Irregular Note 2: Grappling with Reality

Notes about On Beauty, African American Literature and Black Petit Bourgeois Subject formation in the contemporary Novel

I've been back in Rockford visiting my family. My dad and I were driving somewhere. I forget where. But we were talking about Baldwin. I was complaining as I always do about how contemporary literature particularly in the African-American variety pales in quality when compared to the literature written in the 20^th century. The novel is a bourgeois art form and in our post-integration world, what does a petit bourgeois Black subject know about the African-American condition? Well, a lot but they aren't great at writing about it and there's political reasons as to why.

I read an article a few years ago called What Was African American Literature (A Symposium) that profoundly impacted the way that I have been thinking about contemporary literature especially literature written by Black people

(Kenneth W. Warren’s book…)

This article describes a book written by Kenneth W. Warren called What Was African-American Literature. He argues that African-American literature has ended as it only existed in the period of where Black people in the United States were contending with Jim Crow. The reason Warren says “African-American” is because he believes that African-American is reacting to a particular set of circumstances.

“His point here is not that the civil rights movement rid America of racism. It is instead that the way we do inequality now (including the way we do racial inequality) is not the way we did it then, and that acting as if it is constitutes both an intellectual mistake (you get the history wrong) and a political mistake (you end up making things more unequal instead of less). In other words, he's not denying, that "post-Jim Crow remains a society of dramatic inequalities" or that "black Americans are disproportionately represented among those who lack adequate health care, incomes," etc. On the contrary, as Warren understands very well, post-Jim Crow society is actually even more unequal than Jim Crow society was.”

This brings me to my reading of On Beauty by Zadie Smith. While Zadie Smith is not an African-American, she is British, On Beauty is a book about an multi-racial African-American family. The book focuses on the Belseys who are a multi-cultural (as in there's a white dad and a Black mom) family who live in Wellington, Massachusetts which I think is supposed to be a fictionalized version of some elite university in the Boston area.

(Zadie Smith’s On Beauty, published 2005)

Either way, though I began reading On Beauty because I had enjoyed Zadie Smith's novel Swing Time, by the end of the novel, I realized that Zadie Smith in the novel gets at some very interesting questions of our time politically though she perhaps doesn't get all the way there. The question she addresses is the identity formation of a Black petit bourgeois multi-cultural subject. I have a lot of investment in her narrative about this given that I share a lot of those identities. However I believe she bucks a trend that tends not to focus on political questions of African-American condition in a contemporary moment.

In particular, I want to focus on Levi Belsey who is one of the young Belseys in the novel. Levi is a mixed race man similar to myself with two parents in academia. I think one of the things I liked about On Beauty was I saw a lot of myself in the characters. And while all good literature should inspire you to do that, there's a lot there. However, there are also some major differences.

I did not grow up in a predominantly or entirely white city. I did not attend private school with all white people. I did not have a white father. These are assumptions that are often made (understandably so) about a petty bourgeois Black especially multi-racial subject. And why is that? That's where we have to return to the work of our friend Kenneth W. Warren. Integration in many ways has insulated a certain class of Black people from much of the day to day racism that effects Black working class subjects. Furthermore, it goes deeper to the fact that many middle class Black people actually compose the institutions that oppress other Black people (especially the working class and the poor). Examples of this can range from Eric Adams to Cherelle Parker to Kamala Harris. These institutions are not just political but also literary.

So for me the question is how does progressive black petit bourgeois subject formation occur? Well, I'd argue it occurs as Zadie Smith describes Levi's development in the novel through culture and the social movement. The novel was written in 2005. It is clearly a product of the Bush years. Levi begins his desire for “authentic” African-American culture by becoming friends with working class Black youth through hip hop music. This is driven partially in my view because of his desire for a Black masculinity that is absent due to his white father. Subsequently after some conversations with his friends, the novel finds Levi becoming politicized by the 2004 Haitian coup d'etat as well as the working conditions faced by Haitian immigrant workers at the college. Eventually, Levi steals a painting in act of class suicide against Monty Kipps, a conservative Black academic who bought the artwork from Haitians in an exploitative fashion

(the painting that Levi steals…Maitresse Erzulie)

His argument with his mother at the end of the novel as she confronts him for stealing sorta illustrates a class and racial dynamic that many contemporary Black authors refuse to contend with. Levi chatises his mother for getting with a white man as well as the fact that they pay their Haitian cleaning lady Monique four dollars an hour.

'People in Haiti, they got NOTHING, RIGHT? We living off these people, man! We – we – living off them! We sucking their blood – we like vampires! You OK, married to your white man in the land of plenty – you OK. You doing fine. You're living off these people, man!' from On Beauty page 428

This quote speaks to how Levi's own guilt around his family's wealth (and his association with whiteness) has spurred him to political action. Furthermore, it speaks to a complicity of the Black middle classes in the United States in the global exploitation of the Black working classes. In addition, Carl, a character who is Black and working class is frequently depicted with his alienation from Wellington and broader university society as a Black man.

Though Smith does not share my politics (which as I have illustrated before I do not think is necessary for someone to make good art), her description of the contradictions of a Black petit bourgeois subject especially in regards to a certain type of class politics is rare in contemporary literature. I return to the work of Kenneth W. Warren. While I disagree with him that African-American has ended, I share the critique that for African-American literature to hold any meaningful social stake, it has to engage with the fact that as Warren says “the way we do inequality now is not the way we did it then”. This is partially why I write creatively.

I have friends read my manuscripts. One of the questions that I ask them is what do you feel some of the main themes are? While there's a variety of answers, one of the things that stuck with me was my friend's reflection that my work deals with class inequality in the Black community. I think this part has to be central for any work that I do now. In a few short years post-Ferguson, the police department there was thoroughly integrated. The ruling class has a real investment in integration of institutions and narratives that praise integration. So perhaps writers with a progressive orientation (Black or otherwise) may endeavor to write a bit more about our current conditions that maintain inequality rather than fixating upon the past.

(photo from a 10 year anniversary photo in Ferguson…note that all of the cops are Black)

My own background is not one that was insulated or even alienated from Black working class reality. Furthermore, there were numerous moments in my parent's lives where they were deeply precarious in terms of day to day finances. While this is not comparable at all to the daily violence experienced by Black working class or Black poor subjects, I think these experiences as well as going to a Black high school in the hood as well as my own parent's politics significantly shaped who I am. I easily could have ended up as some sort of apolitical or liberal professional class person (like Jerome or Zora or Kiki) in terms of how I think about race and class if not for these experiences. But through my involvement in a social movement against the police, I developed into who I am.

I have countless more thoughts on On Beauty by Zadie Smith but I think these few will have to suffice for the moment. I called this essay grappling with reality because I think the best writing grapples with our material and lived realities. Grappling is a martial art which involves wrestling, grabbing and throwing your opponent. Our opponent as writers is reality especially the social conditions that create our lives, we have to grapple and try to make sense of it rather than trying evade it. We must depict the world as accurately as we can even if it means exposing ourselves in ways that make us uncomfortable rather than relying upon the past narratives. I disagree with Warren…African-American literature is not dead. But if it is, we must revive it through grappling with our material realities in the immediate with bravery, honesty and wit. This isn’t to say artists should be cultural workers…I’ve harped on that enough. But to me, good art necessitates a candor that will shock the marketplace and audiences of the multi-cultural liberal publishing world as the African-American writers of the 20th century did when they wrote. They grappled with reality. We must endeavor to as well.

Till next time,

Luke