The Way You Make Me Feel: Love in Black and Brown

by Nina Sharma

Overview

“Remarkable . . . The Way You Make Me Feel affirms that Black and Brown existence in America comes with no guarantee of collective solidarity, no innate promise of racial equality. The path to justice is uncertain, Sharma reminds us, and we must each work hard—and be bold enough to sacrifice our own comfort—to actualize it.” —Washington Post

A hilarious and moving memoir in essays about love and allyship, told through one Asian and Black interracial relationship

When Nina Sharma meets Quincy while hitching a ride to a friend’s Fourth of July barbecue, she spots a favorite book, Maxine Hong Kingston’s The Woman Warrior, in the back seat of his cramped car, and senses a sadness from him that’s all too familiar to her. She is immediately intrigued—who is this man? In The Way You Make Me Feel, Sharma chronicles her and Quincy’s love story, and in doing so, examines how their Black and Asian relationship becomes the lens through which she moves through and understands the world.

In a series of sensual and sparkling essays, Sharma reckons with caste, race, colorism, and mental health, moving from her seemingly idyllic suburban childhood through her and Quincy’s early sweeping romance in the so-called postracial Obama years and onward to their marriage. Growing up, she hears her parents talk about the racism they experienced at the hands of white America—and as an adult, she confronts the complexities of American racism and the paradox of her family’s disappointment when she starts dating a Black man. While watching The Walking Dead, Sharma dives into the eerie parallels between the brutal death of Steven Yeun’s character and the murder of Vincent Chin. She examines the trailblazing Mira Nair film Mississippi Masala, revolutionary in its time for depicting a love story between an Indian woman and a Black man on screen, and considers why interracial relationships are so often assumed to include white people. And as she and Quincy decide whether to start a family, they imagine a universe in which Vice President Kamala Harris could possibly be their time-traveling daughter.

Written with a keen critical eye and seamlessly weaving in history, pop culture, and politics, The Way You Make Me Feel reaffirms the idea that allyship is an act of true love.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9780593492826
Publisher:	Penguin Publishing Group
Publication date:	05/07/2024
Pages:	336
Sales rank:	361,654
Product dimensions:	9.10(w) x 6.30(h) x 1.30(d)

About the Author

Nina Sharma’s work has appeared in The New Yorker, Electric Literature, Longreads, and The Margins. A graduate of the MFA program at Columbia University, she served as the programs director at the Asian American Writers’ Workshop and currently teaches at Columbia and Barnard College. She is a proud cofounder of the all–South Asian women’s improv group Not Your Biwi.

Read an Excerpt

Birthmark

My eldest sister, ten years older than me, is, as the saying goes, the fairest of them all. What I mean to say is that she's lighter skinned than both my middle sister, eight years older than me, and myself, "Baby." Ten shares my mother's milky coloring while Eight and I veer more toward my father's almond brown. But this is not the explanation my mother provides. "It's probably because she was born in England," she says and leaves it at that.

How could this be? I always think. My mother and my father are both doctors, and when it comes to the body, they tend to talk with precision. My sick notes for school were embarrassingly scientific-not just "Nina has a cold" but "Please excuse Nina from soccer. She has been suffering a rhinovirus infection."

But when it comes to melanin, or lack thereof, the language of science is drained of its color. We are, simply, dark or light, kali or gauri, born in the U.S. or born in England.

England, this suspension of science, this mythical, sunless country.

My parents' reminiscences of London and their bohemian Chelsea neighborhood are more often positive, if not star-studded-my mother seeing the Beatles play on a roof, my father encountering Mick Jagger and Tom Jones on his way to work at the hospital, and this child that seemed to carry an entire country on the dermis.

"Why did you leave?" I once asked.

"Because it was racist," my mother said-so quickly I almost missed it.

There is another set of stories that run a parallel track: the England where my mother had one child who passed away from birth complications before Ten was born, where the Swinging Sixties passed them by as they climbed up the ranks of medicine, where my father got his fondness for both biting British humor and heavy midday drinking, where my mother interrupted her residency to be a first-time mom. These are the shadow stories. They come out quick, if at all.

Their stories of America are more raw, glaring and open wounds even now. My mother can still picture the "bright yellow wallet" she could not find when she disembarked at JFK in 1972. She can still feel how tired she was all the time, "like I had been beaten." Sometimes the exposure is quite literal-the roof peeling off their moving truck, all their possessions open to the elements.

