Queenie

by Candice Carty-Williams

Hello! Welcome to this insight of what Queenie is thinking, and why. Writing this novel kind of felt easy in ways because so many of the ways that me and my Black female friends think, and our experiences, came pouring out. In a way, writing it was a cathartic, often painful, often funny journey, and it’s my pleasure to show you some of the ways that I think, and how being a Black woman has shaped me, and in turn, Queenie. Though, we are very different people. Please remember that, I beg of you.

All of my grandmother’s responses come with a Caribbean frame of reference that forces me to accept that my problems are trivial.

I remember laughing loads when I wrote this line. Here’s Queenie, this twenty five year old second generation Jamaican who is going through this biggest pain she’s ever known, trying to explain heartbreak to her seventy something grandmother who has lived the sort of life Queenie couldn’t begin to imagine. Of course, this isn’t solely Caribbean grandparents. All of our grandparents had to navigate a different kind of hard life. Not having social media has probably saved their minds from a lot of extra trauma, though.

He’d gone to boarding school with James and was adopted by white parents, which I think you can tell quite quickly by the way he publicly ridicules anything resembling black culture and carries his mute blond girlfriend around like she’s some sort of symbolic rite of whiteness.

As a writer, and mainly, as a person, I’m pretty obsessed with people. I began to meet men like this in my early twenties, and was so amazed by the way they’d distance themselves from me even though I was the only other Black person in the space. I used to think it was weird until I realized it was a them problem, and that assimilation into white culture can take many forms. Especially self rejection. I thought it was important to note that, basically, if you’re Black, you’re Black. Proximity to whiteness isn’t going to change that. Sorry!

“It’s constant, with you. It’s too much,” Tom said, his voice cracking. “You’re too much, Queenie.”

If you’re a Black woman, I can guarantee that you’ve either been told that you’re too much, or you’ve been made to feel that you’re too much. For me, it was constant microaggressions that made me feel as though I was too much. I was either called ‘loud’ or ‘very confident’ or ‘a character’, especially at work, even though I’m quite a shy person. It felt important for Queenie to have to understand, from someone that she loves, that the perception of her is bound to stereotype, and that Tom has never really seen the person that she is.

*QUEENIE CHANGED THE GROUP NAME TO “THE CORGIS”*

The first time the Corgis appeared in a group chat was never in the first version of Queenie, which seems bizarre even to me as it feels like such a huge part of the novel. My American editor asked me to think about adding some more scenes that included Queenie, Kyazike, Darcy and Cassandra together, and I remember thinking how impossible it is to get a group of people together (and this was even before the pandemic). And thus, the group chat was born. I actually spent a lot of time laughing whenever I’d write those message exchanges.

I knew Darcy hadn’t meant it, and she was only guilty of it this one time, but I wished that well-meaning white liberals would think before they said things that they thought were perfectly innocent.

Don’t get me wrong, I love a well-meaning white liberal; but it’s a lot. I remember having to turn my phone off when Breanna Taylor and George Floyd were murdered by the police, and suddenly Black lives finally mattered and all the well-meaning white liberals who had my number would message me asking me how they could be better, how they could do better, what they could read, if this thing they said to me three years ago was racist, etc etc etc. What Queenie is articulating is that while the things that well-meaning white liberals say, and the questions that they ask, are harmless, there is a toll on us, the Black people that they’re talking to. It is often emotionally expensive to have to educate the people in our lives when it comes to the experiences that we have to live.

Instead, I was met with what I’d been trying to pretend hadn’t always been a room full of white not-quite-liberals whose opinions, like their money, had been inherited.

A comment on working in either the Arts, or really any sector in the UK. These white not-quite-liberals differ from the well-meaning white liberals in that they don’t see a problem with the way that society is today. And while they benefit from the social, fiscal and political structures that have kept them in power, they still somehow think that meritocracy is what got them to where they are. It didn’t! Your family are rich, you basically just fall upwards your whole life! Come on!

