For while it’s true that Laymon and his mother have an incredibly intimate relationship, she also beat him mercilessly, lambasted him about his body, stole from him to support her gambling addiction (which he eventually absorbed) and thoroughly failed to give him good models for healthy living and loving. Right there we see both the promise and pain of her lessons. In that space, I learned how to assemble memory and imagination when I most wanted to die.” (It’s telling that black women such as Margaret Walker Alexander and especially Toni Cade Bambara are his touchstones and reference points.) As he tells his mama and us, “You gave me a black Southern laboratory to work with words. Laymon’s mother, a professor at Jackson State University, grounded him in black literature and philosophy, radical politics, black Southern identity and a deeply rooted feminism that absorbs and feeds him. America’s failures regarding its African-American citizens, Laymon tells his mom, are the country’s fault lines writ large, and he’s not at all sure we can close the gaps. “Heavy” is conceived as a letter to her, following in the tradition of black intellectuals imagining their most heartfelt, terrifyingly intimate manifestos about America to their black relatives, from James Baldwin’s “The Fire Next Time” to Ta-Nehisi Coates’ “Between the World and Me.” Like Baldwin and Coates, Laymon refuses to lie about America’s broken promises to itself, and it won’t offer easy comfort or redemption narratives.

Shortly after 9/11, Laymon feels an emotional release, walking through Grand Central Terminal in Manhattan.īut Laymon is also attempting to write his memoir onto one person’s heart: his mother’s. Laymon knows that his black male body radiates a different kind of energy to the outside world.

Heaviness isn’t just physical in this book, but also existential and political. He spends a lifetime trying to tamp down his shame and his flesh. I know the feeling - who in America feels happy with his or her weight? - but it’s rare to see it conveyed in African-American writing by men. He steps on the scale at critical moments in this memoir, and nearly every time the climbing numbers chasten him, pound by increasing pound. On nearly every page, he reminds us of how his bulk takes up energy in his brain. His book is of the flesh, about how what happens to our flesh gets inscribed on our souls, and how what we're told to think about our bodies gets branded on us as fiercely as the mark of a hot iron. Kiese Laymon's visceral 'Heavy: An American Memoir' conveys sweat, shivers and raw pain.

Heavy an american memoir