Morgan Jerkins is the New York Times bestselling author of This Will Be My Undoing: Living at the Intersection of Black, Female, and Feminist in (White) America, which was longlisted for PEN/Diamonstein-Spielvogel Award for the Art of the Essay and a Barnes & Noble Discover Pick, and Wandering In Strange Lands: A Daughter of the Great Migration Reclaims Her Roots, released by HarperCollins in August 2020. Her third book, Caul Baby: A Novel, is forthcoming from Harper Books in April 2021. A former Associate Editor at Catapult, Jerkins has taught at Columbia University's School of the Arts, Bennington College, and Leipzig University. Her short form work has been published in The New Yorker, The New York Times, ELLE, The Atlantic, The Guardian, and Esquire, among many others. She holds a Bachelors of Arts in Comparative Literature from Princeton University and an MFA from the Bennington Writing Seminars. Born and raised in Southern New Jersey, she's now based in Harlem where she's currently developing TV and film projects.
Website: http://www.morgan-jerkins.com/; Twitter: @MorganJerkins; Instagram: _morganjerkins
Namrata Poddar writes fiction, nonfiction, and serves as Interviews Editor for Kweli where she curates a series called Race, Power and Storytelling. Her work has appeared in Longreads, Literary Hub, The Kenyon Review, The Los Angeles Times, Transition, Poets & Writers, Electric Literature, The Progressive, CounterPunch, VIDA Review, The Best Asian Short Stories 2019, and elsewhere. She holds a Ph.D. in French Studies from the University of Pennsylvania, an MFA in Fiction from Bennington Writing Seminars and an Andrew W. Mellon Postdoctoral Fellowship in Transnational Cultures from UCLA. She lives in Huntington Beach, California.
Website: http://www.namratapoddar.com/; Twitter: @poddar_namrata; Instagram: writerpoddar
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NP: Your latest book, Wandering in Strange Lands: A Daughter of the Great Migration Reclaims Her Roots, is a work of creative nonfiction that braids a memoir—individual and communal—with cultural commentary, family lore, oral histories and ethnographic research. What prompted you to begin this project, so different from your debut book of personal essays, This Will Be My Undoing?
MJ: I’ve always been interested in silences—the things we don’t say or the things we say through circumlocution. In my debut, I delved into these silences within myself but I always wanted my body of work to extend beyond my own personal experiences. I knew that my communication—or lack thereof—was through familial conditioning. Since I’ve always been a bit of a history nerd, I wanted to do a more ambitious project where I spoke how my life and my family members’s lives fit into a larger story of American history.
NP: I love how Wandering taps into oral histories of your family and community to re-create a portrait of Black identity, one that is skeptical—and understandably so—of institutionalized knowledge on and documentation of an African America. The book was also released within two years of your bestselling debut, no small feat. What were some of the challenges in finishing this research-intensive book within a short period of time? Did institutionalized documentation or scholarship on the topic ever hinder your process? How did you get past the writerly blocks you faced?
MJ: These are such great questions. One of the biggest hindrances was me. I was so vulnerable in my first book that I was afraid to be that intimate in the next book and because of that, the first few drafts of Wandering were not coming together. I tried to write the book without myself or my family’s inclusion, and as you can imagine, the earliest iterations were distant and disconnected. So it was a lot of soothing from my agent and editors to help me get back to that deep place again. But as far as research processes go, it wasn’t as hard per se because I had money from my book deal to not only pay for travel and accommodations, but also a freelance transcriptionist to help transcribe hundreds of pages worth of detail in record speed. Now granted, the roadblocks to documentation were hard because I was going to communities where oral history and written fact could not have been more divergent. But instead of trying to slam a car against a wall, so to speak, I decided to reveal these impasses to the reader as larger commentaries on African-American histories and how our histories and ways of being are devalued in this country. I got past these blocks through much comfort from loved ones, more readings and interviews with historians and community activists, and even some crying, I’ll admit.
NP: In a former academic life, I spent years researching and writing about creole cultures of the Indian Ocean and Caribbean islands—a big influence on my own creative work too, especially since I was raised in the multiethnic, multilingual island-city of Mumbai. When compared with creolized tropical islands, I’m often struck, like your narrator, by how erased Creole identity is in North American conversations on race, migration and multiculturalism, more so when it offers a way out of easy racial binaries. When writing of a Creole identity of the United States via your personal story, was the other Creole America that is geographically close to us—the Caribbean—ever a lens of comparison? Or was its omission in your book a conscious choice?
MJ: Its omission was definitely a conscious choice. Creoleness in the Caribbean is something that I only have scant knowledge of. It’s so vast and diverse. It reminds me of how when I was reading Guadeloupean and Martinican literature, I learned about so many different categorizations of those who have African blood, beyond 1/16th. I left it out because it’s not my story to tell. But maybe someday it will be, as one of my earliest ancestors that I can trace was born in Saint Lucia.
NP: In much of contemporary immigrant literature by writers of color, the notion of “roots” has been demystified. As an American writer who comes from a South Asian desert community with centuries of migration built within our history, I know any effort of mine to retrace my roots will be a journey full of gaps, thanks to a white colonial rule and its erasure of our history at multiple levels. In your book, I relate deeply to the narrator’s struggle with this ever-elusive reconstruction of one’s communal history and identity. Yet the book’s title asserts the claiming of one’s roots, a paradox as I understand it. Can you talk a little more on your book’s relationship to the idea of roots and diasporic identity?
MJ: Well the thing about roots as an African-American is that they extend long and wide. I’m still discovering cousins in places that I never knew my ancestors even ventured. And yet so much is unknown. The title, “Wandering in Strange Lands,” is taken from a poem by a fellow Creole named Arna Bontemps, a noted member of the Harlem Renaissance too. The poem is called “Nocturne at Bethesda” and it speaks of loss. I may never be able to fully recreate my family’s past due to colonization and erasure, as you mentioned, but I can recover something. I know my diasporic identity is ever-expansive even if I can’t find all the strands. But I also speak of reclamation because I did make some sort of recovery of my ethnic identities on American soil, those I was not privy to at the start of the journey.
NP: From voodoo, hoodoo and soul food to free people of color, Creoles and indigenous Blacks across the United States, from real estate and gentrification to police brutality, Los Angeles gangs and riots, Wandering is vast in scope as it continues to unpack the dynamism of Black identity. If you had to pick one idea to share with our readers as the heart of the book, what would you say?
MJ: I would say that America still needs to reckon with how much it has done to devastate African-American lives, histories, and communities —and yet, despite all of these attempts, we are still cosmically and spiritually connected to each other irrespective of time and distance.
NP: What are you currently working on?
MJ: I’m working on my fourth book. It’s historical fiction which is definitely another kind of ambitious project, one I actually never saw myself doing. But I’m really excited where the past will lead me.
