Looking Out for the Universal

Notes on urban social movements in fiction, the weight of modernity, manuscript revisions, and some literary influences ranging from Gabriel Bump, to Roberto Bolaño and many others.

Nostalgia is a funny thing. I find myself nostalgic for some of the worst times in my life. Times where I was less well-adjusted and more clear-eyed than I am now. I talked to a friend about it awhile ago and she said something along the lines “we really believed we knew what had to happen.” My political youth was determined, hopeful, ideological and fervent. That’s how one’s youth should be. While my politics are mostly the same as when I was a youth, I am far less ideological in some ways. Also, novels are the only things that make sense to me these days. Either way, much of my fiction writing began as short stories and eventually a novel about my political youth which began in the early 2010s and ended with the George Floyd uprising. But those stories have morphed into something else entirely now. But I should set the scene first.

There’s a lot of cultural writing about the end of woke as it exists. I don’t fully understand what woke is. It’s still unclear as it has changed meanings. I dunno if I experienced woke as the meaning of that term has shifted so many times, but I experienced the social movements of the 2010s and their less beautiful outgrowths in the campus setting. Both of these things seem correspond with woke even if they were decidedly different things despite their conflation. As I’ve mentioned offhand before, I won entry to a Manuscript Revision Workshop late last year for my unpublished novel. My novel follows a young African-American man who is immersed in an urban social movement in an unnamed East Coast city. I chose not to locate the novel in a particular place or time, because I think the experiences within a social movement are quite universal. While my novel explores some social dynamics particular to the American context, I am less sure that these particularities makes sense to write about too specifically. The police kill and people riot in every place and time. Stories like mine could take place in London, Santiago, Mexico City, Lagos, Paris, Oakland or a thousand other places we do not know the name of. While I began, revised and finished drafts of my novel far before I ever saw One Battle After Another, the timelessness of social struggle in that film is something I think my novel was similarly trying to work though. Much of the contemporary African-American literature I encountered was rooted in identity, but with little concern to the universal concerns of a modern subject, so let’s get to that.

In all urban social movements across the the 20^th and 21^st centuries, there are rebellions, prison sentences, petit-bourgeois subjects forsaking their class trajectory, fist fights, proletarian expressions of rage that clash against leftist orthodoxy, periods of burnout, nihilistic attitudes, avant-garde musicians, problematic men, annoying meetings, and lots of confusion. There is, despite what folks would like to tell us, a particular kind of universality that emerges in the midst of these struggles. Ferguson is not so different from Athens. It is only as the social struggle recedes that differences reimposes themselves. This isn’t to say that differences in identity or politics do not matter in the midst of a social struggle, but the reality is that these differences are mediated even if uncomfortably or violently through the struggle. To some degree, a great historical novel may succeed as a work of art if it excels in it’s ability to describe the universal as it occurs in a particular setting. The urban social movement contrasts strongly with the experience of the highly politicized college setting. While there is often overlap between those subjects produced by the university, and those who fight in the urban social struggle, there is often many differences. This is a part of my problem with narratives about “wokeness” as much writing about those phenomenon particularly in regard to identity collapse deeply complex issues into easy buzzword-based attacks.

I initially wanted to use this essay to talk about revision process and what that was like, but it ended up being a longer treatise on thinking through a novel’s ideas. I can’t thank my mentor Ran Walker enough. His guidance was so critical to developing and editing the book, especially when it came to dialogue. The fascinating part about working with Ran was that his feedback was different from prior readers, as many of those readers had known me back during the times that I initially based some of the book’s events on. While the book began in 2022 as an auto-fiction project, as I was reading stuff like Sean Thor Conroe’s Fuccboi, Nico Walker’s Cherry and Tao Lin’s Shoplifting from American Apparel, the book quickly shifted into a third person limited that followed a protagonist who is quite different from myself. I had heard somewhere that auto-fiction was popular, so I was trying to figure out my own style. Cherry of all of the auto-fiction texts was the one that spoke the most to me, as it presented a subject of history impacted by the Iraq War and the economic devastation of the Rustbelt. I can directly relate to the second thing. I was attracted to auto-fiction in how it dealt with awful interpersonal dynamics, these dynamics for me were often the product of campus social justice cultures, that contrasted with the urban social movements I’ve described before and in other writing. I’ve revised this book over five different times as there are probably six drafts sitting in my drive.

While I think the auto-fictional qualities of the stuff I was reading back when I started the project were inspirational, it quickly became clear to me that my characters were distinct entities from myself and my friends. The problem with the auto-fictional protagonist in most cases is that he is consciously disconnected from the historical moments. He is too self absorbed to consider anything beyond his own interiority. While there is not anything wrong with being concerned with interiority, the reluctance of most male auto-fictional to engage with the historical moment is a weakness of will. Authors who proclaim their work to be “apolitical” are political in their inability to not address the weight of history and thus modernity. My choice to not use a first person voice was intentional. One of my early readers told me to revise the book in first person. But I think the third person voice makes it clear that the protagonist and other characters in my novel are subjects of history, rather than the empty talking heads so common in much auto-fiction.

