Fair Books

In the two (2) librarian bookclubs I facilitate, (locations: Philadelphia & Westchester, NY), we often discuss how there are librarians we work with who don't read, or who refuse to read certain genres, even if it's a matter of reading one or two titles of a popular genre in order to best serve library patrons. We are constantly talking about  what we, as librarians, read, what we are willing to read (or not), and what we are willing to admit that we read (or not). 

The Pennsylvania African American Library Association (PAALA) is sponsoring a bus trip to the  Harlem Book Fair today. Some authors who will be there are reading from their works:

Readings in the Schomburg Courtyard 

12:00 pm – 6:00 pm

Peniel Joseph Dark Days, Bright Nights: From Black Power to Barack Obama 

Bernice McFadden Glorious 

Wes Moore The Other Wes Moore 

Queen Afua Overcoming an Angry Vagina 

Supa Nova Slom The Remedy 

Zelda Lockhart Fifth Born II: The Hundredth Turtle 

Tova Baker Lady B. Moore 

Carol Taylor The Ex Chronicles: A Novel 

Marlen Suyapa Bodden The Wedding Gift 

Stephen F.D. Bryan Black Passenger Yellow Cabs 

Julia Butler Being Single Is Not A Disease 

April Walker More Than One Way to Skin A Dog 

Damon John The Brand Within 

Armond White Keep Moving: The Michael Jackson Chronicles 

Terry McMillan The Interruption of Everything 

Sonia Sanchez Morning Haiku

(source: http://www.nypl.org/events/programs/2010/07/17/harlem-book-fair-2010)

Today at the fair - educators are anonymous readers. They are braving the heat and milling the crowds, listening to authors read, attending panel discussions of various literati, browsing vendor tables, all in the name of reading, writing, and literacy. So I wonder today: As teachers and librarians are walking through the book fair - will all the books there be seen by them as accessible to all the readers they teach?

I ask this question because when we say "book fair" I wonder what that means for people, especially educators. When we participate in a book fair, how are we perceiving books? writers of books? readers of books? How do we perceive ourselves as we participate in a "book fair"? Are we educators? Are we readers? What are we doing when we attend a book fair? Why are we there? For educators, are all books "fair" in the name of reading, writing, and literacy?

I'm also thinking today, about those book fair vendors and authors lined up on both sides of 135th Street in Harlem - hot and sweating outside - hawking their wares - their books - stories they've written and/or supported themselves - parts of their souls they've invested in to be read, to be regarded, to be heard. Then I think of who is inside on the discussion panels in air-conditioned auditoriums, promoting what they've written, promoting their wares from a place of comfort, coolness, convenience - inside.

Stories encapsulated in the form of books - being signified by discourse and autographs ... inside, in relief of the summer's heat, and outside, embroiled in it. Who are the authors having conversations in the auditorium? Who are the authors having conversations on the streets? And what does that say about what's a "fair book" or what makes a "book fair"? Does it mean anything that black people are in a black neighborhood, under their ancestors' sun (or inside), talking about, thinking about, being about black stories, black lives .... black books? Getting back to librarians and teachers, what are we willing to talk about when it comes to reading our people's stories? Are we willing to embrace all of who we are? all of who our people are?

What teachers and librarians teach signifies what we indeed, do read, and what we indeed, deem to be "fair" and accessible to our children, to our community, and alas, to ourselves..

Street Reals

***
"What could possibly be more fantastic than reality?"  ~~Ashleigh Brilliant.
***

 A Tale of Human Lives

On New Year's Day, 2009, Oscar Grant III, an American Black male, age 22, of Oakland, California, was killed by an American Anglo male, Johannes Mehserle, age 28, a Bay Area Rapid Transit (BART) police officer (at the time). That's an indisputable fact - in one sentence.

Here's another fact on the matter:

On July 8, 2010, Mehserle was convicted of involuntary manslaughter for the shooting. In California, involuntary manslaughter carries a prison sentence of 2 years minimum - 4 years maximum.

