During a conference with one of my writing professors to discuss one of my short stories, my professor said to me, “You know, you should write more black stories like this, it’s very in right now.” The story in question had no reference or markers to the character’s race. I can only assume that she assumed from the storyline (narrator’s attempts to search for his father who bailed on the family years ago) that she thought this was an “ethnic” story. Or maybe because I’m black that automatically I was writing about black characters/situations, whether I mentioned it or not. I have no idea really, but the experience has stuck with me, mainly because in seven years of writing workshops at Emerson (I went here for undergrad as well), I have been the only black person. I have been told that I am not the only black person in the grad program, but so far I think this is a myth. We are like unicorns, I guess. The only time I can honestly remember reading in a workshop a short story by a contemporary African-American author was when I brought one in. At the time I remember debating heavily the decision to bring it out of my fear and anxiety of being characterized the token black person in the class with the black stories. I was terrified that this would somehow distance me from the rest of the class. If a story I wrote with no mention of race was classified by my professor as an “ethnic story” then what would happen if I wrote a story in which the characters were black?
My experience mirrors something similar in Nam Le’s “Love and Honor and Pity and Pity and Sacrifice” from his debut collection The Boat. “Ethnic literature’s hot. And important too,” a writing instructor informs the narrator. “You have to ask yourself, what makes me stand out…Your background and life experience,” reiterating that he should write about Vietnamese characters and situations in order to become a literary success. This comment is juxtaposed with the differing opinions of his friends who believe most ethnic literature is reduced to being “full of descriptions of exotic food” and that “the characters are always flat, generic. As long as a Chinese writer writes about Chinese people, or a Peruvian writer about Peruvians, or a Russian writer about Russians…”
This last quote I found the most interesting out of the story and for me begs the question, why can’t Chinese writers write about Peruvians? Why can’t Russian writers write about Mexicans? If what we’re all doing is fiction, then is it possible to write about another race/culture accurately and genuinely? Surely, if James Baldwin can pull off writing about a racist white sheriff in “Going to Meet the Man” then the answer is yes, but why aren’t more writers doing it?
When I worked at a Borders in North Carolina, a couple of local black authors expressed disagreement with Borders’ shelving their books in a separate category. A few customers even came in and complained, viewing it as racist. The term for this practice of shelving books based on either an author’s race/ethnicity or on the content of the book is literary segregation. Why is only African-American fiction singled out? Why isn’t there a separate category for Jewish fiction and authors where they put all the books by Phillip Roth and Jonathan Safran Foer and Nathan Englander on a shelf? Or why don’t they just draw a line through the bookstore and have two headings for each section—“Books By and About White People” and “Everything Else”?
All of this bothers me not just as a writer but as a reader because it seems to suggest that these books would be of interest to no one else. Not only that, but the books in that section are so widely diverse in terms of content that the target demographic is not the same. Writers like Victor Lavalle and ZZ Packer and William Henry Lewis are shelved with books like Succulent: Chocolate Flava II by the ever-classy Zane. Obviously, the person looking for ZZ Packer’s forthcoming novel isn’t going to be the same as someone looking for Big Juicy Lips: Double Dippin’ 2 or Mama I’m in Love (…with a gangsta). To me, this is the equivalent of taking, say, The History of Love by Nicole Krauss, or The Girl’s Guide to Hunting and Fishing by Melissa Banks, and shelving it next to Danielle Steel and Debbie Macomber books. (While you’re at it, put authors like Kevin Brockmeier and Judy Budnitz and Aimee Bender in the Sci-Fi/Fantasy section.)
Where is the line? And does it appear drawn only when it comes to fiction by black writers?
I have no real answers to these questions, but they’ve been on my mind during my time at Emerson and I feel there should be some sort of dialogue about these issues. What are other people’s experiences writing so-called ethnic stories? What about the problems of writing outside one’s race/culture, or even class?
Awesome post, Tanya. This is a bit different, but I’m reminded of several Gary Lutz stories that don’t specify the narrator’s gender, making me assume it was male, only to be surprised when “the husband” is mentioned. I think he also plays with assumptions of male sexuality at times as well.
