Hidden feelings come to the fore
With a possible presidential bid in 2020, Kamala Harris tells John Williams about her book
KAMALA Harris’s new memoir,
The Truths We Hold: An American Journey, begins with a prologue set on November 8, 2016, the night Harris was elected a US senator from California.
The rest of the book addresses the urgent political matters that have risen in the wake of that night, but it also goes back to cover Harris’s tenure as California’s attorney general and her childhood in Oakland as the daughter of immigrant parents: her father an economist from Jamaica, her mother a cancer researcher from India.
Though rumours of Harris gearing up for a presidential run in 2020 are becoming noisier by the minute (when Stephen Colbert asked her last Thursday if she would run, Harris coyly said, “I might”), she told me the memoir was not meant to help lay the groundwork for such a campaign.
“At the expense of sounding immodest,” she said, the book is “really about the work I’ve done already that’s had national impact, and what I hope to come from it.”
Below, Harris answers some questions.
Q: When did you first get the idea to write this book?
A: Election night, 2016. I sat on our couch at home after the election party with a family-size bag of Doritos, which I ate by myself, in awe and shock about what I was watching on TV. It was a night that was bitter-sweet for my campaign, for all of us. None of us saw it coming.
After that night, I felt a more urgent need to tell people what we’re fighting for. When we talk about a fight, it’s born out of optimism; and it’s not a fight against something, but it’s a fight for something.
It was that emotion that led me to speak the words I spoke that night, about the need to fight; and that, by extension, led to the book.
Q: What’s the most surprising thing you learned writing it?
A: I was raised to do things, not to talk about myself or my feelings. It was an effort to talk about my feelings. It was difficult. I talk about a lot that’s really personal, and that I had not talked about in public. That made me feel very vulnerable.
But I felt it was important to talk about it for a couple of reasons. One, I’m clear in my mind that there are a lot of experiences I’ve had that are in common with a lot of people.
But more importantly, I wanted to give context to the work
I’ve done. Almost all I’ve done professionally has been motivated by some experience I’ve been exposed to.
Writing the book required me to really explore what I was feeling at those moments. For example, the chapter that we named “Underwater” – I had never talked about the fact that our mother bought our first house when I was a teenager. I’ll never forget when my mother came back and said, “This is going to be our home.”
The pictures and the excitement she had, and the excitement we then had. I connected that emotion to what it meant for all those homeowners who either had that hope when they engaged in what ended up being a fraudulent mortgage scheme, or when they lost their homes.
Knowing what that meant, when I’m sitting across the table from executives at the biggest banks in the country and feeling a sense of responsibility, that this wasn’t simply a financial transaction.
Q: In what way is the book you wrote different from the book you set out to write?
A: There’s a lot in the book that was happening in real time; so, literally, as I’m writing it, it’s happening. The book was due and then the Brett Kavanaugh hearings happened, and so how do I handle that? It was important to me to at least try to talk about that, knowing that people will be reading about it months after it happened.
Q: Who is a creative person (not a writer) who has influenced you and your work?
A: My mother. She was incredibly creative, as a scientist. But when I think about performers: Bob Marley. I first started listening to him when I was a child. My father had an incredible jazz collection but also a lot of Marley. I saw him in concert at the Greek Theatre in Berkeley.
Jamaica’s history is not that well known in the context of the issues we deal with in the US. But Jamaica grappled with vicious slavery for generations, and then colonists, with a very strong sense of identity in terms of what it meant to be, particularly, a black Jamaican.
A lot of his music was about what it means to fight for the people. He was a very spiritual person also. I’m very spiritual. I don’t talk a lot about it, but the idea that there is a higher being and that we should be motivated by love of one another – that also requires us to fight. | NYT