Due to the insidious history of white cops killing black male citizens in America, Fact 1 + Fact 2 = a very angry, disillusioned, and pissed off Oakland community. While we don't really need to know more about Oakland to understand why the city's people would respond to this conviction on July 8th, by looting and rioting in the streets of its downtown area, here are some facts about Oakland, California, (according to Wikipedia) to bring the city more into context:

• It is the 8th largest city in California, with a population of about 405,000 souls
• It is a county seat
• It is just 8 miles from San Francisco
• Its population is a diverse group of Latinos (25%), some of them certainly descendants of the original Spanish colonizers of the land, Blacks (29%), many surely descended from transplants of the Great Northern Migration, Anglo American (37%), many who are very likely descendants of logger workers of the 19th century, and by the end of last century, various immigrant groups (30% - of which 1/2 are Asian) from all over the world.
• Oakland is the one of the most diverse cities in the U.S.
• About 20% of the population is poor; about 18% of the city population is unemployed - but check this out: only 0.7% of Oakland's population is homeless.

Here's a few facts about Grant and Mehserle:

• Grant: raised in the Bay area
• Grant: dropped out of high school in 10th grade, but went back and completed his GED
• Grant: had previous convictions for drug dealing
• Grant: had a documented pattern of resisting arrest (see Wikipedia article)
• Grant: is a single father of a 4 year old little girl

• Mehserle: raised in the Bay area
• Mehserle: graduated high school, but dropped out of college to attend the police academy
• Mehserle: graduated the police academy at the top of his class (5th)
• Mehserle: is a single father of a little boy, who was born the day after the Grant shooting
• Mehserle: has had to move twice since the shooting due to death threats to his family

Oakland has long been considered a significant cultural center, and can be considered a progressive town, with luminaries such as: The Black Panther Party, Tupac Shakur, Sheila E., the Hawkins gospel family, Paul Mooney, Shamar Moore, Ishmael Reed, Tom Hanks, Pharaoh Sanders, Amy Tan, Gertrude Stein, and Green Day, to name a few. Oakland is also the city where its school board voted in 1996 to recognize Ebonics as an official language, which sparked all kinds of controversy in the education sector with journal and web articles and books being published to flesh out the never-ending debate surrounding insider/outsider language in schools. 

Street Reals

I'm not going to get into the shock-and-awe values of Oakland's crime rate. My observations and experiences bring me to safely conclude that all cities have crime issues - American or otherwise. We know that crime tends to occur when people living in close proximity to one another are lacking jobs, therefore lacking money, therefore lacking social capital, and therefore consequently, not feeling like they have access to equal justice. Oakland's poverty and unemployment rates already tells us that there's crime issues, and when you couple those statistics with a high minority population that lives in the the racist republic of the United States of America, such statistics hint that there's likely issues around equal justice.

The light-handed conviction (handed down by a jury of 7 whites, 4 Latino/as, 1 Asian - 8 women, 4 men) of the BART police officer, whose explanation for the killing is that he mistook his gun for a taser ..., was the cayenne pepper added to a boiling gumbo of no money, no jobs, no access, no justice (everyone's struggling in "these hard economic times"). So street protests, street looting, street vandalism, and street arrests occurred on the night of July 8th, 2010, in Oakland, California, but you wouldn't have known it if you weren't living in the San Francisco Bay area, where of course, it was their lead news story that day and night. Nope. For the rest of us Americans, we were mesmerized, hypnotized, zombie-fied, and disney-fied by mainstream media with the one-hour special about NBA basketball player, LeBron James, and his move from Cleveland, Ohio, to Miami, Florida. 

While the streets were shouting, yelling, pulsating, rumbling, quaking on the fault of the imbalanced justice of the light-handed conviction for the killing of yet another African American male youth, we were being entertained by another African American male youth (Bron-Bron is only 25 years old), who more than likely was oblivious to even the existence of Oscar Grant....I wonder if LeBron knows that he was dooped too.......(Note: I'm spelling "duped" this way for a reason.)

I don't begrudge Mr. James his celebrity nor his livelihood. I begrudge our socio-cultural programming and how we all are actors and players in the fictionalized version of American reality. I begrudge that we don't pay attention to nor prioritize real life. I begrudge that part of our addiction to entertainment is that we actually enjoy our information being planted, harvested, cooked, and spoon-fed to us, nicely being dooped. We want our reality, which includes our daily joys and triumphs, yes, but also our daily struggles and fears, to be broadcast back to us in colorful HD and 3D with CGI, ... background music, please. 

