EDITORS' NOTE: This comment is intended to accompany Mr. Copperman's story, "It," which appeared first, along with this essay, in Copper Nickel 14. You may read it here.
A few months ago, an editor at a small literary magazine offered a polite and encouraging email rejection of a story of mine titled, "Pipe." A child-narrated, first-person story, the piece used a systematic approach to black Delta dialect, not reproducing AAVE (African American Vernacular English) so much as depicting a particular boy speaking it--which is to say, the story had a distinct voice. The editor wrote that as a black writer she was uncomfortable with the story's representation of race, as much as she recognized the power of the piece and the quality of the craft that created it. I wasn't surprised at the response (though I hadn't encountered that precise objection), for I've grown accustomed to editors responding skittishly, working in questions about my own racial background, my childhood and past experience, how my dialect work had been received elsewhere. Some asked why these children spoke "black"--had I considered that I am reinscribing stereotypes? Was this dialect really correct? Wasn't this child's mother's drug use a bit stereotypical? Wasn't this black character's family a bit too unconventional--a middle class black family in the Mississippi Delta, really? I have received dozens of personal rejection letters in my dialect work lauding my "risk with voice," originality, or the vividness of a character, before concluding that, "We don't really publish this sort of thing," or as one editor said, "We are a magazine in the rural midwest and do not do African-American stories."
By contrast, stories and essays written from a point of view closer to my own, a multiracial Asian who taught fourth grade in the rural black public schools of the Mississippi Delta, elicit a different set of questions: Why does this teacher need such a foreign sounding name? Why doesn't he talk more about his own culture? Couldn't I just make the protagonist white? Why isn't the protagonist's race a bigger deal--and what exactly am I trying to say about race in America? As a Japanese-Hawaiian Russo-Polish Jew writing a novel about a naïve, idealistic, young, multiethnic overachiever who tries to save black children from severe poverty in the Mississippi Delta, I am original, which is to say, I am an orphan. On the one hand, I am that audacious non-black author who would write about the black South, a place whose people have been reduced to a series of familiar gestures and stereotypes by Hollywood and the white authors who wrote "great Southern books." At the same time, I am utterly "other," the multiracial everyman who might represent the melting pot but is of no clear people or region or discrete history, and so is rootless, isolated, without an audience who might be compelled by identity politics to seek their own experience. I am not black. I am not white. I am not Southern. I am impure and unruly, and evidently belong--nowhere.
Last year, the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill hosted a seminar on the "Classical Southern Novel," attempting to get at "what it means to be Southern." Their focus was on four primary texts: Harper Lee's To Kill A Mockingbird, Robert Penn Warren's All The King's Men, Eudora Welty's The Optimist's Daughter, and Margaret Mitchell's Gone With the Wind. A News and Observer report about the event noted: "Though the subject of race is omnipresent in most Southern classics, none of the works discussed Friday were written by blacks. There were few, if any, blacks in attendance at the event at the UNC Center for School Leadership Development." The report went on discuss confusion among seminar participants as to whether Ralph Ellison's Invisible Man qualified as Southern, since Mr. Ellison was a native of Oklahoma and only a part of the novel takes place in the South. The attendees were unsure what criteria qualified an author as Southern (must a writer be born in the South, have had a certain experience of the South, i.e., Jean Toomer's Cane, or simply write about the South?), but they were clear about what they were comfortable with--books by whites that considered race from a white point of view. They made their choices before the conference, had already decided whose voices would be heard, and who was excluded. They wanted a comfortable space to conduct a comfortable and familiar discussion. Little surprise few black intellectuals or writers were interested in the conversation.
These questions of race and authorship arise in an America shifting in demographics and attitudes--changes that present less like progress than chaos and unrest. Two years ago, a majority of Americans were willing to consider Mr. Obama on the basis of merit alone. The vote reflected an invisible, generational shift in attitudes toward race, as children growing up in an MTV-internet age of hip-hop stars and sports heroes entered adulthood still wanting to be like Mike. These two years have reversed that seeming progress, the birthers, deathers, and town-hallers rallying around Glenn Beck, bearing guns and inveighing against the "Kenyon" President Obama. After the Henry Louis Gates dustup and the Tea Party's persistent popularity, after the Shirley Sherrod incident, the construct of a post-racial America requires revision. History hasn't been altered; we do not live in a golden age of racial harmony. We are limited by the past. Having a black man in the White House with a Nobel Peace Prize doesn't alter the immediate conditions of black poverty anymore than it convinces the English Faculty of UNC-Chapel Hill to revise their conception of "Southern" to include the black experience.
