The 2020 Whiting Creative Nonfiction Grant Rachel Aviv Carina del Valle Schorske Ben Goldfarb Ferris Jabr ChloĂŠ Cooper Jones Blair LM Kelley Brandon Shimoda Salamishah Tillet
The Whiting Foundation recognizes that works of deeply researched and imaginatively composed nonfiction are essential to our culture but come into being at great cost to writers in time and resources. The Whiting Creative Nonfiction Grant of $40,000 is awarded to writers in the process of completing a work of nonfiction to the highest aesthetic and intellectual level. It is intended to encourage original and ambitious projects by giving its grantees the additional means to do exacting research and devote time to composition.
Rachel Aviv
Strangers to Ourselves Forthcoming from Farrar, Straus & Giroux History of Medicine
Judges’ citation:
The project:
This potent and timely exploration of how psychiatry, its diagnostics, and its pharmaceuticals have woven themselves deeply into our personal and cultural lives charts completely new territory. Aviv’s startling connections, such as identifying psychiatry as a force for colonialism and globalism, or the relationship between racism and schizophrenia in America, are vital; her compassion, curiosity, and deepseated humanism, irreplaceable. Aviv’s writing is breathtakingly beautiful, but even more impressive and moving is her radical empathy.
Strangers to Ourselves explores the way psychiatry orients us toward the world, shaping the social roles we inhabit. The author draws on her own experience of being institutionalized for an eating disorder at the age of six and chronicles the stories of others whose diagnoses profoundly altered their identities, among them: an Indian woman, celebrated as a saint, who lived in healing temples in Kerala; an incarcerated mother seeking her children’s forgiveness after a period of psychosis; and a man who spent decades plotting revenge against the country’s most prominent psychoanalytic hospital, where he’d been treated for depression. The book examines mental illness not just as a disorder of the individual but as a reflection of the communities in which we live.
Rachel Aviv has been a staff writer at The New Yorker since 2013. She has written for the magazine about a range of subjects including medicine, legal ethics, and criminal justice. She was a finalist for the National Magazine Award for Public Interest for a story about elderly people stripped of their legal rights. She has received a Rona Jaffe Foundation Writers’ Award and the Scripps Howard Award, for reporting about police violence. She was a 2019 national fellow at New America. She lives in Brooklyn.
In 2016, I went to Sweden to write a story about a condition known as
resignation syndrome. Hundreds of children from former Soviet and Yugoslav states who had been denied asylum in Sweden had taken to their beds. They refused food. They stopped talking. Eventually they seemed to lose the ability to move. Many had to be fed through nasogastric tubes. Some eventually slipped into states resembling comas. One child told me that during his months in bed he had felt as if he were in a glass box with fragile walls, deep in the ocean. If he spoke or moved, it would create a vibration, which would cause the glass to shatter. “The water would pour in and kill me,” he said. Psychiatrists considered the condition a reaction to both the stress of the migration proceedings and the trauma the children had experienced in their home countries. But doctors couldn’t understand why the illness occurred only in Sweden— not in any neighboring Nordic countries—and only among children fleeing former Soviet and Yugoslav states. As I interviewed families, I realized that many of the ill children had known someone else who suffered from the condition, too. There were allegations that the children were malingering—the illness itself became grounds for these families to be granted Swedish residency—but this seemed impossible; once the children were unconscious, they took weeks, sometimes months, to emerge from this state, even after their families had been told they could stay in Sweden. What began as a protest, or an expression of powerlessness, took on a logic of its own. My conversations with families and doctors in Sweden made me reconsider the time when I was six years old and hospitalized with anorexia. Until then, I had not given it much thought. It had seemed to me a cliché of an illness, attracting a rather uninteresting segment of the population: ambitious, controlling, inhibited, and mostly privileged girls. But something about the mute, fasting children in Sweden felt familiar to me. I do not mean to equate domestic troubles with national and political displacement, but for an immature child, solipsistic by nature, there are limits to the forms that helplessness can take. Culture shapes the scripts that expressions of distress may follow, altering not only our interpretation of mental events but the way we experience them. In Detroit, in the late 1980s, a controlling, angry, fasting child from a medically literate family found herself ushered down a path toward anorexia. In Sweden, in the mid-2000s, children of roughly the same age followed a different trajectory, which depended on their ethnicity. In both illnesses, the refusal of food—one of the few ways that a child can make conflicts about autonomy and dependence visible—is given a label that imbues the ailment with cultural and social significance, and, in some cases, an aura of martyrdom. We then make adjustments, conscious and unconscious, to the way we’ve been classified.
