heads of the colored people by nafissa thompson spires

Some characters appear aware of this, such as Randolph, the protagonist of ‘The Necessary Changes Have Been Made’, who is content to sustain an entirely non-verbal series of territorial exchanges with Isabella – his new, and white, office mate.

The result of this is a sense that Thompson-Spires’s characters have inner lives that are comedic and tragic at the same time – albeit in a way that seems not to have too much consequence. What does this look like? They write petty emails to each other in drawn-out parenting rivalries they battle passive-aggressively with their academic colleagues they monitor their Twitter notifications and plan their suicides – whilst simultaneously perfecting their next Facebook updates. Nor are there any quasi-mythological constructs or characters who are exceptionally gifted or polished at anything in particular.

You won’t find any Serenas or Beyoncés in the collection. They are freed by the metafictional narration from burdens of representation, reader projections, or the need to be taken as symbols. Which is that the characters in this book are allowed to be idiosyncratic. Setting the tone for the entirety of the collection, Thompson-Spires crafts a narrative voice which always walks one step ahead, sometimes turning to us with a wink, before getting back to what really needs to be said. Contrary to any hasty assumptions about his sense of blackness, gender or sexual orientation, we are made aware that Riley simply has a love for comic book characters – and is merely on his way to a convention dressed as one. Not only this, but (just in case we were thinking it), this is neither a story about ‘any kind of self-hatred thing’, nor about ‘the shame of being alive’. The narrator, deft and ironic like a much cooler friend, is quick to add that Riley is also… black. He appears sporting blue contact lenses and gel-slicked, bleached-blonde hair. Take Riley, for example, a character we meet in the titular opening story ‘Heads of the Colored People: Four Fancy Sketches, Two Chalk Outlines, and No Apology’. In Heads of the Colored People, an intricate, playful debut short story collection from Nafissa Thompson-Spires, we are able to observe some answers. ‘How do we,’ she dares, ‘divest ourselves of the need to make ourselves extraordinary?’ Collins was speaking as much about black lives as she was about black fiction. And although she would be dead four years later – losing her life to cancer at the age of 46 – one of the questions she poses to her black students continues to reverberate. She emits warmth as well as deep seriousness.

In the footage, filmed in 1984 at Howard University, Collins is magnetic. Somewhere on the internet is a two-hour video of a lecture by the late writer and filmmaker Kathleen Collins, author of the short story collection Whatever Happened to Interracial Love? (posthumously published in 2017). Nafissa Thompson-Spires’s ‘Heads of the Colored People’

Heads of the colored people by nafissa thompson spires