Interview conducted and Transcribed by Holly Light and Eulea Kiraly
The day after the 2024 presidential election, Arkana staff had the opportunity to interview writer and scholar Mecca Jamilah Sullivan. Her most recent book Big Girl was a New York Times Editors’ Choice, winner of the Next Generation Indie Book Award for First Novel, and won the Balcones Fiction Prize.
Holly Light: Thank you so much for joining us. Arkana is extremely happy to have you. I guess we should just start out, how’s it going for you today?
Mecca Jamilah Sullivan: Well, it’s a day. Days like this remind me of the importance of having clear, frank, direct conversations about the power of writing, especially the power of writing for underrepresented, marginalized, and oppressed communities. It’s something that a lot of us think about every day, but when you get to a day like today, you realize it’s urgent that we not only think about it, but also talk about it publicly within our communities and outside of our communities. The work that I do as a creative writer, as a teacher, and as a literary scholar is really thinking about the voices, especially the literary, creative, and artistic voices, of Black women, of queer people, of underrepresented groups in general, and why our work is politically necessary.
HL: Even though sometimes it feels like one step forward, two steps back, I do think we do see the pendulum moving forward.
Sullivan: I struggle sometimes with narratives of progress. On one hand, the writers that I see as my guides and my teachers are always asking us to think about how we sustain ourselves, how we survive, and how hope and imagination are crucial to that. At the same time, there’s a real emphasis in the literature that I study and that feeds me on telling an unvarnished truth about the sense of pain, terror, horror, and trauma that we also are constantly living with. We must balance both of those things, recognizing there are grounds for hope, grounds for a belief in survival, and even a sense of change. We need to believe in that, but we can also hold space for the knowledge that maybe not everybody feels a sense of progress. A lot of us might feel the opposite. A lot of us are concerned that we’re not actually moving forward. Maybe what looks like progress in some areas makes us more vulnerable to backlash.
It does beg the question: how do we figure out what progress is? Is there a way that we can talk about grounds for hope, and a real, legitimate belief in possibility that doesn’t require a narrative of progress? I think it’s because that language is so fraught in American culture as well.
HL: It feels as if we as a society obsess over technological progress while neglecting the social progress you’re speaking of.
Sullivan: As a writer, as a student, as a scholar, and as a teacher, I think of the “we” that helped shape my vision of progress. Technology is certainly part of that. Science is part of that. All of the things that I think are generally, especially in American culture and Western cultures, understood as markers of progress. But none of those things really matter if we, flesh-and-blood Black people, queer people, women, are not here to make use of that progress, or to create that progress in ways that we need.
The work of literature, of creative writers, of readers, of students, is to imagine the future that we want and the future that we need. Audre Lorde especially talks about this in her essay “Poetry is Not a Luxury,” where she charts out this beautiful theory of poetry as a political tool, a resource for imagination and for change. The idea is that poetry allows us to tap into feelings and ideas, then put them into language. Once we share them, they can help us create a vision for the future that we might want to have, a plan of action for change. This is really what a lot of us are doing when we choose to live life as writers and readers. And I think that work is super important and urgently needed always, but especially right now.
Audre Lorde says “Caring for myself is not self-indulgence, it is self-preservation, and that is an act of political warfare.” I think that is true of our care for ourselves as individuals, but I think it’s also true of our care for our communities and our care for one another. And for me, I find now is a time to really double down on that self-care and be very intentional about marshaling all of my inner resources and whatever other resources I have to attend to those communities.
I’m thinking of so many women who are doing various forms of outreach and activism to help one another and their communities, and there is something to be said for that. That can feed you. I think, as teachers, often this is what we do. At its best, it feeds me and serves me and gives me hope. In moments like this, it’s very important to make sure that we’re getting what we need to be able to do this crucial political work that’s ahead of us right now.
Eulea Kiraly: There’s a great scene towards the end of Big Girl where Nyela recognizes that she has been doing so much and calls out for support, a little applause.
