‘Like which nut or shade of coffee?’: How not to write about race

I once asked a professor how I could render blackness on the page in a way that wasn’t boring to me. I had been accused in a workshop of trying to obscure my characters’ race. “Why do we only find out on page seven that this character is black?” was a question put to my work with irritating frequency, as though I were trying to trick my reader like a parent sneaking vegetables into their children’s meals. I turned to the only black instructor on my creative writing programme to ask how they did it. They leaned back in their chair and said something like, “That’s a good question. Yeah, I don’t know.”

It seems to me now that the question of a character’s race in fiction, when put to black writers in particular, boils down not to a failure of craft or lack of clarity on the author’s part, but to a great uneasiness in the reader. They want to know if a character is black, but they want that information to flow along the usual lines of communication. That is, they want the information to conform to their expectations of race and its workings. They want the descriptions comparing the character’s skin to various nuts and shades of coffee. They want the hair described as various textiles, animal and plant in origin. They want the swagger and the clothing and they want a voice that is somewhere between Gone with the Wind and Dolemite. What they want, I sometimes feel, is art that traffics not in the eternal matter of black people’s souls but a superficial accounting of objects that, when taken together, represent some sort of abstracted notion of blackness.

Percival Everett’s sublime, satirical novel of ideas, Erasure (2001), is animated by the question of whether or not it’s possible for a black artist to create art that is itself ambivalent to the constructedness of blackness. It isn’t so much interested in humanising the black experience, as has often been said of certain novels in the tradition, as it is in drawing attention to the absurdities that attend the inherent doubleness of black literature. A doubleness that comes, in part, from knowing that one must perform for an external white gaze. Take, for example, the opening pages, in which we are introduced to our lead character, Thelonious “Monk” Ellison:

My name is Thelonious Ellison. And I am a writer of fiction. This admission pains me only at the thought of my story being found and read, as I have always been severely put off by any story which had as its main character a writer. So, I will claim to be something else, if not instead, then in addition, and that shall be a son, a brother, a fisherman, an art lover, a woodworker. If for no other reason, I choose this last, callous-building occupation because of the shame it caused my mother, who for years called my pickup truck a station wagon. I am Thelonious Ellison. Call me Monk.

As far as openings go, it has shades of Saul Bellow: a voice turning over itself, prickling with shame and self-recrimination even as it thrusts itself forward with bravado and winking humour. But then, as if acknowledging the pact every black writer makes with his audience, a second introduction thunders down:

I have dark brown skin, curly hair, a broad nose, some of my ancestors were slaves and I have been detained by pasty white policemen in New Hampshire, Arizona and Georgia and so the society in which I live tells me I am black; that is my race.

This second introduction tells us at once less and more about this character. It is less specific to the matter of his soul and his life’s specific circumstances. The tone is one of amused resentment. “Pasty white policemen” stands out because it has a loose, conversational flow. It tells us, because of the racial grammar at play, that the voice speaking is a black voice. Not just that, but a voice with a certain attitude about the origin of race, that is socially inscribed not only by one’s skin, hair, and nose shape, not only by the status of one’s ancestors, but also by interactions with police. All of this feeds through society’s algorithm and churns out a black person. It’s funny as hell.

Thelonious “Monk” Ellison is a writer of dense, obscure fiction. His latest effort has been rejected by publishers for having little to do with the “black experience”. After a series of personal and professional tragedies, Monk sets out to write a novel loosely inspired by Richard Wright’s Native Son and certain commercial novels of black misery. Monk has his agent send the manuscript, titled My Pafology (later changed to F---), around to editors under a pseudonym. Shockingly (or perhaps not so shockingly), his pastiche-cum-parody (reproduced within the text) is a runaway commercial and critical success. My Pafology is broken up into numbered chapters, the titles of which are spelled phonetically, and traces, in parallel to Erasure, the life of a young black man living in America:

And I stab Mama. I put the knife in her stomach and pull it out red and she look at me like to say why you stab me? And I stab Mama again. Blood be all on the floor and on the table, drip drip drippin down her legs and my baby sister starts screamin and I says, ‘Why you be screamin, Baby Girl?’ And she look at me and she say it because I be stabbin on Mama.

So begins an 80-page stretch of violence, grief, chaos, lovemaking and all manner of other antics that comes to resemble, in a way, Don Quixote. There’s a moment in which the narrator of My Pafology ends up on a Jerry Springer/Ricki Lake-like programme, where he is confronted by all the women he has impregnated. There are also, interspersed throughout Erasure, other texts and riffs as Monk follows his own playful creative impulses, writing comedic sketches and notes for novels of historical and political abstraction.

In his great art novel The Masterpiece, Zola depicts an artist at war with himself and his own ideas of art. In Erasure, we see Monk grapple with his ideas of art and history and thought and literature. He tangles with what the artistic impulse means and what it costs us. Erasure is a kind of intellectual sketchbook that reproduces the experiential, yes, in the way that we expect novels to, but it also captures some of the fizzing, electric energy of a writer’s mind. It reproduces the act of thought and creative enterprise. It’s a sensitive depiction of living in a capitalist society whose very purpose seems to be to aggregate and appraise art on the basis of values that have nothing to do with the artist’s own value system. Erasure does capture the black experience – not so much in events, but in the experience of a black consciousness moving through the world, through thought.

There is a temptation to read Erasure as straight up-and-down satire on how race operates in publishing, media and society. The seeming extremity of Monk’s parody makes us laugh and shake our heads as we glimpse the quotidian absurdity illuminated by exaggerated stylistic gestures and flourishes. But, there were moments in Erasure when I stopped and nodded and said out loud to myself: “They really do be writing like that.”

Everett is sly in his parody, creating a satire within a satire. It seems that for him, by way of Monk, reproducing the black idiom for comedic effect isn’t really about taking it to some impossible extreme to illuminate the absurd. My Pafology isn’t extreme at all. It is shockingly – and thus comically – believable.

Everett is illuminating something, all right, but what Erasure sends up is the silliness of going about your business as a black person, only for the world to rush in and try to remind you that you are Black, and that it means something. But that you aren’t allowed to dictate what that something is. The world demands that you introduce yourself twice, first as you are, and second as you are told to be.

The final trick of this brilliant, uproarious book is that for all the posturing it invites us to do in order to show how we get it, wink wink, it is ultimately a novel of deep, human feeling. There’s a beautiful, quiet moment toward the end of the book, when Monk returns to his parents’ home, a little wrung out by the story’s events:

I drove back to D.C., back to what had been my mother’s home, what had been my parents’ home. The inside of the house was stale and hot. I switched on the large air--conditioning unit in the dining room and sat at the table. I sat where I had always sat during meals and regarded the other chairs. Mother and Father had sat at the prominent ends and I was placed on a side alone, facing my brother and sister, an empty chair beside me. The occasional guest would occupy that seat, but otherwise it was always there, empty, never removed to be against the wall like the other -auxiliary chairs.

I listened to the house, recalling my parents’ voices and footfalls, but I couldn’t hear them.

For all of the technical mastery and intellectual mischief, it is a wise novel about how we live: with our families, with our country, with our art, with our lovers, with grief, with pain, with ourselves.

The 20th-anniversary reissue of Percival Everett’s Erasure (Faber, ￡8.99) is out now. Brandon Taylor’s latest book is Filthy Animals (Daunt, ￡9.99)