Black Writers Matter

by Whitney French

  Witnessing fragments of memory leaving someone is a hard scene. A mind that does not remember causes panic. My dad started losing his memory due to old age and illness, and he sensed that he was starting to forget that he was forgetting.

  Deliberately remembering allows you to rewrite the narrative. It is my own story that I’m trying to recount, to understand situations through and in the time, place, and people that made and shape me. Something happening now is different from the same thing happening another time. In retrospect, I’m looking for something that is mine alone and that can exist in the bigger picture.

  You can alter the facts—make them easier to bear or more spiteful, toss the negative, loop the memorable, make room for epiphanies. You find the capacity to articulate feelings based on past experience.

  You can tie stories together, you can discard others, project a situation, realize how you never learn or how history repeats itself—and damn yourself if you won’t do anything about it. Dream of realities, from the reality of these dreams.

  Then, what do you choose to remember, and why? In my case, not that I like to admit it, it’s a gesture of control—I am, consciously or not, carefully selecting the memories. By documenting I am not making anything; rather, I am transforming, analyzing, learning, re-contextualizing, validating. I don’t document in fear of fomo (a millennial term for fear of missing out), it is more in the nature of questioning, looking for a consensus: am I the only one who sees things the way I see them?

  In my internal process lies a dismal dysfunction of mine. Writing is a compulsion that I perfected into a purpose and a salary. I write because I don’t know how to be. When I write, I can be anything, including who I am. I try to remember what is done and how it is done because I am trying to mimic the world in which I’m living. I lack this understanding of social codes and customary behaviour of the world that surrounds me. Social interactions don’t come to me naturally. I dramatically lack tact. I am terrible at having normal conversations. The capacity to remember and to draw from these memories renders itself a backdrop for small talk. I can dodge questions and communicate empathy in a way that feels more sincere and reliable than just my reaction.

  Recollection of memories is also a matter of going through things deeply rather than staying on the surface. What is the meaning of these things I am seeing, and why do I feel an urge to pin them down? It’s less about sharing than it is about keeping. Sharing, in my case, happens in words—a story told, a caption, a status, an essay.

  In this vein, part of my person, including my profession as a writer, is anchored in the stationary. Reflecting on this fact, memories and experiences do not make me a forward-looking person by definition, as I am only in opposition, switching paths or gears after trials and tribulations. I don’t do well with disruption, and upon change, I often need preparation or a moment, long or short, of dwelling. I am a walking reminiscence, anchored in our present time.

  There is a conversation about our capacity of retaining, in this age of abundance of news and stimuli. What happens inside of us when the mind remembers?

  Memory is desperately intangible, despite the amount of time, conscious or not, we spend remembering—from where your keys are to the ways of someone you lost. Remembering, in itself, is not an emotion, neither is it a reaction, although one almost invariably causes one or the other. Yet, memory is one of the elements that strikes us and shapes us the most as human beings.

  I cannot tell if my dad’s constant worry—what did you eat today—directly translates to, “I remember what hunger feels and I do not want you to ever have to live through it, if it be only for a second,” or if it’s less dramatic than I imagine, if he is simply curious to know. Nor do I ask him if he retains that information, for he asks me the question as often as he asks, “How was your day?” when we speak on the phone, which is several times a week.

  Memory is a curse for the resilient, the exile’s sole baggage on a long migration road. In a life of displacement, it can pain you to remember. But how do we find our way home if we can’t remember? In my parents’ oral culture, hailing from Haïti, nothing is written down. You just know what you know and what you were told. Upon migration, you are left with the history of where you come from as proof of your existence. A new identity is forcibly built for and around you through the eyes of your new surroundings. But you cannot forget what becomes known as ‘before,’ or ‘back home,’ or ‘when I was’. These identity claims are rare, out of survival. They have chosen not to speak out in order to protect their children and themselves: a survival tactic adopted under the insidious promulgation that things are better here and this way. And myself, with a foot in each culture, born in Montreal, a city where the Haitian diaspora lives strong, I’m trying the grasp all of the untold stories for archiving purposes. What is this unexplainable heritage I am relentlessly trying to unpack? If my place of existence is secured and settled, my mind still wanders, trying to trace back the path others walked silently to lead me here, safe. I know which oceans they crossed and the land they walked, but I wish to know where their minds have been.

