“I’ve never seen anything like this.” So went the American author Percival Everett’s delighted response to the movie adaptation of his book Erasure under the title American Fiction — a sharp-edged dramedy about a novelist frustrated by the limits imposed on his work by racism. The novel was published in 2001, but the adaptation, scripted and directed by Cord Jefferson and now up for four Oscars, feels thoroughly contemporary in its sardonic, satirical observation of a publishing industry seduced by stereotypical representations of black lives.
Everett’s surprise is perhaps because of the directness of the film’s approach: the cinematic centring of a black male writer beleaguered by the tropes that hamper him, and the invitation to laugh out loud at the culprit of white ignorance.
Writer protagonists in novels are not always popular. Some readers see them as a cop-out — uninspired, off-putting, even cheating. The writer should remain invisible and allow the reader to absorb the story in peace, without being accosted by the thoughts, feelings and experiences of its mechanism of production. But what if the writer is the story? What if their experiences, thoughts and feelings are precisely the material that the novel wants to display?
We might think of the figure of Anna Wulf in Doris Lessing’s The Golden Notebook, or Ifemelu in Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie’s Americanah — not a novelist but a blogger, offering her hot takes on race in America. More recently, there is Rebecca F Kuang’s funny publishing thriller Yellowface, written in the voice of an embittered white author from Philadelphia who is driven to disastrous plagiarism by writerly jealousy.
Erasure’s protagonist, Thelonious “Monk” Ellison, is a particular kind of writer — experimental, highbrow, somewhat embittered. Little-read and under-published, he’d be broke were it not for his day job as a professor of English literature, and he riles at sightings of his books in the black sections of bookstores.
Monk’s most popular novel to date is about a black man radicalised by colour prejudice — thereby placing the theme of race in the foreground, when in fact, in Monk’s own words, “the hard, gritty truth of the matter is that I hardly ever think about race . . . I don’t believe in race. I believe there are people who will shoot me or hang me or cheat me and try to stop me because they do believe in race, because of my brown skin, curly hair, wide nose and slave ancestors. But that’s just the way it is.”
The friction between Monk’s refusal of race and society’s insistence on it is the basis for the film’s radical jest. Jeffrey Wright plays the lead with skilful understatement, alongside Tracee Ellis Ross as Monk’s sister Lisa and Issa Rae as Sintara Golden — the celebrated author of the infuriating new bestseller We’s Lives In Da Ghetto. A stand-out scene sees Monk, having just emerged from his own poorly attended panel discussion, observing Sintara giving a trope-ridden reading from her novel to a captive audience at a book festival (“Yo Sharonda! Girl, you be pregnant again?!”).
Meanwhile Monk’s widowed mother is developing Alzheimer’s, raising questions about how to pay for her care. Answer: write a ghetto bestseller featuring an aggressive black man who can’t spell, title it My Pafology, and submit it under a pseudonym, Stagg R Leigh. It’s meant as a despairing joke, a dig at the literary world, but Random House like the book so much that they buy it for lots of money, then allow Stagg/Monk to change the title to Fuck.
Despite, and contrary to, the espousal of race that so annoys Monk, the psychological experience of racism has traditionally often been either denied or dismissed in white western society as “having a chip on your shoulder” or “playing the race card”. This response invites the effect of deepening the impact of the original affront, which then may lead to further gaslighting.
In American Fiction, this becomes the impetus for jokes that mightn’t have landed not so long ago, when the subject of race was less casually discussed. We witness the Foucault-ruminating Monk trying to do a “black walk” on his way to meeting a Hollywood producer who wants to adapt Fuck. There are several derisive, well-observed exchanges highlighting his industry’s hypocrisy.
The film is part of a trend for using marginalised creative pain as a basis for screen entertainment. Another example is Adjani Salmon’s Bafta-winning Dreaming Whilst Black, which charts a screenwriter’s similar grappling with white gatekeepers in the British TV industry. It draws me to think of Toni Morrison’s famous description of racism as a distraction, usurping energy that might be placed elsewhere. In this case, black artists are making art about not being able to make the art they want to make, because of racism. This is now supposed to be funny — it is funny — but it draws on the same well of black trauma.
Things have changed in publishing since the watershed moment of 2020 sparked by the murder of George Floyd and the resulting escalation in Black Lives Matter protests, which led to demands for greater diversity across numerous industries. There are more writers of colour being published, a host of initiatives are ensuing to create a more widely representative workforce, and there is general recognition of the importance of progress.