Carina del Valle Schorske
The Other Island Forthcoming from Riverhead Books Memoir/Cultural Criticism
Judges’ citation:
The project:
An exceptional investigation of colonization and gentrification, of art and family, The Other Island will be a marvelous and most necessary addition to Puerto Rican literature. Carina del Valle Schorske has a fresh perspective and a bright, authoritative narrative voice; her prose is lyrical and accessible, richly researched and sharply argued. Her intimate story of self-discovery animates this profound work of cultural criticism, revealing what it means to be part of the Puerto Rican diaspora, and how this diaspora has shaped American life in ways many of us still barely understand. Poetic and politically astute, this book reorients our imagination beyond national territory, towards more fluid and capacious forms of belonging.
The Other Island is an exploration of empire, migration, and the transmission of culture in Puerto Rico—the world’s oldest colony—viewed through the author’s shifting relationship to the archipelago as a child of diaspora during a time of historic crisis. These linked essays recognize backup dancers, graffiti artists, indigenous cave painters, state-funded photographers, tenement dwellers, and out-of-print poets as important political theorists and creative innovators, reshaping the no man’s land between citizenship and independence.
Carina del Valle Schorske is a writer and translator living between New York and San Juan. Her writing has appeared in many venues including Longreads, Bookforum, Lit Hub, The Believer, Virginia Quarterly Review, and The New York Times Magazine, where she was recently named a Contributing Writer. She won Gulf Coast’s 2016 Prize for her translations of the poet Marigloria Palma, and she edited the bilingual anthology Puerto Rico en mi corazón alongside Raquel Salas Rivera, Ricardo Maldonado, and Erica Mena. Her essay “The Ladder Up” was nominated for a National Magazine Award, and she has received residency fellowships from MacDowell, Yaddo, Hedgebrook, and the Blue Mountain Center. She is currently a doctoral candidate in Comparative Literature at Columbia University, where she studies women’s performance in the Americas from Zora Neale Hurston through Ana Mendieta.
At midcentury, Washington Heights marked the confluence of two
great migrations: African Americans fleeing the South, swelling the streets of Harlem, and Puerto Ricans catching cut-rate flights out of San Juan. New transportation technologies fueled the desperate exodus of country people from the hemisphere’s haunted plantations, unredeemed by the broken promises of Reconstruction and Puerto Rican independence. New York wasn’t a dreamland. But my grandmother liked the electric sociality of bodies surging down the sidewalk together—which was good, because it’s true that life in the city was a squeeze. If the apartments uptown were bigger, for migrants that mostly meant they could fit more people for less money. Every apartment was prepared to become a boarding house as a matter of necessity. But this arrangement had its pleasures: The doors were always swinging and slamming, the neighborhood girls were always in the median playing hopscotch or jump rope, so being a latchkey kid was less lonely for my mother than it might have been. There were Velázquez paintings at the Hispanic Society and feather headdresses at the American Indian Museum and Mexican movies on TV. The roof was covered with tar paper that made bubbles in the heat, and when they jumped on them they burped like frogs, and when the girls were older, they slathered themselves in oil and lay out to tan, and they slept in big rollers that hurt their necks, and my grandmother threw the best parties, where the boys came in suits and the girls in pencil skirts and there was always dancing, not like the white kids’ parties, where they made spaghetti and smoked grass and didn’t even always put a record on. But my mother and her friends were Americans, too, now, and danced to rock and roll unless it was a family party, in which case they danced merengue with their uncles til their uncles were too drunk to keep clave or just drunk enough to get in the pocket. If they were afraid it was mostly of the men in the family, of wandering hands and secret families and drunken rages, of disappearing dollars, and if there were gangs they only had knives, and if a girl had a long scar on her cheek she was also a great beauty, and if there was smack in the hood only Doña Emilia’s son died of it, and if my mother shrank from the teenager on the corner, she also loved Frankie Lymon & the Teenagers, who were from the Heights, and if West Side Story was a minstrel show they still cheered at the movie theater when the Sharks came onscreen. If the parents couldn’t read the children would read Brontë, and if my mother didn’t speak English in first grade in second grade she won the spelling bee. If her father was a bad man, he was also bad on the dancefloor. If the neighborhood was in decline, the decline was slow.
