Kenji on Writing

Here's a moving piece about the writing life from novelist Kenji Jasper. If you enjoy it, please give him some love.

A Great Migration

For years I have listened while my Caribbean and African friends who live in this country smugly complain about their black American neighbors, saying that many of us are unmotivated, lazy, and shiftless. These critics usually cite the success of their own ethnic groups in America in comparison with African American failures as proof of our inferiority. It always upset me when they did this. Not because they were insulting my people—I'm used to that—but because this is such a stupid and disingenuous argument.

There are of course countless unmotivated, lazy, and shiftless West Indians and Africans too, it's just that those people are still walking the streets of Kingston and Port-au-Prince and Bridgetown and Lagos and Abidjan. When it comes to work ethics and motivation, immigrant groups are not representative of their entire nations. Instead, they are people defined by their overpowering will and determination, traits which enabled them travel out across the world and start a new life in a strange land.

In light of this however, I think I have found the key to black America's future. We are, of course, one of the only two ethnic groups that did not come to the USA as immigrants. Maybe that is what needs to be rectified. To come into our own in the 21st Century, maybe we too should become an immigrant group. Maybe we, the hardworking, freethinking, self-motivated African Americans, should just get the hell out of here.

Here are my suggestions for our new host countries:

1. Ghana.
Accra's a big city with a surprisingly low crime rate, stable government, and an historic tolerance of African Americans (big ups to Kwame Nkrumah). W. E. B. Dubois's grave site is there, and so is a significant African American expat population. The beaches are nice, the clubs are fun, and it's cheap!!!

Check out these digs near Tema. That house is like out of a Biggie video. Guess how much they're selling it for. Can't you just see us out there, chilling by the pool, drinking Star beer while watch the Sixers on the satellite?

2. Jamaica.
Specifically, Treasure Beach, where the Calabash Literary Festival happens. I was a guest for the first year of the festival, it's a rather amazing event. Roger Guenveur Smith bought a house down there. Shouldn't we all follow the brother's lead? Treasure Beach is quiet, on the water, artsy, and you can also get a dope house on the cheap there too. I like this place, which is also for under $200K USD.

Anybody else have ideas on possible destinations?

on The Roots, Philly, and Black Boho Identity

In 1991, my cousin Ben lived in South Philadelphia at Fourth and Monroe, in a little townhouse shell that my aunt has long since abandoned. I still lived in the neighborhood I was born in, Germantown, but to get to my cousin’s house I had to walk from Market East Station at the Gallery II, heading straight down 10th to South Street, and then cutting up the alley of East Passyunk, right past Fifth Street. I spent years hanging out at the former Spike's Skates on that block before it closed, so knew the landscape pretty well. Right there on the corner there used to be a florist, and after 3pm they would dump the day-old flowers right in the back, and I’d long made it a habit to go through the pile to see what was salvageable. So one day, I was heading right past this exact spot and I saw that instead of the day’s trash on the curb there was this gang of dudes, about 20 of them, hovering around nervously, pacing in circles around this white boy tuning an upright bass and chubby dude who was piecing together a drum set. I paused, sat down on a curb across the street and waited as well, just curious. And then they started jamming. And I started listening. And I’ve been listening ever since.

Everybody else around the way heard The Roots too, or The Square Roots as they were calling themselves at the time. They were raw and crude, but in the sense of raw materials and crude oil. Even then, they were that good. Even in those first moments, in those first days, they sounded like the stars they were for the moment pretending to be. Even more, they sounded like Philly. They sounded like the world I knew, a surprisingly sophisticated, urbane, neo-soul black bohemian culture. That Philly could contain such a vibe may not seem like a stretch now, but this was before The Roots changed everything. Jill Scott wasn’t a diva; she was just that cool (and slender) sister who always read the sex poems Friday nights at October Gallery. King Britt was just the DJ who spun at Silk City on Monday nights and worked at Tower Records on the weekdays. I didn’t know Kindred, Bilal, or Musiq Soulchild even existed.

Back on that street corner on, their backpacks still on and actually filled with books they needed for high school, it was clear they were articulating something that hadn’t been heard before. I couldn’t count how many of them were rapping, but I did notice that there was this one little dark-skin cat that consistently rocked it, whom the others returned the mic to like he owned it. I came back a couple of times in the weeks that followed, and they were out there fairly often, rocking that corner like they were paying rent. Their crowds were clearly growing, too. One day not long after the first, there was a rumor in the crowd that someone had hired them to perform at a wedding for three hundred bucks. At the moment, that seemed to me to be such a high level of accomplishment.