  Still, more questions remain. What has been forgotten? What is remembered? Even as my dad cannot remember my address or my birthday, he insists that he is not forgetting me, although it’s harder now to reach out since he cannot remember how to use his smartphone. He remembers how to hide the truth from me, about his health, his state, his autonomy. He remembers how anxious I can be.

  Writing is an old-school medium. It is ancient, reliable, resistant to change. Truth is, I find it hard to be in touch with my time. I wish I could plunge into my father’s memory, turning it into art, into a book, into an essay, into tweets or an Instagram feed. I wish I could use it as my comfort when I’m tired of my own narrative. But memory does not save anything in time. We don’t stay the same.

  Paradoxically, the more you know, the less you are prone to forget. That is why we learn to remember better.

  There are certainly benefits in forgetting. I call it lightness; it can be compared to the bliss of ignorance. You can flush the bad, and that is, ultimately, a luxury. What we remember does not matter, in a sense. I am forcing myself to forget. Forget how worried I am, forget how I make a big deal of everything, forget how much I fail. When it comes to my dad, I only want to remember the positive, childishly pushing away reality.

  I cannot wrap my head around this eulogy I am constantly making, neither am I capable of conceiving a future. I want to remember the why and the how in the mundane, a mundane so full of colours, of laughter, of words and nuance and emotions that the world around me seems to be at worst blind, at best inattentive to what the ‘other’ is living.

  I am trying to put one plus one together, how it came into life and what was before so that I am here today and I keep existing, as a witness and as a result of joys and sacrifices. And I see you. I see you before the memory dies. I am accountable to you, who are denied a happy ending, a dream. I’m trying to express, in my way, that your story won’t die with you. That it touched me.

  As long as I can write, I have a constant access to my memory, to my dreams and thoughts, to how my days were spent. I write to forget. I write to carry on. I write to make sense of things. In the greater sense of things, I would, strangely, want to be forgotten. I’m amazed and puzzled when people remember me or my work. Memories keep a trail of one’s life and this is the life of an absurd person who has memories as quickly as they die.

  The joy in the voice of my dad when he hears my voice for the first time on any given day is a happiness that can’t be faked. It has remained unchanged for as long as I can remember, and it is a gift that I carry along with me every day. Is it a memory if constantly actualized, yet unchanged? My father always has this joke, when we haven’t talked for a couple of days, he dramatically exclaims, “It’s been years!” A declaration that, coming from him, is more absurd in its tone than the statement. Just like me
mories, time is also a question of perception.

  Fiction Is Not Frivolous

  A Lecture

  — H. Nigel Thomas —

  Delivered at the Morrin Centre in Quebec City on April 6, 2013.

  In this lecture I use the words poetry and fiction loosely. When we hear the word fiction, we think of prose. However, the original meaning of poet was: one who invents using language.

  I begin with three quotations. (1) “[Poets] measure the circumference and sound the depths of human nature with a comprehensive and all-penetrating spirit…[They] are the unacknowledged legislators of mankind” (Shelley 1967, 1085). (2) “Aristotle, I have been told, has said that poetry is the most philosophic of all writing: it is so: its object is truth…which gives confidence to the tribunal to which it appeals.…The obstacles which stand in the way of the fidelity of the biographer and historian…are incalculably greater than those which are to be encountered by the poet who comprehends the dignity of his art” (Wordsworth 1967, 325). (3) “Since the truth of human experience is concentrated and preserved best through literary art, it is mainly the black author and his public interpreter, the critic, who will inspire their race toward its destiny” (Emmanuel 1971, 185). Shelley and Wordsworth, who were contemporaries, made these statements in answer to critics who felt that works of the imagination were second class.