Sullivan: Which very rarely comes, but don’t we need it? I remember very well writing that scene. It was very joyful to write. I’m writing as a woman who is not a parent, but who has seen many parents and many mothers, understanding that deep need for recognition–for an explicit, direct gesture of support. It was freeing and beautiful to be able to write that. And also to write what it means for Malaya to offer that support to her mother. That these two women are really acknowledging one another. This is not a family that’s super expressive in that way, but Malaya makes the decision that her vision of womanhood, her sense of possibility, her notion of herself as a woman, is going to be one that goes outside of a cultural norm to just offer her mom support in this way. It was fun to write.
EK: You grew up in Harlem and your descriptions of it and its food are wonderful. It almost seems an extension of culture and like individual identity. What are your influences in how you write about food?
Sullivan: My love of food is probably my primary influence, but so is my neighborhood. One of the things about growing up in New York in general, but especially in Harlem, is that there’s such a mélange of cultures. I grew up hearing all kinds of music, bachata, merengue, reggaeton, hip-hop, old-school rap, all in one physical space. That was true of language as well. English is the language of my family, but I grew up hearing Spanish from a very young age, learning Spanish and some French and hearing Creole and Patois. The same is true for food. The food culture of Harlem is always such that there’s a mix of flavors and cuisines everywhere. As a young foodie, before foodies were a thing, I had exposure to so many different foods and a burgeoning sense of the meaning–the social, cultural meanings of food in my family, for better and for worse. Food functioned both as a gathering space and unifier, but there was also a lot of divisiveness around food and eating culture. I felt very attuned to the complexities of food culture at a very young age.
HL: I did want to bring up a quote by Kate Moss: “Nothing tastes as good as skinny feels.” For me, a Krispy Kreme donut tastes way better than being skinny. But this shows an unrealistic standard, something Malaya comes into conflict with throughout the novel, and her ability to love herself is often hindered by it.
Sullivan: Well, there’s something funny about that quote. It occurs in the earlier section of the novel, when Malaya is being forced to go to these Weight Watchers meetings with her mom. My editor (Shout out to you, Gina Iaquinta!) or maybe the fact checker, came back with, “Oh, well, Kate Moss didn’t say this until 2009.” I was like, “No, no, this was a weight watcher slogan in the 80s.” I remember hearing it repeatedly as a little girl, and so it’s interesting to think about how that history–this notion that nothing tastes as good as being thin feels–is in the culture, at least from the 80s, and probably further back, probably at least as long as Weight Watchers has been around.
EK: Wasn’t it the Duchess of Windsor who famously said a woman could never be too thin or too rich–as if thinness is some utterly desirable thing.
Sullivan: Sadly, I think that that logic is still pervasive in our culture. So to your question, a Krispy Kreme donut certainly may taste much better than being thin feels, many of us, myself included, wouldn’t know, because I’ve not been thin. In the US, the average American woman is a size 16 or 18.
HL: You mentioned in one of your previous interviews the idea of slim thick.
Sullivan: Which we used to call “curves in all the right places.” I think there’s always some sort of language for that in the culture.
HL: How did you feel when that became the model for women, which, in a lot of ways, was almost as unrealistic as the heroin chic was earlier?
Sullivan: I think it all speaks to this sense that women’s bodies are there for objectification, for scrutiny, for judgment, that they are tools to serve whatever master. We often have these obsessive rubrics for evaluating and categorizing women’s bodies. Are you an apple shape or a pear shape or hourglass shape? Some of these languages can be useful in figuring out how clothing is cut, but often there is a sense of a hierarchy. The best shape to have is this, and the worst shape to have is that. Whether we call it “slim thick,” or whether we call it “curves in all the right places,” or whether it’s “heroin chic,” or whatever categorization we use, I think the ultimate message is that women’s bodies are available for scrutiny and for exploitation and for use.
