Light, Love, and Luck:

An Interview with Jamel Brinkley

by Karin Cecile Davidson

 

In the stories of Jamel Brinkley’s expansively beautiful collection, “A Lucky Man” (Graywolf Press/A Public Space Books, 2018), selected for the 2018 National Book Awards Longlist for Fiction, fathers and sons of the Bronx and beyond try to make their way, to negotiate and understand their world. The language here is at times lyrical, always honest, revealing the reach and fascination and discomfort of the places—of the city, of the mind—in which the characters dwell. As Robert Hunsberger (Duende) writes: “Told in nine vivid short stories, Jamel Brinkley’s debut collection, “A Lucky Man,” tugs sharply at the tender threads of intimacy, race, and masculinity. Brinkley’s prose, as fierce in its vigilance as it is in its empathy, casts new light on the delicate and heartbreaking truisms of American manhood.”

Of the Bronx and Brooklyn, NY, Jamel Brinkley is a graduate of Columbia University and the Iowa Writers’ Workshop. His writing has appeared, or is forthcoming, in The Best American Short Stories 2018, A Public Space, Gulf Coast, Glimmer Train, American Short Fiction, and elsewhere, and has been awarded fellowships from Kimbilio Fiction, the Callaloo Creative Writing Workshop, the Tin House Summer Workshop, and the Breadloaf Writers’ Conference, among others. He was the 2016-17 Carol Houck Smith Fellow at the Wisconsin Institute for Creative Writing and is a 2018-20 Wallace Stegner Fellow in Fiction at Stanford University.

‘I got an agitated soul,’ he said. ‘Most of us do, I think. Not from conspiracy or nothing. Just from being black and alive. So what we need is rest. To relax and let shit slide.’
—Jamel Brinkley, “J’ouvert, 1996”

KARIN CECILE DAVIDSON: There are striking, sustaining moments between characters—viewpoint characters who are young and trying to figure out what is this life all about—and adults they’ve just met. The pairings of Ty and Cuffy in “J’ouvert, 1996” and Freddy and Mrs. Clinksdale (or Arlene, as she would prefer to be called) in “I Happy Am” especially come to mind. Within the elder’s words and gestures are tendrils of surprise and wisdom, creating wonder in these momentary encounters and turning the world the younger characters know toward a more expansive angle, allowing them the chance to understand life—and, in particular, their lives—in new light. The scenes, whether brief or spun out, open the stories and send them in unexpected directions, places where breath and thought and movement slow for a few beats or altogether.

Do the characters lead you to these moments, or do you have them in mind already? Tell us of this process, specifically, with these characters.

JAMEL BRINKLEY: For me, it definitely begins with the characters. I’m the sort of writer who wants to have as little of a story as possible already in mind when I begin writing it. Drafting a story is ideally a process of discovering it. When Ty goes to the park where the men hang out and shoot the shit, that scene acts as a stand-in for the scene he doesn’t get to have with the men at the barbershop. I had a notion that it would be fun to write these men’s dialogue, but in terms of the character and the story, I knew something new had to happen. After all, Ty has probably heard these guys saying a lot of the same things before, variations on a theme. But the thing they end up talking about this time is particularly painful for him, and then there’s a newer guy there, Cuffy, whose presence bends the conversation among the men in different directions, too. What I like about the moment Ty and Cuffy share away from the rest of the men is that Ty doesn’t really get it, which seems true to me. He senses that Cuffy is saying something significant, which comes out of the mystery of his experience, but he doesn’t comprehend it. There’s no sudden epiphany or easy lesson. But what I also like is that it doesn’t feel like dramatic irony, either. Readers aren’t necessarily nodding wisely while Ty stands there dumbfounded. What I’m suggesting, or what I hope, is that a little portal of mystery is opened for readers, too. I like the feeling that readers might want to follow Cuffy, or Arlene in “I Happy Am,” off the page and into their own story. Or, seduced by the energy and tension between the younger and older characters, we might want to see them spend more time together, beyond the boundaries of the given story.

