some kind of tomorrow.”*
Barbara Chase-Riboud, Jayne Cortez, Sapphire, Toni Morrison
“As writers, what we do is remember.
And to remember this world is to create it.”
—toni morrison
During an interview in Nanterre, on the outskirts of Paris in 2011, Toni Morrison traced the relatively recent existence of the African American novel back to the folklore of the West African storyteller, the griot.1 For three centuries, African Americans had used music and coded songs to communicate among themselves and pass on traditions from one generation to another. “But,” she explained, “when spirituals, gospels, blues, and jazz became world music, losing their specificity as guardians of the past, then the novel became an absolute necessity to keep their tradition threatened to be erased and made invisible, and revisit the history of slavery not from the point of view of the conqueror, but from the point of view of the conquered, told in an imaginative way.”
This is what the African American postwar novelists Richard Wright and James Baldwin had done, showing in their novels and essays the social and mental ravages of racism born out of slavery. Among other factors, their writings sowed the seeds of the civil rights movement that was to bring on its culminating act of 1964, raising hopes of an equal, nondiscriminatory society.
Yet, by the 1990s, the picture of African American life, as depicted by an emerging generation of African American writers, bore little resemblance to the promises of this landmark law. The roots of racism lay deep, and if this could not be expressed overtly anymore, it nevertheless persisted, morphing into new forms and expressions that included “innuendoes,” “power play,” and “humiliations,” as Jake Lamar reminded us at the Village Voice.2
Jake Lamar
“Fiction allows one to go below the surface and explore the underlying consciousness of being Black and facing racism.”
— lamar, Village Voice reading, April 25, 1999.
We have already met the author of Bourgeois Blues,3 a Harvard graduate and a journalist for Time magazine. He belonged to the generation who had grown up with promises of civil rights increasingly tinged with disillusionment.
A major voice of African American expatriates in Paris, Jake has continued to live in a multicultural northern Paris neighborhood, where he observes the racist remnants of France’s colonial past while continuing to scrutinize his native land from a wider angle. Though his novels and thrillers are filled with resilient African American characters, they are often set in a country resoundingly beset with innate racism.
On April 25, 1999, Jake launched his second American novel Close to the Bone4 at the Village Voice, introduced by Bob Swaim, an American film director living in France.5 The two had met at a prior Village Voice reading, and it was clear that their shared passion for movies would keep them close. As well a writer of screenplays, Swaim praised the cinematic style of Lamar “who could spin a damned good yarn. His novels speak of racism, but they essentially speak to all of us, regardless of race, creed, color, or gender.”
Jake Lamar opened his talk by telling us that he had added “a new confusion to the problem of racial identities” in his latest novel. Among three young couples, one of his main characters, Walker Dupree, is mixed-blood, born of a white father, a fact he conceals from his girlfriend Sadie Broom, a middle-class African American.
Learning that Walker is not only Black, Sadie blurts out that she will not have mixed-race children, arguing that “she would not feel close to them.” Her admission shocks Walker, but another irritant soon comes into play with the O. J. Simpson affair that was exacerbating the American race debate at the time. Contrary to prevailing public opinion, Sadie defends Simpson, claiming that “if the victim were a Black woman, America wouldn’t care.”
A woman in the audience wondered why the author had wanted to show racism in the particular light of a mixed-race and middle-class character.
Lamar: “Racism has been underlying the past two hundred years of American history, but it varies with generations. African American literature has traditionally shown blatant, oppressive racism, especially in novels taking place in the past. Of course, with a new Black middle class, there is no doubt that the issue has become all the more complex and subversive, and this is what I’m trying to show.”
Q: “How was this novel received in America?”
Lamar: “In America, all these nuances, ambivalences, complexities are immediately understood. But there are other elements now in America playing a part in the debate, such as the politically correct. In one case, the reading my publisher organized for me long in advance was cancelled at the last minute by a bookseller in Chicago for fear of offending her customers. Sometimes, readers do not know what to make of the situations I create in my works.”
Q: “How would you describe those ‘situations’?”