Ben Goldfarb
The Ecology of Roads Forthcoming from W.W. Norton Science/Environmental Journalism
Judges’ citation:
The project:
Ben Goldfarb’s impassioned quest to understand the ecology of roads and its impact on the natural world is a marvel. The reader learns something new on every page, disturbed and amazed in equal measure. Goldfarb moves us briskly along the manipulated ecosystem of the highway, with vivid, evocative pitstops for environmental history, ecology, and the built environment. The Ecology of Roads adds a new perspective to conversations on how humans have reshaped life on earth.
The Ecology of Roads chronicles the emergent field of road ecology, the science of how infrastructure affects nature. For humans, roads are so ubiquitous they’re invisible; for animals from toads to Tasmanian devils, they’re forces of death and disruption. Today, road ecologists are striving to blunt their impacts: Researchers are designing freeway-spanning bridges for cougars, elephants, and pangolins; planting roadsides with prairie for butterflies; and deconstructing our forests’ labyrinth of logging roads. While road ecology was born in North America, it’s most vital in the developing world, where fifteen million road-miles will be built by 2050—an “infrastructure tsunami” that may simultaneously lift countless people out of poverty and, if poorly planned, destroy the world’s last intact habitats.
Ben Goldfarb is an environmental journalist and author whose writing has appeared in publications including The Atlantic, Science, Outside Magazine, Smithsonian Magazine, Orion, and Pacific Standard, and has been anthologized in Best American Science and Nature Writing. His first book, Eager: The Surprising, Secret Life of Beavers and Why They Matter, received the PEN/E.O. Wilson Literary Science Writing Award and was named a best book of 2018 by The Washington Post. His work has been supported by the Solutions Journalism Network, the Alicia Patterson Foundation, and the Institute for Journalism and Natural Resources. He lives in Spokane, Washington.
For decades, the interior of many cars resembled nothing so much as a
medieval torture chamber. Well into the 1950s, automakers lined dashboards with sharp edges, pointy chrome knobs, and, worst of all, uncollapsible steering columns, metal shafts that were wont to impale drivers. Getting into a wreck, wrote Reader’s Digest, was “like going over Niagara Falls in a steel barrel full of railroad spikes.” Although manufacturers made some halfhearted gestures toward crashworthiness in the ‘50s, the safety revolution wouldn’t flower until 1965—the year a young lawyer named Ralph Nader published Unsafe at Any Speed, a Silent Spring-style exposé that accused auto manufacturers of bringing “death, injury and the most inestimable sorrow and deprivation to millions of people.” The book became a surprise bestseller, killed the defective Chevy Corvair, and made Nader, aka the “Safety Nazi,” public enemy number one at General Motors, which hired private investigators to tail him and prostitutes to proposition him. Nader persevered, and in 1966 Congress passed legislation requiring seat belts and other features. Automotive safety had entered the zeitgeist. Roads were evolving, too. In 1956, Dwight Eisenhower authorized the Interstate Highway System, a gargantuan network of superhighways connecting America’s traffic-choked cities to its boondocks. Although Ike seized the credit, the interstates had been born seventeen years earlier, in a report that Thomas MacDonald had submitted to then-president Franklin Roosevelt. The system’s mind-numbing scale reflected FDR’s taste for overwhelming public works projects: It would eventually span 48,000 miles, cost $114 billion, and contain enough concrete to fill the Great Pyramid of Giza a hundred times. The new highways would be America’s safest roads as well as its most grandiose. Every interstate was at least four lanes wide—two in each direction, divided to prevent head-on collisions. Shoulders were broad, curves gently banked, slopes gradual. And, critically, drivers could only access the new interstates via designated ramps: no more pulling on and off at random surface roads. By carefully controlling entries and exits, engineers hoped to keep traffic humming along at seventy miles per hour, eliminating the friction that provoked crashes. But not all forms of friction roll on wheels. Some saunter on hooves. Subdivisions sprang up wherever the Interstate Highway System’s tentacles grasped, expanding the suburban savannah each year—ushering more cars, moving faster than ever, into prime real estate for white-tailed deer. The deer that wandered onto the interstates transgressed the system’s very ideals: They were sticks jammed in the spokes of a bicycle, pathogens in the country’s new transportative bloodstream. To achieve their highest purpose, interstates would have to rid themselves of deer.
