by bell hooks
While the book was received warily by mainstream reviewers, reviews in the alternative press grappled with the work on its own terms. Usually, black reviewers, with the exception of writer Thulani Davis, directly addressed the content of the book. They were not concerned about my public persona or whether this book “fit” with the other books I had written. Black writers, like all authors from marginal groups, always have difficulty gaining recognition for a body of work if anything we do is eclectic. Positive reception of our early work may mean that we are positioned by the critical and reading public in specific ways. Deviating from this may cause them confusion.
This is especially the case for American-born black writers. Writers born in the Caribbean or Africa who come to literary prominence tend to be given greater leeway to write in diverse styles than African-American writers. A prime example of this would be the work of Jamaica Kincaid, who was born in St. Johns, Antigua, in the West Indies. Kincaid writes fiction, nonfiction, and autobiographical work. When she uses diverse styles it is seen as a sign of her literary prowess. Her most recent work, My Brother, clearly fits in the category of memoir, simply defined as a record of events based on the writer’s personal observation. Even so, in a rather disingenuous way Kincaid attempted to disassociate her work from the genre, stating: “In fact, the advance copy of the book had the word memoir on it and I made them remove it. When it comes out in hardcover it won’t have it. A memoir is too generous and big a word, it’s certainly inappropriate for anything that I would write. It’s a marketing word that doesn’t apply to the work. Writers really should pay attention to these things. How can you call a work a memoir when you’re writing about a thing that’s ongoing? A memoir is when the thing has stopped, and these events that I’ve written about, they are still ongoing in my life. I’m not yet at the age to write a memoir.” These statements notwithstanding, My Brother is a work that contains a writer’s observations and reflections on her brother’s death; it is a memoir.
There are times in my writing career when I envy the freedom black writers who are not born in the United States have to create work that is not seen through the narrow lens that has traditionally determined the critical scope of readers’ responses to writing by African-Americans. Despite commonalities, writing by black writers who are not African-Americans tends to be seen as always more literary and therefore more valuable than work by African-Americans. Even though I have always loved reading, valuing the library as a place to read books free of charge, it was not until I went away to college that I first read a wide range of literature by black writers in the diaspora. Growing up, as I did, in a social situation of racial apartheid where books by African-American writers were usually impossible to find because public libraries in segregated small towns simply did not order them, my big quest was to find these books and read them. I was desperate to find them because if they were not there it would mean that I had little chance of succeeding at becoming a writer.
Many black American writers born before the days of racial integration, especially those of us from poor and working-class backgrounds, relied on caring librarians to aid us in our discovery of the world of books. Indeed, the white librarians were often among the most generous educators when it came to working with black students. While other teachers imposed their racial biases the librarians usually urged us to read. And those of us who cared about books were given guidance. It was the white librarian at the public library whom I dared tell in my girlhood that I wanted to read books by black writers. While she did not know about them, she was willing to search for them and show me how to find them.
In those days, I did not think about the fate of black writers in the diaspora. My sense of the literary universe had been shaped by the canon of great writing by white westerners. From the moment I entered college I sought to expand my reading horizons. When preparing for my doctorate I chose as one of my areas of concentration African literature, both francophone and anglophone. I read black writers of the diaspora, focusing my attention on writers from Africa and the Caribbean. When reading experimental work by Guyanese writer Wilson Harris or the work of South African writer Bessie Head, I often discussed with classmates the different impact colonization and white supremacy had on those writers and their visions and those of African-American writers. It seemed to me then and now that more of them felt free to articulate their vision in diverse styles than African-American writers. This is especially the case with the work that is in any way experimental.
All too often it is assumed (especially by white critics) that the black writer who is not African-American is inherently more serious and literary. While a writer like Jamaica Kincaid is often asked in interviews to offer her pronouncements and judgments about black American writing and culture, African-Americans doing work that is serious literature are not asked to give our views on the nature of Caribbean or African writing and culture. Unfortunately, more often than not known black writers who are not African-American seek to distance themselves from the forms of censorship in the publishing world that check, control, and shape African-American writing. Taking advantage of the racist stereotypes that inform literary biases, these writers often accept without question and perpetuate the stereotypical notions about black American writing that continue to abound in our culture.