Where the Story @

And we get mad when art imitates life and tells life like life is - band-aid rip and all - as in Street Lit. We get upset and feel uncomfortable when truths are laid out in splayed, spread eagle fashion; we don't want to look at truth, hear about truth, read about truth, or even acknowledge the truth that everyday people live hard in America. We can sing and bounce our heads to Jay-Z's song, It's a Hard Knock Life, but to really digest the reality of what he's talking about? To really look face in another's face (not a mirror, not a window) with what is really going on in inner-city neighborhoods, homes, and streets in the U.S.A. today? Oh, and to realize that it's not just black people or Latino people but ALL people in the hood? Psshhhhh. The horror of it all is enough to ignite a revolt: which is what happened when Grant was killed (Oakland rioted to protest the killing in 2009), and on July 8th when Mehserle was convicted.

Take note that the Oakland riots on July 8th weren't a "black riot" or a "Latino riot" .... oh no no no. If you do a web search on the story, you'll see pictures and slideshows of everybody protesting, looting, and getting arrested. E'er-bod-day - men, women, young, old, city council people, and block captains... Which is why, I believe, the mainstream media got paid to broadcast a one-word statement ("Miami") over the course of 60 minutes. I believe that the media did this on purpose - perhaps under orders (don't get me started on that ...) - because the next morning, July 9th, no one still talked about Oakland (I'm talking mainstream media here). MSNBC, CNN, the Huffington Post, etc., were still leading with "King James." MSNBC didn't mention Oakland until around 10:15 a.m. EDT, where the news anchor soberly reported the story, only to quickly segue into an upbeat tone about - you guessed it - "King James." But I digress ....

My point is this: Oakland, California, on July 8, 2010, didn't conduct a racial riot - at least not from what I read, viewed, and listened to ... it was a human revolt - a human riot. Go look at Oakland's demographics again. View the slideshow I linked to: it wasn't a "black riot" because "black people" got mad because a "white cop" killed a "black man." Nope. Look again.

And these are the kinds of truths that annoy me - that get me going. Silencing the truth about the humanity in all of us. All of us are pissed off, "we all mad," at what Mehserle did, at the expense of Grant ... and at the same time, we  feel a sense of the human that both young men are and were. So while Grant was young, a single father, and a drug dealer, that brother was also very human, very real, and loved. And while Mehserle is young, a single father, and a killer, that brother is also very human, very real, and loved. And perhaps on a deeper level, this is what Oakland was rioting about - the disrespected-ness of the value of human life. We have to respect the whole human story - not just the parts that whatwhat? make us feel good ............

I cried for Oscar Grant and his family. I cried for Mehserle and his family. Here's another fact about both of these young men's situations: both of them - were in the same place at the same time. Mehserle didn't come from cloud nine or planet Eris to interact fatally with Oscar Grant on that fateful 2009 New Year's Day. Mehserle is from the same city as Grant. Mehserle's life is as over as Oscar Grant's life is ..., whether Mehserle serves 2 - 4 years in prison ... or more ... or not. His life as he knew it and assumed it - is done - cooked - flambayed. I don't care how white or male or American he is. He's from Oakland, Cali. He will pay for his crime in ways only karma can chronicle: the Oakland community will see to it, prison will see to it, his thoughts will see to it...

For me, the bottom line is, the Grant/Mehserle killing (I posit that they both died that day) is a tragedy for the Grant family, for the Mehserle family, for the Oakland community, for all of us in humanity. It's a tragic crime that is very real, and sadly all too commonly real in America's streets, whether it be citizen-on-citizen crime and/or cop-on-citizen crime. 

If you read novels by Terri Woods, or K'wan, or Shannon Holmes or Sister Souljah (to name a few), you'd get some real realisms of what's going on in our American streets. Case in point, last year when the movie "Precious" came out, I had to correct a friend who was very clear about the fact that the text the movie is based on, Push by Sapphire, is a biography. I told my friend, "No, it's fiction. It's a novel." She was like: "No it's not - it's real."

A teen book clubber at a Philly library once said to me about Street Lit:

"It's all real - fiction, non-fiction, don't matter - it's all real."

She was 18 years old at the time she said this.

I can't wait until we all care, I mean really, empathically care,  about what's real about these streets. I look forward to when collectively, a consciousness is built that fully acknowledges the power of the streets and respects that power. Then, perhaps, we can really live differently about it.

Lastly, I would be remiss if I didn't share that this last photo is a pic of a neighborhood block in Camden, New Jersey, USA. I can't tell which street, but to guess, I think it's South Camden - near where I grew up.

