The Lindsay J. Cropper Memorial Writer Series welcomes Kiese Laymon, Ph.D.

Kiese Laymon, Ph.D., an essayist and memoirist, is the second Black creative writer to be featured in the Cropper Series for this academic year

Brittany Lang / Feature Editor / The USD Vista

The USD English department, in order to commit themselves to the enduring work of anti-racism, announced that the 2020-2021 Lindsay J. Cropper Memorial Writer Series would be a celebration of Black creative writing exclusively. The department believes that literature has a unique capacity to remind us of the innate dignity of all human life and therefore, they have a particular responsibility to showcase the remarkable talent of writers from all walks of life. 

On Thursday, Oct. 1, the Cropper Series welcomed Kiese Laymon, Ph.D., a writer who is critically acclaimed for his highly observant, perceptive, and often humorous essays and memoirs, for a craft talk and reading. 

Laymon is a proud Jackson, Miss. native. He is an Oberlin College graduate and received his MFA in creative writing from Indiana University. He currently holds the title of the Hubert H. McAlexander Chair of English at the University of Mississippi, and is the 2020-2021 Harvard Radcliffe fellow. Laymon also writes as a contributing editor for Vanity Fair and Oxford American.

Laymon is most well known for his bestselling memoir, “Heavy: An American Memoir,” which was awarded the 2019 Andrew Carnegie Medal for Excellence in Nonfiction, the 2018 Christopher Isherwood Prize for Autobiographical Prose, the Austen Riggs Erikson Prize for Excellence in Mental Health Media, and was named by The New York Times as one of the 50 Best Memoirs of the past 50 years and one of the best books of 2018. 

He is also the author of the essay collection “How to Slowly Kill Yourself and Others in America,” and the novel “Long Division” which defies the rules of genre. Laymon’s work has a distinctive focus on the battle within himself of the personal versus the political, and discusses hard-hitting themes such as racial injustice, poverty, shame, and identity. 

The Cropper Series commenced on Thursday with an introduction of Laymon from the director of the series, Brad Melekian, Ph.D.

Laymon began his discussion with a reading of “Heavy: An American Memoir.” The novel is about Laymon’s uneven and arduous path from boyhood to manhood, and eventually to a writer. The excerpt Laymon read was written about his formative high school years. He recounted events that transpired in 1992 shortly after the verdict of the Rodney King police brutality case was announced. In one particular scene he recited, Laymon described his mother trying her best to calm his anger. 

“The night of the Rodney King verdict you held me in your lap and you would not stop rocking for two straight hours. We watched L.A. burn as cameras showed a white man get pulled from a truck, getting beat up by black and brown men at a L.A. intersection. ‘I hope you see what they aren’t showing’ you said, ‘I want you to write an essay about what white folk feel tonight, I know they’re blaming us,’” Laymon recited. 

The theme that Laymon sought to highlight while reading this excerpt is something he believes still holds true today — that Black reactionary anger is deemed as the ultimate menace even in times of great injustice and violence. The Black community is not allowed to have violent reactions to their own persisting oppression, even after tiring all other peaceful efforts to advocate for equal rights and fair treatment. 

“I had only been alive seventeen years and I was already tired of paying for white folk’s feelings with a generic smile and a manufactured excellence,” he read. “I never heard of white folk getting caught and paying for anything they did to us and stole from us — didn’t matter if it was white police, white teachers, white students, or white randoms.” 

Laymon in this excerpt described in great detail how he didn’t want to have to teach white people how to treat Black people respectfully. His 17-year-old self had this persistent and ferocious anger that made him want to fight all of them and never lose to them again. Laymon wanted to take back what white people stole from Black culture.

“I wanted all the money, the safety, the education, the healthy choices, the second chances — if we were ever to get what we were owed, I knew we had to take it back without getting caught because no creation on earth was as all-world as white folk at punishing the Black whole for the supposed transgressions of one Black individual,” he read.

“Heavy” discusses in explicit ways how white people have fashioned and constructed the enduring Black narrative that has been used to oppress, subjugate, and ostracize members of the Black community — to provide them with less and to suffer more. 

“Our ‘superpower’ I was told since I was a child was perseverance — the ability to survive no matter how much they took from us. I never understood how surviving was one of our collective superpowers when white folk made sure so many of us did not survive,” Laymon recited. 

Following his reading of the section from “Heavy,” Laymon also read a piece that he wrote that morning which is tentatively titled “We Will Know.” The piece explores pleasure and the notion of wanting to feel good during the COVID-19 pandemic. In it, Laymon recounts his meaningful interactions with essential workers and how these rare human connections and long periods of isolation provoked him to question the ways in which humans seek pleasure. 

“Like so many of my friends, my past eight months have been spent dodging death, mourning the dead, creating art, and loving Black people,” he read. “I am unsure what to do, not so much with the absolute pain of isolation nor the rapture of revolution, I am afraid of and fascinated by how the pandemic has fundamentally changed my expectations of looking forward to responsibly feeling good forever.”

This piece by Laymon echoed many of the themes that were present in “Heavy.” One line specifically highlighted his newfound identity which emphasized how much he has come into his own as a Black man and writer, despite the unrelenting anger he felt growing up in a society that does not value and protect Black bodies.

“I am a Black southern writer — that is my one superpower,” Laymon recited. 

The initiative set by the Cropper Series this year was not solely made for the purpose of highlighting works that seek to unravel the prejudices that have been so deeply embedded into our minds and institutions. The series also wants to simply celebrate the diverse talent that exists within the creative writing community, in order to cultivate an improved collective understanding of the broad array of human experiences.