Ferris Jabr
A Symphony of Earth Forthcoming from Random House Science
Judges’ citation:
The project:
This deep meditation on the dynamic and essential relationship between living beings and our environs demonstrates a sense of possibility and purpose. Ferris Jabr has an uncanny ability to explore and explain some of the greatest mysteries of the universe, and his sentences are both luscious and limpid. He shows us how the rhythm of life on Earth has evolved and where we are in the lifespan of that song. Jabr is an exceptional new science writer, and this urgent book is poised to influence larger conversations about climate change and the environment.
A Symphony of Earth explores the hidden connections between life and geology, revealing the many ways that living creatures, including our own species, have transformed the atmosphere, oceans, and continents throughout the planet’s history. Drawing on recent scientific insights, the book reexamines the ancient idea that Earth itself is alive and investigates how this holistic perspective can help us restore longstanding ecological rhythms and prevent or mitigate some of the worst outcomes of the climate crisis. Vivid scenes, lyrical prose, and compelling narrative transport us viscerally into extreme spaces, such as an experimental nature reserve in remote Siberia, the heart of the Amazon rainforest, and a former gold mine turned research laboratory a mile below the planet’s surface.
Ferris Jabr is a contributing writer for The New York Times Magazine and Scientific American. He has also written for The New Yorker, Harper’s, The Atlantic, New York, Lapham’s Quarterly, Foreign Policy, Wired, Outside, and Slate, among other publications. His work has been anthologized in the 2014 and 2020 editions of Best American Science and Nature Writing. He holds an MA in journalism from New York University and a BS from Tufts University and lives in Portland, Oregon.
The notion
of a living planet is ancient. Many religions and indigenous cultures have personified Earth as a deity or extended the concepts of life, sentience, and spirit to rivers and mountains, to the sky, sea, and ground. James Lovelock was not the first scientist to describe Earth as an organism, either, but the audacity, expansiveness, and eloquence of his vision evoked a tremendous outpouring of acclaim as well as derision. Lovelock published his first book on Gaia in 1979 amid continuing counter-culturalism and a growing environmental movement. Although his ideas found an enthusiastic audience among the general public, they were not as warmly received by the scientific community. Throughout the next several decades, many scientists criticized and ridiculed the Gaia hypothesis. Robert May, future president of the Royal Society, declared Lovelock “a holy fool.” But the essence of the Gaia hypothesis—the idea that life transforms and in some cases regulates the planet—proved prescient and profoundly true. Although some researchers still recoil at the mention of Gaia, these truths have become part of mainstream science. The reciprocal evolution of life and the planet is best understood as a single integrated process. Living creatures are not just inhabitants of Earth, we are Earth—an outgrowth of its physical structure and an engine of its global cycles. Some scientists even agree with Lovelock that the planet is, in a very meaningful sense, alive. Astrobiologist David Grinspoon has written that Earth is not simply a planet with life on it, but rather a living planet. “Life is not something that happened on Earth, but something that happened to Earth,” he told me. “There is this feedback between the living and nonliving parts of the planet that makes the planet very different from what it would otherwise be.” The coevolution of organisms and their environments often generates self-stabilizing ecosystems that help temper global climate. Collectively, these systems endow our planet with the features of a living organism: breath, metabolism, a regulated temperature, and a balanced chemistry. Those who bristle at the notion of a living planet will throw up the usual protestations: Earth cannot be alive because it does not eat, grow, reproduce, or evolve like other living things. We should remember, however, that there has never been an objective measure or a precise and universally accepted definition of life, only a long list of qualities that presumably distinguish the living from the nonliving. Like many living creatures, Earth has a highly organized structure, daily rhythms, and an enveloping membrane; it consumes, stores, and transforms energy; and if asteroid-hitching microbes or spacefaring humans eventually colonize other worlds, who is to say that planets are not capable of procreation? If Earth breathes, sweats, churns, and quakes—if it births zillions of organisms that ceaselessly devour, transfigure, and replenish its air, water, and rock—and if those organisms and their environments are inextricably bonded in reciprocal evolution, then why shouldn’t we think of our planet as alive?