All too often one of those stereotypes is that the African-American with token exceptions is not interested in the craft of writing. Hence even if we use experimental styles or write using diverse stylistic strategies we will be judged by a conventional yardstick that demands that we always and only speak from our gut, tell our stories using only one literary paradigm. Writing and publishing Bone Black reinforced both my awareness of the ways in which African-American writing, especially the work of black women writers, gets pigeonholed by both the publishing industry and the reading public. When we experiment with diverse styles, when the content and shape of our work goes against the stereotypical grain we risk it being devalued by a critical reviewing public that does not know how to approach the work. Challenging biases in the reviewing process as well as demanding of publishers that they remain open when selecting work by African-Americans so that unconventional material is not discarded or rewritten to appeal to the marketplace is necessary if we are to gain greater freedom to write what we want to write in the manner in which we wish to write it.
class and the politics of writing
No one speaks about class and the politics of writing in this society. It is just assumed that everyone has equal opportunity when it comes to writing and publishing. Taken seriously such an assumption seems ludicrous, given the reality that so many citizens of our nation do not read or write and that most of what is published comes from an educated elite who are either from privileged class backgrounds or are aspiring to enter privileged classes. On panels when I have even dared to mention that there may be a relation between what we write, what we feel we are allowed to say, and our class background, audiences have vehemently disagreed. This is especially the case when the topic is confessional writing. When I have suggested that groups of people who come from class backgrounds where there are rituals of public confession like psychoanalysis are socialized to be more accepting of self-disclosure in public, audiences respond by trying to negate this thesis, arguing that everyone has these issues. I concur that everyone confronts the issues but maintain that class background often overdetermines the nature of that response.
Women of color from poor and working-class backgrounds have been among those writers who have most called attention to grappling with the question of authorial freedom as it relates to autobiographical revelation in published work. Many of us live with the fear that if we write about certain experiences, individuals we have written about, particularly family members, will punish that writing through ostracization. When I was a student in writing classes and at writing workshops I never really heard anyone from a privileged class background talk about self-censorship that emerges from fear that writing cert
ain experiences will lead family and friends to break ties. In some cases writers from privileged classes were much more likely to hold a vision of writerly integrity that implied for them that there should be no discussion of the ethics of revealing aspects of another person’s life who has not given their consent. From the moment I began to talk about the lives of members of my family, including their stories in my work, I began to think about the ethics of such writing.
When contemporary feminist movement raised the question of women’s silences, of taboos about what women could talk and write about, individual women of color were among that group who shared their fear of coming to voice, of speaking the unspeakable. In the third book I published, Talking Back, I concluded the introductory essay with these remarks: “While punishing me, my parents often spoke about the necessity of breaking my spirit. Now when I ponder the silences, the voices that are not heard, the voices of those wounded and/or oppressed individuals who do not speak or write, I contemplate the acts of persecution, torture—the terrorism that breaks spirits, that makes creativity impossible. I write these words to bear witness to the primacy of resistance struggle in any situation of domination (even within family life); to the strength and power that emerges from sustained resistance and the profound conviction that these forces can be healing, can protect us from dehumanization and despair.” Before many of us even confronted the issue of confessional writing we had to grapple with the more basic question of claiming writing as a site for the articulation of our realities, especially nonfiction writing. Acknowledging this struggle in her work The Last Generation, Cherrie Moraga declares: “Fundamentally, I started writing to save my life. Yes, my own life first. I see the same impulse in my students—the dark, the queer, the mixed-blood, the violated—turning to the written page with a relentless passion, a drive to avenge their own silence, invisibility, and erasure as living, innately expressive human beings.” Again, the new ground that we were breaking at the onset of contemporary feminist movement concerns writing that is explicitly autobiographical and confessional. Moraga contends: “A writer will write with or without a movement; but at the same time, for Chicano, lesbian, gay, and feminist writers—anybody writing against the grain of Anglo misogynist culture—political movements are what have allowed our writing to surface from the secret places in our notebooks into the public sphere.” After struggling to come to voice we then confronted ethical issues.
Since many of us were young writers (I was nineteen years old when I completed the first version of Ain’t I a Woman: Black Women and Feminism) we were trying to figure out how to find publishers. Even though we saw our writing as a form of resistance we were not clear about the way the mainstream publishing world would respond to that writing. Early on mainstream publishing just rejected most of this work, which is why so many of us looked to alternative publishing. In those days we did not talk a great deal about the consequences of writing openly about one’s life because most of us had not reached that level. In my first books, I did not emphasize the personal. I shared very little about my life. This was a reflection of both the academic training I had received as a graduate student of English and my own fear of the personal. I was not eager to talk about my life precisely because I had been raised in a working-class southern black Christian home where talking openly outside the family about any aspect of family life was considered a form of treason. Similarly describing her experience in a poor white southern household Dorothy Allison shares: “I had been taught never to tell anyone outside my family what was going on, not just because it was so shameful but because it was physically dangerous for me to do so.… I didn’t start writing—or rather I didn’t start keeping my writing—until 1974, when I published a poem. Everything I wrote before then, ten years of journals and short stories and poems, I burned, because I was afraid somebody would read them.” Some of us feared violent responses from family members. This was true of Asian and Chicana women writers I knew as well. While many of us wrote of the power and passion of coming to voice it was rare that anyone shared publicly the response to their work on the part of intimate family and friends.
