Guns and Parties: Kim McLarin’s Latest Book is a Revelatory Wink at Black Women’s Survival in Periracial America
Lyndsey Ellis reviews Every Day Something Has Tried to Kill Me and Failed by Kim McLarin (Ig Publishing, November 2023)
Back in 2020 when the lights went out on all in-person book events, we started up our Small Press Author Reading Series on Zoom to help spread the word of other independent publishers and their authors’ new books. Now, that series has morphed into written reviews by guest authors, sharing their thoughts on recent small press publications.
Welcome Lyndsey Ellis, Award-winning author of Bone Broth: A Novel, in this beautiful and thought-provoking review of Ig Publishing’s new release by Kim McLarin.
On the first day of spring, a house finch got trapped in the covered deck behind my house. That wasn’t the first time it happened. A few winters ago, some willful squirrels in the neighborhood chewed a hole in the corner of the screen that encloses the back porch and ate through the deck’s ceiling to barricade themselves in, away from the bitter cold. Animal control successfully removed the furry bunch, without harm, and released them back into the wild. But, the screen’s hole remains, so birds sometimes lose their way and fly in.
I noticed the house finch as I was making breakfast and reflecting on the majesty of Kim McLarin’s latest book, Everyday Something Has Tried To Kill Me And Has Failed.
For the sake of this, I’ll call the bird Ms. Finch. She had less flair in the color department than her male counterparts, but she made up for it with her loud chirps. I’m not a bird whisperer (I can barely decipher what my dog, Titus, says –other than when he signals that he wants to pee, eat, or play). But, based on her tone, I can’t be too sure if Ms. Finch was angry or petrified or sad about being confined behind a screen that disconnected her from the rest of her winged community and the open sky. She didn’t sound cheerful, but resolute despite the circumstances. Regardless, I loved that she was vocal about her situation. Her openness put me in the mind of Maya Angelou’s I Know Why the Caged Bird Sings, which caused my thoughts to circle back to McLarin’s collection.
Because why and how, I wondered, could Ms. Finch stand to be so emphatic about having her freedom taken away?
McLarin’s book title, borrowed from the late great poet, Lucille Clifton, puts it plainly. Even in the most stressful and hopeless moments, there is still much for marginalized communities–particularly Black women–to talk-chirp about, call attention to, dwell on - even celebrate. This, McLarin emphasizes, is a necessity in order to survive in what she’s coined ‘Periracial’ America - the word ‘peri’, being an ominous facet in several cultures and therefore, coming to define the United States as a country on the brink of ruin by way of its fixation on anti-Blackness.
I particularly enjoyed that McLarin’s collection began with guns and ended with parties. Who knew the two could go so well together before the author eloquently demonstrated how both can, and should, play an integral part of Black women’s wellbeing in these turbulent times?
On guns, McLarin illustrates her first lesson on handling a firearm after the killing of George Floyd and the community protests that followed during the pandemic in 2020. Personally, I can recall two relatives and a close friend–all Black women– in Mississippi, Texas, and Arizona who all shared the same panic and an urgency to buy a gun in case they were met with racial strife and needed to protect themselves.
Unresolved fear is real in the Black community. And, so is the rage. To stress the point, McLarin shares a well-known quote from James Baldwin:
All safety is an illusion. It’s just a matter of which illusion you pick.
The author goes on to show how Blacks’ justified terror is often met with white
anxiety over Blacks seeking revenge, which further perpetuates a cycle of violence against us.
The simple truth is that Black people in America have never been as violent toward White people as White people have been toward us, and the White violence against Black people is usually calculated.
As McLarin stresses, the horror of Blacks’ striking back at whites is merely unfounded, and is consequently one of the reasons she dreads loving her Black culture and memories in America without loving America itself:
There is much from and of America that I love deeply, even desperately. But do I love America?
Later in the text, she expounds:
Love America? Ask me tomorrow. Or, maybe later today. Hate America? That’s one easy: the opposite of love is not hate, it’s indifference. If Black people hated America, America would be constantly on fire–and Black people would all be dead. Instead of just some of us.
