From the beginning, Edie admits her foibles and questionable judgment, especially when it comes to men. Although she dreams of becoming an artist, her relationship to painting is avoidant, and she has spent the past two years moving her paints and brushes out of view. Her low-paying job at a publishing house sucks her apartment, a dilapidated space in Brooklyn that she shares with one roommate and a family of mice, also sucks and her love life … well that, too, is complicated. Like most Millennials and older Gen Zers, Edie is barely getting by. This choice challenges readers to recognize Edie’s agency and see her as a young Black woman in progress. Through Edie, her 23-year-old protagonist, Leilani tries to liberate the Black woman figure’s range of behaviors, thoughts, and feelings from an inherent virtuousness or exceptionalism. In a recent interview, Leilani said that she wanted to write the story of a Black woman who was not a “pristine, neatly moral character.” And in Luster, she succeeds. There are no perfect Black women in Raven Leilani’s debut novel, Luster, and that is by design. “But it is the recognition of this messiness that forces you to understand the full humanity of Black women.” In other words, in order for Black women to be seen, their stories must include the good, the bad, and the ugly. “Nina was incredibly fucking messy,” Samudzi says of the singer, whose life was marked by racism, mental-health challenges, and physical abuse.
She attributes the chasm to a collective inability to accept parts of a Black woman’s life that do not fit into a prescribed narrative. In a 2019 episode about Nina Simone on Revolutionary Left Radio, a leftist podcast about philosophy, history, and politics, the writer Zoé Samudzi reflects on this revisionism by analyzing the gap between the High Priestess of Soul’s brutal reality and her golden legacy. And amid the chatter, the identities of Black women get sanitized, oversimplified, and sometimes lost. These discussions have turned into calls to protect their bodies in life and to say their names in death, but they have also led to a kind of deification that assuages feelings of guilt more than it honors lives. The deaths of Breonna Taylor, Oluwatoyin Salau, and Dominique Fells, among many others, have reignited conversations about the women who inhabit a strange space between invisibility and hypervisibility, for whom safety is rare. America has been talking a lot about Black women lately.
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