New novels about race find freedom in satire
Humor, surreal conceits used to explore racism, identity politics
In Chinelo Okparanta’s new novel, a young white man is disgusted by his bigoted, smalltown parents. Some of his reactions are typical: He disavows their views and moves to New York City. Others, though, are decidedly strange: He starts calling himself G-Dawg, joins a self-help group for white people ashamed of their race — and begins to identify as a Black man from Africa.
Yes, Okparanta knows the premise might cause offense.
When she began working on a novel about wellmeaning white people who are blind to their own bigotry, Okparanta, who is Nigerian American, realized the topic was explosive. She was, after all, wading into a fraught debate about racism and identity politics at a moment when those issues were supercharged by George Floyd’s murder and the protests that followed. So she resorted to satire.
Humor was the “safety measure I put in place so I didn’t have to endure accusations of trying to write whiteness,” she said. “I’m not attempting to write whiteness in any real way. I am writing about the pain that has been endured by being on the other side of whiteness.”
The resulting book, “Harry Sylvester Bird,” recently published by Mariner Books, is bleak and biting but often disarmingly funny — one of a handful of new and forthcoming novels that uses satire and surrealism to pick apart common assumptions about racial and cultural identity, and explores what it means to transgress those socially drawn boundaries.
Several of these new novels skewer the more subtle forms of bias that arise from racial blind spots and ignorance, or from a misguided desire to emulate or appropriate another culture.
Mithu Sanyal’s recently released novel, “Identitti,” satirizes debates about race and identity politics in academia. The plot centers on a South Asian doctoral student who is unmoored when she learns that her mentor — a prominent South Asian post-colonial and race studies professor — is not Indian but white. In her forthcoming novel, “Yellowface,” R.F. Kuang lampoons the lack of diversity in the publishing industry with a twisted story about a white writer who steals an unpublished novel written by a recently deceased Asian American author and tries to pass it off as her own book.
In his new novel, “The Last White Man,” out on Aug. 2 from Riverhead Books, Mohsin Hamid uses a surreal premise to examine racial identity as a socially constructed fiction. Set in an unnamed country, it tells the story of a white man who wakes up one morning with dark skin, a mysterious condition that spreads throughout his town and forces people to confront their latent biases.
Hamid, born in Pakistan, came up with the premise more than 20 years ago, when he found himself being seen with suspicion for having “a Muslim name and brown skin” after 9/11. He returned to the story during the pandemic and found that approaching it through the lens of fantasy gave him more freedom to examine the artificial fault lines around race.
“Because I think that race is this imaginary thing,” he said in an interview, “if we start to intervene at the level of us imagining in the first place, there might be insights worth having.”
The new crop of satires about race reflects an ongoing debate about cultural appropriation and the conflicts over whether and how novelists should write across racial and cultural boundaries.
Okparanta said she wanted to explore racism from an unfamiliar vantage point.
“As a Black person who has endured a lot of racism and microaggression, I wanted to understand how a well-meaning white person might still hurt you,” she said.
She first came up with the premise of “Harry Sylvester Bird” in 2016, when she was teaching creative writing at Columbia University and held a seminar on the ethics of writing fiction about other races and cultures.
A couple of years later, Okparanta was living in Lewisburg, a small town in Pennsylvania, where she often felt out of place as a Black woman and an African immigrant. She found herself thinking about her old idea, and began wondering what it would look like for a Black writer to create a white character who is unaware of his own racial blind spots — an idea that felt even more potent in 2020, with rising political polarization and social unrest.
“Harry Sylvester Bird” opens in Tanzania, when a teenage Harry, on a safari vacation with his boorish parents, is horrified by
how they treat the African guides and staff. Back in Pennsylvania, he decides he no longer wants to be white and starts identifying as a Black man, and later moves to New York for college, where he begins the next phase of his metamorphosis. He attends meetings of Transracial-Anon, a therapy group for white people seeking “racial reassignment,” which will eventually culminate in modifications to members’ hair and skin.
As Harry’s story unfolds, Okparanta paints a portrait of an alternate America with unsettling parallels to our own, a country divided by growing extremism and
nationalism, and reeling from the pandemic and from the rise of a hardright white supremacist political movement called the Purists. His desire to shed his whiteness and be “an ally” sets him apart from the blatant bigotry and hatred of the emboldened white nationalists, yet Harry still makes unwittingly offensive comments about Black people. He fetishizes Black skin, and at one point, he marvels to his Nigerian girlfriend about “how people in Africa can be so happy with so little.”
Okparanta said she wanted to make Harry exaggerated but not so cartoonish or
unsympathetic that readers would dismiss his plight as farcical.
Okparanta said she wouldn’t be surprised if some readers feel her satire goes too far. After all, she noted, when Voltaire published “Candide,” a coming-of-age adventure story that doubled as a vicious critique of the European power structures, “the French nobility did not enjoy it.”
“Being that it is a satire, it will be understood and digested differently by different people in society,” Okparanta said. “Some groups might see the humor more readily than other groups.”