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ruta_reads 's review for:
Heavy
by Kiese Laymon
" I am here today because of people who saw me in spite of what I saw in me"
I've never loved a book more than this one. I was immediately captivated by its dark exterior and interesting title "heavy." The title is such a perfect encmapslualltion of this books, after reading it should bring out the collective heaviness of our society. It's sometimes very difficult to read books that are so descriptive and contending parts that are really hard to read, but that's perceicly why I love this book so much, it depends the reader to sit with the cucomporable aspects of our nation's history and our part in continuing its legacy of racism, white supremacy, heternomativity, and sexism. After reading this I didn't feel light, I felt comfortable though. Like a weighted blanket that holds a person down,grounding me and remainding me of the necessity of being conscious of ourselves and our history.
Here are my favorite quotes:
Page 111: I understood for the first time that day how Coach Schitzler, just like most of the grown black men I knew, wanted to set people's brains on fire before situating himself as the only one who could calm the blaze.He wanted us to praise him for his tough love, which was really a way of encouraging students to thank him for not hurting us as much as he could.
But the problem is you hurting yourself by trying to let folk know they hurt you.
But I felt like we spent much of our time teaching them tov to respect where we'd been, and they spent much of their time punishing us for teaching them how we deserved to be treated.
Many wrote for us, without writing to us. After reading Bam-bara, I wondered for the first time how great an American sentence, paragraph, or book could be if it wasn't, at least par-tially, written to and for black Americans in the Deep South.
"You act like the dude carried his own sunset, Gunn."
I knew the power to abuse destroyed the interiors of men as much as it destroyed the interiors and exteriors of women.
Reckon or not, the white women in women's studies class treated me like I was the most liberated of good dudes.
He wanted to run it with the subhead "Voice of the Oppressed." I never used the word "oppressed" and had no idea what an oppressed voice actually sounded like. The editor told me I needed to make the ending of the piece much more color-blind. He said I would lose readers if I kept the focus of the essay on what black students at Millsaps could do to organize, love each other, and navigate institutional racism.
I knew Nola would think almost telling white folk in Mississippi the truth in their paper was as close to winning as black folk could come.
"Watch your back, Kie... Lock your doors. Walk in groups. Strive for per-fection. Edit your work. Something feels off. Are you worried about those people shooting you out of the sky?"
Reading things more than twice was the reader version of revision.
Mostly, I wondered what black writers werent writing when we spent so much creative energy begging white folk to change.
Any real change implies the breakup of the world as one has always known it, the loss of all that gave one an identity, the end of safety.
Nothing, other than losing weight, felt as good as provoking and really titillating white folk with black words.
I was targeted, but I felt strangely happy and free.
This wasn't the first, second, third, or fourth time I let her punch me in my face. Almost every time she did it, I'd said something about her stepmother. I knew it was coming. I hoped it would come. I thought I deserved it.
I'd fallen in love with provoking white folk, which really meant I'd fallen in love with begging white folk to free us by demanding that they radically love themselves more.
Their stories were as differently shaped as they were, but they all agreed contracting HIV saved their lives. The first few times I heard this, I nodded and even said "I hear that," but I never fully understood how something so seemingly full of death could actually save a life.
I didn't tell him the skinnier my body got, the more it knew what was going to happen, just as much as it remembered where it had been.
Folk always assumed black women would recover but never really cared if black women recovered.
Thanking Jesus for getting us through situations we should have never been in was one of our family's superpowers.
She told me no part of the world stops changing just because you leave it.
The worst kinds of teachers be the teachers that teach other folk how to be like them.
I got off my knees and asked God to help y'all confront the memories you were running from. I asked God to help all of y'all lose your weight. I planned to do everything I could not to give my blessings away and provide for y'all. The first thing I had to do was sprint down to the gym before it closed.
I wanted to know exactly how much I weighed so I could decide if it was okay for me to eat or drink before going to bed.
I lied a lot and kept the personal surrounding my professional life a secret.
You told me to learn from my mistakes and understand that pain awaited any worker in this country who made a home of their job .
For the first time in my life, I experienced not having the most fear-provoking body in a contained American space.
I wondered, for the first time in my life, what being an American, not just a black American from Mississippi, really demanded of my insides, and what the consequences were for not meeting that demand in the world.
You claimed that weakened bodies and weakened imaginations made us easier prey for white supremacy. I didn't disagree with you but I never knocked my friends' side hustles. All I ever said was,
"The longer you slang, the higher the likelihood white folk gone hem you up."
By my third semester at Vassar, I learned it was fashionable to call Cole's predicament "privilege" and not "power." I had the privilege of being raised by you and a grandmama who responsibly loved me in the blackest, most creative state in the nation. Cole had the power to never be poor and never be a felon, the power to always have his failures treated as success no matter how mediocre he was. Cole's power necessitated he literally was too white, too masculine, too rich to fail. George Bush was president because of Cole's power.
