Winner of the Kirkus Prize and the Stonewall Book Award, How We Fight For Our Lives by Saeed Jones is a moving testament to everything that makes us who we are, from our mother’s love to our sexual identity.
Published in 2019 by Simon and Schuster, How We Fight For Our Lives by Saeed Jones weaves a moving biography of the pivotal moments of his life. It is a queer coming-of-age memoir that is foreshadowed by death and tragedy from the very beginning, as is evident from these lines from “Elegy with Grown Folks Music” that the book starts with:
“you’re young and don’t know the difference
between abandoned and alone just like your mother’s
heart won’t know the difference between beat
and attack. She’ll be dead in a decade and maybe
you already know what you’re losing without knowing
how,…”
The Premise of How We Fight for Our Lives
Written in a series of vignettes, Saeed takes the reader by the hand with his moving storytelling to show them exactly where, when and how the discovery of his black queer identity took place and what is at stake for him.
Growing up in Lewisville, Texas and later spending his college years in Kentucky, the story unfolds the struggles he faced as a black queer child of a single mother and how he found out very early on in life that homophobia and racism were both entrenched in his country.
“Being black can get you killed. Being gay can get you killed”
Instances like his mother not even naming the friend who killed himself on account of AIDS, his feeling of relief that it was his friend who called him a faggot, somewhat lifting the weight of coming out to himself off from his shoulders, reading about the tragic fates of gay men in the library books he combed in the hopes of getting a somewhat better understanding of his identity and his school’s Theatre department deciding to enact The Laramie Project for that year’s play thus added to his understanding of what his life would entail.
“Being a black gay boy is a death wish. And one day, if you’re lucky, your life and death will become some artist’s new “project.”
Although the format is prose, the language is poetic, and some lines carry such weight that the reader is forced to pause in order to take in the full meaning and depth of what is conveyed. An instance of the same would be:
“Just as some cultures have a hundred words for ‘snow’, there should be a hundred words in our language for all the ways a black boy lies awake at night.”
Themes of Violence and Tragedy Interlaced with Questions of Identity, Race and Sexuality
There is a sense of ongoing violence throughout the book, which starts right from the first chapter when Saeed finds out a photograph of his mother’s friend who kills himself; his mother working two jobs, never having enough money, and always on the edge of exhaustion; his grandmother taking to an evangelizing church to quash her grandson’s worldliness (re- queerness); his dream of going to NYU getting away due to lack of funds, years of sexual encounters (which he admittedly does not like but indulges in any way as he tries to use his body as a weapon against other men to regain his power and identity) all point at the fear rooted in society toward anyone that does not subscribe to social, religious and sexual identities. This fear is also popularly derived from the existence of systemic racism and the intersection of body and self, where Saeed finds space to exist but is not free yet.
The constant fight with his inner self, grappling to come to terms with not only his identity but also the existing social structures of what is accepted, becomes a sort of through line for the book. The simple desire to have agency – to just be – is perhaps seen most when a 14-year-old Saeed feels the distance growing between his grandmother and himself inside the car on the 20-minute drive back from church and thinks:
“I made myself a promise: even if it meant becoming a stranger to my loved ones, even if it meant keeping secrets, I would have a life of my own.”
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A Tribute to Mothers
The book is as much about the tenacity of his mother as it is about him. The continuous occurrence of violence appears in many forms, such as his grandmother’s attempts to save him, crimes against young gay men and university girls in the news, and sexual encounters with racist and violent men, including some white and straight men that objectify and perceive him as an experience.
“If standing over the unconscious body of a man who, just moments before, had tried to bash my head in is the closest I will ever come to feeling like a god, I can say now that I understand how a god might look down at a mortal man and love him all the more, precisely because of his vulnerability.”
Through these experiences, Saeed finds himself and, perhaps, is even liberated by the knowledge of other straight men who are struggling just as much as he is. “I’d seen how much he wanted another man;” he writes “I’d seen the storm he’d been struggling his entire life to contain; I’d seen how much he feared and raged against himself; I’d seen so much more of myself in him than I ever could’ve expected when I first saw him. I didn’t know real men hurt the way I’d been hurting.”
All these moments are punctuated by the presence of the mother’s concern, encouragement and acceptance as time passes by. It is also noteworthy that for the protagonist, only the mother’s opinion matters the most. More often in the latter part of the story, the reader will find that when the mother is not present actively in the story, she is still there as the only thought in Saeed’s mind. So it comes as no surprise that the book is dedicated to her.
Written with unabashed detail, Saeed acknowledges that no identity is born or made unto itself. Other narrative forces exist before and after that shape a person. A mother nourishes a boy into a man; her circumstances and sacrifices decide who he becomes. Throughout the book, Saeed talks about his mother with such love, helplessness, and care that we do not miss the father in the plot at all.
Exploring the Stark Irony of Life
The epigraph at the beginning of Part Four, which is a moving letter from his mother, very openly sets the stage for what is to follow.
Saeed watched his mother suffer throughout her life; he prayed for her well-being even in his adolescent years when a kind of distance had clearly crept in; she was always there at the back of his mind. Ironically, he gets his freedom from all the sacrifices and, eventually, the death of his mother – that she led a life of worry due to the lack of money, right from whether her debit card would work at checkout at the grocery store and asking her son for money to get her car fixed to leave her dream of traveling the world with her son unfulfilled stands in stark contrast to all the dreams that Saeed can suddenly fulfill with the insurance payout he receives upon her death.
The timing and the way the windfall is received seemed like a divine joke when his mother spent a lifetime with a weak and failing heart, not being able to afford medical aid, living paycheck to paycheck, and not being able to pay for NYU even though Saeed was accepted into their writing program. The ending serves to put into contrast the lives of people who get a lot more for a lot less. And the weight of our “what if” when it is too late.
Why Should You Read How We Fight for Our Lives
If you are looking to pick up a riveting memoir that does not hold back, this is for you. This thought-provoking book won the Kirkus Prize for Non-fiction in 2019 and the Lambda Literary Award in 2020, among others. It is a bold and honest account of what it means to be a black gay man from the South and the battles he has to fight to survive. His story reminds the reader of their everyday struggles with a flourish and questions their reactions to circumstances and the consequences of it without being preachy.
How We Fight for Our Lives is a poignant testimony of endurance and hope and a moving love letter to mothers that will instantly resonate with the reader. After all, “Our mothers are why we are here.”
