Writer, editor, educator, and collaborator Tisa Bryant does not merely write across genres; she stretches them, the boundaries between memoir, criticism, and theory pulled taut until they give way to something radical and uncontainable, propelled by an intellectual urgency that is both fierce and formally inventive. Her advice has lived in my head since 2016, when I had the dumb luck of being her MFA mentee at CalArts. Sitting down ten years later to discuss her latest book, Residual—an excavation of the grief of losing her mother that explores an archive of Black feminist thought—I was right back in her autofiction class, captivated by her ethos: "Let's make sure we do a lot of things with who we are," encouraging writers to center themselves and what they know, and “acknowledge how their minds work.”
Residual resists chronology, ordering time through objects, maternal loss, and conversation. By prioritizing dialogue, Bryant populates the text with thinkers like Octavia Butler and Patricia J. Williams. Such autotheory remains sutured by a tight grip on privacy, working in an anti-confessional mode that questions “what does death give me the right to?” as Bryant steams sheets to commune with “all the broken homes of my line.”
Ultimately, Bryant collapses the distance between mourning her mother, research, and the act of writing, because even in the archive “we’re talking about flesh.” What follows is a conversation that took place via email and Zoom about hybrid writing, disclosure, critical fabulation, and family.
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Rosa Boshier González: The one phrase from Residual that has been like an earworm in my head is, “smearing time and feeling into little stinky piles of no.” In addition to the visceral lyricism, I was struck by the act of refusal in this line. Residual gathers this tension between disclosure and refusal to create a new kind of life writing, an anti-memoir. Was refusal something you were thinking about while writing?
Tisa Bryant: Let’s get right to the crux of the matter. Refusal and resistance were natural feelings attending the writing of this book. Whether loving, fraught, hateful or nonexistent, one’s relationship with and to their mother is an enormous expanse of conflicting emotions. There were aspects of my relationship with her that I wasn’t ready to talk about, and that would on their own comprise a book. Then there was my own discomfort with the vulnerability memoir in general, and this writing in particular, demanded of me. I found I could not avoid spilling the guilt, shame and despair I felt, but I could write about not wanting to spill it.
I come from a line of close-lipped, secretive Caribbean women. Their refusal was certainly on my mind while I was writing. My responsibility to them, and to myself, was what I needed to balance. Some things got tucked away in the process. I will say that the Charles Gaines exhibit and book, Theater of Refusal, was on my mind, as well as Édouard Glissant’s Opacity, as they both have to do with a refusal to perform as expected, and with exercising a right (write!) to be unknown. There is also the refusal of the archive to tell or expose: papers, journals, ledgers, often expose and conceal at the same time. What I most wanted to know about my mother—what she wished for her life, if she really wanted to be a writer herself and what happened to that writing—remains untold. She knew, but refused to share that part of her story while she lived, and no trace of it, materially, survives after her death. Except perhaps in the flesh. My brother and I are both writers.
RBG: You write about “purloining,” a word I love, or “pawing” through your mother’s dresser, her bureau, her panty drawer, about “the getting of wisdom through theft.” What’s the tether between stealing and searching? It seems to me that searches of many forms structure the book.
TB: I love the word “purloining” too. It’s very slick, feline and intimate, a secret pocket hidden deep in a skirt. I grew up knowing that my mum’s panty drawer was a sort of file drawer, where she kept important papers like our birth certificates. It was only her death that provided a certain license, because she wasn’t there to stop me from looking through her things, and yet, it was very uncomfortable. I skimmed the surfaces of the places I knew and was much more furtive, reticent, and just not ready to dig around.
There were times, both in the immediate aftermath of my mother’s death, and while writing Residual, that I told myself, “Death isn’t permission.” My mother wasn’t Octavia E. Butler, intentionally leaving her papers to the Huntington Library in Pasadena in anticipation of us. My mother was a Black woman who lived with pleasure, and then with pain, and was always pretty private, keeping herself to herself, as her mother did, and her mother before her. So, there is searching and there is a questioning of that searching, a reaching hand. I question what is my business to know, while still longing to discover my mother again, the other person who was not my mother, but that other person I could only steal glances at, catch glimpses of, and even then, it is because she let me. The word “proxy” also wends its way through Residual, poet r. erica doyle (Proxy, Belladonna Collaborative 2013) and vis-a-vis poet and essayist Brian Blanchfield (Proxies: Essays Near Knowing, Nightboat 2016), as my archival research on Lorraine Hansberry and Octavia E. Butler was proximal to, a proxy for, my longing and failure to discover and know my mother as a writer, but a love letter to her all the same.
