from public to private

writing bone black

When I first told everybody around me that I was writing a memoir, the initial response was usually “Aren’t you rather young to be doing that?” A great many people still think that memoirs should be written late in life, in a moment of reflection and response when one is old and retired. Such thinking seems oddly old-fashioned given that we are living at a time when it is clearly evident that a great many of us will never live to a ripe old age. As never in my life before the young are dying around me or preparing for the possibility of early death. And like many folks in their mid-forties I am stunned by the number of friends, comrades, and/or peers who have passed away just when life was becoming most sweet. Among this mounting dead are well-known writers and artists who leave few if any autobiographical traces. Already there is an aura of unreconcilable loss that is assuredly a response to knowing that we will never hear them tell their stories.

Frankly, I begin to write Bone Black, the memoir of my girlhood, almost twenty years ago. In my late twenties still grappling psychoanalytically with emotional disturbances that were directly related to childhood I turned to autobiography to have a more condensed yet complete picture. I wrote about significant memories, the little incidents and stories I had heard myself tell again and again to explain something about myself. These memories flowed from me in a lyrical poetic prose that fascinated me. My usual writing style was clear and direct. These mysterious, dreamlike visions of the past appeared in an uncalculated manner. The style intrigued me; I felt it was the closest I had ever come to divinely inspired writing.

When I first began writing Bone Black: Memories of Girlhood I did not have a plan. My assumption was just that I would write the story of my life and that it would unfold on the page in a conventional documentary fashion. Yet when I began to write, having made no conscious decisions about style or content, the writing that emerged was not the conventional autobiographical format. The style was lyrical, poetic, and abstract. It was not the straightforward linear narrative that characterized my previous nonfiction work. The writing was different from anything I had imagined, but I liked it. For what appeared on the page were words that evoked the spirit of the world I grew up in and that spirit unfolding in its own manner and fashion moved me. A gentle, tender intimacy was evoked in the words, I felt it. I felt the reader would feel it as well, and so I let the style of the work inspire and claim me.

Any writer who strives to be true to artistic integrity surrenders to the shape the work takes of its own accord. Work comes to a writer differently depending on our circumstances at the time of writing. The politics of experience and location shape our vision. My first book, Ain’t I a Woman: Black Women and Feminism, was written shortly after I left the racial apartheid of my growing up. As a black female coming from a southern, working-class, fundamentalist Christian background, it was incredibly difficult for me to speak with a radical voice, to let go my fear and find the right words. Initially, I wanted to address and appease so many different audiences that the book in its early stages was this wordy, overly pedantic work—full of the academic styles I had learned were appropriate in my undergraduate English classes. I rewrote this book again and again until I found my style, a voice that sounded real to me and not a mere imitation of the fake academic neutral sound I had learned to cultivate in academic settings. The first version of this work was finished when I was nineteen but the book was not published until years later. By then my style was distinct and clear. I worked on refining it for future works. So it was a tremendous surprise to me when Bone Black developed in a direction that was more akin to the style I had as a poet.

Admittedly, I began writing Bone Black as part of a psychoanalytic effort to understand the past. When I sent proposals of the work with sample chapters to publishers, I was told again and again that the work was not interesting in its lyrical poetic prose style but if I would just “tell the story,” i.e., convert it all to linear narratives, it would be acceptable. While we like to imagine ours is not a publishing world that promotes and encourages censorship, it became clear to me that there was a style of African-American writing, particularly work by women, that was acceptable; anything outside the mold was ignored or rejected.

When I began this work more than ten years ago memoirs were not as compelling to readers as they are today. When I sent samples of this work to editors they were not the slightest bit interested. Editors seemed to think the story of my girlhood would be more compelling in the marketplace if it was sensational. They wanted me to tell my story in the good old-fashioned manner of tabloid-like confession or straightforward autobiography. I wanted to tell this story on its own terms, respecting the integrity of artistic vision. Recently, there has been a shift in literary attitudes concerning confessional writing. Memoirs are now regarded more highly. Currently, they have value because there have been many stories that were best-sellers. Of course memoirs that make the most money are most often those that have sensational appeal. Yet this fact of the current marketplace does not make the memoir an inferior or less than literary genre. As a reader who enjoys well-crafted autobiographical writing, I have been thrilled by new and stylistically innovative memoirs. I was excited by the more recent celebration of the memoir. It made it possible for me to return to my earlier memoir writing and complete it.

