Five months passed. The women loved their new outfits. They danced in their hallways wearing them, spun in mirrors gathering mist the colour of Synsepalum. Their reflections were released, mimicking their poses in the poorer areas of town, the other side; a swish of silk skirt passing the window of a Turkish food hall that had shut down, a pantsuit limp against the keyhole of a gutted former Jamaican take-away, a squeezed flamenco dress sleeve brushing the iron gates of an abandoned youth centre that had lost its funding. Slipstreams followed each reflection like a watery shadow.
By June, the shots of pain Manu experienced had intensified, spreading through his limbs. His hands in particular were in constant pain. He woke up in agony, the fingers appearing gnarled to him. He couldn’t keep up with the orders, with the monster he had created. The rise of sand from the suitcase in the corner of the atelier had become too much. The mannequins were pregnant with mirages, stomachs protruded splitting material. The glove in the post slot had swelled with blood. Designs from the periphery had begun to crash through the skylight in confused stupors, unsure of how their material versions would manifest. The chug of the sewing-machines in his ears was constant, till he found himself impersonating the sound sporadically in conversation. He had run out of ash. And his wild African berries no longer grew in the area for him.
On the third occasion the women wore their outfits, they discovered Manu had lied to them. They could only wear the designs three times. The third time, they couldn’t get out of them. Seams tightened, buttons couldn’t be undone, petticoats became silken cages. The women rolled around in the damp earth of their gardens, climbed onto their husbands, partners, lovers, hollering to get the scissors, knives, shears, anything to cut them out. They spilled out onto the streets.
It was on this morning Noma arrived outside the museum to find the crowd of women. Manu had disappeared, gone to the next place, the next set of women who needed to feel good, whose images of themselves he could manipulate like startled adult changelings behind a lens. The atelier was empty, the sewing-machines and mannequins forlorn in the void.
Noma spotted something glinting at the foot of the front entrance. She picked up the curved needle.
The baying women rounded on her. “Who will make us beautiful now?” they chorused, like a warped choir on the loose, faces strained, mouths drawn, teeth bared, closing in, scissors and shears gripped firmly, raised above their heads.
Noma almost dropped the needle just as the women began to turn to ash, the pads of her fingers sweaty, just as a bright red root bloomed in the eye of the needle.
Chinelo Okparanta
Born and raised in Port Harcourt, Nigeria, she is the author of Under the Udala Trees (2015) and Happiness, Like Water (2013), each a New York Times Book Review Editors’ Choice. She has won two Lambda Literary Awards, the 2016 Jessie Redmon Fauset Book Award in Fiction, and the 2016 Inaugural Betty Berzon Emerging Writer Award from the Publishing Triangle. She has been awarded residencies and fellowships by the Lannan Foundation (Marfa), Bread Loaf, the Civitella Ranieri Foundation, and Hedgebrook (“Women Authoring Change”). In 2012, she was chosen as one of Granta’s six New Voices, and in 2017, was named one of Granta’s Best of Young American Novelists and a Distinguished Immigrant by the Carnegie Corporation of New York. She is currently Assistant Professor of English Literature and Creative Writing at Bucknell University.
Trump in the Classroom
The format of a writing workshop can vary. In my particular workshops, all students read a couple or more short stories, poems, or essays, and afterwards we discuss what the work is (or is trying to be), what the work is doing (or is trying to do), what the work’s strengths and weaknesses are. The discussion often focuses on craft—narrative arc, voice, tone, characterization, etc. But the sociopolitical meaning of the story can never be ignored, because a finely crafted story with no message is hardly a story at all.
One day not long ago, I picked up a story written by a student in one of my workshop classes that caused me quite a bit of distress. In it, the author had created a whole new world—the future of our world. Earth was alive and thriving. In addition, a colony at a great distance from Earth had been created, a colony to which all the dark-skinned people had been banished. In this colony, unlike on earth, malaria still existed. Earth, of course, was where all the white people lived.
In the student’s story, the colony—and all the black people in it—was suddenly set to be destroyed, because a few of the black people had taken to bringing up the issue of slavery. They were still living out the legacy and pain of it—an inherited trauma—despite the fact that this was hundreds of years after. This complaining was getting to be too much for the whites, so the whites had now arrived at a solution: blow up, destroy, obliterate all the dark-skinned people. Banishing them to a malaria-infested colony was no longer enough. Rather, put an end to the legacy of slavery once and for all, so that they would no longer have to listen to complaints, the inconvenience of guilt.
The student’s story seemed to assert that black people had good enough lives in this colony, so why were they still protesting?
Context matters. Thanks to Donald Trump, people have for some time now felt empowered to speak honestly and proudly about views formerly denounced as racist, sexist, hateful. The area where I was teaching this class was heavily pro-Donald Trump. The student presented as a white male and hailed from what appeared to be a relatively privileged background, attending this somewhat elite, wealthy liberal arts college. Did I know for a fact his political leanings? No, but it didn’t take me long to realize that, based on his background and on the content of his submitted story, in another world he could very well have been a younger version of Donald Trump.