  James Emmanuel’s statement was made in a different context: at the beginning of the 1970s, when it was understood that all of Black America should contribute to the liberation struggle ongoing in the United States and in Africa. There emerged at the time what was dubbed the Black Arts Movement. Its manifesto was to show Blacks everywhere a way of life different from the one Occidentals had imposed on them.

  These writers stressed community over individualism, respect for nature, and a deeper understanding of the psychological benefits of African or African-derived rituals, and they did so for the most part through poetry and theatre. Houston Baker informs us that, at its height,

  mass black audiences turned out for readings by black authors in Harlem, Philadelphia, Washington, dc and elsewhere. And the most convincing evidence [of its relevance] was provided by the kinds of literary works that black people from all walks of life began to demand from publishers.…It did indeed seem as though black literature had found its communal voice and that its writers had contributed to a radical modification of the acculturative process—a modification that allowed black meaning to move into the foreground. (Baker 1980, 128–129)

  The works of writers like Toni Morrison, Alice Walker, Gloria Naylor, Leon Forrest—too many to enumerate—show the strong influences of the Black Arts Movement.

  Liberation from oppression, external and internal, has always been at the core of African and African diasporic literature.

  There’s a special kind of knowledge that comes from fiction. Let us take, for example, Richard Wright’s Black Boy, published in 1945. Even after reading numerous tomes of history and sociology about Blacks living under Jim Crow, one would still need Black Boy to understand Jim Crow’s impact on the psyches of those who lived under it. For the same reason, I would recommend Chinua Achebe’s novels to anyone wishing to learn about the impact of British colonialism on the Ibo of Nigeria. There is an ongoing debate about whether Abraham Lincoln wrote that Harriet Beecher Stowe’s Uncle Tom’s Cabin was “the author of this great war,” i.e. the United States Civil War.* However, there’s no debate about the profound impact of Uncle Tom’s Cabin on the anti-slavery campaign in the United States. What the story about Lincoln acknowledges is the power of fiction to motivate others—in this case to end oppression. To understand the ethos of classical Greece, we read Homer, Euripides, Aeschylus, Aristophanes, et al. It is noteworthy that philosophers like Schopenhauer, Nietzsche, Sartre, and Camus resorted to fiction to humanize what would otherwise be abstract philosophical formulations.

  I am therefore astonished by the large number of people, usually Black, who tell me implicitly and explicitly that writing fiction is a puerile activity. We writers of fiction do exactly what Emmanuel and Wordsworth say: we record human experience in a manner different from historians, sociologists, and anthropologists. Among the many things that fiction does, I note the following: it bears witness to our times, it reflects the inner and outer forces that sustain or threaten to destroy us, and it constantly reminds us of what we are.

