The Dangerous Lure of Writing For White Readers in an MFA
Aisha Sabatini Sloan Wonders About the Work She Might Have Done...
This essay was adapted from the keynote at NonfictioNOW, in Reykjavik, Iceland, June 2017.
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When I found out I was going to be a keynote for this conference I went through all the stages of imposter syndrome. The first stage was a pretty visceral feeling that kind of bloomed in the back of my head and slid down my spine, like when you’d go: “crack an egg on your head, feel the yolk falling down” and then you’d run your fingers down your friend’s back. I saw myself on that keynote page on the website and saw who had been taken off the page and I said: oh yeah, that makes sense. I am replacing the black keynote who couldn’t make it. It’s uncomfortable to say this out loud, but it’s also uncomfortable to have had this experience, so it’s something that feels relevant for me to share with you given what I want to talk about today.
Believe me, I would have been furious if the author chosen to replace Maxine Beneba Clarke had not been a person of color. But there is a distinct feeling of having arrived somewhere without proper qualifications, or with this one, specific qualification, that paralyzed me for a little while. It’s the same feeling I had in high school when my “best friend” told me that she had less of a chance getting into Berkeley than me because she was white. And then she got in and I didn’t, and that was super fun.
The second stage of my reaction was: there are SO MANY black women coming to this conference who are more established than I am. Why aren’t THEY the keynote? So for a while the way I imagined this address was that I was behind the podium in a onesie with a pacifier hanging out of my mouth.
Then the imposter syndrome started turning into another kind of syndrome. I don’t know what it’s called. It’s a syndrome that makes moments of achievement feel fraught in a way that I imagine may feel familiar to other… other others. In my head it sounded like: “Oh no, what have I done.”
This came about because I re-read the statement of merit that I wrote when proposing this badass panel called “Ekphrasis and the Black Female Gaze.” That statement goes as follows:
Imagine a nonfiction workshop that includes a single black female writer. If this writer has spent much of her time studying, say, postcolonial theory and the literary implications of double consciousness, she may choose to take a circuitous path when it comes to how she conveys “truth” on the page. But if none of her graduate school compatriots are familiar with this literary and cultural lineage, her formal choices are likely to be questioned. This means that a writer of color ends up subverting her original approach to the page in order to make her experiences and her formal impulses more easily accessible to a white readership instead of unleashing the full spectrum of her creative potential. But what happens when black women write for one another? This panel will open up a necessary dialogue about what happens when a black female writer articulates her gaze on her own terms.
As I’m sure you can imagine, the black female writer in this hypothetical scenario is inspired by me. And ten years after that MFA workshop ended I am thinking: oops.
Let me say: as a person who grew up with one white and one black parent, I’m predisposed to having a complex about whether I’m being black enough at any given moment, so not all of this is the fault of my, in many regards, lovely and supportive MFA cohort. America is mostly to blame. But I am absolutely one of those people who learned, through graduate school, to address a white readership in my writing. There were people of color in workshop my first year, but in my graduating class it was just me. I was the person who cry-shouted, midway through a conversation about professional basketball and slavery, “It’s hard to be the only black or gay person in the room.” The advice that steered me toward the process of revision was coming from life experiences that were not familiar with the thoughts and ideas that arise when you are moving through the world with brown or black skin.
This is not to say I’m somehow upset with my writing. I think I did a pretty good job under the circumstances. I am writing for white people on my own terms. But my workshop was composed of people who, and I don’t mean to be offensive here, but: my workshop was composed of people who, the majority of them did not know who Jean-Michel Basquiat was. This hurt my feelings. I remember that day so clearly. It was the thing that should have sent me into therapy. But I was in Arizona, and I wasn’t confident that I could find a queer-friendly therapist who knew who Jean-Michel Basquiat was.
