Here is a quick description and cover image of book What We Lose written by Zinzi Clemmons which was published in. If you decide to check out the book, we hope you’ll do so via this Amazon affiliate link, where if you choose to purchase DIY MFA makes a small commission at no cost to you.Brief Summary of Book: What We Lose by Zinzi Clemmons The breadth and skill Zinzi Clemmons demonstrates in this slim, penetrating novel-praised by early readers from John Edgar Wideman, to Angela Flournoy, to Alexandra Kleeman-establish her as a writer to watch. The meditations in What We Lose are deeply felt, not least because its themes are informed by the author’s personal experiences. In this way What We Lose confronts the horrors and the legacy of Apartheid, and the tyranny of race in the personal and political realms.

The primary sources create intimate and sprawling connections between the reader, Thandi, and the novel’s larger questions: about the construct of race, injustice within social systems, the durability of love, and the ability to overcome grief. She falls in love and fashions an unexpected new family for herself, only to find herself uncomfortable in it-an interloper again-and still deeply disoriented by the loss of her mother.Ĭlemmons intersperses the narrative with photography, text messages, excerpts from blogs and newspaper articles the effect is by turns playful and haunting. After her mother’s death, Thandi struggles to anchor herself to a self-image and to relationships that seem increasingly tenuous to her. Her mother, a pillar of strength in their family, becomes ill while Thandi is at college, and eventually Thandi leaves school to care for her. my precarious homeland.” “Because of my light skin and foreign roots,” Clemmons writes, “I was never fully accepted by any race.” This feeling, of being detached from a tribe, the loneliness of a perpetual outsider, follows her throughout her life. Thandi is raised by her South African mother, yet in Thandi’s daily life she is immersed in the culture of “American Blacks. Told in visceral vignettes that draw from autofiction, online media, and encyclopedia, What We Lose is a thoughtful, poignant debut from a promising new voice.Īt the beginning of the novel we meet Thandi, a second generation South African American of mixed race growing up in the Philadelphia suburbs. Zinzi Clemmons’ What We Lose is a powerful and innovative debut novel that questions the nature of identity, grief, and love through the eyes of a young woman who loses her mother to cancer.

What we lose zinzi