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How We Fight for Our Lives is the debut memoir from award-winning poet and former Buzzfeed editor, Saeed Jones. Jones was born in Memphis, Tennessee and raised in Lewisville, Texas. The memoir is about what it means to be a black gay man in the South, and the survival techniques that one develops as an armor against a society that regularly participates in the execution of black and gay Americans. How We Fight for Our Lives weaves together the strands of Jones’ own identity formation and his tremendous love for his mother, the woman who raised him on her own. Jones writes, “We sacrifice former versions of ourselves. We sacrifice the people who dared to raise us. The ‘I’ it seems doesn’t exist until we are able to say, ‘I am no longer yours.’ ” Jones explores the ways in which he has crafted an identity separate from that of his mother, but simultaneously transcends the conception of an entirely individual identity, creating space for the woman who created space for him to grow in the first place. While Jones spends years developing his own selfhood and coming to terms with his physical and emotional self, his mother’s illness and eventual death provoke in him a recognition of the life she struggled to build for herself and her son. Jones spends the last few chapters reflecting on his mother, conjuring up both the beautiful and the painful moments of their lives together, at once separating and uniting their journeys.
Jones’ identity as a poet is a fundamental component of this memoir’s structure. His prose has the ability to transcend the situation at hand and address the deepest of human emotions, including joy, pain, and love. His writing provoked such a visceral reaction for me, there were so many sentences that I could feel in my chest, and I ache even recalling them now. Jones doesn’t waste time recounting to his readers how he fell in love with literature, this is not one of those “how I became a great writer” memoirs. Rather, he shows instead of tells, with his prose that feels in many ways shaped by writers like James Baldwin, but also entirely singular. Jones doesn’t model himself after Baldwin, but recognizes himself in Baldwin, in the freedom to explore identity, sexuality, and race with words. He writes about reading Baldwin’s Another Country in his youth, “Holding Another Country in my hands, I felt that the book was actually holding me.” Jones’ relationship to his literary forefathers is indeed tortured, as the gay black literary community is inextricably tied to death. In this very copy of Another Country, Jones finds a photo of one of his mother’s old friends who had died of AIDS. Later, he writes that in his graduate literary studies, “it seemed that just as soon as I looked up the name of a gay black poet whose work I aspired to one day see my own work read alongside, I’d learn that the poet had died of AIDS, or poverty, or some other tragedy that left him abandoned on the margins of literature’s memory.” For Jones, writing is survival, it is a way to distance oneself from trauma, to take ownership of one’s experiences, to assert power in a society that sees you as powerless. Jones sees the through line between himself and these dead men, keeping alive their own mission in his work.
Indivisible from Jones’ fashioning of the emotional and literary self is his sexuality. He writes that as a young man, he was always thinking about being gay. He describes the first time he went to the library to read about what it means to be a gay man, and the terrifying AIDS lesson he received instead of any useful education. In the chapters about his early years, Jones’ sexuality feels like this private entity that he cannot share with his mother or his classmates. As he ages, this privacy is shattered by the gay slurs hurled by his classmates, the various exploitative sexual encounters, and society’s public victimization of the gay community. Jones’ sexuality then becomes a weapon against these forces that have intruded upon him, and he uses it in an attempt to reclaim what has been lost. He begins to make a project out of seducing straight men and eroticizes this one modicum of control that he has over those who oppress him. Power and sex are absolutely inextricable for him, and when violence enters into the equation, it becomes clear that Jones’ power was always illusory. The culmination of this tension between control and sex comes late in the memoir, when Jones recounts the story of when he was physically assaulted by a sexual partner at a New Year’s Eve party. All of the threads linking sexuality, violence, death, and power are weaved together in this instance, as Jones is quite nearly killed by a man he actively sought out for sex. He acknowledges that he had objectified his partner, and “built a metaphor around his body”, struggling with a great deal of guilt. The physical attack confirms all of Jones’ worst suspicions that being black and gay necessitates punishment, and the violence of oppression, discrimination, and hate becomes alarmingly real. He loses this fragile sense of control over encounters that had once provided him with intense pleasure, as the violence finally crosses the line between the erotic and the abusive. The only way that Jones is able to create distance between himself and the attack is by writing about it, which feels like a very important recognition of the agency that language can provide, and an endorsement of the memoir’s existence in the first place.
While this book is in many ways about agency and selfhood, Jones recognizes that carefully crafted identities can be struck down in a single moment, that preconceived notions can cut through anyone’s projection of self and reduce it to identity categories. Prejudice will always find you where you are. Selfhood thus becomes a series of defensive maneuvers with the goal of survival, a lesson Jones learns not only on his own journey of self formation, but in his recognition of his mother’s lifelong project of self preservation. He includes in the book a letter from his mother that reads, “I was so tired and depressed about raising a child alone and always worried about paying the bills and putting food on the table. I knew if I made a phone call to my mom, she would take over raising you in a heartbeat. The thought was so loud in my heart and mind to just ‘give up’ and move into a smaller place on my own. I went to the altar and chanted through silent tears because I did not want to upset you. I can’t imagine how both our lives would have been if I did not have that hope in my heart to keep going and do whatever possible to keep us together. I know for sure I have absolutely no regrets for you in my life.” Jones recognizes the ways in which his mother struggled to survive, in a society that is not always kind to single mothers, and acknowledges the strength and grace of her daily struggle. The memoir ends about a year after his mother’s death, a tragedy that has ripped through him emotionally and physically. The closing pages somehow feel tinged with hope amongst all of this suffering, and when Jones finally asserts “our mothers are why we are here”, how we fight for our lives becomes why we fight for our lives.