 © Lisa Teasly
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Black Writer, Black Reader Click to read Click to |
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© Lisa Teasly
|
Black Writer, Black Reader Click to read Click to |
Black
Writer, Black Reader
A writer must read. She’s got to know and experience the classics, the best
stories that have come before her, as many as she can. She must continue her education.
But what happens when a writer is black and must read classics written predominately by white authors? Almost always it’s a hurtful experience. "Nigger" this, "monkey" that—and/or "darkie" that. I’m not only talking about Huckleberry Finn or Heart of Darkness. Before I hurl a book across the room out of anger, I wonder how to work out my frustrations constructively.
In the book High Cotton, the African-American writer Darryl Pinckney describes his trials and tribulations while working for the writer Djuna Barnes, and how her many digs inspired him, at one point, to "get them all," to "expose . . . the sins of Western literature." He set out, as I have wanted to, and listed on index cards: the nigger box in Hemingway’s The Sun Also Rises; the Cadillac of niggers in Fitzgerald’s The Great Gatsby; the darkie towns of Dashiell Hammett; and the passage in D.H. Lawrence’s Lady Chatterley’s Lover where he likens sleeping with a black woman to mud. Pinckney finds, as I have found, "niggers" in Rimbaud, William Carlos Williams, Poe, Defoe, Katherine Mansfield, Shaw, Genet, and, of course, Céline. He found Virginia Woolf’s comparisons of a black man to a monkey.
I needed only open the first page of Virginia Woolf’s Orlando to find the hero "in the act of slicing at the head of a Moor . . . the colour of an old football, and more or less the shape of one, save for the sunken cheeks and a strand or two of coarse dry hair, like the hair on a coconut . . . who had started up under the moon in the barbarian Welds of Africa." She goes on to add that Orlando’s "enemy grinned at him through shrunk, black lips . . ." What hatred Woolf had! And I can’t, for the life of me, figure out why. After thirty-three years, one might think that I had toughened myself to these blows. But I haven’t. Every time I pick up a book by a white author, particularly one written before the 1970s, I am always shocked.
Even with Proust. I thought I had escaped unscathed, but halfway through the first volume of Proust’s Remembrance of Things Past, the story is told of a minor character who "went the other day to the Zoo, where they have some blackamoors—Singhalese . . ." and this character, Madame Blatin, approaches one of the cages and says, "Good morning, nigger!"
Even Truman Capote’s most beloved Holly Golightly failed to win me over. In fact, I hated her after her exclamation to her agent in Breakfast at Tiffany’s: "You’re such a slob. You always nigger-lip." Later she puts down the narrator’s short story for being about "Brats and niggers . . . It doesn’t mean anything." Still later, she imagines the babies that she and her Brazilian boyfriend would have: "I’m sure some of them will be rather dark—José has a trace of le negre. . . . What could be prettier than a quite coony baby with bright green beautiful eyes?" In still another scene, the narrator comes down to her level and describes those who goaded their horses through Central Park as "savage members of a jungle ambush, a band of Negro boys [who] leapt out of the shrubbery . . ." But does a writer hate a writer for his or her failed humanity, or does a writer look at a writer strictly for how he or she perceives and illustrates the world?
Should I pass on Henry Miller for his unfavorable sexual descriptions of women and miss out on his spiritual wisdom in Big Sur and the Oranges of Hieronymous Bosch? Should I be embarrassed by the fact that the amazing American writer Toni Morrison debuted with a tale of black incest and was awarded the Pulitzer Prize for Literature for her portrayal of a black slave mother who kills her child? Should I dismiss Gabriel Garcia Marquez for his numerous offensive portrayals of "mulattos," or Nabokov for also writing numerously on the love of a man for a prepubescent girl? Should I skip the precise first-person narratives of Knut Hamsun because he was a Nazi sympathizer?
The end result of Darryl Pinckney’s exercise in exorcising racist classic authors was that he threw out the index cards. He said he realized the motive for his note-taking was "pretty sorry," since after leaving the employment of Djuna Barnes he had "fallen into the pit of trying to prove that there was more to me than she thought." His grandfather told him, "Let them talk. You know your name."
Just as I know mine. The stories I have to tell come from what I’ve perceived and need to express. Whatever limitations are exposed of my moral character, I will find out, when and if I am read. And as a reader I still have these many humps to get over—the psychological pain of an uncomprehended white racism. At some point, I hope, I will be over it. Besides Darryl Pinckney’s tossing of the cards, there are other examples of transcendence. A writer friend of mine, who is Jewish, named his daughter Céline.
Profile
From the poem "she has many ancestors,"
for Lisa Teasley.
—Kevin Powell
Bio
Lisa Teasley
Place of residence: New York.
Birthplace: Los Angeles.
Family: Husband, John Vlautin. Daughter, Imogen Teasley-Vlautin.
Day job: Writer/painter.
Education: B.A. in English, University of California at Los Angeles.
Anthologies: In the Tradition: An Anthology of Young Black Writers.
Serial publications: Between C and D. Catalyst. Rampike. Los Angeles Times. LA
Weekly. Details Magazine. Fiction and articles.
Cover art: Callalo, Volume 17, Number 4. Herstory, Volume 1 (Spring
1992).
Awards: May Merrill Miller Award for Fiction. National Society of Arts and Letters
Short Story Award. Amaranth Review Award for Short Fiction.
Current project: Historical novel on the West Indians who dug the Panama Canal.
Favorite animal: Iguana.
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