‘American Fiction’ and what stories get told

Among the Academy Award nominees for best picture that got trampled by the Oppenheimer juggernaut was “American Fiction,” a movie about writers, writing and the publishing business. The movie has a lot to say about the state of publishing and its gatekeeping function. Who gets to decide which novels are made accessible to the broader public? By extension, the movie’s message also applies to other art forms, and to the business of marketing and promoting books, films, music, and other works of art.

Watch the “American Fiction” trailer.

Disclaimer: I have not yet watched the movie, so I write this from an uninformed perspective. Then again, I didn’t catch “Barbie” or “Oppenheimer,” so I write from a purely naïve, untainted-by-other-Oscar-nominated-films point of view.

Since I haven’t seen the movie, it’s best that I let the Internet Movie Database summarize it:

“A novelist who’s fed up with the establishment profiting from Black entertainment uses a pen name to write a book that propels him into the heart of the hypocrisy and madness he claims to disdain.” Adapted from the Percival Everett novel Erasure, “American Fiction” did win an Oscar for best adapted screenplay. It was the movie’s only Oscar of the night.

Who gets to decide?

The questions the story raises are important ones for writers to consider. Specifically: Who gets to decide what “story” makes it to the mainstream audience and, therefore, influence society’s perception of any particular group?

In “American Fiction,” the question centers on the idea of a “Black book.” Monk, the movie’s main character who has been struggling with finding a home for his work (sound familiar, writers?), decides to give the publishing industry what they want and, as a joke, writes a novel, My Pafology, that panders to the stereotypes of what he sees mainstream America expects from a Black novel — a world of “deadbeat dads, rappers, crack.” He writes it under a pseudonym — Stagg R. Leigh, a play on the name Stagger Lee, a century-old folk song about a Black pimp in St. Louis who was murdered — and it becomes a best-seller.

In one sense, the movie is a retelling of the Faustian bargain: desperate artist cuts a deal with the devil to achieve fame and fortune.

At a deeper level, though, the movie also asks questions about the role of the artist in the world.

A recent Washington Post piece — a transcript of an email conversation about the movie among the Post‘s three Black columnists — offers some insightspondering.

Columnist Perry Bacon begins the conversation by asking, “What does it mean to do public work (art, film, music, book writing, journalism) as a Black person in ‘woke America’? That’s a question I think about a lot. ‘American Fiction’ is very explicitly about that question.”

He continues:

America is also capitalist, of course. So art, music, journalism, etc., must usually connect with (or at least appease) the market and White managers/bosses. When Monk, the main character played by Jeffrey Wright in “American Fiction,” says something along the lines of, “My book is a Black book because I’m Black and I wrote it,” he’s getting at a really important issue. I would like to live in a world where Black people decide what counts as a Black book. I think most White power brokers would say they agree.

But in reality, if you want your book/article/play/movie to be heavily promoted by your company (usually run by White people), it will need to fit their definition of what counts as a Black book and one they want to promote. (Your company might agree, for example, that a documentary about reparations is a Black product and also feel it is too radical for them to promote heavily.)

Perry Bacon, “Fact or ‘American Fiction’? 3 columnists on the best picture nominee.” (Washington Post, March 8, 2024)

I would like to live in a world where Black people decide what counts as a Black book.

Here, Bacon hits on the artist’s dilemma. And it extends to every artist, regardless of race, gender, sexual identity, and more.

Wouldn’t every writer — every artist — like to live in a world where we decide what counts as a book that represents us?

Well, maybe yes. But maybe no.

A part of the broader tapestry

Off and on over the years, I’ve been toying with a piece that may one day become a memoir, or at least an essay, about my experience as a man of Mexican heritage in the United States. The idea is to write about my experience as that of a pocho, as someone who has been so fully assimilated into the dominant Anglo culture as to lose much of my Latinx identity. Just about everything in my life besides my surname is so fully Anglocized that it is indistinguishable from the crowd here in middle America. (There’s also an old novel called Pocho by Jose Antonio Villarreal that discusses this tension as the author experienced in in Depression-era California.)

My story would not necessarily reflect the experiences of many Mexican-Americans in the U.S. today. Certainly not the stereotype. I’m a second-generation Mexican-American, yes, but also a Midwesterner who has lived in New England. I don’t speak Spanish, although I studied Spanish my senior year of high school to meet the foreign language requirement. (In college, I took 13 hours of French, which I preferred to Spanish.) Spanish wasn’t spoken in the home. My skin is lighter than many people of Mexican heritage. And so on.

Should my experience or my story to decide what counts as the Mexican-American experience, or even the pocho experience? I certainly would like for my perspective to be a part of that experience, but it is not a representative story. I’m not the quintessential Chicano.

