Comments on: Why All Young, Attractive, Writers of Color Are Geniuses

By: d j lufkin

d j lufkin — Sun, 09 Dec 2007 16:35:55 +0000

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.

By: Stan

Stan — Fri, 16 Nov 2007 23:06:43 +0000

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.