Being invited to interview a writer that one admires is so rewarding, and I’m thrilled that I got the chance to speak with Zinzi Clemmons about her new book Freedom: Essays. We need Clemmons’s voice. We need her critique. It was a pleasure to be present with her, watching her think from moment to moment as she carefully considered her answers to my questions. An intellectual who is as fierce as she is sensitive, Clemmons has major literary guts. She also has the power to inspire.
*
Myriam Gurba: Freedom: Essays is an elegant collection narrated with brilliantly cool restraint. How would you describe its sensibility?
Zinzi Clemmons: ‘J’accuse’ is the book’s spirit. Freedom is an indictment of systems, institutions, and people who have failed women, Black people, the young, the poor, and me. When I wrote my first novel, What We Lose, I hadn’t yet reckoned with much of the ugliness endemic to publishing. Freedom is different. I didn’t have to worry about selling it and that let me be confrontational. I love polemical rage, and I have the time for it. While writing Freedom, I was reading Riot Inside Me: More Trials and Tremors, an essay collection by Wanda Colemen. She’s an artist of rage, which I love, though that’s not the way that I write. Grief animates Freedom. In several essays, I return to the death of my mom, an experience fictionalized by What We Lose. That loss hangs over much of what I’ve written. I also tend to be very analytic and my anger and frustration go there. As a writer, I’m always trying to get to the root of an injury. I want to know and understand what wounds.
