In Conversation with Shakeisha Levene
by Atiyana Ringling
One of the first people to submit to htstw, before there was even a website or layout, was Shakeisha. From the start, she understood the goal and wanted to be a part of accomplishing it. And, her paper was exactly the kind of work I was looking for. Hers was the first piece fully edited for the site and after reading it, I wanted to interview her about it. I had questions! And how often are we in a position to ask authors questions? Her academic paper, “Reflecting on the Residual: Toni Morrison, Race, Gender, and Strategic Essentialism” is available to read on the site, and offers an insightful interpretation of Morrison—something jazzier than we normally get in intro lit classes. Shakeisha Levene is currently a Masters student at City College,CUNY and received her BFA in Literature at Purchase College.
At the beginning of our conversation, I wasn’t recording. It was my first interview. And, my loss. Shakeisha, known to some of her friends as Lilian, can be a warehouse of information and the speed and ease at which she delivers her breadth of knowledge and insight will make you wish there was a recording.
In the beginning, I asked her when she became “suspicious” of Morrisons work and she told me sometime around her reading God Help the Child. There had been scary or creepy elements to the book that her theory class brought to her attention. I also asked about her experience writing an academic piece, something most of us have done as some point in our academic careers, and a process that is, for the most part, very uncomfortable. She said that to her, academic writing wasn’t anything in particular. her piece began to sound more academic after the primary round of editing, done with her incredible and absolutely gracious advisor Kathleen McCormick. But she believed that her piece would “form it’s own elegance.”
She said that all writing, including academic work, is “a response to something else. Academia is trying to respond to something in the world. Our culture is a discourse. It’s a question.” And she believes, and I agree, that one of the main benefits our current education system(because it is very flawed) is that it gives us a “structure to think about things.” It teaches us to be “oppositional readers” because sometimes “they themselves (the authors) can not conceptualize it in their own culture.” It can be anything from the freedom they desperately yearn for but do not know how to vocalize or their characters standing up in ways they have not seen in their world. This is not always a fault of the author, of course, but as an avid reader myself, I had to learn to be critical of what I was reading because books aren’t always right. And, likewise, just because Toni Morrison is arguably the greatest American writer of the last fifty years, doesn’t mean the worlds she creates in her novel can be “everything” for the black community. Writing is personal.
Shakeisha Levene: All of this is personal as anything else, everything about writing. This essay to me was per-son-al in every way. That’s what they see, they see literary writing or creative writing as fucking personal and academic writing is somehow objective which it is not. Nothing is. There is no such thing as objectivity. So, it’s all biased, it’s all personal. Political is personal.
Atiyana Ringling: When you were writing this, did you find yourself trying to make it sound a certain way or adhering to any structures or forms that you wouldn’t have necessarily on your own?
S: No. I worried a lot that it wouldn’t sound like those things. But I didn’t try to make it sound, like I worried that it wouldn’t sound academic. I was like, “What? I’m gonna write this whole paper?” That’s like 90 pages. It’s gonna be me rambling.
Yea, I worried a lot that I wouldn’t sound academic cause I don’t talk like that and I write like very in a kind of crazy ramble-y way. But through the process of editing is when it started to sound more academic. I worried a lot about that because I don’t consider myself an academic but it came out the way it came out because everyone’s a fucking academic. And when you start to think about anything it’ll form its own elegance. If you’ve given it the kind of time that it should. /?/
A: Some more Toni stuff. So, I know you said when you read Tar Baby you kinda knew, but was there something that you read first of hers that made you kinda suspicious of her work or when did you know?
S: So, it was this whole summer. I had decided that I wanted to work on a Toni Morrison book for my senior project, so the summer before that I had read God Help the Child. That’s where the real issues came from. I read God Help the Child and I was like, “hmmmm(pensive).” God Help the Child prompted me to reread Beloved and Sula and Bluest Eye and Paradise. So, I read all of those, and then Tar Baby was the last of those read in the summer. I think they all somehow..., they’re all very scary, kind of. [laughs] They’re very creepy books—on many levels. I couldn’t actually figure it out, what bothered me about any of them until, again, I sat back in class and heard some theories, and then “Okay, so this is what is was.” Which is why every person should know theory. And I don’t mean like every person in school, I mean like every fucking person [laughs] should know theory. Just like we were talking about how pleasure doesn’t happen in a vacuum; you need a structure to think about things even.
A: How would you say this has changed your enjoyment of her literature? Like, have you read anything since...?
S: Yea! What did I just read? I just read Song of Solomon, which I had never read and which is supposed to be her best work. And I read Love recently as well which I had read before but I had only read it once when I was a small. I was like 11 and definitely didn’t know what the fuck it was about. Still don’t. You know what, it’s taught me to read things differently in general. I used to just think, “Okay, so I like this author. Whatever they say is fucking gold. Golden. Golden.” And I read in a very, almost like prescriptive way. Like I’ve always read to learn how to move through the world, learn about myself or whatever, and so I’ve allowed people’s reading to very literally affect the way that I think and move throughout the world. Now, I don’t do that. Now, I really evaluate things very seriously before attaching any value or any meaning to it.