Chloé Cooper Jones
Easy Beauty Forthcoming from Avid Reader/Simon & Schuster Memoir/Cultural Criticism
Judges’ citation:
The project:
In this ambitious and elegant book about seeing and being seen, Chloé Cooper Jones invokes thorny, theoretical material about identity, the social order, and how we measure human value, but her clarity and compassion invite all readers in. She has created a forceful and fresh point of view from which to anatomize power, access, and perception in her precise, unsparing prose. A necessary, relentlessly honest book that feels both of the moment and timeless.
Chloé Cooper Jones braids memory, observation, and the history of philosophical aesthetics to consider her life as a woman with a visible congenital disability; after unexpectedly becoming a mother in violation of unspoken social taboos about the disabled body, she sets off alone on a journey across the globe to reclaim the spaces she’d been denied, and denied herself.
Chloé Cooper Jones is a philosophy professor and freelance journalist who was a finalist for a 2020 Pulitzer Prize in Feature Writing. Her work has appeared in publications including GQ, The Verge, VICE, Bookforum, New York Magazine, and The Believer. She lives in Brooklyn, New York.
I never much cared for the Greek concept of beauty, nor did I agree that it
was a virtue on par with truth or justice. I’d always preferred Hume’s notion that beauty was not a set of external properties, but rather that it existed in the contemplative mind. “Each mind perceives a different beauty. One may even perceive deformity where another is sensible to beauty.” Hume argues that some people are better judges of beauty than others. He calls them the ideal critics. And this is a better theory for me, a woman with a body that could never be mistaken for symmetrical or orderly. In contemporary aesthetic scholarship, the Greek objective evaluations of beauty are often regarded as wrong, outdated, or— worse—uncool. I wondered if I’d rejected the possibility of divine, objective beauty simply because I was excluded from it. Being excluded from a theory didn’t make it incorrect. A few months after the homecoming dance, Jim had tried to kiss me. He said, “I was wrong before. Something has changed. And I like you.” Before, Jim had spoken to me as if beauty were an unalterable fact, but now suddenly my beauty was discernible, visible if only in the right light. “What changed?” I asked him. “You grew on me, you made me laugh enough times that I started to want to be around you more, you are smarter than my last girl.” I remember the pang of pride I had when Jim said this. I remember how it motivated me, like a dog wanting to please its owner, to prove my worth to him over and again. Jim’s perceptual shift, not what he said in the library, is the worst part of this story. It embedded a damaging idea in me, one I’d recognize deeply when I read Elaine Scarry years later: beauty was a matter of particulars aligning correctly. My body put me in a bracketed, under-credited sense of beauty. But if I could get the particulars to line up just right, I could be re-seen, discovered. In order to be accepted as a whole person deserving of the whole range of human desires, I had to be extraordinary in all other aspects. My worth as a woman wasn’t apparent otherwise. Philosophically, Hume and Scarry provide richer views of beauty than the Greek conception of mathematical perfection. But accepting the argument that beauty was malleable came, for me, with a cost. The Platonian view rejected me cleanly, but Hume and Scarry left a door ajar, and I’ve spent a lifetime trying to contort my form to see if I could pass through it.
