Creative Nourishment: Black Friend by Ziwe

Voice, point-of-view, and moving between artistic forms

I’ll be joining Julie Gammack, the founder of the Iowa Writer’s Collaborative, on her podcast on Monday, May 6, at 12 p.m. CT, to talk more about the philosophy behind my Substack and my work at CultureALL. You can tune in to the conversation on Zoom.

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“Feed your brain. Take care of it. Let it do things in its own way.” - Carmen Maria Machado

Creative Nourishment is an exploration of the art that I’m feeding my brain, the work that causes me to think deeply about experience and art and storytelling and what it means to embark on the life of a writer. Through essays and reviews, I look at how the work of other creatives is informing the artist I hope to become.

To watch a Ziwe interview is to always feel a little bit uncomfortable; it’s kind of the entire point. The comedic star has been working her way through the NYC alt-comedy scene for years, but rose to the next level of fame in 2020 with her Instagram Live series of interviews with celebrities about race.

Remember June 2020? Remember how misguided celebrities can be when talking about social issues that affect every day people? You can probably guess where the discomfort comes from.

I wish I could remember how and when I discovered Ziwe, whose legal last name is Fumudoh but has taken on the mononym because “people develop short-term memory loss when you say a name that doesn’t align with Western linguistic hits like ‘Smith’ or ‘Johnson’ or ‘Roald Dahl’…if being a mononym puts me in the same conversation as Beyonce, Madonna, and Prince, so be it. If anything, the fact that the ethnic name that I was tortured over can now be exploited for branding purposes is a form of reparations.”

Ziwe is an omnipresent cultural figure to me, a staple of my Instagram timeline. Her 2020 fame earned her a Showtime series that expanded upon her interview premise and made her into a pop cultural icon. She engaged guest after guest in a game of “I am intentionally and obviously baiting you into a race conversation you cannot win and the absurdity and discomfort will be hilarious.”

I picked up Ziwe’s debut book of essays, “Black Friend,” at Reading in Public,