She travels to Portland for a meeting and meets Peter, and is instantly attracted to him. She finds the work the opposite of inspiring as she witnesses the bureaucracy and lack of compassion at her work. She graduates and moves to New York to work at an agency dedicated to AIDS research. Thandi is crushed by her mother’s death and grows distant from her father. When Thandi’s mother dies, she leaves Thandi a sum of money that allows her to return to school. Thandi puts all of her energy into doing what she can for her mother as she grows increasingly sick. Thandi learns that her mother has been diagnosed with cancer and leaves school to care for her. They go to abort the child without telling him. After a brief breakup with Frank, Aminah tells Thandi that she is pregnant.

Thandi meets a boy named Dean and falls in love with him, but he eventually begins dating a white girl, crushing Thandi. In college, Thandi tries to have relationships with other black women but finds that her light skin and good looks always get in the way, as they come to resent the attention she receives.

Thandi has one very good friend, a girl named Aminah who dates a wealthy white boy named Frank. Thandi’s mother tells her that she will always have trouble with other black women because of her light skin, and encourages her to straighten her hair and date only black men. Thandi recalls how terrified she was of visiting her relatives in South Africa, fearing the violence there.Īs a light-skinned black woman in Pennsylvania, Thandi struggles, caught between two worlds. They returned to America together he became a professor, she a nurse. Thandi’s mother met her father when he volunteered to work in Botswana. Her mother’s family was very wealthy, and South Africa was a pleasant place for them the violence of Apartheid did not affect them. Thandi is American, the daughter of a dark-skinned African-American man and a light-skinned South African woman. Thandi then recounts how her parents met. She has a dinner of Chinese takeout with her father, but when she thinks about her mother (the food reminds her of the meals her mother will no longer make her) and the possibility of losing her father as well, she becomes sick. The novel begins with a brief prologue set after Thandi’s mother has passed. Clemmons employs a variety of experimental techniques, telling the story without a traditional narrative and instead conveying events and emotions through short vignettes, snatches of dialog, and song lyrics. Based on Clemmons’s own experiences, the novel tells the story of a young woman whose mother is diagnosed with breast cancer, which changes her life in a variety of negative ways. What We Lose is a novel by Zinzi Clemmons, published in 2017.

What we lose zinzi