sobre el funcionamiento del Consejo Según el Código Olivencia:

Writer Social Influencer + Activist

Black and Latinx women’s literature in which Black/Latinx, first-generation people, most especially women and girls, are the subject helps both readers and researchers articulate the importance of our very beings and our work in the society overall while also counterbalancing normative narrative about our subjecthood and existences.

In this epigraph, the speaker identifies the didactic significance and the epistemological implication of this literature. For her, supporting young girls in reading about similarly situated predecessors and examples helps them understand both the interconnectedness of their struggles and the ways in which their freedoms and successes are tied.

Such a statement brings to mind the moment in popular culture during which Issa Rae, comedian, show creator, social influencer proclaimed “I am rooting for everybody Black” while on the red carpet at the 69th Primetime Emmy Awards in September of 2017. The reading and rooting are examples of bearing witness of and acclaiming triumph for Black peoples experienced throughout the diaspora.

Ibi Zoboi is an author and thought leader whose work seeks to honor truths, and critique normative, hegemonic, institutionalized, intersectional oppression. Appropriately, the truths honored in her texts are didactic, exemplary, and help bear witness to some of the greatest and yet accepted atrocities of our time.

In the socio-political climate of the United States in 2018, people’s very beings exist in constant contestation and protest of the new white supremacist, misogynist, jingoist, and xenophobic “norms.” With increasingly conservative, anti-Black, anti-Muslim, xenophobic law and order dictates from the White House, this political moment is ripe with rebellion. Authors like Ibi Zoboi offer readers both examples of people in revolt and teach of the impact of these realities on marginalized peoples—as indicated in the epigraph. The texts of these authors are relevant to the public education system because they offer different epistemologies than those oft-taught in classrooms. For students, especially students of color here in the United States, it is essential to show and allow young girls of color to read about women who are like them. In examining works by Ibi Zoboi as well as the ideologies and politics of her text, we center the multifaceted nature of novels about transnational migration and the ways they are keenly also about Black women’s liberation. Thus, American Street (2017) belongs in the genre of Black women’s literature of transnational migration. I argue throughout this study that this genre is also an important site for theorization about migration, immigration, and dyaspora.

Black women’s transnational literature of migration conveys that “[l]iterary and cultural production are… intimately and pervasively present in how we construct analytics of race, gender, and location, in that they invoke and provoke contradictory desires to have the known world reflected but also to create new and varied connections” (Pinto 17–18). Precisely because it offer humanistic inquiry and provoke reading difference and comprehending differently, as Samantha Pinto suggests, Zoboi’s text promotes radical shifts in representations of Black women themselves and

the worlds in which they both inhabit and aim to better.

Both including and before the creation of contemporary movements like #MeToo, #BlackLivesMatter, #SayHerName, and more, radical Black women continue to invigorate, embody, and expand the socially-defined boundaries of Blackness, womanhood, and radicalism and, as such, justify the need for new definitions. These women complicate the standardized binary boundaries between respectable and radical; re-imagine quotidian rebellion; highlight and convey the multiple forms of women’s leadership; and characterize anew the various intersections of race, gender, class, and sexuality oppression. According to the introduction of Want to Start A Revolution by Dayo Gore et al., contemporary Black women also highlight “the diversity of strategies and approaches Black women employ” (Gore 6) while artfully conveying the “differing ways Black women [imagine and enact] their ‘freedom dreams’” (Gore 6). The dreams, as we see in Zoboi’s novels, are genuinely nightmares and through them the protagonists argue for the America of radical protesters against the United States government.

In this chapter, I introduce Haitian author Ibi Zoboi and examine her first novel American Street. Moreover, I describe the ways the text engages the concept of Black feminist citizenship, crimmigration, and later dyaspora saudade. In articulating this and the politics these texts contest, the novels themselves, I envision as political tools.

Crimmigration and Coming of Age

Haiti and came of age in 1980s Bushwick, Brooklyn—a neighborhood Zoboi describe as a “war zone” in this epoch (233). In her own words, she wrote American Street because she “wanted to write a contemporary story set in a disenfranchised environment, to examine an immigrant coming from one of the poorest countries in the Western Hemisphere to one of the poorest cities in America” (Poray Goddu). Furthermore, Zoboi “wanted to look at what happens when economic disparity and a rich culture, like that of Haiti and Detroit, clash, and what happens to a teenager in the center of that clash” (Poray Goddu). Zoboi chose to place her debut novel in a city that in 2016 was filled with the dilapidated, underinvested, under-resourced, precarity of Bushwick, Brooklyn when she was coming of age.

In an interview about her debut novel and her forthcoming work Pride, Zoboi states

[w]hen I first started writing American Street, there was a New York Times article called “Last Stop on the L Train: Detroit.” It was about gentrification and how even Bushwick has become so expensive, so the next stop was Detroit. I have a history with Bushwick. And Detroit looks very much like how Bushwick used to look in the 1980s when I first immigrated there. (Turner)

This choice of literary setting demands attention as it demonstrates Zoboi’s interest in social justice issues at the intersection of race and class. Moreover, the literal place in which the plot occurs, the home, is also significant.

8800 American Street is a home that evokes quite clearly that the American Dream is farcical as it does not expand to address the needs of everyone. In the

eponymous chapter, low-income male poverty, depression, death and more are cemented into the foundation of the home itself. All the men who live there die tragically: Adrian Weiss, the first tenant in 1924, is shot and killed; Wilson Coolidge who moves there from Ohio in 1942 is struck by a car; Alabama native and child of sharecroppers, Lester Charles Walker—the first Black father in the home—is shot and killed by his white neighbor; and “all through the eighties and nineties…[d]eath claimed the lives of dealers and junkies alike” (Zoboi 162). In 2000, Fabiola’s uncle, Jean-Phillip François, buys the house from the city only to later die by way of a “single bullet to the head outside of the Chrysler plant” (Zoboi 162). Death is an ever- present force in this novel used to different ends. “Death,” Zoboi writes to close the chapter on 8800 American Street:

Parked itself on that corner of American and Joy, some days as still as stone, other days singing cautionary songs and delivering telltale riddles, waiting for the day when one girl would ask to open the gates to the other side. (162)

This girl is Fabiola, the novel’s protagonist. With a character who resembles a lwa of mortality and with whom Fabiola converses and works to save her cousin, Fabiola is the girl who does the asking and changes the fates of her family. A book written by an author whose experience is akin to that of her protagonist and created to illuminate stories of disenfranchisement, migration, and poverty in predominantly Black communities—understandably, American Street is an informative text.

In American Street, Ibi Zoboi crafts women-centered spaces and sister-circles that embody Black feminist citizenship as well as the characteristics of contemporary