Booty Call on the 6 Train
Current mood: worried
Category: Writing and Poetry

This is an excerpt from an interview that Tavis Smiley had with Toni Morrison:

Toni: Also you have generations now who don't really have that experience, where being black or being African American now to a lot of people is mostly style. And in some instances, it's not even that. It's just a brand because their personal experiences are not that deeply embedded in the culture of the neighborhood. And that, I think, is gonna continue. It's part of, I suppose, what it means to complete assimilation.

Tavis: What's the danger in that? I assume that there is a danger there. What's the danger in that reality as you see it?

Toni: Well, I think you lose your power as a race. You also forget some important things to remember about your history: the things that made us strong and complicated and sophisticated and interesting. It also affects the art, I think. It gets watered down. It gets accommodationist, and it may lose its vitality. You know, whatever you can say about early blues or early jazz or those paintings is that it was rich, forceful. It was complicated. It was sophisticated. It was angry. It was consoling. It was complex. And what you get later is the sort of blatant, out-front, in-your-face style without the richness, you know, of the culture. I hope I'm explaining this properly to you because I worry about it more in terms of the output of creative activity than I do about, necessarily, the political consequences, which are dire, by the way, and may be getting worse, but nevertheless, those things can be more rapidly changed.

A friend sent this to me and it says everything that I've been wanting to say about my fears for what is happening to us and to our art. It's easiest to talk about our music first because i think it is certainly on the forefront on the mind of thinking people, the question of what is happening to our music. It's not an original question, really. But, my dilemna of the day has nothing to do with our music and everything to do with our literature, though they are inextricably linked.

In terms of Black literature, I feel like I live in a balloon of amazing talent. I'm surrounded by brilliance, by thinkers who create art and bust their ass to get this art out into the world. I'm surrounded by inspiring folk. Every once in a while, the balloon pops. Like today, on the train. I always tend to look at people's reading material on the train--and I'm always particularly interested in what Black folk are reading. This is what I've observed:

I generally don't see Black men reading on the train. Aside from the occasional NY Daily news, engineering textbook or The Alchemist, they're either playing PSP's or listening to music--sometimes using earphones, often times not and the entire car has to suffer their musical taste.

Black women seem to read more in transit. It is almost always a self-published title or an Eric Jerome Dickey/E. Lynn Harris book. As far as the self-published titles, these are the titles that come to mind (and I'm not being sarcastic!) Booty Call, Undercover Brother, Ghetto Love, Hustler, you get the point.

Am I saying black folk don't read? No. These are my observations and I'm trying to make sense of them and more importantly, trying to make sense of my inner reactions to my observations. On the way home today I saw another woman reading Booty Call again on the train and I thought about what Toni Morrison said about our art, basically being destined for a diminishing because we basically no longer have a perceivable shared experience. About our art losing its lustre, it's complexity, its sophistication. I'm really struggling with what's going on in my head because I don't want to be thought of as an elitist or an intellectual snob and I've never read Booty Call and perhaps its really good and it's the most slept on book of 2006 and maybe i'm judging it because its self published and becasue of the unoriginality of the title and maybe the woman reading it was writing her doctoral dissertation on self published Black literature and maybe I'm just buggin' but who is really going to be buying the books my friends write--my not so easy to swallow friends, my friends who write horsepills for literature.

When i see teens (in particular) reading bullshit, a part of me thinks, well, at least they're reading because I seldom see teens reading anymore. And how dangerous is this mentality that as long as their eyes are caressing words, it must be a good thing? In a few years, we'll be seeing our teen reading picture books and saying the same thing. When does it end? When do we say--no! You're reading bullshit. This school system has betrayed you and you are taking the easy way out. You can be reading something more, yes sophisticated, complicated, rich.

I passed through a school system where I was reading the Invisible Man and Song of Solomon and Their Eyes Were Watching God in 9th grade and I remember the complexity of these discussions--the drop of black paint in the white can, the unhipness of Hurston's intraracial novel, a mother's milk. After reading something like Invisible Man, I remember reading books like Counte of Monte Cristo and Alas, Babylon just for fun.

Most of all, I'm worried about our kids not reading the literature of our dead--with us as a society in general not participating in the art of the dead. They take information with them that we will never access if not through their work. They hold the keys to many of our locked doors, to not so buried treasures.