Black Female Writers I Want to Be When I Grow Up

I started writing this post sometime after Maya Angelou passed.  It took putting my thoughts down to realize just how important she was to me.  I read I Know Why The Caged Bird Sings as an early teen.  My memories are unreliable and I cannot remember why I read it, but I know I wasn't supposed to, but I did anyway.  It would be an understatement to say it changed me.  There were parts of that book that affected me on a personal level -- aspects of a young Maya I recognized in myself, and not only with some of the subject matter, but in the fact that Maya was a young black woman just trying to make a way out of no way.  I have to say, in some ways, her memoirs were what inspired me to write...as cliché as that may sound.

Actually, when I was a child, I read a lot of books I wasn't supposed to read.  My mother was, and still is, an avid reader.  She often had popular paperbacks lying around the house.  I did not get I Know Why the Caged Bird Sings from my mother, but I am certain I read of it in one of the novels she had.  I do know I read every Terry McMillian novel published through the mid-1990s -- books I had no business reading because of their "adult themes."  My mother's favorite genre is "African American Urban Fiction"... or what you would find in the bookstore under the category "African American Fiction," regardless of content.  In fact, as a young person, I could probably list off every famous and popular black writer there was at the time, but if you ask me about Walt Whitman or Margaret Atwood, I would have no clue.  What I read exclusively until I was a freshman in college were books written by, for, and about Black women.

Recently, I've been inspired by the work of many other Black female writers (BFWs for short).  Even now that I do know who Walt Whitman and Margaret Atwood are, and have done much to study literature that goes beyond the inadequately termed label of "African American Fiction," I am still finding that I am most inspired by those in whose faces I see traces of myself.

Below are four BFWs giving me chills of inspiration (and envy) right now...or rather, "women I want to be when I am no longer a baby writer and I finally grow up."

1. ZZ Packer
I was introduced to ZZ Packer and her writing with the short story Brownies.  In fact, after I read Brownies, I immediately ordered "Drinking Coffee Elsewhere."  Brownies took me back to my childhood, to growing up in the south, to feeling swept up in something bigger than myself and realizing there is evil in everyone, even if its just a little.  As Julie Meyerson of The Guardian writes, "Something about Packer - her lack of pretension, her shy wit and spark - is infectious. You finish the book with a mad sense that, in writing, anything is possible. Dangerous, of course, because, like all great writers, Packer makes it look easy."

2. Danielle Evans
I randomly came across Danielle Evans while internet stalking Junot Diaz.  I wasn't really internet stalking him so much as I was researching ways of connecting with writers like him and came across links to a workshop he is associated with for writers of color.  Danielle Evans was listed as one of the authors who was participating in that workshop at the time, so I decided to start internet stalking her.  I am glad I did.  My favorite short story from her collection, "Before You Suffocate Your Own Fool Self" is Virgins.  I cannot express how much I love and, again, found myself in her characters.  As The New York Times says, “The most vivid characters in Danielle Evans’s story collection are in-betweeners: between girlhood and womanhood; between the black middle class and Ivy League privilege; between iffy boyfriends and those even less reliable; between an extended family and living on your own. To say they’re caught between worlds isn’t quite accurate, though; they tend to be hard-headed, sadder but wiser and, most of all, funny.”

3. Roxane Gay
To say this woman isn't a superstar is to deny that the sky is blue.  If you have not heard her name in the past year than you have been living on another planet, and even then I am sure inter-galactic communication has found traces of her name via some form of space Morse Code.  I literally read An Untamed State in twenty-four hours.  I came across this book while internet stalking John Green (I do a lot of internet stalking, don't judge) and met her via her Tumblr feed before ever reading any of her fiction or non-fiction.  I was so impressed by her as a human-being, I knew I would enjoy her writing.  I am part way through Bad Feminist and Ayiti, a collection of short stories.  I recommend all of it!

4. Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie
My short story instructor paired Chimamnda Ngozi Adichie's short story Jumping Monkey Hill with Donald Barthelme's Glass Mountain as examples of post-modern metafiction.  Since then, I have been slowly reading through other examples of her work, but as you can see from the link to her website, she is a busy woman and it is taking me some time.  I recently ordered Americanah and am looking forward to reading what the New York Times says is "witheringly trenchant and hugely empathetic, both worldly and geographically precise, a novel that holds the discomfiting realities of our times fearlessly before us. It never feels false."


I hope this post inspires you to pick up a story written by one of these talented women or any woman of color.  Diversity in literature matters.

 

Road Trip Wednesdays: Favorite Required Reading!

Road Trip Wednesday is a ‘Blog Carnival,’ where YA Highway's contributors post a weekly writing- or reading-related question that begs to be answered. In the comments, you can hop from destination to destination and get everybody's unique take on the topic.

