The Method, Madness, and Marketing of Street Lit [Response Essay]
by Latoya Peterson
The best article I have read to date on street lit was published last month in Elle Magazine.
Author Bliss Broyard – who explored her family’s complicated racial past in her book One Drop – presents the story of Miasha, a force in her own right and the subject of envy by other street lit authors.
Miasha, a 28-year old novelist, is walking through the Los Angeles Convention Center, home to the 2008 BookExpo America, an annual publishing conference. Sporting large diamond hoop earrings, sequined Manolos, and a short, lime green dress with a keyhole neckline that reveals impressive cleavage for her tiny frame, Miasha, an African-American novelist who is one of the biggest names in urban fiction, looks as if she wandered by mistake into the crowd of predominantly middle aged white women clad in comfortable flats and faded lipstick. [...]
Although Miasha has sold a respectable 200,000 books, she flies herself to the BookExpo and all the other literary and African-American festivals she attends. She prints (and pays for) T-shirts and tote bags she gives away. She maintains her website, produces a webcast featuring scenes from her life, and has begun staging “street plays” of her novels – all on her own dime. She foots the bill for lavish red-carpet release parties – complete with naked-models-in-body-paint re-creations of her book jackets – which sparked a trend among her urban fiction compatriots. “People in the game always commend me for that,” she says.
Boyard’s article fascinated me for a number of reasons. In addition the Miasha’s story, which is engaging in its own right, Broyard also adds her own history to the mix, draws a comparison to the work of Miasha and Kara Walker and sheds a light on the struggles of black authors working within the publishing industry.
Street Lit, Itself
Called hip-hop lit, street lit, and ghetto fiction, as well as the more decorous urban fiction, sex-drenched tales of crime, drugs, and glamour like Miasha’s crowd the shelves of bookstores and the tables of street vendors. Written in expletive-laced, colloquial style, the opening sentences of Miasha’s first novel, which launched her career in 2004 with a bidding war between three New York publishers, are fairly typical: “You know what, bitch? You fucked with the wrong one!I’m gonna kill you right in front of ya little boyfriend and then I’m gonna kill him!…Pop! Pop!” What follows is a suspenseful saga of two transvestites who use men to keep themselves in Marc Jacobs handbags, Dior minidresses, and Range Rovers.
Miasha is one of the many authors riding the boom of street lit, a topic we’ve tackled once before, in reference to young adult literature. In my last post, I wondered why so many of the young girls I knew were bypassing the YA section of the book store or library and heading straight to the adult oriented titles. Since then, I’ve wondered what the draw is for street lit. Who composes the market, and why?
It isn’t too difficult to find street lit on the shelves – it tends to crowd out everything else, it’s racy titles and provocative covers serving as a beacon to the genre’s fans. And the beacon is working – street lit stacks big numbers. As Broyard writes:
Sessalee Hensley, a fiction buyer for Barnes & Noble who’s often called the most powerful woman in publishing, says that urban lit now dominates the African-American scene: “We have 25 or so new urban titles a month, versus about one of the literary titles.” With titles like Bitch Reloaded and Sistah for Sale (one of Miasha’s) and covers of scantily clad women and flashy cars, these books stand out in stores even beyond their disproportionate numbers – to the dismay of some customers, Hensley admits, citing the heartfelt letters the chain has received pleading, “Why are you putting these books out?”
The answer is simple: Urban fiction sells. While Barnes & Noble tries to assuage offended patrons by erecting as many marquee end-of-aisle displays for mainstream and literary African-American titles as their urban counterparts, the book giant isn’t about to refuse to sell them. According to Hensley, in roughly 125 of the more than 700 Barnes & Nobles around the country, urban fiction not only outsells classics by black authors such as Richard Wright, Ralph Ellison, Zora Neale Hurston, Toni Morrison, and Alice Walker, but also popular genre fiction like The Da Vinci Code. As for the owners of independent black bookstores, many say that, like it or not, they stock urban fiction to keep the lights on.
