Grist

The Journal for Writers

Zoshchenko’s Unstable We: The Tension of Collective Plurals in Soviet Fiction | by Alina Stefanescu

By

1.

Mikhail Zoshchenko was born in Poltava, in present-day Ukraine, to a Ukrianian father and a Russian mother. He wrote primarily in Russian. His short story collection, The Galosh​ and Other Stories​ (London: Angel Books, 2000), has kept me company during the estrangement of Trumplandic pandemic. At the heart of Zoshchenko’s work is the role of satire and its relation to political dissent, or rather, the precise point at which satirizing a society becomes a critique of the state itself. Because I am deeply interested in satire as critique of current American culture and governance, I want to provide context for Zoshchenko’s brilliance and his stakes in the skin of the Soviet game. 

2.

In the 1920’s, the USSR was a country between gernes. Bolsheviks won the battle over governance, but no one knew what that meant yet. It was a middling time, easier to describe in retrospect. Lenin’s New Economic Policy acknowledged the need for gradualism in order to create a proper Soviet proletariat. A simulacra of liberalism and market exchange was permitted while official decrees and statements criticized the culture of bourgeois materialism. NEP was a practical strategy, both pedagogic and economic, buying time for the institutionalization of drastic social change. Poets like Vladimir Mayakovsky became literal poster-boys for the mocking of petty-bourgeois socialization; Mayakovsky’s popular posters scoffed at mechchenstvo​, or lack of devotion to revolutionary ideals. 

The role that writers would play was being negotiated. Tracing the history of satire through the early Soviet period gives us a sense of how language implicates–and is implicated by–constructions of power. Under NEP, satire was permitted and not censored.

Entertainment included laughter, mockery, and served as a unifying force and release valve for social pressure. But there were rumblings from Soviet critics even then. Those critics insisted that satire wasn’t necessary after 1923, since the establishment of the Soviet Union addressed social ills legally and correctly. What “correctly” meant would be an ongoing dispute throughout the Soviet period. 

3.

The concept of kulturnost​, translated by Jeremy Hicks as “living properly,” referred to civilized behavior, social norms, hygiene, and manners. But what does it mean to behave​ correctly​ in a revolutionary time when the scriptures of Marx do not apply to the situation on the ground? Like fundamentalist pastors, Soviet leaders and theorists became divining rods for unquestionable dicta, interpreting textual scripture from a position of expertise and authority, thus turning alternate interpretations into secular forms of heresy and crimes against the state. The line between propaganda and literature or entertainment does not exist for those who rely on texts as avenues to revelation.

In Zoshchenko’s stories, the characters consistently trespass a blurry, evolving kulturnost​ that consists of technical, uncertain words increasingly used at Party meetings and in media. To the extent that they attempt kulturnost​ by use of new language, they wear it awkwardly, extraneously, like a cheap, one-size-fits-all costume. 

Although his work was seen as satire, Zoshchenko insisted that it was didactic, and the humor was a side-effect rather than the intention. Zoshchenko considered himself a rationalist, and the question remains: what was his satire teaching? In 1927, he described what he did as a “parodying,” adding that he was standing-in for the proletariat writer who didn’t yet exist. The proletarian writer question was eventually resolved by the formulation of Socialist Realism, but the 1920’s remained marked by an open space where new terminology coexisted with economic shortages. 

4.

The feuilleton​, an elaboration of topical factual material, had emerged as a popular genre, facilitated by the rise of the printing press. Zoshchenko transformed the feuilleton by localizing with the Russian storytelling mode known as skaz, ​​in which the narrator is another character. As a narrative style, skaz was popularized by Nikolai Gogol and Nikolai Lesvov. Using satire to make ideology the locus of conflict in community life revealed the existential nature of early Soviet life. A generalized utopia which exists in both future and present tense–a temporality never quited resolved by Soviet theorists–is tested in the actual banality of human lives, where abstractions don’t map the characters’ experience of the world. The question of trust and loyalty enters at the level of individual experience: should one trust what one knows by experience or what one believes according to official experts? In a sense, Zoshchenko gets away with satire because the characters always defer to the ideology, which makes it hard to call it a social critique. 

5.

Svetlana Boym notes that “authoritarian and totalitarian regimes favor a resacralization of the public realm.” In this new sacred space, literature and arts are means of propaganda or socialization into the sacred ideal of revolutionary spirit. Rival discourses and “unsanctioned performances” are seen as competitors for truth, a threat to the sanctity of the state in its new positioning as vanguard of the global communist revolution. The disappearance of private life, the sense in which surveillance turns even the intimate into public space, foregrounds spectacle. Stalin’s emphasis on enforced attendance mass festivals as galvanizing events is inseparable from the development of what Boym calls “the secret spaces of fear” internalized by Soviet citizens. 

The new binary of “sanctioned” vs. “unsanctioned” art guides writers and artists during this time when state sanction begins to determine publication, membership in the Writer’s Union, and ideological correctness. The state destroys the Church in order to replace it as the primary vehicle of moral correctness, the authority on good behavior, the seat of judgement before the tribunal of Hegelian History. By 1930, political needs led to the shutting down of satirical presses. Comedy became suspicious; mockery became dangerous as reverence for the regime took precedence. Zoshchenko’s writing voice lost official sanction.

6.

