Freedom: Essays

The electrifying nonfiction debut from novelist Clemmons (What We Lose) muses on the thorny concept of freedom in “a world buckling from the consequences of centuries of interlocking injustices.” In particular, she contrasts the American right’s narrow definition of personal freedom at the expense of others to that of Black people, for whom freedom is both more “expansive” and also continually “revised” through struggle. The title essay ruminates on a 2013 trip Clemmons took to Johannesburg to unveil her mother’s headstone that coincided with the death of Nelson Mandela. “Home Going” examines the Great Migration alongside the author’s experience moving to the West Coast. In “A People Without a Nation,” Clemmons interrogates Afropessimism’s rise alongside that of Trump, and considers how Bigger Thomas, the protagonist of Richard Wright’s Native Son, can provide “a window into the psychology of the school shooter, the serial rapist... the white supremacist.” Most harrowing is “Freedom Pt. 2,” Clemmons’s account of being forcibly kissed by a Pulitzer Prize–winning novelist when she was in grad school and later speaking publicly about the incident during the #MeToo movement, only to have her veracity questioned, likely damaging her career and leading her to worry about being “reduced to a footnote in The Author’s story.” It adds up to a sharply glimmering vision of how personal experience connects to larger political moments. (June)