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belleisa on July 2nd, 2010
There’s a game I like to play when I walk into a bookstore. Based on the the title, cover and store placement I can always interpret the marketing intention for a book meant for a black American audience. The best part of this game is that the books will, typically, fit into the following categories (they are, in no particular order):
1. Black Pathology or “What’s wrong with Black people?”
2. The literature of “sistah gurl”
3. Christian-oriented fiction/inspirational
4. Street-Lit or Hip-Hop fiction
5. The Slave Novel
6. The Civil Rights Book (This also includes Black Nationalism)
7. The extraordinary rise from street life/poverty/welfare into the middle class.
8. Poorly styled celebrity memoir, or well researched and documented hagiography
9. Black Queens and Kings
10. Hip-Hop analysis
11. AFRICA
12. The “Black” version of some mainstream topic (For example: “Black Girl’s Guide to Fashion; “Black Families’ Guide to Wealth;”) Guides will include slang, bright colors, and inevitably the phrase “the legacy of slavery.”
13. The Classics: Harlem Renaissance 101 and/or The Black Arts Movement. Toni Morrison.
14. Contemporary Classics or Literary Fiction (Mostly woman, mostly diaspora authors)
15. Non-black author writes really compelling story about black person(s); story gets awards accolades, lots of press and movie deal.
These topics produce wonderful books and poorly written books. They often represent a compendium of the black American experience, and just as often, they are simply a reflection of what publishing thinks black people read.
In a recent Washington Post op ed, author, Bernice L. McFadden wonders about the nature of books that would fit into number 15 on my list.
Kathryn Stockett’s novel The Help, published by a Penguin Books imprint, sold 1 million books within a year of publication. Her novel has gained accolades and awards, including the prestigious South African Boeke Prize. The Help is being adapted for the screen; at the helm of production is the Academy Award-winning director and producer Steven Spielberg. Sue Monk Kidd’s best-selling novel The Secret Life of Bees, also published by Penguin Books, is another story set in the South with African American characters. Kidd’s novel garnered similar fame, fortune and recognition. Kathryn Stockett and Sue Monk Kidd are living the dream of thousands of authors, myself included. But they are not the first white women to pen stories of the black American South and be lauded for their efforts.
More after the jump.
About seven months ago, I read Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie’s Half of a Yellow Sun. Primarily, it was the fictional story of how wealthy Nigerian twin sisters and their lovers (one Nigerian, one White) dealt with the harrowing effects of the Biafran-Nigerian War (1967-1970). Before reading the novel, I knew nothing about this conflict or how many lives it destroyed—and in the end, what appealed to me most about the work was that I was able to learn so much actual history by becoming so deeply invested in the lives and loves of these fictional sisters.
When I heard about Maaza Mengiste’s debut novel, Beneath the Lion’s Gaze, also a work of historical fiction set in a time of genocidal revolution, I hurriedly added it to my reading list, eager to experience the same connection to history through imagined participants that I felt reading Half of a Yellow Sun.
I was not disappointed.
More after the jump.
belleisa on February 3rd, 2010
Nicholas Carr from the Britannica Blog on Why How We Read Matters:
“A change in form is always, as well, a change in content. That is unavoidable, as history tells us over and over again. One reads an electronic book differently than one reads a printed book – just as one reads a [...]
slb on January 18th, 2010
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.
More after the jump.
belleisa on December 17th, 2009
My earliest reading of Wallace Thurman’s The Blacker the Berry, I believed and still contend that this novel is a defense of dark-colored skin. His portrayal of the light-skinned antagonists and the bevy of characters who subscribe to the “light is right” mindset are one-dimensional and often vicious. This is similar to what Richard Wright does with the ”villains” in his novel Black Boy. However unlike Wright, and what my first encounter with the text missed, is Thurman’s vehement dismissal of victimhood.
Emma Lou Brown, Berry’s main character, reaches a breaking point as she realizes that she can’t continue to bounce from state to state in search of acceptance as as she did for most of the novel. With each personal and professional rejection, Emma draws “more and more within herself.” She becomes “more and more bitter.” She can’t undo her emotionally fraught upbringing amongst The Blue Vein Society, which is an organization in the novel created by her grandparents, where admission is the appearance of “blue veins on the underside of the arm.”
In the final pages of the novel Emma must come to terms with her reality: She will always be dark skinned.