It sells, it sells, it sells. How often do we hear this as a rationale for creating and producing stereotypical fare, especially what is racist and sexist. But the question still remains: why does this sell, and why does it outsell so many other genres?
Perhaps part of the answer lies with the authors of urban literature. Blessed with a hustler’s mentality, many of the authors become personalities along with their books, selling themselves along with their work. Broyard presents one of Miasha’s publicity moves, where the savvy writer made a deal with a snow cone vendor, then offered a free cone to anyone who showed her book. Author Relentless Aaron because the subject of his own lore, hustling books on 125th Street in Harlem both before and after his six figure book deal with St. Martin’s Press, and eventually receiving a write up of his life and work in the New York Times.
To their readers, the authors also feel familiar to their readers, many promoting their background and life story as a form of credibility while simultaneously presenting themselves as ambitious entrepreneurs out for their version of the American Dream. Broyard explains that in Miasha’s world, the art of the hustle is golden.
[T]he lessons that taught her to “do what you have to do to get by” are now helping her to get ahead. Just as a rap album contract used to be the golden ticket out of Compton (or Queens), writing has become the creative soul’s unlikely conduit to fame and fortune. “I’m trying to be a household name,” Miasha says, “a substantial person in the entertainment industry, a Tyler Perry or Will and Jada.” With six titles out in just over three years; book contracts totaling $400,000; photo ops with Jamie Foxx, Kanye West, and Jay-Z; and media coverage by the CBS Early Morning Show, the CW Network, syndicated radio powerhouse Wendy Williams (the Oprah of urban fiction), Essence and Black Entertainment Television, her once improbable dream is seeming ever more probable.
More important than stage persona, street lit authors like Miasha also make their work accessible to potential readers. Relentless Aaron peddles his wares on buses headed to prisons and open air markets. Miasha goes to beauty shops and hosts stage plays all in the hopes of drawing more readers. When I had originally started looking into the street lit boom, I wondered who was actually purchasing these books. A few months passed before I realized that there were many women around me with their own street lit book clubs – I just did not know about them as the genre did not appeal to me. At one office where I worked, four women had a healthy book trade going on, informing each other about new titles and exchanging books with friends.
Recently, I was on a family vacation and noticed some street lit underneath the passenger seat. Knowing my father was reading a David Baldacci thriller and my younger sister was busy sneaking my copy of Certain Girls out of my bag, I figured it had to belong to my dad’s girlfriend, Candy.
I showed Candy Broyard’s article and started asking her about the books she read. She informed me that many purveyors of street lit stopped by the salons or open-air markets that she visited, which made the books easily accessible. She also pointed out how much money I spent on books during the trip (I had run out of reading material and spent $50 at the bookstore on a hardback and a few paperbacks) and told me that I could have gotten more books for that price if I had purchased the cheaper paperbacks. She finished by explaining that many books were difficult for her to get into, but urban lit had an easy to follow plot and was juicy enough to share with your friends or coworkers.
Based on the very limited research I conducted, I would posit that street lit is popular because it tapped into an overlooked market – a person that would not necessarily describe themselves as “a reader” but still likes to be entertained.
The Perils of Publishing While Black
However, the gap between the sales of traditional literature and street lit is not solely due to market forces. There is a healthy bias in publishing that holds some very strange idea about what type of people read books:
“For years, publishers said that black people didn’t read,” says Calvin Reid, who oversees African-American coverage for Publishers Weekly. That changed in 1992, when three black women – Alice Walker, Toni Morrison, and Terry McMillan – landed on the Times best-seller list. Publishing houses scrambled to sign up African-American authors, and some added specialty imprints for black audiences. But it wasn’t until 1999, when The Coldest Winter Ever, the story of a drug kingpin’s daughter written by Sister Souljah, racked up big numbers that people fully realized the commerical potential in tales from the street relayed in raw, unmediated language. (Ex-cons Iceberg Slim and Donald Goines garnered attention in the 1970s with “true life” novels, but the movement didn’t spread much beyond them.) At the same time, amateur black authors began putting out books themselves – often after being rejected by conventional publishers – and managed to sell far more copies that so-called legit writers.
