Born in 1985 to a South African expat mother and a Trinidadian American father and raised in the Philadelphia suburbs, author Zinzi Clemmons has witnessed many fights for freedom in her lifetime. As a young child traveling to Johannesburg, she experienced that “the idea of freedom—lofty yet close enough to taste—was all around.” In 1994, Clemmons watched her mother vote for Nelson Mandela’s African National Congress in South Africa’s first all-race election. In 2008, shortly after Clemmons graduated from Brown University, the election of Barack Obama brought jubilance and hope. In 2017, the #MeToo movement appeared poised to challenge the power of “men who were formerly considered untouchable,” she writes. And in 2020, watching the protests sparked by the police murder of George Floyd, “it felt like anything was possible. A new world was about to be born.”
Yet, as Clemmons explains in her nonfiction debut, Freedom—following her acclaimed 2017 novel, What We Lose—in each case, the liberty gained was incomplete, crushed by backlash or stained by betrayals. Throughout eight essays that “reflect a world buckling under the consequences of centuries of interlocking injustices,” Clemmons weaves affecting memoir with incisive criticism and reporting to map out the limits of personal, political, racial, economic, and gender-based liberation—and to muse on how those bounds might yet be surpassed.
The collection’s most personal and wrenching essays are “Freedom” and “Freedom, Pt. 2,” across which Clemmons—the director of creative writing at UC Davis—offers an account of autonomy curtailed that also provides an explanation for why nine years have passed between her debut novel and this book.
“Freedom” meditates on a collision of personal and national grief and how fear can hold us back. It revolves around Clemmons’s visit to South Africa in December 2013, a year after the death of her mother, Dorothy, from cancer at age 55. Throughout the essay, which unfolds almost like a travel diary, Clemmons reflects on the chasm between the mother she knew and the woman Dorothy had been in her youth. A mixed-race woman who spent her youth fighting against apartheid as one of the most wanted student activists in South Africa, Dorothy had been “reshaped” by America, Clemmons writes: “If she once craved freedom in her youth, she grew to fear it in her later years.… Like many black Americans, her desire for conformity took the form of striving, which she channeled into her children. She kept a tight leash on us—me especially. I was just as rebellious as she was when she was younger, and therefore, we were constantly at odds.”
In Johannesburg without her mother, Clemmons feels a measure of the freedom Dorothy once struggled for, a feeling that compounds days after her arrival, when Mandela dies, sparking a “mix of tragedy and pride,” the latter for the revolution that he had brought to the country. Yet reminders of what Clemmons identifies as South Africa’s “postcolonial hangover” loom, including the informal settlements made up of inadequate housing where many impoverished Black and mixed-race people live. And when a man sexually assaults Clemmons toward the end of her trip and she attempts to silence the terror she feels in the aftermath, she comes to appreciate her mother “as another version of me”—“curious, intelligent, and trailed by the threat of danger.”
The nature of that threat is underlined in “Freedom, Pt. 2,” which further explores the parallels between the author and her mother in a meditation on how Clemmons came to feel that “freedom denotes nothing but risk.” For the first time, she lays out the full story of how a novelist whom she had once “idolized” bullied and forcibly kissed her at an event she had planned as an MFA student at Columbia University in 2012. Most readers will recognize “the Author,” as she calls him here, as Junot Díaz; in 2018, Clemmons made headlines for publicly challenging Díaz about the episode. “Freedom, Pt. 2” unspools how Clemmons slowly came to terms with both what happened with Díaz and the assault she suffered in South Africa, and how the #MeToo movement encouraged her disclosure. The essay also provides a harrowing account of the backlash Clemmons faced from supporters of Díaz who cast her as a “liar,” “out for attention,” and “petulant, naïve, crazy,” and how it affected her psyche and her career: “I feared that I had ruined a cause that I believed in. I was to blame for all of it, and slowly I turned the hatred of others inward, on myself. It all hurt so much that I stopped writing and stopped thinking about publishing. My career, which was taking off when I went public, largely stalled.” In this, Clemmons lays bare the cost of the pendulum swing away from #MeToo, which, for all its flaws, she positions as “one of the most important democratizing free speech movements in history.”
Readers may come to Freedom just for what Clemmons calls out as “some morbid desire for gossip: to know the who, what, where” of her #MeToo moment. But they would be remiss to skip the essays that appear between “Freedom” and “Freedom, Pt. 2,” among which is the strongest in the collection: “Chasing Robbie,” a probing investigation into the school segregation that still plagues the Philadelphia suburbs. Refracted through the lens of the 2018 killing of one of Clemmons’s few Black peers in tony Swarthmore public schools, the essay reflects on the consequences of systemic disinvestment in Chester, the nearby majority-Black city where Robbie was born, taught, and died. Similarly compelling is “Home Going,” in which Clemmons traces her father’s family’s migration to Los Angeles in the 1970s, motivated by the promise of economic opportunities that had previously seemed out of reach for Black people. Reflecting on building her own life in California, the author harks back to Joan Didion as she picks apart the myth of the “California Dream” and sits with “the deep turbulence at the heart of this place.”
It is an embrace of complexity that animates Freedom. For all the forces of subjugation that Clemmons critiques as curbing our freedoms, she is anything but defeatist—that would be too easy. She draws instead on the African diasporic tradition of seeing liberation as “expansive, revised continually over time through generations of struggle and triumph,” referencing the Mozambican slogan “A luta continua!—The struggle continues!,” which once echoed throughout South Africa. Freedom serves as a potent reminder of how much remains in that struggle.•
Kristen Martin is a writer and cultural critic. She is the author of The Sun Won’t Come Out Tomorrow: The Dark History of American Orphanhood.
