THE BLACK EXPERIENCE
Writers deserve a better legacy
In West African tradition, griots are storytellers who pass along warnings, histories and divine awareness to their tribes, from generation to generation.
Until her death in 2006, U.S. author Octavia E. Butler served as a modern-day griot, using her 15 novels and numerous short stories to communicate the magic and methods of black survival to generations of readers over the course of her 35-year career in letters.
In Kindred, Butler’s fourth and most venerated novel, she connects past and present tensions for black Americans — from traumatic kidnapping and the gruesome Middle Passage to the terror of Reconstruction and Jim Crow lynch mobs and contemporary police violence — in a way that science fiction uniquely enables.
Long before #BlackGirlMagic was a hashtag, Butler used the conceits and techniques of science fiction to describe the powerful wizardry that black folks hold in our bones.
Kindred’s protagonist Edana can travel through time, from the home she shares with her white husband in 1970s California to her slaveholding ancestors’ plantation in 19th-century Maryland, and connect with her forebears.
In Wild Seed, Ayanwu can shape-shift into other humans and animals — literally embodying the perseverance enmeshed in the DNA of the enslaved as well as the royalty and conquerors from whom they descended.
In Fledgling’s fantastic world populated by vampires, U.S. majority culture literally feeds on black folks.
“We are a naturally hierarchical species. When I say these things in my novels, sure I make up the aliens and all of that, but I don’t make up the essential human character,” Butler said in an interview with the New York Times.
What could be controversial in non-fiction, Butler makes enjoyable through transcendent fiction storytelling.
Ask an acquiring fiction editor at a major publishing house, and you might be told the publisher is looking for stories conveying that human essence, whose themes resonate with the widest possible audiences.
Another might admit such a mandate adds a unique challenge to acquiring novels by writers of colour — as if survival, identity, assimilation, the importance of creativity, shape-shifting and code-switching can be understood only by readers who share the author’s demographic.
Another might recount hearing in meetings how black faces on a book cover could alienate audiences, as could the absence of white characters in the text.
And yet, ask any person of colour occupying less diverse spaces — predominantly white colleges and universities, corporate workplaces, shopping in luxury department stores — and such a person could easily pluck out those chords embedded in almost every facet of public life.
Mainstream publishing is often an exercise in navigating the white (or dominant culture’s) gaze. Even despite grand achievements, writers of colour can find themselves ignored when the dominant gaze hones in on work by one of its own.
Ben H. Winters just published Underground Airlines, a novel set in a contemporary U.S. landscape where slavery remains legal in four states. The story is narrated by Victor, a former slave.
The New York Times described his choice of subject as “creatively and professionally risky,” “dicey” and a “high-wire act,” if not only because the “subject of racial injustice in America” is “thorny,” then because, in the author’s words, “We tend to think of racism and slavery as something that’s appropriate only for black artists to engage with, and there’s something troubling and perverse about that.”
Not quite. As Toni Morrison famously stated, “White people can write about black people — anything can happen in art. There are no boundaries there.”
The deeper issue with Underground Airlines is the tradition it follows, where white-authored novels about race are praised for their daring approach to an uncomfortable topic, despite centuries’ worth of similarly themed works by writers of colour.
Take Kathryn Stockett’s The Help, written from the perspective of a black maid, which enjoyed the top spot on the New York Times hardcover fiction bestseller list for six weeks in 2010 and 15 weeks in 2011 (and was made into a successful Hollywood movie).
No black woman writer — discussing race or any other topic — has topped that list this decade, and the last to do so was Terry McMillan in 2001 with A Day Late and a Dollar Short.
Even the Times managed to forget Butler’s legacy in its article on Underground Airlines, a book blending science fiction and slavery, despite acknowledging this very aspect of her work in the obituary it published upon her death in 2006.
What does it say when a black woman artist can break historic ground in her genre, win the MacArthur Foundation “Genius” Grant, two Hugo Awards, two Nebula Awards, the PEN American Center lifetime achievement award, be inducted into the Science Fiction Hall of Fame and still be completely forgotten when a white male writer comes into her lane?
The way forward lies in the conversations prompted by this question.