From the shores of Coney Island, they slowly crept inward, first to the Bronx, where Eight was born, a shade browner than the first kid, and then to central New Jersey, to the suburbs. There, in what would become an enduring Indian community, I was born, only to up the brown quotient just a bit more. Atop my ruddy newborn skin lay a big black birthmark. The mark was just above my butt, at the small of my back, the size of a potato or the palm of a hand.

I don't remember thinking much of the birthmark as I grew up. I could not even see it unless I looked in some kind of double mirror, which I never made an effort to do. I wasn't a fan of looking in mirrors.

But when I was ten years old my mother took me to a plastic surgeon, and before I could say "general anesthesia" the birthmark was lopped off.

All I remember is what came after-the big pad of gauze stuck on my back for weeks like some bulky diaper, and my mom forcing me on the bed, ass up. I cried and writhed as she yanked stitches out.

The surgery never healed properly, leaving a thick keloid in the shape of the number five. It is purple sometimes, red others. A rupture more than erasure. A color releasing more colors.

Twenty years later, my mom quips with a sneer and a grin both, "Maybe we can cut that off, too."

When I think of the Hindi words for black and white, kali and gauri, I can't help but think of the accompanying Hindu goddesses. Images of fair-skinned Mahagauri are scattered about the house and family home temple-a statue here, a picture there. Kali does not hold such a place. My first exposure to her was not through my devout parents but through Indiana Jones and the Temple of Doom, the horn-headed evil cult leader chanting: "Kali-ma, Kali-ma!"

And yet, whiteness always seemed more like the big baddie to me. "She is so gauri," the auntie would praise. But I always heard gory, heard it like a curse, a brutal thing. The two words have different etymologies-gory coming from the Germanic "gor" meaning dirt, gauri coming from Sanskrit: shining, bright.

It was the paradox of my life-to be told constantly to stay out of the sun to stay shining, light, and brilliant. To know that under the surface of their comments was not a fear of the sun but a fear of Blackness.

It was the paradox of my life-to know the racism my parents experienced at the hands of white America and yet to be saddened by how they desired to be white themselves.

It was the paradox of my life-to watch with family Black performers on stage and screen, to cheer for Black athletes, to benefit from the gains of the civil rights movement, Black Power, yet to meet their rejection of Black people in real life. Too long in the sun and I'd hear "you have become black!" which even then I understood was something to fear.

I didn't spend much time heeding this advice. Skin to me was an afterthought, a container for the body that I just wanted to take outside to play. I like to think I grew up to be someone who is not very preoccupied with coloring or appearance overall. I don't have a vanity table and my makeup bag consists of a blush brush but nothing to dip it in.

But maybe this isn't true. Maybe I gaze more than I know or want to acknowledge. For even now I can see it, more than I can see any other section of my body-that birthmark-and I must have looked at it more than I thought. I can see its deep black hue, a constant, nearly a perfect circle, a still and deep place, a place where all the light goes.

In my twenties, I gave the scar a story. A man I was dating asked about it. "I got it at Five Points. That's why it's in the shape of a five. That's how I joined the Five Points Gang!" My intention was never to tell a convincing lie; I didn't want to prove any sort of toughness. I was just sick and tired of being asked "What's that?" I kept the lie up for a few days, even bringing him to a brunch spot called Five Points. After fifteen minutes of looking worriedly into his pancakes he finally asked, "Are you okay to eat here?" He had believed what I thought was a very far-fetched tale. I dumped him soon after that.

A year later, I was in New York, lying in bed next to the man I would go on to marry, the man who, based on the color of his skin, my parents were hoping I would not marry, the man who was Black, whose skin was the same color as mine.

As the morning light poured in, I pried myself out of our tangle of brown limbs and bedding. I got up to go to the bathroom naked-the kind of naked that stretches out all over you like a ball gown. The bathroom door opened to a full-length mirror and I couldn't help but linger there a bit.

"You never asked about my scar." I did a big stretch and arched my back.

"I just assumed it was a tail," he joked.

"It was nothing big. A surgery." I set my hands to my hips and fanned my fingers, sliding them across keloid and skin.

"I'm sticking to cat tail," he said.

"You know, you are the first person who hasn't asked." My fingertips met the top of my butt.

"Because," he said, "whatever it was, you survived."

