Nina Sharma’s The Way You Make Me Feel is insightful and poignant, a love-story-in-essays that is as important as it s profound.
Booklist wrote of the book:
“Sensual, sharp, and raw, Sharma’s memoir digs deep into the roots intertwining anti-Black racism and America’s South Asian diaspora, unearthing what often remains unsaid when establishing true allyship . . . Through the lens of being in an interracial relationship, Sharma cleverly draws on pop culture, political discourse, and academic writing to deliver social criticism that persistently highlights the racial discrimination running beneath the surface of American policies and social conventions. Just as impressive as Sharma’s composed, polished, and wholly sincere writing is her range of topics, including mental health, the model minority, police brutality, familial trauma, and COVID-19’s anti-East Asian racism—the breadth of all of which illustrates the complex racial fabric of America today.”
In her own words, here is Nina Sharma’s Book Notes music playlist for her essay collection The Way You Make Me Feel:
I feel like the pressure is on since my husband, Quincy Scott Jones, in his LHB playlist said, “My wife is the one that can pull the deep cuts and offer an on-the-spot thesis both informative and entertaining – music nerds are the coolest nerds of the nerd tribe.” Unfortunately, after I finish writing I feel like my brain erases the whole process of writing. Fortunately, music is a form of remembering.
My book, The Way You Make Me Feel: Love in Black and Brown chronicles my and Q’s story and through our Afro-Asian love, I think about what allyship really is or can be. In love and marriage, is allyship a given? Or does it require an effort as big as the history of racism in this country? Through this book, through the life it will take on through the hands of readers, I hope to find out. Each essay tells the story of how my identity forms as the love between us grows, a sense of self that both informs our allyship and is altered by it.
A child born of the cassette generation, mixtapes and the music I’ve laid on them are just as formative to my identity as anything else. I think they were my first essayistic practice, stitching a story through them, hoping to invoke a feeling across them all.
Michael Jackson – The Way You Make Me Feel
I had the opening to the title story “The Way You Make Me Feel” on the page for months before I began to write the rest. Those first few paragraphs flew right out, but then everything stopped.
I had wanted to write about my experiences with bipolar disorder for a long time but I was still so deeply ashamed of myself, of my mania and that is what usually came out – shame. I went to my thesis teacher Margo Jefferson who asked me simply if I remember feeling pleasure during that period. Pleasure. She encouraged me to write from there – from a point of pleasure as much as pain. Margo likened this approach to how some writers write about drugs. Not to romanticize mania and depression, but rather to de-stigmatize it, consider it as another type of altered state.
I began to tell this story again, this time relishing in the details, flirting through Michael Jackson songs. Grounding the story in detail felt like finding and staying in its body.
Nina Simone – Four Women
I love the Richard Pryor quote, “White people had Judy Garland — we had Nina.” I first came across it in a Rolling Stone article, accompanying a picture of Nina Simone which I stuck up on a board by my writing desk for many years. Pryor’s verb choice always stuck with me – “had” as in “to be held in use.” We had Nina – the necessity of Nina. I never thought I’d write about Nina Simone. It’s when I knew I had to write into my childhood for this book that I did. I came to Nina Simone when I was 10 through a mixtape. “Four Women” had an outsized presence on the mixtape it was on, like every other song orbited around it. Most of my coming of age and assimilating as a first generation South Asian American girl came about through music, mimicking the tastes of my white male prep school classmates especially. But this song so willfully resists assimilating, it’s bigger on the inside. In ‘“Don’t Let Me Be Misunderstood’: Nina Simone’s Theater of Invisibility”, Danielle C. Heard writes:
With poetic brevity, the lyrics of “Four Women” tell the distinct stories of “Aunt Sarah,” “Sephronia,” “Sweet Thing,” and “Peaches,” whose lives are shaped by skin shade, hair texture, generational relation to slavery, sexuality, and differing responses to adversity and oppression. Simone, perhaps, transmigrates the spirit of the four little girls murdered in Birmingham into these four fictional characters, invoking the specter of silenced black girls and women.
I don’t remember my prep school covering the 16th Street Baptist Church bombing in Birmingham, Alabama in 1963, the death of the four young Black girls: Carol Robertson (14), Cynthia Wesley (11), Addie Mae Collins (14), and Denise McNair (14), murdered in the church basement bathroom as they were getting ready for Sunday service. This was where the bomb was detonated – an act of terrorism, “racist terrorism” as Angela Davis says, by four white men, segregationists and members of the Ku Klux Klan, none of whom were arrested until decades later.
And no matter what my school did or did not teach about how much anti-Black violence shaped this country, even as a walkman-wearing 10-year old, I knew the safety that came with playing into the stereotype of the “model” docile, quiet minority, undisruptive to the myth of white supremacy. All to say, Simone was a necessary disruption to that course of my life, a necessity to my burgeoning political consciousness, to my initial inkling that you can wall yourself off in earphones, in prep school, in model minority, but you cannot wall yourself off from the world, from anti-blackness, from what Simone demands you hear and see and name.
