Reflection on a Desire for a Peopleâs Literature
Today, Black Americans find themselves in the crosshairs. Perpetually, the target of Americaâs militarized police and media machine, yet curiously absent from the pages of most American literature and all but few bylines . Those of us operating in the shadow of this environment cannot afford to be glib or ironic about it. The abysmal statistics cited in a recent PEN America conversation, come as no real surprise and reflect very tellingly, the values of a nation steeped in a history of criminalizing literacy. Black writers are creating inside the paradox that is our existence in America. However, outside of our singular achievements, the landscape is uniformly and starkly white.
The moment we find ourselves alive to witness is critical for Black people both domestically and internationally. Hate speech has again become commonplace in American political discourse and we are contending with police and vigilantes, who murder Black citizens of this country, daily, with impunity. In a 2014 interview with Kamila Shamsie for Guernica Magazine, Indian author Pankaj Mishra asks where the rage is in American fiction. When, he asks, is American literary fiction going to engage with the role and consequences of its countryâs empire? And why donât Americaâs citizens at least care that in the dragnet of imperialism, their own freedoms are being encroached upon?
The answer, in the short term, is this nearly all-white publishing environment is creating the illusory projection of American political hegemony. In the long term, this is the way history is written, or not. It is not the state of nature that renders American literature devoid of such rage and reflection. It is the self-conscious and self- perpetuating practices that make the industry, in 2015, obstinately, 89% white. The continued construction of âauthorsâ as: white, male, and middle- class or better, aids the overarching narrative of America that orders itself on the political silencing of the Black people it has hoarded for centuries. All while placing us alongside carefully curated diversity.
Meanwhile, the stakes are literally life and death for Black people all around the globe. Borders are claiming our lives. The Sea is claiming our lives, smoking guns, the constant pummeling from above from all sides are claiming our lives. And most of all the worldâs silence and complicity is claiming our lives.
Currently, the state of Louisiana incarcerates more people, per capita, than anywhere else in the world. Today, Black Panther party member, Albert Woodfox remains in solitary confinement in Angola State Penitentiary, where he has been every day for more than forty years. Louisiana is one such place in America, where Black people know the wages of dissent. For Black Americans, this age of mass surveillance Mishra points to, as encroaching also on the rights of US citizens, is hardly a twenty-first century development. Rather it is a state of being that has influenced and informed our perspective for centuries. This expansive experience of confinement that has dominated the lives many Black Americans, is ironically, what connects us to many oppressed peoples, who find themselves the prisoners of their respective governments and/or national conditions.
Black Americans are unable to work within the boundaries of nationalist assumptions of audience afforded to our white counterparts. Though many of us are poor, underemployed, overworked, incarcerated, deported, isolated, struggle with childcare, do not speak English, live in neighborhoods where we are afraid, and are generally unable to access the fictional world where we might, but most often do not, exist. We are also brilliant, beautiful, and in constant creative flux. Black American artists continue to subvert nationalist expectations with a literature of aesthetics, orality and language that precedes the American project. We understand well, the circumferential reach of our culture.
And so, in that case, we are writing anyway.
While the industry continues to debate our validity many Black writers and artists are exploring notions of hybridity, doing away with genre, and accessing alternative media and forms of visibility for their work. Never before has there been opportunity, like the one that exists now to create a literature that is resistant to the conventions, constraints, and consequences of state allegiances. The creation of the kind of literature, the kind that can disembody the ideology of the militarist State will require people us to stop waiting on more [ white ]American writers to come in to the know. It will require a disruption of current formulas and a return to the imagination. That force that Amiri Baraka called a âpractical vector from the soulâ and the source from which all problems can be solved.
It will require exchange and cooperation between those working in traditional capacities and those working very diligently outside of them. The day that Black writers in America are published at a rate that matches the amount of quality work being produced is a long way off. Old binaries must be demolished if Black writers are ever to free themselves from the bondage of American letters. From my vantage point in the American Deep South, the time is now for a declarative new thinking around writing and publishing.
A time for reconnecting with the legacy of those, who wrote while in bondage; sure that their audience was not contemporary. Those who created the songs that leapt oceans and preserved the rhythms that continue to move us through our lives. There is more excellence in our community than will ever be accommodated in white spaces. We must engage strategies that might look beyond borders to connect with artists and audiences. A movement toward giving all the words to the people of the world; moving them around in the ways that we know best. The ways we have grown expert. This is a movement toward freeing the work and the imagination, if we and the land are ever to be.
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