Review: The Secret of Black Girl Magic

Review by Rochelle Spencer

Meet Behind Mars
Stories by Renee Simms
Wayne State University Press, May 2018
$18.99, 144 pp.
ISBN-13: 978-0814345122

What It Means When a Man Falls from the Sky
Stories by Lesley Nneka Arimah
Riverhead Books, April 2017
$26.00, 240 pp.
ISBN-13: 978-0735211025

I should be clear: Black women are not superheroes. We hurt and bleed and are vulnerable and tired . . . But our ability to defy, persist, and excel in the face of systematic oppression is a magical beast . . .

—Idrissa Simmonds, from The BreakBeat Poets Vol. 2: Black Girl Magic
Ed. Mahogany L. Browne, Idrissa Simmonds, and Jamila Woods

Freedom. This idea is infused in two recent short story collections that address the question, in situations where you’re tied to a job or to a partner by economic or familial ties, how do you escape?

Renee Simms’ Meet Behind Mars (Wayne State UP, 2018) and Lesley Nneka Arimah’s What It Means When A Man Falls From the Sky (Riverhead Books, 2017) contemplate escape. In these stories magic burns at the center, or at least, warms and singes the edges. But these stories are magical not because of fantastical elements but because of their investigation of how and why people try to escape. Simms and Arimah cast spells with imperfect women battling society’s many trolls and demons, including its hierarchical authorities and structures. These women don’t always do what society expects of them, and that’s the point. Through these stories, we better understand liberation: preserving who you are and finding ways to defy, challenge, or resist.

In the first story in Simms’ collection, “High County,” the protagonist, Hathoria, or Hattie, wants to be a writer. She sometimes resents being a wife and mother and the steady plod of ordinary life (Hattie’s mother-in-law lives in a retirement community where “the squat tan and olive houses look like tortoises lined up close together”). A strange and brilliant moment occurs when Hattie meets characters from stories she’s read:

They’re gone,” Arleta says. “Isn’t that what you wanted, sugar? For them to be gone so that you could write?” Hattie stares at Arleta. She is aware of the heat again and of the sweating that she can’t control. A ceiling fan whirls above, moving the dusty air around. Arleta takes a swig of her beer, then lets out a loving belch. “I’ve been waiting for you to write me into one of your stories,” she says. “Look—my hair turned white I’ve been waiting so long.”

These characters offer to “loan” themselves to Hattie, so that she can finish her novel. Hattie’s interactions with these characters matter; they offer proof that Hattie’s writing is her best strategy for asserting her autonomy. Hattie realizes this herself: “If she can find the strength, her story is on the verge of breaking open and revealing the world exactly as she sees it.”

Simms reveals the strange in the mundane. In “Dive,” Alex, visiting her adoptive parents, describes the creepiness of the suburbs: “There’s a reason why so many horror movies have had suburban settings. I dare you to look out at night at the expanse of an unlit backyard and not see eyes lurking in the hedge.” But even though the world can sometimes seem unsetting and mysterious, Alex understands how life’s repetition, “those moments when the past and present converged and time felt like a loop,” can leave us feeling trapped, as we try to carve out our own spaces and are forced, sometimes, to create space for family and responsibility, “to make room, somehow, for a grown man and a baby.” And the flood of emails from Gloria Clark, the mother in “Meet Behind Mars,” beautifully illustrates how raising a black child in a hostile and punishing society can be exhausting.

Set in Detroit, the Motor City, perhaps Simms’ fiction can’t help but explore ideas of freedom and movement. “American Industrial Physics” manages to allude to both the automobile industry and to the animal rights activism questions explored in Kaitlyn Greenidge’s We Love You Charlie Freedman. Greenidge and Simms explore how black women’s intellectual work can serve as refuge—one’s curiosity and imagination can offer (some) fulfillment even when society oppresses. Simms’ Dr. Johnetta Green, who cares for the test monkeys at Ford Motor Company, may question the importance of motherhood and nurturing more than Greenidge’s Laurel Freeman, the black woman scientist who teaches a monkey sign language. Simms, like Greenidge, explores the parameters of compassion: how much should we nurture our children, what responsibilities do we have towards ourselves?

Arimah similarly constructs fiction with fantastical moments and realistic stories with elements of wonder and escape. “Wild” and “War Stories” are stories about why we tell stories, how we try to escape by requesting someone else witness our pain. In “Wild,” two warring cousins acknowledge their secrets and grow close, even as sexism limits their freedom. In “War Stories,” a family shares stories that reveal how, in the process of telling a story, we generate not only empathy but also resilience, the ability to navigate “the strangeness…the growing moroseness” saturating our lives. In “Wild” and “War Stories” we once again see rebellious girls, almost women, not afraid to be themselves. The magic in these two more realistic stories can be found in how much Arimah celebrates—or at least acknowledges—that rebellion. When Nwando, the girl protagonist of “War Stories,” is criticized by her mother for harassing her classmates, Nwando is unapologetic. Ada, the teenaged protagonist of “Wild,” witnesses her mother high on ecstasy (because Ada has disguised ecstasy pills in an Excedrin bottle) and doesn’t exactly feel shame for her behavior. “Light” reveals Arimah’s commitment to female protagonists who enjoy breaking the rules. At the end of “Light,” a father mourns the independent-minded daughter who becomes meek and loses her “streak of fire.” “Redemption,” the story that closes the collection, describes how Mayowa, a young female servant, mischievously challenges the mistreatment directed at poor young women.

There’s magic in seeing complicated girls and women argue, rebel, and attempt to live as they want. Yet when Arimah ventures into magic and fantasy, her protagonists’ realities stun. The pain cuts sharp when a young woman sees her dead mother in “Second Chances.” Nnwam feels guilty about her mother’s death, and this story, about what we’d say to our loved ones if given the opportunity, haunts us. “Who Will Greet You at Home” and the collection’s eponymously titled story Afrofuturist story are breathtaking. Both rely on folklore adeptly embedded into the narrative (Otesánek, the Flying Africans). Hope and survival steady these fable-esque stories with a keen emotional realism. “Who Will Greet You at Home” transports us into a world where poor women create living babies out of the materials around them (yarn, grass, mud, hair), with the hope that their children can live better lives.

“What It Means When a Man Falls from the Sky” explores the complexities of empathy. Nneoma is a prickly contrarian. Even though she comprehends a mathematical formula for reducing human suffering, she decides to use that information to help only a few. Nnemoa is a study in self- preservation; what seems like selfishness may be armor against how caretakers, in many cases women, are unfairly burdened with emotional labor. Even though the story contains fantastic elements, its pessimism seems realistic, warranted.  But I wonder if more time could be spent exploring the pleasure in forming human connections.

Traditionally, in black culture, the conjure woman had more power than other people in her community. By showing complex, contemporary women who encounter magic and occasionally wield it, Simms and Arimah allow us to understand the radiance of everyday life. The phrase “Black Girl Magic” is originated by a black woman, Cashawn Thompson. Maybe in the era of #blacklivesmatter, a movement founded by black women—Alicia Garza, Patrisse Cullors, and Opal Tometi—and the Tarana Burke-led #metoo movement, we’re discovering what it means to be truly magical.

Rochelle Spencer is the author of AfroSurrealism: The African Diaspora’s Surrealist Fiction (Routledge, 2018), co-editor of All About Skin: Short Fiction by Women of Color (Univ. of Wisconsin Press, 2014), a member of the National Book Critics Circle, and a former board member of the Hurston Wright Foundation.