Years later, I have had the pleasure of delving into the writing of Tisa Bryant, Gabrielle Civil, Samiya Bashir, Wendy S. Walters, Renee Gladman, Alea Adigweme… please see the participants on the “Ekphrasis and the Black Female Gaze” panel. And I can’t tell you how much of a relief that has been. I can’t tell you how much of a relief it is to come to this conference and sit on a panel with other black women who love museums. But this year in particular is a year that, for me, has involved a lot of feeling distraught that my MFA cohort couldn’t have resembled this panel a little bit more. I feel very heavy with this feeling. In The Grey Album, Kevin Young calls the books that black authors might have written but didn’t, “shadow books.”
So lately I am carrying around a real sense of shame. Of almost humiliation. And I’m not just saying that because Wayne Koestenbaum is here. I am humiliated that I was never really writing with a black reader in mind. All of the overtures that are made to “explain” the experience of being a minority are tiny coded signals that the reader is presumably unfamiliar with this experience. And the reader who doesn’t have to guess at that reality can feel those signals as a distancing. In some cases, these are teeny, tiny gestures. But the reality is, even the smallest of those gestures can feel huge. And it seeps into the level of bigger formal decisions: ok, I guess I’ll engage in conversation with the narrative risks taken by Zoe Wicomb and Michelle Cliff later. I’ll break form in a way that nods in the direction of Jean Toomer’s Cane some other time. I’ll just put that shit away for the foreseeable future.
Before I went to graduate school in Tucson, Arizona, I was memorizing passages from the Postcolonial Studies Reader. I thought a lot about the way Kamau Brathwaite described language in Barbados, an English-based Creole that was like “a howl, or a shout or a machine gun or the wind or a wave.” I was immersed in questions about the politics of the sentence. I moved through the world while playing in my mind Isaac Julian’s video narratives about occupying different cultural spaces in London. I spent dozens of hours reading and writing about the conceptual artist, Adrian Piper, who was always looking for new ways to say “fuck you” to everybody—through workshops where she taught people how to dance to funk music, by stuffing a towel in her mouth and riding the bus, etc. Then I moved to Arizona and I went to school and learned how to write for white people.
All these years later, I feel as though I lost my paddles. I am across the lake. I might be across the ocean by now. I forgot what those artists were saying. I forgot to respond to their questions. I’ve been so busy responding to the feedback I got in workshop when I had intended to write an experimental nonfiction book about interviews I’d done with women of mixed race around the world. In my first workshop, I was told, by my professor, “Nobody cares about this.” My interest in writing about people whose experience resembled my own was something that my professor went so far as to diagnose—he described my project as “compulsive.” I was told, by a classmate who was genuinely speaking out of what he thought was love: “I’m not interested in them. I want to hear about your family. I want to hear more about your dad. What was it like to grow up the way you did?”
I can see in retrospect that this advice is rooted in familiar aphorisms, some of them quite useful: show don’t tell. Write what you know. But handy aphorisms aren’t necessarily concerned with dismantling the white supremacist patriarchy, are they? The gestures that I was trying to make to complicate narrative voice on the page were being met with a big fat no. “I don’t understand what you’re up to.” “Is this nonfiction?” “Why is this in the second person?” It’s true that I was just getting started, and it’s true that I was learning how to use craft. But the impetus for making these moves was being brushed away. So I wasn’t being shepherded in a direction that kept the scholarship of someone like Henry Louis Gates Jr. in mind—on the contrary, the scholarship of someone like Henry Louis Gates Jr. had never so much as crossed anyone’s mind. I was being told, “you’ve mentioned coffee or warm beverages 17 times in three pages.” (Actually, that last critique was really useful.)
Recently, encounters with black artists have prompted me to question just where my work might have gone if I hadn’t followed this particular route. I was at the Tucson Poetry Festival not long ago. At dinner one night I had the pleasure of sitting across from the poet, Jericho Brown. He was one of the funniest, most irreverent people I’ve met in years. And loud. The next day, when I saw him read, his voice took on a tone I can’t quite describe, it was so quiet and tender. It had a breathiness, a moaning quality that sucked us in. He was magnetic. He was someone completely different. Not like, “whoa, what a drama queen.” I mean, “holy shit. He is a shape shifter.”