McLarin likens this dance between Blacks and whites in America to that of an abusive relationship. These types of unions are symbolic of romantic partnerships that are toxic, one-sided and reek of unbalanced power. Dead or alive, the abuser always wins because the maltreatment is so embedded in the mind(s) of the oppressed that there’s no seeing around it or through it. There’s a bunch of excuse-making, rationalizing and wishful thinking but, as McLarin states:
Black people will never love White Americans into letting go of power. Black people will never love America into facing itself.
So, if not love, then what? McLarin writes about the joys of frequent travel, as well as her and many other Black Americans’ desires to travel often and if possible, permanently leave a country that doesn’t value us. She writes about navigating violence and systemic abuse that’s followed Blacks for ages.
I am thinking of generations.
She writes about a community’s natural ebullience and hopefulness in the face of white America’s eternal letdown:
We should have known it would come to this. If we’re being honest, we have to admit that things were far from sweetness and light even at the beginning. All the abduction and buying and enslavement, all the whippings and raping, the branding of skin and wrenching of children from our arms. Not exactly days of wine and roses. You told us all the violence and exploitation was for our own good, that we were lazy (hah!) and childlike and helpless without you, that you knew what was best and that God approved. We disagreed with that, but you had the dogs and the guns and the armed patrols, so we pretended to go along, resisting in whatever ways we could that did not get us killed. Or sometimes did. When that first, terrible part finally ended–our honeymoon!--we had high hopes that things would get better, that you would change. People like Booker T. Washington told us that you would. All we had to do was stay in our place, not ask too much and smile. Always smile.
And, despite the trials, heaviness, and collective sentiment that real change is impossible, McLarin writes about the writer’s responsibility to shake things up and never give in. To continually make waves regardless of the outcome. To be the compass of resistance that makes noises and refuses to become numb against the horrific machine of racism in its many forms.
But the writer’s job, Baldwin taught me, is to challenge the fallback, to push and keep pushing, to question the dream.
Beyond McLarin’s loud rebuke of white violence inflicted on Black lives, I love the care in her writing when it comes to intergenerational resilience. Without reservation, she welcomes the reader into her world of caregiving for a mother she reveres yet still works to understand. Her poignant take on family dynamics centers the complexities of Black womanhood.
Ask each of us about our mother and you’ll hear a completely different story, five blindfolded individuals describing an elephant. That made my mother several different people: the mother I wanted, the mother I had, the mother my siblings had and whoever she really was.
In addition to illustrating her indebtedness to the elders in Black culture, McLarin expertly weaves in her views on kindness (versus love), the value of learning as a perpetual student in life, and lastly, how being in community can eradicate one’s ego through the sheer act of throwing a party.
Although a compelling read overall, I believe there was room for an opportunity to touch on how white violence against Blacks also, and more often, manifests as everyday microaggressions and performative allyship - perhaps McLarin has something else in the works that spotlights this aspect. There were also a couple of knee-jerk moments in the book around McLarin’s assessments of Blacks in mainstream culture and her general outlook of the Midwest and South, which I found to be jarring, but I understand it comes down to both personal preference and my viewpoint on some aspects of Black culture as a Millennial.
Still, I think the author’s razor sharp critique is in sync with what I’ve been feeling and have been too angry, too grieved, too disgusted, and at times, too emotionally and mentally exhausted, to sometimes put into intelligible words.
Notice I didn’t write ‘shocked’. Like McLarin, I’m no longer surprised by what happens in White America. Bodies of work like the author’s are often hard reminders to be compassionate toward oneself by giving the space to be angry, as a Black woman and to also be intentional and strategic about my anger. After all, anger–like any emotion–can be therapeutic and healing, if channeled correctly. And, depending on the occasion, it may not–and should not–always sound or feel like we expect it to.
So, maybe Ms. Finch gets it. I don’t know, but last I looked, there was an empty deck–ie no bird corpse–which means eventually she found her way out, back to what she knows as freedom.
Translation: the chirps weren’t at all in vain.