![]() ![]() ![]() ![]() The Guardian talked to White, 32, from his home in Oxford, Mississippi, where he completed an MFA. Contrary to dominant narratives about the supposed dysfunction of the “projects”, their care proves the hyperconnectivity of the hood. Neighbors invite him to sleepovers or give him bowls of beef-and-pumpkin stew when his mourning father wanders. When Key loses her battle with cancer, that sets them adrift grief creates its own mini-diasporas. Eviction, school expulsion, job searches and loss, desire to experience life and art, and finally death scatter them. In their own way, each feels stuck yet is moving, often against their will. And indeed dislocation is the norm for the characters in White’s saga of an African American family in New York City. Audrey can see spirits, a sometimes unwelcome ability she passed on to her daughter, Key.īlack women like Audrey have long been the most likely tenants to face eviction in the US. Nineteenth-century ghosts look for freedom. Audrey’s lover parks himself in a chair in her apartment as if he hadn’t left her – or died – long before. A woman in a nightgown watches over her young son outside a Brooklyn strip mall. As the reader travels in time with Audrey, her daughter and her grandson, spirits keep returning or flat-out refuse to leave. But the supernatural jostles with the ordinary in We Are a Haunting, a much-anticipated debut novel from the Mississippi-by-way-of-New York author Tyriek White. Eviction is a quotidian kind of bureaucratic violence. ![]()
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