Not long after this, I left Philly to go to college out in the Midwest, and when I tried to contact Cricket, their early manager, I found out that the band had left for Germany to record a cd. When I heard that, that seemed like it: if it were possible for any of us from Philly to make it on a national level, it would be The Square Roots. With all of their skills and originality, if they couldn’t make it then none of us could. Their talent was undeniable, so if they were denied we all would be. I included myself in that estimation. The album came back from Europe with them, Organix, with a low budget black cd cover that got passed around thoroughly long before it hit the stores. “On the actual, I swings like I'm Satchel/And brings groovy things to my peoples on the natural,” Tariq wrapped with Amir’s drum snapping behind the words and that was exactly the sound that I heard the first time on Passyunk. They captured it.

But it looked like nobody outside of the black boho scene in Philly really cared. The album got barely any play on Power 99, or the only other black station at the time, WDAS. I heard more cars drive by in Germantown rocking it on their cd players than I did on the radio. So for a while, I thought that was it. Judgment from the universe. Then their deal from DGC Records came through and it looked as if they would get a reprieve from obscurity. This new album actually had a budget behind it. There was this butter Philly jawn I was trying to talk to, and one of our first dates was cancelled because she ended up working till 3am designing the cover for one of first Roots singles, “Proceed.” I was salty, but I was also eager to hear the LP, so I got over it.

In 1994 though, I found myself in London, stuck in a disastrous relationship with a different woman, a relationship that I desperately wanted to work despite all evidence it was rightfully doomed. Emotionally exhausted, disconnected from my own roots and hometown, I managed to get tickets to see The Roots perform in the U.K.’s Camden (very different from Camden, NJ) for a concert put together by Straight No Chaser magazine. As much as I loved London, I had no family in that world, no friends that knew me from back in the day, no real connections, and at this hard time I was feeling the effects of that. I entered that theater a damaged and wounded man, disconnected and reeling. Waiting through the other acts, I stared down at the stage from the balcony until finally they appeared—it was only three years later, and there were those same dudes from the corner, now on the world stage. And for the length of their performance, I was home again. Not just in Philly, but also in a world where I existed and mattered. They actually did the song that my past crush had worked on the LP design for, “Proceed,” and for a moment I felt the strength to do just that. The nightmare relationship I was in took another four months to truly hit the wall, but that breather, that moment to collect myself, helped me gather the strength to make it through that period and get beyond.

Last weekend, I finally watched Dave Chappelle’s Block Party, and saw the guys from The Roots, and Jill, and thought about this. I read a review of Block Party that criticized Chappelle for having such minor acts such as The Roots, Jill Scott, and Erykah Badu instead of Jay-Z, Beyonce, and other A-list black musical guests. I knew immediately that this writer was not a part of our community, nor had any real understanding of it. That is what that movie was about, community. Black artists who do sophisticated work invariably find the majority of their audience to be, as Amir eloquently put it in the film, “People who don’t look like us.” The result of this is that we rarely get to be in environments where we are the majority, where we control the reality, where we are completely at home.

Writing prose is probably the most solitary of artistic endeavors. I create my art alone, and in silence, and my audience receives my art in much the same way. And though I have been successful in my field, mine is a small small audience as well. Writing, unlike comedy or popular music, is not greatly appreciated by this society, regardless of ethnicity. I go on tour every couple of years, meet those few people who come out to say hi, but besides that I have no connections to my audience, and rarely any with most of my literary peers. I have almost no connection with other artists of my caste and age in other mediums either. Along with Vic LaValle, I hung out with Mos Def once—a huge Victor LaValle fan—but that’s about it. Mos is an avid reader, and as such a rarity. I have never hung out with dancers, musicians, visual artists, or comedians of the larger black bohemian world. As a result, the artistic community I belong to is largely in my head, on my laptop, and in my iPod. Both of my novels have been in part about that: creating a community on the page, asserting the boundaries of my internal world. In the creation of my voice, I owe as much to The Roots in their articulation of that Philadelphia reality as I do to many of the literary giants I tried to emulate. That’s true regardless of the fact that no literary critic has ever identified my work as being a part of that Philly neo-soul aesthetic, nor that most of the people who were and are in that world have never read me. Still, “I shall proceed to continue to” write my books. In the hope that someday I too will find my audience out there waiting for me.

