Alison Mills Newman’s sensual autobiographical novel “Francisco,” long out of print, offers a portrait of the artist as a young Black woman trying to find a way back to herself.
This sensual and languorous autobiographical novel by Alison Mills Newman is a portrait of the artist as a young Black woman trying to find a way back to herself: she is searching for an opening through which her capacities might be unloosened and where her talents will be actualized in accordance with her own designs. When we encounter the unnamed narrator, she has turned her back on worldly metrics of success.
In this fugue state, she meets Francisco. The novel reads like a series of journal entries about the narrator’s infatuation and love affair with Francisco. While Francisco lives and breathes his work, the protagonist tries to find hers. Others call her lazy and unmotivated, accuse her of wasting her time; her father implores her to go to college and do something with her life. She appoints herself as muse.
If the narrator is a muse of sorts, she is a complex one. She wants to do more than stand behind her man, even as she accepts that she takes second place after his commitment to his art. She knows the devotion and the concentration required to make art. There are rare glimpses of her in this state of dedicated creation regarding her music.
The story is dispersed across parties, film screenings, concerts, small gatherings, hanging with friends, and lots of lovemaking on sofas and in borrowed bedrooms. It is funny and irreverent: “we talked about revolutionists. i hate revolutionists . . . they all turn out to be movie stars in this country anyway”; “i couldn’t think of no black famous man i wanted to fuck. once i wanted to fuck huey newton when i was sixteen, but not no more.
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