{"id":120725,"date":"2018-01-25T09:00:22","date_gmt":"2018-01-25T14:00:22","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.theparisreview.org\/blog\/?p=120725"},"modified":"2018-05-21T12:59:37","modified_gmt":"2018-05-21T16:59:37","slug":"owning-brooklyn-interview-naima-coster","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.theparisreview.org\/blog\/2018\/01\/25\/owning-brooklyn-interview-naima-coster\/","title":{"rendered":"Owning Brooklyn: An Interview with Naima Coster"},"content":{"rendered":"
\"\"<\/a>

Naima Coster<\/p><\/div>\n

 <\/p>\n

Naima Coster<\/a> and I met in passing in college at Yale. We had people in common, but I knew her first onstage. I remember watching Naima perform on the step team: her long braid was like flashes of lightning, but I sensed that even as she was moving,\u00a0she would not be moved. This is a kind of torque I now recognize in her writing. Her debut novel, <\/em>Halsey Street<\/a>, remains true to the stubbornly slow pace of psychological change and to the centuries that bind us to others and to the street, to the body, and to the earth itself. But her writing also registers the sudden speed with which an event can snatch us up and set us spinning. Her craft is polyrhythmic, like the jazz she is named for<\/a>.\u00a0<\/em><\/p>\n

Halsey Street\u00a0chronicles all the ways the machinery of gentrification gets jammed by unruly human lives. The time and place is mostly Bed-Stuy circa 2010, where Penelope Grand, an art-school dropout, has returned to care for her sick father. She\u2019s rented a room in the renovated brownstone of a wealthy white family new to Brooklyn. Her father\u2019s beloved record store, a neighborhood icon, has been priced out of business. His wife, Mirella, has left him, returning to the Dominican Republic, where she was born, in an overdue bid for independence. In <\/em>Halsey Street, losses intersect and ramify like cracks in ice, and underneath rushes a reckoning: cold, bracing, hard to bear, yet still the sign of a new season.<\/em><\/p>\n

But calling <\/em>Halsey Street \u201ca novel about gentrification\u201d somehow, ironically, gentrifies it via quick taxonomy. So much of what I remember from my reading doesn\u2019t register in that description. I remember Penelope\u2019s view from the attic window, and the obsessive sketches she makes of it in a frustrated effort to render the world as one she can desire. I remember all the ways she styles her hair. And most keenly, I remember the letter Mirella writes to Penelope: \u201cI have learned that to be a mother is to be left behind. I did it to Ramona; you have done it to me. When you were a girl, you used to follow me around, and I did not like it. I was not fit to be followed.\u201d\u00a0<\/em><\/p>\n

Naima has taught me, in life as in fiction, that we don\u2019t have to be \u201cfit to be followed\u201d in order to make way for one another. Sometimes candor is more loving than comfort. We text a lot or email, and I\u2019m grounded by this communication and restored to my human dimensions. Cardi B would say \u201cregular\u00a0regular\u00a0shmegular.\u201d I think writing to Naima helps me feel regular about even my wildest fantasies, ambitions, refusals, and ambivalences as an artist. She reminds me that we all have them, along with blood, breath, vision. This call was taped on a Saturday morning in January between New York City and Durham, North Carolina. We were drawn together by a snap of blistering cold.<\/em><\/p>\n

INTERVIEWER<\/p>\n

Halsey Street <\/em>isn\u2019t a sentimental book, but it\u2019s a book that cares for its characters. I feel that shows in your descriptions of lips, hair, thighs. How do you approach writing about bodies? Has looking as a writer conditioned the way you see bodies, say, on the street?<\/p>\n

COSTER<\/p>\n

I love this question. I understand bodies as a major way that we come to know one another in the world. I\u2019m not interested in bodies only in terms of possession, I\u2019m thinking about all the connections we have with one another that are embodied. Some of them have to do with desire and some don\u2019t. But everything from, you know, placing your hand on the hand of a parent to looking at a friend and noticing how her hair catches the light. In fiction, I understand bodies as a site to begin my study of character. Bodies tell the story of how we spend our time, who we come from, and how we\u2019ve been read in the world by others. Of course, I\u2019m also really interested in the inner lives of characters, and often that\u2019s represented as really divorced from the embodied life. We can see that in so many sex scenes that we read in fiction where there\u2019s a disconnect between what the body is doing and what\u2019s happening in the mind, or, dare I say, in the spirit.<\/p>\n

