In Tackling Being Black, Trans, and Gentrifying Brooklyn Hannaham has Crafted New Great American Novel
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Out writer and visual artist James Hannaham has written one of the new great American novels in Didn’t Nobody Give a Shit What Happened to Carlotta, out now.
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It’s one of those magical narratives that seems both contemporary and prescient without feeling bloated or pedantic.
It’s also fucking unbelievably hysterical.
The plot and synopsis are pure genius but could’ve easily overstayed its welcome: “Carlotta Mercedes has been misunderstood her entire life. When she was pulled into a robbery gone wrong, she still went by the name she’d grown up with in Fort Greene, Brooklyn—before it gentrified. But not long after her conviction, she took the name Carlotta and began to live as a woman, an embrace of selfhood that prison authorities rejected, keeping Carlotta trapped in an all-male cell block, abused by both inmates and guards, and often placed in solitary.”
“In her fifth appearance before the parole board, Carlotta is at last granted conditional freedom and returns to a much-changed New York City. Over a whirlwind Fourth of July weekend, she struggles to reconcile with the son she left behind, to reunite with a family reluctant to accept her true identity, and to avoid any minor parole infraction that might get her consigned back to lockup.”
Written with the same astonishing verve of Delicious Foods, which dazzled critics and readers alike, Didn’t Nobody Give a Shit What Happened to Carlotta sweeps the reader through seemingly every street of Brooklyn, much as Joyce’s Ulysses does through Dublin. The novel sings with brio and ambition, delivering a fantastically entertaining read and a cast of unforgettable characters even as it challenges us to confront the glaring injustices of a prison system that continues to punish people long after their time has been served.
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In an interview with Pen, Hannaham speaks directly to the humor in the book stems from him “always been trying to be funny, maybe since birth.”
Among his influences he cites: “Monty Python, Richard Pryor, Gershon Legman, Franklin Ajaye, Marsha Warfield—and OG SNL Head Writer Michael O’Donohue in particular, because of his faith in dangerous humor and his hatred of the false dichotomy between comedy and tragedy.”
Speaking to research he did, Hannnaham says, “technically, the research started when I was a child, and my grandmother and aunts and cousins lived in a brownstone in Fort Greene that my grandfather bought in the 1950s (some of my cousins still live there). The research I did consciously for this book started a bit later; the word “process” makes it sound a lot more organized than it ever was. Focused, yes, but organized, not at all. I sometimes do research in the middle of writing a sentence. I mean, the Interwebs is right there, man! I read a boatload of books, interviewed people, read more books, went to websites, downloaded pamphlets, visited Colómbia, volunteered with organizations, read more books, watched movies, saw plays, read poems—what didn’t I do? Even all the gay clubbing I did in the 90s turned out to be research for this book. It’s like, I have no word for research. Life is research. I use what’s at hand. But I had always intended to show off some of my institutional knowledge of the New York Metro area with this book, because books about New York City are so overdone. But they don’t always acknowledge the kind of semi-demented street life I wanted to indulge.”
Speaking to the fact that much of the novel details the gentrification of Brooklyn over the decades, he’s asked what gets lost in the process. “I wouldn’t hate gentrification as much if it could just freeze at that moment when there are enough higher income people (not all of them white, thank you, I’m not going to fall into that trap) for a pleasant mix of people where POC are still in the majority, the supermarkets improve (sometimes the prices in low-income areas aren’t any lower than the ones in the high-income supermarkets, and that feels like a variety of crime), a fancy wine store and a not-fancy one can coexist, and the West Indian restaurant owners haven’t fled. But the housing market is totally rapacious and unfortunately the dynamics of our country mean that there’s a kind of white flashover at a certain point. For Fort Greene, Black homeownership did slow that to some extent, but that flashover already happened at least 20 years ago. Now we’ve got these gigantic unaffordable high-rises filled with the white folks who wear the yellow sweaters on their shoulders, and the only new restaurants that survive are Italian ‘cause some people who shall remain nameless can’t deal with spicy, exotic cuisines. Or people.”
The book is itself a piece of art as Interview magazine notes: “the writer invited artist Kalup Linzy to create a collage that represents the character of Carlotta Mercedes (a tough, wise, misunderstood trans woman, portrayed in various photos by Linzy) who has been paroled from a long stint in a men’s prison and returns to her greatly changed Brooklyn neighborhood to try to sew her life together again.
Hannaham and Linzy met a decade ago in the New York art world, and forged a friendship during their overlapping stays at MacDowell artists’ colony in New Hampshire in 2017. As a creative dynamo, Hannaham is the real deal, cocreating the pioneering performance group Elevator Repair Service in the early 1990s, and working in art, music, theater, and journalism before writing two acclaimed novels.
Didn’t Nobody Give a Shit What Happened to Carlotta is on sale now.
