Sh*t To Help You Show Up November 12, 2021
Kiese Laymon's Ethic of Revision
When I was maybe 10 or 11 years old I came upon a first edition paperback of Toni Morrison’s The Bluest Eye on a RIF table in the school library. RIF was “Reading Is Fundamental” and the RIF table showed up once a year in our library so that every kid in school could take a book home of their very own. I suspect the person who chose to put The Bluest Eye on the table had never even heard of it, much less read it. A story of family violence, incest, poverty, and racism, both external and deeply, tragically internal, it is not a book anyone might knowingly hand to an elementary school kid, but I’ll tell you, that book changed my life.
Ms. Morrison asserted throughout her storied career that she endeavored to never write for the White gaze. So, for sure when she wrote tenderly and fiercely about Pecola Breedlove getting pregnant by her drunk, violent daddy she wasn’t writing for me. And yet, she wrote with such emotional clarity and authenticity that even as I was awash in the lush particularity of the world she had created I was struck dumb by how it resonated with the emotional state of my own life.
I hadn’t realized how alone I’d felt until I read her words and didn’t feel alone anymore.
That is the beauty of great art, is it not? It opens up new worlds for us, fully realized worlds that are nothing like our own. And yet it touches on something so essential, so universal, that we can find ourselves in them. James Baldwin, another icon of Black literature wrote:
You think your pain and your heartbreak are unprecedented in the history of the world, but then you read. It was books that taught me that the things that tormented me most were the very things that connected me with all the people who were alive, who had ever been alive.
Another modern Black writer that embraces Ms. Morrison’s refusal to write for the White gaze is Kiese Laymon. I was lucky enough to meet Laymon briefly while selling his books at a talk he gave on the Ithaca College campus. At that time he had two published books, an essay collection entitled How To Slowly Kill Yourself and Others in America and a novel, Long Division. He later went on to write the critically-acclaimed memoir, Heavy, which cleaved my heart like an axe in a closed door. Not just because it vividly describes abuse, sexual violence, and body hatred, but because the love that Laymon strives to find for himself and his people even in the midst of terrible pain is what loving real, imperfect people deeply and honestly is about.
Laymon dignifies his people. By dignifying his people he offers us the opportunity, by extension, to dignify not only them but ourselves.
This week Laymon was interviewed by Tressie McMillan Cottom for The Ezra Klein Show. Though you can read the entire transcript here, I hope you’ll take time to listen to the interview, available on all major podcast platforms, so you can dive deeply into the lyrical lilt of Laymon’s voice. Though I am from the “Shallow South”, there were plenty of folks recently transplanted from further south around me growing up that sounded like Laymon. When I listen to him talk I am also thrust back into life in Memphis, TN with my grandmother. He sounds like home to me.
In the interview, Laymon and Cottom speak at length about his “ethic of revision”. In 2020, Laymon spent over ten times the amount he was initially paid for his first two books (about $4000) to buy back the rights from the publisher. He did it because he wanted to revise those earlier works, which is not a thing that authors ever do, really. When Cottom asked him why he chose to revise these successful works Laymon replied:
[O]ne of the worst Americanisms is like if you did it, it’s good… especially for cisgender men, cisgender straight men, like everything I do got me here, so I shouldn’t regret anything I’ve done. You know, like that, that’s dangerous for an artist. But it’s catastrophic for a human.
In his revision, Laymon removed two essays completely because he felt he could no longer stand by them. Laymon admits that he’s not sure his revision made the collection artistically better, per se, but instead made it more true to who he knows himself to be now:
[T]hat’s the thing about, I think, revision, I think if we’re honest. You know, like sometimes I think, yeah, like the goal is to make something necessarily better. But I think sometimes making something have a bit more integrity is not necessarily making it artistically better…I was trying to make this have more integrity for me, you know what I’m saying?
Cottom and Laymon speak further about how an ethic of revision can show up in your private life as you learn to show up with more integrity in the world, forcing you to develop a different relationship to art that you previously loved unequivocally. Laymon describes, for instance, the evolution of his relationship to the seminal N.W.A. hit “Fuck The Police”, which had originally helped him feel like he could “walk with his head up.” Now, though, it subverts his work to confront his own misogyny, queer antagonism, and trans antagonism:
I don’t need more incentive to believe the ideas in that song. And I have plenty of incentives to believe the ideas in that song. That’s me. You know what I’m saying? This isn’t for somebody else. It’s because like I’m already queer antagonistic. I’m already trans antagonistic. I’m already anti-Black. I’m already misogynist.
If I know certain things are going to encourage me to be more, I need to, as a grown human being who creates art, be like, I’ve got to divest myself of that art. And I think that’s what we all have to do as human beings in this world if we want to move to a more honest, tender place. I can’t control the world, but I can control what I do, you know?
Finally, the two authors discuss how Laymon’s work wrestles with our American cultural tendency to refuse revision. As a nation, we refuse to revise our stories about our history, our present, and our narratives for the future. “How could we value revision in a nation whose entire story is about resisting revision?”, Cottom asks. Laymon’s response in its entirety follows because it’s a mini-masterclass on integrity:
I think the thing that connects all of us is that it is really hard to look back yesterday at something that we did that we don’t want to look at — on a very elementary level. I think a lot of us don’t even want to assess what we have done if we have potentially done something that is harmful. So we can’t even talk about revision if you don’t talk about the vision. Like the assessment is the vision.
And so the thing that I’ve learned most importantly is that the times in my life when I’m so sure that I have done a relationship, a job, a piece of art like ethically and tenderly, like those are the times you have to like commit more to looking back and seeing what kind of harm was done, if at all? What kind of joys are secretly in there? But for me, like the act of revision on the page is so tied to the act of living our lives.
And the hardest part is the assessment. I just want to say like the vision, like looking at who and what you’ve done. And then if you look at that with like any sort of like rigor or clarity, I think, one, can be like, OK, well, here’s what I need to do differently. What I think we do as Americans is that we resist the hard vision. We resist the hard assessment.
Therefore, the revision seems right out the door. And what most people want in a revision is a commercial. Like this will make you better. This will — no, what revision is is like the commitment to perpetually assessing work going forward. So there’s no done. You’re never done.
But I don’t even think we can get there because most of us are afraid of what we see when we look backwards. And I am too. But I know that the only way that we can grow backwards and forwards is to like honestly assess the ingredients that we put into life. And that’s what I try to do with my work.
Whether or not you have ties to the South or have an interest in Black literature, I hope you will listen to this interview. I very intentionally didn’t do audio for this newsletter because if you’re going to listen to audio, you’d be much better served by listening to Laymon. Like Ms. Morrison, he will take you deep into worlds that you may never have imagined, and when you least expect it, you will find yourself there.
Laymon also authors essays regularly in a variety of publications, including the New York Times, The Guardian, ESPN, Oxford American, and The LA Times. Whether he is writing about culture, writing, publishing, sports, or relationships, he always manages to drop wisdom about the nature of what it is to live and love with integrity in this complicated, painful world.
In an essay for Vox in May of this year, Laymon wrote about how his ethic of revision brought truth, integrity, and deeper love to one of his oldest friendships. In spinning the story of the revisions necessary with his old friend Ray Gunn, Laymon imbues the act, which is such an elemental part of an ever-evolving integrity practice, with a spiritual significance that is worth remembering:
Revision required witnessing and testifying. Witnessing and testifying required rigorous attempts at remembering and imagining. If revision was not God, revision was everything every god ever asked of believers.