If I was doing my job, I had to find a way to love the wealthy white boys I taught with the same integrity with which I loved my black students, even if the constitution of that love dif-fered.
This was new to me, but it was old black work, and this old black work, in ways you warned me about, was more than selling out; this old black work was morally side hustling backward.
I thought about how even when we weren't involved in selling drugs, big, dark folks like us could be used to shield white folk from responsibility.
I told him that I knew well what transformative justice was, and asked again how anything transformative could be happening in this room if it's predicated on us believing a big black dude made the small, smart white boy buy cocaine.
But I wasn't sure how fair it was to practice transformative justice on the cisgendered, hetero-sexual, white, rich male body of someone who'd been granted transformative justice since birth.
and accepted no matter how much weight I lost, small, smart white boys would always have the power to make big black boys force them into buying our last kilos of cocaine. Then some of us would watch them watch us watch them walk free after getting caught. And some of us, if we were extra lucky, would get to teach these small, smart, addicted white boys and girls today so we could pay for our ailing grandmamas' dental care tomorrow.
Seat belts:
The heaviest version of my body was past tense. My current body was present tense.
There was no limit to how light I could be, and I knew I needed to live in the future.
What I saw of my father that day didn't make me miss the father who was rarely present in my childhood, but it made me feel the beautiful black boy you fell in love with. It reaffirmed my belief that you needed a loving partner in our home far more than I needed a present father. I realized you and my father had broken and you'd never tell anyone about the depth of the breaks.
I sat on the floor knowing my body broke because I carried and created secrets that were way too heavy.
Like nearly everyone else at the gym, I wasn't in the gym
looked and felt.
to be healthy, I was in the gym to feel in control of how fat i My body knew that my weight, the exact number, became an emotional, psychological, and spiritual destination a long time ago. I knew, and worried, about how much I weighed and exactly how much money I had every day of my life since I was eleven years old. The weight reminded me of how much I'd eaten, how much I'd starved, how much I'd exercised, and how much I sat still yesterday. My body knew I was no more liberated or free when I was 159 pounds with 2 percent body fat than I was at 319 pounds with achy joints. I loved the rush of pushing my body beyond places it never wanted to go, but I was addicted to controlling the number on that scale. Controlling that number on the scale, more than writing a story or essay or feeling loved or making money or having sex, made me feel less gross, and most abundant. Losing weight helped me forget.
What, and to whom, were my partners consenting if I spent our entire relationship convincing them that a circle was not a circle but just a really relaxed square?
I would leave that meeting knowing that there are few things more shameful than being treated like a nigger by—and under the gaze of-intellectually and imaginatively average white Americans who are not, and will never have to be, half as good at their jobs as you are at yours.
I will understand that I am vulnerable but I am not power-less. I am not powerless because, though we have no wealth, we have peculiar access to something resembling black power.
Either way, I am supposed to be happy because I am free, because I am not in handcuffs, because I have peculiar access to something resembling black power. I will know that I am not free precisely because I am happy that my wrists are free of handcuffs the month I earn tenure with distinction from Vassar College.
Promises:
"I'm here because I'm sad, lonely, and addicted to losing," is a sentence never shared between casino friends.
I kept coming back to the casino because I felt emptier and heavier when I lost than when I won.
She said our choices have to be more than traumatizing each other at home or driving two hours to be traumatized and broke.
To blame you, I'd have to admit to you how sad I was and how much I failed.
I lied to you, sometimes because I did not know how to tell you the truth, sometimes because I did not understand the truth, other times because I did not think you could hold the truth. Every time I lied, I wanted to control you, control your memory of us, control your vision of me.
You've got to be much more careful. White folk do not deserve to stick their nasty hands into our raw. Hiding from them and being excellent are actually the only ways for us to survive here."
"I just think sometimes we don't do the best we could have done, and it's impossible to know that if we're scared to remember where we've been, and what we actually did.
I wonder if a part of me wants to hold on to the possibility of hiding, running, and harming myself. I cannot do that if I have a child.
Bend:
"I was just trying to put y'all where I been," she will say.
"I am just trying to put y'all where I bend," I will hear.
I wrote this book to you because, even though we harmed each other as American parents and children tend to do, you did everything you could to make sure the nation and our state did not harm their most vulnerable children.
I finally understand revision, rereading, compassion, home training, imagination, and a love of black children are the greatest gifts any American can share with any child in this nation.
I am working on that, and I finally understand there can be no liberation when our most intimate relationships are built on—and really inflected by-deception, abuse, misdirection, antiblackness, patriarchy, and bald-faced lies.
We will share. We will remember, imagine, and help create what we cannot find.
