Book Publishing Beyond the Margins

While I was home, I talked to my parents about their upbringing and their journey to the states. You get older and you realize your parents are getting older, too. Eritrea is not a place—like many countries of the Global South—where official documents are rigorously kept or things are written down, so a lot of history is passed through the oral tradition. I started recording them to have their stories for myself one day.

My parents were born in Asmara, which is the capital of Eritrea. They came over for a number of reasons. Eritrea was engaged in a war for independence with Ethiopia, which had gone on for 30 years by that point. Truly devastating. My father’s brother was lost in combat—his body was never recovered. I recently learned that someone who served with my uncle told my father’s family that he had buried my uncle. Though who can really say. They went to Sudan; they were there for about a year. I don’t know if refugee camp is the right term, but they were in a layover-type place. My mom worked as a nanny for well-to-do people in the city.

They arrived in the United States in the mid-1980s. I was born in Columbus, Ohio in 1987. I know one job my mother had when she got to Ohio was working at a grocery store because I remember playing in the parking lot while she worked. It is a fun memory, actually.

He drove people with special needs to their appointments. If you met my dad, you would know why he’s perfectly suited for that job. He’s just a gentle, gregarious type of person. Then he switched to driving a taxi. Columbus, Ohio has a huge Eritrean and Ethiopian population (and now a big Somalian population) and the thing you do is drive a taxi. It’s hard. You’re sitting all freaking day. My dad’s a brilliant guy. Every job is valuable and the people who work these kinds of jobs are some of the most important people we have, you know? Society stops functioning without its blue-collar workers. But do people like my parents get that level of respect? No. My dad’s been cursed at, he’s been called slurs. He’s been robbed. But he worked because he wanted to ensure that I had a good life. I was shielded from a lot. Imagine leaving your country, everyone that you know, the smells, the food, and, on top of that, you’re coming to America in the 1980s, you’re coming to Ohio in the 1980s. My mom tells me the first time she smelled McDonald’s she wanted to vomit because it was so foul to her.

I definitely have many fond memories of my childhood, but there are also memories where I look back and I wonder, Did I understand what was really going on? We had this old car—it was a hideous car, but it was lovely because it was ours. It was comfortable in every way, and it was gold. What’s better than gold for a 6 year old? One day, my father and I head to the car and on the trunk someone had keyed “KKK.” They had dumped vomit onto the windshield. I remember being confused at the sight of the vomit; I didn’t comprehend what it was until much later, but I did know that “KKK” was something very bad. I’m not sure why I was aware of this as a 6 year old because these weren’t exactly the things my parents talked about around me, but I was. But, also, being Black, you very quickly acquire this knowledge of all the potential threats around you, all the people who want to kill you, destroy you. You get in the know real fast.

My parents always encouraged me to read. They understood the power of books, and as immigrants, they understood the power of language. We were always at the library. My school had these Scholastic book fairs every quarter and I would bring home a catalogue and circle all the books I needed—I want this one and this one and this one. I read all the time. Reading is a lovely escape. Often, we talk about escape and it’s layered with a kind of sadness but sometimes escape is just this wonderful thing. I knew I was gay from a young age, but I didn’t come out until freshman year of college—with reading, there is an element of slipping into into someone else’s skin that I have always found really nice.

I understand Tigrinya, but I struggle as a speaker. My mom thinks it’s more of an insecurity. Can I wax on about Derrida in Tigrinya? No, probably not. But I can understand a very sophisticated conversation, which is sadly somewhat rare. Maybe I shouldn’t speak for my generation, but it seems like more and more I hear of people my age who don’t know how to speak or understand Tigrinya. It’s another reason I recorded my parents. I want to hear their voices, but I also love the language

I’m not. I’ve always been proud to be Eritrean but this journey to better understand my parents and Eritrea has only happened in the past seven or so years. I read “I Didn’t Do It For You,” by the journalist Michela Wrong. The subtitle is “How the World Betrayed a Small African Nation,” which I think says it all. Superpowers, including the United States, treated Eritrea with contempt and took advantage of the land and the people. Jeffrey Gettleman wrote about Eritrea for The New York Time Times, Dan Connell has written a few books on Eritrea. But they’re all white, you know what I mean? I need to read more Eritreans on Eritrea. I recently gave my dad the book The Historical Dictionary of Eritrea. It’s essentially an encyclopedia of Eritrea, just this trove of information going back thousands and thousands of years.

The other ways my parents and I connect is through food, of course. A long time ago, my mom taught me how to make tshebi, a stew that is an anchor in Eritrean cuisine. During the pandemic, she taught me a few more dishes. I love her to the moon and back, but she’s not the world’s greatest teacher because I’m like, How much of this do you put in there, and she’s like, I don’t know I just eyeball it. And I’m like, Okay, well how much of this and she’s like, I don’t know I just feel it. And I’m like, Okay, girl, well that’s deeply unhelpful. We also connect over Eritrean music; Eritrea also has an interesting film industry, a lot of it is slapstick. There was this vaudeville comedy troupe, similar to “The Three Stooges,” that my father and I used to watch together all the time. You can find some Eritrean movies on YouTube, but often you’ll have to order them on a DVD because it’s that hard to come by over here.