HL: But never for women.
Sullivan: No, it’s certainly not for the women themselves. The body is something to be evaluated externally, not something to be experienced internally. As I’ve talked to people about this novel, it’s been interesting to see how that message is ubiquitous. Everyone experiences it. Cis-het male athletes have spoken to me about the weigh-ins that they have had to endure, and the shame of being too small or too large for their weight class. People of various ages, cultures, and genders tell me that the patriarchal language of diet culture actually impacts us all.
EK: So how does Malaya figure that out? There are three, possibly four generations of women who have struggled with that reality, but Malaya, the youngest, is the one who starts to see through it.
Sullivan: There’s a cost to her figuring that out. Her girlhood ends up being quite painful. I see her as a hero, because she takes in the experience that she’s having as the biggest woman in her family, and, of course, the youngest. She sees the irony and also the impossibility of that location. She feels it, and it’s untenable for her. She knows urgently that something has to change, and because she’s an artist and a sensitive, observant person, she also knows that what doesn’t need to change is her. So it has to be her relationship to these expectations that are swirling around her.
HL: It makes me think of “the manosphere,” which is very fitness based. Guys like Andrew Tate or the Fresh and Fit podcast tell young boys, “Hey, young guy, you’re fat and worthless. You should listen to me, and ergo all of my awful, awful opinions.”
Sullivan: And “fat and worthless” is also a code for effeminate and not doing gender correctly, which also is racialized. Audre Lorde calls this the mythical norm. This guy who’s incontrovertibly masculine, the most hetero, but also wealthy and able-bodied as he can possibly be. That figure is never going to be a person of color. Sabrina Strings writes about this in her book, Fearing the Black Body, and the connections between racism, patriarchy, and fatphobia that are always there in various aspects of the culture, including diet culture. We might not always see them and tease them out, but we experience them.
HL: Oh, absolutely. In a lot of circles, fatphobia is the last bigotry that’s allowed because it’s, “Oh, I’m not fatphobic. I just think you’re unhealthy. Yes, I’m worried about your health.”
Sullivan: Exactly. In the culture, it’s very difficult to make hard and fast distinctions between diets that are about health and diets that are about weight loss. And there are a lot of folks in disability studies who remind us that ability and health are temporary states. It’s not as though you are a healthy person, and that’s what you will always be. That’s a temporary state. Even people deemed as “unhealthy” deserve health care. They deserve human rights. They deserve respect. All of these things that fatphobia keeps us from.
I’m thinking now about June Jordan’s “Poem about my Rights”: “I am not wrong. Wrong is not my name / My name is my own, my own, my own.” She is shifting the locus of power, of control, rejecting a morality that suggests we must be wrong because we are not accessing power in the way we’re told is the only way to access power. And in some ways, that’s what Malaya is moving toward. She’s a teenager, but she is realizing that she can think of herself as the one who gets to decide what is right for her, what is wrong for her, what she wants, what’s good for her, what’s healthy for her, even. That’s her ultimate triumph. She ends up deciding not to choose between her pleasure in food and her pleasure in creative expression.
EK: I thought I knew Harlem from other writing, but now I know Harlem of the ’80s and ’90s–between the crack epidemic and the beginning of gentrification. Tell us about the importance of the setting to your novel.
Sullivan: Every time I go home, I have to reorient myself because it looks like a different place. And that’s been happening ever since I left for college in the very late ’90s. The moment you think the gentrification of Harlem has slowed down, you realize we’re probably still just in the beginning. The neighborhood is deeply influential for me as a person, but especially as a writer. The visual landscape, the sonic landscape, even the olfactory landscape.
Culturally, there’s an ongoing debate about what Harlem should be and what it should do. This mirrors what’s going on for Malaya. It’s also the place where she finds escape–escape into a kind of belonging, even though she’s got a fraught relationship with some people in the neighborhood. She’ll have little conversations, and sometimes they’re pleasant, and sometimes they’re critical. But she is in tune with Harlem’s changing, complex moods.