This Week's Topic is: Back to school time! What's your favorite book that you had to read for a class?

 

Hola (that's from 7th grade Espanol Uno)!  Sorry I have been incognegro for a few days.  I wish I could say it's because I am recuperating from a wild Labor Day Holiday trip down in the Big Easy.  But, sadly we never made it.  Issac owes me BIG TIME!  Although, we definitely made up for it!  I promise not to only post on Wednesdays and will definitely make it up to you all (all 13 of you ;).

Let's hop to this weeks RTW!  I alluded to 7th grade Espanol, however, I am going to take this week's RTW back to college...mainly because everything I read in middle school and high school is pretty much a blur to me.  

 

I was an English Lit major at the University of Maryland in College Park (GO TERPS!) and if there was one book I remember, still go to, and turned my head around, upside down, inside out, it was Cane by Jean Toomer.

 

From Goodreads:  A literary masterpiece of the Harlem Renaissance, Cane is a powerful work of innovative fiction evoking black life in the South. The sketches, poems, and stories of black rural and urban life that make up Cane are rich in imagery. Visions of smoke, sugarcane, dusk, and flame permeate the Southern landscape: the Northern world is pictured as a harsher reality of asphalt streets. Impressionistic, sometimes surrealistic, the pieces are redolent of nature and Africa, with sensuous appeals to eye and ear.

 

This book was assigned to me in a course I took on the Harlem Renaissance.  I immediately fell in love with it.  I related to it in a way that I wasn't truly prepared for because, although I wanted to write back then, I didn't know that writing like this existed.  This book was almost like a gift from a ghost, as if someone...an ancestor maybe...reached down and put this book in my hands to remind me of where I came from.  

 

I grew up on a dirt road, in the south in the 80s and 90s and I felt like Jean Toomer took me out of the "city" (well, it was pretty city to me) of College Park, MD back home to rural Ashland, VA, where cows roamed around on the farm across the street from my high school.  Although this book was a reflection of a time that I could never and would never truly understand because of my privileged circumstance of being born when I was, the time period depicted in this novel (if it can truly be called that) did not matter, because ultimately the vignettes, the poems, the spirituals, were about the people, not necessarily the place or the time.  And, I knew these people.  They were alive and vivid to me because they were my family, they were the people that went to my church, they were part of the stories I thought of every time I thought about home.   

 

I am not saying the book is not without its faults.  I am quite partial to the first half of the novel.  It is also quite complicated and generally it takes much interpretation and sometimes complete mind-bending to understand much of it.  However, what I also fell in love with was the mix of genres that is the base of the book's structure.  This, again, is a reflection of who I was at the time I read it.  I prided myself on being a poet, you see.  I still think of myself that way, but I am now into using poetic elements in my fiction that I think will enhance the prose.  I don't really write poetry anymore, although I miss it.  However, if I were so bold, I would write something like this...avant garde, original, complex, and so utterly soulful that it even includes negro spirituals.  And like Toomer, I would probably confuse the hell out of anyone who read it.

 

I don't think I can recommend this book to everyone.  It's not for everyone.  It's not the type of book you pick up and are thoroughly entertained.  

 

It's the type of book you pick up to examine.  

 

It's the type of book you get a highlighter out, draw boxes around sentences, underline passages, dog ear, and repeat lines of over and over until you think you have figured out what he is talking about (isn't that why they gave us required reading in the first place?).

 

It is the kind of book that will make you want to read Langston Hughes, Zora Neale Hurston, Nella Larson, and W.E.B DuBois. 

 

 It's the type of book that will make you want to eat some fat back, watch dusts of red clay billow down a dirt road, or listen to some jazz.  

 

For me, it's the type of book that makes me want to write and I pick it up every now and then (like now it is actually sitting on my desk) to remind me what character means to any piece of work, whether it is fiction, poetry, songwriting, or whatever the hell else you want to write about.  Because it's that type of book too: that throws conventional rules of structure out the door to create one giant piece of just plain old art. 

 

This book...it ain't for the average folk.

 

Alice Walker said of Cane, “It has been reverberating in me to an astonishing degree. I love it passionately, could not possibly exist without it.”  

 

I couldn't have said it better myself.

Retraction: August Favorite...Sorry Folks, I Changed My Mind!

I have to take back my last post.  If I had waited just one more day to finish this book, I wouldn't be such a hypocrite.  But, damn it, once I started, it could not wait.  It's still August people and this is my favorite book of August.  And it may stay my favorite book for a really long time...

Ya'll, I am in love.  Not the happy-go-lucky forever type love, but the kind of love that rips your soul apart so bad you will never be the same again.  I am in love with a book that has broken my heart and I don't know what to do with myself.  I don't even know why.  The writing was simple, the theme nothing that I had never thought about before...nothing any African American has not thought about before...and the chapters were short and rushed, but that's a YA novel for you.  But, this one...this is much more than a YA novel.  This is heartache on a white page in black ink.  This book is what I wish I could write.  This book had my head, my heart, my insides all turned upside down.  This book had me doing something I haven't done in a while, not since I finished The Fault in Our Stars. This book...made me cry ya'll.