A white editor for a New York publisher recalls meeting 10 years ago in which a black editorial assistant enthused about a manuscript by ” ‘this new African-American erotica writer, Zane’… Eleven befuddled white faces stared back at her,” the editor says. When Zane couldn’t find a publisher, she released her first three novels on her own, selling more than 200,000 copies through a viral marketing campaign. (Eventually Simon & Schuster snapped her up and even gave her an imprint to oversee.) According to 2008 figures from BookScan, the book division of Nielsen ratings, Zane has since sold 2-million-plus copies of her own works, not including sales online, in beauty salons, by street vendors, and at smaller black bookstores.
Readers like to read. This isn’t a secret. But book promotion remains a murky thing. As many books as I read each year, I only follow the careers of a handful of authors. And even still, I’m not always sure when my favorite authors release a book that I may want to read. I’ve casually followed Farai Chideya’s career since she dropped Don’t Believe the Hype, but didn’t find out about Kiss the Sky – her fiction effort featuring a black rocker – until I caught a reference to it on Twitter. Erica Simone Turnipseed blew me away with A Love Noire, but her moody 9-11 based follow up Hunger was a mystery to me until 2008, two years after its release. Benilde Little writes wonderful characters, but I rarely see more than one copy of any of her works lining the shelves. Now this isn’t a problem that is solely the issue with writers of color – one of my favorite genre authors released the next installment in her Hollows series and somehow, I missed that too.
Missing my favorite books has made me realize how reliant readers are on information being provided to them. Normally, I stroll through a bookstore at least once a week, looking for my favorite authors on the shelf displays and hit the new books section at the library about once a month. Still, I miss things, particularly if one of my favorite authors is not necessarily popular. How do readers find new books? How much do we rely on reviews? On email blasts and blogs? On national bookclubs like Essence’s and Oprah’s? And how much of a book’s success is based on word of mouth? Marketing a book is tough for any publisher, but Broyard’s piece also touches on the unique concerns to black authors naviagting within a system geared toward white audiences:
Even when they mastered the nuances of African-American media, publishers still had to contend with the consequences of pigeonholing their authors. If you put a person of color on the cover, will white readers still pick up the book? How do you avoid treating black authors like a monolith? To what degree is sharing the cultural or ethnic background of characters in a book essential to the ability to enjoy it? Some people read with an eye toward having their suspicions about the world reaffirmed, while others read to discover what they don’t know. How does a marketing plan take all this into consideration?
How does a marketing plan cover all the nuances of a reader? And could a plan such of this ever realistically capture the reality of who is reading a book? If the publishing industry created a model consumer for all of the genres I like to read, I highly doubt I would be in any of their compilations. Like so many of the other industries I love, according to those who are making the decisions and those who are conducting “market research”* I do not exist. I’m too old to read manga (as the target demo is somewhere between the ages of 12 and 17), too girly to play video games, and too black to read fantasy. The end result is frustration. It’s hard enough to find books I like, let alone ones I need to hunt down.
Which leads me to another one Broyard’s observations in the piece. In addition to just finding books to read, how much does the quality of a book count?
But while it may take Miasha a few months to write a book, many literary authors labor over a novel for years. The temperament required to create serious, ambitious work – introverted, contemplative, and high-minded – can be hard to reconcile with the chutzpah required to hawk your wares on the corner. When I remark to Barnes & Nobles’ Hensley that no on expects Jonathan Franzen or Jhumpa Lahiri to take to the streets, she laughs ruefully. “It’s very true and very telling – and awful.” I can’t imagine anyone asking a white writer to do the same thing.