In fact, we occupy a moment of cultural backlash--old battles and divisions have been revived, recast in new terms. "Socialist" and "African" are the new "nigger"; the talk-radio pundits of the right tell us that Mr. Obama is a threat because of his racism against white people, that much-marginalized group; the new nostalgia is not for the days of segregation or slavery, but as the 9/12ers tell us, for the day after 9/11, when we were united by fear and grief and a President who talked to a God who told him to turn with righteous fury on anyone he could brand an enemy. It is in this climate, feeling we ought to be "post-racial" and finding ourselves instead embroiled in discord and dispute, that I locate this discussion of authorial authority in race and regionality. My initial premise is simple: current literary attitudes toward race, regionality, and authorship are fundamentally regressive, gazing into the past or passively mirroring the dissonance of the moment.
Black writers today are frequently encouraged to write about past injustices--the "reading public" loves Toni Morrison, enjoys the gentle multicultural feel-goodism of Maya Angelou, and will give the National Book Award to Edward P. Jones for a properly historical novel like The Known World (while paying little mind to his contemporary work, like Lost in the City). Oprah champions Zora Neale Hurston as if she was the first to find her. At the same time, the winds have turned against Jeremiah Wright and Jesse Jackson and anything that reeks of the experience of contemporary poor black people, favoring uplifting, transcendent rhetoric about post-raciality, preferably delivered by a black man who speaks the language of white America. Blacks who live like upper-class whites are in: this is the year of Colson Whitehead. Class is supposed to be the new race. Among black writers who would say something else, panic sets in--and so the black experience beyond that of an Obama or Whitehead becomes ever more outré and insular, writers trading missives in Callaloo, fighting bitterly over the few "ethnic" slots in major journals. Nobody will take a chance on a book that doesn't fit into an established category, and everyone on every side would tear that book to pieces out of self-interest, misunderstanding, identity politics or ideological opposition. Things close down, fracture and fragment. Little is possible. Less is tried.
Authority is elusive, contingent on factors as slippery as experience and observation. Here's how Jim Shepard frames the problem:
The first worry writers have ... has to do with the issue of authority: as in, where do I get off writing about that? Well, here's the good and the bad news: where do you get off writing about anything? Where do you get off writing about someone of a different gender? A different person? Where do you get off writing about yourself, from twenty years ago? Writers shouldn't lose sight of the essential chutzpah involved in trying to imagine any other kind of sensibility.
Of course, Mr. Shepard isn't speaking directly about race--but he ought to be, because the questions are essentially the same: how does anyone have the chutzpah at all? Who can fictionalize history they didn't live through? How can a woman presume to write from the point of view of a man, let alone vice versa? When applied to race, these questions are functionally the same. Does Mr. Obama, for example, know anything of the lives of black children who live in rural poverty in Mississippi, as different as his life has been from that experience? Do I know of the experience of a Jewish immigrant or practicing Jew, or even what it means to be a Japanese-Hawaiian in Hawaii, raised as I was in Oregon? What gives anyone the right to claim the authority to write at all?
I accept Flannery O'Connor's dictum that conviction without experience makes for harshness. Regarding black fourth graders in Indianola, Mississippi, who speak in the general Delta idiom with the AAVE of black communities in that region, I seek only to write their particular experience. For the two years I taught in Indianola, I spent eight-to-ten hours a day, five days a week, listening to them tell their stories and share the particulars of their lives in and out of the classroom. I don't claim to know the lives of "black" people, or even of "black" adults in the Delta, but I know the kids I taught at Carver Upper Elementary. I know their voices, their need, the texture of their daily lives, better than I know of lives of any "white" person of any class in any region.
