Their Eyes Were Reading Smut?

I hate to go into my litany of "I told you so's" but I saw this coming years ago. Back in the days before blogging was popular, I had a website where I reviewed every book I read (and at the time, that may have been a couple a week). I was also a frequent reviewer, of said books, on Amazon.com. Though I read my share of popular black fiction at the time, I was mindful that the popular fiction of Terry Mc Millian, E. Lynne Harris and Eric Jerome Dickey was not in the same category as the literary magic of Toni Morrison, Edwidge Danticat and Alice Walker. I divided my reviews into three categories: Literature, Popular Fiction and Non-Fiction.

Books by then emerging authors such as Tananarive Due, Florence Ladd, Helen Elaine Lee, Pearl Cleage and Diane McKinney-Whetstone were granted access to the "Toni" club while "dating game" fiction by Omar Tyree (couldn't get beyond the first few chapters after a chronology snafu that pissed me off), Lolita Files (I reviewed Scenes From a Sistah on Amazon and got a downright funky note from her so-called business manager) and Benilde Little (whose style and quality I found far better than others) were products of the burgeoning Terry McMillan genre. I understood and prefaced the differences between the different sub-genres in the growing black book market on my site and in general conversation. Book snob that I was, I always got a little peeved when someone claimed to be an avid reader yet only read the sex and relationship drama filled novels by those whom I considered to be not so great writers or story tellers. Those same folks always claimed that Toni Morrison was "too hard" to understand or that they "couldn't get into" some of the deeper novels by writers who'd truly studied the craft and were well versed in literature as a whole.

So, it is no surprise that even the sexy, black soap opera genre has devolved into a market for overtly erotic/semi-pornographic books which, because the authors are black, get lumped into the "black literature" category - much to my chagrin and, apparently to that of Nick Chiles who wrote this piece for the New York Times.

With an extra spring in my step, I walked into the "African-American Literature" section - and what I saw there thoroughly embarrassed and disgusted me.

On shelf after shelf, in bookcase after bookcase, all that I could see was lurid book jackets displaying all forms of brown flesh, usually half-naked and in some erotic pose, often accompanied by guns and other symbols of criminal life. I felt as if I was walking into a pornography shop, except in this case the smut is being produced by and for my people, and it is called "literature."

As a black author, I had certainly become familiar with the sexualization and degradation of black fiction. Over the last several years, I had watched the shelves of black bookstores around the country and the tables of street vendors, particularly in New York City, become overrun with novels that seemed to appeal exclusively to our most prurient natures - as if these nasty books were pairing off back in the stockrooms like little paperback rabbits and churning out even more graphic offspring that make Ralph Ellison books cringe into a dusty corner.

Early last year I walked into a B. Dalton bookstore in a New Jersey mall where the manager had always proudly told me how well my books were selling. This time, I was introduced to a new manager who was just as proud to show me an enhanced black books section teeming with this new black erotica. I've also noticed much more of this oversexed genre in Barnes & Noble bookstores over the past few months, although it's harder to see there since the chain doesn't appear to have separate black fiction sections.

But up until that visit to Borders in Lithonia, I had thought this mostly a phenomenon of the black retail world, where the black bookstore owners and street vendors say they have to stock what sells, and increasingly what sells are stories that glorify and glamorize black criminals. The genre has been described by different names; "ghetto fiction" and "street lit" are two I've heard most often. Apparently, what we are now seeing is the crossover of this genre to mainstream bookstores.

But the placard above this section of Borders in Lithonia didn't say "Street Lit," it said "African-American Literature." We were all represented under that placard, the whole community of black authors - from me to Terry McMillan and Toni Morrison, from Yolanda Joe and Benilde Little to Edward P. Jones and Kuwana Haulsey - surrounded and swallowed whole on the shelves by an overwhelming wave of titles and jackets that I wouldn't want my 13-year-old son to see: "Hustlin' Backwards." "Legit Baller." "A Hustler's Wife." "Chocolate Flava."

I've heard defenders say that the main buyers of these books, young black women, have simply found something that speaks to them, and that it's great that they're reading something. I'd agree if these books were a starting point, and that readers ultimately turned to works inspired by the best that's in us, not the worst.

To some bookstores' credit, perhaps just having a "black section" (usually right next to the gay section) is convenient as I know, personally, people who will walk into a chain and ask where the black books are. I've also noticed that authors like Toni Morrison and Alice Walker have their works dispersed amongst the mainstream (white) literature as well as amongst the black books. So while I understand the angst in seeing a Pulitzer and Nobel winning authors like Toni, lumped in with soft porn authors like Zane simply because of race, I conclude that we cannot have it both ways.

I shop mostly online for books now but in the days when no weekend was worth living without a trip to the bookstore, I would make special trips to Oakland, from San Jose, just to go to the legendary Marcus Books where I could bask in the smell of every genre of black book from cookbook to historical non-fiction. If you want diversity in that which mainstream bookstores toss all into one basket, finding a black bookstore is the best solution. Otherwise, I think that stores need to get rid of the "black section" and intersperse the books by genre - not race. That may be a challenge for those who cannot take the time to understand some of the more prolific writers. Hunting for good books, without prior research, can be an all day thing.

Full story also at mezomorf.com.

Update: Debra Dickerson, guest blogging at Political Animal, also weighs in on this.