A love-story exposé of race, immigration, and more
While many a story about America’s race history is wrapped in pain, some stories come wrapped in love. Nina Sharma delivers her brush with race as a love story in her debut non-fiction essay collection, The Way You Make Me Feel: Love In Black And Brown, named after the Michael Jackson classic. Written in a romcom-meets-chick-flick-meets-personal-diary style, the book unlocks a bigger story about immigration, colonialism, Afro-Asian connection, class, caste, white supremacy, colorism in India, and racism in America. Besides herself and her husband Quincy, mental health and sexuality are equally conspicuous protagonists all through the collection.
The book is personal, political, and hilarious. Sharma teaches English at Barnard College, Columbia University, and is also the co-founder of a South Asian women’s improv group called “Not Your Biwi.”
Edited excerpts from a Zoom interview with Sharma
India Currents: The book is extremely personal. To bare your interiority for mass consumption is gutsy. Are you cringing now?
Nina Sharma: (laughs) I try to think of myself as a character. That creates a dissociative distance. This is the first time I’ve done this on such a massive scale. So I’m really experiencing it in real-time… the cringing, blushing, all of it. When I was writing, my husband and I kept calling each other Harry and Sally; that was a way I kept a placeholder for this character. That let me let it all hang out, let myself be naked… that’s one of the things I worked on editorially — really getting this relationship with all its colors on the page and going from Harry and Sally to finding Nina and Quincy.
That’s also my training; I’ve written memoirs for many years, I’ve studied non-fiction writing, I read a lot of non-fiction. It’s kind of just the way I am in the world. I think I am a chronic oversharer!
IC: Even so, did you create boundaries for yourself while writing?
NS: I think as a non-fiction writer you’re constantly negotiating that internal boundary. Sometimes it makes sense to honor that boundary and sometimes it makes sense to challenge it. It really depends on where you’re at and on a lot of things.
IC: Like what?
NS: Like — Are you ready to tell that story? Is that story a whole book unto itself? Am I holding back? Am I self-censoring? Is it because I’m protecting myself or for some other reason, like feeling ashamed or thinking ‘what will people say’? Is there anything that’s making me hesitate?
IC: What’s the backstory here? Why did you write this book?
NS: I’ve been working on this book for 10 years. At the heart of this book is a love story — my husband’s and my love story — that’s where it began for me. It came from me moving from New York to Philly. I left my community, my ecosystem; we were barely dating, we were in that lusty stage and I just was like “I need to hop in bed with this guy!” It was such a move of passion.
From a very busy New York life I found a lot of stillness. Right at the same time I started taking a local community writing workshop called ‘Life Writing’. I didn’t even consider myself an essayist, I was just taking the class. My community in Philly was just me and him. So I began to write about us — stories of us becoming closer, of what happens when you settle in and really get to know each other, warts and all.
I began to crack into talking about all different parts of my identity through our love story.
I love watching romcoms and I realized I’d never seen us portrayed in a love story that way — never seen a Black or brown person in a white American love story. The Black or brown person is a helpful sidekick.
IC: It seems like being the child of immigrants informed the blueprint of the book…
NS: My parents came in the 1970s and I was born in Edison, New Jersey, in a large Indian community in the 1980s, and that really did inform the lens with which I understood the world. I come from a particular time and place in my parents’ immigration.
I’ve been thinking a lot about telling the story of assimilation — and how assimilation can feel like a capitulation or erasure of your identity. I think a lot of how anti-Blackness is baked into assimilation.
Broadly speaking, the idea of being a “quiet,” model minority is a stereotype of Asian Americans, which is set against the idea of the “angry Black Americans” being the “problem” minority. Those two lies are narratives that grew out of white America trying to problematize the Civil Rights Movement to uphold the ultimate lie of white supremacy. For me it’s that journey of thinking about how much we as immigrants adhere to stereotypes out of a false notion of safety. But that just keeps us in pain.
IC: South Asian writers seem to be having a collective moment. Name some favorites.
NS: Bushra Rehman (Roses In The Mouth Of A Lion), Rajiv Mohabir (Antiman), Mecca Jamilah Sullivan (Big Girl), Prachi Gupta (They Called Us Exceptional: And Other Lies That Raised Us), the late Kamilah Aisha Moon (poet).
The Way You Make Me Feel: Love In Black And Brown was published by Penguin Press on May 7.