At Emerson I’ve only been assigned one short story by a contemporary African-American author–”Gold Coast” by James Alan McPherson. You raise a lot of interesting questions, one of them being “If what we’re all doing is fiction, then is it possible to write about another race/culture accurately and genuinely?” What do you think about What is the What by Eggers?
LaTanya–
“If a story I wrote with no mention of race was classified by my professor as an ‘ethnic story’ then what would happen if I wrote a story in which the characters were black?” That’s a fair question, and I’ve seen some painful answers in Percival Everett’s fiction and in interviews with some of the multiracial/ethnic authors that I like about how they’ve been marketed and treated.
As for personal experience – I wrote a story in which a main character was Asian-American. Because I didn’t mark him as such overtly, workshop members assumed he was white. I wrote a story with rich male main characters, and no one batted an eyelash about the fact that I’m a female writer who has never been rich. I wrote a story about a teenager who could teleport, and I can’t teleport, and people didn’t like a science fiction element in an otherwise mainstream fiction piece. I don’t mean to be flip with the last example, just to say that different workshop groups have different issues with different elements of “authenticity.”
I am sympathetic to your points; it’s a tricky business. The conversations in marketing/advertising/promotion departments and in mainstream reviews aren’t going to be nuanced. They come down to – how many copies can get sold and will anyone’s reputation take a hit for supporting it or trying to sell it. And writers very often make concessions to fit into molds so that they can pay the bills and/or get published.
The couple of local black authors is good people I think.
Two related, but distinct issues at play here: how publishers market and booksellers categorize fiction based on ethnicity, and how awareness of that status quo affects what would be writer-to-writer advice if it weren’t in an ultimately academic setting.
Part of the funny thing about Nam Le’s characters’ evaluation of ethnic literature is that their reductive opinion of it constitutes much of what post-Crusades (and pre-Crusades, and…) European merchants, priests, scholars, and soldiers wrote or sent back regarding cultures foreign to them: commodities or descriptions of commodities, socioeconomic, military, and/or religious customs. The latter they wrote almost universally from a superior point of view, organizing the world into a hierarchy with them at the top (beneath God and country, of course). In such cases as India, argue authors like Naipaul (in An Area of Darkness, written long enough ago that the situation of course has changed since, although for better or worse I’m in no position to say), European colonization of the places its representatives visited has led to many former (or present) colonies emulating their colonizers until in many ways the country ceases to be what it was, having refashioned itself according to how its colonizers would describe it. A growing unease, or at the very least caution (skipping over hundreds of years of examples–Maria Koundoura’s travel lit class spent last semester reading and discussing Montaigne, Freud, Herodatus, Lucian, Napal, Baudrillard, Polo, Pratt, Thoreaux, and a number of other travelers, critics, and psychologists, and in three months we’d barely scratched the topic), among modern writers of all ethnicities with writing foreignness and potentially flattening it (because ultimately what you’re describing doesn’t exist) is one of the birthpains of a globalized awareness. (This is what is known as an oversimplification.)
I’m saying your being weirded out sounds pretty fucking sane to me.
It follows that some shy away from this unease, and others will embrace it, such as it is, but I’ve been speaking on a very basic, individual-writer level. What I know of the publishing industry and booksellers in general is that large, mainstream institutions by definition do not alter their protocols based on nuances of a changing landscape. Their operations hinge on what sells: if enough people complain African-American (itself kind of an outdated term since modern black Americans aren’t necessarily from Africa) sections in bookstores, or egregious book marketing, began to yield poor sales, practices would change. That hasn’t happened, so things stay the same (all Borders do that, as do many Barnes & Nobles and even public libraries). Your professor’s comment was insensitive and kind of stupid, but not entirely off-base–many black authors find an audience by allowing this to endure (Tayari Jones even wrote an op-ed defending the practice), and the prof assumed (wrongly) that you wanted to follow suit. Instance of practical publishing advice promoting wrongheaded adherence to mainstream MO’s.
Re diversity among writers at Emerson: even disregarding EC’s more publicized racial issues, it’s still kind of funny to me that during orientation they said, Hey, guys! You’re outnumbered! Ooooo!