Thanks for listening.

Evidences

I became acquainted with Mia Mingus today, a fellow Frida Kahlo admirer. Frida Kahlo's birthday was yesterday, July 6th. While acknowledging Kahlo's birthday via my Facebook friend and fellow librarian, Isabel Espinal, I learned who Mingus is, and boy am I glad.

Mia Mingus is a "a queer disabled woman of color korean american transracial and transnational adoptee working, creating and loving towards wholeness and connection, love and liberation" (Leaving Evidence blogsite, 2010). She speaks frequently on the college lecture circuit about "disability justice, race, reproductive justice, gender, queer liberation, transformative justice, transracial and transnational adoption, multiple oppressed identities and multi-issue politics" ("About," Leaving Evidence blogsite, 2010). Mia inspires me because I easily relate to her passion to give voice to her multi-layered identities that all have meaning and all signify upon one another.  Like Mia, for me, and many people in my cultural community, it is a daily articulation to negotiate your various identity constructs based on gender, color, culture, history, sexuality, education, economics, etc. As a woman of color, especially as an African American woman of color in academe, daily living for me is political. I believe that the gift that Frida Kahlo gives women of color, via her art and her life story, is an articulation of politicized daily living as an opportunity to know oneself intimately, and to enjoy the space of being charged to be courageous in staking claim to who you are in this reality. This is what makes me love Frida Kahlo and all that she is, and by extension, or better yet, by correlation, this is what makes it easy for me to love Mia Mingus, too.

So I'd like to re-post Mia Mingus' philosophy statement that provides the framework for her blog. She says:

We must leave evidence. Evidence that we were here; that we existed; that we survived and loved and ached. Evidence of the wholeness we never felt and the immense sense of fullness we gave to each other. Evidence of who we were; who we thought we were; who we never should have been. Evidence for each other that there are other ways to live--past survival; past isolation. 
(Leaving Evidence blogsite, 2010).

I think it's obvious as to why I am posting Mia's quote on my Street Literature blog. For this is exactly what Street Lit does - it leaves evidence that a people are here, they exist, survive, love, ache, seek wholeness via fractured and wounded living ... Street Lit leaves the page open to expose "who we are, were, who we thought we were; who we never should have been." And believe it or not, Street Lit also evidences "that there are other ways to live--past survival; past isolation" (Leaving Evidence blogsite, 2010).

I'm just sayin'.

P.S. Thank you Mia for all that you are and all the work that you do. I see you.

Fairytale Grit

These past couple of days, two signs came to me that inspired this post: (1) an email from author friend, Zetta Elliott, pointing me to a radio interview segment from on the media, about urban fiction, and (2) a link sent to me via my best friend, Jeff Bullard, about fairy tales being originally inspired by and written for urban dwellers centuries ago. Zetta and Jeff reminded me of a piece I wrote 3 years ago (and am in the process of re-reading and updating) entitled, Inner City Teens DO Read, which I presented as a paper at a conference at the University of Birmingham (UK), in August, 2007. I am posting the introduction to the piece, below:

*******************************************

Excerpt from "Inner City Teens DO Read" by Vanessa Irvin Morris (2007):

Introduction

Every society has a dominant narrative that chronicles the lives of its citizens. As far back as the work of the Grimm Brothers’ recordings of German folk tales, stories have been regarded as “reflections of the popular mind”. [1] We hold folklore within our collective consciousnesses, with stories such as The Frog Prince, Cinderella, and Hansel and Gretel, representative of fictionalized reflections of “the emotions, dreams and desires of every human being."[2] As communities live through history, new stories, perhaps “necessary fictions” of our contemporary worlds are told in various mediums—cinema, television, newspapers, music, art, and literature.[3] It is part of the human condition for us to feel connected to stories, especially to stories that we can relate to.[4] Stories that convey characters, settings, and experiences that represent how we look, sound, and feel, reveal truths about both the young and the old.[5] Our narratives validate our humanity.