I began to write about my life as a way of reaching out to readers across class and race. Since I was writing feminist theory I saw it as a necessary political dimension of that work to strive to make it as accessible as possible. Initially, I shared my work with my family and bore the brunt of harsh criticism from my mother. She was especially disappointed when I began to describe our family as dysfunctional in print. My writing was an act of resistance not simply in relation to outer structures of domination like race, sex, and class; I was writing to resist all the socialization I had received in a religious, southern, working-class, patriarchal home that tried to teach me silence as the most desirable trait of womanliness. Writing about the ways I was often punished, particularly for the offense of talking back, I shared in published work both the pain and isolation I felt as a girl dreaming about ideas and writing as well as the punishment I received for refusing to be silent.
My mother felt particularly targeted by my work; she felt I was publicly blaming her. Even though I tried to explain again and again the way writers draw on their own lives fully acknowledging that my interpretation of the past would differ from hers, she felt and continues to feel hurt by my autobiographical work. Any description of someone in the family that does not resemble her memory is perceived as false. Neither of my parents attended college. They have not had the experience of writing about their lives, or even speaking much about their lives in any unfamiliar setting. Even though writers from privileged class backgrounds may write work that alienates family members, there is a much greater chance that shared educational backgrounds will enable them to understand the process of writing even if they do not agree with what is written. At times I fear my parents will read something I have written about our family and excommunicate me forever. When I sit down to write I ward off that part of me that would censor my words to protect our silences, that would keep intact the intimacy of our secrets.
This fear of being cut off by family members for writing stuff they may not understand, whether it be autobiographical or nonfiction, surfaces in all the writers I have known from working-class backgrounds no matter their race or region of origin. In the essay “Telling Stories of Queer White Trash,” Jillian Sandell contends: “In a culture that promotes storytelling and the confessional narrative to almost hyperbolic proportions, the fact that stories about impoverished whites have been virtually untellable suggests a profound collective anxiety about what such narratives might reveal.” When I first met Dorothy Allison, a writer who like myself was writing about rural southern experience, about poverty, in her case being seen as “white trash,” and neglect, abuse, and abandonment, weaving together narratives about race, sex, and class, and in her case lesbian identity, we had more in common than I have had with most straight black writers from privileged class backgrounds, who had no understanding of what it means to write “against the grain.” Dorothy Allison has shared with many of us both in conversations and in her recent essays how writing about family members has affected their lives. Early on in her work, by merging her autobiographical and fictional narratives, she was able to “protect” family members even as she disclosed much about her life, simply because the reader did not know what was true and what was fiction. Still, her family knew and even though they did not always remember as she did they tried to understand.
In her collection of essays Skin: Talking About Sex, Class and Literature Allison talks about the difficulty of writing from an autobiographical place even if the work you do is mainly fiction. She writes about her worries that being open about sexuality from a lesbian perspective might “endanger” her relationship to her son by providing information that could be perversely used to take him away from her. Yet when she enters the writing process she gives herself over fully without allowing her words to be shaped by fear of censure: “When I am writing I sink down into myself, my memory, d
reams, shames, and terrors. I answer questions no one has asked but me, avoid issues no one else has raised, and puzzle out just where my responsibility begins and ends.” Not all writers from poor and working-class backgrounds grapple with ethical issues. Some folks simply turn their backs on the past, writing into a world of class privilege where it is better if they let the past go. Those of us who struggle to maintain our allegiance to the class of our family of origin are continually faced with issues of accountability and responsibility. Whereas folks with money who are written about in ways that they do not like can sue or even challenge family members in print, our relatives have no spaces to “talk back.” Often we write about their responses to our work to give them presence beyond our interpretive representations. In Allison’s essay “Skin, Where She Touches Me” she reveals: “Some of what I wrote had been painful for my mama to read, but she had never suggested I should not write those stories and publish them. ‘I’ve never been afraid of the truth,’ she told me after my book of short stories came out.” How fortunate Allison is to receive such a response. Many writers from working-class backgrounds have not been as fortunate.