whatever happened to interracial love? by Kathleen Collins

Times lIterary Supplement 19 July 2017

Kathleen Collins’s (1942–88) short stories, written in the 1960s and 70s, were unpublished in her lifetime. Alice Walker, then an editor at Ms. magazine, wrote Collins a generous rejection note but it took a posthumous screening of Collins’s film Losing Interest last year, organized by her daughter, for her prose to reach an audience.

This first published collection of stories offers an important perspective on themes of racial identity, sexual freedom and erotic fulfilment. One can’t help but think, however, that some of the stories might have been better left undiscovered. Collins has an impressionistic style and a non-linear approach to narrative. In the final story of the collection, “Dead Memories . . . Dead Dreams”, for example, this makes the tale – about a black girl feeling distanced from her lighter-skinned maternal relatives (“How did I get here, skin too dark, hair mixed up?”) – powerfully elegiac, but in other instances, meaning threatens to get lost amid Collins’s lyricism.

Collins made, but did not feature in, porn films with her husband, in order to raise money for other projects. The influence of this undertaking seeps into the stories which are often located on film sets and, even more frequently, feature a refreshingly frank degree of sexual yearning. In “Interiors”, a woman describes how “a cold longing weighted itself between my legs”. The same woman also indicates the limits of free love, as she is haunted by images of her partner “unbuttoning [him]self in front of a diverse sampling of salesgirls, waitresses, go-go dancers, and deaconesses”.

In the title story, Collins ironically reflects on the theme of Sidney Poitier’s film Guess Who’s Coming to Dinner (1967): the narrator comments “Everyone who is anyone will find at least one ‘negro’ to bring along home for dinner”. Later on, Collins states that “Race was not a factor. Sexual fulfilment is colorblind”, but interracial love often feels like a battleground in these stories.

It is a fear of isolation that links these stories; as the narrator of “Broken Spirit” says of her lover: “Only once did I feel we broke all the way through to each other”. 

This review first appeared in the Times Literary Supplement