Stevie Wonder – Isn’t She Lovely
In the book, this song plays in a club scene – the legendary Philly hip hop club Fluid (RIP). But the line “Life is Aisha” is the one I want to spotlight. The song celebrates the birth of Stevie Wonder’s daughter, Aisha Morris. And I hope my book in some way celebrates the life of my friend Kamilah Aisha Moon. Moon (Aisha to me) is a great poet and essayist who was taken away from us too soon. She was so deeply present in both my personal and my writing life as Quincy and I fell in love; I hope my book honors that.
When people ask me who my audience is for the book, my first and most honest thought is Aisha, Justine, Quincy, all of us kicking it on the couch together after a party or a reading. Before I even knew I would write essays, I always knew I wanted to create something that resembled the spirit of these conversations. In the personal essay, being an utterly conversational form of writing, I found the perfect medium for this work. When her first book came out, Aisha said about writing, “The hope is to somehow set free some portion of the ineffable whenever possible.” I often thought our conversations, the loving circle of the four of us, even in the most off-hand moments, worked toward that – the “ineffable.”
Aisha, among all her writerly feats, could also always name the original song sampled in the one we were listening to in less than a minute. I believe those were her words though if they aren’t, I can attest to it. Weaving music in the book feels like having a continued conversation over the songs that matter and why they matter to us. And I never knew a bigger fan of Stevie Wonder.
I knew Aisha was working on an essay collection herself. I know her essays are out there for us to discover and to read and to be set free.
Busta Rhymes – Gimme Some More
Once I heard it, I couldn’t unhear how Busta Rhymes samples Bernard Herrmann’s “Prelude” from Psycho. I write about Psycho in the book, as for a long time it was the closest thing I had to a discussion of mental health.
Mental health is an important theme in my writing, in particular experiencing depression and bipolar disorder as a first generation South Asian American woman. For me, the journey of breaking silences over my mental health experiences directly correlates to the journey of shaking off the myth of the model minority. Coined by sociologist William Petersen and discussed in his 1966 New York Times article, “Success Story Japanese American Style,” the stereotype of the Asian American “model minority” emerged as a means to problematize Black Americans protesting for civil rights and perpetuate the myth of white supremacy. Sometimes, I think of my history of depression and eventually mania as what my mind did when it could no longer uphold this mythology.
Writing about mental health for me requires noticing when I am writing from a place of stigma, perhaps reifying the model minority, and when I am getting to a place beyond its damning judgements. Amy Hempel once called this “writing in spite of yourself.” When I write into mental health, I think about what’s the fun of a story, noticing that fun thing helps me keep going, in spite of myself. I always say sometimes the fun of the story is a good joke, sometimes it is simply that we have survived and live to tell.
Paul Simon – Diamonds on the Soles of Her Shoes
This song features midway through the book as Q and I got serious about stitching a life together. In those years, we began to reckon not only with our racial but socio-economic differences. We both grew up in middle class suburban Jersey towns but our different relationships with money, the way our families did or did not talk about it, showed up right on time – the first year of marriage. “She’s a rich girl, she don’t try to hide it…” Paul Simon sings.
The album the song is on, Graceland, came out just around the time when both of our families were settling down in suburban New Jersey, in the early 80s. Simon broke from the U.N.’s cultural boycott on apartheid South Africa to record with Black South African musicians. I find it a deeply suburban album. I can hear it playing in a prep school friend’s house. I can hear the prep school friend’s parent parroting what Simon says of the Soweto musicians he first heard on a tape that inspired him to go to South Africa: “It was very good summer music, happy music.” What did that mean to Simon in comparison to the Black South African artists he worked with – happiness? I often felt a pressure to perform the part of a happy brown person. I didn’t realize how much perhaps until that first year of marriage.
Will Smith – Summertime
There is lot of Philly love in this book. Philly first crops up in my trips to visit Justine, then my and Q’s “short long distance” romance from NYC to Philly, and eventually I moved there for two years. Philly was quieter than my NYC life and I found some stillness in which my writing life really blossomed. And likewise, it’s where my and Q’s relationship really deepened and grew. It took me moving there to listen to “Summertime” and realize all the Philly love that song has: “a place called the plateau where everybody goes.” Philly pride is unique, there is something inherently comic, rooting for the underdog about it. I think of Fran Ross’ Oreo and Quinta Brunson’s Abbott Elementary. I hope some of that Philly love and pride comes through in the book.
DJ Rekha – Basement Bhangra Anthem
After two years in Philly, I persuaded Q to move with me to NYC. I wanted us to be young (as in mid-30s) writers here together, to experience the vibrancy of the city together. I cannot have imagined a better way to return than going to a DJ Rekha show – their music is interracial allyship embodied in rhythm: lush and deep in the ancestor spirit. It gets right into your bones and is a reminder that revolution is something we do with our whole body.
Janelle Monae – Make Me Feel
This song isn’t in the book but I can’t think of a better finish – a layer-cake of funk and r&b that oozes joy and sensuality. It remembers pleasure. Quincy and I interviewing Monae upon the release of The Memory Librarian was such a special moment of collaboration, to think through Monae’s Afrofuturism together and to dream toward a future together.
Nina Sharma’s work has appeared in The New Yorker, Electric Literature, Longreads, and The Margins. A graduate of the MFA program at Columbia University, she served as the programs director at the Asian American Writers’ Workshop and currently teaches at Columbia and Barnard College. She is a proud co-founder of the all–South Asian women’s improv group Not Your Biwi.