Something Thoughtful

  Nicholas Reid reflects in essay form on general matters and ideas related to literature, history, popular culture and the arts, or just life in general. You are free to agree or disagree with him.

                                              CONFUTING A LITERARY BIAS 

 

I admit it. I hadn’t even heard of the film before I was watching it on a plane as we were flying to Oz some months ago. I’m not sure that it had ever been released in New Zealand cinemas, even though it was released last year (2023) in the USA and elsewhere. On top of that it won the “Best Adapted Screenplay” award at the Academy Awards. The film I am referring to is American Fiction, written and directed by Cord Jefferson. It was based on a novel called Erasure by Percival Everett. Both novelist and screen-writer/director are African-American.

Here's my brief synopsis – Thelonious Ellison is a Black professor of literature at a university in Los Angeles. He has had some novels published and he is clearly an upper-middle-class man with a love for the work of many great writers. But his novels sell poorly and his publishers have turned down his most recent novel. Thelonious is frustrated. He realises that the only books written by Blacks that are accepted and applauded by White critics are about Black gangsters or drug-dealers from deprived families or mistreated and neglected children on the mean streets of a ghetto. Black life is sensationalised and stereotyped. He is angered by the popularity of this sort of sensationalism when a book called  We’s Lives in Da Ghetto gets rave reviews from the usual suspects – White pundits and book reviewers. So he adopts a pseudonym and writes a deliberately ridiculous, over-the-top, exaggerated, sensationalist novel about Black life in da ghetto called My Pafology. And guess what? It becomes a huge bestseller. Pundits and reviewers drool over it claiming that it reveals the authentic lives of African-Americans. A movie company plans to makes a film based on My Pafology, but they think the title should be changed. Through Thelonious’s agent, they ask what the film’s title should be. Over the phone and in despair Thelonious says “Fuck”… and down the line, the movie people – all White – say what a brilliant idea that is. So the film will be titled Fuck. The nonsense wears Thelonious down.

Now there’s much more to this film that my abridged synopsis. Thelonious has some family problems to deal with and a botched romantic affair. But the essence of the film is Thelonious’s anger at the way mainly White reviewers take it for granted that Black lives are always as they are in sensationalised novels… and Black writers often pander to those who want to believe that. How else would they become bestsellers?

Such reviews of the film as I have read, American Fiction is interpreted as a blast against stereotyping, and against the ignorance that there is a large Black middle-class in the U.S.A. Not all Blacks in America live in ghettos or slums. Far from it.

But I would suggest that the film is also taking a major jab at White liberals, who think they have done something virtuous just by reading what they imagine to be authentic accounts of Black life. And of course it is White liberals who are, in their virtuousness, often the first to object to what they see as offensive in the way of unpleasant racial slurs … when Blacks are capable of taking such slurs in their stride when they understand the context in which the slur is presented. This is underlined in an early sequence in American Fiction when Thelonious is teaching a class and he recommends his students to read Flannery O’Connor’s short story The Artificial Nigger. The title is chalked on the blackboard. In a mixed-race class, the only student to object to the objectionable word is a White girl who goes stomping out of the class.

Footnote 1: Here’s a problem for me. Ignoring real racial slurs, up until the 1960s in America, it was polite to refer to black-skinned people as Negro or Coloured – but in the 1960s, activists insisted that “Black is Beautiful”, and so for a number of years the word Black became the most acceptable word. But more recently the accepted term has become African-American. Now I know that there are many other ethnicities in the U.S.A. who are also hyphenated, such as Italian-American, Irish-American although rarely German-American and apparently never English-American, while Latin people are called Hispanic. But the fact is that many African-Americans do still proudly call themselves Black. Which is why I have used the terms White and Black in this review. Yes, Black is Beautiful.

Footnote 2: Just to check out why Flannery O’Connor’s short story The Artificial Nigger was interesting to Thelonious, I grabbed off my shelf a collection of O’Connor’s stories and re-read the story I’d read years ago. It features two White hillbilly types, grandpa and grandson, who go to the big city, get lost and en route grandpa makes a number of ignorant comments about “niggers”. They are certainly not meant as role models to be admired.