But it is interesting to note, according to a US study, that while the number of black authors being published in the US increased by 22 per cent between 2014 and 2020, 20 per cent of this happened in 2020, with previous annual increases ranging between 0.01 per cent and 3 per cent. In the UK, there was a 56 per cent rise in the sales of books by writers of colour in the financial year to 2021, but an Authors’ Licensing and Collection Society census the following year revealed that just 6 per cent of living, published authors in the UK are not white.
The feeling arises that, with the ebbing of immediate outrage, the energy for change is in danger of stagnating, owing to deep-rooted structural inequalities. Although we are seeing a broader range of subject matter, there exists a penchant in acquisition and marketing departments for “risk-free” books by writers of colour — such as the slave narrative or the racial identity narrative or the gritty urban tale.
Twenty-two years separate Percival Everett’s Erasure and Rebecca F Kuang’s Yellowface, published last year, but they share the same grievance against the machine. Kuang, however, takes another angle. Her author protagonist is just as pissed-off with racism as Monk — except that she is a middle-class white woman called June Hayward, whose pen name shifts to Juniper Song when she decides to publish her dead Asian friend’s novel as her own. Athena Liu died suddenly by choking on a pancake, and so begrudging is June of Athena’s bestselling literary-darling status — magazine spreads, TV appearances, large social media followings — that the novel manages to suspend our disbelief enough to pull off a most unlikely book heist: white girl from Philadelphia pretends to have written an excellent elegant epic about the Chinese Labour Corps recruited by the British in the first world war.
It is of course a calamitous stunt, affording much gothic fluster (Kuang describes the novel in her acknowledgements as “a horror story about loneliness in a fiercely competitive industry”). But Yellowface also dissects contemporary debates about the value of the sensitivity reader, tokenism and the antagonism between reverse racism and positive discrimination.
“Do you know how much shit Athena got from this industry?” an irked ex-member of Juniper Song’s publishing team asks her. “They marked her as their token, exotic Asian girl. Every time she tried to branch out to new projects, they kept insisting that Asian was her brand, was what her audience expected. They never let her talk about anything other than being an immigrant, other than the fact that half her family died in Cambodia, that her dad killed himself on the 20th anniversary of Tiananmen. Racial trauma sells, right?”
The tirade goes on, and it is so deliciously naked in its sentiment, so demonstrative of the novel’s satirical exercise of self-reflection, so meta, and so basically recognisable. British fiction is not very different from American fiction on this issue, and I can recall similar instances of being seen as singular, representative and race-affixed. I was once dubbed, with the best of intentions, “the literary voice of multicultural Britain”, as if there could ever be a useful or viable rendition of such a thing, or this were a role I wanted to step into. In the literary world, my work has been referred to as “post-race”, or too nuanced when it comes to race, not race-y enough — although a crucial area of my interest as a novelist has been the study of how racial disease manifests in modern life.
There is often a military aspect automatically imposed on black creativity, an expectation of retaliation against something monstrous and systemic, the effect of which can be repressive, instructional, even thwarting. Did Peter Pan know he was white? Can you imagine his story being accompanied by an exploration of the impact on his identity of the colour of his skin? The fiction of race disturbs the natural thematic innocence of storytelling, and risks there being no room for nuance or experimental freedom or intellectual dreaming. In Everett’s Erasure, the main narrative frame is disrupted by surreal conversations between Derrida and Wittgenstein, Joyce and Wilde, symbolic contemplations on carpentry and fishing. I love these moments, as they affirm the human right to the imagination.
So perhaps there is progress to be made in self-reflection, in encouraging the machine to laugh at itself in cheerful recognition. Via the kind of charged, exacting comedy on offer in American Fiction, maybe cultural industries on both sides of the Atlantic will become capable of arriving at an open road of steady transformation, where it is possible to tell the truths that hold us back.
Cord Jefferson, buoyed by the Oscar nominations, has said he hopes the film will help lead to a greater variety of black stories in Hollywood. Entertainment is after all a forceful catalyst for action, not least in its own corridors of power.
‘American Fiction’ is in UK cinemas from February 2. Diana Evans is the author of ‘A House for Alice’ and ‘Ordinary People’
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