And so the end of ambiguity arrived, as it often does, with war.  As World War II unwound, Stalin came to believe that ambiguous satires were dangerous for Soviet readers. Like many silenced writers, Zoshchenko turned to children’s stories to escape the censors, and even wrote a youth-directed series about Lenin. But when his satirical short story, “The Adventures of a Monkey” was published in a 1946 literary journal, it led to harsh. Andrei

Zhdanov, the Communist Party spokesman on cultural matters, read the story as a satire of Soviet life which suggested it was better to live in a zoo cage rather than the city. Zhdanov attacked it in his own literary mode, by using the new genre of party resolutions (I swear Party Resolutions are a genre that deserves more attention). In the Party Resolution of 1946, he called the story slanderous and deviant. Zoshchenko was attacked alongside Akhmatova in bitter, hyperbolic language. 

As a result, Zoshchenko was expelled from the Writer’s Union. Public ostracism and persecution broke his will to write, since he believed that his task as a satirist and proponent of rationalism was to educate Soviet readers. Zoshchenko found it nearly impossible to publish anything until after Stalin’s death in 1953, when he underwent a slight, informal rehabilitation.

This informal rehabilitation enabled a soft return to the public scene. In May 1954, a group of English students met with him and Akhmatova. The students asked if they agreed with the Party Resolution condemning their word. Akhmatova managed a yes – her son was a prisoner in a gulag at the time – while Zoshchenko announced that he did not. As a veteran soldier, Zoshchenko took special issue with the accusation of cowardice which suggested he had avoided the Leningrad blockade. 

When Soviet officials ordered Zoshchenko to retract his public objection to the Resolution, he refused. This ended his life as a writer in the USSR. He died four years later, problematic to the end. 

 Here is a dry table of the events in my life: Arrested – 6 times,  sentenced to death – 1 time, wounded – 3 times, committed suicide – 2 times, got beaten up – 3 times.

In this short bio, we can see how Zoshchenko’s satire mobilizes Orwellian doublespeak to encode, for example, his double condemnation by Soviet officials as forms of suicide, the writer killing himself. 

7. 

I want to look closely at Zoshchenko’s early short stories in order to understand how satire becomes threatening to totalitarian and authoritarian regimes. Each of these stories runs from one to three pages, using brevity and compression in ways that are instructive for flash fiction writers. 

In flash, the title does a lot of work in setting tone and insinuating conflict. Zoshchenko’s short titles often set up a sort of intimate, conversational banality that feels contemporary. Using newspapers for themes and content, Zoshchenko estimated that thirty to forty percent of his stories were based on news articles and letters to the editor about social problems, including the housing shortage and fights breaking out over lack of personal space. The titles tell the reader what conflict to expect by framing each tale in light of its new vocabulary. “Economy Measures,” for example, evokes a new economic drive announced by the Communist Party. His use of titling is a stunning expansion of intertextuality, including official speeches, party meetings, new party directives, and ordinary letters from citizens. And “Does A Man Need Much?” brings Russian history to bear on the contemporary in referencing Lev Tolstoy’s didactic essay, “How Much Land Does A Man Need?” (first published in Intimate​ Tales for the People​, 1886). 

The skaz ​​narration technique, where characters and narrator tell the story in conversation, deploys rich language, common expletives, and a collective we. ​While Lestov’s We tends to be the We of the village or peasant folk-life, Zoshchenko’s We includes the new urban pre-proletariat population. It is a shaky We, an unstable We, and a fascinating one. One could argue that Soviet readers were being introduced to the language of revolution through these stories. Zoshchenko centers the emerging class-conscious verbiage through constant reference to these words in such compressed space. 

Individual characters are not always given proper names. Instead, we meet a five-man commission, a timekeeper, a Housing Manager, a Hero of Labor, Nepman, proletarians, an efficiency manager, various specialists, minorities, parasites, militiamen, thieves, emancipated workers, lecturers, citizens, witnesses, relatives, and victims. The use of these words which determine class status reveal the tension of the Soviet We, best represented in the consistent, mandatory use of Comrade as address. The brevity and sharp syntax creates a snappy, brisk pace made comfortable by occasional colloquialisms and street talk.

8.

The sense in which these stories are conversant with–and reflective of–current events makes them accessible while putting the author in an increasingly vulnerable position as censorship is institutionalized. Insults borrow directly from official Soviet directives describing the proper​ ​ citizen. The average asshole is now the “bourgeois bastard”; the transient man is automatically a thief; the unemployed is a “a parasite”; the disabled is an “invalid”; the thinker is an “obscurantist.” Zoshchenko’s fiction internalizes these new hierarchies of status by allowing characters to use them as common insults. (It is interesting to note the large role that exorbitant hyperbolic language played in official Soviet communications, since Zoshchenko borrows this effect in his stories. As does Trump for his stadium narrations.)

“Monkey Language” reports a dialogue between two men employing foreign words like quorum and plenary overheard at political meetings, but their inability to understand the words they are using becomes a feature of alienation from language rather than shared community.

“A Speech About Bribery” makes fun of the foreign, hyperbolic words of an Engineer Line Manager announcing to railway workers that the incredible “evil” known as bribery “has been reduced by fifty percent.” And then pontificating his belief that it should be executable, a crime just after murder. These moral pronouncements at party meetings combine with statistics and percentages, calculations that demonstrate how the Soviet state is accomplishing and measuring its results on the ground. Zoshchenko’s use of the “Speech” as a form for short fiction was satirical until it became the actual social script for CP unity and loyalty. I think of Trump’s Republicans and their blindered loyalism. I think also of corporate culture’s constant measuring and how this has combined with evangelical numeration of souls saved, etc. I think there are so many ways to learn from Zoshchenko’s narrative style in the present.

