‘The Prophets’ is a period novel, seminar in Black queer culture
Set on a 19th-century plantation in the American South, Robert Jones Jr.’s “The Prophets” is by definition, a horror story.
Jones drops us into brutal cotton production life, where we meet Samuel and Isaiah. They are lovers, partners, friends and they are enslaved. Their brutal enslaver has relegated them to the backbreaking slop and hay existence of the plantation’s barn. In that barn, they are able to create tiny moments of sanctuary. Their tender relationship becomes their only comfort in the midst of unbearable violence and terror.
The plot thickens when some characters, luxuriating in the defiance embodied by Samuel and Isaiah’s forbidden love, clash with others who choose homophobia and hatred. As readers we want to protect the couple. We can’t. We anticipate doom and surrender to this impeccably haunting tale.
Jones’ authorial style breaks fixed language into something far more fluid. Kings are women, wives are men and people choose gender assignments from a range of representations that include “man, woman, all or free.” The text is designed to reject shorthand and terms loaded with uninterrogated meaning.
Words like “white” are untethered from their implicit relationship to superiority or purity and replaced with terms like “toubab” and “yovo,” African words describing people of European descent. Jones knows that any language lacking thoughtful consideration can harbor oppression. This prompts him to write with a style that honors his ancestors.
He writes with what feels like a spirit-led blessing from those who were enslaved as well as the likes of Octavia Butler, Zora Neale Hurston and Toni Morrison, layering his narrative with a tone reminiscent of James Baldwin. “The Prophets” is not only a novel, it is a graduate seminar in Black queer and gender expansive theory.
Jones uses the 66 books of the Bible as well as the Apocrypha as a framing device, so that what was once familiar is dismantled and remixed. He adds the structural texture of his own books named for characters and events that
point to the Black diaspora’s spiritual heritage and extends it far beyond biblical text.
In “The Prophets,” the author challenges us to reckon with the use of the Bible as a tool of oppression with roots in racial hatred. He reminds us that race can’t be untangled from queer and gender oppression. They have always worked together on this soil, fueling a genocidal agenda of power and greed.
Through added elements of suspense and mystery, Jones delivers the doom we expect with some unexpected comic relief as perpetrators of enslavement suffer fates of ironic degradation and misfortune.
Ruth, the central white female character, has a sense of ownership that is delusional. Her white womanhood is linked to cruelty and wildness. Jones situates her against a fuller historical backdrop in which white women jockeyed for firm legal status as enslavers. And while Paul, her husband, is meant to have the dominion she so desperately wants, he is more fool than fief lord in his everyday interactions. Still, the white couple impose the terrorism that was slavery on the Black lovers. Their absurdities do not eclipse the bigger picture of their roles as tormentors, which Jones makes clear they have handed down through decades of subsequent tyranny.
While “The Prophets” is a work of historical fiction, its themes and tragic circumstances are, sadly, quite real and contemporary. Black trans women and gender expansive people are being murdered at horrific rates. Rights protecting sexual and gender identity are eroding.
“The Prophets” leaves us with a task on which our present lives and future depend: Unite or be doomed. Love or lose our souls. “The Prophets” urges us: “Don’t look away.”
Robert Jones Jr. will appear at 7 p.m. Wednesday at the August Wilson Cultural
Center in Downtown as part of its TRUTHSayers series. Tickets for the 45-minute talk and moderated Q&A afterward are $28 at awc.culturaldistrict.org or by calling 412-456-6666.