The Stories We Inherit: A Conversation with Author Asale Angel-Ajani on Family, Race, and the History We Carry
Asale Angel-Ajani’s grandmother kept the family’s history in scrapbooks, documents, and a family Bible. When those records were lost to her, Angel-Ajani turned to the stories her grandmother had told and to court records to piece together her family’s past. The result is Fugitive Archives: My Family and the American Myth of Belonging, a memoir that traces how love and anti-Blackness could coexist in the same family. In this article, the novelist and anthropologist discusses what it took to reconstruct that history, how she decided what to share, and why she wanted readers to see her family’s story as part of a larger American one.
You are a writer, anthropologist, and professor. How have those different callings shaped the way you approach a story?
Being trained in Anthropology taught me how to observe people and communities, measuring the actions of individuals against the words that we use to shape meaning in our collective. Being a writer of both fiction and nonfiction taught me how to create and recreate the sights and sounds and emotion of things with some precision so that the observations that I had about culture or society could be deeply felt or seen. Teaching all of this to students is a reminder that these two parts, the writing and the observing, are nothing without engagement with other people
Your work moves across nonfiction, fiction, scholarship, and now memoir. What does each form allow you to explore that the others do not?
It's funny because I consider myself a novelist first before I am anything else, and I say this with only one novel under my belt. I think this is because as a reader, novels are my first love. As a writer, I think that the forms are not that different from each other. There is a subject in all of these forms– and the goal is to bring them alive on the page in a way that is compelling and hopefully, as interestingly or beautifully as possible. Having said that, I think that narrative nonfiction and scholarship is a much easier form to write in– there is a way to say a thing in more than one way, and sometimes, even confirm your POV through quotes, citations or interviews… it's more collective and less naked than novel writing. Still I prefer writing fiction than non.
What first compelled you to turn toward your own family history and begin writing Fugitive Archives?
I think 2019 and 2020– the 2019 media blitz of Ibram Kendi’s How to Be an Anti-Racist which bled into the summer of 2020 and the continued spectacle of Black televised murder– I was, like I think many Black folks, exhausted but the polite discourse around anti-racism and the idea that racial violence and terror were mere symptoms of unfamiliarity between races. I knew from my family as well as through the study of our less discussed history that intimacy between races did not guarantee safety.
Your grandmother was the keeper of family records, and after her death you took up that role. What did it mean to inherit not only an archive, but the responsibility of deciding how to read it?
Yes, my grandmother was the keeper of our family history, I think many of us have someone or more than one person who serves that role in a family. The idea of an intact archive in my family is doing a lot of heavy lifting so I should clarify. Like most archives, even what my grandmother kept, scrapbooks of all the kids, grandkids, her ex-husbands– at least 12 of them, the great-great, aunts, uncles, grandfathers and grandmothers, these were all fragments. But she mainly passed these people down to me and my sister in stories. So when my grandmother’s precious albums, documents and family bible were physically lost to me– I had to reconstruct through mostly oral tradition, the facts that lived on paper and in court records. This means that the responsibility of reading the family archive was a responsibility to weigh the documented truth against what a family thinks it knows about itself.
You and your twin were the only Black children in a working-class white family. How did that experience shape your earliest understanding of race, family, and belonging?
My family is very diverse. Both my mother and my grandmother, who were white were married to Black men, for the time, and in California in particular, that was not so unique (except for my Grandmother’s generation), my other grandmother was Japanese, I have half siblings who are Latino, cousins who are Native American, Black, and white– I never thought of my family as being unique, especially because what kept us together was the fact of our working class status. While I don’t think that having a mixed race family inherently gives anyone, and especially myself, extraordinary insight on race, what I did pay attention to in my family was how anti-Blackness in particular was wielded by people who said that they loved me and my sister and how this reflected broader trends in the United States. Growing up it was clear that “whiteness”, was and always had been, an invitation to access (or at least the promise to access), and this makes folks do and say and act in sometimes terrible ways to each other as a means to gain belonging in the larger society.
The book reckons with abandonment, betrayal, love, and silence within a fraught family. How did you decide what to reveal, what to protect, and what you were not yet ready to resolve on the page?
