« older | Main Largehearted Boy Page | newer »
April 29, 2021
Hari Ziyad's Playlist for Their Memoir "Black Boy Out of Time"
In the Book Notes series, authors create and discuss a music playlist that relates in some way to their recently published book.
Previous contributors include Jesmyn Ward, Lauren Groff, Bret Easton Ellis, Celeste Ng, T.C. Boyle, Dana Spiotta, Amy Bloom, Aimee Bender, Roxane Gay, and many others.
Hari Ziyad's memoir Black Boy Out of Time is a moving and important testament about being queer and Black in America.
Lambda Literary wrote of the book:
"Black Boy Out of Time is grippingly personal and as tender as it is harrowing. Ziyad’s beautifully written, genre-bending work transcends the memoir form and intimately showcases what it means to be Black and queer in America today."
In their words, here is Hari Ziyad's Book Notes music playlist for their memoir Black Boy Out of Time:
My recently published memoir, Black Boy Out of Time, is a meditation on the ways Black people become separated from their childhoods, ultimately written as an attempt to reconnect with mine. Naturally, the music of my youth played a huge role in the writing process, and was critical in helping me to recall what certain experiences looked and felt like and how they moved me, especially in the moments I was having trouble fleshing out certain memories.
Besides helping to transport me back to specific times and places, I often wrote to music in order to evoke particular feelings that I wanted the reader to access for various scenes and conversations. Initially I thought of myself as music’s master in this process, wielding it as a tool to do my bidding in this way, but just like I found my childhood self to have more agency than I presumed when I first began writing to him in the book, I was surprised to realize just how often I found that the music was instead using me. Between writing sessions, or stuck in my head all night after a day spent typing in front of my computer, certain songs would regularly come to me unprompted, offering new shape to the world I was writing that I hadn’t even considered.
Many times, I would think to myself, “If only the reader could just hear this song, they’d really get this scene!” but I didn’t really assume anyone besides me would ever get the opportunity, so I’m very excited to share some of those songs with you today!
“Hey Mama” by Kanye West
The heart of my book is my relationship with my very religious mother, who passed away from cancer in November 2020, just before the book was finished. We struggled with her reluctance to accept my queerness for much of my adult life, but there was never a question of her love for me. There is hardly anything I’ve ever done, including writing this book, that wasn’t meant to make her life better in some way, and so Kanye West’s ode to his mother on Late Registration, and his almost desperate cry to celebrate her life, has always spoken to me. It resonated particularly as the process of writing the book—and my mother’s life—started to come to an end.
There is a popular opinion that the death of Kanye’s mother contributed to his more recent mental health struggles and anti-Black eccentricities, and now that my mother is gone I can understand how the center of someone’s universe can destabilize a person in such a devastating way. My hope is that through truly reckoning with my mother’s loss head-on, which is something I attempted in the book, I can avoid the same fate.
“Electric Slide” by Marcia Griffiths, Bunny Wailer
In the chapter “A Prayer for Another World” (excerpted for BOMB Magazine here), I write about being at a friend’s family party in Newark that reminded me of the family reunions of my childhood. If you’re Black, you know that there’s no such thing as a family get together that includes any amount of elders without a little line dancing, and my friend’s was no exception.
When “Electric Slide” came on, I was struck by the way the music moved through the old folks’ bodies, how they each showed out without trying to put one another to shame, and how both their limberness and carefree rivalry was reflected in the faces of the children around us. In that moment, I was reminded just how possible reclaiming one’s childhood might actually be.
“It Don’t Have to Change (ft. the Stephens Family)” by John Legend
This is one of those songs that would haunt me at night after I’d finished writing, particularly sections of the book about past good times with my family. As hinted at above, a theme of the book — perhaps the theme — is the reclamation of childhood, specifically one’s childhood experiences before family traumas began to fester and sore. In this John Legend classic, the crooner muses about perfect times with his big, connected family, rejecting his fears that those times might one day come to an end.
I started my book with those same fears realized, and this song called me to understand that rejecting them was still possible, in so many ways.
“Sleeping Soul (Jiv Jago)” by As Kindred Spirits, Gaura Vani
As I discuss in the book, I grew up in a Hindu household. One of the more popular contemporary singers in the Hare Krsna movement is Gaura Vani, and his group, As Kindred Spirits. We grew up watching Gaura Vani sing at festivals and bought all of his CDs, so it’s no surprise that when writing about my experiences in the Hare Krsna community one of his songs would not leave me alone.
