Veronica Chambers’s cultural highlights

Veronica Chambers is a prolific author, best known for her critically acclaimed memoir, Mama’s Girl, which The New Yorker called, ‘a troubling testament to grit and mother love… one of the finest and most evenhanded in the genre in recent years’. Born in Panama and raised in Brooklyn, her work often reflects her Afro-Latina heritage. She coauthored the memoir Yes Chef with chef Marcus Samuelsson, as well as Samuelsson’s young adult memoir Make It Messy, and collaborated on 32 Yolks, which she co-wrote with chef Eric Ripert. Veronica has been a senior editor at The New York Times Magazine, Newsweek, and Glamour.

Exhibition: Belle da Costa Greene: A Librarian’s Legacy

I’ve recently published my first historical novel, Ida in Love and in Trouble. History has been a through line in my life and work. I deeply believe that black history is a masterclass in hope. Recently, I was very intrigued by the story of Belle da Costa Greene, who was born into a black middle-class family at a time when the opportunities for blacks were so severely limited that Belle and members of her family decided to pass for white. After a stint at Princeton, she became the personal librarian to J. Pierpont Morgan and, in her twenties, she became one of the highest paid young women working in New York City. You can see a little of the recent exhibition at the Morgan Library and Museum in a five-minute YouTube video. The library very wisely integrates stories of passing and the black community she came from into the story. You can also read about her life in the 2021 novel by Marie Benedict and Victoria Christopher Murray, The Personal Librarian.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=AKumBc2HLfQ&t=106s

Theatre: The Estate: National Theatre

I am a big fan of the actor Adeel Akhtar, and so I was very excited to see him on stage at the National Theatre in a play called The Estate. Tickets sold out almost immediately, but I kept checking for returns and was lucky to score two. Akhtar plays Anghad Singh, a politician whose father came to the UK and worked as a baggage handler at Heathrow. Now the leader of the opposition has resigned in a scandal and it looks like Singh, against all odds, might be the one to take his place. But he is in a personal battle with his two sisters — one that reveals deep questions about abuse, gender inequities in the family, secrets that were buried and scores that demand to be settled. The playwright, Shaan Sahota, is a doctor as well as a writer, and the writing was some of the most vivid I’ve seen onstage in a good long while.

https://www.nationaltheatre.org.uk/productions/the-estate/

Art: Yoshitomo Nara

I have been a big fan of Yoshitomo Nara since I first travelled to Japan as a journalism fellow more than 20 years ago. I love the dreamy landscape of his characters and the way they marry a kind of cartoon, child-like whimsy with a bit of a rock and roll sensibility. I was so lucky to catch his show at Southbank before it closed. I think this was the biggest collection of his work ever shown in the UK. Wandering the galleries, I kept thinking of how his work reminds me less of being in a museum and more of growing up in New York City in the 1980s, when street art was everywhere. Although Nara’s style is very different, I could see any number of his figures with a text spray-painted on the #2 train to Flatbush Avenue, which is where I grew up. I believe strongly that the things we make matter. The attempt to draw a face, or write a song, or scribble a love letter, or bake a cake is meaningful. Even if it doesn’t end up in a gallery or win prizes or make money, the effort to say something and make something is valuable. We discover something about ourselves in the making, and then we discover something about the world when we share it.

https://www.southbankcentre.co.uk/venues/hayward-gallery/past-exhibitions/yoshitomo-nara/

Animation: Edward Lee

If you’d like to see the chef Ed Lee talk about growing up as a kid in New York when graffiti artists ruled the subways. You’ll see an interesting parallel to Nara’s work, I think.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=j-XLKl8J-Wg

Audio-book: Black Girls Who Love Jane Austen

I don’t belong to a book club but if I were to start one, it might just be called ‘Black girls who love Jane Austen’. I first fell in love with Jane in my twenties, and then I think it was solidified by Emma Thompson’s script and performance in Sense and Sensibility. I am currently re-reading Persuasion, and it has become my favourite. I love that Anne Elliot is considered past ingénue age, and that there’s this whole ‘second chance at a first love’ theme running through it. Now that I live in England, I get how infuriating it must be that all of the many TV and film adaptations were so unimaginative in their casting. I would have loved to see Zawe Ashton play Emma and Wunmi Mosaku play Anne Elliot. But I think the books are stunning in their artistry — the way Jane Austen shaped the tropes of modern romance: friends to lovers and enemies to lovers; the straightforward marriage plot to the not so straightforward second-chance love. I am listening to Juliet Stevenson read Persuasion, and she is pure heaven as a narrator. It is a kind of crazy joy to walk through the park listening to her. I get the exact opposite feeling that I get from binge-watching a great Netflix show until 2 a.m. Time outdoors, plus time with Austen, is nourishing and inspiring in all the ways that feed me and inspire me.

https://www.audible.com/pd/Persuasion-Audiobook/B002V8L5OE?srsltid=AfmBOor-AcNAIZYBy60LO3EcH4KoXlTTyQ9aX3PuyHsRfntPmGwE7KY6

Art: Fabiola Jean-Louis

Octavia Butler once said, ‘You have to make your own worlds. You’ve got to write yourself in.’ To that point — and furthering the Jane Austen theme— the Haitian American artist, Fabiola Jean-Louis does just that with her series Rewriting History. It’s not her most recent work, but it remains one of my favourites. Take a peek at her website and you’ll see what I mean.

https://www.fabiolajeanlouis.com/rewriting-history-color-prints