How We Fight For Our Lives by Saeed Jones

When your notion of becoming yourself is a martial movement, finding your truth sometimes can be accompanied by a lack of compassion, feeling depressed or very lonely.

Jones visits the public library to find any texts related to gay people-something he could not find anywhere else in his childhood-only to realize that being gay and having AIDS were considered almost synonymous in the nineties. In asking, his mother responds with deep melancholy, informing him that the man was a friend from her past who killed himself when he found out he had AIDS. Soon after that, Jones finds a photograph of his mother with a man he does not recognize.

In Chapter Three, it’s June 1998, and Jones recalls being eight years old hearing the local news from his couch with his mother: three white supremacists beat and killed a man named James Byrd, Jr. The first part of the book focuses on his childhood and Jones becoming a man, raising awareness of his sexuality, religiosity, the conflicts with his Christian grandmother, the impossibility to communicate deeply with his beloved mother, and being able to finally say “I am gay.” The next four parts focus on his step towards university, his move to the East Coast, and finally the road to independence. Although Jones was born in Memphis, Tennessee, where his family is from, he grew up in the warm summer heat of Lewisville, Texas with a Buddhist mother, Kingsley, their dog, and the constant threat of death for being black and gay. Each of the twenty-one chapters starts with a date and the place something important happened in his youth, then proceeds with an anecdote that generated a realization or something that changed the course of the events. Winner of the Kirkus Prize for Nonfiction in 2019, How We Fight for Our Lives is a chronological and geographical narration. We sacrifice former versions of ourselves.” How a human being builds an identity is a long story-Jones knows it when he claims “People don’t just happen. And later, memories resurrected and sharpened into new words, stronger than before, are a way of saying this is my truth, this is my life, this is how I fight now. Growing up with the task of being the perfect son, citizen, student, of keeping quiet or being invisible, and then with the intention of defying that ‘perfection.’ The memoir written by the author of the poetry collection Prelude to Bruise (2014), Saeed Jones’s How We Fight for Our Lives works as a question to an entire nation: “If America was going to hate me for being black and gay, then make a weapon out of myself” Perhaps that weapon is forged by a burning desire to no longer be appeased. Growing up an only child of a single mother. Growing up in the South of the United States.

How We Fight For Our Lives by Saeed Jones