In the preface to Bone Black: Memories of Girlhood I stated my reasons for writing and publishing this book at this time, calling attention to the growing body of psychological and sociological feminist writings on girlhood and the paucity of information about black girlhood. I emphasized the fact that when black girlhood is talked about novels are the text evoked. Without in any way diminishing the importance of novels about black girlhood, I stressed that fiction cannot be used by critical thinkers as a base for accurate ethnographic comprehension of this experience, that nonfiction accounts are needed. Documenting my own experience was an act of critical intervention. A growing body of fictional accounts of girlhood exist that graphically tell narratives of rape, incest, and overall abuse in black girlhood. These accounts are often drawn from true stories and embellished. Bone Black tells the story of my attempt to construct self and identity in a troubled home environment. Most specifically it paints a portrait of an artistic, gifted child in a working-class southern religious household whose yearning to read, think, and write are at odds with family expectations. There is much psychological conflict, torture, and physical pain, which when I was an adolescent led me to feel suicidal. The girlhood decision of whether or not I should kill myself is consistently juxtaposed with the struggle to find my place as thinker, dreamer, and emerging writer. In many ways it is a common story of adolescent alienation—an account of the feelings of a misunderstood outsider who cannot find a place to belong.

Much to my surprise none of the reviews I read mentioned suicide. This was the case even when reviews overwhelmingly praised the work. Indeed, a number of reviews (largely by white women), though written with positive intent, implied that though full of “marvelous” lyrical prose there was nothing really significant happening in the book—no story. Black woman writer Thulani Davis took the book to task for its lack of graphic revelation. Based on her understanding of my previous work she concludes, “One might expect a memoir of utter clarity, rendered without sentiment.” She concludes her piece with the statement that these “memories of girlhood may seem no more than moments safely told of the ordinary days of an extraordinary person.” Since she does not refer to the suicidal longings expressed in the memoir, readers cannot know if she thinks such longings are safe and ordinary. Like many reviewers, Davis seemed unable to let go her desire to hear a particular kind of gutsy down-to-earth account of a gifted black girl growing up in a troubled family long enough to appreciate the significance of my chosen narrative content and style.

There is nothing sensational in Bone Black, no rape, no prolonged graphically violent beatings, no incest. It is not a “safe” book, as it resists contempt for the ordinary, reminding readers that we are as marked by small, seemingly trivial moments in life as we are by dramatic incidents. The suicidal longings of an adolescent girl are not the stuff of great intrigue, nor did I want them to be. I wanted to show how one can be terribly isolated and desperate while calmly embracing the mundane. From the onset I was concerned that it would be difficult to interest a reading public so inclined toward the sensational that I was not confident that a more lyrical imaginative account of black female experience could find a place. So many stories of black girlhood are filled with lurid tales of all manner of sexual abuse, incest, rape by strangers, and unrelenting violence that this has almost come to represent in the popular imagination what black girlhood is. To deviate from this “norm,” whether by describing similar situations without sensationalism or offering a completely different account, in many readers’ minds would be tantamount to a betrayal of conventional stereotypical assumptions about black girlhood. For the most part mainstream reviewers did not know what to make of this book. It simply did not fit their expectations.

While the book was received warily by mainstream reviewers, reviews in the alternative press grappled with the work on its own terms. Usually, black reviewers, with the exception of writer Thulani Davis, directly addressed the content of the book. They were not concerned about my public persona or whether this book “fit” with the other books I had written. Black writers, like all authors from marginal groups, always have difficulty gaining recognition for a body of work if anything we do is eclectic. Positive reception of our early work may mean that we are positioned by the critical and reading public in specific ways. Deviating from this may cause them confusion.