Noughts and Crosses by Marjorie Blackman

From Goodreads: Two young people are forced to make a stand in this thought-provoking look at racism and prejudice in an alternate society.

Sephy is a Cross -- a member of the dark-skinned ruling class. Callum is a Nought -- a “colourless” member of the underclass who were once slaves to the Crosses. The two have been friends since early childhood, but that’s as far as it can go. In their world, Noughts and Crosses simply don’t mix. Against a background of prejudice and distrust, intensely highlighted by violent terrorist activity, a romance builds between Sephy and Callum -- a romance that is to lead both of them into terrible danger. Can they possibly find a way to be together?

In this gripping, stimulating and totally absorbing novel, black and white are right and wrong.

Oh.  My.  Lord!

What I am going to point out first are the things I did not like about the book.  The reason I want to point these things out first is because, in the grand scheme of things, they don't matter.  This wasn't written for me.  I am a 30-something-year-old woman who just happens to be pretending she is a 17-year-old and reading books made for kids.  My main critique is with how simple the writing is.  But, any critique that can be made about the reading level is ridiculous.  It was written for 12-year-olds and up.  There is not much depth with respect to the language itself.  The chapters are short and often feel rushed but that is generally the standard for books geared towards this audience with their reading level and comprehension abilities in mind.  

But, in being an adult reader, I picked up on what wasn't said.  I was able to pick between the words on the page and grab the feelings there like something precious that fell down a hole, just because it wasn't there right in front of me, didn't mean it wasn't down there and that I could not get it.  I had to reach for it.  I liked that.  Marjorie Blackman's restraint was just enough to help me understand exactly what I was reading without feeling as though there was something missing.  She had to be simple to get the message across to her intended audience and as an adult reader, it was my duty to interpret beyond that, pick up the nuisances between the words and determine the feelings there even though it wasn't explicitly stated.  And I felt it, believe me, every thing that the characters didn't say, because they didn't have to.  I felt all of it.

Now, I am going to tell you what I did like...no love...about this book:

Race Matters: It wasn't just about race yet it was all about race.  Imagine apartheid in its reverse and that is what you have here.  Its an allegory on how race essentially does not matter, that human nature is what determines our fundamental desire to control and rebel against said control.  When flipping racial power structure on its head like this it isn't hard to grasp how simple things could have been reversed...where blacks weren't enslaved, but did the enslaving, where the standard of beauty is based on African features instead of European, where even something as simple as a band-aid doesn't come in the standard pink like it does now, but in dark brown...and that if our world was changed in this way, it would not have been any better on either side.

That's easy to say now, however, because my life, albeit not entirely free of racism, was nothing compared to what it could have been if I was born in another time.  I also just finished a book called Mudbound that was based in the Mississippi Delta right after WWII in the 1940s.  I think my quota for reading racially charged literature this year has been met between these two books, for sure.  After reading that book and seeing what happened to the black characters who are victims in the Jim Crow South and then reading Noughts and Crosses has been an experiment in tolerance for me.  I can't say I recommend reading both novels this way, one after the other, but if you get an opportunity to, try it and tell me how you feel afterwards.

Adult Themes:  Although this book was written with a teen audience in mind, the subject matter is not solely for young adults.  This book covers it all from sex, to violence, to alcoholism, to racism, to religion...and everything in between.

Tragedy:  Lastly, I will say that I was turned upside down at the end.  I'm going to try not to spoil it, but it doesn't end like your typical YA novel.  This book has Shakespearean levels of tragedy.  So much so that the story was adapted for the Royal Shakespeare Company.  

 This is the first in a series of three books plus a novella and the first time I've read a book in a series where I am not interested in reading the follow up novels.  This story ends so tragically that I don't think I would be able to take any more heartache.  I love the characters that much.  I may start off with a sample of the follow up book...see how I feel, if I can really handle it, and then go from there.

Another note, Noughts and Crosses was published under the title Black and White in America, so if you can't find it under its original title, look for it under this other one.  According to Wikipedia, as the book was published in 2002, it wasn't released in America because of themes relating to terrorism which was a sensitive topic following the 9/11 attacks.  It wasn't released in this country until 2005.  I am not sure as to the reason for the title change, probably because they couldn't call it "Tics and Tacs" or "Hugs and Kisses"...so what else could the title be?

So, people, I am sorry to go back on my former post.  I still like that book too and I still recommend it.  But this here...this is different...this is love, pure but not so simple.  Please read it...please...please...please...

I LOVE YOU CALLUM!