Who Gets the Privilege of Grieving?: An Interview with Sara Koffi about “While We Were Burning” https://ift.tt/xWKf3YC
With true-to-life, hair-raising plot twists that persist through the final pages, Sara Koffi’s debut novel While We Were Burning explores the chasm of lawlessness that opens when justice is withheld, swallowing lives and livelihoods and exposing the systems perpetuating disparity.
Elizabeth Smith is blindsided when the closest person she has to a friend is found hanging from a streetlamp in their affluent Memphis neighborhood of Harbor Town. Unable to accept the ruling of a suicide, she begins a frantic search to uncover the truth, leading her into a mental health crisis and her husband’s insistence she hires help.
What she doesn’t know is that her new assistant isn’t there by chance.
After the death of her Black son at the hands of police, Brianna Thompson has embarked on her own search for answers, which are locked inside the confines of Harbor Town. Elizabeth is her key.
Written with striking prose and often gut-wrenching tragedy in the wake of the brutal murder of George Floyd — and others — in 2020, While We Were Burning brings to life the chilling realities of racism, classism and ableism, at its core asking who gets the privilege of grieving?
Sara Koffi is a writer and editor from Memphis, Tennessee, with a BA in English from Whittier College. As a writer, she strives to explore the nuances of “unlikable” female characters and humanize Black women by giving them space on the page to breathe. While We Were Burning is her debut novel.
We spoke via video in March.
You have a beautiful letter to the reader that shares the backdrop from which While We Were Burning took shape. “I was so sick with grief for the state of our country, for the state of the world, that I felt like if I held it all in I was going to become someone entirely different. Someone with rougher edges. Someone with a closed-off heart.” Do you feel like you were able to avoid this?
I think so. Writing this book was very therapeutic, in a way. Through the process of writing it and having beta readers, realizing I wasn’t alone, that led to connection. I feel like in general, writing from that angry, more desperate place, I won’t say it was frowned upon, but I wrote this because I was frustrated. It led to deeper connections with people, and I’m going to assume a better connection with readers.
In many ways, “someone with rougher edges… a closed-off heart” is who Brianna becomes.
Unfortunately, that’s absolutely right. Through her arc, she ends up becoming bitter and more closed off. What I think is interesting is that it depends on who I ask how they feel about the ending. I’ve had some readers who loved it, and there’s other readers who found it sad.
I would hope for the ending that people feel a sense of justice, in a weird way. It’s not restorative justice — that could never happen in this case — but I feel that the world has been righted in some way for this character. The entertainment factor is more important than the likable factor. I think people enjoy reading messy books and messy situations.
Elizabeth in particular embodies the practice of many “good white folks,” who try to separate themselves from white supremacy and the “bad” white folks, in some sort of “not all white people” movement. She outwardly distances herself from Patricia, turns down the Neighborhood Watch, and verbally recognizes that calling the cops on a Black person is deadly, yet she does it — and doesn’t even give her own name.
You write, “They were powerful in their absolute ignorance, in their absolute refusal to place themselves as part of The Problem.”
During 2020 there was this viral video of this Black man who had spray painted or written in chalk on the sidewalk “Black Lives Matter,” and he had this white woman come up to him and say that she didn’t think he should be writing on the sidewalk because this is vandalism, and she tells him that the owner won’t like it. It turns out he owns the house. Come to find out this is a very liberal woman, yet she had taken time out of her day to do this racist thing. This is a woman who truly thinks she is not racist. It was Martin Luther King, Jr. who basically says the moderate whites are the most dangerous. It’s so much harder to gauge where moderate white people stand.
You capture the convoluted ways racism appears in our lives, and also the disparate manners in which excuses are made for certain people — white boys who shoot up a high school are “mentally ill” while Black youth are charged as adults at exponentially higher rates, which you also exemplify in the novel with Brianna and Vera reading an article that refers to a Black teenage boy as a man. Do you have concerns that this will be missed by readers?
The main purpose of having other stories going on like with the teenager was to give readers a taste of what it means to be Black sometimes. Vera and Brianna are out having a good time and there’s this article that has racist leanings. It’s so normalized as part of your day as a Black person, just living your life and you see this awful thing happen to another Black person and then you have to go back to your regular life.
There was a great deal of complexity to the relationship between Elizabeth and Brianna. At the root, there’s an affluent white woman experiencing a mental health crisis following a distant loss, and she hires a Black woman grieving in the wake of her own son’s death. On one hand, I want to cheer that mental health gets attention for its disabling nature, but it also exposes the distinct ways it’s awarded (even accounting for Brianna’s ulterior motives). What were some of your thoughts as you were bringing this into the story?
The idea is that Elizabeth is having the mental health issues — which are valid, and should be treated — but the way she’s coddled and has all the support and is able to afford really good therapy and have medication and get support, and then Brianna is grieving but has no support and there is no coddling. It’s just, sorry for your loss, get back to work. She has chosen anger instead of grief.
I was trying to imply that, too, because you can see Briana’s anger escalate. She’s not processing her emotions in a healthy way, but she doesn’t have the opportunity to do that. Sometimes when you’re doing extrajudicial things, you make a mistake. What we want to imagine is a world where the system of justice we have is working and people don’t feel like they’re taking it into their own hands.
Race is at the heart of this novel, but really it’s a question of humanity and a lack of justice and who gets to carry out that justice — Patricia’s name goes on a building while Jay’s death is unmentioned.
That’s really intentional. Two people are wrongly killed but are mostly silent. You don’t hear much about them, but both their deaths get treated differently. I like to imagine Black women are going to read these books, and I don’t feel it’s worth it to re-traumatize readers, because they can imagine it, I don’t feel it’s necessary to get into the details.
So many white folks jumped into “social justice” in 2020, and by 2024 that’s largely petered out. Is your hope for While We Were Burning to show that liberation is just as needed now as ever?
My big hope for this book is that it inspires empathy in a lot of people that do not share Brianna’s identity or experience. People are already moving on, DEI is dead, we’re over it. And for people who do share Brianna’s identity I hope it inspires this aspect of being seen. If we’re being real, the interest in Black authors and Black spaces peaks and valleys. There are times when people are more interested, and we’re going back into a time where it’s plummeting. But that comes with being marginalized.
Connect with Sara Koffi and her upcoming events at her website: www.sarakoffi.com
FICTION While We Were Burning
By Sara Koffi
G.P. Putnam’s Sons
Published April 16, 2024
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