by Kelly Harrison
August 3, 2023
Kelly A. Harrison, MFA, teaches technical communication at Stanford University and works as a writer and consultant in San José, CA. She edited West Winds Centennial, an anthology of works by the California Writers Club, for which she won the Ina Coolbrith award. Her works have appeared in literary journals and anthologies, including Reed Magazine, Hidden Compass, and Celebrate Creativity, and she writes for Technical Communication. She is the Associate Editor for West Trade Review.
Witness: Stories by Jamel Brinkley; Farrar, Straus and Giroux; 240 pages; $27.00
Jamel Brinkley’s Witness examines characters living the mundane struggles that define much of urban American life. By harvesting actions, nuances, and details, Brinkley’s stories form profiles of Black people in the boroughs of New York, where no one triumphs over adversity or comes out ahead. Instead, Brinkley crafts brief moments in the lives of working-class people, young and old, in engaging stories that immerse us in moods of their lived experiences.
By including an epigraph by James Baldwin and by taking the title Witness from a Baldwin passage, Brinkley invites readers to consider his work as a response to Baldwin’s. The title works on at least two levels. First, Brinkley’s characters are more witnesses than actors (in Baldwin’s parlance), experiencing their lives almost as flâneurs going where the life path takes them. The title also slyly names Brinkley, as Baldwin called his own role, as a central witness to inner-city life, but any comparison between Brinkley and Baldwin can only be drawn clumsily (Black male authors writing about inner-city life). While Brinkley’s prose style is polished and a joy to read—with syntactical choices like this: “…and just like that, with inexplicable ease, our reunion, our alliance, was again, however lovely the bond, broken,”—his stories sometimes lack a deeply emotional satisfaction.
Brinkley’s structure and endings deflate tension and resist epiphany. The first story, “Blessed Deliverance” quoted above, begins in the first-person plural point of view following several teens in their last vestiges of youth as they watch an attempt at gentrification that clashes with a local mentally “disturbed” man they called Headass. Brinkley deftly pulls readers into this collective teen sentiment, describing, for example, how without even speaking about it they walk the same direction, they settle on which pizza to eat and where, and they agree in opinion about new music. In addition to the mundane, their actions also include the strange, as when Headass moaned and pointed at the group until they all “through a process of reluctant submission” began moaning, too. Brinkley even writes seven lines of dialog without attribution because anyone of the five kids could be speak the same thoughts—and this collective approach is engaging, fresh, and seems to be moving toward some universal truths about urban life. Up to this point, the only hint that we’re not really in a collective story is that one of the teens is unnamed. So well-together is the story functioning that when the point of view shifts just over two-thirds of the way through, the effect is that of reading a completely different story, and perhaps that’s instead the point. The teens have coupled off, our narrator alone reflecting on how life “pulls bodies apart.” This shift in the story, while it serves a point, jolts the reader in a way that subtly deflates the teenage energy.
Where Brinkley really excels as a writer is in character portrayals that include deeply intimate and tender details. His people feel real because their stories occur with backdrops rather than center stages of imminent death and with family members or friends in crisis. Feelings and mood in a moment in time predominate over plot lines. His characters accept rather than reject or fight their experiences. What Brinkley identifies as “reluctant submission” rules in this collection, so Brinkley here is resisting an emotional resolution, even one that ends sadly or tragically, in favor of a statement that asks the reader to feel what his characters feel.
When Brinkley’s characters linger, seeming for the most part to accept their lots in life, their emotional growth stunted, or at least paused, Brinkley is showing that this is urban life in the US. In “The Let-Out,” a young man is drawn in by an older woman who then taunts him about being his father’s first love. The man follows the woman into a museum where she pokes and pulls at the scabs of family history to the point of breaking, but he never leaves her despite wanting to, as if some familial obligation sealed their fates together. When she leaves the museum, he’s rooted at the threshold. In “Comfort,” Simone spends the story drinking or drunk, avoiding most people, while ruminating over the loss of her brother. (This story also has a point-of-view shift at the end when her lover from the previous night—he’s one of several—returns to check on her.) And in “Sahar,” Gloria, a woman nearing retirement, has a rather whimsical platonic affair of sorts in her imagination about the young woman who delivers her food. Gloria writes letters she never sends, and after losing her job, she laments that it will take some time for her to reunite with the courier. Brinkley evokes an urban mood, an emotional tenor that resonates through the pieces. He finds a note, a chord, and sticks with it throughout, leaving readers to wonder if hope or change exists for those living in urban America.
Pinned down by the past, the characters in Witness are mostly unaware they have a future or resigned to not having a future in these boroughs, even in “Arrow,” a standout from the collection because it features a literal ghost of the narrator’s mother and the narrator assumes he will also become a ghost, which is the closest any character gets about some future prospects. Despite her paranormal actions (including a sex scene of sorts between corporal father and spectral mother), the story’s narrator, Hasan, is just as grounded and self-aware as the other characters in Witness. Hasan relates his “arrow of time” idea, saying people fit into two categories: those who have an “appalling optimism” that the next thing will be better than the last, and the ones like his mother who become ghosts because they cannot move forward in time. Brinkley is telling us most of his characters are ghosts, unable to look forward, as is the case with Anita, the mother in ”Bystander,” who floats around the house, unable to come to terms with her daughter’s illnesses and teenage edginess. Or as in “The Happiest House on Union Street,” with Beverly, a young child at Halloween, who is too young to understand the troubles her father and his identical twin brother are in financially; for her, the present time connects unchangingly with the past, back to her grandmother after whom she is named, and with the future where she imagines herself still living in the same house.
Brinkley takes a delicate and detailed approach toward his characters. They cogitate, ruminate, deliberate over life in the moment. For example, in “Barstow Station,” the narrator, who has been complaining about his job as a delivery driver, suddenly realizes the job, given its human interactions, is actually fine, and this scene is the closest Brinkley comes to including an epiphany. Brinkley’s characters can be gender fluid without the story being about their gender. They are often polyamorous, both men and women, with affairs and divorce as common as a trip to the corner store. Women are stronger than men, less flawed but still complicated by life’s harsh realities of a job lost, a brother killed by a cop, a longing to connect with someone. The people in their everyday inner-city struggles are what sing in Witness.
©2023 Iron Oak Editions LLC
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Seeing Life Just as It Is in Jamel Brinkley's Witness
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