You describe THE YELLOW HOUSE as being about geography and belonging, but also about being “unmapped,” which has various layers of meaning. Can you elaborate on these multiple layers?
I have long been interested in the ways in which maps privilege certain narratives, often to the exclusion of others. Mapmaking, as I see it, is a position of power. To set the landmarks of a place feels not dissimilar from photography in that maps direct our eye, tell us where to focus. But where I like to look is toward the places omitted from the widely disseminated map, in the direction of those people who are often deemed inconsequential, who are often beyond the map’s edges. In this book, I see myself as the mapmaker, drawing out our world, expanding the map of New Orleans to include my family’s experience.
My book begins with the house, but it expands to be about the city of New Orleans and, ultimately, America. Which is partly why I framed the narrative structure in “movements.” Symphonies are typically composed of four movements, each a self-contained world varying in feeling, pace, and tone, but most powerful when taken as a whole. My work is about physical movement, too—migrations and displacements, departures from and returns to the places we inherit and thus belong to, whether or not we want to claim them.