It was as though a bright, delicate object they couldn’t see, some filament, were held between them, along the length of her sapphire dress stretched taut by his thigh… and they had no choice but to pull each other close, to preserve the object between them, otherwise it would drift free and fall and lose its light.
—Jamel Brinkley, “A Family”

DAVIDSON: Intimacy exists in these moments between younger and older characers, as well as between friends and couples. In “No More Than a Bubble,” after the night with the two girls, Ben understands more about Claudius, and himself, than he ever knew he would. In “A Family,” as they dance, Curtis reflects on the “filament” of energy between himself and Lena. In “Everything the Mouth Eats,” brothers Eric and Carlos not only share in the intimate dueling dance of capoeira, but in the secret of the past of forced familial touch.

Tell us about these discrete acts of intimacy throughout “A Lucky Man” and what it was like to write them.

BRINKLEY: In all the cases you mention, what I might be writing about are instances of love. Intimacy is an appropriate word, too. Many of us tend to think of those words, love and intimacy, as belonging properly to the context of romantic and sexual relationships. I’m interested in those often shocking moments of love and intimacy that fall outside or on the margins of that specific context. In terms of writing about them, I do think in terms of physical closeness. All the instances you named involve the bodies of characters being sometimes literally pressed up against each other. That’s when the strangeness happens. That’s when the air surrounding two characters sparks. I believe that each character in a story has a particular chemical makeup and, maybe more important, a rhythm. When their bodies come into proximity or contact in unexpected ways, new music can emerge, new layers or depths can be perceived.

Cody didn’t lack confidence. She knew she was attractive. She had full, distracting breasts, dark areolae that I could see through her tank top. I worked so hard not to look that I lost track of our conversation. She was giving me an expectant look, her lashes and lips both floating from her face in the same way, following the same gentle circuits.
—Jamel Brinkley, “Infinite Happiness”

DAVIDSON: The stories “A Lucky Man” and “Infinite Happiness” expose instances in which relationships are disrespected and trampled. Main characters Lincoln of “A Lucky Man” and A.J. of “Infinite Happiness” respectively commit acts that change the original trust and makeup of marriage and friendship. How these two traverse their worlds is very different, but there is regret and shame and a kind of sorrow in realizing the irreparable undoing of close relationships with intensely beautiful women. Here, men take and justify themselves in the taking, and in the end, there is a form of repentance and knowledge that there is no going back to how it all was before.

Jamel, these stories and others in the collection tilt masculinity toward an angle that illustrates an underside, something unspoken, a kind of unraveling in how men interact with women and at times with other men. What do you think it is that leads to the unraveling?

BRINKLEY: A word that pops up in “A Lucky Man” is deserve. Lincoln reflects on the idea that his life looked a certain way when he was young, that he was in a position to have a wonderful life and, moreover, that he deserved to have that wonderful life. I do think that much of the way masculinity in its most patriarchal and toxic forms operates is through the conviction that (heterosexual) men deserve certain things: money, success, admiration, women, beauty, and so on. When you approach life in this acquisitive way, and especially when you approach other human beings in an acquisitive way, then you’ll likely end up with the kinds of damaged relationships you mentioned. A.J. thinks he’s better than Micah, more deserving of Cody than his friend is, but of course we find out he’s just as bad, if not worse. Lincoln can’t bear to think that he hasn’t gotten the life he feels he deserves, and, sadly, self-destructively, he turns on the very best part of his life, his wife Alexis.

Was a black Jesus different from the other kind? Was he easier to talk to? What kind of person would even have a black Jesus?
—Jamel Brinkley, “I Happy Am”

DAVIDSON: Images throughout the book pull us into scene: in “J’ouvert, 1996” the dancer at the J’ouvert revel who calls out, “Dance or go home!”; the painting of the “black Jesus” in “I Happy Am”; the sensory-loaded subway car in “ A Lucky Man”; the great-horned owl mask of “J’ouvert, 1996” that Ty’s brother Omari wears.

There are writers and artists who consider reality as a source for fiction. Depending on the storyteller, truth refracted through the prism of storytelling becomes a greater truth. In this light, are these images ones that are called from memory? Or perhaps from stories, pieces of overheard conversation, paintings, or places once experienced and now distilled?

