06 February 2009
Literature at the Crossroads
By Tayari Jones
A native of Atlanta, Georgia, Tayari Jones writes about the urban south. Her first novel, Leaving Atlanta (2002) won the Hurston/Wright Award for Debut Fiction and was acknowledged as one of the best of the year by the Atlanta Journal-Constitution and The Washington Post. Her second novel, The Untelling (2005), won the Lillian C. Smith Award for New Voices. Recipient of prestigious fellowships including Yaddo, the MacDowell Colony and Bread Loaf Writer’s Conference, she is currently an Assistant Professor in the Masters of Fine Arts program at Rutgers University, Newark, New Jersey.
If you go into a large chain bookstore in the United States, you will find my books shelved under a sign that reads “African-American Interest.” Every few months, I receive an e-mail from an outraged (usually white) reader who is dismayed by what she sees as the denigration of my work. “Your work should be in the front of the store with all the regular authors!” By “regular,” she means white, but she doesn’t even know that yet. I also receive messages from younger black writers who worry about the status of books they haven’t even written yet. “How will I get my book off the Black Shelf?” they worry in advance. After a few weeks of class, my own creative writing students work up the nerve to ask me how I feel about my novels being “Jim Crowed” (referring to pre-Civil Rights Act de facto discrimination). And like many other people, they can’t understand why I am not particularly upset that my work is shelved almost 10 full feet away from the likes of American legends John Updike and Joyce Carol Oates. Some readers wonder aloud how, in this age of Barack Obama, a bookstore would have the nerve to note the race of an author and organize the shelves accordingly. One well-meaning reader even went so far as to offer to write a letter to the bookstore owner on my behalf. Although I was touched, I urged her to calm down. I am not sure that I want to shed the label of “black writer” in favor of the indistinction of being just a “writer” or even an “American writer,” minus the hyphen that makes my life interesting.
Unlike many of my peers, I approach labels with an amused fascination. As far as I am concerned, the more labels, the better. Tayari Jones is an African-American woman, southern, middle-class, right-handed writer. She is the writer in her family. She is the writer who wears a green sweater and eats crème brûlée for breakfast. I don’t mind being identified by descriptors as long as they are true and as long as I am allowed to choose as many as I like. The trouble with labels is not with the label itself, but with the reactions some readers have to those labels. Traditionally, labels have been used to designate a lesser status. Simply avoiding the label doesn’t address the caste system that gives rise to the labels in the first place. To the contrary, eschewing the label “African-American writer” can actually reinscribe hurtful assumptions. There is a reason that people sometimes say, “Your writing is too good to be in the ‘black’ section of the store!” as though merit is what separates the blacks from the rest. The kind reader seeks to rescue me from racism, rather than attack the beast itself.
Even as I write this, the very questions feel a little irrelevant, even though I feel very strongly about the words that I have written. It seems impossible to answer any questions about being an African-American writer without addressing the issue of what it is to be read as an African-American writer or, even more fraught, to be marketed as an African-American writer. The artist in me is annoyed by the question, as it doesn’t really address the thing that I do with my paper and pen.
Writing itself is a spiritual labor of the imagination. Alone with the page, I do not think of the shelving practices of large chain bookstores, I do not worry about the language that will be chosen by reviewers. When I wrote my first novel, Leaving Atlanta, I was driven by a desire to tell the story of the African-American children of Atlanta who lived -- and died -- during the child murders of 1979 to 1981. The novel documents an emotional history of a generation at a particular time and place — and much of its value comes from this function. Although the events of that terrible time are now considered historical, to me it felt more like memory than history. In 1979, I was a 10-year-old girl with over-large teeth and not enough friends. By the time I turned 12, two boys in my fifth-grade class would be dead and the corpses of dozens more strewn across the landscape of my hometown, the “city too busy to hate.” Coming of age against the backdrop of this horror was how I came to understand the cost of Blackness. When I sat down to write my very first novel — my baby, I call it -- the project felt more like an urgent matter of truth-telling rather than the academic task of “filling in the gaps of history,” which is often seen as the “work” of the African-American writer.
While I do applaud those writers who have used their imagination to render in fiction the lost voices of generations past, I believe that African-American writers must also embrace contemporary narratives. Although African-American writers have beautifully reconstructed the past — Toni Morrison’s brilliant Beloved comes to mind — we must not become so obsessed with filling the pages left blank by an incomplete historical record, that we leave no record of our own meaningful lives. I do not like to imagine my own granddaughter forced to rely on library archives to reconstruct my life because I exhausted my resources and talent pondering the past. At some point, serious writers must commit ourselves as fervently to transforming our own experiences into art.
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The transformation of experience to art, observation to art, emotion to art, or even idea to art is the alchemy of the writer. This magic happens midway between the brain and the heart. Perhaps the enchanted site is the throat, where voice is born.
All of my novels are set in Atlanta, Georgia — my hometown. My favorite settings for my work are the urban centers of the American South. I love them because they are the spaces where old world meets new technology, where the goalposts of race, class, gender, and politics are often shifted in the night, so when my characters wake up in the morning, they have no idea where they are and must spend the rest of the novel looking. We are together in this -- my characters and me. We are always searching for the truth. And the truth, as we all know, is universal.
It’s possible that I seem to contradict myself in this essay. At first I am speaking of the specificity of my experience as an African American. I’ve even embraced the separate section in American bookstores. But then, just a few paragraphs later I am waxing in the abstract about the universality and transcendence of art.
For me, these thoughts hardly contradict. They intersect. In many traditions of the African Diaspora, the crossroads is a sacred space where the mortal and spirit worlds overlap. I think of African-American literature as art that finds its home at the place where two roads meet. Connected with physical word, African-American writers speak of the reality of our brilliant, diverse people. The ways we interpret this tangible reality are as various as our faces. There is no authentic reality that marks African-American literature, but there is such a thing as authentic witnessing, which is determined by the writer and her conscience. But on that spirit road is the thing that binds us all as human beings, that is more significant than our constructed realities.
To end this story where I’ve begun, let us return to the bookstore with its separate sections. To my friends and readers who are dismayed to find my books in a section they deem “irregular,” I encourage you to become a bit more circumspect. The sign above the shelf designating my novels, my human stories about love, family, and home, does not declare them “irregular.” The sign just reminds the shopper that I am African-American, that my work comes from a certain rich historical tradition. It is an invitation to experience the humanity of the lives described in these diverse, yet bound-together, works of art. I do not believe that truth is ever the enemy of art, and the sign hanging there states a complicated, but unequivocal, truth. When you stand before that marked shelf you are at that magical, mythical crossroads. Do you dare feel both things at once? Whatever emotional response you may have to the frank racial description of the author represents your foot on that solid, earthy road, but do you dare experience that other thing, that extra-human thing? African-American literature, like all literature, is food for the souls of all people. Can you embrace the label and come forward, taking in its simultaneous relevance and irrelevance? It is difficult to walk along both roads, but you can do it. And I believe you will. All you have to do is admit your soul’s hunger, and hunger is an expression of the most human need of all.