INTERVIEWER<\/p>\n

Yes, you dare!<\/p>\n

COSTER<\/p>\n

I\u2019m really interested in bringing those together in fiction because it\u2019s true of my life\u2014I experience my emotions in an embodied way, and so sometimes even when I\u2019m writing I will do something at my chair, I\u2019ll smile or I\u2019ll frown or I\u2019ll evoke a memory to see what kinds of sensations it brings up in my body. But I don\u2019t think that\u2019s something that I was formally trained to do in my study as a writer\u2014to be attentive to bodies or to what\u2019s happening inside a body.<\/p>\n

INTERVIEWER<\/p>\n

There are so many body-based moments I remember in the book. Samantha\u2019s blonde bun at the nape of her neck that leads Penelope to speculate that she might have been a dancer in her youth. Or when Penelope lingers on the thinness of Marcus\u2019s lips.\u00a0It\u2019s racialized, it\u2019s sexualized, and yet, there\u2019s something about the way you render Penelope\u2019s gaze on Marcus that cultivates, in the reader, a tenderness toward both characters\u2014even when they\u2019re hard to love. Do you feel you have to push yourself to write characters tenderly?<\/p>\n

COSTER<\/p>\n

So against my better judgment, I was looking at some reviews online! And it was really interesting, because a couple of people said that they really disliked all the characters in the book. And underneath that is this idea that they\u2019re all bad people. But I don\u2019t believe in that. My characters are neither victims nor villains, they\u2019re just messy people who are carrying damage but also have deep capacities for love. Of course, I wouldn\u2019t say that my characters always see one another that way\u2014<\/p>\n

INTERVIEWER<\/p>\n

Not at all! One of the things the book renders well is the way characters can slip into those totalizing visions of themselves or others. There\u2019s a poignant moment toward the end of the novel when Penelope is in a new relationship and asks herself,\u00a0How long will it be until he realizes that her bad moods are her? Part of the nuance of your telling is both rendering and yet refusing to replicate that totalizing vision. \u00a0<\/em><\/p>\n

COSTER<\/p>\n

I\u2019m so glad that came through. I mean those passages in the book to be painful to read, in the way that it\u2019s painful to hear someone you love articulate something self-hating. As I wrote this book, I was interested in the impulse that people have to hide whatever they think might cost them the love and esteem of others. Everyone in this book is doing that. Even the gentrifiers, with their beautiful home and the veneer of a good life, have all this tension inside of their family\u2014an isolated daughter, an overburdened mother, a deceitful father. And the Grands, in their time of glory, also had this reputation in the neighborhood as being an exemplary family but had their own domestic turmoil of envy, resentment, and emotional neglect. In life, real intimacy happens when we\u2019re ready to share the mess of our inner lives with one another, and I think that\u2019s also one of the ways that intimacy happens in fiction.<\/p>\n

INTERVIEWER<\/p>\n

Speaking of the Grands, it\u2019s so refreshing to see an interracial relationship that\u2019s not white and non-white.\u00a0 There are nostalgic visions of Brooklyn that run something like Prince\u2019s song about \u201cUptown<\/a>\u201d: \u201cWhite, Black, Puerto Rican \/ Everybody\u2019s just a-freakin.\u201d As much as I love that rhyme, we\u2019re not always \u201cjust a-freakin.\u201d Being real about the tensions of the old Brooklyn is also a way to be real about the tensions of the new Brooklyn.<\/p>\n

COSTER<\/p>\n

Yes, and that is something I\u2019ve felt so much in my own life and story. I identify as both black and Latina\u2014as you know\u2014and I think that sometimes, in my own family life in New York, I\u2019ve wanted to say, Black, Latina, samesies! To think, We\u2019re the same, we\u2019re connected, we roll together. It\u2019s been harder to look at the real tensions and difficulties that come from having both of those identities. My own resistance was a signal that there might be something to uncover there. What are the points of connection, what is the solidarity between these communities, which are diverse in and of themselves? And then, where are the tensions? That\u2019s something I haven\u2019t seen examined as much as I\u2019d like, in part because I think that a lot of the stories that we get about people of color are about people of color in proximity to whiteness.\u00a0That\u2019s true of my book, and I was aware of that when I was writing it. Maybe a story about Penelope is more palatable than a story that focuses primarily on Mirella and her world in Brooklyn as a Dominican immigrant. She doesn\u2019t have access, in the same way, to a more affluent, whiter world. So many of the stories that we read by writers of color are about someone stuck between two worlds, and I think part of that is because that\u2019s a sticky, interesting place\u2014<\/p>\n

