Faith Adiele’s books Her Voice and Voice / Over form a twosome that maintain intimate dialogue with each other while exhibiting unique identities. Both use the language of film to revisit Adiele’s origins as a “Black-and-white-make-brown” child raised by a young, single mother and her Finnish and Swedish (“newly white”) parents, the family a tiny outpost of “hothead” Leftists surrounded by a Christian Right community in rural Washington state.
Her Voice takes the form of filmmaking advice directed toward Adiele herself, who at the outset decides to make a film as a process for recalling the sound of her long-passed, beloved grandmother Mummi Lempi’s voice. Voice/Over, presented as a screenplay, focuses on the family’s activities the day of the 1972 election, folding in chapters in which Adiele imagines recasting iconic films from Birth of a Nation to the 2016 remake of The Magnificent Seven with members of her family. (The title Voice/Over also connects this reader to Mummi Lempi’s mortality and the loss of her ability to voice her principles; near book’s end we are told: “1972 will be Mummi’s last presidential election. During the 1974 midterms … she will be battling cancer.” (V/O, 68)
The use of filmmaking guidelines and the screenplay format — along with other condensed forms including lyrics, poems, and sidebars, and images including film stills and photo collages — allow Adiele to zero in on vital details with economy, and to create an objective distance through which to view this beloved, flawed group of humans with humor, affection, and frank critique (for example about no-account Uncle Michael-Väinö, a “[d]ashing, hard-partying uncle who rarely notices the rest of us” [V/O, x]).
Through these choices along with skillful use of flashbacks and flash-forwards, Adiele also enables us to glimpse her own journey into adulthood. We follow along as she learns to inhabit, interpret, and shape her world — from the young child watching her enormously creative Mummi Lempi bake mouthwatering desserts and paint and decorate “everything, turning rocks and soap into art” (V/O, 67); to the 9-year-old who “[l]ikes to say things like: ‘No fair!’” and “[s]uffers from Being the Only Black Girl in School-ism” [V/O, ix]); to the Harvard undergrad who is “still committed to righting wrongs” and “[s]uffers from Not Knowing How to Resolve Her Identity-ism” (V/O, xi); to the adult author of these texts, who savors “the taste of words in my mouth, the way they accumulate on the page, building portals to the past.” (HV, 5)
Revisiting childhood from two closely related yet utterly original angles, Her Voice and Voice/Over enact the terms of a world where individuality is celebrated and vigorous debate is encouraged — precisely the world many of us are praying and fighting for. Evidently both these books are excerpted from a longer work-in-progress. Here’s hoping the entire epic emerges soon. — Sarah Rosenthal