Miscellaneous Files: Jabari Asim

In a 1990 interview, Toni Morrison pointed to the dangers of the so-called “master narrative.” Morrison defined it as “whatever ideological script that is being imposed by the people in authority on everybody else,” and identified wide evidence of its damages: from a little girl who believes the most prized Christmas gift she can get is a white doll; to Ella, a character in Morrison’s Beloved, who has learned to “don’t love nuthin.’” Nearly three decades later, the writer Jabari Asim is wrestling with the same mainstream script. In his latest essay collection, We Can’t Breathe, he asks himself, “On any given day, how often do I manage to keep oppressive thinking out of my head? Am I ever free from an imagined white gaze?”

For Asim, writing is a way of beginning to answer those questions, and narrative a mode of resistance. His decades-long career exemplifies this, from his work as an editor for publications including The Washington Post and NAACP’s official magazine The Crisis, to his role as MFA program director at Emerson College, to own writing across fiction, non-fiction, poetry, and children’s literature. His 2008 book The N Word: Who Can Say It, Who Shouldn’t, and Why, a thorough interrogation of the life of the titular word, shows Asim’s commitment to uncovering the destructive narratives embedded in American myths, whether in the writings of George Washington and Thomas Jefferson or contemporary hip-hop. Essays in We Can’t Breathe are similarly ambitious: A simple point of departure—an African American’s strut—expands into a history of jazz, Southern planters’ efforts to push back the Great Migration, and the dangers of moving around in a black body, as the writer himself does every day.

Asim and I spoke about how words can be used as weapons, how he prepares his students for a punishing publishing landscape, and how he situates himself in a long tradition of African American writers: “like entering a room when a conversation is already taking place.”

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