Or, it is possible we will not remember.
We will not imagine.
We will not share.
I've never loved a book more than this one. I was immediately captivated by its dark exterior and interesting title "heavy." The title is such a perfect encmapslualltion of this books, after reading it should bring out the collective heaviness of our society. It's sometimes very difficult to read books that are so descriptive and contending parts that are really hard to read, but that's perceicly why I love this book so much, it depends the reader to sit with the cucomporable aspects of our nation's history and our part in continuing its legacy of racism, white supremacy, heternomativity, and sexism. After reading this I didn't feel light, I felt comfortable though. Like a weighted blanket that holds a person down,grounding me and remainding me of the necessity of being conscious of ourselves and our history.
Here are my favorite quotes:
Page 111: I understood for the first time that day how Coach Schitzler, just like most of the grown black men I knew, wanted to set people's brains on fire before situating himself as the only one who could calm the blaze.He wanted us to praise him for his tough love, which was really a way of encouraging students to thank him for not hurting us as much as he could.
But the problem is you hurting yourself by trying to let folk know they hurt you.
But I felt like we spent much of our time teaching them tov to respect where we'd been, and they spent much of their time punishing us for teaching them how we deserved to be treated.
Many wrote for us, without writing to us. After reading Bam-bara, I wondered for the first time how great an American sentence, paragraph, or book could be if it wasn't, at least par-tially, written to and for black Americans in the Deep South.
"You act like the dude carried his own sunset, Gunn."
I knew the power to abuse destroyed the interiors of men as much as it destroyed the interiors and exteriors of women.
Reckon or not, the white women in women's studies class treated me like I was the most liberated of good dudes.
He wanted to run it with the subhead "Voice of the Oppressed." I never used the word "oppressed" and had no idea what an oppressed voice actually sounded like. The editor told me I needed to make the ending of the piece much more color-blind. He said I would lose readers if I kept the focus of the essay on what black students at Millsaps could do to organize, love each other, and navigate institutional racism.
I knew Nola would think almost telling white folk in Mississippi the truth in their paper was as close to winning as black folk could come.
"Watch your back, Kie... Lock your doors. Walk in groups. Strive for per-fection. Edit your work. Something feels off. Are you worried about those people shooting you out of the sky?"
Reading things more than twice was the reader version of revision.
Mostly, I wondered what black writers werent writing when we spent so much creative energy begging white folk to change.
Any real change implies the breakup of the world as one has always known it, the loss of all that gave one an identity, the end of safety.
Nothing, other than losing weight, felt as good as provoking and really titillating white folk with black words.
I was targeted, but I felt strangely happy and free.
This wasn't the first, second, third, or fourth time I let her punch me in my face. Almost every time she did it, I'd said something about her stepmother. I knew it was coming. I hoped it would come. I thought I deserved it.
I'd fallen in love with provoking white folk, which really meant I'd fallen in love with begging white folk to free us by demanding that they radically love themselves more.
Their stories were as differently shaped as they were, but they all agreed contracting HIV saved their lives. The first few times I heard this, I nodded and even said "I hear that," but I never fully understood how something so seemingly full of death could actually save a life.
I didn't tell him the skinnier my body got, the more it knew what was going to happen, just as much as it remembered where it had been.
Folk always assumed black women would recover but never really cared if black women recovered.
Thanking Jesus for getting us through situations we should have never been in was one of our family's superpowers.
She told me no part of the world stops changing just because you leave it.
The worst kinds of teachers be the teachers that teach other folk how to be like them.
I got off my knees and asked God to help y'all confront the memories you were running from. I asked God to help all of y'all lose your weight. I planned to do everything I could not to give my blessings away and provide for y'all. The first thing I had to do was sprint down to the gym before it closed.
I wanted to know exactly how much I weighed so I could decide if it was okay for me to eat or drink before going to bed.
I lied a lot and kept the personal surrounding my professional life a secret.
You told me to learn from my mistakes and understand that pain awaited any worker in this country who made a home of their job .
For the first time in my life, I experienced not having the most fear-provoking body in a contained American space.
I wondered, for the first time in my life, what being an American, not just a black American from Mississippi, really demanded of my insides, and what the consequences were for not meeting that demand in the world.
You claimed that weakened bodies and weakened imaginations made us easier prey for white supremacy. I didn't disagree with you but I never knocked my friends' side hustles. All I ever said was,
"The longer you slang, the higher the likelihood white folk gone hem you up."
By my third semester at Vassar, I learned it was fashionable to call Cole's predicament "privilege" and not "power." I had the privilege of being raised by you and a grandmama who responsibly loved me in the blackest, most creative state in the nation. Cole had the power to never be poor and never be a felon, the power to always have his failures treated as success no matter how mediocre he was. Cole's power necessitated he literally was too white, too masculine, too rich to fail. George Bush was president because of Cole's power.
