Fiction in New Orleans


FATE AND NEW ORLEANS FICTIONS

Margaret Wilkerson Sexton's debut novel  A Kind of Freedom (Berkeley: Counterpoint 2017) did receive more than a demitasse of acclaim.  It was a 2017 National Book Award Nominee, a New York Times Notable Book of 2017, and a New York Times Book Editor's Choice, a choice commended for shining "an unflinching, compassionate light on three generations of a black family in New Orleans, emphasizing endurance more than damage."  The critical gods and goddesses who cavort in public discussions of fiction can only ensure that we know titles.  Praise alone does not persuade us to read novels.  Word of mouth, the innocent gossip that circulates among select groups of African American and American readers, is often more effective in tantalizing us to read a novel.  As the Tricentennial celebrations of the Crescent City  move forward, one hears virtually nothing about A Kind of Freedom.  Nor does one find it on the shelves of local favorites at Barnes and Noble in Metairie.  Fate is as quirky as the city that care forgot.  What occupies the space where Sexton's novel should be is Jesmyn Ward's justly celebrated Sing, Unbound, Sing, winner of the 2018 National Book Award for Fiction, an import from Mississippi.

Sexton is not alone in being overshadowed by fate.  In the United States it is estimated that more than 400,000 works of fiction are published yearly, and Fatima Shaik, a talented native daughter of New Orleans, also sits in the shadows of a golden time of day in the Seventh Ward.  Shaik's The Mayor of New Orleans: Just Talking Jazz (Berkeley: Creative Arts Book, 1989) and What Went Missing and What Got Found: Stories (New Orleans: Xavier Review Press, 2015) are candidates for recognition in our rituals of remembering what black New Orleans has contributed to the republic of American letters.  There will be more to remember when Maurice Carlos Ruffin's first novel We Cast a Shadow is published in 2019.

Perhaps in the near future if New Orleans becomes as assertive in promoting local literacy as it is in manufacturing disaster for tourist consumption, Sexton, Shaik, and Ruffin will become familiar names in Treme and other wards of our city and in our public schools, where students can learn that achievement is not a cluster of tantalizing grapes.  The "perhaps" depends on our doing the necessary cultural work and forcing New York-flavored fate to sit in the shadows.

Jerry W. Ward, Jr.            May 3, 2018

Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

CLA paper

CLA,   April 6, 2018 Jerry W. Ward, Jr. PHBW:   Negotiating the Ideas of Seven Writers [1]                 Founded in 1983 by Dr. Maryemma Graham, "The Afro-American Novel Project" (AANP) had the initial goal of identifying all published novels written by African Americans from the nineteenth century to the late twentieth century.   AANP became The Project on the History of Black Writing (PHBW) in 1990 to reflect an enlarged vision and a more ambitious aim.   PHBW want to make a substantial contribution to what we then spoke of as our "Profession" by organizing bibliographic information and databases, sponsoring institutes and seminars, and by encouraging our colleagues to have rigorous engagements with all genres of black (African American) "writing" within   frames   of historical inquiry.                              The Project's   working frame was an   adaptation of the paradigm of unity in African American Studies , f
Read more

reading notes for September 23, 2019

Reading Notes for September 23, 2019 Eighteen years after the tragedy of 9/11 as I re-read Amiri Baraka's "Somebody Blew Up America" (2001), two meanderings occur: 1) a chance temptation to ask what the term "pro-Semitic" can mean in the contexts of (a) Israeli and world politics and (b) to what extent the amount of foreign aid the USA donates to Israel truly matters, and 2) a more focused temptation to ask if Morrison's Playing in the Dark sheds light on the motives that govern projects devoted to discussions of slavery beginning with 1619. I suspect those projects are at once very literary and very political. Such speculations arose during a September 12 conversation with one of my former UNCF/Mellon mentees whose research on redemption now teaches me, the former mentor, a few things about the urgency of scholarship in the twenty-first century.   The journey forth happens in the cognitive territory of "universal enslavement,"
Read more

Tell Them We Are Rising

TELL THEM WE ARE RISING TAKE ONE/ 16 February 2018                                                                                       Scene: Ash é Power House, 1731 Baronne Street, New Orleans, LA Act:   PBS/Indie Lens Film Screening: "Tell Them We Are Rising: The Story of Black Colleges and Universities" Purpose:   To view a short version of Stanley Nelson's most recent documentary, a visual narrative of many narratives, designed "to tell the dynamic story of Americans who refused to be denied a higher education and ---in their resistance --- created a set of institutions that would influence and shape the landscape of the country for centuries to come." (quoted from Ash é Cultural Arts Center newsletter, February 2018) Brief report on TAKE ONE                 My impressions of this documentary were prejudiced by (1) the advertising of the film, (2) my intimate knowledge of HBCUs from having been on the faculty of two of them fo
Read more