Another time, I saw Samiya Bashir at a conference. Everybody in the room was sort of buzz buzz. I was sitting on the floor, it was packed. The panel was a beautiful hodge-podge of topics. And as she prepared to speak, she had veiled her head in fabric and her eyes were closed. When it was time to speak, she passed around a piece of paper. “Tear some off,” she said. “Share it with your neighbor. Nibble on it. Eat it. Hide it in your clothes.”
Then there was that time at AWP when Gabrielle Civil read the names of the girls who had been kidnapped by Boko Haram out loud and invited us to react as we listened. She threw the pages into the air. Douglas Kearney ran behind her, picking them up. I didn’t feel like it was particularly necessary to attend any other panels for the rest of the conference.
Everything about all of these experiences changed everything about everything for me. I’m right back to where I started. I am wondering about the way that an audience is to be addressed. About the sanctity of any given stage. About what power can look like. About the setting of terms. About masks and boundaries and modes. Truth as document versus truth as an emotional or political or cultural or communal experience.
There is this thing that we take as a given in “traditional nonfiction,” a voice of “neutrality” that explains things. It says, “Hi. I am me. You are you. This is that.” We are told when to laugh and how hard. You know the voice. But that neutrality, that idea that “hello, this is a hop skip and a jump from journalism, now I am going to tell you my story. I’m going to tell you some facts.” Or, “I am going to tell you a story about something that happened the other day.” That framework, that presumption of a singular historical reality, all that linearity, is a concession toward whiteness. This is talking white.
But I’m not just talking about voice. It’s also a question of angle. Talking white or talking to white readers or talking to white readers who have a lot of work to do around race is a matter of positioning. It can take many forms.
Writing that confuses—writing that troubles the idea of truth is not really allowed to be nonfiction in the end, right? Because, look, the genre says “NON” and then it says “FICTION.” But writing that confuses illustrates a lived experience of conflict and dissonance, of winking, of knowing how good it feels to be winked at, of being at once invisible and hyper visible, of struggling toward multiple forms of fluency. This kind of breakage on the page can get messy, and maybe it’s hard to teach, but it’s coming from an impulse that is all too often seen as somehow adolescent, something to be tamed and redirected. But not all of us are allowed to live in this one dimension where you can’t hear all these other voices. These sometimes screaming voices that are saying: that’s not my truth! Or, they are ghosts mostly.
In the realm of conceptual art, poetry and performance, or, outside of mainstream nonfiction (and not to say these worlds aren’t problematic in their own way) the fun of the form is predicated upon the understanding that the person reading or receiving the art is, well—the bottom. You heard me. And you know, maybe even a power bottom. But at least one who doesn’t “know what’s going on,” and kinda likes it that way.
So I will end this by asking some questions of the white, American readers toward whom, for better or worse, I have been orienting my writing for so long: What options are we left with when we are writing our way out of this intersection of atrocity and absurdity? When so often even the most direct approach is misunderstood? When years of education and effort are met with an honest to goodness request to touch our hair? How do we communicate anything when the lens through which you see us, through which we see ourselves, is so irreparably cracked?
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We asked several writers to respond to the questions above—their responses are below.
I went to a panel at the American studies conference this weekend on Lisa Yoneyama’s newest book: Cold War Ruins. At the event she read a selection of her book’s conclusion which traced the legacy of nuclear plants in Japan as the direct outcomes to suppress anti-nuclear and anti-war activism. Nuclear power plants were installed after the bombing of Hiroshima and Nagasaki in order to suppress and appease critiques of our current nuclear world. The explosion (the atrocity) of Fukishima’s plant is the transmigration of our atomic bombs (the absurdity). Can this be any more clear, cruel?
The searing research writers such as Yoneyama and Aisha Sabatini Sloan bring us, the kind of critical labor that dissembles the confidence of (trans)national and historical narratives—their glean, their simplicities—the way they connect for us what should not be connected (atrocities to absurdities, activism to capital “gains”)—they offer, so many have offered so much. New methodologies, language, frameworks, narratives. I read them and see them and things feel possible.
After attending Yoneyama’s panel I receive an email from Aisha about our options. I don’t know what the options are. There is dearth but it is not their writing, it is something else.
Dear Aisha–
Thank you for asking me to add a few thoughts here. I hope I can do justice to what you have written.
