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Why All Young, Attractive, Writers of Color Are Geniuses
THE DEW BREAKER by Edwidge Danticat
It’s not that the writing is so bad, it’s not. It’s OK. But if a white male (without proper credentials via biography) wrote this, it would never have been published. Though ostensibly fiction, what seems inherent in the attraction of the book is the authenticity of the story. This is a person who’s “been there” not unlike the book A LONG WAY GONE by Ishmael Beah (which my son is reading now). Here’s the thing: one can’t suppress the sense that it is the STORY these people (or people close to them) have lived that makes us read on. These are tragic and dramatic stories. That does not mean, however, that this is necessarily “good writing” (in the same way Graham Greene is good writing, or Patricia Highsmith, both favorites of the moment).
Has it always been so? One imagines some “True Stories from Africa” written by an upper class twit in Victorian times. Ah, but such books did not survive the ages.
Will The Dew Breaker survive? How does it even stack up against “fiction about Haiti”? There’s a sense that the literary establishment is doing a subtle form of affirmative action–promoting “authors of color” especially where, given the dramatic content of their stories, there can be no denying they are rich in something. But what? Danticat knows the territory alright, knows Haiti and the Haitian diaspora, but is she a decent storyteller? The New Yorker (the old artiber of taste, now bowing to it’s political agenda like most of New York) thought so apparently.
But one suspects we supposed to appreciate these stories within a context of (a) the “unheard voices” of diverse people of color; (b) damage done to the Third World probably directly caused by capitalism, especially Republicans, especially the “current administration”; (c) a debt, a literary reparations where we have to allocate a certain percentage of our publishing/reading to stories like this; (d) other pluses: a survivor, an [attractive] young woman who can write!
It’s hard even to bring up these questions.
The reviews of the book are gushing positive from the Amazon and Barnes and Noble sites. I need a reality check. I need someone to read this that is not afraid to say, it’s not good writing. Ah, but if it were memoir (mem-wa!) we could forgive the lack of subtlety in drawing character, we could say–it is true, how amazing this poor woman survived. This is part of the draw in books like A Long Way Gone. You continually are amazed: this really happened! To a boy! To THIS boy/author!
But what happens when dramatic stories are revealed to be “made up” - what if Mr. Beah was an adult living in Brooklyn. What outrage. (One thinks of James Frey’s A Million Little Pieces controversy). His book was presented as memoir and when revealed to be (largely? what percentage?) fictional, the outrage poured on him. We were lied to, yes, but how many stopped to say: was a it a good story, with good characters, does it work as fiction?
Besides race and our debt to the underprivileged of this world, the other issue here is youth. Like Zadie Smith, Ms Danticat is a attractive young woman of color. What if she were old, ugly? One senses the book (and I assume visits with Oprah) would be less compelling. We like youth; we like beauty. We like the fantasy (in theater, films, art, literature) that a young (hopefully attractive) person can be a genius. I suspect there is something innate in us that looks for a (recently born) savior. Old saviors are merely nags or tiresome. Young “genius” doesn’t NEED aging to help us appreciate their message. Their passion is more than compensation for any lack of wisdom, or lack of understanding of human relationships, or errors attributable youthful brashness. One thinks of Michel Basquiat, the young (also Haitian-American) who became overnight the darling of the New York art world (no small thanks to Andy Warhol who elevated him from street artist to ‘genius’). While it’s true his paintings (years after his premature death before the age of 30) are still fresh, one wonders what would it have been like to see him age, mature, ala Jasper Johns, or DeKooning? Would our fascination fade or would his skill continual to evolve and amaze? Would he be merely forgotten (his 15 minutes of fame long gone) as another “genius young street artist” took his place?
What complicates all of this is our de-valuing of wisdom and aging. There are exceptions, of course, but the world we live in tends to like to ogle the physical attributes of our geniuses, better yet if they have, ala Danticat, exotic stories. On so many levels we are entertained and titillated. But not on the level of literary achievement!
There, I said it.
November 16th, 2007 at 5:06 pm
Haven’t read her yet, but I would throw in another take on the Edwidge Danticat sort of phenomenon, namely that our western culture has a constant appetite (=$$ in sales) for uniqueness - in any form we can get it, and so long as it’s not too risky - that we can sprinkle in among the rest of our homogenized, Starbucks-and-Target life. As a culture we’ve digested “American West” (fads following “Urban Cowboy”), “African Roots” (following, of course, “Roots” and later Paul Simon and other musicians who made pilgrimages to South Africa), “American Southwest” (interior design trend in the early ’90s) “Restaurant Hell” (”Kitchen Confidential”, “Hells Kitchen”), “White Junkie” (Paul Frey) - the list is endless. But we’re still hungry.
So Edwidge Danticat no doubt represents another culture we can mine for fleeting uniqueness: an author who is the child of Haitian immigrants ranks as a perspective that I probably haven’t heard before (and therefore might buy) despite the writing being average.
December 9th, 2007 at 10:35 am
I think the answer is that all published writers are geniuses, but especially those with a marketable platform. In a world where there are more writers than readers, being somehow unique in terms of a back story is all anyone’s got. I’m not sure that most so called literary writing is distinguishable in any way any more. Every short story the New Yorker publishes could be written by the same person and always begins with a sentence like this:
“Oscar Wolenkrantz smoothed the pleats of his well-worn wool trousers and squinted in the noon-day sun of a cold winter day in the Chelsea district of the city known as Manhattan.”
By the end of the story, some scary hidden truth is revealed. Oscar was abused as a child probably. Oscar is a stand-in for the author. Or is he? No doubt Oprah will get to the bottom of it, after she makes “Oscar” a best-seller.
In a world where Oprah is Truth and Truth is Oprah, readers want a story, not the challenge of reading great writers. For that, we have the great writers, I suppose.