The article originally appeared in the The Washington Post
A writer explores the complexities of her interracial relationship
Nina Sharma contemplates the power of Black and Brown love in her essay collection “The Way You Make Me Feel.”
Review by Meena Venkataramanan
Shortly after George Floyd’s murder in 2020, The Washington Post ran a news story about interracial families attempting to explain his death to their children. “A man was unjustly killed here,” a White father recalls solemnly telling his biracial Black child.
But there was a gap in the coverage: “There are no interracial couples without a white partner” featured in The Post’s article, Nina Sharma observes in her new essay collection, “The Way You Make Me Feel: Love in Black and Brown.” Drawing variously on personal reflections, pop culture and history, Sharma makes it her project to decenter Whiteness and highlight a love that has long been relegated to the shadows: that of Black and Brown couples.
Sharma, who is Indian American, is married to Quincy Scott Jones, a Black American educator and poet whom she met at a Fourth of July barbecue, as she recollects in the anthology’s title essay. They had, she writes, grown up just one hour from each other: Jones in a majority-Black suburb of New Jersey, Sharma in Edison, N.J., a town that’s now home to one of the largest concentrations of Indian Americans in the country.
In 16 essays spanning 300 pages, Sharma chronicles her relationship and places it in conversation with other Afro-Asian love stories. Among them are that of the Black-Indian couple at the center of Mira Nair’s 1991 film, “Mississippi Masala,” and the story of Vice President Harris’s parents. (Sharma refers to Harris as her “time-traveling daughter” while contemplating having children of her own.)
The sweeping but focused collection demonstrates Sharma’s commitment to exploring Afro-Asian intimacy in all its beauty and complexity. In one essay, she probes Donald Trump’s indictment of racial others and grapples with her immigrant father’s complicated adulation of the former president. Using “Mad Men” as a launchpad, Sharma incisively considers the “nothingness of whiteness”: the luxury White people are accorded to make “something out of nothing,” while Black and Brown stories are always expected to make a statement.
In the book’s standout essay, “Sacrifice,” Sharma meditates on her parents’ suggestion that Quincy shave off his dreadlocks before their wedding. She compares the sanctity of a Hindu head-shaving practice, called mundan, with the violence of shaving the hair of enslaved people. “Head shaving was one of the first acts of enslavement,” Sharma writes, recounting the history of Europeans and slave traders shaving heads as a way of “cutting from enslaved Africans all ties to their place and people, all known markers of identity.”
But Sharma doesn’t simply dismiss the sacrosanct Hindu practice of tonsuring; instead, she treads carefully to highlight its nuances and considers the opposing valences that head-shaving carries in Indian and Black communities. She extends her exploration of hair to Black women’s wigs and weaves, which sometimes source hair from India and China, often selling it to consumers as “true Indian hair.” In the essay’s conclusion, Sharma refuses to comfort readers; instead, she recalls her wedding, when her older sister complimented a Black guest’s hair. “I love your hair,” her sister said. “Well, you should,” the guest replied. “It’s yours.”
As such moments prove, Sharma’s debut is remarkable for its daring, how unafraid it is to eschew rosy visions of racial solidarity. She interrogates the ongoing anti-Blackness of her family, even after her marriage to Quincy, refusing to glaze the collection with the banal optimism that assumes all people of color have joined forces to avenge racism. As a case in point, Sharma reminds us of the complicity of the Palestinian American owner of the corner market outside which George Floyd was murdered, and that of the Hmong American police officer who stood watching.
Sharma brings the same candor to her own life and its unglamorous details: her multiple mental health hospitalizations, her persistent cheating on a college boyfriend, her struggle to quit smoking cigarettes. The prose is lush, if occasionally clichéd, such as when she describes a peck on the lips as an “unbearable lightness” and concludes the book by ruminating on the undefined nature of dividing zero by zero while approaching Exit 0 on a New Jersey highway.
Although that metaphor feels strained, its nod to life’s precarity is apt: “The Way You Make Me Feel” affirms that Black and Brown existence in America comes with no guarantee of collective solidarity, no innate promise of racial equality. The path to justice is uncertain, Sharma reminds us, and we must each work hard — and be bold enough to sacrifice our own comfort — to actualize it.
Meena Venkataramanan writes stories on identity, culture and Asian American communities for The Post.
The Way You Make Me Feel
Love in Black and Brown
By Nina Sharma
Penguin. 323 pp. $27