More after the jump.
belleisa on November 30th, 2009
Emma Lou Brown is a dark-skinned black girl in the 1920s. born to a family reaching for status and desperate to avoid any semblance of blackness. For Emma, it’s a daily reminder of why everything in her life is wrong. Written in 1929, The Blacker the Berry is a fierce defense of dark-colored skin. At [...]
belleisa on October 15th, 2009
During dinner a friend of a friend foolishly told me he didn’t read. My confusion at the notion turned to heartbreak, then I tried to reserve my judgment. He couldn’t have possibly known he was having dinner with a girl who goes to bookstores for fun. Seeing the disappointment on my face, [...]
belleisa on September 25th, 2009
Referred to as a “tragic mulatto tale,” an accurate description, yet one that has never interested me, Quicksand by Nella Larsen is about the most frustrating black female lead I’ve ever read–Helga Crane. She’s a woman whose eccentricities today, I imagine, would be imitated and fawned over. Her described beauty would be put on magazine covers and her style called things like “classic” and “funky,” “retro” and “vintage.”
But really Quicksand is about female sexuality and identity, and the desire to express those things without compunction. It’s also about passion and security, and pitting those two elements against each other, as literature often does, as if they can’t naturally exist together. Can they?
More after the jump.
belleisa on August 17th, 2009
 from random house It has been speculated that Uncle Tom’s Cabin aggravated the cultural conversation about slavery and planted the seeds for the Civil War. Whatever analysis is taken from the novel, Harriet Beecher Stowe’s serialized stories became relevant during a very particular time and place.
So, what set the cultural tone for an unknown West African man to publish the novel that would come to be seen as the seminal work from the African continent? Why was it important that this story be written in English?
More after the jump.
belleisa on August 14th, 2009
 from random house Ricky Rice is a former dope fiend and a surviving member of a suicide cult. And when he gets a mysterious letter to uphold a promise he made long ago, Ricky becomes a member of a secret society of paranormal investigators called the Unlikely Scholars. When the society is threatened, Ricky is teamed up with Adele, a Scholar with a past maybe even sketchier than as his own.
I sat with the author, Victor LaValle, who also wrote Slapboxing with Jesus and The Ecstatic, to talk with him about his new novel Big Machine. It’s well-written, fiilled with mystery and adventure. Also, it’s just damn funny. I tried my best not to reveal too much about the plot. We talked about the story, the writing and the process. An excerpt:
BelleIsa: You also said that “I view writing fiction as a lifelong pursuit toward self-awareness.” What if anything were you attempting to work through?
Victor LaValle: In the novel, I was working through choice. The after effects of making choices. There was a woman I had been dating. I got her pregnant and she had an abortion. We went through it together in the sense that I was with her while she went through it. Then we broke up, really badly. And I thought the abortion was only supposed to matter to her. Like it’s something that only the woman continues to think about after the fact. It wasn’t supposed to leave a lasting feeling of responsibility, guilt, and questioning in me. That’s what I thought, but I was wrong. So I wanted to write about that. To understand it.
But I also wanted it to be a kick ass-story about a secret society with black people acting as crazy as people in a Bruce Willis movie.
More…
belleisa on July 28th, 2009
from coverbrowser.com
It’s the story of pre-colonial Nigeria, groundbreaking because it was originally written in English by a black African writer. The title was taken from a William Butler Yeats poem. It features the story of Okonkwo, a young man struggling to maintain the old customs with the ones brought by white Christian missionaries.
Gods [...]
blackink12 on July 27th, 2009
Because of technical difficulties and an unusually busy work day, this almost became Your Tuesday Random-Ass Roundup. Sorry I’m late again.
DougJ at Balloon Juice: “We’re a country where a uniform and a badge entitles you to arrest people for speaking loudly on their porches.”
Your PostBourgie-approved weekend reading material:
First things first, [...]
[youtube=http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9cqyJjZKk9o&rel=0&color1=0x2b405b&color2=0x6b8ab6&hl=en&feature=player_embedded&fs=1]
shani-o: Sometime early in the year (or was it last year?), I heard a radio interview on Philly’s public radio station with a man named Joel Berg. Berg was discussing ‘low food insecurity’ (also known as ‘hunger’) in the U.S. His energy and candor made me take note of his book, which came [...]
belleisa on July 2nd, 2009
After a walk by the Apollo theatre or a visit to the local music or book store, it’s clear that Michael Jackson is going to make people a ton of money posthumously. And as the media stories speculate on how he died, and people start barking for who owns what of his estate, the rights [...]
belleisa on June 15th, 2009
*Note: We’re making this discussion a sticky post, and it’ll be at the top of the page all this week. Scroll down for newer posts.
 From Random House Benji, Reggie, Nick, Clive, Bobby, Randy, Marcus & NP (“Nigga Please”). Back when summers were idle, the coming of September meant reinvention and, in the meantime, there were a ton of “firsts” to be had. First car, first job, first kiss, first (insert your summer story here). More…
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