Voyage of discovery cracks open incisive books by authors of color
I made a decision last January to read more writers of color. It was motivated by the big dustup over Jeanine Cummins’ novel “American Dirt,” a controversy centered on whether a white writer had the right to write a story of Mexican refugees fleeing a violent drug cartel. While I came down on the side of an author to write outside the realm of her own experience ( I just appreciate good writing), I also recognized that the publishing industry has a pathetic record when it comes to giving voice to nonwhite writers. The aftermath of the death of George Floyd and the subsequent conversation about and recognition of systemic racism in our country only strengthened my resolve.
It’s not that I ignored writers of color before: I just hadn’t made a conscious effort to seek them out. I’m glad I did because I’ve discovered several terrific writers who otherwise might have escaped my notice.
Jerald Walker is at the top of the list. The author of two previous books of nonfiction, Walker’s new collection of essays, “How to Make a Slave,” finds him at 40, a professor of creative writing at Emerson College, raising two Black sons in a white suburb of Boston and struggling with how to exist as a Black American teacher, father, writer and responsible human being in the complexity of our country’s racial landscape.
The fury of his youth — he acknowledges his background as a gang member and drug addict — has been somewhat tempered by age and parenthood, but he’s also changed his perspective. When he runs into a white liberal at a cocktail party who wants Walker to hate him — “White people,” he insists, “are your oppressors” — Walker confounds the man by telling him, “My students don’t focus on white cruelty but rather its flip side: Black courage … slaves and their immediate descendants were by and large heroic, not pathetic, or I wouldn’t be standing here.” The surest way to drive white liberals up the wall, Walker writes, is “to deny them the chance to pity you.”
Other essays address shopping at Whole Foods while Black, making restaurant reservations online only to show up and be ushered away, and the dilemma Walker encounters when on an Amtrak train: editing a student essay, his pencil slips from his hand and rolls under the buttock of a sleeping white woman seated on the adjacent seat. Walker ruminates about and deals with these situations with a fierce, multifaceted intelligence that is only enhanced by his ability to see the humor ( albeit dark) in them. He’s an extraordinary observer and writer.
Danielle Evans, whose new collection of short fiction is “The Office of Historical Corrections,” is a welcome fresh voice. In “Richard of York Gave the Battle in Vain,” she tells a highly unconventional brideleftatthealtar story with an exuberance that I found to characterize all of her work. She has a sharp eye for artifice and hypocrisy but never takes an easy shot, describing even her less attractive characters with compassion. In “Boys Go to Jupiter,” a disaffected, apolitical young woman becomes the target of an online hate mob after a photo of her wearing a Confederate flag bikini goes viral. Again, the story doesn’t go down the expected path, and Evans adroitly tackles the minefield of political correctness, free speech and cancel culture.
Richard Blanco’s book of poems, “How to Love a Country,” was another happy discovery. Blanco, the Miamiraised son of Cuban immigrants, writes poems that are unsparing in their depiction of injustice past and present, from the exile of Navajos to the Pulse nightclub murders. But he also celebrates our ideals and what holds us together.
“Complaint of the Rio Grande” is told from the point of view of the river itself, the site of so many immigrant crossings: “I wasn’t meant to drown children, hear mothers’ cries, never meant to be your geography: a line, a border, a murderer.”
It’s the hope Blanco somehow keeps alive that makes his work so precious. Our imperfect, divisive, heartbreaking country, Blanco writes in “America the Beautiful Again,” is “the only country I know enough to know how to sing for.”
The surest way to drive white liberals up the wall, Jerald Walker writes, is “to deny them the chance to pity you.”