Lamar: “I deal with ambivalences in my Black characters who question their place in the world and what I call ‘barriers of consciousness,’ like Sadie’s biased approach to the Simpson trial. The traditional divide between Black and white doesn’t take into consideration the new Black middle class with the relatively new Black access to professional jobs. Such ambivalences require a more nuanced approach to racism which, I admit, knocks people off kilter.”
Q: “Do you think that living abroad gives you the distance to treat the issue of American racism differently?”
Lamar: “Certainly, living in France gives me a more detached perspective on America, and following the blown-up O. J. Simpson affair, I saw the weirdness of America more acutely. The O. J. Simpson affair is a thread running through the book, and at the end of it, my characters are at one another’s throats over him, reflecting the reality of the country. People were consumed by its every detail. Following the case from France, I had some distance, allowing me to be more interested in the effects such a trial was having on people. Perceptions of racism are varied and complex, and in fiction you can examine those perceptions from many different angles.”
Q: “For a long time, the debate on racism was inseparable from the class issue, yet the title of your memoir Bourgeois Blues clearly implies that the access of African Americans to middle- and even upper-class jobs doesn’t protect them from racist attacks. Has the traditional pairing of class-race become obsolete?”
Lamar: “True. For a long time, race has been assimilated to class. And there is a term that defines this pairing of race and class: it is the ‘caste system.’ The heritage of slavery, segregation, and lynching are in the many stereotypes and images that stick, that are glued to your skin. Caste consciousness is not just about color or class; it has to do with all those images brought to you from the past.”
Q: “There are many African Americans working in the film industry today; they are film directors and actors. Do you think that their films have changed or are changing the way Americans look at African Americans?”
Lamar: “Right. There are many African Americans in American films, but generally those actors prefer to play neutral roles. The movie business, being what it is, wants to show stereotypes out of which two are common: the Black man as a macho thug out of the hood, or the nonthreatening type, a clown. Both are the defining stereotypes, and the business wants images that can be easily digested. . . . Complexity doesn’t go well with Hollywood, but for me it’s the reverse. The more complex, the better.”
John Edgar Wideman
“Listen to the music that young people create. Really listen.”
—j.e. wideman,
Village Voice reading, February 2, 1992.
In early February 1992, John Edgar Wideman read from his gripping memoir Brothers and Keepers,6 just published in France under the title Suis-je le gardien de mon frère? The Biblical reference, more obvious in French, points to the responsibility, even guilt, the author, a university professor, feels toward his younger brother who has been given a life sentence in prison. They were both raised in the same family but their destinies stand at the two extremes of the social spectrum. How did this happen?
To begin with, Wideman explained that this portrait was an “attempt to free my brother from his prison and to help free myself from a metaphysical prison, which is part of growing up Black in America.”7 The passage he chose to recite was the long, passionate, and angry “epitaph” written by his brother, his recollections of his involvement in the 1968 protest events he had organized at school in a moment of exaltation, but only ended up with “locks and cops.”
Q: “Did you yourself take part in that movement?”
Wideman: “I was naive politically then. I was starting an African American studies program at U. Penn that was important to me as I tried to bring more Black students into my university. I was working on it and writing my books at the same time. I had no idea of my brother’s involvement in those militant activities at school. When I began to write this book, during my visits to him in prison, I learned about him, and I learned about myself. So, in the process I discovered that my brother had a certain kind of wisdom, a certain kind of understanding.”
Q: “Writing this book did not resolve your brother’s predicament; he is still in prison. But did it help you in any way?”
Wideman: “Discovering this side of my brother’s life was an education for me because, had I been alert and conscious at the time, I would have seen the connections between what I was trying to do at the level of the university and what he was doing on the street, and we could have been allies. But the distance between us corresponded probably to the distance between the heads of the Black Power movement and the actual lumpen proletariat in the street, workers and poor people rebelling in different fashions . . .”
Q: “The picture you describe of the African American predicament today is very dark, especially in your latest novel, Philadelphia Fire.8 How do you see the future?”
