“I understood from the start that I wanted to break open the American notion that once the individual is born, the world begins! No. When we are born, we inherit ideas, philosophies, heritage, mythologies, the weight and trauma of systemic injustice”
Sarah M. Broom. Photo: Courtesy of Broadside I first met Sarah M. Broom two years ago, when we found each other via Twitter and met for coffee. It was one of those getting-to-know-you dates you try to arrange with people whose work you admire. I knew of her book project when the Whiting Foundation gave her a Creative Nonfiction Grant in 2016. A friend who knew Broom from a residency at the MacDowell Colony told me, “She is one of the smartest people I know.
New Orleans is one of those places many people claim to know. Even the most casual visitor stakes a claim on it. Broom’s book, then, is a revelation and an antidote to the image of New Orleans that has emerged in the past ten years or so — a hipster haven for artistic-minded transplants from more-expensive cities like New York, Los Angeles, and Chicago. The Yellow House is decidedly local.
Once I’d drawn that world clearly, it felt much easier, writing-wise, to start to juxtapose the experience of life there with the experience elsewhere. I tried to do that subtly by, for instance, building a case about how “historicized” certain New Orleans neighborhoods are and how that grew a kind of “charm” that actually affects investment — what the schools are like, what the view from a person’s window is, where they go for jobs, the direction and shape of public-policy zoning, for example.
Burundi was a critically important time for me because it was where I landed after much spinning out, post-water — when I was moving farther and farther away from New Orleans and the trauma of my family’s forced displacement and migration. Burundi was me forcibly displacing myself but gaining a cutoff-ness that the baby of 12 children often yearns for. It was also a great way to talk about myth and stories of a place.
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