However, I was more interested in writers like Ellison, McKay, Wright and to a lesser degree like Rooney who wrote explicitly about subjects in history. While Rooney’s characters remain largely separated from the historical forces, they are at least observant of what’s going on. I remember listening to an audiobook of Normal People at a gas station in some unknown American town while I was getting gas sometime as I drove across the country. In the novel, Connell remarks the necessity of violence when it came to a protest that Mariame tells him about. Despite this, he never truly reckons with his own position beyond lamenting his class status in relation to his lover’s. In a better example from the 20^th century, you could look to the young proletarian African-American intellectual protagonists tied down by the weight of the racial histories in the United States written by folks such as Ellison or McKay. African-American narratives where protagonists are beset by the weight of history are rarer than ever. The main two examples that I can think of that directly grapple with the long histories directly are Everywhere You Don’t Belong by Gabriel Bump and Black Arms To Hold You Up by Ben Passmore. Both stories follow a Black protagonist who is trying understand his place in relation to Black history, particularly African-American urban life. What is a young African-American to make sense of themselves when Fred Hampton has been murdered? When so many freedom fighters are gone, what remains for them? Can you find hope in a socialist organizing meeting, the fires of a riot, art, Black nationalist armed groups or assimilation? Perhaps something else entirely.

Political repression is not an uncommon experience across the globe even for people who are not racialized as Black. Bolaño’s character and self stand-in Arturo Belano who re-emerges across his work is a child of the doomed revolution in Chile. Belano is a freewheeling bohemian who is searching for meaning and past poets in light of the coup. Other characters in Bolaño’s work recount stories of their experiences of political repression. As a good example, there is the story of the character Auxilio in The Savage Detectives who survives the army’s invasion of UNAM in 1968. This part of the novel was later turned into the novella Amulet. The invasion of UNAM preceded the Tlatelolco massacre where Mexican armed forces open fire on unarmed protestors in the Plaza de las Tres Culturas. The image I used for this article is from a demonstration in 2025 commemorating the killings in 1968. The weight of history hangs heavy over the image. There’s a universal quality to the photo, black masks and clashes with the police are not a rarity anywhere these days in the United States. Apart from the Spanish on one riot cop’s helmet, the image could be taken from any-town, USA. Fascinatingly, the tragedies of repressed political movements is not something that many novelists wish to take part in writing about these days. The Black movement against police violence that I was a part of as a youth is largely gone. The working class participants have been killed, imprisoned or just went back to work. Meanwhile, many of Black leaders from the nonprofits have just moved on to whatever is next for them career wise. A lot of them are just writing bad takes on movies and celebrity culture on Substack it seems. What is an African-American intellectual to do then? The weight of history is heavy. Perhaps the answer is following bohemian pursuits like Arturo Belano.

Revising the manuscript was fascinating as I spent large amounts of time working through the more undeveloped ideas within the novel, in particular, the character’s relationship to music. A common feedback from Ran was that he wanted the music to be more present. It made sense. Music was often a way for my friends and I to express ourselves. We didn’t see the art as separate from the urban social movement even if functionally was. In some ways, my own movement into my novel and musical explorations were ways to make sense of the repression and ongoing right wing backlash since 2020. I’ve been listening to the new Dominic Fike single “White Keys” over and over as I wrote this essay, music fills the space within my mind as I write. I told my girl that I sometimes just want to go back to being a musician. To some degree, it is less difficult to find Black music that grapples with the weight of modernity. The blues through R&B and rap are still alive. Who can forget Nina Simone’s song Why? (The King of Love is Dead) or 21 Savage’s more recent “Nothing New” or Polo G’s “Wishing for A Hero.” As Nina sings,

Will my country fall, stand or fall?
Is it too late for us all?
And did Martin Luther King just die in vain?

Polo G and 21 Savage similarly lament King’s death and the emptiness of modern life over fifty years later. What is that if not the universal? As I’ve complained about before, so much of “radical literature” focuses upon futurities rather than the crushing realities of the present. It’s why speculative fiction and Afro-futurism is popular. In my view dealing with the future is easier than writing directly about the horrors of modern life. Hip hop and Black music as a whole remains a beautiful clarifying force.

I was doing another set of revisions in 2024, I was obsessed with two novels Martyr by Kaveh Akbar and The Rabbit Hutch by Tess Gunty. These novels were not written by African-Americans and yet they evoked something in me similar to how James Joyce has with his work Ulysses. In the end, all of these works confront the weight of modernity to varying degrees of success. Cyrus is a character who is Iranian, but feels alienated from his identity as he lives in Indiana. Blandine, the protagonist of Gunty’s novel finds solace from her horrible Rustbelt life through out of body experiences and becoming obsessed with mystics. Both of these novels are less precise than they could have been when it comes to addressing the weight of modernity, but it struck me how they both evoked something in me, even if I found the endings of both novels odd with their respective emphasis on a metaphysical experience. But perhaps that’s a part of it. Life is quite metaphysical. Either way, I am really enjoying Ulysses, it reads like life. We should all be trying to write like that. Revisions can help find our ways to it.

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ROUGH DRAFTS REMINDER

A reminder that I am about to embark upon a cross-country odyssey with my friend Maurice to work on our podcast Rough Drafts. We were funded by the People’s Media Fund in the Greater Philadelphia area to interview writers, artists, academics, filmmakers and organizers across the North American continent. Our podcast is broadly about artistic/creative processes, American subjectivity, masculinity, and social movements. We read a lot of books for each episode so readers are encouraged as guests. Check us out everywhere. If you’d like to be a guest on our podcast, please message me on here or email us at rough.rough.drafts@gmail.com.