In his essay, “How Invisible Man Taught Me to See,” on The Wall Street Journal‘s Speakeasy blog, Victor Lavalle explores, among many things, what it means to be a black writer with a burgeoning white audience. For him, it means resistance to instinctual conclusion-jumping and, unexpectedly, fulfilling the wish of Ellison’s underground narrator to become an individual, rather than a monolith of one’s culture.
Here, he speaks about imagined responses to two sets of white friends who called his latest novel, The Big Machine, “a black book, but not a black book, you know?”:
When I was younger I would’ve felt sure I knew the answer immediately. They meant it was a book they could relate to and, by implication, most black books weren’t. They meant it was a book that didn’t scare them like all those brutish black men out in the real world. They meant the book didn’t work double-time to make them feel guilty for being white. These are some of answers I would’ve come up with when I was a younger man. And, quite frankly, it would’ve been enough to end both those friendships. I would’ve stalked off, feeling self-righteous and certain and no one could’ve told me different.
But as I say, that was ten years back. And in that time, my goodness, I have said and done the wrong thing countless times, most often without even realizing I’d been an ass. (Try telling a Bangladeshi author how much you enjoy Indian literature and you’ll see what I mean.) So when these friends spoke that dread sentence I took a moment to recall their faces: flushed red with embarrassment, their eyes making contact with the ceiling, the walls, the floors—anything but me. They were scared, bordering on terrified, by what they wanted to say. It’s a black book, but not a BLACK book.
He then decides to offer them the opportunity to elaborate, rather than to assume he already knows what they mean:
They said that Ricky Rice (the narrator for most of the book) just seemed like them. His fears, his dreams, the way he navigated the world. They were surprised to find so many of their own trials reflected in his. They wouldn’t have guessed that a 40 year old black man from Queens, a former junkie and petty criminal, who was raised in a religious cult, would seem exactly like a 33 year old white mother living in Brooklyn or a 35 year old white father who’d grown up on Long Island.
That’s sure as hell not what I’d expected them to say. In five lifetimes I would never have imagined such a thing. Their answers made me think of Ellison’s novel again. That ending. But with a different understanding this time. In 1953 Ellison’s “Invisible Man” had to assert the idea that he might be speaking for the reader—any reader, whereas now, these two friends of mine were asserting their similarity to Ricky Rice. And it was me, the author, who had to be convinced of their kinship.
In the end, Lavalle’s essay reads as more than a rumination on Invisible Man and more, of course, than an exercise in improving communication between the races. It seems an admonition against the assumption of difference. It’s about the perils of reading segregation (of experience and ideas) into cross-racial friendships. And as a bonus for writers, there’s a message here about underestimating your readership; doing so can negatively affect your writing and your discussions of content with culturally diverse audiences.
Give the whole piece a gander, when you get time. Particularly on MLK Day, this essay’s a great read.
