The final assignment for my upper-division modern British literature course (taught at the University of Minnesota Duluth in Fall 2023) was to ask a question about a text from our syllabus and answer it in a format and medium of the student’s choosing. Beginning with Zadie Smith’s 2012 novel NW, John Leppik asked the question: “How does passing relate to Natalie/Keisha’s identity?” Keisha is one of the book’s protagonists—a Black woman from London who renames herself Natalie. John chose to explore this question by putting Natalie/Keisha into dialogue with Clare, a character from American author Nella Larsen’s Passing (1925). As John explained in his preface to the project, he “chose Clare from Passing since she is also ‘successful’ in passing in her story, up until the point where she’s found out. [Clare and Natalie/Keisha] have similar but significantly different perspectives, being from different time periods and different continents.”
To create a dialogue between these fictional characters, John chose to imagine the women meeting in a video game world modeled on a game called Disco Elysium. (A primer for Disco Elysium is included below.) As John explains, “I chose Disco Elysium for my style because the game has an extremely introspective point of view with regards to the player character, Harry Du Bois. Since he has different parts of his mind talking to himself constantly in the form of skills, it means that the player has the ability to see not just his thought process, but how different parts of his thought process interact.”
The result of this creative blending of literary and digital worlds is a fascinating conversation between fictional characters from different nations and time periods whose experiences with passing are mutually illuminating.
Here is John Leppik’s primer for the game Disco Elysium.
And here is John’s creative essay, “NW Elysium.”
Learn more about the author on our 2024 Contributors page.
MEJ 