Reading your essay, I can’t help but think of another writer from the Tucson Poetry Festival, Teré Fowler-Chapman and their poem “For the white liberal/carrying this book/with both hands.”
The poem begins “you breathe in our music / cover our songs / dress yourselves in our cool / hold our theories up like Gods…” After a list of smart, lyric, searing observations directed at the way whiteness makes use of African American culture the poem ends:
the work
is bringing the consciousness to your subconscious
resisting the urge to celebrate the work you are doing
to hide the work that has yet to be done
the work
exists
when we
exist
without existing in your conversation
the work
is light work
built to sound heavy
built to take too much time
the work is
your work
and the work
looks nothing like mine
Fowler-Chapman writes to whiteness in order to call out its failures and hypocrisies. And when they write “the work is / your work / and the work / looks nothing like mine,” the phrase with its doubled meaning helps me begin to feel my way toward a response to your essay and your questions.
The literary work of the “canon” taught in English departments and creative writing programs remains overwhelmingly the work of whiteness (see the analysis of Lillian-Yvonne Bertram and her collaborators) despite the fact that alternative canons have always existed. It’s another refraction from that “irreparably distorted” lens you evoke. And we fail as educators (as well as readers and writers) when we approach and evaluate the writing of our students (or any writing) through that distorted lens.
But the other way that I read Fowler-Chapman’s phrase “the work” is in reference to the labor of reshaping the lens through which whiteness sees. That’s the work that white allies must commit themselves to over and over again. And it is not the work of POCs—although unfortunately, I realize you are both limited by and asked to point out the flaws in that lens too frequently.
I know a lot of white people who have the deepest desire to not be racist. And that desire is flawed in the deepest ways. Given our cultural circumstances, we are all racist—albeit not to the same degree. The desire to “not be racist” is a desire related to designation rather than transformation. Transformation requires the work that Fowler-Chapman calls on us as white allies to do. If allies are interested in being anti-racist, then we need to do the work of questioning our perceptions, our ingrained biases, and our assumptions about “so called” universal experiences. We need to interrogate whether our opinions are always necessary and ask ourselves if our desire for “comfort” is enough to justify the perpetuation of systems of inequality.
I am only beginning to discern what that work means for me as an educator, a citizen, a mother, a partner, a friend, an artist, and person who desperately wants a better world than the one we have now. I urge those white allies reading this to do the same: to ask themselves how can they begin to repair the distortions in the lens, how they can reshape the frame through which they view the world.
I know that part of that work is reading and learning from writers of color such as you and Teré Fowler-Chapman, Bhanu Kapil and Carmen Giménez Smith, Solmaz Sharif and Layli Long Soldier, just to name a few writers whose books I’ve taught and been moved by recently.
And here I want to address myself to white allies in particular: while this work is not written for us, it can educate and thrill and open new worlds for us aesthetically, emotionally, and intellectually. It can begin to mend the distorted lens, if we let it. It is work that can transform us, in part because its beauty, strength and integrity comes precisely in the fact that it was not written for our transformation.
With love and gratitude,
Susan
Writing Apprehension: A Formal Invitation
To paraphrase Erica Hunt, I wonder what it will take for white readers to simultaneously reckon with their historic selves and encounter our authentic reading and writing selves without making oppressive, diminishing, wrath-evoking gestures and utterances that are the flailings of those who need to be the center of attention but not of scrutiny and accountability, reifying absurdity and atrocity in the process.
And I urge you to be careful. For there is a deadly prison: the prison that is erected when one spends one’s life fighting phantoms, concentrating on myths, and explaining over and over to the conqueror your language, your lifestyle, your history, your habits. And you don’t have to do it anymore. You can go ahead and talk straight to me.
–Toni Morrison
If Black or nonwhite writing literally serves as a formal invitation to a petting zoo rather than being truly in relation to another, the fracture remains centered on “you,” and cannot be remedied in words. Because an invitation to touch, and perhaps a desire to be touched, is built into that form of the writing itself. It’s not a healing touch. There is something caught up in address when one is, presumably, addressing a Eurocentric “you” who would want to reach over understanding and knowing and just want to touch us. That is seeing oneself through the cracked lens of white supremacy.