9.

At a time when ideology attempted to do away with petty bourgeois habits of materialism and status-seeking, we see how those very habits become all the more important and pivotal, institutionalized in the new form of government. Even love is aromantic, concerned with material things, with the theft of coat or galoshes, as we see in the story of a lover walking his girl home at night, where the trope of romantic revelation is subverted by a street robber. In “Love,” the lover’s dejection is not over saying goodbye to the lover:

“I walk her home, and I lose my property. So that’s how it is.”

This foregrounding of property as a both a word and an identity undermines the sentimental context. Throughout his stories, one discovers repetitive objects, most of them marked by scarcity, creating a new economy of value, including fur coat, galoshes, rubbish, matchbox, partition, communal apartment, lamp, property, overcoat, sheepskin hat, napkins. As objects grow more difficult to procure, conflict develops between friends and family. The objects seem more important than people, an ironic turn for a People’s Republic. In this, Zoschenko seems prophetic, laying the cognitive groundwork for a society in which citizens eventually offer their brothers’ lives to secret police in return for a summer vacation. The market for misinformation and gossip flourished in the Soviet Union. And because it was legal and normalized, citizens learned to adapt and participate in ways that suited their personal self-interest.

10.

In “A Dogged Sense of Smell,” published in 1924, Zoshchenko creates a tapestry of social guilts and recriminations. It begins with a narrator and a conversation:

“Comrades, you know they can do amazing things with science these days, incredible!”

The science here refers to how dogs can be trained to detect robbers and criminals. The narrator marvels over these new “militia-sniffer dogs,” and then recounts how a friend sought help from police who then used one of these dogs to find a coat thief. Instead of finding the thief, the dog focused on an old lady, hounding her until she confessed to stealing five buckets of yeast and a vodka-still. The dog then hounds the Citizen Chairman of the House Committee, who surrenders, saying: “Kind people, class-conscious citizens…Tie me up.” The dog begins grabbing people at random, and all confess to various crimes like losing funds at gambling or hitting their wives with an iron. 

Citizens profess their own guilt in a symphony of petty bourgeois self-loathing, a performance of mass self-flagellation that resembles much of what occurred under

Stalinism during show trials, and what became characteristic of Party meetings across the Iron Bloc. 

In a criminal system run by dogs, everyone is guilty. Everyone must stick to the script of self-denunciation in order to survive. And what feels more relevant, somehow, than the last sentence, the way Zoshchenko ends this 3 page story with the narrator locking himself in his room, considering what he might have said or confessed, finally concluding:

“Comrades,” I would have said, “I am the worst criminal of all: though I didn’t touch the fur coat, I take advances from magazines, publish the same story twice, and all the rest of it. Beat me, wretch that I am.”

We see a similar theme in “A Hasty Business,” where a character says: 

“As yet, we don’t know what my husband’s got caught for. But one things for certain, they’ll find something or other. Everyone’s done something, and we’re all skating on thin ice. But can they really give you capital punishment for that?”

Note how Zoschenko’s sentences are not connected by logical sequence so much as “and” or “but.” Nothing makes sense and yet there is an order to it. His syntax shifts between long-winded speechification and staccato-like phrases or exclamations which lack a verb. In using the wrong words, characters heighten an atmosphere of absurdity that distorts speech and twists it to fit the lexicon.

What is the difference between piety, loyalty, and devotion? The performance of loyalty requires this piety, these rituals, which became verbal. As Soviet citizens, writers were expected to use revolutionary language which often felt (and was) foreign. Zoshchenko references these new forms continuously in the intertextual engagement of party directives and propaganda. Does he do this intentionally to estrange Soviets from their language? I’m not equipped to answer that. But I can note these new forms include criminal reports, court summons, speeches, legal redress, “economy measures,” foreign telegrams, cultural reports, and legal words, among others. 

Zoschenko interrogates agency by making it seem random, unpredictable, and absurd. The word “accident” is often used to describe an event while destabilizing its veracity. Holidays include “an ex-saint’s day,” revealing how characters internalize censorship of religion. The word “respectable” feels meaningless and silly in the context of its descriptor (i.e. “respectable tray”). “Social status” is referenced by characters as both a threat and a concern, creating a seam of obscurity in which Soviet citizens flounder, sink, swim, drown. When looking to explain things, characters don’t actually do the work of thinking through an explanation; instead they defer to official statements, labeling something as “a question of culture.” One gets a sense of how discussion and thinking ceased in the USSR. 

Zoshchenko’s careful attention to language included using expressions and idioms that suggested irony of circumstance (see a little bit of an incident, slight mistake, achievement) and/or created tension through defamiliarization by foregrounding the collective We. Reading “unanimous shouts” and “chorused” gives us the performance of We-ness without the emotional or other-regarding content. 

11.

The danger of satire is that it makes the sacred vulnerable; it profanes the pedestal of power. If writers exist to create a script for statecraft, then mockery is unacceptable, especially when the country’s ego is conflated with that of the leader. In an essay exploring Bertolt Brech’s reliance on satire, Walter Benjamin said something which demonstrates the inherent risk of satire for writers:

The satirist confines himself to the nakedness that confronts him in the mirror. Beyond this his duty does not go.

When the distance between the self in the mirror and the social collective collapses, when human rights play second fiddle to the interests of the state, the satirist’s mirrored gaze is untenable. 