While I largely agree with your ideas, I have one word of caution. In the paragraph where you say: “Writers like Victor Lavalle and ZZ Packer and William Henry Lewis are shelved with books like Succulent: Chocolate Flava II by the ever-classy Zane.”
Be careful. I think that is possible to critique the shelving practices of chain bookstores without demeaning other writers. I understand your point, of course, but it just seems sort of mean. What has Zane done to deserve to be sneered at every time a black literary writer gets mad at Borders? It seems that everytime I read something on the subject of shelving, the writer takes the Santa Claus route, separating the “naughty” from the “nice.”
Also, I think that couching this argument in this way sort of suggests that being in the “regular” section is matter of merit. In the “regular” section, Morrison and Myers could easily be bedfellows.
@Peter, my article didn’t defend the shelving exactly. Rather, I am suggesting that the shelving is an easy target. Afterall, what is stopping readers from coming over to the Af-Am section to see what available? I believe that it’s naaive to think that the only thing standing between black writers and a larger marketshare is a matter of the shelving practices at Borders.
It is very important that readers ask themselves what is so alienating about a sign that says “African American Literature.” That’s where i think the issue is. The words “African American Literature” and black faces on cover art is not cryptonite.
In other words, I am arguing that the sections are a SYMPTOM rather than the problem.
Yes, I agree that the sections themselves shouldn’t matter–I should’ve worded that differently.
My bit about bottom line I meant to connect the fact of racial imbalance in some writing programs–about which I unfortunately have next to zero non-anecdotal information–to a professor advising a black writer to write what the prof thinks sells, which is that issue stated most simply. I happen to disagree with such advice on general principle.
Re unicorns, in the US Supreme Court case Parents Involved in Community Schools v. Seattle School Dist. No. 1 (PDF), the court found that “Although presently observed racial imbalance might result from past de jure segregation, racial imbalance can also result from any number of innocent private decisions…”
It’s unwise to apply the whole thing broadly, but the concurring opinion takes a measured look at the distinction between a simple fact of location (although EC’s faculty situation complicates it) and an unfairly engineered characteristic of association.
Hey Tanya,
I’m not going to speak to the root of this post, but just the matter of bookstore (especially chain bookstore) shelving.
There’s one thing that bookstores and publishers think about when it comes to retail categories, and that is what shelf do you put a book on to sell the most copies. Okay, there might be other things too, but they fade into the background compared to sales. They might not always be correct about where they place the books, and the bookstores and publishers certainly don’t always agree, let alone the author, but their reasons are simple. So I think we have to approach “literary segregation” with at least a little credulity, because the booksellers have created these categories in order to sell more copies of the books. All that being said, I think it’s stupid and probably doesn’t serve the bookstores as well as they think, but without any data to support the position I’m inclined to let the people who sell the books do the best job they can.
Girl, I needed this post. Do we all need to be James Baldwin? It’s like we got to write about the “man” beatin’ us down, or nothing at all.
I’m African-American, but I speak fluent Spanish. I lived in Colombia, Venezuela, Costa Rica and Spain. So even though I’m black, I’m probably more Latino than many Latinos in the U.S. And after many hear me speak Spanish, they refuse to believe I’m actually African American.
But as a result of my “bi-cultural” background, I was inspired to write novel from a Hispanic’s point of view. In short it’s about a soft-spoken, yet brilliant politics student from Mexico with low self-esteem. His name is Juan Rosamunda. Juan secretly hopes to one day become president of Mexico. But he suffers a lapse of judgment trying to help his mother avoid foreclosure. That serious “mistake” forces Juan to flea Mexico and escape to the U.S. where he works as an illegal immigrant. As he overcomes obstacles, Juan will not only redeem a nation, but learn to believe in himself and love himself and his country.