Blair LM Kelley
Black Folk: The Promise of the Black Working Class Forthcoming from Liveright/W.W. Norton History
Judges’ citation:
The project:
Timely, necessary, and loving, this is an authoritative and groundbreaking work that serves as a corrective to longstanding ignorance about the Black working-class. The project of interpreting the rich landscape of their lives and politics is revelatory and long overdue. Few academics can write in such a clear, captivating voice. Kelley’s characters shine and her insights pop; she writes with an urgent sense of time and place, bringing human scale to a major moment in American history. This shows every sign of becoming a seminal work that our children and grandchildren will still be reading.
Any attempt to understand America’s working class must begin with the history of Black folk, who have historically been the most active, informed, and impassioned working class in America. Tracing the story of the Black working class from first emancipations to the essential workers of our COVID-19 present through family stories and traditional sources, Black Folk describes the connection between the everyday lived experience of working Black people and their labor and politics.
Blair LM Kelley is an assistant dean and associate professor of history at North Carolina State University. Her first book, Right to Ride: Streetcar Boycotts and African American Citizenship, won the Letitia Woods Brown Best Book Award from the Association of Black Women Historians. Active inside the academy and out, Kelley hosted her own podcast and has been a guest on MSNBC’s All In and NPR’s Here and Now, and she has written for The New York Times, The Washington Post, and NBC’s Think. She lives in Durham, North Carolina.
Enslaved Black people built a new faith way, one that at first glance
runs parallel to that of their oppressors, but it was marked by fundamental differences. Their new churches would put them, the downtrodden, at the center of the story. One worshipper recounted that when they would gather to sing and pray they would “take pots and put them right in the middle of the floor to keep the sound in the room… [to] keep the white folks from meddling… the sound will stay right in the room after you do that.” The overturned pot was a remnant, a piece of an African faith, perhaps a symbol of a forgotten deity or part of a holy ritual. The details were lost, but a sense of its power for the faithful remained. The overturned pot helped to make the hush harbor both quiet and holy, imbued with the authority of their old faith to protect them as they worshipped in a new way. One former slave minister, Peter Randolph, recounted that “the slaves [would] assemble in the swamps out of reach of the patrols.” Guiding each other by “breaking boughs from the trees, and bending them in the direction of the selected spot,” they would meet at an appointed time. Randolph described their worship: They first ask each other how they feel, the state of their minds… Preaching in order… then praying and singing all round, until they generally feel quite happy. The speaker usually commences by calling himself unworthy, and talks very slowly, until, feeling the spirit, he grows excited, and in a short time, there fall to the ground twenty or thirty men and women under [the spirit’s] influence. Enlightened people call it excitement; but I wish the same was felt by everybody, so far as they are sincere. The slave forgets all his sufferings, except to remind others of the trials during the past week, exclaiming: “Thank God, I shall not live here always!” Then they pass from one to another, shaking hands, and bidding each other farewell, promising should they meet no more on earth, to strive and meet in heaven… Even as more laws designed to stifle black gatherings were put in place, the desire of the enslaved for congregation grew. In their secret gatherings new leaders were born: those who could minister, those who could sing, those who could lead others to faith or to freedom. After Emancipation, these congregations became their first black collective spaces. The fights for education, mutual aid, the battle to govern and to gather together both in and out of faith, began in those churches that started without walls. Those hushed conversations provided a guide for how the newly freed working women and men would seek out righteous ways of figuring out the cost.
