Nightcrawling

Leila Mottley

Bloomsbury

Otago Daily Times, June 25th 2022

The suburbs of East Oakland are not an easy place to be poor or black, as Leila Mottley’s stunning debut novel makes abundantly clear. With her father dead, her mother on remand, and her older brother lost in dreams of rap stardom, it falls on seventeen-year-old Kiara to keep the remnants of her family together and to care for the 9-year-old son of her addict neighbour. Unable to find work, she resorts to prostitution to scrape together the money for rent and food, only to be caught by police while being raped by one of her customers. As an alternative to arrest, they invite her to ‘entertain’ them, and with no choice but to comply, Kiara joins the ranks of women (including other underage girls) regularly servicing the OPD. But it is not until she becomes a key witness for the prosecution of the officers involved that the last vestiges of her life unravel.

Although based on real events and grounded in the reality of the African American experience, Mottley refuses to pander to signifying. Kiara’s voice has a beauty and rhythm that captures the cadences of her community without resorting to stereotypes of ‘Black’ language, and she never thinks of or refers to herself as such, since this is as much a part of her as her heartbeat or breath. The novel’s portrayal of the structural racism and exploitation that keep Kiara and those like her trapped in a web of poverty and abuse, “running from things you can’t run from and trying to forget that we were just babies who wanted to skate and walk around with no shoes” is similarly unflinching. But what makes Kiara’s story especially heartbreaking (and hopeful) is her refusal to compromise even though she has been betrayed or abandoned by everybody who ought to have protected her, and that in her world, there is no such thing as justice. She is determined to carry her own burdens, take control of her life, and protect those she loves: “to make this city ours again…[get] an empire of our bodies restored”. Whether this is actually possible or she is more like a fellow prostitute who is not “a woman walking free…[but] a woman who survives, even if that survival means tricking herself into believing this world is something it is not” is unclear, but I desperately hope it is the former