It was important to me to document my experience of Harlem as somebody who was a teenager in the ’90s during that early phase of gentrification, the period of red, black, and green on 125th Street. It was iconic. I knew at the time that it was special. As Harlem started to change, it engendered a real sense of loss. What does it mean when a whole community experiences a collective loss, and it’s a loss of place, not even a tangible loss? Narratively, it was very interesting to me to figure out how to explore that.
HL: It felt like two points of cultural erasure that Harlem had to endure: gentrification and the crack epidemic.
Sullivan: Yes, the crack cocaine crisis created a tremendous sense of loss, even before gentrification. It’s the loss of the possibility for Mayala who can’t go out and enjoy her neighborhood as a child. This is a real heartbreak for her parents, who both grew up in these Black communities where as a child you go out and play on the street until the street light comes on. This was their vision of what family life and class mobility would be, and the loss of that vision contributes to confusion over how to raise their child. If she can’t go out and play, what does that mean for her body? What does that mean for her relationship to movement? How does she experience running and movement as joys and not just as labor or a means to change herself? How does she experience her body as a vehicle for the pleasure of play versus the work of exercise.
HL: If physicality is no longer a pleasure for her, then all she has left is food.
Sullivan: And her color pastel pencils.
HL: Thinking about other artforms, how has your background as a playwright influenced the writing of this novel?
Sullivan: Two things: first, the sense of dialogue. Playwriting is really about boiling plot down to language spoken between characters. The other thing, maybe the biggest thing, is just thinking about plot in terms of scenes. I think my experience with playwriting really helped me in revising Big Girl. Thinking about beats and scenes like plot points and storyline helped me create an economy with language.
EK: You’ve also written and continue to write as a scholar. Big Girl and Poetics of Difference came out within two years. How do you balance your creative and academic writing roles?
Sullivan: I think of them as two parts of the same perspective. A lot of the people I study write as theorists and creative writers in multiple genres. Audre Lorde, Toni Morrison, and Ntozake Shange are theorizing race, gender, class, and sexuality, while also writing poems, novels, and creating new genres like choreopoems and biomythography. I came to my life as a literary scholar already knowing that I was a creative writer. I’d written what was the very first draft of Big Girl before I even thought about the PhD. When I started the program, one of the main questions was how do I reconcile what I’m now told are these two different drives? But I came in thinking, well, Toni Morrison can do both. Audre Lorde can do both. I can definitely do both. Let me do it all. When I came to realize that institutionally there were separate career trajectories, separate intellectual discourses, it was important to me to name why I saw them as connected, two parts of the same. As an artist-scholar, it’s important to me to say that these distinctions between the creative and the theoretical are institutional, not intellectual. That turned into my dissertation topic, which became the seed of my first academic book, The Poetics of Difference, which is about how Black, queer and feminist writers and artists create in multiple forms and genres to make important interventions into conversations about power and identity. In some ways, that’s also what Big Girl is about.
HL: What would you say to people who would want to write, even though they might not consider it to be a career?
Sullivan: First, not everything we do has to be a career. Our time on this planet is limited. If you want to do it, do it. And if you don’t want to do it, don’t do it. That’s also okay, too.
Now, of course, that doesn’t speak to the economic realities of survival, of paying the rent and keeping food on the table. I think then it’s important to look to the many, many writers who have found various ways of making a living. I happen to really love reading and I love teaching, and so for me, it seemed to be a pretty seamless move to live a life that allows me to read the works that feed me creatively and also to nurture the perspectives and the writing lives of young writers.
But I believe that those of us who have a real desire to write will write, even if we’re not writing novels that end up on people’s shelves. If another writer wants to write letters to their beloved, or another writer wants to write computer programs–whatever is your thing, if it matters to you–just do it.
EK: Mecca Jamilah Sullivan, thank you so much for joining us today.