After the rejection by the black editor, I fought back, insisting she erred in rejecting my story--if the work failed aesthetically or formally, that was fine, but race should be left out of it: on the written page, I argued, craft constitutes representation. The editor wrote back to explain that she was open to stories including dialect that depicted a broad range of the black experience, that "anyone could write about anything." I liked the position, but felt it was intended to pacify more than anything--once raised, the question of race and authority lingers. Roxane Gay, a black writer, wrote a piece for Luna Park concerning her own struggle with race and the literary:
When I do write about race, I don't write the typical black narrative. Sometimes, I write about Haiti (because I'm Haitian American) and sometimes I write about the black boarding school experience and the experience of being black in academia because that's my black narrative... I often avoid writing about race because people seem to only want to read about race when it satisfies their shallow expectations. This is a frustration I am certain is common to all writers of color. There is a lot of unwillingness to acknowledge the multiplicities of experience.
There, in a couple lines, is the entire quandary: the desire from readers and critics for the "typical black narrative" that will satisfy expectations, and the complexity of authenticity--Ms. Gay could on the basis of phenotype make an easier claim to authority in my dialect material than I could, even though it is thoroughly out of her actual experience. The market eschews the particular for the representative, the actually "authentic" for the familiar.
I don't suggest that we should open the gates, and encourage anyone to write and talk black, that it should ever be appropriate to fetishize the black experience and AAVE dialect as entertainment. But I think there's a serious risk in the position I've encountered at panels at the Association of Writers and Writing Programs Conference, where I once heard a well-published black writer make fun of a white graduate student for asking a question about the speech of a minor character in their novel-in-progress before suggesting that no writer should ever represent a black person except a black person like . . . herself. This declaration was met with thunderous applause. Such a position segregates black literature, is self-marginalizing. It refuses to allow representation to be particular and complex. It divides on the basis of past division, insists on a demarcation predicated on a construction of identity that is unresponsive to the present. In reacting against the status quo, it inadvertantly affirms it.
The status quo afflicts me, then, from both sides, and I fear that because of its representation of race, my novel will never gain consideration. Black writers want a wider consideration of their own multiple backgrounds, but cling to the limited opportunities available. Editors are eager for familiar constructions of race, narratives that readers can recognize and so distance themselves from--they are concerned with the commercial, which is their right. My plight is a shame not because I'm a writer of earthshaking merit, but because my work complicates the question of narrative authority and race in ways that may be transgressive, but are also substantive. My protagonist wants to tell a story about the poor black Southern children he delivers to safety. Instead, he does more harm than good, and finds that rather than solipsistically controlling these children's stories, he is complicit in their suffering. The dialect chapters ironize the teacher's story and complicate his narrative authority by revealing the limitation of what he knows. They render what Roxane Gay called a "multiplicity of experience" to make the world of the story larger, to suggest that narrative is myriad, and so necessarily inadequate--only overlap, refraction, and absence indicate the whole.
Narrative's purpose is not to mediate or recreate or make moral. Flannery O'Connor famously said in a letter to Betty Hester, "[M]ore than ever now, it seems the Kingdom of Heaven must be taken by violence, or not at all." In "A Good Man is Hard to Find," readers are presented with a terrible, bland, obnoxious family that they can't help but wish would be taken out and shot... and so we become complicit when they are, altered by their suffering just as The Misfit is: we participate in it and cannot escape our own involvement. The story includes us by implicating us in its world--it is not that we see the truth about the world in the story, but that the story forces us to see ourselves. Every story fails in representation if it is concerned with being representative. Every narrative reinscribes the problematic past in terms of the present. Even writing attempted humbly, with a mastery of craft and an excess of lived experience, cannot be equal to the world. The aestheticizing impulse is fundamental to narrative: to order and make beautiful. Yet what narrative is adequate to human suffering? What are the aesthetics of Vietnam or Hiroshima? What meaning should be made from the Holocaust? Narrative is not exculpatory, nor should it be.
The only way to grapple with the irresolvable is to recognize that we are culpable for what we say and how we say it. That does not mean we shouldn't consider the difficult or contested--unless we seek an art less easy, we will fight the same battles, encounter the same barriers. And so I hope we have the courage to earn authority rather than assert it, to attempt knowing that though we're likely to fail, we have a responsibility to try.