In America, with its various class structures and ethnic subcultures, different groups maintain their own fictions, mythologies, legends, and folklores. These narratives reflect the daily lives of urban poor communities in sometimes fantastical yet perhaps relational and cautionary ways.[6] Currently there is a vibrant genre of narratives being published within the African American community that goes by several names: some call it ‘street/urban fiction,’ others call it ‘street lit,’ or ‘hip hop fiction.’ The novels being produced within this genre chronicle the daily lives of poor and working-poor Blacks and Latinos living in America’s inner-city enclaves. This literary sub-genre speaks from a collective memory of surviving the ghetto streets, of life and death in ‘da ‘hood.’[7] Such stories depict characters that experience unpredictable and all-too-often violent lifestyles as a result of choices made due to a lack of education and under- or non-employment. These street fiction novels not only illustrate the dramatic impact of living as a marginalized American, but the stories also communicate the gendered paradigms of womanhood and manhood, as characters try to make sense of the intense relationships illustrated within their fictionalized world.[8]

Outsiders to inner-city American life often struggle to accept that these fictionalized depictions of life in da ‘hood could closely parallel the realities that many Americans face; however my fieldwork in teen readership of this genre confirms that street fiction is largely based in a world that the readers recognize as real. A street fiction book club reader, or ‘clubber’, Angie[9] (age 16) stated: “It’s reality for me.” Another clubber, Tanya, (age 18), said: “It’s all life; non-fiction, fiction. It’s life.” [10] With American street fiction novels typically set in major metropolitan areas such as New York City, Atlanta, Los Angeles, Philadelphia, and Baltimore, teen readers often see themselves or someone they know (a friend or relative) within a narrative, and such recognition empowers them to make sense of their own lives.[11] Indeed, as Lily Owens wrote in The Complete Brothers Grimm Fairy Tales (Gramercy Books, 1981) of the Grimm Brother fairy tales, characters in oral fictions and folktales based on a parallel reality allow us to further understand the real:

“… however high or low, exaggerated or outlandish, the emotions and experiences of fairy-tale characters have their real-life counterparts … [we are] recognizing our world in theirs”.[12]

This paper is intended to show how young urban readers of street fiction read this genre in order to validate their own existence. There is a connection between the worlds depicted in street fiction novels and the worlds that inner-city teens navigate on a daily basis. Inner-city teens experience unique obstacles within their communities. Because teens are navigating these obstacles at the most intense developmental stage of their lives (adolescence), how they perceive their worlds is all the more intense and amplified.[13] In order to map the connection between the worlds of street fiction and real life ghetto worlds of its audience, it is necessary to place ourselves into the shoes of the reader, so that we may comprehend their localized narratives.[14] This is not an easy or attractive option as scholars studying today’s American inner-city often must accept the same raw and graphic conditions as the environments described in street fiction novels. However, such confrontation with the truth is necessary in order to document why teenagers living in such communities gravitate so heavily towards stories that parallel their experiences, rather than escaping into the polar-realities of other forms of literature.

This paper will also apply literary response theories to street fiction to illustrate how teen readers move beyond this genre to a heightened sense of literacy—one that allows them to employ a more refined reading and more enhanced critical literacy of their own lived worlds. Because the ghetto/inner-city is their primary world, I contend that even before they reach their teenaged years, most inner-city children are profoundly aware of their environments. Having worked with teens on a daily basis for nearly a decade, I have seen how street fiction aides in their overall comprehension of their surroundings. These ‘hip hop generationers’ have learned to combine both street literature and music to empower themselves. Looking at life critically in order to “know what’s going on” is key to their survival and street fiction plays an important role in not only heightening their resistances to the unsavoury people and locations surrounding them, but it also strengthens their resiliencies, allowing them to carve out a sober space within their neighbourhoods.

---

[1] Lily Owens, ed., The Complete Brothers Grimm Fairy Tales, Gramercy Books, 1981, pg. xiv.

[2] Ibid. 

[3] Michelle Citron, Home Movies and other Necessary Fictions, University of Minnesota Press, 1999.

[4] Owens, pg. xiv.

[5] Citron, 1999, pg. 139; Nathan Ausubel, ed., A Treasury of Jewish Folklore, Crown, 1948, pg. xviii.

[6] Michelle Fine and Lois Weis, The unknown city: The lives of poor and working-class young adults, Beacon Press, 1998; Elijah Anderson, Code of the Street: Decency, Violence and the Moral Life of the Inner-city, W.W. Norton & Co., 1999; Bonnie J. Ross Leadbeater & Niobe Way, Urban girls revisited: Building strength, New York University Press, 2007.

[7] Francois-Xavier Lavenne, Virginie Renard, and Francois Tollet, “Fiction, between inner life and

collective memory: A methodological reflection," New Arcadia Review, volume 3, 2005.