RBG: Let’s keep talking about that. In addition to fiction and life writing, you’re a formidable film writer, literary critic, frequent artistic collaborator, editor, and archivist. Residual includes passages of research and speculative encounter, or, to use Saidiya Hartman’s term, critical fabulation, on the lives of Lorraine Hansberry, Kathleen Collins, and Octavia Butler, to name a few. Why were these sections important to include?
TB: In contrast to the abundance of memory but dearth of material traces of my mother’s life from my own family home, I took refuge within the abundance of materials in archival collections such as Lorraine Hansberry’s and Kathleen Collins’ papers at the Schomburg Center for Research in Black Culture, in Harlem, and Octavia E. Butler’s papers at the Huntington Library in Pasadena. I was working on specific projects with Lorraine Hansberry and Octavia E. Butler, and in Residual, I reflect on the shift between viewing their archives as sites of death (congruent with my own sadness) rather than sites of life (a gift and record of their creativity, encouragement to keep going). Their presence in Residual provides a peek into my research experience and (then paused) writing projects, and contrast against the silences and unanswerable questions about my mother’s desires to be a writer.
These archives are sites of grief, as filmmaker Kathleen Collins, playwright Lorraine Hansberry and science fiction writer Octavia E. Butler all died prematurely, as my mother did, all before the age of 65, which I consider premature. In my research on each of these brilliant Black women, I had the privilege of knowing their hopes, desires, ambitions, methods, their critiques and dreams. It was an extraordinary and intimate experience, and so immersive that I mourned them all over again, as if I didn’t know at the outset how and when their stories would end.
I had many conversations at the time with poet and critic Frances Richard, who was researching artist Gordon Matta-Clark for what would become Physical Poetics. We talked about all of the feelings that came up in becoming so intimately familiar with the dead through their archives, where their allure, charisma, inventiveness, all their aliveness, was still active and acting upon us. Until relatively recently, it wasn’t common for a biographer or scholar to present even a bit of their own subjectivity beyond the introduction to the writing structures, methods and choices at hand. The grief and mourning, but also pride and wonder one is left with after the research, with you during the rest of your living, gets dealt with elsewhere.
This was one of the questions I had years ago at the outset of Residual: “What are you left with?” when the project you’re researching makes no space for how you felt doing the work, when you’re supposed to synthesize yourself out of the equation? That tension between the textual and the fleshed is also important to the idea versus the reality of the interior. Even what we write from within our deepest selves isn’t it, but an approximation. What are you left with, where do you put it? And, another question, “Are you ever done with it?”
I continue to learn from and be inspired by Lorraine Hansberry, Octavia E. Butler and Kathleen Collins, as I do my own mother. I also learn from the daughters, literary and biological, their public engagements through their work in maintaining and extending their mothers’ legacies. The energies of mourning, stewardship and elation are so intertwined. They alchemize into gratefulness for being able to know them, be impressed by them, to see their works, at all.
RBG: Talk to me about your conceptualization of “afterlife writing,” a term used frequently throughout Residual.
TB: Dr. LaMonda Stallings theorizes “afterlife writing” in her book, The Afterlives of Kathleen Collins. She says, “I want to offer a concept of ‘afterlife-writing’ and apply it to the work of Kathleen Collins, because, as I hope you will discover, she was dedicated to seeking out new lives and forms different than the biopolitical narrative imposed on her very existence and that of other Black women.” This is in response to the constricting and homogenizing conventions of biopics, rooted in white supremacy and capitalism, that by design cannot account for, hold, or present the radical creativity of Black women like Kathleen Collins, whose films, writing, and life sought to express other ways of being, making, and living. Dr. Stallings offers afterlife writing as an alternative to these constrictions, which she performs as well as theorizes throughout her book, as a scholar but also in the role of experimental filmmaker, or muse. Afterlife-writing becomes a way to name the critical, multimodal, interdisciplinary and intuitive forms of both archival research and writing that continues the lifework of Black radical women writers, filmmakers, poets, visual artists. Rather than canning a radical life into a labeled, consumable product, afterlife-writing allows for an expansive affinity, an open, unanticipated continuance. There is no one way to do this work.
RBG: We can see that from how this book takes many modes —archive, biography, speculative encounter, eulogy, confessional. It also engages with many forms—poems, immigration documents, letters, family photographs, film stills. Can you talk to me about your hybrid and multi-genre approach?