There’s a way in which the pulse quickens and the eyes tear up and the face burns with heat when one stumbles upon a story like this. If one is a particular kind of person, anyway. Say, a dark-skinned person reading about the destruction of herself by her very own student—the student she comes into contact with at least twice a week. The student she had no idea was capable of ever harboring such destructive thoughts, even in a fictional universe. I felt like a child skipping along a field of pretty green grass, dandelions and their clocks floating in the air, and suddenly realizing there were mines scattered all around me. I was one of the darkies this student’s fiction was seeking to demolish.
In the classroom that day, standing in a sea of whiteness (only one black student—just the two of us, and she so quiet and hesitant, perhaps in the discomfort of it all), I felt my blackness profoundly.
“This is a very disturbing story,” one white student whispered.
“Yes, I didn’t know what to take from it,” another white student agreed.
And yet, the story, with notable adjustments, could have been a satire. Perhaps, in a different world, it could have been parallel to Jonathan Swift’s “A Modest Proposal,” in which Swift encouraged readers to serve the children of the poor as food to the wealthy elites in order to help ease Ireland’s economic issues. Or was it like Voltaire’s Candide, an ironic rejection of false optimism? Or was it like Paul Beatty’s The Sellout, which sought, satirically, to call for the return of slavery and segregation? If it were meant to be a satire, the tone was clearly off. Satire is notoriously difficult to master.
In my workshops, I insist that students not explain, defend, or apologize for their work. But in this case, I asked the student for just a tiny bit of clarification: had he, in fact, intended his story to be satirical?
No, he responded, without any visible pause or hesitation. But he added that he hoped people would see how sad it was that the father and his daughter were about to be destroyed.
So, what, then, to make of the story?
I tried to imagine the reason why my students and I were being presented with this narrative. Perhaps the young man had congratulated himself on coming up with a solution for dealing with all the annoying black people who keep whining about slavery. Perhaps he h
ad forgotten, in all the whiteness of his semi-elite, super-wealthy liberal arts college, that his dear professor was a black woman. Perhaps he had grown used to airing these kinds of ideas with all those other whites who shared ideas like this one. Maybe his parents were responsible for bestowing the very idea on him. Only, they had neglected to warn him about how it would come off if he went on to dispense it to an audience that did not share his personal views. Maybe he himself hadn’t thought of the story’s implications. He’d perhaps gotten too caught up in his own cleverness to realize that a story like this is not just a story. Cannot ever be just a story.
But had the student really done anything wrong? Does one not have the right to write whatever he wishes in fiction? James Baldwin, in his defense of William Styron’s controversial Confessions of Nat Turner, famously said, “No one can tell a writer what he can or cannot write.” Even I myself have written stories that have been deemed, in some way or other, scandalous. Is fiction not just fiction?
What if my student had written his story with no bad intentions?
In response to Baldwin, Ossie Davis replied, “I respect [Styron’s] right to write the book any way he wants to. But at the same time, the social consequences of a book do not necessarily always act out the good intentions of the writers themselves. If we in our country have decided that race and color are nonsensical . . . and no longer need we concern ourselves with them, then I say to the book all success.” Davis added: “Had we already solved the racial problem as we face it in this country, the whole question would be academic. I would read the book, like it or dislike it, and leave it at that.” But clearly, racism and color were still plaguing the country then as now, and Ossie Davis feared the consequences—the destructive reactions by the masses of non-literary-minded people—of Styron’s story being magnified on the screen.
Davis was aware that some were accusing him of overreacting in his censure of Styron’s work. His response? “I will overreact as long as I am aware that racism is in our country and is a threat to me as a black man . . . I’ve been a black man all these years, and I cannot stop all of a sudden when my country has not stopped yet making me pay for that fact.”
At this point I opened the class up to a discussion on social consequence, an issue I think of more and more these days. Much in the fashion of Ossie Davis, I explained that a story like this can have real-life damaging effects. It’s the issue of power and hierarchies. Who has the control in any particular society? Because of power structures, it’s not usually the same effect—or the same meaning—when someone who has all the sociopolitical control writes a story like this as when a person with little or no power/privilege writes it, especially given the lack of satirical intent. Power imbalances are the reason why things that begin as fiction, when constructed and given life by people in positions of authority, can progress quickly into reality—a group of people who are seen as a nuisance could very well be annihilated in real life by those in power, and have been annihilated many times over the course of human history.
In his preface to Blues for Mister Charlie, James Baldwin aptly wrote: “What is ghastly and really almost hopeless in our racial situation now is that the crimes we have committed are so great and so unspeakable that the acceptance of this knowledge would lead, literally, to madness. The human being, then, in order to protect himself, closes his eyes, compulsively repeats his crimes, and enters a spiritual darkness which no one can describe.” This blind repetition was the horror that my student’s story seemed to be seeking to enact.
Kill the blacks if they won’t shut up might be better written by him as a satire, I told my student. (Here, I mentioned to him Swift, Voltaire, Paul Beatty). Or better yet, maybe kill the blacks if they won’t shut up is not the story you really want to write.