John Edgar Wideman, Village Voice reading, February 1992. © C. Deudon
Wideman: “The present is a nightmare, and it’s very discouraging as we don’t see many good signs. America is a big place, and there are Black families that are very strong, Black families that are middle-class and Blacks in the lower class that are confronting their problems in a communal way. There are new schools and other improvements. However, in the face of the tremendous deterioration of the actual conditions in which Black people live and of the general breakdown of the cities, America is tied up, becoming like South America: the middle class is fast disappearing, and between the Haves and the Have-Nots there is a wasteland, and Black people are in there. And if you want another witness to that, listen to the music that young people create. Really listen.”
Q: “Do you have in mind rap music and such groups as the ones included in your recent novel Philadelphia Fire? The lyrics are very violent. What is your approach to this new expression of anger?”
Wideman: “Like I am towards most things, I’m ambivalent about it. I listen to that music and enjoy most of it. I hear in those groups traditions I do know about and watched them develop over time, and so I have a perspective, historical in that sense, and I’m very excited by this continued tradition. Whether I like them or not, they are performing a crucial function in the culture.”
Q: “What kind of function? Could you elaborate?”
Wideman: “Such popular creations represent spaces cut out for ourselves to try to preserve something basic of the African American culture. They may not be all good, but it’s a space we need to create to keep a distance from the immense pressure and immense danger we are exposed to. People did not go out and create music simply for fun. It came out of a sense of being in danger: ‘I’m not listened to’; ‘Nobody cares’; ‘My face is not on the TV screen’; ‘My voice is not in the music I listen to’ . . . [raising his voice in anger] ‘Who am I?’ [pause]
Yet opening the door and inviting them to marry my daughter? NO. [laughter] You sense my ambivalence about this. But it’s a hope, and it’s coming not only from the street but also from younger people. And how many lifelines have we managed to throw down to them? That’s how they make that music themselves.”
For a long time, African American literature meant signature works, such as those of the Harlem Renaissance poet Langston Hughes or of the novelists Richard Wright and James Baldwin. With the women’s movement of the 1970s, feminist presses resurrected a prestigious tradition of eminent Black female writers more or less forgotten, including Zora Neale Hurston, the Harlem Renaissance author of Their Eyes Were Watching God (1937); Gwendolyn Brooks, the first African American poet to be awarded the Pulitzer Prize for Poetry (1950); or Lorraine Hansberry, whose play A Raisin in the Sun was produced on Broadway in 1959. Similar to these prestigious female writers, Paule Marshall, the author of Brown Girl, Brownstones (1959) was rediscovered by the Feminist Press in 1981.9
Paule Marshall
In her novel, Marshall introduces this work as an intimate dialogue of a young African American woman of West Indian origin. Selina is coming of age in the New York of the 1930s when jazz was all the rage. We follow her through her search for a real identity, her sexual awakening and her encounter with the brutality of racism as she strives to conciliate disparate selves and become whole.
On April 22 of 1983, Marshall was invited to Paris by her French publisher to launch the translation of her novel Fille noire, pierre sombre10 at the Village Voice. She introduced it as a “breakthrough” back in the 1950s. Then, it was rare to find a young, Black female character with a consciousness of her inner life and a determination to overcome seemingly impossible obstacles in order to grow into her own person.
Q: “What inspired you to write this book at that moment?”
Marshall: “It was my hunger for literature. I had been a voracious reader since my younger age. I could identify with heroes and heroines of all the books I read, but I could feel there was something missing. I was thirteen when I picked up an anthology of poetry in my neighborhood library and opened it to the photo of a Black poet. I read a couple of poems; they were talking directly to me. There was even a poem about passionate love between a Black man and a Black woman, a theme that was not present in literature before.”
“Yet,” she added, “I had likewise discovered the ‘miracle of literature’ through my mother’s imaginative and colorful ways of speaking, especially when she was with her Barbadian friends talking in Bajan Creole, a mix of English and Creole.”
Selina’s decision to leave exhilarating New York for her parents’ native island where she has never been is thus intimately connected with this maternal language which, Marshall stressed, was her mother’s “homeland.” From it, she wanted to capture something of the poetry that imbued her with power and spirit in an attempt to bring together her own broken identity.
Whereas in the 1960s it was vital for the African American women to join the ranks of their Black brothers to defend the cause of the civil rights movement, the feminist movement of the 1970s was also a turning point in literature by African American women. Female writers started to explore more personal issues, from the family and social milieus to the intimate self, encompassing original writing styles that extended from fiction to poetry.