But I scratched the idea because I’m not Mexican. (Family members, while scrunching their noses and frowning as if they’d just gotten a whiff of dog crap, would generally say: “a Mexican?” “Yeah,” I’d say, wishing I’d never told them I was writing a novel. But having lived in Latin America I honestly felt the pulse of the Hispanic culture racing through my veins. But I, too, fear the novel would NOT be published, or accepted, written by a black man. And my family so busy being “hurt” and “insulted” that I’m not writing about a “brotha,” that they totally miss the point and misunderstand the power of creativity.
I would love to write a Holocaust novel – and yes there were blacks in Germany during that time (I can already see the barrage of questions now).
LaTanya, you teacher’s comments were ignorant. J.K. Rowlings can write about a boy wizard who can fly on a broom and talk to snakes, but you can’t write from a white person’s point of view?
In the halls of great literature is where I thought we were suppose to find the forward thinkers of our day. Creativity has no color. I do believe publishers know this, but I think they fear American buyers, like your teacher (who had no black writers on the syllabus) won’t take the time to read black literature. And sadly, I don’t have an answer to this problem.
BORDERS
I have mixed feelings on the Borders African-American section. I think the section just might bring in lots of money. And is it just me, or ARE WE SEEING MORE BLACKS IN THE BOOKSTORE OVER THE PAST COUPLE OF YEARS? I am sooo motivated by this trend and think Black readers, in general, are becoming more well-read as consumers.
Tayari Jones, I hear where you’re coming from. But I think the point the blogger is making is that the African-American section of the Borders does not seem to reflect Black America, certainly not to the extent the mainstream fiction section reflects white America is all its shades and gradations. In the black section at Borders, the majority of the books, while probably written well, I can guarantee you they are not on the level of a James Baldwin or a Toni Morrison. Also the way they deal with their subject matter is often off-putting to many. When I say Black America is changing, I mean more and more blacks are leaving the ghetto. There are black kids who’ve never seen a shoot out, and a man standing on the corner dealing drugs is about as foreign to them as driving a Cadillac through outer space. I can just see some stupid publisher saying: “Yeah, gimme’ some more soul in that book. Gimme’ some more bootylicious, some guns.”
We need more novels dealing with blacks in professional positions whose lives are NOT defined by the bills they can’t pay or limited by the check they hope comes in the mail this week.
We have a black Supreme Court Justice for crying out loud. Stephen Carter’s novels reflect this reality, at least.
So as more and more novels about educated blacks are written, many will see that the problems blacks experience don’t differ very much from the issues whites deal with.
Now on the flip side – there could be an opening for black literary writers, according to Toni Morrison.
Morrison said in an interview (this is heavily paraphrased) that someone (an editor/book reviewer) told her she should try to branch out and that would help her gain more “readers.” Morrison took the comment to mean that the editor/book reviewer was telling her to write White if she wanted to gain more success; write White – White subject matter, etc. But Morrison responded absolutely not! She said that she writes for blacks. I’m won’t lie, my eyes did water with pride at that comment. For a literary titan like Morrison to make that statement…just WOW! At that point I no longer felt that writing a black novel was equivalent to writing something that would be marginalized like a second class citizen.
Morrison also said: Black America is VIRGIN TERRITORY. I agree. But I believe we as black literary novelists can explore black issues in all their splendor, and lack thereof, but with the pen of a Tolstoy, and the craft of a Proust.
The subject matter, however, should be presented to appeal to a more professionally minded, educated, and critical-thinking black reader. When I go through the black section in Borders, the target audience for those books could easily be the neighborhood thugs and drug dealers. (Am I judging a book by its cover, you damn right!) When you have dust jackets that could easily be put on the cover of Hustler or Playboy without ANY alternation, how do you expect anyone to take what inside the book seriously.
So the black Americans have a long way to go as far as becoming well read. They need to see great figures in literature, in leading roles that don’t have anything to do with slavery or drugs. Or the subject matter, at least, needs to be treated with a skilled pen.
It’s hard to talk about this subject without putting down one group and uplifting the other. The truth is not easy to swallow at times.
Also current, Black-American literature is suffering from a lack of serious male novelists. Yes we have Colson Whitehead and a Victor LaValle – but are you kidding me? They hardly represent the vast spectrum of the Black-American reality. Sorry. We need more.
LaTanya great post. Let’s keep it going!