Editorial Reviews

03/11/2024

This sinuous debut memoir-in-essays from Sharma, who is of Indian descent, utilizes her romance with Quincy Scott Jones, a Black poet, as a jumping-off point for wide-ranging meditations on American and Indian culture, racism in the U.S., and Afro-Asian solidarity. Her essays circle around dueling personal and historical plotlines; for example, she unpacks the racial politics of hair in the U.S. (surfacing rarely discussed facts, such as that the import of Asian hair for wig-making was banned in the U.S. until 1966) in an entry grappling with her parents’ complaints about Jones’s dreadlocks during their 2011 wedding preparations. In another piece, Sharma’s father’s tone-deaf insistence that the couple hold a wedding-related event at Donald Trump’s golf club in Bedminster, N.J., is foregrounded against Barack Obama’s release that same year of his birth certificate in response to Trump’s racist conspiracy theories. (Sharma is unsparing of her family in these sections—some of their remarks are cringingly racist.) As Sharma’s narrative roves, she forms unexpected pop cultural associations, sometimes wringing humor from heavy subjects. (Reflecting on the possessed house in the movie Evil Dead, she writes: “Living as a minority in America is living in a house laughing at you and living as a model minority is joining in that laughter.”) The result is a powerfully forthright portrait of an interracial relationship that doubles as an insightful investigation into the history of racism in America. (May)

Publishers Weekly

The sweeping but focused collection demonstrates Sharma’s commitment to exploring Afro-Asian intimacy in all its beauty and complexity . . . Sharma’s debut is remarkable for its daring, how unafraid it is to eschew rosy visions of racial solidarity . . . The Way You Make Me Feel affirms that Black and Brown existence in America comes with no guarantee of collective solidarity, no innate promise of racial equality. The path to justice is uncertain, Sharma reminds us, and we must each work hard—and be bold enough to sacrifice our own comfort—to actualize it.” —Washington Post

“In 16 bold, rich essays, Sharma unfurls the chronicle of her love affair with a Black man named Quincy . . . Sharma adds color and nuance to her essays by braiding TV reviews with cultural commentary and memoir . . . But in the main, this is a book about love. Sharma shows us that she’s got range, moving seamlessly from a discussion about racism on a national scale to making out with Quincy . . . Readers will appreciate Sharma’s diaristic recounting of their lovers’ spats and her reflections on the central tension in their relationship: that in the American caste system, a Black man and Indian woman simply do not fit any accepted narrative. With writing that is at once humorous and profound, The Way You Make Me Feel confronts the paradoxical realities of race and the family, and calls for greater solidarity by way of love.” —BookPage

“Sensual, sharp, and raw, Sharma’s memoir digs deep into the roots intertwining anti-Black racism and America’s South Asian diaspora, unearthing what often remains unsaid when establishing true allyship . . .  Through the lens of being in an interracial relationship, Sharma cleverly draws on pop culture, political discourse, and academic writing to deliver social criticism that persistently highlights the racial discrimination running beneath the surface of American policies and social conventions. Just as impressive as Sharma's composed, polished, and wholly sincere writing is her range of topics, including mental health, the model minority, police brutality, familial trauma, and COVID-19’s anti-East Asian racism—the breadth of all of which illustrates the complex racial fabric of America today.” —Booklist

“A powerfully forthright portrait of an interracial relationship that doubles as an insightful investigation into the history of racism in America.” —Publishers Weekly

“Sharma’s amazing collection of essays about love and culture will move you. She invites readers into her interracial relationship with a lot of heart and humor. This is a book that will remind you of the kindness in the world.” —Debutiful

“Searing, nostalgic, and incisive . . . Braids together cultural history, personal narrative, and global commerce that while insightful also demonstrates the author’s deftness and alacrity with the narrative form. Sharma’s essays are also a keen exercise in cultural criticism . . . A beautiful, painful, and poignant love story that overcomes all odds—and endures.” —Khabar

“Nina Sharma is an ardent, fiercely intelligent explorer of American life in all its hybrid complexity. Indian American and African American worlds collide and collaborate; so do love and anger, art and politics, fear and ambition, grief and wit. ‘Collection’ is too temperate a word for these essays: each is an act in a suspenseful, still-unfolding play.” —Margo Jefferson, author of Constructing a Nervous System

“Nina Sharma’s thoughtful debut is equal parts memoir, criticism, and long-ranging conversation with a new friend. A love story for the ruminative reader that is generous with both scrutiny and romance.” —Melissa Febos, author of Girlhood, winner of the National Book Critics Circle Award