Shortly after I dismissed the class, it occurred to me that maybe this story was exactly what the student should have written. Who was I to tell anyone what they could or couldn’t write? At the tender age of twenty, maybe this was the perfect time for a white man to get that kind of story out—and maybe my fiction class was the perfect place to do it. Because if not now, and if not in this context, where we could openly talk about the horrors of such a mentality and the potential consequences of giving life to that sort of horror, even on the page—of breathing air into it by sharing it with other readers—then what happens when it is entirely too late, when he is forty or fifty or sixty years old and running for president, and perhaps has even won the vote, and is now hard and fast on his way to demolishing the “darkies”?
“We learn by discussion and by talk and by reasoning together,” Ossie Davis said. Maybe my student did the right thing by revealing his thoughts in that relatively low-threat sort of way, and in a relatively low-threat sort of setting. By allowing me the opportunity to initiate a conversation with him, to dialogue openly and share my concerns; by allowing me to share my shock at the inhumanity of his story; by his being open to listening to my thoughts, instead of, for instance, blowing me up—perhaps he did precisely the right thing.
Yewande Omotoso
Currently living in Johannesburg, she is a Nigerian-Barbadian architect and author. She completed an MA in Creative Writing at the University of Cape Town. Her debut novel, Bomboy, was shortlisted for the 2012 Sunday Times Fiction Prize, the MNet Film Award and the 2013 Etisalat Prize for Literature. It won the South African Literary Award First Time Author Prize. Her short stories include “How About the Children” in Kalahari Review, “Things Are Hard” in the 2012 Caine Prize Anthology, “Fish” published in The Moth Literary Journal and “The Leftovers” in One World Two. She was a 2013 Norman Mailer Fellow and a 2014 Etisalat Fellow. In 2015 she was a Miles Morland Scholar. Her second novel, The Woman Next Door (2017), was longlisted for the Bailey’s Women’s Fiction Prize. It was also shortlisted for the Aidoo-Snyder Prize, the Barry Ronge Fiction Prize, the UJ Literary Prize and the International Dublin Literary Award.
Open
He was boy-man. His body was boy, lean and taut. Surprisingly smooth when I stroked his skin. His face was boy. His lips plump, soft when they laid upon me, when he kissed my face and my mouth. His eyes weren’t particularly large. They were hard but not man-hard, boy-hard, a hurt little person, a person that wasn’t playing anymore. When he smiled he was beautiful but the wideness also exposed a black incisor, a detail that made him seem even more boy-like, a discarded boy. He’d been tired when he arrived. He’d driven six hours from Durban but I could tell his fatigue was from before then. Man fatigue, heavy with the weight of troubles. I was shy with him for only a few minutes. We hadn’t seen each other in three years. The whole thing, his sudden presence in my bedroom, his small travel bag on the floor, had been devised so quickly, had settled into fact so suddenly, I was still adjusting.
“Excuse me.”
I changed in my bathroom. Pulling off my clothes, wondering as I always did when I saw myself naked, why some bodies form one way and others another. Thinking of all that nakedness. Seven billion naked beings, so many ways to be naked. I pulled on a long-sleeve top, no need to put on leggings. In the room he’d climbed under the duvet. His trousers were on the floor next to his bag. I could see his bare shoulders and the top of his chest.
“Need anything?”
“I’m fine.”
“Water? You’re not hungry? After your long trip.”
He shook his head. I put down the clothes I’d changed out of and got beneath the covers. I was aware of the hairs on my legs, long and soft, several months old. When he’d phoned to say he was coming, when he’d said it (not asked permission but simply told me) I’d worried that it was past midnight and I had no razors in the house. We would make love, I told myself. He would have me with the long hairs on my legs and that’ll teach him to arrive unexpected. Or perhaps the lesson should be mine. Teach me to always be prepared. Or perhaps the lesson was even simpler—none of it matters.
“Sorry, I feel shy,” I said and he smiled. Touched me underneath
. “It’s strange.”
“Yes?” he said and moved closer. “What’s strange about it?”
His softness surprised me, the succession of small kisses, like a tired moth stepping. He’d asked me a question that I wasn’t required to answer. The act, the caressing would suffice, not as an answer to “what’s strange” but as confirmation.
Afterwards he leaned over and switched off the lamp and, with my head on his chest, a wide chest, capable-like for all his boyness, I played back the whole thing in the dark. I’d somehow expected more but whatever disappointments were tempered by his grip around my body, so tightly was he holding onto me in the dark. His breathing slow, our bodies clicked together like a fit. I’d expected deeper kissing, more passion. His messages over the years had been plump with hunger, ardent, even violent in his insistence that we meet. I’d expected that. I laughed at myself, in the dark, held so tightly, I’d expected what he’d written which I keep forgetting is a mistake. I changed position, my back to his chest and he moved in closer, gripped me. It felt good to be naked in the middle of the night, with another naked person upon me, with the duvet over us both, with the darkness.
In the morning we slept in. The sun, timid at first, grew confident through the curtains, warming us. We’d separated in the night and found each other again with daylight. I wanted to pee. He was snoring. I thought I might have work to do. Felt muddled. His skin burnt against mine. My bladder forgot and I fell back asleep, slept deeply, woke up held, my nose at his neck.
“I need to get up,” I said.
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