![]() ![]() In November of that year, Tamir Rice was killed by a police officer in a park gazebo he was playing with a toy gun. The aspect about my dad’s books didn’t come in until much later.įast-forward to 2014 when I was working on my MFA. So my initial motivation for writing anything was always about my dad, though there were some early threads about being part of an interracial marriage and having a mixed race child, about being white in Africa. It took some time to see that of course I wasn’t grieving for Ngoni’s father, I was grieving for my own. I realized I was grieving, but for someone I’d never met. My motivation was to understand what had happened to me there. So the first piece I wrote-and I didn’t think of it as anything but writing an experience I’d had-was about visiting Ngoni’s father’s grave. The people who had died were spoken about all the time. ![]() I was suddenly in the bosom of this family for whom grief was just part of the fabric. That process, and some very early form of this book, started in 2002, when my husband, Ngoni, and our first son, Julius, were living in Zimbabwe. As an adult-and a writer-I was trying to figure out how to. I was raised in a family that didn’t talk much about it. ![]() As a child, I didn’t know how to grieve my dad. JMM: At first, I was just trying to understand my grief. Did you set out to tackle these issues with this book and how did it feel to publish it during this time? Across this nation, we are confronting in new ways the difficult realities of what it means to be white and what it means to be black in the United States. MB: So much of the personal story that you’ve revealed in the pages of The Book Keeper resonates in this current cultural moment. In this interview, Munemo shares the evolution of this timely story and what the path to its completion taught her along the way. The Book Keeper adds another intelligent voice to the broader cultural discussion on the barriers to racial progress in this country. Entwined in that inquiry that centers on race are converging themes of grief and loss, mental illness and shame, and, ultimately, forgiveness and love. With clear-eyed, incisive prose, Munemo guides us on her often painful, powerfully transformative pilgrimage to unearth long-buried roots in order to trace the contours of the person she is now. In interrogating the layers of this unwanted legacy, Munemo confronts a family past that intertwines with the narratives of her marriage and the fear-laced reality of raising black-bodied boys in America. It’s a gentle introduction to a deeply complex story that begins with Munemo finally reading the stack of pulp fiction novels characterized as “slavery porn” her father wrote under various pseudonyms before his death by suicide when she was five. It is this fact, she tells us, that will explain why what follows in the rest of the book means so much to her. ![]() Only then does she zoom in on the fact that she is white, her husband is black, and her boys are mixed race. She begins with their clothing-the matching seersucker suits on her two young boys, her “fabulous” rust-colored dress, her husband’s tie the same shade paired with a dark grey suit-and she details the backdrop and lighting. In the prologue of The Book Keeper, Munemo describes with careful precision a snapshot that hangs on her fridge: a dated polaroid of her family dressed up for a wedding. Neither could she have anticipated that the deaths of three Black Americans-Breonna Taylor, Ahmaud Arbery, and George Floyd-would spark public outcry and prompt a long overdue national conversation about systemic racism that would make all the more urgent the threads of privilege and race that weave into the pages of her story. When her memoir, The Book Keeper, launched on January 14, 2020, Julia McKenzie Munemo did not know that exactly two months later, when the lockdown began and the world shuttered against the Covid-19 pandemic, her book tour would come to an abrupt halt. Reviews & Interviews by Melanie Brooks Interview How Memoirist Julia McKenzie Munemo Reckoned With Her Family’s Racist History ![]()
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