Дебютный роман Тэи Мутонджи «Мой человек» исследует расовые различия и кризис идентичности

When Toronto-based author Téa Mutonji wrote 2019’s “Shut Up You’re Pretty,” her linked short story collection, as an undergrad at University of Toronto, she was in a rough place. Looking to prove she could finish what she started, she submitted her manuscript to an open call — and ended up with a book deal. The collection, which navigates sex, femininity, class and self-definition in Scarborough, went on to win the Trillium Book Award. Mutonji was later named a Writers’ Trust Rising Star, completed an MFA in creative writing at New York University and saw “Shut Up You’re Pretty” become a finalist for CBC’s Canada Reads. This week, her debut novel, “My Person,” hit shelves. “With ‘My Person,’ I really chose to be a writer,” Mutonji told the Star with a disarming candour reflective of her prose style. “Previously I had used writing to change the course of my life — and it worked out … For my second book, I kept saying, ‘I’m going to do this right.’ I got an agent, listened to my mentors and studied the craft deeply.” “My Person” follows Tania, a Black novelist in her mid-20s who decides to abruptly end a two-decade friendship with Margot, her white childhood best friend, at a dinner party. It evolves into a first-person account of Tania’s blistering search for a stable sense of self through degrading sexual encounters, drugs and poetic reflection. Here, Mutonji speaks about writing complicated women, the psychology of friendship and the limits of “colour-blindness.” “My Person” opens with a jarring, public friend breakup. What do you think friends owe each other today? I come from a generation of women who treated female friendships like do-or-die romances. There were rules: my best friend had to know everything about me, and I had to include her in every decision. That theme is loud in mainstream TV, too — this sense of sisterhood — so it was present for me while writing “My Person.” I started to recognize that this style of friendship doesn’t fit me and now I’m the one introducing emotional space into my friendships. I think friends today can think more about making room for each other to ascend into the different directions our lives are taking. After a long unravelling, the friends try couples therapy. Have you ever pursued couples therapy with a friend? I have not. I’m mysteriously pretty good at friendships. A lot of my friends are academic nerds and we tend to have larger conversations that are more analytical — a lot of my friendships thrive because of clean communications. We like to analyze our dynamics and relationships. But if I had the opportunity to go to couples therapy with a friend, I’d love it. Wouldn’t it be such a good thing? As an author, I got to pretend to be the fly on a wall, watching how it would play out. Tania and Margot both have unhappy moms. Were you suggesting that their girlhood bond was trying to compensate for something they didn’t get in childhood? I wanted to give Tania and Margot one more avenue to compare their experiences. Margot’s mother didn’t envision herself as a mom, whereas Tania’s mom did but she suffered so deeply from postpartum depression and wasn’t allowed to express it. In the Congolese culture I grew up around, there weren’t really conversations about mental health. Suffering is private, and I wanted that repression to be in the book — something that Tania can later reflect on as an adult. My single regret of this book is not giving the mothers a scene together. Tania, a novelist, is full of contradictions. Do you think of her as an unreliable narrator? Being a person is like writing a messy draft. People figure themselves out as they go. It’s not that Tania’s unreliable — it’s more about her having this deeply human experience of f—king up. She’s a young woman with new successes that no longer fit the lifestyle she’s cultivated for herself. That would be disorienting, and I didn’t shy away from that. One day something makes sense. Another day something else makes more sense. You and Tania share many qualities. Were you ever nervous that readers would conflate you with your main character? I welcome the conflation! Tania wasn’t a writer for the first two drafts. But language and interpretation are such a big part of the book that I needed to justify why she’s so poetic and lyrical. I needed to explain that in a way that still gave her space to not be me. And, paradoxically, the only way to do that was to give in and let her reflect me. When “Shut Up You’re Pretty” came out, so many readers assumed it was autofictional. It truly isn’t. I’d sit on panels and audiences always wanted to uncover my loneliness or my relationship with the protagonist. I’m a messy little girl so I made “My Person”’s main character purposely resemble me. I wanted to give readers permission to skip the speculation and just experience Tania’s story. Her personality is actually vastly different from mine, but she looks like me, and I saw an opportunity to play with the way we enter Black literature. Growing up, I rarely saw characters who looked like me. I love giving my books things I didn’t have, so Tania’s resemblance is also a response to those missing characters. All of the white characters in “My Person” are more or less “colour-blind,” or so they claim. What’s the book saying about the racism that can exist within affection? Race is undeniably clear in America. There, saying someone is Black isn’t an insult. In Canada though, sometimes there’s a suggestion that just naming someone else’s race is offensive. I don’t know if it’s just from growing up in a small, Catholic and predominantly white pocket of Ontario, but it seems like there’s more just looking away when it comes to race and class. So I wanted to make room for how confusing that can be for everyone involved. Margot, bless her soul, believes she’s being such a good, nonracist friend because she never brings up that Tania is Black. Growing up, Margot kept insisting they were the same, denying their differences. But those differences — Margot’s French braids versus Tania’s cornrows, for example — are something Margot treats as insignificant. There’s a lot of tension because Margot’s so proud of how inclusive she’s been toward Tania all her life. I wanted to show how that approach can be both helpful and harmful. Margot isn’t intentionally bad, but because she’s genuinely scared of the world that we live in — like so many people today regardless of race — she ends up accidentally leaving little room for Tania’s individual identity and culture. Without spoiling too much, talk about the ending’s ambiguity. The ending took some work to craft because I wanted to leave it open enough to interpretation. Readers can get what they want without it feeling unresolved. If you need their friendship to be 100 per cent over, that’s one way to read it. If you need the possibility of reconciliation, there’s room for that. And if you need to leave it undecided, that’s on the table, too. I reread the book recently and this time I interpreted the ending differently myself.