This is especially the case for American-born black writers. Writers born in the Caribbean or Africa who come to literary prominence tend to be given greater leeway to write in diverse styles than African-American writers. A prime example of this would be the work of Jamaica Kincaid, who was born in St. Johns, Antigua, in the West Indies. Kincaid writes fiction, nonfiction, and autobiographical work. When she uses diverse styles it is seen as a sign of her literary prowess. Her most recent work, My Brother, clearly fits in the category of memoir, simply defined as a record of events based on the writer’s personal observation. Even so, in a rather disingenuous way Kincaid attempted to disassociate her work from the genre, stating: “In fact, the advance copy of the book had the word memoir on it and I made them remove it. When it comes out in hardcover it won’t have it. A memoir is too generous and big a word, it’s certainly inappropriate for anything that I would write. It’s a marketing word that doesn’t apply to the work. Writers really should pay attention to these things. How can you call a work a memoir when you’re writing about a thing that’s ongoing? A memoir is when the thing has stopped, and these events that I’ve written about, they are still ongoing in my life. I’m not yet at the age to write a memoir.” These statements notwithstanding, My Brother is a work that contains a writer’s observations and reflections on her brother’s death; it is a memoir.

There are times in my writing career when I envy the freedom black writers who are not born in the United States have to create work that is not seen through the narrow lens that has traditionally determined the critical scope of readers’ responses to writing by African-Americans. Despite commonalities, writing by black writers who are not African-Americans tends to be seen as always more literary and therefore more valuable than work by African-Americans. Even though I have always loved reading, valuing the library as a place to read books free of charge, it was not until I went away to college that I first read a wide range of literature by black writers in the diaspora. Growing up, as I did, in a social situation of racial apartheid where books by African-American writers were usually impossible to find because public libraries in segregated small towns simply did not order them, my big quest was to find these books and read them. I was desperate to find them because if they were not there it would mean that I had little chance of succeeding at becoming a writer.

Many black American writers born before the days of racial integration, especially those of us from poor and working-class backgrounds, relied on caring librarians to aid us in our discovery of the world of books. Indeed, the white librarians were often among the most generous educators when it came to working with black students. While other teachers imposed their racial biases the librarians usually urged us to read. And those of us who cared about books were given guidance. It was the white librarian at the public library whom I dared tell in my girlhood that I wanted to read books by black writers. While she did not know about them, she was willing to search for them and show me how to find them.

In those days, I did not think about the fate of black writers in the diaspora. My sense of the literary universe had been shaped by the canon of great writing by white westerners. From the moment I entered college I sought to expand my reading horizons. When preparing for my doctorate I chose as one of my areas of concentration African literature, both francophone and anglophone. I read black writers of the diaspora, focusing my attention on writers from Africa and the Caribbean. When reading experimental work by Guyanese writer Wilson Harris or the work of South African writer Bessie Head, I often discussed with classmates the different impact colonization and white supremacy had on those writers and their visions and those of African-American writers. It seemed to me then and now that more of them felt free to articulate their vision in diverse styles than African-American writers. This is especially the case with the work that is in any way experimental.

All too often it is assumed (especially by white critics) that the black writer who is not African-American is inherently more serious and literary. While a writer like Jamaica Kincaid is often asked in interviews to offer her pronouncements and judgments about black American writing and culture, African-Americans doing work that is serious literature are not asked to give our views on the nature of Caribbean or African writing and culture. Unfortunately, more often than not known black writers who are not African-American seek to distance themselves from the forms of censorship in the publishing world that check, control, and shape African-American writing. Taking advantage of the racist stereotypes that inform literary biases, these writers often accept without question and perpetuate the stereotypical notions about black American writing that continue to abound in our culture.

All too often one of those stereotypes is that the African-American with token exceptions is not interested in the craft of writing. Hence even if we use experimental styles or write using diverse stylistic strategies we will be judged by a conventional yardstick that demands that we always and only speak from our gut, tell our stories using only one literary paradigm. Writing and publishing Bone Black reinforced both my awareness of the ways in which African-American writing, especially the work of black women writers, gets pigeonholed by both the publishing industry and the reading public. When we experiment with diverse styles, when the content and shape of our work goes against the stereotypical grain we risk it being devalued by a critical reviewing public that does not know how to approach the work. Challenging biases in the reviewing process as well as demanding of publishers that they remain open when selecting work by African-Americans so that unconventional material is not discarded or rewritten to appeal to the marketplace is necessary if we are to gain greater freedom to write what we want to write in the manner in which we wish to write it.