I am clear that I am only writing from the perspective of my own experience. I am certain that many in my family will not agree with some things I say or even some of my experiences. I decided not to write about my siblings, it wouldn’t be fair to them, other than that, I figured that if I found information in the archives and could verify sources then I could write about it. There are still gaps– but those I will return to in a different project, hopefully some day.
In researching your lineage, you encountered ancestors who were enslaved, Indigenous, free, white, and connected to racial violence. How did you hold such painful and contradictory histories without flattening anyone into a simple hero or villain?
Because my family’s story is nuanced like all of our stories are, and because it tracked so closely with the rise of the United States– where I was expecting to find some white family members to be enslavers, it turns out that they weren’t– but my ancestors were. What was the most surprising thing for me was how my mother’s line and my father’s line bent back on to each other– my parents, in a matter of speaking, were distant cousins– which is not uncommon if you go back far enough.
What did the archive reveal about the difference between official history and the truths families carry—or conceal—across generations?
I thought it was interesting that my mother thought that her father was raised in a different part of the country and was related to different people than he was. I think that no one in my family knew or talked about my grandmother June’s time in a Japanese internment camp. I think that some families, much like
Why was it important to connect the intimate story of one family to the broader American myths of race, violence, liberty, and belonging?
I think I wanted to think through my family narrative as merely one tributary running out into a much larger ocean. We tend to think of families at these unique singular units, rather than somewhat similar groups with similar core aspirations. I knew that the minute my publishers decided to call this book a memoir, it becomes easy for people to say, to quote Kendrick Lamar, “not like us” which was why I worked hard to thread every family story to other stories that connect us all to the larger American tapestry of racial violence and terror– so that it is clear that my family’s story is so common that we all have a place in this broader national narrative.
As a mixed-race woman, how has your lived experience influenced the questions you ask about identity and the ways others try to categorize us?
Though I have a white mother, I haven’t ever identified myself as a “mixed” person. Maybe it's an age thing. I’m Black. I was raised and socialized as a Black woman. Blackness itself, like whiteness, like many names we call ourselves in the United States and in the Americas is a marker of hybridity and power and proximity (or the lack of). I think about this all the time when I think of what genetics tells us (or not) about race and racial categories. Many Black Americans, like a lot of people in the Americas are mixed with so many different ethnicities. Slavery and its brutality shows in our blood, colonization is there, patriarchy is there, class too. I was surprised to see just how rich and complex my African DNA was– the many disparate countries on the continent that made up me and my Black American ancestors– that knowledge alone underscores the violence endured by so many that makes me possible. This is the historical present– a truth that I suspect white folks have done a very good job of forgetting.
Your scholarly work has addressed race, gender, migration, incarceration, and criminalization. How did that body of work inform the research and moral questions at the center of this memoir?
My first book was about West African women held in Europe's largest female prison. Like the new book, Fugitive Archives, I was not interested in simply telling a story about female drug traffickers. The story everyone thought they already knew. I wanted to show, through history, geopolitics, colonization, racism and sexism, how these women ended up where they did.
Your prose has been described as both lyrical and incisive. How did you balance historical research and intellectual rigor with the emotional and creative demands of telling your family’s story?
I don’t think I have a good answer for this question. Writing is both the most enjoyable, affirming and elevating practice that I do, it is also the most maddening and painful and elusive. I write with exactly one goal in mind, which is to not be boring, I try not to be at least. For years, I wrote too many academic essays that spent too much time trying to sound smart. I realized that if I don’t want to read what I write, then likely no one else will either.
What do you hope readers—especially those carrying complicated family histories of their own—will take away from Fugitive Archives?
I think all of us carry within us legacies of people who were complicated and nuanced. These legacies shape us and then leak out from our individual selves into the collective body. This is what powers the system that creates the screwed up world we live in and I think the knowledge that we hold about our connected struggles, both the ugly and beautiful bits, will be the way we inform our collective struggle for justice and dignity in the future. At least that is what I hope, someone will take away from Fugitive Archives, that or simply the desire to look deeper, archive, and keep talking about the history that is being erased before our very eyes.