Brandon Shimoda
Japanese American Historical Plaza Forthcoming from City Lights Publishers Political Reportage/History
Judges’ citation:
The project:
A powerful new exploration of Japanese-American incarceration that speaks to our current cultural conversations about trauma and silence, reparations, and the carceral state. Brandon Shimoda is an elegant, incisive writer, and his book on the afterlife of the concentration camps will help to ensure that this dark stain on American history is never forgotten. As the eightieth anniversary of Executive Order 9066 looms, readers will be tremendously moved by the ambition and scope of his examination of the concepts of reparations, displacement, national belonging, and memory—and by the brilliant and painful insight regarding the limits of each that the book offers.
Japanese American Historical Plaza is a book of creative nonfiction inhabiting the ongoing afterlife of the mass incarceration of Japanese immigrants and Japanese Americans during WWII. It is a memoiristic travelogue through the ruins of the incarceration sites; memorials and museums; representations of incarceration in popular culture (art, literature, film); present-day legislation; and the lives and stories of former incarcerees and their descendants.
Brandon Shimoda is the author of seven books of poetry and prose, including The Grave on the Wall (City Lights), which received the PEN Open Book Award, and Evening Oracle (Letter Machine Editions), which received the William Carlos Williams Award from the Poetry Society of America. Recent writing has appeared in Harper’s, The Nation, The Paris Review, and Tricycle, and he has given talks on Japanese-American incarceration at the Asian American Writers’ Workshop, the University of Chicago, the University of Connecticut, the International Center of Photography, and elsewhere. He teaches at Occidental College and in the low-residency MFA program at Pacific Northwest College of Art, and works at the Pima Community College Library, in Tucson, Arizona.
My great-aunt Joy
was four when she and her family were removed from their home and sent to a detention center at the Santa Anita racetrack, in Arcadia, California. The only thing she remembered, and could hear, with perfectly clarity—because she delivered it directly to our table at the Sea Empress restaurant—was her mother’s constant sneezing. They lived, for three months, in a horse stall. There was hay on the floor. They stuffed their pillows with it. Poston was the largest of the ten main concentration camps, and the first to open. It was proposed to—and was met with the objections of—the Colorado River Indian Tribal Council, as an opportunity for their reservation to be developed. The Japanese Americans cultivated farmlands, made adobe bricks, built an irrigation system that drew water from the Colorado, and built 54 schools for the Hopi and Navajo. They also produced camouflage netting for the war, which many incarcerees were against. The question of whether or not, or how much, or in what ways, to support the war, was a source of divisiveness—between the Issei and Nisei, among family members and friends. Joy did not remember the divisiveness or the camouflage or the irrigation system or the Native Americans. Her memories were only beginning. There was not yet the understanding of freedom against which she could place her memories of being a prisoner. She remembered dust. Cold winters. Eating bologna for dinner. At first there were no forks or spoons, only knives. She remembered playing with marbles and string. Even though the guards in the towers were very close, they had distant, nondescript faces, less expressive than the guns they were holding. Joy’s father was a cook in the mess hall. Her mother worked in the elementary school. Poston was divided into three camps. Joy and her family were in Poston 3. Her aunt and uncle and cousin were in Poston 1. Joy asked her cousin, who was three years older, what she remembered, and she responded that being incarcerated—but that is not the word she used—felt like summer camp: biking, swimming, playing Monopoly, kick the can, swimming in the river. Movies were screened outdoors once a week. The men caught snakes and made snake soup. The women carved wooden birds. Summer camp, and yet it was noted that the winters were cold. The memories were of friends and time and space, not yet struck through with the resentment, the anger, that would have upended the sense of peace of being a child in an exceptional place. To grow older often means to grow silent. As the children aged, the peace they felt and forced themselves to believe in aged too. To Joy’s bologna, her cousin added: tongue, heart, liver, Vienna sausage, and okoge, the crust burned onto the bottom of the rice. 1942, 1943, 1944, 1945. It was not as difficult for Joy, she said, as it was for her parents. But it was more difficult for them after incarceration, when her family was released and returned home to Los Angeles. The postwar atmosphere was even less kind. The veil of security separating the Japanese Americans from expressions of white anxiety and rage had been lifted. They were welcomed home by anti-Japanese signs. Japanese houses were shot at. My great-aunt Joy was vilified by her classmates. Her mother was a maid for a white family in Beverly Hills. Joy remembers being fed the white family’s scraps. She remembers especially the fat from the white family’s meat.
