, irony, and the art of the “slow burn,” Harris builds tension not only in Nella’s career and relationships but also in our own expectations as readers, tensions between who we want Nella to become and the reality presented to us-a reality that reaches beyond fiction to race relations in this country and gender inequality in the workplace. Nella’s sense of the person she believes herself to be, and of the person she perceives Hazel to be, begins to unravel. Nella is the only Black employee at the prestigious Manhattan publishing house Wagner Books-that is, until she meets a new Black employee named Hazel. What happens when your understanding of a person does the same thing? As the lines between physical reflections and self-reflection begin to blur, opening us up to new possibilities and new tensions, we can find ourselves in a place similar to that of protagonist Nella Rogers in The Other Black Girl by Zakiya Dalila Harris. An Interview with Zakiya Dalila Harris, by Randy WinstonĪ mirror can, from time to time, reveal more to us than we bargain for.
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