This is a major point. Street lit turns over books far faster than the industry average – Relentless Aaron even hosted a one day book writing challenge where he attempted to write a book from start to finish working from afternoon to midnight. Contrast that feat to National Novel Writing Month, which allots writers 30 days to pen a 175 page novel. The organizers of NaNoWriMo are clear with their aims:
Because of the limited writing window, the ONLY thing that matters in NaNoWriMo is output. It’s all about quantity, not quality. The kamikaze approach forces you to lower your expectations, take risks, and write on the fly.
Make no mistake: You will be writing a lot of crap. And that’s a good thing. By forcing yourself to write so intensely, you are giving yourself permission to make mistakes. To forgo the endless tweaking and editing and just create. To build without tearing down.
However, favoring output over quality has become a hallmark of the urban literature genre. After reading about two dozen books from multiple authors, one of the things that stands out in my mind is the lack of editing. (Imagine that – a blogger complaining about the lack of editing. But this blogger does not have a book deal…)
Sometimes, this is because the book is self-published. Other times, a book will have spelling or grammatical errors (in the text, not while characters are speaking) even if it was published through a major house. One would get the impression that street lit authors and publishers don’t care about quality writing. And for many in the black literati, this is not acceptable. Broyard notes:
Some of the more fervent criticism of the genre comes from black literary writers (few of whom, it should be noted, ever receive the financial reward or media coverage Miasha has). In a New York Times editorial called “Their Eyes Were Reading Smut,” lit author Nick Chiles recalls encountering row after row of urban fiction at a Borders: “I felt as if I was walking into a pornography shop, except in this case the smut is being produced by and for my people and it is called ‘literature’.” Later, in a letter leaked on the Internet, best selling author Terry McMillan excoriated publishers of urban fiction for their “exploitative, destructive, racist, egregious, sexist, base, tacky, poorly written, unedited, degrading books.”
Broyard turns her eye to Miasha’s books and comes to a similar conclusion:
Miasha’s books are engrossing – I read one straight through sitting in a borders – and she has a talent for creating surprising plot twists and sympathetic characters, but after a prolonged ride through her fictional world I felt deadened, like I’d stayed up all night watching a Cops marathon on TV. A street-honed justice normally prevails in the end, but all the designer-brand obsession and sex and drug-slinging adds up to a stereotypical vision of the black urban experience – and left me feeling like I was colluding with it. Her books are competently written, but there is no beauty of language lurking behind the dark subject matter, no sense of redemption, no contextualization to illuminate the social roots of all the ugliness. It’s almost as if the craft of sentence writing associated with “literary fiction” is at odds with the quest to “keep it real.”
My own opinion is that, once again, street lit is written for entertainment, nothing else. But I think the discussions of keeping it real are a bit misplaced. While older genre standards like Omar Tyree’s Flyy Girl are notable for their unflinching view of their characters lives, a lot more of the recent offering seem to present an over-the-top version of reality. Broyard provides insight into this as well:
Novelist and African literature professor Eisa Nefertari Ulen occasionally works with Brooklyn middle school kids, many of whom live in the projects. While the students gush over street lit for “keeping it real,” when she asks if they know people like those in the books, they draw a blank. And so does she, despite having a cousin on crack herself. “[Urban fiction] is a glamorization of black pathology,” Ulen says, “and we begin to accept it as our truth.”
Is street lit conveying the truth? Perhaps. But it is also a very limited view of what it means to be black.
Christopher Jackson, an executive editor for the Random House imprint Spiegel & Grau, had the kind of childhood that might provide fodder for urban lit – his father died when he was five and he was raised by his mother, then grandmother in a Harlem project but what he remembers about visiting the African American section of bookstores was finding one phenomenal book after another – James Baldwin, Ralph Ellison, Richard Wright. “I’d think to myself, Man, the black writers are putting it down!” The he adds, a little wistfully: “I suppose if I was a kid today, I would come out with a handful of urban books.”