In her novel Sally Hemings, the writer and sculptor Barbara Chase-Riboud resurrects the life of the female slave in the service of Thomas Jefferson.11 He had made her his lover, the woman who bore him at least six children, but “What was her role in history? What was her personal life like, what were her feelings toward Jefferson?” and “How could she have freely loved the man who had the power to free her, but never did?” the author wonders out loud.
In her anthology of jazz poetry Firespitter12 activist, poet, and performance artist Jayne Cortez cries out in anger on behalf of Black women experiencing both racial and sexual violence. In her well-known poem “If the Drum Is a Woman,” she pleads in a jazz invocation: “don’t abuse your drum, don’t abuse your drum, don’t abuse your drum . . .”
Then, on April 6, 2004, came Sapphire, a bold, young, and unconventional New Yorker to present her novel-poem Push13 that recounts the life of Precious, an illiterate, unwed mother from Harlem, sexually abused since childhood by her father. Her schoolteacher gives her a chance to change her life by teaching her how to read and write. The story of Precious is bleak, but the girl’s language—“oral speak,” with its limited syntax and vocabulary—is transformed by her colorful imagery and darting rhythms. As she performed a passage from this stream-of-consciousness dialect, Sapphire conjured up Precious’s language that metamorphizes a dismal fate into fireworks of images, sounds, and a liberating tempo.
All these voices continued a long tradition of eminent Black female writers, forgotten, resurrected, and now flourishing, with the Nobel Prize in Literature awarded to Toni Morrison in 1993, giving African American women literature worldwide exposure and long overdue recognition.
Toni Morrison
“It is language that seals and reclaims the singularity of existence.”
—toni morrison
Toni Morrison was invited to France in September 1989 to launch the translation of her novel Beloved,14 winner of the Pulitzer Prize the year beforehand.15 Her publisher had planned such a full schedule of events that we welcomed his offer to organize a signing in place of the reading we had been eagerly expecting.
Morrison’s novel about the tragedy of Sethe, a slave woman driven to kill her small daughter to save her from being sold back into slavery, captured the hearts and imagination of French readers. Morrison had become the stellar figure of American literature in France.
However, well before becoming world famous for her prestigious literary awards, this New York editor and writer used to drop by the Village Voice whenever she was in Paris visiting friends and fellow editors. A distinguished, beautiful woman, Morrison was an imposing yet highly accessible presence.
Back in the 1980s, Morrison was hardly known in France but was a name among our American customers, and her first novel, The Bluest Eye (1970), was taught in international schools in Paris and the French university system. We carried all her published titles in the bookstore, modest paperbacks, I confess, yet she had always graciously signed them and never failed to buy copies of her own books as gifts for her close friends here.
Among them were Michel and Geneviève Fabre, scholars in African American studies.16 One night they invited me over for a dinner with Morrison. Their house was located in one of those narrow cobblestoned lanes in Paris, bordered by small gardens full of fragrant flowers and plants and illuminated by antique street lamps. It was a cozy evening, the four of us sitting around an inviting dinner table. I didn’t talk much, eager to listen to the conversation on their respective works and mutual acquaintances, often interspersed with vivid anecdotes about the scholars and writers they knew. The chatting was light and lively, spiced with in-jokes—not always clear to me, but setting off great bursts of laughter in Morrison.
Barbara Hendricks and Toni Morrison, September 7, 1989. © Roberta Fineberg
The grand launch of Beloved in Paris, planned by her publisher Christian Bourgois, included our afternoon signing session that attracted a long line of readers happy to exchange a few words with the author, followed by a recital at the Théâtre des Champs-Elysées.
That night, accompanied by her friend Barbara Hendricks, the renowned operatic soprano, Toni Morrison read excerpts from Beloved in front of “le Tout-Paris” and an international audience of intellectuals and artists. In turn, Hendricks rendered the same passages in French that alternated with her singing of Black spirituals.
In her memoir Lifting My Voice, Hendricks meaningfully revives the duo’s performance: “Toni Morrison read her own words with such passion . . . I tried to read mine with all the same involvement, as if I were singing.”17