On the Question of Literary Canon
[Originally written March 2022]
I am American-born to Malawian parents, who had left behind a violent authoritarian government in our homeland in the 1980s. My family and I eventually moved to Canada, once my parents’ American visas expired and they were denied renewal; and six years after moving to Canada we went back to Malawi, once the dictatorship ended, a place my siblings and I had never actually lived but had nonetheless always been made to understand was our real home.
When I returned to the US for college in 2002 I found myself anxious that because I had left the US too early in my childhood to really learn American Blackness — and was only the child of African immigrants, as opposed to being descended of slaves — I would not be seen as Black enough, by peers both Black and white. So when a drunk fraternity brother called me a gorilla and a monkey one night close to the end of my freshman year as I was walking home from a party, as much as it hurt it was also strangely a relief. Whatever people might have thought about my then-British-accented English and multinational background, the color of my skin meant that American Blackness was incontrovertibly my birthright, so inescapable that it could have been stamped on my birth certificate when I first emerged into the world. Just by existing as a Black person in America I would always be Black enough.
But American Blackness is rarely so cleanly situated. Over the years that I have learned to claim the US as my home in addition to Malawi, I have also learned that the act of being Black in a space not originally created with Blackness in mind is perceived as a potential act of aggression or even a threat. And this is no less true in the literary landscape, though in many writing workshops I have heard writers try to claim that writing can be “purely” good, as though writing could exist independently of the ugly cauldron from which a society’s language is constantly being concocted and dispensed.
But the American literary canon was not conceived with non-whiteness in mind. Thus writing by a person of color — a threat by virtue of its mere presence — is by definition an exception, at the very least, and at worst a full-on corruption.
White writers write about their lives and it is simply writing into experience. But Black and other writers of color write about their lives and it is seen as many things — politically-, socially- or even emotionally-oriented — but never plainly experience, too. The implication of this being that while white writing is immediately a contender for crystallization into the chronicle of American life, the writing of people of color has to fight to access that space, and somehow prove first that its writing can live in peace with the existing canon before being admitted into it—which it nonetheless rarely is.
A few years ago I read Chigozie Obioma’s The Fishermen. When I sought out the book’s reviews afterwards, to find out what thought and analysis of the book existed so far, one phrase that kept coming up was that it was a “Cain and Abel” story — I suppose because the book revolves around the axis of violence between brothers and the downstream effects on a community this violence takes. Except that it is not a Cain and Abel story at all: it is, rather, a deeply African tale of family curses, and whether one can truly escape the inheritance of a curse once it is imparted.
The American literary language to describe the trope that this book fell into, thus, ended up insufficient to the task; anyone opening the book expecting a Cain and Abel-type fable and who was otherwise illiterate in African culture stood a good chance of closing the book with a disappointed feeling, as though the book had failed to live up to its description and promises. The book was, deservingly, resoundingly applauded — it is intricately brilliant — but I can’t help but wonder if its assessments were limited by the language we have to talk about literature by people of color in America, indeed to talk about literature in general.
Most of the literature and experience we understand right now as canonically American does not fit the experience of so much of America. Surely there are a statistically-significant enough population of Africans in America, for example, to be able to expect the accurate coding of ‘The Fishermen’ as a tale of a family curse rather than a Cain and Abel story, and then to concomitantly expect readers to have at least a passing understanding of what the weight of a family curse might mean. And yet America’s writing landscape does not permit for this.
Not only that: when it does allow for this expanded language for its literature it otherizes that expanded space, rather than choosing to perceive it as something deeply and essentially of this country, as American as emigrating from one’s homeland in order to escape the fate one would have otherwise had and writing a new fate for oneself in the old story’s place. There are narratives in America, written by Americans, that will simply never be taken as American enough.
The fact that writing by people of color in America exists at all will not meaningfully shift the dial on the acceptance of writing by people of color in the American literary landscape. Not until the language we use to talk about it is rightfully expanded, and becomes more accurately representative of the myriad cultures comprising American society today.
