Black Americans

With the exception of one story (“The Subject of Consumption”), the stories in the collection all focus on the experience of individual black people, living life day-to-day in the United States of the early 21st Century. There are several variations on this experience; there are, for example, characters who experience that life in terms of violence (“Heads of the Colored People”, “Wash Clean the Bones”). There are also characters who experience black life in America in terms of expectation – that is, the expectations of white-dominated culture and blackness-defined history. That aspect of this experience is at the core of the stories chronicling the experience of Fatima, who as a child, a teenager, and a young adult is consistently and persistently aware not only of her blackness in a world of whiteness, but how that awareness has negatively affected her sense of self-worth.

That said, there are stories...