Asali Solomon's Writing Life

Growing up in West Philadelphia, the child of Afrocentric, activist parents, Asali Solomon often felt at odds with the larger world. 

That was true as a youngster at the neighborhood school, Henry C. Lea Elementary, where classmates made merry over Christmas while Solomon and her younger sister, Akiba, celebrated the seven principles of Kwanzaa, couldn’t eat pork, and had exotic names. Later, that sense of alienation was compounded when she attended the elite, mostly white, mostly wealthy Baldwin School on the Main Line. 

"I think being a child is hard in a way that being an adult is hard," says Solomon from her unadorned third-floor office in Woodside Cottage. "I didn’t have a bad childhood, but I was aware of dangers and difficulties that my parents had no control over. That’s one of the shocking realizations. Even though parents control your world, they don’t control the world."

Solomon, 42, an assistant professor of English and Haverford’s first tenure-track professor in creative writing, draws upon those experiences in her debut novel, Disgruntled, which was published earlier this year to acclaim. It tells the tale of 8-year-old Kenya Curtis, who lives in West Philly in the late 1980s. 

The protagonist is alienated from her neighborhood friends because of her upbringing, which echoes Solomon’s own childhood in the mundane details. ("Anything interesting or dramatic that happens in this book didn’t happen to me," says Solomon, who lives in West Philadelphia with her family, just blocks from her childhood home at 51st and Locust Streets.) Later, Kenya attends a private school on the Main Line—Solomon went to all-girls Baldwin from fourth to eighth grade—and continues to feel like an outsider because of socio-economics and race, even as her family life disintegrates.

But rather than have Kenya deliver a treatise on the injustices she feels she encounters, "the shame of being alive," Solomon deftly uses humor, often sardonic, to communicate hefty issues. She captures quirky behaviors and cultural touchstones in a moment in Philadelphia’s past, pre-gentrification, even as she dissects racial and class dynamics.

In a review, The Los Angeles Times called Solomon "a masterful writer … who presents beauty and complex ideas in clear, accessible prose."

Consider this passage from the opening page about Kenya as a fourth-grader in her mostly black neighborhood school: "It was also that she couldn’t eat pork, including the bologna sandwiches that were the everyday fare of the lunchroom—something to do with her father muttering that white people forced slaves to eat hog guts—though as far as Kenya could see, white people love bologna enough to give it both a first and a second name."

It is a wit that she and her sister, now a journalist, practiced at the family dinner table in the hopes of making their parents laugh, but that has deeper roots. "There’s a strong irreverent streak in my family, a love for dark and bawdy humor and good stories," says Solomon, whose megawatt smile is the focal point of a face made more striking by close-cropped black hair. 

"My grandmother, Mamie Nichols, who was an extremely respected local activist, was quite funny and quite profane," she adds. "I think, however, that the humor of my parents, of my grandmother, of my uncles, is often in the service of shocking truth telling."

That humor, though a kinder, gentler version, makes an appearance in her literature and creative writing classes. In the latter, it creates a safe, comfortable space for students to share their written words during workshops and receive suggestions—that’s the word she prefers to "critiques"—from other classmates and Solomon.

Last semester, students in her "Advanced Fiction Workshop" provided feedback to Sarah Shatan-Pardo, then a sophomore English major who had read aloud part of her short story "The Cleaner." It revolves around a man who cleans up after those dying from a mysterious affliction. Students led off with big-picture questions: What is the time period? Where does it take place? Meanwhile, Solomon moved the process along with questions of her own. "Why is it useful to know where something takes place, temporally or physically?" she asked. 

"It adds to the urgency," said one student.

Responded Solomon: "My question is, why is that important?"

"It would give the reader more reason to trust the story," another student offered.

As she often does, Solomon ended the workshop by asking students to say what they liked about "The Cleaner," such as its pace and details.

Discussing her approach afterward, she says: "You have to develop an atmosphere of trust and constructive comments. I try to keep it light. We laugh a lot. I try to be extremely thoughtful about what I say. At times, I interject a lot. At times, I interject less. … It takes a lot of people to read a story."

Dana Nichols ’14, who majored in English with a concentration in Africana Studies, took all of Solomon’s classes—"Introduction to Creative Writing," "Advanced Fiction Workshop," and two Africana literature classes—while at Haverford. "She was a rare entity in my educational career," says Nichols, 23, who hails from Los Angeles and is a modern dancer and sometime-writer. "I had stories to tell, and I wasn’t sure if I knew how to tell them or if they were worth telling."

The supportive atmosphere of Solomon’s classes allowed her to share those stories, Nichols says. "The bottom line is that telling stories as a person of color is difficult in any capacity. It is an act of rebellion. In her class, it was just a story. … I was for once in my life in the position where my everyday existence was not a challenge, but acknowledged and understood. At the end of the day, that is what diverse faculty is all about." 

In her fiction writing, Solomon has long explored racial and class dynamics while at the same time affirming the daily experiences of African American life. Her first book, Get Down (2006), is a collection of coming-of-age short stories also set in 1980s Philadelphia. Many pieces focus on black girls from the city attending suburban, private schools.

