In Cinelo Okparanta’s new novel, a young white man is fed up with his prejudiced little town parents. Some of his reactions are typical: he denies their views and moves to New York City. But others are obviously strange. He begins to call himself G-Dawg, joins a self-help group for whites who are ashamed of race, and begins to identify him as an African black man.
Yes, Okparanta knows that the premise can cause crime.
When she began working on a novel about a well-meaning white man who didn’t know her prejudice, Nigerian American Okparanta realized that the topic was explosive. After all, she was devoted to a fierce debate about racism and identity politics at the moment these issues were supervised by the murder of George Floyd and subsequent protests. So she relied on satire.
Humor said, “It was a safety measure I took, so I didn’t have to endure the accusations of trying to write whiteness.” “I’m not trying to write white in the actual way. I’m writing about the pain I’ve endured by being on the other side of white.”
The book Harry Sylvesterbird, published this week by Mariner Books, is dark and bitter, but often disarming. Explore identities and the meaning of crossing those socially drawn boundaries.
Some of these new novels skewer more subtle forms of bias that arise from racial blind spots and ignorance, or from the false desire to emulate or adapt to another culture.
Mithu Sanyal’s new novel, Indentiti, released this month, satirizes the debate about racial and identity politics in academia. The plot focuses on South Asian doctoral students who were unleashed when they learned that her mentor, a prominent South Asian post-colonial and racial research professor, was white rather than Indian. .. In her next novel, Yellowface, RF Kuang is a twisted story about a white writer who steals an unpublished novel written by a recently deceased Asian-American writer and tries to see it off as his book. And downplays the lack of diversity in the publishing industry. ..
Mosin Hamid, in his new novel “The Last Whites,” published by River Headbooks on August 2, is a surreal premise for examining racial identity as socially constructed fiction. using. Set in an unnamed country, one morning a white man with dark skin has to confront potential prejudices in a mysterious state that spreads throughout the city.
Born in Pakistan, Hamid came up with the premise more than 20 years ago, when he was suspected of having “Islamic names and brown skin” after the 9/11 terrorist attacks. He returned to the story during a pandemic and discovered that by approaching it through a fantasy lens, he was given more freedom to investigate artificial fault lines around the race.
“I think race is this imaginary thing, so if we start intervening at the level we imagine in the first place, there may be insights worth having,” he said in an interview.
Black novelists have long worked on racial taboos with surrealism, farce, and satire.
In 1931, black journalist and writer George S. Skyler published a critique of the white supremacist arch called “Black No More”. Since then, Ishmael Reed, Charles Wright, Percival Everett, Matt Johnson, and Paul Beattie have used the comic Surrealism to tackle themes such as slavery, lynching, hate crimes, and the failure of the civil rights movement.
According to Nana Kwame Ajay Brennia, humor and fantasy can act as a kind of buffer when writing about issues that would otherwise be too painful, such as police violence against blacks and colorism. .. His next novel, “Chain-Gang All-Stars,” takes place in another United States, and a commercial prison system allows prisoners to compete for freedom in a gladiator-style death-fighting reality show.
“By having such a surrealistic and satirical belief, I can have a lot of control and create a space where I can work on the same subject,” he said.
The new racial harvest of Satea also reflects the ongoing debate about cultural appropriation and the conflict over whether novelists should write across racial and cultural boundaries and how to write. I am.
Okparanta said he would like to explore racism from an unfamiliar perspective.
“As a black man who has endured a lot of racism and microaggression, I wanted to understand that a well-meaning white man could hurt you,” she said.
She first came up with the premise of “Harry Sylvester Bird” when she was teaching creative writing at Columbia University in 2016, and held a seminar on ethics to write fiction about other races and cultures. Okparanta, who moved from Port Harcourt in Nigeria to Boston at the age of 10, recently published her debut novel, Under the Udala Trees, a story of lesbian growth set in the 1960s during the Nigerian civil war.
When students discussed novels such as William Styron’s “Nat Turner’s Confession” and Arthur Golden’s “Sayuri,” Okparanta was impressed with how the problem was polarized.
“It got hot,” she said. “Because there was a power problem. Who has the power to do it, and what does it mean to use that power in a way that doesn’t accurately represent your culture? “
A few years later, Okparanta lived in the small town of Lewisburg, Pennsylvania. There she often felt out of place as a black woman or an African immigrant. Realizing that she was thinking about her old ideas, she began to wonder what would happen to a black writer creating a white character who was unaware of her racial blind spot. And social unrest.
“Harry Sylvester Bird” begins in Tanzania. Harry, a teenager, is scared of how African guides and staff are treated while he is on a safari vacation with his poor parents. Returning to Pennsylvania, he decided he didn’t want to be white anymore and began to identify him as a black man, then moved to New York for college, where he began the next phase of his transformation. He attends a meeting of Transracial-Anon, a treatment group for whites seeking “race reassignment.” This ultimately leads to changes in the member’s hair and skin.
As Harry’s story unfolds, Octaranta is destabilized with ourselves, divided by heightened radicalism and nationalism, from a pandemic, and from the rise of a pure white white supremacist political movement called purists. Draw an alternative American portrait with similarities. His desire to strip off his whites and become an “alliance” separates him from the explicit prejudices and hatreds of bold white nationalists, yet Harry unknowingly makes unpleasant comments about blacks. He worships dark skin, and at one point he marvels at his Nigerian girlfriend, “You can be very happy with so few Africans.”
Okparanta said he wanted to exaggerate Harry, but wasn’t cartoonish or sympathetic enough for readers to dismiss his plight as a farce.
Even with a buffer of humor, Okparanta says he is prepared for backlash from readers and critics who may misunderstand her purpose or feel that the novel has failed as a satire. The initial reaction is a bit complicated.Kirkus Reviews Called it A ferocious review of the New York Times, while claiming that the novel “lacks a thrilling surrealism to animate successful racism,” casts doubt on the quest for how deep racism is. “Tart” insisted.
Novelist Tayari Jones, who praised the novel for using humor as a “weapon, tool, and salvation,” said Okparanta’s satire was sympathetic to her character and subject matter at the same time. He said he was successful because he got closer.
“She is not a white man in a racial crisis, but a keen observer of a society in a racial crisis,” she said. “She knows what it feels like to be an African exposed to the Western gaze.”
Okparanta said it wouldn’t surprise some readers to feel that her satire was overkill. After all, when Voltaire announced “Candide,” an adventurous adventure story that also served as a vicious critique of Europe’s power structure said, “French aristocrats didn’t enjoy it.” rice field.
“Because it is a satire, it will be understood and digested differently by different people in society,” said Okparanta. “Some groups may find it easier to understand humor than others.”
