Princess Joy L. Perry on Lost History

First Draft: A Dialogue of Writing is a weekly show featuring in-depth interviews with fiction, nonfiction, essay writers, and poets, highlighting the voices of writers as they discuss their work, their craft, and the literary arts. Hosted by Mitzi Rapkin, First Draft celebrates creative writing and the individuals who are dedicated to bringing their carefully chosen words to print as well as the impact writers have on the world we live in.

In this episode, Mitzi talks to Princess Joy L. Perry about her new novel, This Here is Love.

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From the episode:

Mitzi Rapkin: I think your characters, who were all slaves, lived on these really visceral memories. Like Cassie had these memories of Africa, so she knew something different. But maybe that’s even more torturous than her child named Bless who never even knew that country.  You actually opened the book with her having a dream of being in Africa. I’m curious about that.

Princess Joy L. Perry: I think that Cassie and the ancestors of her generation, they had that sense of a real self. They knew who they had been born to be. They knew who they were without oppression. I think for me, that’s the historical loss that I feel, probably most deeply.  I will never have any knowledge of that other life, you know over the generations I would have been born into. I am sure I have distant relatives, you know, in West Africa, and I will never know. I will never know who they are and what my life would have been like. I will never know that history.  To me that is a loss that can’t really ever be reconciled. Bless, she has this sense of this gaping hole in her history. And I don’t dwell on it, but it’s there. It’s there. And I think that as a writer, and as I research, I become more and more aware of it, and it saddens me more and more the older I get. So that’s, I think, the mix of the story and the mix of the writer, that that is something that makes me sad. I’ve been researching my ancestry on one of those commercial websites. I’m sure my family, by now is really sick of me calling them with “guess what I found out?” And you know that the thrill of that is really like having pieces of yourself kind of slotted back into place with stories and names, family names. One of the names that I found in my family tree was Phoebe, and I took some of those names from the family tree and use them in the story, I think, as a way of restoring those people. Because I knew I had an uncle named Andrew on my father’s side, and I knew I have a living cousin. Her real name is Phoebe, and I never thought about where those names came from, and the people who were called by those names generations ago. So, to be able to discover them and use their names in this book was to reclaim them somehow so their stories are not forgotten. Chances are they were not if they were literate, maybe not very and I don’t know much about the stories of my family beyond my maternal grandmother. So, to be able to reclaim those stories that was a great feeling, I mean great feeling is such an understatement. It was like they were given something back that had been taken from them and have been taken from me.

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Princess Joy L. Perry is the recipient of a Virginia Commission for the Arts Fellowship and a winner of the Zora Neale Hurston/Richard Wright Award. Her short stories have appeared in All About Skin, African American Review, and Kweli Journal. She lives in Norfolk, Virginia.  Her new novel is This Here is Love.