[8] Vanessa J. Morris, Denise E. Agosto, Sandra Hughes-Hassell, and Darren T. Cottman, “Street lit: Flying off teen bookshelves in Philadelphia public libraries,” Journal of Young Adult Library Services (YALS) 5, 1

(Fall 2006): 16-23.

[9] Note: All book clubbers’ names throughout the paper are pseudonyms.

[10] Book club field notes, 11 March 2005; 21 April 2007; 16 August 2007.

[11] Morris, et al, 2006.

[12] Owens, pg. xiv.

[13] Anderson, 1999; George Dimitriadis, Friendship, cliques, and gangs: Young black men coming of age in urban America, Teachers College Press, 2003.

[14] Dennis Sumara, Private readings in public: Schooling the literary imagination, Peter Lang, 1996; David Barton and Mary Hamilton, Local Literacies: Reading and writing in one community, Routledge, 1998.

"Urban" is not the new "black"

Note: The pic to the right is the first image that comes up when you enter "urban" on Google Images.....

So I was on this author/librarian panel recently to discuss “urban fiction” aka “street lit.” And what I found fascinating was the first question asked of the panel – how do you define “urban fiction”? Those who offered their definition each had a different take on the question, and this set the stage for various uses and understandings of the term “urban fiction” throughout the panel discussion. This in turn, imho, played out what I believe to be at the crux of the confusion, debate and controversy surrounding this literary genre that we call “urban fiction,” “hip hop fiction,” “ghetto lit,” or “street lit” – the issue of what we call it, based on what it is. Even authors who write in the genre call it different things, but the terms that I see street lit authors use the most are “street lit” and “hip hop fiction.” This is understandable because the literature they write is a direct response to, and outcome of, the Hip Hop movement, which came from where? the streets. I’ve written about this point in past writings that are posted on my website, http://www.vanirvinmorris.com.

Okay, so I’m thinking about this whole “urban fiction” label, and whereas, I too, used to use this term to define the street lit genre, I now find this term problematic for a couple of reasons:

1) “Urban” is not the new “black”. I’m seeing that authors, librarians, and teachers alike find it easy to conflate “urban” with “black people” and/or “people of color.” Now what is interesting about this is that I’m listening to people talk, and they’re not saying “black people in city settings” or “people of color in city settings.” No. They are saying urban = black people; urban = people of color. This is flat out – incorrect and insensitive. To see “urban fiction” as a genre that describes just black peoples’ experiences overall, once again, marginalizes black people/people of color to a monolithic identity that is truthfully? Offensive in 2010. I’m not going to flesh out in this blog post the obviousness of the plurality of everyone’s experiences … that people of all hues live in all places and live all kinds of lives. What I will point out is that to equate whole populations of people to one location, setting, and therefore experience is just well, ignorant. Ignorant as in “not knowing,” “lacking knowledge,” “mis-educated.” Ignorant in terms of the dictionary-use of the word “ignorant.” I think it’s important to think about this also: not all black people/people of color in urban settings are low-income or working poor. The reverse is true also: not all whites in urban settings are high-income or wealthy. Case in point, Sister Souljah’s latest novel, Midnight: A Gangster Love Story (2008) illustrates the rich diversity of city/urban dwellers very well. In Street Lit, I’ve read stories that depicted all kinds of ethnic locations: Latino, Caribbean, African, Asian, European, etc.

Everyone is in the city, and by extension (not inclusion), yes, everyone, meaning diverse peoples from all kinds of backgrounds, traditions, identities, and locations, lives in the hood. To cite my own experience growing up in Camden, NJ, my neighborhood included Jews, Italians, Koreans, Puerto Ricans, and Blacks. My neighborhood today, in the Germantown section of Northwest Philly, consists of Blacks, Germans (it’s hard to understand Ms. Edith with her accent sometimes), Jewish, Irish, and Jamaican, who are also a hodge-podge of straight, gay, educated, under-educated, old, young, etc. The woman who runs the bodega down the hill is a Philly born and raised white woman, Miss Audrey, who is NO JOKE. Now that I think about it, I have yet to go to any neighborhood in any American city I’ve visited and/or lived and witness just one group of people living there, whether that neighborhood was high income, middle income, or low income. I’m not saying such neighborhoods don’t exist, I’m saying that by and large, that all neighborhoods express cultural diversity by default, because human beings are diverse, by default.

