Black Friend.
The first time I was introduced to Ziwe’s work was when my brother sent me a clip of an interview she’d done with Phoebe Bridgers. Ziwe had kind of tricked Phoebe Bridgers into saying something problematic but I didn’t know that this was her interview style so I thought Phoebe Bridgers was tricking herself into being problematic, and the whole thing was a little confusing, but I remember being intrigued.
I didn’t investigate then, but a few months later, when I was home for the holidays, my boyfriend and my sisters and I sat down and watched a bunch of Ziwe’s interview segments on Youtube. I found that I kept wanting to see the next one and then the next one because when you see them at length, when you see them in a row, they become increasingly brilliant in how she—in the moment—can make racism bubble up, can show everyone how it lies on the surface of everything. She makes this revelation feel less like a downer and more like something peculiar, something strange. We thought we were working on it but look it’s even lurking right here and over there and see how you just said that, see how you think like that, it’s literally hiding in your very mouth.
As someone who is weirdly obsessed with racial dynamics and also doesn’t like to make people feel bad, I am especially enamored by Ziwe’s work. It is constantly pushing on the edges of what we’re allowed to say and yet done in a way that makes people tell her what they’re thinking, that makes people—on camera, when being interrogated for where their problematic ideas lie—still sit with her and let their guard down.
I love what I’ve seen of her interviews, and I was immediately drawn to her essay collection with its hot pink cover and its title Black Friend. This title does not disappoint because the titular essay is weird and hilarious. She writes about a time she was hiking outside her Airbnb and a random White guy in a truck asked her what she was doing. After a while, when she let him know this conversation was getting kind of racially uncomfortable, he and his wife assured her that they had black friends, that they in fact had a black friend in the backseat and then proceeded to roll down the window to show Ziwe a Black child. As they drove away, the child did not break eye contact with Ziwe until it was impossible to keep looking. (I screamed.)
Ziwe also writes about her own experiences as a Black child in a way that is both poignant and precise, and she writes about her adulthood too, trying to remain herself in a fancy White school, trying to make it in comedy despite how hard it is to get in as anyone, especially as someone marginalized, and she does all of this in ways that are quirky and funny and smart. She loves footnotes, and she opens each chapter with excerpts from her interviews. She includes some poetry she wrote in college—both what one might consider bad poetry and what one might consider drastically improved poetry—and I think this is emblematic of what the whole collection feels like: it’s vulnerable, sometimes very put together and sometimes more urgent, confessional. She embodies in this book what it feels like to be someone growing up, someone who—in her identity—is often elbowed to the sideline and then—because of who she is—elbows her way back to center stage. I love Black Friend for its weirdness, for Ziwe’s ability to just be herself on the page and for how, like in her interviews, she can make you feel unguarded and can unguard herself while wading through what just might be particularly murky waters.
Image: Abrams Image