Notes & Sources: Much of the information about Zoshchenko’s life came from Jeremy Hick’s excellent introduction to this translation of the short stories, see The Galosh and Other​     Stories​. Translated by Jeremy Hicks. Overlook Press, 2009.  For more on Zoshchenko’s stylistic innovations, see emotions that are subverted or turned: jealousy as a petty bourgeois state, generosity, conscious, honesty, abstract state, etc. For Benjamin on Brecht, see Benjamin, Walter., et al. Reflections: Essays, Aphorisms, Autobiographical Writings,​     Mariner Books, 2019, particularly “Brecht’s Threepenny Novel,” where Benjamin also theorizes that Marx set the tone for this distance between writer and subject. For references to Boym, see Boym, Svetlana. Another Freedom: the Alternative History of an​          

Idea​. University of Chicago Press, 2012. (pp. 68-72). For short biography authored by Zoshschenko, see Russiapedia, “Mikhail Zoshchenko”

https://russiapedia.rt.com/prominent-russians/literature/mikhail-zoshchenko/.  Accessed 24​ Sep. 2020.

Alina Stefanescu was born in Romania and lives in Birmingham, Alabama with her partner and several intense mammals. Her writing can be found in diverse journals, including Prairie Schooner, North American Review, FLOCK, Southern Humanities Review, Crab Creek Review, Virga, Whale Road Review, and others. She serves as Poetry Editor for Pidgeonholes, Poetry Editor for Random Sample Review, Poetry Reviewer for Up the Staircase Quarterly, and Co-Director of PEN America’s Birmingham Chapter. She was nominated for 5 Pushcart Prizes by various journals in 2019. A finalist for the 2019 Kurt Brown AWP Prize, Alina won the 2019 River Heron Poetry Prize. She still can’t believe (or deserve) any of this. More online at www.alinastefanescuwriter.com.

Susie Revisited | by Peter Galligan

By

About fifteen years ago, after my aunt passed, I took possession of her creative writing. It wasn’t until last year that I finally got up the nerve to sort through it all. I poured over the stacks of pages in crates, mostly finding unsalvageable, incoherent story fragments. When I found her student work, though, at the bottom of the last crate, I discovered a poem, a simple sonnet, that gave me chills, a piece I keep returning to.

On the cover of several collections of poems and journals from high school, Susie wrote “Dreams Full of Promises, Hopes for the Future Faded Memories” as a sort of catchphrase. For one particular collection of poems, she put this catchphrase on blue laminated labels with raised type and glued the labels to the thick green cover of a slim three-ring binder. The poems were carefully arranged on the page, the letters crisply inked from a typewriter. Some had titles, some didn’t, but each poem was signed after the end line with her initials. The arrangement suggested to me that this was not a first draft, or a second. Every page was placed in plastic binder sleeves, but the plastic wasn’t enough to keep the paper from foxing to a dull beige over the years.

As one would expect from a teenager’s work, the writing overall was a bit uneven. Unexpectedly strong lines emerged among the flowery, pastoral, teenage clichés. There was a talented voice in the work, but it was young and underdeveloped, leaning on angst-love and sunrises, darkness and chasms, rainbows and reflections. Susie’s efforts were strikingly similar to the care that I took as a self-assured writer in my halcyon adolescence when presenting my polished words. In my own poetry, the first piece of a collection always held special meaning. And I could see why Susie led off her manuscript with this particular gem:

Ozymandias Revisited

They came from the edges of oblivion for hope
And were met at the “Golden door” by men who
Would strip them of their pride and lay bare
The sweet meat of their feelings. By mechanical
Beings that would preach to them- – give them
Opinions in place of their own. Place them in
Cracker-jack homes where the prize is a
Plastic love that snaps when you use too much.
The land that once was rich is now given over
To weeds- – the air that once was life-giving
Now threatens our existence, and the lady with
The cracked robes still reigns the polluted waters
But her arms kind of tired now, and who will care
If she takes a nap, but the light in the lamp is low.
                                                           SG

There was a small, blue mark above the phrase “But her arms kind of tired now” as if Susie continued adjusting the meter and phrasing after typesetting the work. I related to Susie’s compulsion to edit and fix and scratch at the manuscript until the damn thing bled. I was seized by the image of the “plastic love that snaps when you use too much,” the description of Lady Liberty’s “cracked robes.”

And I was thrilled to have found the writer my aunt was, and could have been. The poem in its loose sonnet form echoed the fourteen lines of Emma Lazarus’ “The New Colossus” scribed on Lady Liberty’s pedestal. I searched for the titular Ozymandias and learned that my aunt’s work also recalled competing sonnets penned by Percy Shelley and Horace Smith. I reviewed Lazarus, and I read Shelley and Smith for the first time. Then I returned to my aunt’s fourteen lines, amazed on how well this poem of hers, penned maybe fifty years ago, held up.

Not long after I found this poem, I asked my brother about the day he found Susie.

It was shortly after she returned from an unsuccessful trip to the Mayo Clinic to treat her chronic pain, and Susie was unreachable by phone. Tim drove to her townhouse. He knocked on the front door. He rang the doorbell. No one answered, so he went around to the back.

“Somehow I was able to get in,” Tim told me, “I walked around and saw her on the couch…like she was sleeping. She was breathing. But I couldn’t wake her up.”

He called 911, and an ambulance took her away.

“She had two fentanyl patches on,” he said, adding, “The pain…it started with the wrist, some calcification or something,” he reflected, “I think the fibromyalgia was real.”

I knew all of this, but I’d never heard it from my brother.