I got very lucky with my parents because they support me, they follow my lead. They trust me to make the right decisions. And again, they hold language in such a high regard that they see working with words as a kind of luxury, which it is. When I was working at Vogue, my mom loved telling her friends that I worked at Vogue even though I was just an assistant. Then I went to Random House the first time and my mom didn’t know Random House in the same way that she knew Vogue so she was like, “What, you don’t want to stay at Vogue?” I think my parents have a very common immigrant mentality, they have big dreams but they're also very practical. They’re safe people. They kind of have to be, right? I’m only here because of them, because they were safe, because my dad took on work as a taxi driver for years and years, and my mom worked in a factory, despite having other dreams.

Oh gosh. My dad loves math. He could have been an excellent teacher. My mom is empathetic in a way that is marvelous to behold. We used to visit a family friend at his nursing facility, she would stop and gab with these 100-year-old people as if they were her best friends. And I said to her, “You should have been a nurse, you should have been some kind of healthcare worker—you just have this kind of force.” But life just didn’t work out that way for her. There’s this George Eliot quote: “It’s never too late to be what you might have been,” which I really do believe in. I think my mother has many more chapters left. She and I have actually been researching courses and certifications for her to make a career change.

I don’t want them working their jobs forever. My dream is to buy a house. I fully intend on having my parents live with me at some point. That’s pretty customary in Eritrea (and elsewhere in the world). I think my mom is ready to move to New York and live with me now. I definitely need to find a man first.

I’ve had a different experience from my parents. For one thing, I have, from birth, taken in Black American imagery and culture. Eritrea has such a distinctive culture, and there are occasionally ways in which it overlaps with Black American culture that I find interesting. For instance, you can often trace hip-hop dances back to Africa. There is a traditional Eritrean dance where you move your shoulders up and down—everyone’s shake is different, like a signature—and it’s always reminded me a little bit of the Harlem Shake. I am definitely a proud Black American, but I am also proudly Eritrean and how I negotiate and merge these two identities and cultures is something I’m still figuring out.

At the same time, the lens through which I’m viewed has informed how I view myself, for better or worse. In America, too often, it feels like people don't distinguish between Black Americans. You may be Eritrean or Nigerian or Sierra Leonean, but to a large majority of this country you are only Black. On the one hand, I see myself as a Black American because I feel a solidarity with every other citizen who shares my skin color but on the other hand I cling tightly to my roots, to being an Eritrean, because you know, unfortunately, there are many Black Americans who can’t trace back their lineage to a specific place beyond West Africa, which was the geographical source of the slave trade. I feel privileged in that way to be able to say, this is where my people are from and this is where my people still are. There are also commonalities to the Black American experience that, regardless of where you’re originally from, you just get it. Black people are always communicating silently in public, be warned. If I’m in a grocery store and a white lady makes a really suspect comment, I can guarantee you that me and the nearest Black person are talking a mile a minute with one another using only our eyes and smirks.

That’s something I’m teasing out for myself because I had an interview recently––we won’t say with whom––where I felt as though I was being asked questions to fit a kind of thesis.

That Black people have been hired and elevated to these positions in publishing and beyond as a kind of response to Black Lives Matter. I have almost always been the only Black person in the room, wherever I’ve worked. And I’m not sure what I represent to other people. It’s tricky because I feel as though, sometimes in these moments of great change or disruption, people of color are often expected to bear the burden of fixing structural issues. Has my skin color played a factor into hiring? I can’t answer that. What I can say is that it’s been mitigated by the fact that I’ve been accorded a lot of freedom to do what I like. There’s been very little hand holding at Doubleday in the best way possible. When I took this job, my fear was that I would be treated as an apprentice but I’ve really just been given a lot of freedom. Do I feel a sense of responsibility to give a platform to voices that are often shunted to the margins of the culture? Definitely. But at the same time, who are the people that we’re missing? Because the publishing ecosystem is still very insular. When we were at Iowa together, you saw how every agent would come through and pluck writers for their author lists, but what if you don’t have the luxury of going to Iowa? What if you’re at community college in Detroit? Who’s going to see your fiction?

I’m also going to be driven by my sensibility, which is eclectic. I love John Edgar Wideman. I love Ann Beattie. I love Penelope Fitzgerald. I love Jenny Erpenbeck. I love Christine Lincoln. I love Philip Roth. I love Jamaica Kincaid. I love Cathy Park Hong. My taste runs across the board and I hope that in remaining true to my own sensibility and what I find interesting, I will bring about some kind of change to this ossified structure. I’m not oblivious to the fact that I’m a Black person in a very high-level position and that doesn’t happen all the time. There’s Erroll McDonald. There’s Chris Jackson. Now there’s Lisa Lucas and Nicola Yoon. There was Toni Morrison. But it doesn’t happen very often. It’s a very complicated thing because you also struggle with impostor syndrome; you look around and no one looks like you. In the back of your head, sometimes you wonder, Why was I hired? And it’s insidious, that’s how racism works, right? You are encouraged to doubt yourself and your abilities. But there’s a lot I want to do.