(photos by Sarah J. Glover)

 Karen's View - May 2006

    Hey All!

    I can't wait . . . only a couple of more months before my new book, Satin Nights, comes out! This is the first of my books being published by Warner Books, and so for the experience has been delightful. Made especially since Warner had the good sense to hire Linda Duggins -- co-founder of the Harlem Book Fair -- to work in their publicity department. You can be sure that Linda is sending me on a banging tour this summer, so I hope to see you all of you this year! (Check out my tour page to see if I'm coming to a city near you.)

Satin Nights -- the sequel to my first hit, Satin Doll -- officially comes out in August, but you can pre-order your copy now online at  The Black Library.com or Amazon.com. Other books which I would heartily recommend for your summer reading pleasure are Daaimah S. Poole's new book Ex-girl to the Next Girl , my girl Miasha's debut novel,  Secret Society  and I Do? by Edwardo Jackson.  Also check out the new book The Glass Door by Kasey Taylor.

Okay . . . moving right along . . .

    I went to the Book Expo of America last week (May 18-May 22), and there were two panels about street literature. The gist of the talk was about whether or not street literature really even qualified as literature. Let me say that there are a lot of mainstream fiction writers, especially African-American fiction writers, who knock street lit.

    I'm not one.

    Do I write street lit? No. Will I ever write traditional street lit? Probably not. Do I read street lit? Sometimes . . . but only if it's good. Same goes for mainstream fiction. I'll read it if it's good.

    The main knock against street literature -- or as it's sometimes called urban or ghetto literature -- is that it glamorizes dope-dealing, pimping, woman-beating, and whoring. It certainly depicts dope-dealing, pimping, woman-beating, and whoring -- but that's not the same thing as glamorizing it.

I mean because Terry McMillan mainly writes about women yearning to find a good man does that mean that she's glamorizing desperate women?

It does get on my nerves that a lot of the street lit books are poorly edited and have misspellings and grammatical errors, but you know what? My first book, Satin Doll, was originally self-published and it had a huge amount of misspellings and grammatical errors. Satin Doll went on to become a Blackboard and Essence Magazine best seller in spite of the errors. The readers didn't hold it against me that I couldn't afford a top-notch editor, I'm not holding it against the street lit writers or their publishers.

     I'm a middle-aged, middle-class, overweight African-American woman leaving in nice middle-class neighborhood of Philadelphia -- but  can I share something with you? When I read books by Terri Woods, Shannon Holmes, and Kwan, I find the stories they write are ones to which I can relate. Much more than I can relate to the stories written by Terry McMillan or Tony Morrison. And let me tell you, I'm a HUGE Terry McMillan fan . . . read all her books and will continue to do . . . but the bottom line is I didn't grow up in a middle-class two-parent home in a California or Arizona suburb as most of McMillan's characters have.

I grew up poor, on welfare, in Harlem, raised by my mom.

I dropped out of school when I was 13.

I have an HIV-positive sister who's been on crack for the past twenty years.

And I have an older brother who's been heroin since he was 12.

Ahem . . . does my life sound like it was a Terry McMillan novel to you?

Yes, dope-dealing, pimping and all that other jazz are depicted in the street lit books, there's no denying it, but they are depicted because they are some people's realities. Maybe it's not all of our realities, maybe not even the reality of the majority of us, but let's be honest . . . it is reality for at least some of us. And that in and of  itself makes it worth writing.

Back in the early 1920s there was a huge debate about which school of thought African-American (or Negro) literature should  follow. One school -- put forth by W. E. B. Du Bois -- said that literature should be political; teach African-Americans about their history; and establish a noble, sophisticated African-American identity that would serve as our representative in the white world; proof to them that we could operate as equals in their world. Langston Hughes once wrote that this school of thought catered to African-Americans who wanted to fit into white society so badly that they willingly rejected aspects of their own heritage. 

Another school of thought, put forth by Alain Locke, was that writers should write books that depicted real-life characters and real-life situations in the African-American community, without worrying about whether it would either offend or impress members of another race -- or even impress or offend members of our race. Just write what's real, and what's real to you, he urged writers.

The debate about street fiction puts me in mind of this earlier debate. To be honest, I really enjoy writers from the first school (such as Countee Cullen, Jesse Fausset, and early Langston Hughes, etc.) as well as writers from the second (Zora Neale Hurston, Claude McKay, and later Langston Hughes, etc.) Just as I enjoy the so-called mainstream African-American fiction and the so-called street fiction of today.

And why can't I do both?

Why are so many people -- and so many "mainstream" authors -- threatened by street lit books? Is it because street lit is now the fastest growing segment of African-American fiction? So what if it is? If you continue to write good books people will continue to buy your books, and that's the bottom line. Don't get upset because another author is selling more books than you, or making more money than you. We should be supporting each other . . . not trying to teach other down.

When Claude Brown came out with his classic, Manchild in the Promised Land James Baldwin didn't write an editorial saying, "Oh, this is trash! Don't buy it. It has pimps, whores, and dope dealers in it. . . and there's also a lot of cussing and - my goodness - they use the 'N' word!"  He could have, because all of that stuff is in there, but he didn't.

So why would an established author try to tear down the street lit books? Yeah, Street Dreams by Kwan might be more graphic than Manchild, but Manchild was written in 1964 and Street Dreams in 2004.

Call it progress, call it regress, but the thing is things change.

But at the same time, the more they do the more they stay the same.

    Can't we all just get along?

 Until then . . .

         Keep  Reading!

  Karen

“The artist must elect to fight for Freedom or for Slavery.
I have made my choice, I had no alternative.” Paul Robeson