[REVIEW] The In-Betweens by Davon Loeb

(Everytime Press, 2018)

REVIEW BY CHRIS CAMPANIONI

—

Davon Loeb wants to tell us that all writing—even and especially memoir—means writing what never existed; that all writing demands a mix of imagination and memory, the blending of literal and emotional truths; that even his story, the story of his life—the lyrical narrative of The In-Betweens (Everytime Press, 2018)—subverts our own generic expectations and considerations of what it means to write about ourselves, if only because to write about ourselves would mean to write about all of the people who have formed us, each in their own way, and in ways we may never know, not all the way.

And so Loeb harnesses the speculative and the real, nurturing both, beginning with the hypothetical subjective, entering his story by telling his parents’ story, imagining the life before he had a life, resisting sentimentalism and nostalgia to talk about a past with real stakes: “He was married to a woman his age, and a father of two. She was married to a man her age, and a mother of two. And my father was White and my mother was Black, in America, and everything was stacked against them” (4).

This is a blueprint Loeb continues to return to in his bodily, materially sensitive memoir, in which a memory of tying up a cousin to a tree, leaving her in the rain, ushers in a description of summer thunderstorms; elsewhere, a memory of sitting up in bed interminably waiting for his father to arrive prefaces a larger exploration of his father’s visitations, his frequent absences. The book moves seamlessly through frank explorations of masculinity and gender norms, the superstitious and contractual rites of childhood, racism and the racial imaginary, the failings of education, and the particular experience of being in-between; the everyday experience of interraciality—“the accident ink blot” in a predominantly white, racially-segregated town. Loeb offers lengthy investigations into his own childhood, moving even further back as he imagines his grandparents while re-tracing his lineage; at other moments, he employs lyrical density toward vignettes that encompass all of a single paragraph—a snapshot of a moment that becomes re-contextualized in the voice of an older, wiser, narrator. Yet it’s also Loeb’s ability to imbue his narrative with a disarming and demonstrative self-critique that makes The In-Betweens stand out from countless other memoirs.

Whether it’s in his retrospective unpacking of the family game of “White Boy in the Middle” (“Alabama Fire Ants”), in which he ruminates on his realization of how “somehow if given the chance, the oppressed will always become the oppressor” (44), or his own conflicted relationship to hair and stereotypes (“Thoughts on Hair”), a confession that ends with the self-description of “an actor on stage—guilty of this appropriation—guilty of gainfully being racially ambiguous” (96), Loeb displays both a vulnerability and a self-accountability that is rare, separately and especially together, in a genre that is prone, too often, to a writing of the self which forgets to look inward. In showing his readers his own complicity in the cultural issues he is calling into question, Loeb also forges an emotional bond with his audience; I came away from The In-Betweens feeling as if I had known its author my entire life, a rare feat for any writer, no matter which mode or genre they are writing in or responding to.

But I want to stay here for a moment, to let this linger, to relish it, if only to continue showing how Loeb subverts the genre he is indeed working in, if not also working against. “But I didn’t know what to believe about Richard Downey,” Loeb begins, in a final essay aptly titled “Retirement.” “I had heard so many stories. It becomes a problem when we narrate other peoples’ lives; there’s a misconception of what we think we know and the actual very real story of someone’s life” (184). By relating another second-hand account, while troubling the very nature of relation, of passing along stories that destroy us, yet also sustain us, Loeb complicates storytelling itself; the failure of stories to add up to a life. Much earlier, when he imagines “My Mother’s Mother,” Loeb is quick to intervene in his own narrative, if only to remind himself, and then us: “Then again, that’s just one chapter in this story, one narrative that belongs to a part of her, but not all of her. And it’s important for me to tell you that her life is not to be defined by all that struggle. That there was a beauty in her body and skin before it was bent and broken and blackened—that her skin was just skin before” (12).

As I read this startling debut, which does work “somewhere between telling history and taking on history” (182), as its own author writes elsewhere, to describe another teacher’s instruction, I am reminded of the importance of oral history in recognizing and thereby preserving personal histories so that they might be shared, and in being shared, so that they might validate multiple histories, which is to say, multiple lived experiences, multiple versions of the world as we know it, in an effort to breakdown the singular or authorized dominant account—the as we know it that so often goes unquestioned. “I had to keep my façade that none of this ever bothered me. That I was a participant to learning like everyone else, and not the thing that was being learnt” (86), Loeb writes, in “But I Am Not Toby,” a powerful response to the tokenism of learning Black history once a year, but also the internal struggle with becoming the sole representative of all black experience; the trap of representation in a cultural branding of “diversity” absent a true engagement with difference.

This form of sharing and re-sharing, of passing down, of inheriting and re-distributing has obvious social and political implications, but it also speaks to what might otherwise go unspoken, the trauma that so often results in self-silencing. So much of this book reads like a series of parables, and this is exactly why: Loeb recognizes our own failure—as a people, as a culture—to see beyond our own limited scope of imagination. Who cares if it’s true, as in the delightful and heartbreaking rendition of “On Some Things, I Wish We Did,” so long as these stories become true, and thereby become instructive, to us. When Loeb relates an anecdote about an eighth-grade wax museum project (“O.J. and the Wax Museum”)—“My brother could have been Bill Gates. He always liked computers; we had an IBM. […] Would he have to paint his skin, part his hair, change the inflection of his voice? […] It was all make-believe anyway. And when we tell kids to make-believe, we want them to imagine—to explore the possibilities—or do we really mean to be exactly who you are, what you are” (71-72)—we are meant to take him at his word.

—

Chris Campanioni’s new book, the Internet is for real (C&R Press, 2019), re-enacts the language of the Internet as literary installations. His selected poetry was awarded an Academy of American Poets College Prize in 2013, his novel Going Down was named Best First Book at the 2014 International Latino Book Awards, and his hybrid piece This body’s long (& I’m still loading) was adapted as an official selection of the Canadian International Film Festival in 2017. He runs PANK and PANK Books, edits At Large Magazine and Tupelo Quarterly, and teaches Latinx literature and creative writing at Pace University and Baruch College.