Susie was taken away in an ambulance, and the last time I saw her, she was in a coma, cachectic, more hospital gown than flesh. And there we were, gathered around her, her nephews and nieces, her brother and her sister-in-law, watching the medical instruments, following the travel of her oxygen level, up and down. I remember discussions among our family about her heart rate, finding some renewed hope every so often when it would steady, becoming fearful when it began to drift.

At some points during our visits into her hospital room, Susie appeared to weep while her eyes remained closed. She cried when we spoke, as if she was responding to us with an absolute, final anguish. We were assured she was brain dead, that her crying had nothing to do with our conversations or any pain. She wasn’t in pain, we were told. This I didn’t believe. Not with the way she cried.

I wish I could have asked Susie about the pride of the Statue of Liberty as a proxy for the hubris of the pharaoh Ozymandias. I don’t believe that the state of American ruin Susie expressed is the same decay I see now. Unlike Ozymandias’ antiquities, the ruins of America seem perpetually renewed. Monuments fall that should have never stood, new and gaudy ones take their place. I see the same pandemics, such as prescription opioids, burning quietly on as novel pandemics prevent us the privilege of gathering around our dying family members as they weep through their last breaths. I see new cracks in the symbols of America. And nothing is ever fixed. Nothing ever perfected. Instead, there is pain erased by voices of authority gaslighting us into believing that we are incapable of feeling anything, that our nervous systems are just overwhelmed. The image from Susie’s poem that does echoe so true now is of this great monument of liberty abandoning her post because she is tired and she assumes that no one will care.

In the other piles of Susie’s writing, there are seven thick plastic-covered binders with typed manuscript pages, comprising a portion of one hefty novel, her tome, with pages numbered from 317 to 2068. There are loose papers, booklets printed during the era of Windows 97 and clip art and ready-made greeting cards for inkjets. The pages typed on a typewriter are bound primitively, with laminated cover art. There are journals with thick fake-leather or cardboard covers, the sort of thing you gift the aspiring writer in your life. There are legal pads tucked into plastic covers, notes and first drafts scrawled onto the first few pages, with the rest of the paper untouched, ready to use. It is distressing to see these piles and think about the amount of work put into creating a chaotic mess of words to be left wasting away in obscurity. It is at least in part the reason I return to her sonnet – that by finding some of those words deep enough to return to, that by appreciating the small organization of fourteen lines, I can keep the bleakest thoughts of futility at arm’s reach a little longer.

In her sonnet, Susie lamented that the lady is tired, and “who will care if she takes a nap,” and I picture our torch girl wearing a tan brace on the arthritic wrist that grips the copper flame. She steps off the pedestal and sets her tablet, her last promise of independence, by the words of Lazarus, the lost promise of huddled masses yearning to breathe free. She steps into the river to rest, sinking below the polluted, air-bridged harbor, suffering a pain we cannot know, her best work tucked safely away under those cracked robes.

Peter Galligan is a communications manager from Denver, Colorado. He is currently pursuing an interdisciplinary master’s degree in writing and business administration at Western New Mexico University. His work has appeared in journals such as Mud Season Review, From Whispers to Roars, Red Savina Review, and Metrosphere. He also produces electronic dance music under the name “Medias Res,” and his music has been featured on numerous EDM compilations.

The Issue of Race in Writing | by Cynthia Robinson Young

By

On Being Intentional

Here is an interesting confession: I have always assumed that any books a teacher assigned in any kind of class, no matter what the subject, unless is was a designated class on race, the author would be white, and it would be probably be about white people. The subject of race was always contained within the definition of the course.  If the teacher was Black, then all bets were potentially off, although I still thought it safe to assume the authors would be white if English literature was the subject.  And I wasn’t the only one who held this assumption. In my first semester in a graduate creative writing program, I took a class on poetry with an African American professor who assigned a poetry collection by Nikki Giovanni. I was not surprised that he had chosen a Black poet, but the fact that he had chosen a woman was impressive, exposing my prejudice that as a male poet, I assumed he might lean more toward choosing other poets like himself.  But that wasn’t the concern of the rest of the class, in which were two other women of color. Looking back, I hope that the student who raised her hand with a question just represented herself and not any of the other white male and female students when she asked the professor, “Why are we reading a Black poet?”

Looking back, all this student did was expose what she had been educated to believe: in a general education about poetry that hasn’t been listed as “Other”, the poets would be “universal.” The professor’s answer was succinct and priceless. He answered calmly and unruffled; it was a class viewing the craft of poetry through the lens of Zen Buddhism after all.  So, in a voice just above a whisper, he said, “Because I said so.”

Taking the class revealed even more as the craft of writing pertains to race. Even the professor’s first poetry assignment was controversial. When he asked the class to write a political poem, students were in a flurry in the class a week later, as they talked about the difficulty of the assignment amongst themselves before the professor entered the room. I was both interested in their struggle and confused. I realized then that pretty much everything I write is political. It isn’t intentional. I thought it was life. So when I read this excerpt from David Mura’s essay, “The Search for Identity” in A Stranger’s Journey, I thought this might be why. He writes:

When a person comes from a family or a group that has been marginalized, when she is one of the “subalterns,” the silence such a person confronts about herself and her experiences within the greater culture is a political condition. In such cases, the very act of writing about herself and her experiences becomes a political act.

It was interesting to note that the other women of color in the class also wrote from their experience in being women of color. Their poems were authentic and moving, therapeutic poems of discovery of another layer of racism they had experienced.

