The Other Black Girl
introduced by Maurice Carlos Ruffin
INTRODUCED BY Maurice Carlos Ruffin author of two books, including the story collection The Ones Who Don’t Say They Love You, forthcoming in August from One World.
We come to books for the experience of reading stories that reflect our lives and enlarge our understanding of the world. Reading Zakiya Dalila Harris’s The Other Black Girl was a double enjoyment for me. I felt the pleasure of her craft: the clear, tense prose that unfurled a plot about a young woman trying to make her way in publishing. I also felt the pleasure of being seen. I know what it is like to work in the corporate realm with all the office politics, the manipulations, the microaggressions. To see those details laid out with such precision made me feel less crazy. My situation wasn’t a one-off. A talented writer like Harris could help me contextualize experiences that I had deep feelings about but hadn’t been able to explain.
I read so much of The Other Black Girl while holding my breath. There’s a huge amount happening beneath the surface. One of the areas the book explores is gaslighting, that unique form of psychological abuse we’ve all become so familiar with. What made you want to delve into this topic?
When I first started writing this, I didn’t have gaslighting at the top of my brain. I really set out to explore the tense, complicated relationship between these two Black women who work in a very white publishing house. But as I started writing deeper into their interactions and their motivations, I started pulling back in order to see the bigger picture—to think about why their relationship was so tense, why it was so complicated. The answer, to me, stemmed from seeing the publishing industry claim to support “diversity” and “inclusivity” while simultaneously continuing to center whiteness (often at Black people’s expense). And of course this isn’t unique to the publishing industry. For years, pretty much every sector of American society has been commodifying diversity while disregarding the individual, and I would venture to say that this itself is a harmful form of gaslighting. It’s especially harmful for my protagonist, Nella. As the only Black person working at her publishing house, she thinks she has figured out how to exist within the very white world of publishing as an Other: She jumps through every hoop, withstands every microaggression, doesn’t push too hard for diversity town halls. So when her new Black colleague, Hazel, shows up and has great success playing by different “rules,” it’s that much more frustrating for Nella. She feels foolish, and I think a lot of Black people can relate to that feeling of not being valued or listened to—that feeling of You’re damned if you do and damned if you don’t.
Your writing is closely observed and hyperrealistic. At the center of it all is our protagonist, Nella. Tell us about her. Who is she, and what does she want as the story begins?
Nella is a Black, twenty-six-year-old editorial assistant who dreams of becoming the Black editor that her publishing house, Wagner Books, hasn’t had in many years. Much of her drive comes from her love of books written by Black writers, and one of her favorite books is Burning Heart—a best-seller written and edited by two Black women and published more than thirty years earlier by Wagner Books. Like many Black women, Nella occupies two distinct worlds. One of these worlds bursts with Blackness— Black pop culture references, Black hair talk, Black Twitter—and she keeps all of these things separate from her work life, which is her second world. Small, prestigious, and very white, Wagner Books is the kind of place Nella has spent most of her young life rehearsing for, since she grew up in a mostly white suburban neighborhood in Connecticut and got very accustomed to being the only one at a young age. The hiring of Hazel ruptures the boundary that separates these two worlds in a lot of ways, and Nella hopes that she’ll no longer have to carry the burden of being the only representation of Blackness at the office. She also really hopes she and Hazel will be friends.
What writers, traditions, or stories did you think about while writing The Other Black Girl?
I’d just started reading Passing by Nella Larsen when I started writing The Other Black Girl, and I was taken by it so much that I named my protagonist for the author. I loved how rich it is in subtext and nuanced characters and uncomfortably tense situations, and the fact that it still feels timely, nearly one hundred years after it was written. While my protagonist isn’t lightskinned, she could be seen as “passing” in her own twenty-first-century way: She was raised in a middle-class family, she attended a great university, she has a white boyfriend, and she speaks and behaves in a way that fits in pretty seamlessly with her white colleagues. I was also really interested in exploring the conversations we have within the Black community about racial uplift and the truism of “each one, teach one.” I have been fortunate to experience this kind of selflessness and support from many other Black people who came before me. But I know that this isn’t always the case, partly because of another truism that Black people often poke fun at: that there can be only one of us. So often it seems like many companies think that diversity issues can be fixed by simply plopping one or two Black people into a mostly white space—and when that seems to be the mentality, of course it’s going to make Black people feel competitive toward one another. The genre element of The Other Black Girl was inspired by my love of horror and sci-fi stories: The Stepford Wives, The Twilight Zone, and Get Out, to name a few. I love stories that follow characters whose lives seem just like ours until something sends them down an otherworldly rabbit hole. I enjoy that journey as a reader and a consumer, so I had a lot of fun creating my own rabbit hole.
Five years ago did you think you would be about to publish a highly anticipated book?
Not at all! Five years ago I was in the “Okay, no more school—now what?” stage of my life. I’d just received my MFA in nonfiction writing from the New School, and after learning of my desire to work in publishing, a wonderful instructor of mine—the inimitable Hettie Jones—mentioned she might be able to connect me with someone at Penguin Random House (PRH). But since I’d spent years applying to publishing jobs and internships without hearing anything back, I wasn’t sure the PRH thing would actually pan out. It eventually did, but not until three months later. In the meantime I was just working at a Brooklyn pie shop and trying to build up my portfolio virtually from scratch. Because even though I’d written a handful of personal essays for my MFA thesis that I felt really proud of, none of them felt “finished” to me—not just yet. They needed more work and even more perspective. So my plan was to take a little break from those, give them time to marinate, and focus my attention on pitching new ideas. To be honest I haven’t revisited my thesis since then. But I don’t think I would have been able to write The Other Black Girl without first writing those essays, all of which revolved around my own complicated relationship with my Blackness.
What do you hope readers of The Other Black Girl will experience or take away from the book?
I wrote this with my own personal experiences as a Black woman in mind, so I really hope that particular demographic of readers sees themselves, or some part of themselves, in these pages. Maybe it’s in the conversations about 4C and 3C hair. Maybe it’s in the Black movie references. Whatever it is, I hope this resonates with them. But I also hope that this book conveys to non-Black readers the importance of understanding the richness of our experiences. While The Other Black Girl mainly follows Nella, this book is also about Kendra Rae and Diana and Shani, and even Hazel and Malaika. All of these Black women have different opinions on what it means to be successful; all of them make mistakes. But there’s a beauty in what sets them apart from one another, and my hope is that by giving each of these Black women a place on the page, readers will come away with yet another example of how nuanced our views and values are. Lastly, I hope that The Other Black Girl inspires people within the publishing world to do better. There is no justifiable reason for how white publishing still is today. Publishing houses have the money and the resources to reconsider who they hire, how they hire, and what kind of authors they publish. They can do better—and as an industry that sets the tone for what the world reads and deems worthy of discussion, they should.