And yet, my experience and the idea of this diluted identity is very much a part of the Mexican-American experience in the U.S. It may not be the dominant story of the experience, but is part of a broader tapestry of experiences that may be woven together to provide a greater meaning to this aspect of American life.

To fully see and appreciate this tapestry, however, would require a lot of reading.

Access and exposure

And speaking of reading: How well do the powers that be provide the reading public with access and exposure to the voices of the authors who have significant perspectives to share of their experience? How much do authors have to betray their authentic selves to gain the attention of the gatekeepers — first the publishers, then eventually the academic administrators who decide what books go into reading curricula? How much of a Faustian bargain must any artist strike?

Conversely — and this is also a question “American Fiction” poses — what role do the gatekeepers of publishing play in ensuring marginalized voices get heard, and at what cost? Many literary journals and publishing houses large and small encourage submissions from authors from underrepresented groups, which I appreciate. But I also wonder if these well-intentioned gatekeepers, like those depicted in “American Fiction,” are bending too far backward to accommodate these voices they perceive as diverse.

Karen Attiah, one of the three Black Washington Post columnists who weighed in on “American Fiction,” homes in on this point.

“This movie is about the absurdities of White ‘woke liberals,’ for whom the language of inclusion and allyship masks patronizing behavior, stereotyping, etc., which maintains White power over the types of Blackness that get platformed,” she writes.

My so-called liberal arts education

Pondering all of this, I can only reflect on my own experience, once again.

I think of my own college experience of the early 1980s. As a journalism student, I read a lot in my humanities courses, especially in the requisite history and English courses that form the bedrock of a liberal arts or humanist education. But how much was I exposed to diverse perspectives in my readings?

By my own accounting, not much.

In one American lit course — I think it was called “the American Novel” — only two of the 11 books assigned to us were written by Black authors: Ralph Ellison’s Invisible Man and Zora Neale Hurston’s Their Eyes Were Watching God. Both books are phenomenal explorations of Black identity, and I would highly recommend them to anyone. But how well do they reflect the Black experience? (I realize the difficulty faculty must face in determining what should be read in a survey course. If I had to choose only two books by Black writers, one written by a man and one by a woman, I’d be hard-pressed to select different novels.)

Two other elective courses exposed me to more Black writers. One was focused on African American literature, and through that course I learned of the great writers of the Harlem Renaissance. But the focus was primarily on poetry, and we didn’t read anything by Richard Wright or James Baldwin.

Another class, “America in the Sixties,” introduced me to Eldridge Cleaver’s provocative Soul on Ice. Again, a tremendous, eye-opening read. But we did not read Martin Luther King Jr.’s “Letter from a Birmingham Jail” or anything by Malcolm X.

It’s easy to Monday-morning quarterback all of this today, the Monday after the Oscars. But it’s also worth noting that, had I not taken either of these elective courses, I — a journalism major required to take a lot of liberal arts and humanities courses — may never have been exposed to these works of literature, and consequently, my understanding of the Black experience in the U.S. may have been diminished.

Further, I never was assigned any reading by a Latinx or Chicano author, a Native American author, or a gay or lesbian or queer or trans author.

If we narrow the aperture of our storytelling to the stories of just a few types of storytellers, we may fall into the trap of what Nigerian-born writer Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie calls the danger of a single story. As she recounts:

When I began to write, at about the age of seven, stories in pencil with crayon illustrations that my poor mother was obligated to read, I wrote exactly the kinds of stories I was reading: All my characters were white and blue-eyed, they played in the snow, they ate apples, and they talked a lot about the weather, how lovely it was that the sun had come out.

Now, this despite the fact that I lived in Nigeria. I had never been outside Nigeria. We didn’t have snow, we ate mangoes, and we never talked about the weather, because there was no need to.

Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie, The Danger of a Single Story”

My undergraduate education occurred in the late 1970s and early 1980s, a few years before the battles began in academia to broaden university “great works” reading lists beyond the “dead, white European males” to include more writers of color, more LGBTQ+ writers, more women, more indigenous, Native American, and Latinx writers. It was also before the ensuing backlash to these efforts by the likes of Harold Bloom and others, an attack on curricula that continues today. So maybe that’s the reason, or at least a convenient excuse. But the fact that a major movie like “American Fiction” raises these questions today tells me that they are worth pondering, perhaps more now than 40 years ago.

I admit that I am no more knowledgeable about nor qualified to discuss what books are read in university English and history courses today than I am about the details of “American Fiction.” So I have no idea how much the required reading of an average college student exposes them to the works of diverse writers.

But the idea of who owns the stories, or who keeps the gates open or closed to broad access, is a question that will continue to nag at me, even as I write not for money, but for the love of it. (I realize that I am privileged to do so.)

As for myself and my own writing, I will continue to give voice to my true self, as best I can articulate it. To quote a famous dead, white European who was probably male (William Shakespeare): “To thine own self be true.”