It is unfortunate that professors have to be intentional if they are to include writers of color in the assigned reading of even contemporary literature, and unfortunate that it is questioned when they do it, and assumed to be “normal” when they don’t. One of my three classes on magical realism and fairy tales did not include one author of color, even though that is the main genre I enjoy reading and so I know that many works, such as those of Louise Erdrich, Isabel Allende, Octavia Butler, and most recently, Ta-Nehisi Coates with his book, The Water Dancer. But I am thankful for my professors who are intentional, because in doing so, they are truly educating the students deal with the reality of racism in terms we have not been challenged to even consider.

The scope of the issue of race in writing is vast. In this essay, I don’t think I can cover all the nuances of the impact of race, and how it affects the craft, but I would like to begin the dialogue as I attempt to explore some of the ways race impacts the craft of writing, and two writers, Toni Morrison and David Mura, who have pondered this issue.

Toni Morrison began to explore the impact of white superiority is portrayed in literature in her nonfiction book, Playing in the Dark: Whiteness and the Literary Imagination, and expanded some of those ideas even more, theories which served as the basis of The Origin of Others, where she also wrestles with the question of what it even means to be a writer of color, and all of the implications.  David Mura, building on Morrison’s insights, offers a unique approach to race in his book, A Stranger’s Journey: Race, Identity, and Narrative Craft in Writing.  I will then explore how these ideas are employed in Morrison’s novel, Sula. My goal in writing this paper is to explore the depth of how race has not only influenced our reading of literature, but how it influences our writing, and, in understanding the role of race, to be more intentional in using the craft of writing about race to inform how it is a craft that must be acknowledged and considered, as well as how I can use this knowledge in my own writing of my novel.

White Superiority in American Literature

Until recently, little thought was given to the label, “white superiority”, as it was reserved for those who openly identified with the Ku Klux Klan, the White Citizen’s Council, and Nazism and its followers. But the term seems to have taken on a new life as it has been redefined. Whereas it previously was defined in the narrow term of white people who believe that the white race is the smartest and most civilized and thus should have control over all races because it is the gift of white people to be the brightest and best, the broader definition is more based on the reality of what white superiority looks like, what the culture of whiteness looks like, which includes privileges that people of color do not have access to. In literature it appears in different forms. It is interesting to note what Morrison says white writers use as shortcuts in their writing—black images and black stereotypes. In Playing in the Dark, she notes, “I do not have quite the same access to these traditionally use constructs of blackness. Neither blackness nor ‘people of color’ stimulates in me notions of excessive, limitless love, anarchy, or routine dread. I cannot rely on these metaphorical shortcuts because I am a black writer struggling with and through a language that can powerfully evoke and enforce hidden signs of racial superiority, cultural hegemony, and dismissive ‘othering’ of people, language which are by no means marginal or already and completely known and knowable in my work.  It is troubling that white writers can just throw a Black character in their novels and trust that the reader will make stereotypical assumptions unquestioning the truth of these assumptions is troubling, but it has been the experience of all readers who read novels such as these. Here is an example of writing not what you know, but who you know. And if the writer doesn’t know, s/he must either avoid writing about them, or find that trusted “other” to vet his/her works. In Sula, Morrison has a plethora of characters, and all of them are individuals. Morrison says, “…my vulnerability would lie in romanticizing blackness rather than demonizing it; vilifying whiteness rather than reifying it.”  What was Morrison’s struggle in having Sula be a Black woman who was promiscuous in the eyes of the townspeople, when that is a stereotype of Black women?  The example lies in the depth of characterization of Sula:

“Sula was completely distinctly different. Eva’s arrogance and Hannah’s self-indulgence merged in her and, with a twist that was all her own imagination, she lived out her days exploring her own thoughts and emotions, giving them full reign, feeling no obligation to please anybody unless their pleasure pleased her. “

 She is written as a complex character who does what she wants. It therefore makes sense that she acts as she does. Sula isn’t defined by her race or her sex, but by her personality. Nell is a Black woman, as is her mother, Helene. Neither of them have the personality to act as Sula did. Part of the craft of writing about race is the ability to see that characters are people first. How many writers, Black or white are willing to struggle with writing real characters that represent truth versus the politically correct truth of the moment? It is also interesting to note that white readers can bring their own ignorance of race into their reading of a book like Sula.  in a recent class, when a white graduate student who had not heard of Toni Morrison until she read the novel, Sula, asked the class if we thought that the character was lying in this scene when Nell is talking to Sula on Sula’s return:

“Tell me about it. The big city.”
“Big is all it is. A big Medallion.”
“No. I mean the life. The nightclubs, and parties…”
“I was in college, Nellie. No nightclubs on campus.”

(Morrison 99)

It was quickly pointed out by other white students that on page 121, Morrison writes that Sula “had lied only once in her life—to Nell about the reason for putting Eva out, and she could lie to her only because she cared about her”, while the two African American women students were sitting in the class speechless, trying to process what was actually being implied in the white student’s question.

Another part of white superiority is the assumption that all of the readers will be white, so there won’t even be any offence taken by Black readers because there won’t be any! This brings up the subject of universalism in writing. In Playing in the Dark, Morrison states, and Mura repeats her statement in his book the idea that,

“For reasons that should not need explanation here, until very recently all of American fiction has been positioned as white. I am interested to know what that assumption has meant to the literary imagination. When does racial ‘unconsciousness’ or awareness of race enrich interpretive language, and when does it impoverish it? What does positing one’s writerly self, in the wholly racialized society that is the United States, as unraced and all others as raced entail? What happens to the writerly imagination of a black author who is at some level always conscious of representing ones’ race to, or in spite of, a race of readers that understands itself to be ‘universal’ or race-free? In other words, how is ‘literary whiteness’ and ‘literary blackness’ made, in what is the consequence of that construction?”