“I put off writing a blurb for this delicious book because I could not bear the idea of its author’s voice no longer accompanying me through my days. Nina Sharma has done something extraordinary with The Way You Make Me Feel—even unprecedented. This is more than a memoir. It is a modern story of life in the diaspora captured through the lens of an unsettlingly brave and honest sage, a woman of tremendous insight and gifted with the keenest of literary chops. It is utterly absorbing, intelligent, disturbing (in the finest way), and musical. Sharma’s narrative sensibility moves seamlessly and profoundly between the personal and political. As a reader, I learned things and I felt things. But at bottom, this is a for real love story—love of community, of color, of the other, and most of all, love of self.” —Emily Bernard, author of Black is the Body

“In a world that seeks to divide, Nina Sharma’s charming and insightful essays show us how love humbles, connects, and inspires us to be better allies. By deftly weaving in pop culture, politics, and history into her personal narrative, she explores the ways in which we are taught to inhabit our identities—and how love so often requires us to unlearn these rigid norms.” —Prachi Gupta, author of They Called Us Exceptional

“Nina Sharma’s The Way You Make Me Feel is a delicate balance of memoir, cultural criticism, and history. It moves seamlessly between love story and the interrogation of race, making insightful, brilliant connections. Sometimes funny, sometimes haunting, Sharma’s work is powerful: days later, I’m still thinking about her essay on The Walking Dead and the murder of Vincent Chin.” —Jaquira Díaz, author of Ordinary Girls

“Nina Sharma has pulled off a bold feat: a collection of highly crafted essays that ring with improvisational verve. In fearless prose that manages to be witty, incisive, and nakedly honest all at once, Sharma shares scenes from her Black and brown marriage that reveal a great love story enduring alongside the paradoxes of race. Deftly intercutting personal tales with cultural critique, Sharma holds many to task: ‘the big baddie’ of whiteness, society, her family, and above all, herself. The way this book makes me feel is compassionate and in awe, and a whole lot smarter.” —Bridgett M. Davis, author of The World According To Fannie Davis

“The Way You Make Me Feel crackles with electricity only found in deep hybridity. This memoir chronicles a brown person coming of age in a racist United States and illustrates for us how allyship can fruit into a complicated, sweet accompliceship. A love story to South Asian and Black communities, Sharma’s debut is a must-read for those of us who depend on one another to survive America. Told through fragment and recurrence, personal narrative and love story, reading The Way You Make Me Feel makes me want to break out into song, I never felt so in love before.” —Rajiv Mohabir, author of Antiman and Whale Aria

From the Publisher

2023-12-05
Musings on the South Asian author’s marriage to a Black writer, popular culture, and more.

About two-thirds of the way into this meandering collection, Sharma writes about attending a writing workshop at a bookstore. “I don’t have anything to write about. All I have been doing is wedding things,” she worries. “How about writing about those wedding things?” suggests her fiance, Quincy. Unfortunately, the author’s storytelling urge never gets much more urgent than that. It’s not that she has nothing to say about their interracial relationship, which Sharma frames in the context of allyship, but there’s not much forward momentum in its unfolding. They watched Mississippi Masala, about a similar love; later, they became fans of The Walking Dead. Sharma braids her discussion of the death of a popular Asian character on the latter with a review of the facts in the 1982 hate-motivated murder of Vincent Chin. This examination connects to discussion of more recent hate crimes, including the shootings of Asians in Atlanta and George Floyd’s murder in Minneapolis. We take a slight detour into the author’s history with improv comedy and emerge to discuss the Lovings and their “almost decade-long fight for their interracial marriage.” Then, back to the 2011 wedding, then back to Floyd, and then a chapter titled “We Can Neither Confirm Nor Deny That Kamala Harris Is Our Time Traveling Daughter.” This chapter is largely about the freezing and maintenance of Sharma’s eggs, leaping back and forth through a timeline stretching from 1958 to 2022. The author also includes her sharply funny 2019 essay, “Shithole Country Clubs,” which was inspired by her father’s membership at Donald Trump’s New Jersey golf club, and she salts the text liberally with jokes and wisecracks. (Nina: “Is there anyone like a ‘rich activist’?” Quincy: “Batman.”)

The path of allyship unfolds, with some gems along the way.

Kirkus Reviews