“Everybody, every subject position, and every demographic should be treated as if they could be the most interesting person in the world,” Asali Solomon tells Street. “And that’s the method by which we become more human while reading fiction, that the concerns of any person you see on the street should be something that should be deeply explored with all of the nuances.”
The range of characters who converge in Solomon’s 2021 novel, The Days of Afrekete evinces this approach to storytelling. The protagonist Liselle, once an out–and–proud lesbian, is now married to a “WASPy gadabout” man named Winn. The novel focuses on the dinner party hosted by the pair in the aftermath of Winn’s political defeat. Solomon’s novel loosely bases itself on Virginia Woolf’s Mrs. Dalloway, but cites a variety of influences from Toni Morrison’s Sula to Audre Lorde’s biomythography Zami. The past as well as the future loom large as Liselle reminisces about her ex–girlfriend Selena whilst awaiting her husband’s impending arrest by the FBI. Throughout, Solomon carries over Mrs. Dalloway’s plot structure as well as its mood of something “breaking at the seams.”
The Days of Afrekete both continues and departs from Solomon’s previous writing. Her preceding books Get Down and Disgruntled are mostly set in West Philadelphia, where Solomon was born, raised, and currently lives, having returned after 20 years. By revisiting the city in each of her works, Solomon hopes to create a “mythic geography” of Philadelphia that harkens to Edward P. Jones’ writing about Washington, D.C. The Days of Afrekete turns its attention to a different neighborhood in Philadelphia: Mount Airy. For Solomon, this required “taking a leap.” In fact, when comparing The Days of Afrekete to her previous writing, she describes it as “the furthest” from her experiences.
“It started with a question that was kind of outside of me, which was something along the lines of how interested I was in Black women in their 30s and 40s, who were either married to men, or were avowedly queer, suddenly doing the other thing, and there was no discussion about it,” Solomon says. “You know, this person was lesbian—now they’re just married [to a man] or the opposite. No big process, no big anything: Just, like, this is what we’re doing.”
Solomon expounds on the life story of Chirlane McCray as one of the most surprising examples: “This poet was a committed Black lesbian, and then she was just, like, married to Bill de Blasio.” Still, in some ways, the novel is a mirror: “I live in Philadelphia, and all my books are about Black people in Philadelphia.” Solomon says her books “generally tend to focus on Black women in Philadelphia [who] usually have navigated some combination of very Black spaces and very white spaces,” like Solomon herself, who touches frequently on the personal impact of attending a mostly white private school.
Finding pieces of the writer in the novel is unsurprising, given that the characters in Solomon’s first stories were named “Asali” after herself. “There’s parts of me all over the book. There’s parts of me with regard to, I mean, my husband is white. … There’s parts about early motherhood, and there’s parts about my [college experience]. … There’s parts of me that are a lot in Selena.” Still, if you were to press Solomon on the autobiographical elements of her work, you would most likely get this response: “What I say about almost everything that I’ve written … is that anything in the books, or anything that happens to the people that’s interesting, did not happen to me.”
What you will definitely see of Solomon in her writing is a “pathological” amount of music, alongside “a lot of references to TV [and] a lot of deep engagement with old sitcom plots.” The music referenced in The Days of Afrekete ranges from Drake to Stevie Wonder, and Solomon attributes the heavy musical influence to her childhood. “I grew up in a family that was really into music. My father—it wasn’t his day job, but he was a songwriter. He taught himself to play piano at, like, 28. So there was literally always music in the house,” Solomon says.
The Days of Afrekete traverses throughout time to tell the stories of Liselle and Selena, who were in love during their college years at Bryn Mawr and are now in their early 40s. Time–jumping presents a challenge for any writer, and it is one that Solomon overcame through a process of many drafts and heavy reverse outlining. Plotlines were made all the more complicated by her rejection of the traditional coming–of–age narrative.
“It’s not like, first kiss, first date, first generic experience of racism, you know, it’s like, what are the things that define this particular person’s development and coming of age? And so the thing I was thinking about for The Days of Afrekete is that [question], but also the fact that on any given day, we would tell our life story differently,” Solomon says.
The author’s attitude was influenced by her favorite book, Maud Martha by Gwendolyn Brooks, which portrays the life of a working–class Black woman in Chicago through a series of vignettes. The Days of Afrekete makes meta-literary references to other unique coming–of–age stories, such as Zami by Audre Lorde, in which Afrekete is a central character. Zami is a “biomythography,” which Solomon defines as being “like a memoir, but … also really invented in a particular way. … All the important nodes are her different relationships with women.” This isn’t a structure Solomon follows for her own novel, although she admits that Liselle and Selena’s most formative relationships are with women. Zami ends with the narrator having a magical encounter with a woman named Afrekete, which Solomon sees as Lorde attempting to “reclaim the development narrative from a Western, Eurocentric, and ultimately Freudian trajectory, and make it into something else.”
According to Solomon, “There is this question about whether or not two Black women can actually survive in a relationship, because all of these forces are against them individually. And so when they come together, there’s a sense of, you know, vulnerability. And so the book [Zami] sort of solves that by creating this nip at the end that at the time wasn’t really true.”
The “nip” refers to Audre’s description of a relationship with the goddess Afrekete, whose character doesn’t seem to correspond to anyone in Lorde’s life at the time. Zami first appears in The Days of Afrekete when a professor refers to the encounter between Audre and Afrekete as a fantasy sequence, reflecting Solomon’s interest “in this question of [a] socio–economic math problem about Black women [and whether they can survive in a relationship].”
It’s unclear whether Solomon intends The Days of Afrekete to be a counter–factual narrative to the professor who sees Audre and Afrekete’s relationship as a fantasy. The novel ends at a tipping point with Selena’s arrival at Liselle’s door, and Winn awaiting confrontation with the authorities. The futures of all three remain unresolved, but the novel’s final events cast a different perspective on their pasts. She attempts to clarify by referring to the fact that Selena returns to Liselle at the end of the novel: “I did, in that sense, but I didn’t, in that I didn’t then show what happened. There’s still some kind of question. But my imagining is that—well, actually, I’m not gonna say.” Ultimately, Solomon chooses to leave the ending canonically unanswered.
As a reader, what we see as the defining decisions of each character is in flux as their stories progress, reflecting Solomon’s view that “on any given day, we might say that [one thing] was the defining moment [of our lives], and then the next day, we would be like, no, no, no, no, actually, it’s not. … And as you get older, it really changes, in colors, how you see different things.”
The Days of Afrekete encourages its readers to change the way they frame their life’s progression, to notice that the frame is always changing, and thus to withhold judgment on themselves and on others.