Why not write apprehension, a different doubling of consciousness and subjectivity that both assumes that the writing is in and is for the grasp of a nonwhite and/or Black audience, and also creates an atmosphere of slowness, caution, discomfort, (with all its attendant joy, pleasure and hilarity) that destabilizes assumptions of Euro-centrality, defuses exceptionalist notions about ability and trips up easy essentialism about authenticity.
Writing apprehension attempts to scramble the code by redirection of address away from a presumed white audience, by the inclusion of multiple registers of language and frames of reference that don’t explain Black subjectivities but embodies them through resistance, desire and sonic action. Apprehension as a performative feature of Black writing insists that a reader be still in the place not knowing puts them in, disallowing any reaching over this discomfort to get to a pleasure born of inherited dominance, say, through wanting to touch a Black person’s hair (or other body part), trespassing against a Black subject’s powers of self-definition and self-containment.
This “knowing” through touch is not learning at all, is not understanding, but a constituent feature of dominance that springs into action against language. It’s a grip, sure, but not comprehension. It’s possession. It’s acquisition. It’s a way to hold, to have intimacy without effort, eros without discomfort, politics without risk, a way to have everything—the nonwhite or Black text-cum-body—without giving anything up. Writing apprehension thwarts that, allows the writer to move through atrocity and absurdity to something else, leaves the reader to ponder and reckon at whatever level of the text they’ve found themselves, without recourse to easy outs.
Maybe one of the hardest things to reckon with is how the black performance is not yours and you can’t have it. It’s not for you. Because the thing that you can recognize is so much more flattened and simple, linear, cause-and-effect, tidy even in its messiness. Black art is imbued with multivalent experiential and theoretical dissidence, and it is resistant in its conception as a thing against something else—against white patriarchy, white racism, white privilege. The work stretches and pulls outside of itself, constantly brushing through the world and social lives as impossibilities not to be taken for granted but rather as sites of subjection, sites of coercion, sites of abject neglect and impoverished possibility.
–Thomas F. DeFrantz, “I Am Black (you have to be willing not to know)”
Despite its definition, writing apprehension does not infuse a text with fear or worry per se, but requires a reckoning with the discomfort of not knowing. It apprehends the reader, sees and understands and holds them while allowing the writer freedom to move towards audiences and direct their desires as they see fit. To turn this another way, I am no longer worried about whether or not Black people will read or understand my work. It’s for them. Period.
Articulations
–for Aisha
(Scream.)
This is a stage direction.
I am not “a white, American reader toward whom, for better or worse, [the world has] been orienting [too much] writing for so long . . .” Still, in motion, I have a few things to say.
FAT BLACK PERFORMANCE ART!
In my activations of Swallow the Fish, I often scream these words to materialize my flesh. And so, the phrase becomes a speech act, a fusion, a correction, a jubilation, a wink and a nod, a repudiation of silencing, an outrage, a reckoning, an “I-don’t-give-a-fuck,” a rupture of polite reading space, a response to terror, a galvanizing of resistance. Far from the cracked mirror, this becomes a new reflection. The scream recovers a vocal outlet for new power. This is one option to cut through the silence and white noise.
In my work as a black feminist performance artist and poet, I’ve welcomed many options—double voiced poems, voice-overs, quotations, palimpsests, cut ups, mots étrangers—all to approximate, assert, and explore various voices within myself. Who exactly is the audience for this? Whoever has ears, whether ready or not, for this new articulation. Sometimes, I don’t feel ready. The good girl in me doesn’t want to get loud or seem angry or make a fuss. I have been so pleasing just a few minutes before. But it is urgent, irrepressible. I am urgent, irrepressible. You are urgent, irrepressible. This articulation, and my other attempts in writing and gesture, conjoin enunciation and syntax, the page and the stage, art and the world, the flex of the body, mouths and hands, joints and bones.
Aisha Sabatini Sloan’s latest essay collection, Dreaming of Ramadi in Detroit, is available now from 1913 Press.
