Dear Kiese,
I damn near broke down in my class. In front of a bunch of twenty-year-olds in a private liberal arts college, seniors who were about to enter a world that hurts, a world you wrote about in Heavy. A world that obliterates the heart.
We were discussing your memoir, the last book of a long semester of life writing, and I was talking some professorial writer stuff—you know, the thing we call “craft”, whatever that means—about repetition and power, and how breaking repetition breaks power, and how power is fragile and contradictory, and how some of the best poets utilize repetition to contradict the fragile ego of the self, how your memoir—which is a love poem that bruises—hedges on repetition (in language & in life). I was reading the last movement of your book with the repeated sentence construction of I will…I will…I will…that transforms into We will…We will…We will…and then becomes We will not…We will not… that ends with “We will not ever have to be this way.” Reading these pages aloud, swept away by the rhythm of the prose, something peculiar happened. Your words—they were carving themselves into me for the first time. Because I wasn’t lesson planning. Because I wasn’t thinking about the topics I would need to go over. Because I wasn’t worried about being a teacher of color teaching a book by a writer of color. I found myself breathless at the end of that last repetition—We will not ever have to be this way. My eyes were wet. I had to stop for a long minute, stop and settle in that awkward silence that sometimes happens in a class. I felt my student’s eyes on me, the three-hundred-pound Thai guy about to lose his composure and crash into a heap of tears.
I did not speak for about a minute. And when I did, I said, “I don’t think I can teach this book anymore.”
*
Dear Kiese,
I just went for a run. The first time in 4 years. Like legit run. Biggie and the Digital Underground were rapping in my earbuds. I went running because it took a pandemic to make me realize I want to live longer, be stronger. Because I found myself so tired, so, so tired, and it wasn’t from the physical weight I carry or the blood sugar that spikes up and down and up and down. It was from life and its barbs. I was running and thinking about how much I hate running, about what it means to be fat, about why fat means weak, means sloppy, means outcast. I was running and doing a lot of math, like you, calculating weight and calories and time. I ran faster. I hated running faster. I ran as if someone was chasing me. It was dark. I chose the darkest streets for my run. I didn’t want anyone to see me. I didn’t want to be seen.
This, I think, is the thing I come back to in your memoir, Kiese, how you want to be seen. This is the ultimate issue of human existence, isn’t it? What we present to others. How we carve out a person we want others to see. How we hide who we really are because who we really are is hated. But who is doing the hating? Strangers? We believe so. Friends and lovers? Maybe. Our mothers? Quite possibly. Us? Yes. Yes. Yes.
So I started running. I ran at night. In the dark. I ran fast because someone was chasing me. If I looked back, who would I have seen?
*
Dear Kiese,
When I first read your book, I didn’t read it. I listened to it. Before the pandemic, my 3-year-old son and I would drive an hour to work and school. During that time, I listened to Heavy. It was your voice I was hearing, not some actor, and that made me feel like you were speaking to me. I played with the volume, lowering it when the language got R-rated. My son was/is in the absorbing phase of life, mimicking words and phrases. He has started saying, Get your head out of your butt, and this is entirely my fault.
I lowered the volume, so my son wouldn’t hear the book. But I wanted him to hear. I wanted him to know the world he exists in. I wanted him to know that people will hate him. Will hurt him. Will hate and hurt and want from him. I wanted him to know that sometimes he will hate himself. And he will not know what he wants but he will want anyway.
I want to tell my son that life is about wanting. Like you, I have wanted. Heavy is full of wants. Like you, I wanted to lose weight, believing my weight would be the solution to all my woe. Like you, I wanted to make my mother proud. Like you, I wanted to impress this girl with language and thought that would make her breathless. This is the conflict of life, isn’t it? To constantly want. I believe most literature revolves around this—people wanting what they can’t have. Every page of Heavy is ladened with want. Your story is a reflection of my own, yes, but it is a bigger reflection of what it means to be an American, and what is more American than wanting, voraciously wanting?
My son is learning to want. Right now, his wants are simple. He wants fries. He wants chocolate. He wants a new stuffed animal. I try to satiate his every want because I know, someday soon, I won’t be able to. I know, someday soon, he will want so badly it will shred him.
My son, my son, my son—he is everything. Already I see myself in him. I hear myself in his voice. This scares the shit out of me. I think the hardest lesson I learned on those car rides listening to your book is that our first heartbreaks will always come from the people we love most—a mother, a father. And once that happens, it can never be the same again.
*
Dear Kiese,
One of my students came to my office. She was in that class where I nearly lost it. It was for nothing in particular but to tell me I have to teach your book again. I have to. “This is a necessary read.” It is, Kiese. Thank you. I promised her I would even if I break.
Your fan,
Ira Sukrungruang