It’s mainly more of an oppositional reader, I think.
A: So, I picked out a quote to ask you about and didn’t actually write a question. You said in there that “Unconsciously, Morrison wants Jadine and herself to be free from confinement to nurturing capacities (26).” That even though Morrison doesn’t agree with Jadine, she allows her to escape.
S: Writer’s sometimes write within frameworks where they cannot even conceptualize the idea of the freedom that they want, you know what I mean. They don’t even know that they want this freedom. They’re not able to think about it. It’s like a silence in their culture. A writer can write something and not know what it even means. They put it there because the human mind— everyone wants to be free. That’s what everyone is working to. Everything in culture. Most literary work is written with the idea of how can this aid freedom somehow? In human freedom, of thought, whatever. You can’t conceptualize that while writing it.
What I simply mean is that you can’t always conceptualize the freedom you want. Sometimes, it is beyond you. But just because it is beyond you doesn’t mean it isn’t within you, doesn’t mean that some corner of your brain doesn’t know that that freedom exists.
A: It’s so interesting, cause again, reading your piece makes me re-think, obviously, all of her works. When I first read her works it was more like, “Oh my god, here’s this amazing American author who’s a Black woman. And everything she says is great. She’s done all the thinking for me, I’m just gonna enjoy it.
S: Right! And that’s the thing. Especially as a Black woman and with only having so few writers that are available or that you’re exposed to, you’re not looking to criticize them. You just want someone. You’re just ready and willing to lift them. As well as also, what you immediately think is that any Black woman writer is gonna be radical. So you’re already like, “Oh yea, she’s got it. She’s radical.” Like you already have that idea that she’s somehow gonna be revolutionary. So you don’t look for the ways in which they are not revolutionary. You look for the ways in which they are. If you’re reading a fucking white male who wrote some shit during slavery times, you’re like “this nigga is a fuckin slaver.” You’re looking for ways to criticize him. The way we read like Fitzgerald or some shit or like Hemmingway, you’re like “Nah, these niggas is racist.” So, you’re already reading with that oppositional ear. When you read a Black woman, Black women are radical or revolutionary, they have to be. You expect it to be, you expect the work to relay that. But in every way, everyone's not like that.
A: You also talked about this briefly earlier. What has been your experience with Black expectations and perceived Blackness versus your authentic self, I guess. You said that you kind of related to Jadine for how people were projecting.
S: I mean, people are trying to tell you what Blackness is from the moment you come out of the fucking womb. And you know that, first of all, Blackness cannot be just that if I’m this. So, you feel it’s wrong immediately. And then you feel the sense of alienation. My experience has been that I’ve always felt alienated by [call broke up] the black community. That was not what I have even been taught Blackness was, so I was able to escape that. But when I was younger, especially like my family. My family has always told me that I was crazy. Always just like, “Shakeisha’s weird. She’s weird. She’s just a weird child. She’s an oreo. She’s this, she’s that.” So, I’ve just always been taught that Blackness is this one thing by everyone. [lost audio over call]
A: We talked about a specific black community when you first answered the question. I missed that part.
S: I think whatever Black community you’re in will try to tell you that “this is Blackness.” Will try to define the whole scope of Blackness by it. Like Jamaican Blacks, which is my culture, will tell you very firmly that they are it. And that if you don’t behave this way then you’re not Black. Everything, for example, when I was a kid, everything, the way that I spoke was not black. Which obviously doesn’t make any sense because if I am Black and I speak it, then it’s fucking Black. When you’re in the hood, first of all, I remember when I was a kid, I always thought that all Black people were poor, somehow, because all the Black people I knew were poor. So, I associated Blackness with poverty. And I was like well, if you were Black and not poor, then you somehow weren’t Black to me. That negated your Blackness somehow. I think that everyone tries to put Blackness in a box somehow, depending on what box they’re in. But it’s not and it’s because white people tell you that basically, everything that is not in your box is white. Everything outside of Black is White. So Black can only be a small amount of things and white has to be everything else.
A: You said that you kind of related to Jadine in that way, on that same tangent.
S: Yeah. I definitely related to Jadine in every way. I related to Jadine because she also wanted to kind of experiment with herself, and who she was and who she could be. That’s what she wants to do throughout the novel is experiment with her potential. And people constantly try to tell her her potential is only “this.” Or that it should be “this.” And so that’s how I always feel. I always try to experiment. Jadine doesn’t know who she is and she wants to know but she doesn’t think that that’s a one-stop thing. People will tell you that that’s a one-stop thing. And that’s how I always feel, like a person who’s experimenting with what it means to be an individual and what my identity is. And people are constantly trying to lock in my identity as this one thing. I think everyone feels that way really. I’m not special.
A: You’re special whenever you want to be. [laughs]
S: Right answer.