Solomon also delves deeply into the less-told experiences of intra-racial dynamics—the "relationships that black people have with each other that go across class within those communities," she says. Take the Main Line middle school dances she describes and the role of race in the choices the black boys make about whom they will select as dance partners. 

"She has a straight-up, unflinching storytelling style that most reminds me of a modern hip-hop-influenced descendant of African folktales," says author Lorene Cary, who met Solomon through a writing workshop Solomon led with her sister for Arts Sanctuary, a black arts organization Cary founded in Philadelphia. "Those folktales can be a little hard-core. Her storytelling says, 'That’s the way of the world.' … The language does not shirk from showing it. It’s funny, [comedian] Kevin Hart, laugh-at-my-pain funny."

Often, Solomon tackles what she calls the mythologies of childhood. "The thing about being young is that you don’t know the world is not really waiting to embrace you," she says. "You know, a lot of time the world is, at best, indifferent and, at worst, actively hostile."

It is a feeling best described, Solomon says, in the word 'disgruntled:' The simmering fury the single word captures pulses through her novel, and through Kenya. In fact, the true inspiration for her coming-of-age tale is the author’s fascination with architect Frank Lloyd Wright’s infamous servant. Julian Carlton and his wife, both Barbadians, worked for Wright and his mistress, Martha “Mamah” Borthwick, at Taliesin in Wisconsin. In 1914, when Wright was away, Borthwick fired Carlton. The butler set fire to the house and attacked those who tried to escape with an ax. Seven people, including Borthwick and her two children, died. 

"Something about that story caught my imagination," Solomon says. While she is quick to emphasize that "in real life that guy was crazy," Carlton’s story becomes a way to frame Kenya’s experiences of apartness, oddness. "It’s not rage, but suppressed rage becoming alienation."

Carlton’s story serves as a rubric to think "about contemporary African American life as a moment of wondering, of thinking about what was supposed to have happened and what didn’t happen in the wake of the civil rights movement and to an extent the black power movement," Solomon says. "There is this invisible barrier to the whole pursuit of liberty and happiness. It’s what it always was. You’re black. Or you come from this class. I think of the title as a way of thinking about that."

Is she disgruntled?

"Oh, yeah, every day, all the time. It’s my natural emotion," Solomon says, revealing a bit of that famed dark humor. 

In her West Philadelphia childhood home, where her parents still live, the Solomon girls were exposed to a black perspective, say parents James Solomon and Rochelle Nichols-Solomon.

"We essentially brought them up to love who they are," says her father, who has long composed songs and worked for the Social Security Administration until his retirement. 

"They were sensitized to issues of race, class, and gender," adds Solomon’s mother, who is an advocate for public education.

Television was limited, and both children were book magnets. Asali loved The Chronicles of Narnia and anything by Toni Morrison, whose books she came to too early, she says. "She and her sister were both professional players,” Nichols-Solomon says. "They loved making up things, and part of making up things is imagination. … We really, really tried to steer the girls into math and science."

But Asali was destined to write, penciling her first storybook at age 4. It was about mice. The Central High School graduate went to Barnard College, where she got a degree in Pan-African Studies in 1995 and learned workshop techniques she uses in her own classes. In 2002, she received her doctorate in English from the University of California, Berkeley, and then earned an MFA in 2004 from the University of Iowa, attending its famed Writers’ Workshop.

That was where she met her husband, Andrew Friedman, who was working on an MFA while simultaneously pursuing a doctorate in American studies at Yale University. 

The two have long shared their working drafts with each other. "He’s honest," Solomon says, adding that she’s always after one of his "This is incredible," pronouncements. "I don’t always get it."

"When I’m reading Asali’s work, I don’t think I’m reading as a critic per se," says Friedman, an associate professor of history at Haverford and author of Covert Capital, about the impact of the CIA on Northern Virginia. "I’m reading as her reader. So I’m not usually there to say, 'This word is too long! This word is too short!' I’m there to help see that Asali is writing her work. Asali’s work, to me, has an epic quality, regular people who are involved in epics, yet who must also contend with the regularity of life." 

After teaching stints that included Washington and Lee University and Trinity College, Solomon followed Friedman to the Philadelphia area, working for a year at Bryn Mawr College before taking a post as a visiting professor in Haverford’s English department. 

Associate Professor of English Gustavus Stadler, who chairs the English department, says Solomon’s hire was an "incredible opportunity" to bolster the creative writing concentration, which she leads. "We saw this person who just excelled in so many ways on both sides of the curriculum," he says, noting that her MFA and Ph.D. give her both creative and scholarly creds. "She was obviously on her way to becoming a writer of enormous stature." In addition, he says, Solomon "brings a fresh and cutting-edge perspective to the study of African American literature."

Last year, Solomon was promoted to assistant professor. The mother of two young children (ages 5 and 2) has to make time to write around her classroom and family responsibilities. "I usually write during the day, in the summer, when the children are in daycare," says Solomon, who already has plans for her next novel. It will, she says, pay homage to Virginia Woolf’s Mrs Dalloway and revolve around a fateful dinner party.

"I don’t want to say any more than that," says Solomon, with one of her big smiles.

-Lini S. Kadaba