INTERVIEWER<\/p>\n

\u2014but it\u2019s also a function of the kind of class mobility that it takes to even get to the point of being able to publish a book. As we know well, publishing involves extreme proximity to\u00a0whiteness\u2014not only white people but whiteness as an institution.<\/em><\/p>\n

COSTER<\/p>\n

Yes, exactly. My own story is one of somebody who grew up in Fort Greene, but it\u2019s also the story of someone who went to private school at twelve on the Upper East Side and then eventually went on to Yale. And there are so many other stories about life in Brooklyn and the impacts of gentrification that come from people who do not have a biography like mine. We want those stories, too.<\/p>\n

INTERVIEWER<\/p>\n

I hear you. But I think you\u2019re selling your book short if you frame it as a story about people of color in proximity to whiteness. Your structure is slyer than that. The way you weave Mirella\u2019s story in gives us a sense of a whole other world with its own set of repressions and displacements. At the same time, since your novel is not primarily about the Dominican Republic, you are able to foreground the emotional distances that diaspora engenders.<\/p>\n

COSTER<\/p>\n

I love that. Actually, my favorite chapter of the book is \u201cThe Mountain,\u201d the one set in rural Dominican Republic, written from Mirella\u2019s perspective. After I wrote that chapter I thought, Oh, this could be a whole novel! But in the context of Penelope\u2019s life, it really is just a chapter. It\u2019s long and has a lot of psychological weight, but it isn\u2019t the whole story. And I feel like that\u2019s true of diaspora as well. I think of my summers in the Dominican Republic\u00a0as intermittent chapters in my life that hold such resonance, but they\u2019re not the whole story.<\/p>\n

INTERVIEWER<\/p>\n

And then Brooklyn becomes its own old country! Halsey Street<\/em>, for you, is in a way an archive of a past self, since you spent so many years writing it. What do you feel you\u2019ve closed the door on with Halsey Street<\/em>, the book, and what questions remain open for you, as wounds or otherwise?<\/p>\n

COSTER<\/p>\n

The question that started the book was a question about Penelope.\u00a0When you learn to put yourself away over the course of your life, how do you move through the world? How does it affect your relationships? And then, how do you eventually find your life? Those particular questions have been answered for me by the book. I also don\u2019t think I\u2019ll write another book about gentrification. But I do think I\u2019m going to keep thinking about how people live together across lines of class and race. I think my writing will continue to be place based, and I\u2019m going to remain interested in the inner lives of women, and trauma, and how the past presses in on the present.<\/p>\n

I\u2019m working on two other book projects right now, and I always start with questions. One of my current questions is,\u00a0How do you learn to be tender when life has hardened you and when your survival has been contingent on a kind of armor? I think that is a question that maybe started with Halsey Street<\/em>. The end of the book brings Penelope to the verge of tenderness. So that\u2019s the question I wanted to pick up next, in a different setting, form, and genre.<\/p>\n

INTERVIEWER<\/p>\n

A different genre!<\/p>\n

COSTER<\/p>\n

Yes\u2014the book I was just describing is a work of speculative fiction.<\/p>\n

INTERVIEWER<\/p>\n

So exciting. I\u2019m curious about genre in relation to the question you raised about tenderness. I immediately thought of our mutual attraction to FKA\u00a0Twigs. In her look and sound, it feels like she engages in a mode of speculative fiction in order to be as tender as she is. Maybe the intensity of her tenderness would feel more dangerous to perform within a mode of total realism.<\/p>\n

COSTER<\/p>\n

Yeah, I\u2019m really interested in how her work confounds this dichotomy between passivity and agency. Especially because we have this impulse to categorize people, and it comes up all the time in fiction, right? I\u2019ve had people say of my characters, Oh, sometimes she\u2019s really passive and sometimes she\u2019s feisty!<\/p>\n

INTERVIEWER<\/p>\n

Oh, God.<\/p>\n

COSTER<\/p>\n

Which is an interesting word.<\/p>\n

INTERVIEWER<\/p>\n

Aka racist!<\/p>\n

COSTER<\/p>\n

She\u2019s a \u201cfeisty Latina.\u201d But she, like you, contains multitudes! The first time I watched the \u201cTwo Weeks<\/a>\u201d video, I just cried. I\u2019m still learning how to look at one<\/em> version of myself, and FKA\u00a0Twigs is inviting us to look at twelve <\/em>of her dancing. <\/em><\/p>\n

