Barbara Browning

Six months after Tye’s “Performance for Women & Performance,” about one thousand people Occupied Wall Street, which is to say, on September 17, 2011, protesters marched through the financial district and settled into Zuccotti Park. The encampment remained in place until shortly after midnight on November 15, when the NYPD gave notice that protesters would be removed due to ostensibly unsanitary conditions. A little while later, they cleared everybody out.

Barbara Browning came to life before me on a chilly gray Sunday, as I lay under the bedsheets, dressed in wool for warmth. I’d just finished Sheila Heti’s How Should A Be?, a book that left me feeling a little bit empty and angry. I was in the mood to read more, it was a day made for reading, and so I followed it with Tove Jansson’s Fair Play, a book about artists and writers performing their art on the pages, through video and film.

CS: First question–Maybe it’s too tedious or too politically correct to mention it, but the racebending in this book is more convoluted than the genderbending in a performance of “As You Like It” during the Elizabethan era. What does it mean to be a white person writing a mixed race man who deals with intrusive Stupid White People questions about his life and art? What does it mean for you to write a mixed race character who notices a paucity of other people of color in the spaces that he’s in, or gets tired of children asking what exactly he is?