In Whisper to a Scream, Raina feels safer in her ASMR videos. In Suicide, Watch, Jilly leans on her online Facebook community as she drops hints of her coming suicide. It’s a collection of short stories centering on the black experience, as it relates to the individual, with environmental and social factors acting as the intrusion, as opposed to the catalyst, to their overall well-being. The real heads, of course, as this brilliant collection of word paintings displays, can be on anybody’s bodies. In Heads of the Colored People, we see just how dynamic relationships can be, both in person and digitally. Heads of the Colored People is most certainly that type of book.
Thompson-Spires, thankfully, depicts a wide range of people, not seeking either overwhelmingly positive or negative images of a race but capturing diversity - reality - in much of its multifarious beauty and terror. Not all of Thompson-Spires’s stories are overtly satirical, and they become progressively more serious as the collection progresses, but a thread of outrageous, glaring self-awareness runs through the collection, granting even many of the more severe tales a tone of dark comedy.
Thompson-Spires’s metafictional satires, oriented around questions of blackness, join a particular tradition of African-American fiction, recalling the sardonic absurdism of Everett’s Erasure and Paul Beatty’s The Sellout, among others. Clever, cruel, hilarious, heartbreaking, and at times simply ingenious, Thompson-Spires’s experimental collection poses a simple, yet obviously not-simple, question: what does it mean to be a black American in this day and age?.
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