2) Call it what it is. Another reason I find the term “urban fiction” problematic is because what I’m picking up is that people use this term in order to NOT use terms like “street lit” or “ghetto lit” or “hip hop lit.” Yesterday, I heard someone call it “pop lit.” I was like – “Wow.”

Bottom line: The genre is about street living, street survival, reality-based stories about the streets. Yet, even though this is what the genre talks about, it seems like no one wants to talk about the streets. It’s as if we are ashamed, or scared, or intimidated to discuss, I mean to really discuss, the streets. However, this lack of discussion misses a very important and large point – that it is the power of the streets that is the central backdrop and impetus for the genre, whether we want to call it what it is or not.

I believe another reason we don’t want to call this genre what this genre is – “Street Literature” – is because we equate “black” and “people of color” with the streets, and we perceive the streets as chaotic, unpredictable, dark, big, powerful, unknown, unseen, dangerous, and scary. So because we view the streets in this way, it would give way too much power to describe the genre, as “Street Literature” and thereby, signify the very people the genre illustrates with this kind of power. We don’t want to think about inner-city residents as big, powerful, and unpredictable. Actually, truth be told, we don’t want to think about inner-city residents much at all. We’d have to see inner-city people as human beings, experiencing a full range of everything that goes with everyday living, and well, that’s just scary to our middle class and safety-focused sensibilities. It fucks with our fears that people from the hood have intelligence and morals and living standards– thus, they might wind up what-what? Moving in next door. We don’t want to think about what is unknown and unseen, even when such mystery is revealing itself right in front of our face (or school, or library, for that matter). The current iteration of this genre has been shouting for over a decade now, and we still, in our very identification of it, seek to silence it, to ignore it, to disrespect it, to push it under the proverbial rug, to try to deny what it is.

Here’s my thing: What’s wrong with the street? What’s wrong with there being literature about the streets? Every community is beholden to the streets – every community.

So, I’ve been doing some new reading and research on the term “street literature” also. In yesteryear, as recently as a century ago, street literature came in the forms of “broadsides” (i.e. large poster-sized publications that told the news of the streets) and "chapbooks" (i.e. small self-published pages). These publications were multi-formatted too – with poems, ballads, political announcements, social commentary, advertisements and community gossip lines (ancestral “tweets”) that were written in the colloquial language of the masses, “more versatile than printed books, with best-sellers, and classics of fiction and non-fiction” (Shepard, 1973, p. 19). Broadsides and chapbooks were how social and political commentary was passed to everyday people. Authors would walk the streets promoting their publications, selling it for a small fee (sound familiar?). Street literature was how everyday people got their read on in language and formats they understood and prices they could afford (sound familiar?). Street literature was how everyday people created and documented living history (Shepard, 1973). I contend that today's street literature is doing the same thing. And like street literature of yesteryear, today's Street Lit's shout is a form of protest.

My last word on today’s soapbox. Urban is not the new black. Urban is not synonymous with black people or people of color or non-white people or poor people or hip hop people, or whatever other kind of people you want to ascribe the term to ( just ask the marketing team at Urban Outfitters - I bet they’d heartily agree). “Urban” is a geographic-location specific term, synonymous with the term “city.” I didn’t make this up – you can consult Webster, Wikipedia, or the OED on this matter. Better yet, I’d go with the US Census Bureau’s definition, at: http://bit.ly/b5bJ1R, because they are in the business of counting people. So when we are talking about “urban fiction,” we can talk about K’wan alongside James Patterson; we can talk about Nikki Turner alongside Lisa Scottoline; we can talk about Kimani Tru alongside Gossip Girls (although we might not really want to – I know). And then when we get that understanding down pat, then maybe we can talk about Wall Street, and Main Street, or maybe just swap stories about the street where we live. After all, that’s what street lit does, it chronicles where and how we live truthfully, unashamedly, uncompromisingly, unapologetically. It is what it is – even its rightful name.

Thank you for listening. My next blog will be about why I no longer believe that Street Lit is a sub-genre of African American literature.

Reference:

Shepard, L. (1973). The History of Street Literature: The Story of Broadside Ballads, Chapbooks, Proclamations, News-Sheets, Election Bills, Tracts, Pamphlets, Cocks, Catchpennies, and other Ephemera. Detroit, MI: Singing Tree Press.