“Maybe if all ah we had learned to talk about our troubles, we wouldn’t carry so much on our shoulders all the way to the grave.” He turned to walk out, his stick hitting the floor with purpose. “Maybe we haffi learn from this new generation, Veronica.”

Finally, finally, someone came through for Queenie. And who else but grandad, a man who is basically mute for the whole novel except for a few instances where he moans about his shed and the water rates. It was important to me that Grandad, this voice of quiet authority, would be the one to stand up for Queenie. While Grandma is the one who makes the rules, Grandad is the one who hears all and sees all. And, of course, because Queenie has so few experiences with Black men in the novel, it was vital that the one Black male presence in her life stands up for her. She’s been let down before by her dad was who absent, and her stepfather who was abusive. It was important that she realized that Black men were not only agents of fear or abandonment.

“I can’t wake up and not be a black woman, Janet. I can’t walk into a room and not be a black woman, Janet. On the bus, on the Tube, at work, in the cafeteria. Loud, brash, sassy, angry, mouthy, confrontational, bitchy.”

These are all negatives that Black women have been called, either to their faces, online, or behind our backs. I’ve certainly been called all of these things, even though (in my opinion) I’m not any of these things. I don’t think any Black women who is called sassy is actually ever sassy. One of my key explorations in Queenie was the idea that the very little representation we have, be it in the media, novels, or on television and film, paints us as either: a) Sassy b) the Magical Negro or c) the exotic temptress. These presentations of Black women are reductive, and ultimately, they are unfair and damaging. They allow the narrative to be furthered in society that we are these things we’re shown to be. Queenie is telling her therapist that she can’t wake up and be anything but the things she’s been told by society that she is.

“The road to recovery is not linear. It’s not straight. It’s a bumpy path, with lots of twists and turns. But you’re on the right track.”

God, the truth in this. Sometimes when I remember things I’ve written I’m like ‘yeah, you wrote this because you needed to believe it.’ As someone who is pretty depressed all the time, with a few good days every now and then, and who is in therapy, I have to remind myself constantly that being ‘better’ takes time. And that there will be no real ‘better’, that you’ll have up days and down days, but that ultimately, when you put the work into yourself (ideally with a therapist) you’ll begin to heal. And that recovery isn’t neat, and tidy, and doesn’t stick to a time frame.

“. . . You said that I could be any type of black girl that I wanted to be.”

This line made me cry when I wrote it. I cry a lot, but that’s not the point. Black women contain multitudes. As I’ve said before, the representation of us (very rarely written or presented by us) is incredibly reductive; not only does it give us limited options of who we can be, but it makes us feel like we have to conform to those options. A lot of Queenie’s inner turmoil comes from the straddling of two cultures that she has to do, constantly. She has no idea what kind of Black girl she can be, or what kind of Black girl she should be. Thank God for Kyazike, a different type of Black girl to Queenie, who has always been around to remind Queenie that she can be whoever she wants to be. There’s no right or wrong way to be as a Black girl. And Kyazike, unapologetic and fearless, knows this because she has a stronger sense of self than poor Queenie.

Is this what growing into an adult woman is—having to predict and accordingly arrange for the avoidance of sexual harassment?

I mean – is it? It’s a question me and my female friends still ask of society. I personally think it’s a huge part of being a woman, or even being a girl. I remember first being aware that my body was an ‘issue’ for men around me when I was around seven. I was told that I should cover up around a male family member, and I remember being completely baffled as to why. As I got older, this got worse, more frequent. Plus, paired with blame culture, it became clear when I hit my teens that simply existing in a woman’s body was political, was up for question, was up for debate. Adding to that being in a hypersexualized black woman’s body. In essence, Queenie is constantly asking all of the questions that we as women are always asking.

acknowledgments

I want to say thank you for reading Queenie! I know there are so many amazing books out there, so it’s an honour that you’d invest in a character that I understand is such a problematic fave. While you wait to see if there’s going to be a sequel to Queenie, I hope you’ll enjoy my next novel, People Person, just as much. I’m not only bringing you one problematic fave, I’m bringing you a whole cast of them. https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/52514822-people-person