This statement first addresses the subject I mentioned in the beginning of the paper– how an educator can fill a syllabus of assigned readings that only represent white writers and not realize the white superiority that is implied to do so, as well as what it teaches the white students who will leave the classroom not even considering reading the work of writers of color because they only read “universal’ writing versus books written for Black readers? Mura goes on to say, “While white writers have not traditionally had to imagine a reader of color, writers of color have always been cognizant that their work would be judged and interpreted by white readers.”

To be sitting in an English class on African American Women writers with English graduate students who have not read anything by Alice Walker, Toni Morrison, or even heard of these writers that have been the core of my literary sustenance astounds me, and begs the question, what have they been reading? And why have I read all of the books they’ve read? Mura calls this “racial segregation of reading and learning.”

The statement also addresses the idea that as an African American writer, to be successful I must write to a universal audience; that every readers won’t be able to my work because if I mention race, if there are Black characters, then it won’t be accessible. What it actually is, is code for the white superiority of reading; that if it’s not written for white people, it’s not going to be commercially successful. No African American writer is going to challenge that, even if they decide it doesn’t matter to them. Our prime example is Toni Morrison’s two books, The Bluest Eye, and Sula. Before Oprah’s Book Club, which appealed to white America so much that anything Oprah recommended became a best seller, most of white America had not heard of Toni Morrison. The rush in popularity of her books produced a repackaging and printing of her books and catapulted her to stardom, Oprah’s Book Club became synonymous with “universalism”. If Oprah told white America to read a book written by an author of color, it was “safe”, it was accessible, and it was appealing.

Is There a Way to Not Write About Race?

David Mura presents an interesting contrast between the basic assumptions white writers and writers of color bring to their writing (and reading). To summarize: for whites, the default race for the characters is white unless stated so to mention race turns the work into a racial/political piece; there is no indication of how any characters of color view the white characters so there is no lens of race to judge the work—it’s race-less. For writers of color, if the characters are not white, they must be labeled; the writer must make a decision about the way these characters are seen because we are aware of the stereotypes that will projected if we don’t; the lens of race “is essential to understanding…the way the writer views her characters and the larger society.”

This reminds me of how most African Americans are raised; we never represent ourselves, but rather a whole race. I was always aware and envious that my white friends could be themselves, and all white people weren’t judged by how they acted, how they dressed, how they spoke. And here it is again in writing, where white writers are free to just write whatever and assume everyone will find it accessible and race free. In the introduction of Sula, Morrison discusses the burden put on Black writers as she experienced it with her novel. “If the novel was good, it was because it was faithful to a certain kind of politics;…the judgement was based on whether ‘Black people are—or are not—like this.”

Morrison, always aware of, and always trying to be intentional and purposeful in her writing, starts Sula off with what she called a “lobby” (Morrison xv) which served as a gentle entrance for whites to enter her novel. She says of the later novels, that they “refuse the presentation, refuse the seductive safe harbor; the line of demarcation between…them and us.”  Morrison notes how Black writers don’t possess “privilege” in America of not wrestling with this question. In her essay, “The Color Fetish” in The Origin of Others, she writes, “I became interested in culture rather than skin color; when color alone was their bête noire, when it was incidental, and when it was unknowable, or deliberately withheld. The latter offered me an interesting opportunity to ignore the fetish of color as well as a certain freedom accompanied by some very careful writing. In some novels I theatricalized the point by not only refusing to rest on racial signs but also alerting the reader to my strategy” (Morrison 49),

With this idea in mind, she later writes the novel, Home, as her attempt to write with the freedom white writers have, with no mention of race at all. In Home, there is no “colored storekeeper” or “white doctor”. Instead she uses Black codes to indicate to the reader what the race is, and what it would look like through the lens of the characters. It is a story of a brother named Frank Money who, after leaving the Army, travels across the country to find his sister, Cee in Georgia. The novel opens with Frank, needs to escape from the hospital he was being held prisoner in. he remembers seeing an AME Zion church, where the pastor tells him, “They must have thought you were dangerous. If you was sick they’d never let you in.”  These were three clues that the protagonist is Black. There is even a description given of him as a “young, hale, and very tall veteran” but that is all.  When the AME pastor goes to help Frank in his quest to get to his sister in Georgia, he does something that only a Black person would know about. “Reverend Maynard gave him helpful information for his journey. From Green’s traveler’s book he copied out some addresses and names of rooming houses, hotels where he would not be turned away.” There are other little references, such as this exchange in a diner that one of the Red Caps recommended, when someone asks Frank where he’s headed.

“Georgia?” the waitress shouted. “I got people in Macon. No good memories about that place. We hid in an abandoned house for half a year.”
“Hid from what? White sheets?”

It was interesting to study the craft that Morrison employed in this strategy of being consciously mindful of culture and codes versus race. It was therefore disappointing when Morrison said, “…I was so very successful in forcing the reader to ignore color that it made my editor nervous. So, reluctantly, I layered in references that verified Frank Money, the main characters, race. I believe it was a mistake that defied my purpose.”

