You Can’t Forget What You Never Knew

When I first read The Book of Laughter and Forgetting I didn’t get it. The forgetting, I mean. Not the laughter. The scene at the funeral, with the hat? Classic. But the struggle of memory against forgetting under an oppressive regime? I was American. The stories and history grounding my people were so strong I couldn’t conceive of them being erased. Hell, they were viral before viral was a thing. The whole world wanted in.

Cold War kids, right?

Ten, fifteen years later, I get into a writers’ workshop. Intensive six-week residence. One of seventeen others is this shy black Adonis named Kai Ashante Wilson. Guy’s a genius. We all know it. A few years later Kai publishes The Devil in America, about a black child gifted with power she can’t understand. It runs in the family, but America took their history away, made them forget. Nor is there much to laugh at when the girl makes an unknowing deal with the Devil, and the devil takes his due in the form of a white mob come to lynch and slaughter the whole town. As white mobs did, though my America forgot to tell me that story, and I, blessed innocent, did not think to look.

I was supposed to be one of the good ones.

Reading has taught me all kinds of things: how to think, how to empathize, how to person. For a long time it taught me that character and choice matter, that a person can make a difference, that justice, in some form, will be served. Those are good stories. It’s no wonder they catch on. But there are other stories those stories buried, ones where the best you get at the end isn’t justice but the will to persevere, the strength, somehow, to carry on and try and remember where you came from. Sometimes you don’t even get that. To unbury those stories and bring them into the light changes the ones that so filled younger me with confidence. It’s the struggle of memory against forgetting, and I laugh to think how fooled I was.

https://www.tor.com/2014/04/02/the-devil-in-america-kai-ashante-wilson/