As I read Bryan Washington’s Family Meal, a quote from Toni Morrison kept coming to mind. Just after receiving the Nobel prize for literature, reflecting on her career, Morrison said: “I stood at the border, stood at the edge and claimed it as central. I claimed it as central, and let the rest of the world move over to where I was.”
Washington’s writing – the short story collection Lot, and an uncannily affecting debut novel, Memorial – achieves a similar effect. His eye is trained on the compromises, victories and ingenuity of Black, brown and queer characters and communities, but he never emphasises their supposed marginality. Nor, importantly, does he play the anthropologist: he doesn’t explain the specificities of the queer or Black lives he follows as if they are beyond the ken of straight and/or white readers.