INTERVIEWER<\/p>\n

That\u2019s the speculative element I was trying to name. Sometimes in order to imagine the basic complexity of a woman of color we have to see her literally multiplied by twelve! In gold body paint.<\/p>\n

Recently, we\u2019ve both written about resistant ways of being in our bodies. You\u2019ve written\u2014in a secret draft that only some have seen!\u2014\u201cFeeling yourself<\/em> is a phrase that can be used to accuse someone of arrogance, but it can also be a declaration of sweet self-content. Feeling yourself<\/em> seems to me an especially important form of resistance in the face of gentrification that values certain communities, classes, ways of being over others.\u201d\u00a0I\u2019ve written about a similarly double-edged word, ensimismada<\/em><\/a>, which can describe a negative form of self-absorption or a dreamy state of being, \u201chead in the clouds.\u201d And I guess the strategic ethic of feeling yourself <\/em>is one version of a portable Brooklyn that can\u2019t be gentrified. What would it mean to carry Brooklyn inside of you, to be Brooklyn elsewhere, if Brooklyn becomes what it\u2019s becoming? I\u2019m thinking about that so much with Puerto Rico right now, after the twin catastrophes of PROMESA<\/small> and the hurricane. What is a vision of survival that\u2019s not necessarily contingent on that block staying the same?<\/p>\n

COSTER<\/p>\n

Oh, man, that\u2019s such a good question. I have a few thoughts. When I was growing up we were really proud to be from Brooklyn, and part of the reason we celebrated Brooklyn\u2014not the whole reason\u2014was knowing that it was devalued by outsiders. It gave us a special impetus to claim it as a way of celebrating ourselves. When I think about the portable Brooklyn I want to keep, there\u2019s that toughness.<\/p>\n

My mom has a story of a day the bus broke down in the snow. My brother and I were very small, so she had to carry one of us under each arm through the drifts and ice. I think about what that must have been like. She didn\u2019t have good winter boots, so her feet were cold. Blocks and blocks and blocks. I don\u2019t want to romanticize what sounds like a painful and difficult experience for my mother. But I try to stay connected to that part of my legacy\u2014mental toughness, the hustle.<\/p>\n

And, also, relying on others to get things done. There was a woman in our building\u2014she and my dad alternated driving a few of us to school. We didn\u2019t go to our zoned school because both of our parents had figured out a way to get us into a better school in the district. When I think of Brooklyn, I think of that kind of interdependence and shared life. I think of music in public spaces. There\u2019s so much I want to keep. You did such a beautiful job of describing how you think about this in your own work, too.<\/p>\n

But I think one of my most painful memories of being a child is being called comparona<\/em>. Do you know this word?<\/p>\n

INTERVIEWER<\/p>\n

Oh, I do. I\u2019ve been called\u00a0comparona<\/em>,\u00a0<\/em>too.<\/p>\n

COSTER<\/p>\n

That\u2019s so funny\u2014it might be a Caribbean thing. It basically means \u201cshow-off,\u201d and I\u2019d hear it if I was getting creative with how I was expressing myself\u2014flourishing my hand or performing in any way. But don\u2019t we all want to be seen and to be noticed? And I responded to this by outwardly expressing myself less, and, honestly, I think I turned to writing because I wanted to find space for myself, a way to be, as you\u2019re saying, ensimismada<\/em>, right? Now, I\u2019m at a place in my life where I\u2019ve been doing that in my writing for a long time. I want to figure out some ways to do it off the page, too.<\/p>\n

INTERVIEWER<\/p>\n

Comparonas pa siempre.<\/em><\/p>\n

 <\/p>\n

Carina<\/span> del Valle Schorske<\/a> is a poet, essayist, and Spanish-language translator. Her writing has appeared in the <\/em>New York Times Magazine<\/a>, <\/em>Lit Hub<\/a>, <\/em>The\u00a0New Yorker online, the <\/em>Los Angeles Review of Books,<\/em>\u00a0<\/a>and <\/em>The Point<\/a>, where she is contributing editor.\u00a0She is the recipient of fellowships from CantoMundo, the MacDowell Colony, and Columbia University, where she is a doctoral candidate studying Caribbean literature and culture.\u00a0<\/em><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

  Naima Coster and I met in passing in college at Yale. We had people in common, but I knew her first onstage. I remember watching Naima perform on the step team: her long braid was like flashes of lightning, but I sensed that even as she was moving,\u00a0she would not be moved. 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