Regardless of the outcome for Morrison, and as skillful as she was as a writer, I would like to attempt to employ these ideas in the novel I’m writing, a story of how generations of women try to cope with loss that began with the loss of their African homeland to the loss of their ability to control their lives. Through their stories, they try to help the next generation. My intention in my novel is to people the work with both white and Black characters. But now I’m wondering if all of the characters should be only African and African- American, exploring the craft of using codes or cultural references, and leaving out any whites. However, that might not be historically or culturally realistic, especially since whites are pivotal in how the family got to America in the first place, and why they thought they needed magic to survive. As was pointed out in Home, white people seem to touch every aspect of Black lives, whether we choose to acknowledge them or not. They are always in the background impacting the lives of Africans and African-Americans, and to ignore that is to not tell the truth, and it really would be a novel of magical realism.

Works Cited

Morrison, Toni. Home. Random House, 2012.

Morrison, Toni. Playing in the Dark: Whiteness and the Literary Imagination, 1992.

Morrison, Toni.  Sula. Random House, 1973.

Morrison, Toni. The Origin of Others. Harvard University Press, 2017.

Mura, David. A Stranger’s Journey: Race, Identity, and Narrative Craft in Writing, the University of Georgia Press, 2018.

Cynthia Robinson Young, an adjunct professor of Special Education at Covenant College, is also a graduate student at the University of Tennessee in Chattanooga. Her work has appeared in journals including The Amistad, Rigorous, The Ekphrastic Review, and Freedom Fiction. She was the Poetry Editor for the 2020 issue of Catalpa: a magazine of Southern perspectives, and named Finalist for her poetry chapbook, Migration, in the 2019 Georgia Author of the Year Awards in her category. 

Shelve It! The Necessity of Abandoning Your Novel

By

When a writer friend came to visit, we took a walk to the nearby park with my family scootering and running all over the place. My friend, taking in the full domestic lunacy of my three small children asked, “How do you find the time to write?”

Before I could offer up any rote response of treating it like a job, making a habit of it, and loving what I do, my wife jumped in and began a Rain Man like impersonation of me, rocking back and forth on the road, “Course, I have to write, Yeah. Course, I have to write.” She was playing out my hidden inner neuroses on full display for our friend, our kids, and any neighbor wondering why my wife was now breaking down in hysterical laughter at her own apt performance.

I was not mad at her for this show, as it was funny, and who else would be able to identify the uglier part of my writing self, where I am uber-driven, hyper-focused, and constantly nervous about not having accomplished enough. After all, my self-identity is interminably wrapped up in a task that for most of my life I had nothing to show for. This part of me, the one my wife was mimicking, was not so kind, and often, for many years, felt like a deep burden I could not shrug.

I had realized that writing was a long apprenticeship about ten years in. I had plateaued, and sought out graduate school as a way to improve. There, I began to acquire the skills that would make me a lifelong writer. Those skills were how to deal with criticism, employ the elements of craft, use reading as a source of a material, and devise a system of creativity that was self-sustaining and maximally productive. My system meant taking notes on what I read, using those notes to start drafting a story, revising dozens of times with one craft element in mind each pass through, then seeking reader’s input until it was ready to send out for publication. If that story came back rejected I sent it through that system again. I got to a point where I always had at least one story in each stage of my production process, and so always had something to work on. When my short stories became longer, and began turning into novels, I kept this system in place, thus having many works in my sphere at a time. This also produced an attribute I was never really taught, or if I was, I never really understood the value of until now.

I was always nervous having to put aside a story or a novel draft. Part of me wanted it done, out in the world, to validate how I was spending my time. That inner Rain Man had to write. HAD. TO. WRITE!

It was this need to feel validated that swatted that inner anxiety metronome. But now, looking back on my path to publication of my first two novels, I see that time, those spaces the books had to be put aside, was essential to the process, and I should have been kinder to myself.

Novels take years to write. We change as people over those periods. I had to grow as a person and read books that gave me details, language, scenes, and character ideas to funnel into my work. I am no longer the same person that started my books. I have evolved, actually softened, got married, started a family, and kids kept coming for a few years, until I knew to go back to my manuscripts and look for moments where people love in deeper ways. I needed to find new authors like Willy Vlautin and Simon Van Booy to discover where to look for opportunities for my charters to love and how to pare back my sentences. I had to discover and gorge on Ann Patchett, and Zadie Smith books to add more lushness to my sentences and see how characters interact with each other in conflicted harmony. I had to have other people find their way into my work to help me see it through their eyes. Classmates, writer friends, mentors, my agent, my editor, and wife.

We do not live in a world that rewards waiting and increasingly cannot handle waiting. Yet a writer has to have endurance to do one menial task after another, ad nauseam. It is an easy thing to burn out doing. Many writers tire, put their rough drafts aside, and never return to them. Though this is when you have to live your life and be kind to yourself and those who humor your writing obsessions while you are hunting for the keys to reignite yourself. This is the step that saves the writing and the writer. This shelf time is essential to gain objectivity on that project, grow as a writer and person, and read widely. At some point, something you read, write, or experience will deepen your understanding of a moment in your shelved manuscript. These little insights are keys to reenter and revise. At some point you will have enough of these keys clattering around that you will be excited to go back and improve your last draft. The draft was not a failure, it was just waiting for you to become the writer capable of improving it.

Devin Murphy is the national bestselling author of the novels The Boat Runner and Tiny Americans published by Harper Perennial. These books have been selected as Barnes & Noble Discover New Writers, Illinois Reads, and book of the year by the Chicago Writer’s Association, and Society of Midland Authors. His recent short stories appear in The Chicago Tribune, Glimmer Train, The Missouri Review, The Sun, and New Stories from the Midwest as well as many others. He is an Associate Professor of Creative Writing at Bradley University.