Q & A with Mahogany L. Browne

In her latest collection for young readers, A Bird in the Air Means We Can Still Breathe, writer, organizer, and educator Mahogany L. Browne centers on a myriad of New York City teens grappling with love, grief, survival, and loss during the height of the pandemic. Browne, who is the inaugural poet-in-residence at Lincoln Center and the writer behind YA novels in verse such as Vinyl Moon and Chlorine Sky, spoke with us about how having Covid impacted her storytelling, writing about coming of age in a pandemic, trusting Black girls to be this story’s guide, and the importance of centering love.

Elektra and Hyacinth are our entry points into this collection. Where did these characters come from?

They came from several parts—friends. I have a Jamaican comrade and a Trinidadian comrade, and listening to them talk to each other, it’s very similar to what you see represented in the text. However, they’re not young women; but I just remember having that feeling of relaxed interpretation that happens when thinking about folks who have migrated from a different space. That’s who I turned to for those specific characters.

Each of their sections are defined as a chorus. What does that particular role mean to you, and why did you want to assign it to these two characters, as opposed to other characters throughout the collection?

I use the chorus as witness, as observer, as narrator. I like the idea of it being young women, because those are the folks we forget most times, right? So I thought that would be an amazing empowerment tool: to say no, I trust these narrators. I trust these witnesses. They’re responding from a different filter, because no one cares if they’re watching. No one cares if they’re blocking it. No one trusts their voice, even though they see more than we think.

How did you capture the shifts in New York during the height of Covid? As a longtime New York resident, what observations helped shape this collection?

I was outside. I made myself be a part of the elements. I put my mask on and I sat in the parks, I went to the grocery stores. I stood in line and watched the bodega owners have their own community to ensure that everybody was taken care of within this larger community. I lived in New York City. I survived it. That’s why I was able to write about it in that hand-to-heart way. I was writing as it was happening. But even now, if I don’t read the text, I kind of forget the absolute maniacalness of that pandemic. It changed all of our lives. But most people are capable of putting these barricades around their memory so that they can survive the trauma of it. And so I made it a point to write every day within that first year of the pandemic, just to have some textured notes, to have something that was more than just memory from a news article or a picture I had. I caught Covid in March 2020 while walking outside, doing what the former mayor told us to do. I realized, I don’t know if I’m going to be okay after this, so let me write what I think is going to happen.

How did experiencing Covid firsthand offer a different perspective or lens into understanding the pandemic?

I wasn’t working from praxis; I wasn’t working from theory. I was responding as someone who survived the moment. And there was a different urgency to that. The urgency was no longer, “I’ve read this, and this is what it will take.” The urgency then became, “This is what the eucalyptus can do, what lavender can do.” What happens when you run out of these things while responding to the pandemic? And this is how the art is responding to the lack.

You have multiple POVs throughout this collection, grappling with troubles ranging from the loss of parents, grief of an ailing grandparent, to facing Covid within a correctional facility. Were there any characters whose experience were particularly challenging to write?

The hardest one to write would have been Yusef’s, the story of the young person incarcerated during Covid. A lot of that, knowing those details, actually came from a family member who was locked up during the pandemic. We had a direct line in finding out what was working, what was happening with the things that we were sending, and had it not been for them I would not have had the desire to tell that portion of the story. I wasn’t there, but when I was listening to him, I think I felt not only called to do it, but an obligation to tell this story, because we weren’t certain that he would get out alive. And thankfully, he did. So, there is this hope at the end.

But this book also touches on the beauty of life: one’s first heartbreak, the intimacy of a local bodega. Can you tell us about navigating that balance?

That was the truth of the matter. You had people who were still caring for their houses and their elders, but then you had young people who we asked to put their lives on hold. We asked them to hold off on homecoming, on graduation, on their first love, on parties. And I just kept thinking, as the stories poured out in the newspapers six months, nine months, a year later, all of those touchstones of their growth. Slowly but surely, a lot of those muscles atrophied, especially if they weren’t developed. And you have 16-year-olds who came out into the world as a 20-year-old with no first love. You had 17-year-olds who had to bury their grandparents or their parents, who became the breadwinners for their family by 21 and never had that first kiss, because they were so busy making sure that their families were safe. So it felt like a really hard balance, but it also felt like the only way forward was to consider the love that these young people did not know that they were giving up their shot at. It only felt right to really center the loss of a childhood.

There is an interesting line found towards the end of the book: “Love is not a vaccine. But when we take care of one another, man…. Love is the cure.” How does love show up in this story? Why is love a cure?

I think if we pose the question, “What do you know about love?” to any person, it always revolves around compassion, empathy, and service. [It shows up as] I’m going to hold this thing to the light, celebrate it. When you say “empathy”, a lot of people don’t know what that means. But if you say “love,” we have an access point. So that felt like the correct usage, because even if you say you’ve never felt it, you know what it is to give your love to something, to have a love of something, whether it’s returned to you or not. But also, I had to be mindful of saying that it isn’t a vaccine because so many of our loves were lost to the pandemic. I don’t want to be pithy.

The timing of this book is also notable. We’ve seen so many books grappling with Covid. What does it mean to be releasing this book now? Do you hope it helps us better understand the longer impact of what it meant to come of age during the pandemic?

I think it’s important that it’s coming out now. For one, it’s the five-year anniversary of Covid’s introduction to the world. And two, it’s not over. There are still traces of Covid. I lost my sister to it. She had heart disease, and it is not lost on me that her disease was exacerbated by the pandemic. So the story is important for me, because you still have folks who are living with the residue of it. We have young people who are now adults. We never said thank you for your service. That same way we say thank you for your service to the military, we should be saying thank you [to young people] for giving up these incredibly important parts of your youth. Thank you for pausing your growth, for pausing that moment for the betterment of your countries, your people. I think those go hand in hand for me.

A Bird in the Air Means We Can Still Breathe by Mahogany L. Browne. Crown, $19.99 Mar. 11 ISBN 978-0-593-48647-4