BRINKLEY: They come from various sources. The owl mask, for instance, was inspired by the dog mask worn by Stan’s daughter in Charles Burnett’s film Killer of Sheep. I’ve always found the image of her wearing it haunting, the way its eyes are askew, the way she sticks her hand into its mouth. The image of black Jesus comes, I think, from an episode of the TV show Good Times. At least that’s the earliest source I can remember. Most of the images I’ve seen of Jesus depict him as white, and this was especially true when I was a kid. The subway comes from years of personal experience commuting to and from school or work in New York. “Dance or go home” feels like it comes from memory, perhaps something overhead, but I can’t place it. What I do know is that the sensibility of that phrase is something I’ve been exposed to a lot, not just during my experiences at J’ouvert. Capoeira, for instance, has a similar notion of everyone participating, either in the game itself, the singing, or the playing of instruments. In fiction, “Dance or go home” seems like a good reminder for our characters, that it’s probably not best for them to be mere observers, playing the wall like a shy person at a party. They need to get involved.

As always when observing capoeira, I could concentrate on only one player at a time. The experience resembles reading a poem with clever line breaks and complicated syntax: my sense of the dynamic between two players corrects itself retrospectively, deferred until a second or two after the surprise of a noteworthy exchange.
—Jamel Brinkley, “Everything the Mouth Eats”

DAVIDSON: “Everything the Mouth Eats” is presented perhaps in the written form of capoeira, the Afro-Brazilian martial arts tradition combining elements of acrobatics and music. In the same way the story’s momentum contains breath met with quick, powerful maneuvers, its underlying narrative creates leverage and surprise, supporting and strengthening the overlay of story. Again, there is intimacy here, power and cruelty as well, and ultimately a kind of understanding.

There are pairings of boys and men throughout the collection—brothers, friends, fathers, and sons—but tell us, what of Carlos and Eric? What brought their story to you?

BRINKLEY: Two things, I’d say. My own relationship with my brother is something I think a lot about, what it means to have someone who has shared so many formative experiences with you, but is a totally different person who has taken a totally different life path since leaving home. I’m interested in the tension between intimacy and distance there. The other thing is James Baldwin’s story “Sonny’s Blues,” which was the inspiration and the model for “Everything the Mouth Eats,” the story I wanted mine to be in conversation with. Among other ways, Baldwin’s story proceeds with the ever-increasing intimacy between the narrator and Sonny. I wanted my story to proceed along somewhat similar lines, except by the end, to go back to your previous question, my narrator has to go beyond being the audience to his brother’s artistry. By the end, he has to experience it himself. You’re correct that I wanted to get something of capoeira itself into the writing. I hope the swing or sway between the present and the past, in a way that the past isn’t merely backstory, mimics the foundational movement in capoeira, which is called ginga.
 

DAVIDSON: What would you have me ask that no one else has?

BRINKLEY: Honestly, I think you’ve already done it. Much of the way people have tended to respond to the book has boiled it down to a collection about masculinity. Of course, it is about that, but you’ve engaged me with questions about intimacy, image, brotherhood, and so on. I feel excited when I get a chance to talk about the book beyond the idea of masculinity, or to take that idea and break it down into its component parts.

But Lincoln was a man with luck—yes, he still had it… Good fortune can change in an instant, however, or it might never… For years it had persisted in following him. It went home from work with him, lived with his family, claimed a space between him and his wife in their bed. She still had her light, but his was his luck.
—Jamel Brinkley, “A Lucky Man”

DAVIDSON: The lives of brown and black boys and men from the Bronx are ortrayed here, as well as the peripheral lives of the women who stride alongside with their beautiful backbones and singular wills. Within these portrayals, we understand how hope can turn into despair, tenderness into cruelty, strength into vulnerability. What is the lesson here?

BRINKLEY: Well, this may sound like a dodge, but I resist the idea of a lesson. I don’t mean my work to be didactic in any obvious way, not that there’s anything necessarily wrong with didactic art. I think our emotions are in such proximity to one another that one can easily morph into another one, or we see how shadings of one emotion are hidden within another, or we realize that there are blendings of emotions for which we have no names. So the way to get at them is through art, through stories or poems, and only in the totality of each piece of art can you get what you might call “the lesson.” The entire story is the lesson. The entire collection of stories is the lesson. The characters gathered together between the covers are the lesson. It can’t be extracted via the surgery of analysis, not really, not without something being lost or damaged. In fact, I hope the stories are capacious enough that they make rooms for readers of all kinds who might all find a different lesson in each of them, each time they encounter them.

 

Karin Cecile Davidson, Interviews Editor