The Brooklyn Rail

On the occasion of the awarding of the Center for Fiction First Novel Prize, Rail Books section co-editors Elizabeth Lothian and Joseph Salvatore interviewed 2023 recipient Tyriek White about his debut novel We Are a Haunting. In their conversation, White discusses troubling the boundaries between Western ideas of life and death, writing a story about growing up in a predominantly Black and brown, blue-collar neighborhood, and how Brooklyn to him represents an attitude, a demeanor, and a set of principles.

Joseph Salvatore: There is such a long tradition of literary ghost stories: Turn of the Screw, A Christmas Carol, Beloved, to name only a few. In each case, the haunting can function as a metaphor, for example, an inner state of a character, a relationship to the past, a historical event, etc. Can you discuss your choice to include the supernatural? On what levels might you see it working in We Are a Haunting?

Tyriek White: I think the ghosts in this story work in a couple of ways. It begins as a way for Colly, the protagonist, to work through the loss of his mother. People we love stay with us, even after they’re gone. I wanted to take that concept a step further and trouble the boundaries between Western ideas of life and death. This put me on a whole journey of learning about death in other religions, other spiritual practices. Gloria Anzuldua’s Borderlands/La Frontera and Orlando Patterson’s idea of social death both talk about existing in an in-between space in different ways. The experience of being a part of an underrepresented community, that denial of citizenship and how that plays out politically in our lives, often feels like a sort of half-living. I wanted to question our relationship to the past, show the specter of history that lingers about, that colors our experience, that colors even the way the world perceives us.

Elizabeth Lothian: Your depiction of grief is honest, multifaceted, and at many points magical. Tell me about your choice to examine grief in the work. How does Colly’s grief over losing his mother serve to develop his sense of self and his relationship to the world around him?

White: Colly is grieving his mother’s absence, he’s grieving the space left in his family, that fracture. He’s grieving the future, in that she’ll never know who he will grow to be. It’s just as much about healing as an everyday process, through sharing bonds with friends, pouring into your community, consuming art, etc. Even though she’s gone physically, his mom is still able to guide him toward these things. Still, he is confronted with all of these questions he has about his mom and the gift she passed on to him. He becomes a part of this journey of self-discovery that spans generations, and the story of his family is inherently tied to the history of this community, and in a larger sense, this country.

Salvatore: An element of the craft of fiction that can often be under-developed is a sense of place or setting. But in We Are a Haunting, the land and landscape you present feel like a character, depicted with features that have an influence on the plot and the characters. And of course the different time periods can intensify this. Was your use of place a conscious choice on your part from the beginning, or did it evolve as the story evolved?

The idea was always to have a story about growing up in this predominantly Black and brown, blue-collar neighborhood, communities which are largely neglected by our society, but I wanted to write about it with the kind of wonder, the kind of depth and grand scale that I felt when I grew up. The stories that always stuck with me the most made me feel rooted in a place. I will always love how Jesmyn Ward writes about Mississippi, or the way Harlem becomes a character of its own in Jazz by Toni Morrison. I think what evolved for me was how I wanted to write about this place, which is why you get elements of the Southern gothic when describing parts of New York, or such a focus on the land itself—the soil, the fauna, the coastline—even though it’s the “inner city,” which isn’t typically written about in that way.

Lothian: As someone born and raised in a deep Brooklyn neighborhood, I appreciated your rendering of Colly’s Brooklyn. Having grown up in Brooklyn yourself, was it important to you to represent this slice of the borough, so very different from the hip fantasyland that is often portrayed in pop culture now? What went into your research process in terms of place as the narrative moves back in time?

White: People ask me a lot what Brooklyn means to me, how important it is in this novel, and it is so hard for me because I can hardly put it into words. It represents an attitude, a demeanor, a set of principles. It’s also a kaleidoscope of culture and language. It's such a large part of my worldview. For this story, I was invested in showing a working-class Brooklyn. The characters become a part of how we understand this place, the story of this family, being in the body and moving through the world. I think the specificity makes a certain kind of reader feel seen. People from here remember a time before the Barclays Center; they may have jumped the barricade at the Labor Day parade, or been to the aqueduct swap meet. I talk about sitting down with my older brothers or cousins, my dad, folk in my old neighborhood, and going to them as living, embodied archives. What did folk dress like, what did people drive, how did people engage in community? I also sought out photo albums, old newspaper articles, old TV guides, and more—in order to tap into the materiality of those earlier times.

Salvatore: The title is linguistically quite sly. Applying a little Chomsky-ian deep-structure analysis, one could read it two ways, depending on the function of the verb: e.g., whether it's functioning as a linking verb or as an action verb. In the former, the speaker is claiming that the subject of the sentence “We” is literally a “haunting”—they are one and the same. But the latter has a more recherché usage, that of an action verb: in this interpretation, the verb is describing something that the subject is doing, not merely being. For example, in the Christmas song, we get “eight maids a-milking,” “seven swans a-swimming,” “six geese a-laying.” In that sense, your title can have both a passive and an active function. Can you discuss the different senses of “haunting” in your novel?

White: That’s a great point. I think the book deals with the implications of a person, a family, or a people as a haunting. Colly is haunted by the ghost of his mother and his family’s lineage, and on the flip side, he haunts the streets, the city, and this country in a similar way, reminding America of its original sin, which is slavery and all of its afterlives. The book as an object itself, an artifact, is a haunting. I had conversations with other writers about this during the early stages of writing this story. A book can be an archive, an act of preservation. I think about archival work as conjuring work, summoning the people who were here before us, imagining the lives they lead. When people hear about a haunting they think about fear, or something out of a horror movie, which can be the case, but I also think about confrontation. A haunting is being confronted by the past and that’s not always a bad thing at all. Sometimes it's necessary in order to move forward.