TB: These modes were the best way for me to answer the questions I ask throughout Residual: “What are you left with?” and “How were you dead?” These questions are posed both in regard to the aftermath of my mother’s death, the impact of my dad’s dementia and the vicious realities of loss, and to the years of feeling untethered and without purpose as a writer or will to life as a person. I allowed myself to list, speculate, question, but also recover, cite, and reflect on that period as the feeling moved me. There is an associative charge between emotion and mode, and that lent itself to the vignette structure, as I remembered the face of my great aunt, or the voice of my grandmother. What did each kind of recall demand, in register, duration, detail, the actual span of words across or down the page?
Framing a memory as a scene imposed a simple form—intro, outro—I have been thinking about the pieces in Residual less as essays and more as long exposures, but some are snapshots, deep sketches of character and situation. The material traces, the photos and letters, both their quality and quantity, also correspond to the very small cache of family items I am left with after the loss of our family home, our family archive.
RBG: In Residual, you visit the Museum of Home in London. Of your family’s home in Massachusetts, you write, “This house drew blood.” You describe the pride and yet the urgency of homelife, the stress laid at the feet of your mother to maintain the family home as the structure’s “wish list” became “bodily and dire.” Residual returns time and again to home with a keen focus on domestic spaces. Why?
TB: Home, culture, style, memory, interiors both built and psychic are all concerns of Residual. These are inheritances, either lost, damaged, faded, or, as memory or lore, maintained. I’m remembering your MFA thesis at CalArts, Rosa, and home spaces, immigration, material and maternal conditions were major components of your writing across time and three countries. There’s something that we’ve both explored about being at home in the world, and how losing a mother, literally or figuratively, is to break the tether, lose home, and we have to gather all our forces, of memory, conjure, empathy, forgiveness, love, to strengthen the root, be at home in the world and ourselves. The Museum of the Home in London helped me see, alongside the homes of so many Caribbean friends, just how West Indian my mother was, materially, which allowed me to explore more closely the ethical and moral dimensions of that, as I recall experiencing her as a mother, while at the same time, much of the cultural references in our home were Black American. One installation, “The Caribbean Front Room,” at the Museum of the Home, by Michael McMillan, affirmed this, too.
RBG: Safe to say that ten years later we both remain haunted by matrilineage, haha.
TB: It is quite a thing, this particular hauntology, which is biological, physiological, right? Women carrying eggs that might become future daughters, and so on and so forth. Layers of time and life, visitations, traces. Haunted, yes, and also informed.
RBG: From inside…wow. Can you talk to me about the concept of the Black Interior? How does it shape the book?
TB: I remain inspired by Elizabeth Alexander’s excellent collection of essays, The Black Interior. The title essay reflects on Ms. Alexander’s mother’s shaping and signaling family identity and values through her style and taste in decor, particularly her mother’s “shelves,” the objects upon which are ritualistically cared for, and have an altar-like presence. The images and feelings Ms. Alexander shares immediately struck a chord and flooded my memory with scenes of the homes my mother created for us, but also for herself, first. The Black interior, though, isn’t just homes and decor. It’s our inner-most self, voice and reason from within. It’s specific types of knowledge, sense-making, fantasy, processing history and daily events, violence, humor, trauma, daydreams and so much more through perspectives and perceptions that are at once singular, for each Black person, and shared, a collective sensibility, record-keeping, vigilance, love. That plurality that is also an “I,” seen.
RBG: I love that. There’s so much plurality in this book, so many conversations.
TB: When you’re writing you're bringing all of these people with you, all these ecologies of knowledge.
RBG: Different registers.
TB: Exactly. When you choose a register, you're assuming an audience. There's always a signifying that's in there. A referentiality. A sampling.
RBG: In addition to memory, loss, home, and maternal and cultural inheritances, Residual is also about the writing life and the craft of writing. Why was it important to include your own writing process and views on writing in this book? Do you think of it as a kind of craft book at all?
TB: You ask such great questions!
I don’t think of Residual as a craft book, but I’m interested in how it might function that way, how it might show a process of recovery and release after grief and depression, or after or through any number of conditions that affect a life. Along with gathering up traces of my mother’s life and impact on me, running my mind over fissures and promontories of our maternal lineage, the lost and remembered homespaces of our maternal line, I also trace my research, notetaking, working with images and film, as a way to account for, affirm and recoup writing as life process, a way to be at home in myself.