I don’t think it was any coincidence that this particular song kept coming to me, however. "Jiv Jago" is a traditional Sanskrit tune, sung alongside its English translation in this rendition, with an As Kindred Spirits shouting the meaning, “Wake up sleeping soul, it’s time to wake up!” As someone who didn’t consider themselves very religious at the start of this book, it was odd that this very clearly religious song got stuck in my rotation. But ultimately it’s message is what the book called me to do: wake up to my inner child and be present with him in a way I hadn’t been before.
“Love Language” by Kehlani
My bio half-jokingly mentions that I am constantly trying to introduce my friends to new RnB starlets, and the queer up-and-comer Kehlani is foremost on that list. She really catches the poetry of young love quite well, and her last three albums have been the soundtrack to Tim’s and my relationship, with “Love Language,” a laid back track about her desire to be fluent in her partner’s love language being the center.
In the chapter “A Prayer for New Language,” I write to my younger self about my relationship with my now-husband, Tim, and how the vision of love my younger self held is realized in different ways through this relationship. It’s one of the more buoyant, upbeat chapters, but it still acknowledges the struggles I have understanding the love language my partner and younger self spoke with.
“Garden (Say It Like Dat)” by SZA
Another RnB singer who writes music to my (and presumably that of many others) young adult angst is SZA, whose track “Garden” from her debut album CTRL is a vulnerable exploration of the singer’s insecurities about one person whose presence almost, almost alleviates them. As someone whose struggles with anxiety are central to the book, this track could be a verbatim recording of my most troublesome self-talk, and it’s just short and catchy enough that you’re forced press repeat at the end, which I did way too often for more than a year to my partner’s bemusement.
“BIGGER” by Beyoncé
On the other hand, Beyoncé’s more recent output has been a salve to self-doubt, specifically the kind that might plague a Black person in this country. Much like “My Power” and “Brown Skin Girl,” from the same The Lion King: The Gift album, “BIGGER” is a celebration of one’s inner power, a beautiful reminder for the moments when you feel small and insignificant that you are part of a larger purpose. It’s the track of a new mother who knows the destructive narratives her children will be faced with, and as the book took me to a place where I attempted to better partner my inner child, it’s the kind of message I had to keep reminding myself throughout the process.
“Born Tired” by Jhené Aiko
Jhené Aiko has a way of speaking to the sad, broken down parts of your soul, and building them back up. Many of her records sport heartbreaking lyrics over a joyous beat or vice-versa, reflecting her deep understanding that feelings don’t belong on a binary. For Aiko, there are no good or bad feelings, feelings are just parts of who we are, and sometimes that part of us is exhausted.
“Born Tired” came out toward the end of writing the book, a two and a half year process that had broken me in so many ways and reminded me of how long I’ve been broken. But this process was also so much more than that. It was all the ways I’ve persisted through exhaustion, all the ways I’ve managed this stress, too, and it was ultimately glorious. Like the mantra Aiko repeats at the end, “I’m tired, but I’m fired up, tired, but I’m fired up, tired, but I’m fired up, tired, but I’m fired up…”
“Little’s Theme” by Nicholas Britell (Moonlight soundtrack)
If Moonlight was any other film, the best thing about it would have been it’s brilliant score. When I sat to write, I most often used the score as my writing music, with “Little’s Theme” being my entry. Full of light piano and horns, “Little’s Theme” speaks of possibility without words. When I listen, I see the sun rising over a quiet horizon, or the iconic image from the movie’s trailer of little Chiron floating soundlessly in the water, smooth and shiny and peaceful against his Black skin. And beneath all this vibrance, all this possibility in the music, is a hint of sadness, a hint of everything Little and every other Black boy must come up against. We don’t forget that part. We never will. But we can center the music around our joy.
Hari Ziyad is a cultural critic, a screenwriter, and the editor in chief of RaceBaitr. They are a 2021 Lambda Literary Fellow, and their writing has been featured in BuzzFeed, Out, the Guardian, Paste magazine, and the academic journal Critical Ethnic Studies, among other publications. Previously they were the managing editor of the Black Youth Project and a script consultant on the television series David Makes Man. Hari spends their all-too-rare free time trying to get their friends to give the latest generation of R & B starlets a chance and attempting to entertain their always very unbothered pit bull mix, Khione. For more information about the author, visit www.hariziyad.com.
If you appreciate the work that goes into Largehearted Boy, please consider making a donation.
