As the novel We Are a Haunting opens, Audrey is headed to eviction court. Her infraction: overdue rent for a public-housing apartment where repairs are also overdue. Still, the rent keeps increasing. A neighborhood fish fry could easily cover what she owes. But why take money from other poor people to give it to a landlord, she wonders. “Normal people don’t have to transcend their surroundings,” she thinks to herself.

Not to mention that there is a ghost living in the home she is set to be evicted from.

Eviction is a quotidian kind of bureaucratic violence. But the supernatural jostles with the ordinary in We Are a Haunting, a much-anticipated debut novel from the Mississippi-by-way-of-New York author Tyriek White. As the reader travels in time with Audrey, her daughter and her grandson, spirits keep returning or flat-out refuse to leave. A woman in a nightgown watches over her young son outside a Brooklyn strip mall. Audrey’s lover parks himself in a chair in her apartment as if he hadn’t left her – or died – long before. Nineteenth-century ghosts look for freedom. Audrey can see spirits, a sometimes unwelcome ability she passed on to her daughter, Key.

Black women like Audrey have long been the most likely tenants to face eviction in the US. And indeed dislocation is the norm for the characters in White’s saga of an African American family in New York City. In their own way, each feels stuck yet is moving, often against their will. Eviction, school expulsion, job searches and loss, desire to experience life and art, and finally death scatter them. When Key loses her battle with cancer, that sets them adrift; grief creates its own mini-diasporas.

Her son, Colly, tries to find his way. Neighbors invite him to sleepovers or give him bowls of beef-and-pumpkin stew when his mourning father wanders. Contrary to dominant narratives about the supposed dysfunction of the “projects”, their care proves the hyperconnectivity of the hood.

The Guardian talked to White, 32, from his home in Oxford, Mississippi, where he completed an MFA. We Are a Haunting is his first book. It’s made a splash, earning spots on “must-read” lists, a star in Publishers Weekly and a Kirkus review that praised its ambition “to capture and to celebrate not just these characters, this family, but the community and the city they emerge from, serve, and love”.

Can you talk to me about how where you’ve lived shaped your life and maybe this book?

The book is very much rooted, and to keep it a hundred, in that I wanted to write a story about my neighborhood. It’s very particular: The Boulevard Houses, New York, Brooklyn. And [it’s also rooted in] that idea that what you write, however specific it is, can be universal.

In the United States, we have so many narratives about public housing and the people who live in it – and few of them are good. How did you engage with those narratives without letting them determine what the book would be?

Typically, these spaces are depicted with a lot of trauma porn or stereotypes … I wanted to be honest about what I’ve been through [including the death of his grandmother] and what so many others have been through.

But how does one exist more deeply than the traumas or victimhood? … I wanted to hopefully depict people who aren’t flat characters that things just kind of happen to, but are autonomous, who are grounded, and at the same time knocked down by normal realities.

In my imagination, I’ve always had this mystical element in my thinking about an apartment building or a tenement. It always just occupied this space for me. Like being transported, going downstairs and that floor smelling like whatever is cooking that night, whoever’s throwing down that night. [That smell] takes over the whole floor. Then you go to the next floor, it smells completely different. You’re taken to a different Caribbean island, down south.

So even trying to form some sort of narrative or plot, it was hard – because how can I tell this story without telling all the stories?

And the story involves so much: the Great Migration and a kind of future space where my [housing] project is now half-owned by a private realty group.

It was a daring move to start your first chapter with the line, “There are mostly women in housing court” because it’s butting right against ideas epitomized in the Moynihan report of 1965, which argued that there was a crisis in the Black family, largely caused by woman-headed households. Why the women?

You don’t want to make a [blanket] statement about a group of people like “the women”. But it’s mostly women in housing court. That’s a fact. They’re mostly women caring for others. Oftentimes, my mother was the primary breadwinner. She put a roof over my head.

… The men in my life, the dudes in my life were engaged. My dad, he wasn’t NOT working. He was a construction worker at the time, but before that, he was in the streets. I was thinking about who was keeping the house intact.

… While his dad was out of the house a lot, and that absence felt, I was interested in what [happens] if you take a woman out of that house, leaving him to fend for himself.

There’s a moment in the book, where a repairman shows up to fix something in an apartment. But the request is a decade old.

That has happened. You can [easily] write about the supernatural and the surreal [in public housing]. You don’t even have to lie because the shit they do to us is enough.

There’s so much life and death in this book, often conveyed by water imagery. There are references to Igbo Landing, when captive Africans took over a slave ship and then committed mass suicide by jumping into the ocean off St Simons Island, Georgia, in 1803. Your characters are literally drenched in history and drowning in grief.

So just to describe my community or my neighborhood, right? So the south side is essentially coastlines, a tidal estuary. Then, it opens up into a bay, which opens up into the Atlantic Ocean. Spatially, I think it was important to trouble what you think of when you think of a hood or a project. I use nature to upend the typical urban decay kind of vibe that you get from a lot of [other accounts of public housing].

Water was important in thinking about space itself, in terms of language and metaphor. It’s hard to get us [as Black writers] to stop using the ocean to think about our connections to diaspora or our histories. You literally can’t because it’s so wrapped up in how we got here, where we stay.

So much of our myth making, the folklore, is entrenched in the ocean, in water. Think about Song of Solomon and its story of the tribe of flying Africans, or stories of the enslaved who swam back to Africa or walked back to Africa on the ocean floor.

I’m glad you brought up Toni Morrison because she’s in this book, which because your characters are readers, is a syllabus of Black literature. You quote Sula without telling us you’re doing it – if you know, you know.

I think she’s the greatest American writer. You can’t tell me different.

I’m not trying to!

But going back to a previous question, how I was writing the women in this story. A lot of it was: who does it the best? [laughs]. A lot of it was rooted in just my aunties, all of that, but also Morrison, theory by Barbara Christian, Paule Marshall. The kind of writers who just would not be writing any old thing, but pointing to how women think about themselves, how people think about themselves in a context that’s systematically held hostage.

Looking at those narratives, even Jazz by Toni Morrison, in which the speaker is sort of the city, [influenced the book]. The way she talks about the city, you can’t beat it. Yeah, Toni’s all over this.

How are you dealing with reception to the book?

I’ve been questioned about why would I write about this community, by several people in the book industry. Or encountered surprise about it. Whatever they write these literary books about these days, this is not about those places or those rooms. These people, these characters, these spaces are worthy of literature, worthy of art, worthy of the high-brow.