Sincerely,

Mat Johnson
www.niggerati.com


PS- When Vic asked Mos Def whom his favorite MC was, Mos answered in an instant: “Tariq from The Roots.” In particular, “I'm like Aquaman and Brown Hornet/I'm like Imhotep but don't flaunt it,” is what he quoted, nodding his head in awe.

PS-PS- that "butter Philly jawn" that stood me up to work on The Roots LP and I hooked back up five years later. She said yes when I asked her to marry me. As I write this, our three kids rock to Phrenology.

Everybody Loves Slavery

While preparing for a Slave Narrative course I will be teaching next semester, I came across a wealth of primary materials on the web, things that just didn't exist when I was a student. Did you know that every North American slave narrative can be found in full at the University of North Carolina—Chapel Hill's Documenting the American South?

To hear the voices of the actual slaves, give a listen to the University of Virginia's site. Or just go to the Library of Congress for its collection.

As a writer, I used to hope that after I am gone my books might still lived on in print. Now I hope that someday, long after the meat has decayed off my bones, people will continue to download my text into their living rooms.

Update

Hello Everyone,

My apologies for not posting this week, I have been distracted.

At the moment, I'm writing the final pages on my next novel. There was a time when this act of completion would send me into a depression. I once heard George Saunders say that writers who experienced this end-of-novel melancholy were mourning the loss of the perfect novel they'd imagined but couldn't write, and accepting instead the limitations of the novel that they did produce. On the completion of this latest novel, however, I just feel relief that it went as well as it did. It's not that it is perfect, it's just its a rather bizarre piece of ficiton, and I know it could have gone much much worse.

For all of you aspiring Ladies and Lords of the Niggerati, I will be teaching at both the Callaloo Writing Workshop and the Hurston/Wright Writers in the summer of 2007. If you want my assistance with your writing, please apply.

Callaloo Writing Workshop

Hurston/Wright Writers Week

Best,

Mat Johnson
www.niggerati.com

on The Meaning of Work

The Washington Post has a good series focusing on issues specific to black men. The article linked below goes to the heart of what we have been discussing here, focusing on one young man's struggle to break out of unemployment and poverty. The article itself is well written, balanced and fair.

What I think is interesting about subject Chris Dansby's situation is that it is not only a common one for his caste, but also that his predicament defies the narrow rhetorical solutions trumpeted by many of our ideologues. In reality, there is no one solution for his problems.

If there were more government resources available to him it would benefit Dansby, but it wouldn't completely solve his issues, many of which are internal: part of his problem is that he repeatedly gets demoralized and just stops going to his low paying jobs, therefor he never builds momentum and moves up the ladder.

On the other side, while an increased level of personal responsibility would greatly help him, that wouldn't solve his problems either: he lacks the mobility to drive to better jobs, and the training to get anything beyond entry level employment. Even more devastating is that he lacks an understanding of how work works, that you are supposed to climb yourself up slowly, one job at a time. That you don't quit one job until you have another one, and that you find a way to get the training that will put even more lucrative jobs within reach.

In a stunning bit of dialogue, Dansby reveals that he thinks a GED is enough to guarantee him a higher paying job. This, of course, hasn't been true since the 1950s. But with an absentee father, and a mother who never learned the keys to mobility herself, nobody is around to tell him this basic fact. Danby's knowledge of the way the world works is so inadequate that it seems as if just one day of good instruction would do him a world of difference.

Maybe that's what the black middle-class needs to be doing, going back into poor black areas on a regularly basis and sharing the personal information we have on social mobility. Not hollow "You are somebody!" slogans, or "You came from kings!" history lessons, or even vague "Stay in school! Go to college!" directions either, but very pragmatic, nuts and bolts instructions for gaining access to the middle-class dream.

Read the article and try this: based on what you learn of him in the piece, how would you counsel Chris Dansby on entering into the middle-class before he's thirty? Or do you think that that goal is impossible for him?

The Meaning of Work

Chewing on Ridley

Run, Jesse! Run! No really, run, John Ridley's coming for you.

Ridley's at it again. Blogs are still spinning over the Manifesto, and here comes this bad boy:

No more edicts, Jesse

Anyone want to sign my petition for a Ridley vs. Jackson fight in the next episode of Celebrity Boxing? If that goes well, I'm hoping for that Crouch vs. Sharpton Heavyweight Championship we've all been dreaming of.