Cabbie Chronicles#2: The Streets Got Him

Recently I took a cab to the office and I was talking with the cab driver – a wonderful gentleman who drives the cab on a part-time basis. He was very friendly, talking with me about the city, and about how he doesn’t drink, smoke, or do drugs. He talked about how he tries to stay focused on good and right living. Then he shared with me a very real and raw story.

It went like this:

Cabbie: I had a son who died in 2002. He was just 20 years old.

Me: Oh my god, I’m so sorry for your loss. The streets got him?

Cabbie: Yeah.

Cabbie: I raised him up from the time he was born, until he was 18, you know? When he was born his mother didn’t want to raise him, didn’t want to be a mother. So I took him full time and he came up hard you know? But he was a good kid. Well, when he got to 18, his mother wanted to step in and be a part of his life. I wasn’t going to say no, you know? It’s his mother.

Me: Yeah. I would have done the same thing.

Cabbie: Yeah, you know, I’m not like that. So she started calling him and he would go over to visit – getting to know her I guess. Then when he was 20 she called him, because some female relative was having a problem with a relationship or something, so he went over there, got into something with them, and they killed him.

[prolonged silence]

Me (whispering): I don’t know what to say. I am so sorry.

Cabbie: Yeah. So. It took me 5 years to get it back together after that … it’s been a hard road back.

Me: Wow. I just can’t get my head around it – that was the best she could do after 2 years of mothering or whatever she was doing.

Cabbie: Yeah. That was the best she could do. It’s taken me a while to get back, but I’m making it, one step at a time.

Me: Thank you for sharing your story with me; I am humbled and honored. Thank you.

Then we started talking about something else – the directions to the building I was headed, the traffic. As we continued to talk, I noticed he had tears in his eyes.

Cabbie Chronicles#1: Heroin Legacies

On Tuesday, I took a cab to work, as my partner is out of town this week, and my oldest daughter drove my car to school that day.

My cab driver was a regular type dude, the kind of dude with the cap cocked on the side of his head and a toothpick hanging out the side of his mouth ... no problem ... these my type of dudes, the cool dudes from the hood. He living an honest hustle, he's driving this cab, doing his thing .... all right.

I get into the cab and he says, "Good Morning, just wanna let you know my meter broke. Where you goin?"

I said, "33rd and Market."

He said, "A'ight, that's gonna be about a quarta."

I said, "Dat's 'bout right .... I usually do about 20 to 25 on this run."

He was like, "A'ight, cool. I been gettin' good people dis mornin', no arguments 'bout my quotes on da fare."

I said, "Nah, you got it. Dat's about right."

So we start the ride, and I quickly adapt to him talking on his earset and talking to me at the same time. I quickly figure out when I'm spoken to, and when he's talking to a friend, or rather, not talking to me. It always seems like people from the hood automatically know how to hold multiple conversations at one time....

As we're riding along, agreeing on the route, he does get twisted in the directions a bit, but quickly makes up for the time. When we're on 34th Street, about 3 blocks from Market Street, my cab driver is feeling comfortable with me (I guess) and shares his story:

"Yeah. You know. I'm the son of 2 heroin addicts. I been holdin' down this hustle for 3 years now, finally gettin' my life on track. I been outta jail for that long, and I am NOT goin' back. I been in jail, and outta jail, twice, I'm not goin' back no more. Things done changed in there ... when I went the first time, there was mostly old dudes in there, you know, and not alot of us young dudes. The last time I was in it was like, damn, totally switched. Now there's mostly young dudes in jail and not that many old dudes ... somethin's not right ... that blew me away ... I was like, naw, I'm not doin' this no more. When the judge asked me, "Why you deal drugs?" I didn't tell him my parents were heroin addicts. I would NEVER tell him or anyone (in the system) that. But what am I supposed to do? I was tryin' to feed my family, make a livin'. I'm from the hood ... what else did I know to do? But I wasn't gonna tell him that my parents were heroin addicts. Now I'm a supervisa ... I'm doing good .. I'm makin' it."

I told that brother on my way out the cab as I paid my fare, I was like, "Yo, you do you. You keep doing you. You're doing great." He was like, "Yeah, it's all good!" You have a good day now and thank you!" I said, "Thank you! Have a good day, take care!" I rolled out the cab (yes, I literally rolled), got my bearings, and walked to my office.

And I never learned his name.