If I was doing my job, I had to find a way to love the wealthy white boys I taught with the same integrity with which I loved my black students, even if the constitution of that love dif-fered.
This was new to me, but it was old black work, and this old black work, in ways you warned me about, was more than selling out; this old black work was morally side hustling backward.
I thought about how even when we weren't involved in selling drugs, big, dark folks like us could be used to shield white folk from responsibility.
I told him that I knew well what transformative justice was, and asked again how anything transformative could be happening in this room if it's predicated on us believing a big black dude made the small, smart white boy buy cocaine.
But I wasn't sure how fair it was to practice transformative justice on the cisgendered, hetero-sexual, white, rich male body of someone who'd been granted transformative justice since birth.
and accepted no matter how much weight I lost, small, smart white boys would always have the power to make big black boys force them into buying our last kilos of cocaine. Then some of us would watch them watch us watch them walk free after getting caught. And some of us, if we were extra lucky, would get to teach these small, smart, addicted white boys and girls today so we could pay for our ailing grandmamas' dental care tomorrow.
Seat belts:
The heaviest version of my body was past tense. My current body was present tense.
There was no limit to how light I could be, and I knew I needed to live in the future.
What I saw of my father that day didn't make me miss the father who was rarely present in my childhood, but it made me feel the beautiful black boy you fell in love with. It reaffirmed my belief that you needed a loving partner in our home far more than I needed a present father. I realized you and my father had broken and you'd never tell anyone about the depth of the breaks.
I sat on the floor knowing my body broke because I carried and created secrets that were way too heavy.
Like nearly everyone else at the gym, I wasn't in the gym
looked and felt.
to be healthy, I was in the gym to feel in control of how fat i My body knew that my weight, the exact number, became an emotional, psychological, and spiritual destination a long time ago. I knew, and worried, about how much I weighed and exactly how much money I had every day of my life since I was eleven years old. The weight reminded me of how much I'd eaten, how much I'd starved, how much I'd exercised, and how much I sat still yesterday. My body knew I was no more liberated or free when I was 159 pounds with 2 percent body fat than I was at 319 pounds with achy joints. I loved the rush of pushing my body beyond places it never wanted to go, but I was addicted to controlling the number on that scale. Controlling that number on the scale, more than writing a story or essay or feeling loved or making money or having sex, made me feel less gross, and most abundant. Losing weight helped me forget.
What, and to whom, were my partners consenting if I spent our entire relationship convincing them that a circle was not a circle but just a really relaxed square?
I would leave that meeting knowing that there are few things more shameful than being treated like a nigger by—and under the gaze of-intellectually and imaginatively average white Americans who are not, and will never have to be, half as good at their jobs as you are at yours.
I will understand that I am vulnerable but I am not power-less. I am not powerless because, though we have no wealth, we have peculiar access to something resembling black power.
Either way, I am supposed to be happy because I am free, because I am not in handcuffs, because I have peculiar access to something resembling black power. I will know that I am not free precisely because I am happy that my wrists are free of handcuffs the month I earn tenure with distinction from Vassar College.
Promises:
"I'm here because I'm sad, lonely, and addicted to losing," is a sentence never shared between casino friends.
I kept coming back to the casino because I felt emptier and heavier when I lost than when I won.
She said our choices have to be more than traumatizing each other at home or driving two hours to be traumatized and broke.
To blame you, I'd have to admit to you how sad I was and how much I failed.
I lied to you, sometimes because I did not know how to tell you the truth, sometimes because I did not understand the truth, other times because I did not think you could hold the truth. Every time I lied, I wanted to control you, control your memory of us, control your vision of me.
You've got to be much more careful. White folk do not deserve to stick their nasty hands into our raw. Hiding from them and being excellent are actually the only ways for us to survive here."
"I just think sometimes we don't do the best we could have done, and it's impossible to know that if we're scared to remember where we've been, and what we actually did.
I wonder if a part of me wants to hold on to the possibility of hiding, running, and harming myself. I cannot do that if I have a child.
Bend:
"I was just trying to put y'all where I been," she will say.
"I am just trying to put y'all where I bend," I will hear.
I wrote this book to you because, even though we harmed each other as American parents and children tend to do, you did everything you could to make sure the nation and our state did not harm their most vulnerable children.
I finally understand revision, rereading, compassion, home training, imagination, and a love of black children are the greatest gifts any American can share with any child in this nation.
I am working on that, and I finally understand there can be no liberation when our most intimate relationships are built on—and really inflected by-deception, abuse, misdirection, antiblackness, patriarchy, and bald-faced lies.
We will share. We will remember, imagine, and help create what we cannot find.
Or, it is possible we will not remember.
We will not imagine.
We will not share.