American Fiction is the film I’ve been waiting for since I majored in film studies at Columbia University more than two decades ago. Only 27 minutes into it, I was compelled to stop, not only so that I could contemplate the beauty and complexity of this quintessential American story, but also because I couldn’t help seeing my own life reflected in its story lines.
The film’s protagonist, Thelonious “Monk” Ellison (played by Jeffrey Wright), is a writer of literary fiction. But because his work isn’t deemed “Black” enough, it is of little interest to the publishing industry. What’s missing from his writing, as Monk himself acknowledges, are certain kinds of characters: “Black people in poverty, Black people rapping, Black people as slaves, Black people murdered by the police, old soaring narratives about Black folks in dire circumstances. … I mean, I’m not saying these things aren’t real, but we’re also more than this.”
Monk becomes incredulous when he discovers the kind of book that publishers—and the reading public—seem to want from a Black author: We’s Lives in da Ghetto, a best-selling, Ebonics-styled rendition of urban life by a young woman named Sintara Golden (played by Issa Rae). As a joke, Monk decides to write a similar novel under the pseudonym Stagg R. Leigh, playing off the name of the notorious Black outlaw immortalized by Mississippi John Hurt and others. He fills his satirical work with all kinds of stereotypes and calls it My Pafology, though he later retitles it Fuck in an act of defiance. To his astonishment, the book becomes a massive hit.
Adapted from Percival Everett’s novel Erasure, Cord Jefferson’s satirical directorial debut delivers a poignant narrative about family, about aging, about coming to terms with one’s identity. These issues are universal, of course, not at all limited to Black American life, and a significant part of American Fiction is, in fact, not about race. But the intertwining of the characters’ struggles with an exploration of race and artistic integrity is masterly. American Fiction conveys the experience of “an artist who happens to be Black,” rather than simply “a Black artist.” The difference between these terms may seem subtle, but it is important. I think of myself, for example, as a writer who happens to be Black, not primarily as a Black writer. I don’t always define myself by my Blackness, which becomes prominent only in my interactions with white Americans. (When I am in Europe, by contrast, I’m identified as an American first, not a Black American.) In American Fiction, race may drive the narrative, but it doesn’t overtake the story. And that is one of the things that makes the film so compelling.
American Fiction resonated with me in another significant way. Monk’s complex relationship with the world of publishing reminded me of my own experience when my debut novel, The Blue Is Where God Lives, was recently published.
Before the Covid-19 pandemic, I was not a working writer. I had given up on the idea of completing a novel because I had been told by so many people—beginning with a teaching assistant at Columbia who said I wouldn’t make it at the university because I couldn’t write—that it would never happen. When the world shut down, I gave it another shot and succeeded. My agent sold the manuscript; a 2023 publication date was set. But there was a problem. I didn’t want my novel—which incorporates elements of magical realism to tell the story of a Black family across time—to be marketed as a “Black American book.” My publishers, however, couldn’t imagine an alternative. Without marketing it that way, they didn’t really know where to go.
My desire not only created significant confusion for the book launch, it also put me at stark odds with the biggest influence on my writing, Toni Morrison, who said in a 2015 interview, “I’m writing for Black people in the same way that Tolstoy was not writing for me, a 14-year-old colored girl from Lorain, Ohio. I don’t have to apologize or consider myself limited.” So … was I wrong? The answer is so complex. Not least because the one book event where I felt deeply embraced, where I felt the strongest sense of belonging and celebration, took place at Kindred Stories, a Black-owned bookstore in Houston’s historic Third Ward, a neighborhood synonymous with the persistence and survival of Black Americans.
In American Fiction, both Monk and Sintara are invited to serve as judges for a prestigious literary award. The other three panelists are white, and Monk is explicitly told that he and Sintara have been recruited because the panel needed diversity. (I’ve heard those same words so many times in similar situations, I’ve lost count.) As it turns out, Monk’s publisher has submitted Fuck for this very award, so he must maintain the ruse that he is not in fact Stagg R. Leigh. And although the white judges are thoroughly impressed with the novel’s supposedly honest account of Black life, Sintara has a different take, calling the work “pandering.” Monk agrees, describing the book that he created as a joke as “simplistic and meaningless.” But he also asks Sintara why she thinks her own novel isn’t similarly pandering, given that its elements of “trauma porn” are at odds with her upbringing. Sintara counters that she is simply providing what the market demands. The larger question here is, for whom do (or should) Black artists create?
Recently, I was invited back to Kindred Stories, this time to facilitate a discussion with an author who had written a novel praised in The New York Times and the Los Angeles Times. I was honored. The novel—about a clandestine society of spies composed solely of Black women in the era of slavery—is incredibly well written. But I was also conflicted: the entire first half of the book is mired in the degradation of slavery, with the two main characters running through the mud, enduring the thick humidity, suffering the indignities of southern plantation life, and so on. As I waited for the plotline involving the spy ring to emerge, I kept wondering: How much longer will we have to be mired in the mud in order to tell our stories?
My novel, unlike my colleague’s, did not receive much press coverage beyond a couple of notices in literary publications, but our books do have certain things in common. Both are set, for significant portions, in 1800s America and take on the legacy of American slavery. Both authors are Black. Both live in the American South. But the differences are more crucial. His novel is limited in its depictions of time and place. Mine is about a shapeshifting, timeless witch who outwits God. The promotional materials for his book focused on the agency of his women protagonists. Mine, despite my objections, trafficked in the language of “Black poverty porn”—even though two of the biggest landholding and slaveholding families in the story are Black. My colleague’s book was published by an imprint run by people of color. My book was not.
When I consider Toni Morrison’s famous quote about writing for Black people, I think that maybe I’m not as brave as she was. I don’t trust that my books will transcend racial boundaries if they are squarely situated within those boundaries. I don’t trust that I can shed the weight of being a racialized being if I’m squarely situated in race. Did my strong objections to the stereotypical descriptions in the promotional materials make it too challenging for the sales team to develop a strategy that would resonate with white Americans? I wonder.
During his acceptance speech for Best Adapted Screenplay at this year’s Academy Awards, where American Fiction was nominated for five Oscars, Cord Jefferson called out Hollywood’s risk-averse film executives: “I’ve been talking a lot about how many people passed on this movie … and I worry that that sometimes sounds vindictive. I don’t want to be vindictive. I’m not a vindictive person anymore. I’ve worked very hard to not be vindictive anymore. … It’s more a plea to acknowledge and recognize that there are so many people out there who want the opportunity that I was given.” That plea is echoed by nearly every artist in America who happens to be Black.