  I would like at this point to emphasize the value of African-Canadian authors to a Canadian audience, both Black and white. Those of us who are Black are aware that Euro-Canadians have us at the lowest stratum in their schema of human value. With this ascription of value comes a dominant narrative with powerful tropes: primitive, backward, intellectually inferior, etc. While this perception still regulates how the dominant culture interacts with us—for example, paying us less for our labour, declaring our art to be inferior, our intellectual work to be less stellar—nowadays such notions are rarely overtly expressed, and only get into the public discussion when an ad or sports commentator or some publicity-seeking persona expresses what the dominant culture believes and acts upon but would rather not talk about. Such attitudes are encrypted in the narratives of daily interaction, so, for example, twenty or thirty years ago, Black employees in white workplaces would be subject to, for example, a barrage of racist black jokes. The jokes themselves comprise the narrative that reifies the perception. When Blacks who were subjected to these demeaning jokes made light of them, they were commended for having a good sense of humour, which in essence meant that they understood that whites had the power to humiliate them with impunity. Thankfully, this rarely happens now. Those who would still like to be able to do so freely complain about the restrictiveness of political correctness. Still omnipresent, however, are the daily reminders that Blackness is marginal to Euro-American and Euro-Canadian culture. In Canada, if you have black skin and kinky hair, you are deemed to be from a country or continent known as Where-Are-You-From? In French: T’es d’où? When I lived in Quebec City, Blacks there were barraged with this question daily. A friend of mine, who taught at Champlain Regional College, left a teaching position she loved and went to live in Toronto, because, she said, this question felt like an assault on her being. She was born in Saint-Adele, from a Caucasian mother and a Black father. No one who asked her that question was satisfied with that answer. There was always a follow-up question: But where are you really from? Which she translated to mean: you are Black, you cannot truly claim Canadian roots. You are marginal to this culture. She left Quebec City the year before the publication of Lawrence Hill’s Black Berry, Sweet Juice (2001), which thoroughly analyzes the attitudes underlying this question. In my own case, I decided to have a bit of fun with where-are-you-from? I answered: ‘The Earth. And you?’ Eventually I stopped, after coming close to being beaten up. And sometimes it got troubling: my friend and I were both asked, on different occasions, how it was that we had such excellent jobs, weren’t there qualified Canadians to fill those positions?

  Let me elaborate further on the dominant narrative by recounting another personal experience. In February 1988, the Quebec Human Rights Commission invited me to give a talk on Black ontology. I seized the opportunity to challenge the notion that, until the arrival of Europeans, Africans were trapped in the Stone Age. Culling information from works by Leo Frobenius, Cheik Anta Diop, Basil Davidson, Ivan Sertima, et al., I argued that Blacks were certainly not backward. On the day of the lecture, a reporter from La Presse read my speech before I delivered it and accused me of creating a fiction to embellish the African past. Nothing I told her swayed her from that opinion. I’d anticipated this. I’d had a foretaste in Quebec City. I’d asked an acquaintance there to check the paper for possible mistakes in the French, and he told me that he was shocked by my false claims. He worked in the Quebec public service—still does—and asked if he could share the paper with his colleagues. I told him yes. The larger the audience, the better, I felt. From
his report, they called my findings pathetic, deranged assertions. This friend questioned a few of his acquaintances who’d lived in Africa, and from what they told him, he now seems to have a more nuanced view. Back to the La Presse reporter. I don’t remember her name. I begged her to wait, because I had a short video that features Basil Davidson discussing the Iron Age in Africa. She stayed, saw the video, and apologized to me afterwards. She did further research and wrote a piece about it in La Presse. I went to that lecture knowing that, as a Black man, my white audience would not take the facts I presented seriously, unless they had been authenticated by whites. This deeply ingrained bias made Harvard professor Derrick Bell wonder, in Faces at the Bottom of the Well: The Permanence of Racism (1992), whether references written by him on others’ behalf had any value.

  What I have stated in the foregoing are facts that Blacks know to varying degrees, but they are, in addition to many other preoccupations, facts that Black poets, playwrights, and fiction writers embody in their characters. For, to be a serious writer one must get behind the facade of what passes for reality; much of the time that face masks reality. It therefore pains me when Blacks—oftentimes holders of university degrees—say they don’t read fiction, that fiction is frivolous. Others say that life is hard and books about Black reality are depressing and therefore to be avoided. The latter statement usually leaves me speechless. All the Black Canadian writers I know hope that their work would in some way empower and educate.

  References

  Baker, H.A., Jr. 1980. The Journey Back: Issues in Black Literature and Criticism. Chicago: University of Chicago Press.

  Bell, D. 1992. Faces at the Bottom of the Well: The Permanence of Racism. New York: Basic Books.

  Emmanuel, James A. 1971. “Blackness Can: A Quest for Aesthetics.” In The Black Aesthetic, edited by Addison Gayle. New York: Doubleday.