.karlajstrand spoke with author Melanie S. Hatter about her latest book, 'Malawi’s Sisters,' a powerful story of an African American family dealing with racial violence that threatens to tear them apart.
. How did her murder, and the killings of other Black women and people of color, prompt you to write the book—and how did it impact your writing process and character development?
Several years prior, I had started writing a story about these two sisters, Ghana and Kenya, and I really struggled to find their story. I knew one was in a troubled marriage and I knew the other was having challenging dating experiences, but for some reason, I couldn’t quite find the story. So after Renisha, [who] was on my mind for weeks afterwards, Ghana and Kenya’s voices came to me. It was almost like they were saying, “Okay, this is our story.
And to some extent, I feel like the Walker family could be representative of the Black community. I wanted to look at a family where you have this horrific event, this huge loss. But you have real people with real emotions, real feelings.
As a woman, I like to tell stories from a woman’s perspective. [At first] the story was going to simply be Ghana and Kenya’s stories, two Black women, and then bringing in the affluence, being able to sort of explore that. As I started writing their stories, Bette’s [the sisters’ mother] voice came in. I thought it was important to get this perspective of the mother, this older woman in all of her colors and all of her mistakes and things that she’s done in her life and [her] regrets.
I was warned [not to] read the negative reviews but sometimes you can’t help it. So there’s that initial sort of stab… oh, they didn’t love it! And then you take a breath and say, it’s okay, not everyone is going to love everything I do. And that’s the good thing about the world: that we live in a world where everybody doesn’t have to love everything the same way. We can all come to things with our own ideas and opinions and that makes the world what it is.
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