Salamishah Tillet
All the Rage: “Mississippi Goddam” and the World Nina Simone Made Forthcoming from Ecco/HarperCollins Biography
Judges’ citation:
The project:
An ambitious and incisive mix of cultural criticism, biography, and memoir, this much-needed book frames the necessity and beauty of Black women’s rage through the lens of a towering figure in American music. Salamishah Tillet, a critic and academic who produces consistently vital work, is a pleasure to read; through this fresh take on Nina Simone, we will understand not only her legacy but her ongoing vitality in American popular culture and the politics of social change. Tillet is giving us the book that Nina Simone deserves.
A blend of criticism, memoir, and biography, All the Rage: ‘Mississippi Goddam’ and the World Nina Simone Made is a book about Simone’s life and why she, in her cultural afterlife, has come to embody the struggles of contemporary America more than any other artist of the civil rights era. Through the story of Nina’s most radical protest song, “Mississippi Goddam,” Tillet reveals that Nina was not just a musical prodigy, but also as a prophetic voice, one whose vision of America shaped Tillet’s own pursuit of justice as a writer, mother, and activist, as well as influenced several generations of Black artists and activists who continue to invoke Simone’s legacy as they try to build themselves and this country in her image of freedom today.
Salamishah Tillet is the Henry Rutgers Professor of African American Studies and Creative Writing and director of New Arts Justice at Rutgers University - Newark. She is a contributing critic-at-large for The New York Times and author of Sites of Slavery: Citizenship, Racial Democracy and the Post-Civil Rights Imagination (Duke University Press, 2012), and In Search of The Color Purple: The Story of an American Masterpiece (Abrams, 2021). In 2003, she and her sister, Scheherazade Tillet, founded A Long Walk Home, an art organization that empowers young people to end violence against girls and women. She lives in Newark, New Jersey, with her two children and life partner.
I’d like
to tell you that I grew up on Nina Simone’s music and say that I’ve always been a radical feminist and a lover of Black people. But the truth is I didn’t. I grew up on disco, funk, and sometimes soul, and on any given morning in the late 1970s, I’d wake up to my mother, a child born in 1955, on that opening bell of the civil rights movement and a jazz singer in her own right, playing Roberta Flack, Chaka Khan, and even Phyllis Hyman. Like so many of my hip-hop generation, I discovered Nina through snippets: first, through synthesized loops and rap samples and later in YouTube clips and movie soundtracks. When I did find her, or better put when she found me, I only knew her as a name drop. I was at the height of my own depression after having been violently raped in Kenya by a near-stranger ten months earlier. If Lauryn Hill hadn’t made herself the heir apparent to Nina by putting gangsta rap’s male bravado on blast, “So while you’re imitating Al Capone, I’ll be Nina Simone, and defecating on your microphone” in the Fugees’ song, “Ready or Not,” I would not have known Nina Simone existed. In those intervening days and years between my finding Nina and her fully shaping me, I held onto to her as if she were a special gift that Lauryn bequeathed to me and no one else. I didn’t play her music for my friends, or swap CDs, or let anyone know that I had begun to consume all things, Nina Simone. Sharing her seemed too great a risk because I sensed her trauma was, in a way, mine. Like Cassandra, that Greek goddess whose once gift of foresight was turned against her, I assumed that Nina’s femaleness did not just make her more similar to me, but also destined her to a lifetime of being misheard or misunderstood. “The name of this tune is Mississippi Goddam,” so said Nina on stage at Carnegie Hall in 1964 to introduce her song. “And I mean every word of it!” At first, much of her predominantly white audience giggled in response to her cheeky preamble. But when she started playing they soon realized that her show tune was not a bit, or a gag, but instead a Molotov cocktail backed by a mid-tempo beat. It was her ultimate warning to America: Either end your violence against Black people or explode.
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