Quirky Black Fiction

Nearly 4 years ago I wrote “From Gossip Girl to Ghetto Girls: What are We Teaching our Daughters” and I think that my thinking has changed or crystallized in terms of my thinking around Hood Lit/Hood Fiction/Urban Fiction.

Given the fact that there are different kinds of Black people, shouldn’t different kinds of stories be told? In 2006 I wrote “How Zora Neal Hurston Had a Fight with Urban Fiction and Lost“. To be honest the post is awful, it hurts my eyes, there are too many colors, and during one of the transition periods I lost many commas so the text looks wonky.

But I like the post because it represents my thinking at a particular time period.

Lately I have been thinking that hood lit has a right to exist as an end in of it self.

Why? Well, to say that it isn’t good or positive fails to consider that writing like art, is subjective.

I think these stories deserve to be told, or perhaps I am thinking that it isn’t my place to say that they shouldn’t. That may be better.
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Now this does not mean that I don’t have a critique of the market and the ways in which major publishers pick and choose which books have a larger platform, attractive placing in Barnes and Noble or Amazon. Or with the rise of hood lit

But, I think that the bottom line is that if I think that there are different Black communities then I must also accept that those different communities have a variety of stories to tell.

So what do you think?

Did “hood lit” change the game for the negative?

Who has a right to say which “Black stories” should or shouldn’t be told?

Publishers Weekly cover from Dec 2009

The other day I was reading an interview with Ishmael Reed and he said some things about Black fiction that got me to thinking.? The interview was with Jill Nelson for his new book, “Barack Obama and the Jim Crow Media: Return of the Nigger Breakers.” Tell me how you REALLY feel Mr. Reed.

There is one part of the interview about Black art that stood out to me:

Jill Nelson: Why were you unable to get this book published in the United States?

Ishmael Reed: This is attributable to the state of black letters. Serious fiction and non fiction by blacks are becoming extinct, except for that which upholds the current line coming from the media owners and the corporations that all of the problems of Africans and African Americans are due to their behavior. This is true not only for literature but for black theater, film, art galleries and opinion columns as well. I saw a show of Kara Walker?s work at the Brooklyn Museum. I feel that this young brilliant artist?s growth is being stunted by museum curators, and big money capitalists. Even some white intellectuals support her most mediocre work and pit her against the great Betye Saar who uses a variety of materials and subject matter and whose work contains more depth.

This gave me something to think about, in terms of the serious, capital F fiction vs. hood lit conversation.

A little about my book background. I am a long time book list keeper. My? book list weighs a ton. And I don’t really get to read fiction often, so quirky fiction is special to me both because of my lack of time for it and its scarcity.

In fact, looking at my book list I realize that I have always had the eye and mind of an archivist (I have been working on a database of Black women artists which will be a link page on NMM then a site in its own right eventually.)

@Blacksnob Tweeted about Paul Beatty. Then @janie_crawford saw it, and I tweeted her a link to my post on Paul Beatty’s Slumberland.

Then @janie_crawford and I had a conversation about the fact that Paul Beatty needs to be on Twitter. Say? Word. I was beginning to think about where are these Quirky Black Fiction writers who have published in the last ten or so years, as newcomers?

There is a range of “Black experiences.” We are heterogeneous as shit, even if mainstream media would have folks think we are either the Cosby Show or The Wire, I know better and I would imagine that you do too.

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There is some shit that we are subjected to because of how whiteness as a social system dominates, but yes, Virgina, we are all different.

Truth be told our lives are a mixture? and we need to have a range of art that captures the variety.

The hood lit vs. official lit argument is binary, doesn’t serve our interests

and is hyper counter productive.

However, I know that certain niggafied images of Black people serves the interest of maintaining White Supremacist Patriarchal Capitalism.

More that that here, here and here.

So. It is in that spirit that I make a list of Quirky Black Fiction Writers.

Here are ten. Please add more in the comments, if you got ’em.

Danyel Smith– More Like Wrestling

Carl Hancock Rux– Pagan Operetta

Ernesto Quinonez -Bodega Dreams

Junot Diaz –Drown

Matt Johnson- Hunting in Harlem

Nichelle Tramble– The Dying Ground

Paul Beatty – Slumberland

Percival Everett – A History of the African-American People (Proposed) by Strom Thurmond, as told to Percival Everett & James Kincaid (A Novel)

Victor Lavalle – Slap Boxing with Jesus

ZZ Packer– Reading Coffee Elsewhere

Zadie Smith– White Teeth

Looking forward to your comments.

Read anything good lately in general?

You have names for the list?

Thinking About the Importance of Hood Lit/ Urban Fiction

The Hyper Marginalization of Black Fiction