There are times when the atmosphere is ripe and the storytelling is good when your great auntie drops in a choice tidbit about her “hoin’ days in Chicago” before getting back to the memories Big Ma’s fried catfish dinners.Ĭoleman uses the hell out of this technique to make How to Sit feel like a story being told to us, rather than one we are reading in isolation. It’s a technique that mirrors the way Black families share things. Read carefully because you never know when she will drop a shocking nugget in a line and just move on with the story. Readers are going to love the lyric prose and Coleman’s way of manipulating her words to pull a twist out of a regular sentence. It’s that one point in “I am Karintha” when I realized the girl in the essay was talking about an experience that is all too familiar with black girls like me.Īuthor Tyrese Coleman, courtesy on Twitter. The essay “Thoughts on My Ancestry DNA Results” mirrors how I felt after taking the same test when the weight of my history was heavy upon me. However, in many ways, it felt like these pages could have come from my own. Excerpt from “Why I Let Him Touch My Hair” We Can RelateĪgain, this did feel like I was reading my friends’ diary.
Done, he cried, “I did it!” His accomplished smile. He rubbed my hair, only bending the ends. Who knows what I expected being petted would feel like. And, we will never admit to it or even share it with anyone but our diary. But, it is some moment that happened - whether out of naivete, stupidity, or desperation - that changes us. Take for example the piece, “Why I Let Him Touch My Hair.” The subject alone is something that no Black girl would admit to, ever.
Her conversations, reactions, and actions are all lyrically teased out of every narrative until, at the end of the essay, the damage or the lesson is more than apparent. Coleman creates a journey through life in the shadowy places, the closed doored areas, and the secret spots where things “happen” to Black girls, Black women, and change them forever. You won’t find a dry retelling of high school, college, career, and family here. This isn’t an observation of her life at the surface. Published by Mason Jar Press, How to Sit is a memoir in a narrative essay format that rolls smoothly through the raw and very real life of a Black Girl in America. So Much More than an Essay Collection Image collage of Tyrese Coleman published with ‘How to Sit’ essay “Thoughts on My DNA Test Results,” courtesy ‘The Rumpus’
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