One of the larger themes emerging around the street lit debates relate to how street lit is changing the landscape of black literature – both visually (translating to shelf space and dominance) and in terms of influences. What is happening to the readers of street lit? And what is happening to black writers?
Broyard inserts herself into the narrative, discussing the issues of representation, which sparked quite a few conflicting emotions for this reader.
I didn’t appreciate the dilemma until the publication of my memoir One Drop: My Father’s Hidden Life – A Story of Race and Family Secrets. The book recounts how, after growing up white and privileged, I learned from my father on his deathbed that he was black (according to our country’s custom of defining a person with just one black ancestor – one drop – as black. One Drop found readers from many backgrounds, fortunately, so when I learned that the paperback’s release was being delayed to coincide with Black History Month, I told my publisher I was worried: Booksellers might regulate it to “black sections” where whites would likely overlook it. And honestly, I was embarrassed by the idea of One Drop rubbing bindings with titles like Freak in the Sheets. (The date was changed).
Hmm.
While I read this article, which was extremely well-done, I kept having one nagging thought at the back of my mind. Would Miasha’s story have made Elle magazine if a black author had pushed the story? Or was it due to Broyard’s access that this story was being heard? Her comments here are truthful – and I applaud that.
But as a black writer, it makes me a bit uneasy. I was glad she brought up the issue of whites overlooking the black section at bookstores – this is something many black authors have discussed, finding their work, regardless of subject matter, relegated to a section due to their race. And I am also pleased that she was so open about the embarrassment a traditional author would feel having their work next to street lit.
And yet.
The fact that she was able to alter the fate of her novel, to intervene and voice her objections and have her publisher take her seriously is an amazing thing.
I wonder if a black author, with the same kind of story, would be able to do the same.
Is it Art, Entertainment, or Something Else Entirely?
When I ask if the industry has a responsibility to prevent a proliferation of negative black stereotypes, [Reid, from Publishers Weekly] waves me off: “I don’t think you can build a business plan based on saving the most stupid people from themselves.”
Reid’s comments exemplify the attitude that many hold about any form of entertainment that is popular, yet promotes stereotypical behavior. But Broyard sees things a bit differently. One of the more interesting comparisons Broyard draws in her piece draws a line between Miasha’s work and the work of Kara Walker.
Across the street from the restaurant is the Hammer Museum, where a retrospective of African-American artist Kara Walker is showing. Walker’s highly sexualized silhouettes of antebellum-era pickaninnies, mammies, and masters have made her famous, while also provoking a firestorm of criticism among some of her art world elders. They accuse Walker of serving up despicable stereotypes for the viewing pleasure of white people, which echoes the scorn McMillan heaps on urban novels. “Old white men buy them to jerk off to in the bathroom,” she told me in an interview.
Detractors notwithstanding, the subtext of Walker’s work suggests that she is consciously using her incendiary messages to examine the still toxic influence of race on American culture. Miasha, however, isn’t trying to make a meta-point. Her message is literal. She wants to demonstrate the consequences of making bad choices, she says. “I know so many people who have this mentality of hustling me,” she says, shaking her head.
While Kara Walker and Miasha are working in different mediums and different industries, some of the questions surrounding their work is the same. The largest one looms in progressive spaces: Is their work causing more harm than good? Are they perpetuating rather than challenging stereotypes? And what is the ultimate responsibility of a black artist? Are they more loyal to their work or their politics? Broyard describes the visual impact of Walker’s work on Miasha (who, she notes, has never been to an art museum before their interview). She notes her wonder, and then closes her piece with the following paragraph:
Near the end of the show, as Miasha is wondering why Walker would make these images, we find ourselves before a video in which the artist is explaining herself. She talks about wanting “to freeze frame a moment that is full of pain and blood and guts and drama and glory.” The Walker says, as if speaking directly to Miasha “Its about, How do you make representations of your world, given what you’ve been given?
The larger question surrounding street lit is similar: How do we make representations of our world if our realities don’t fit the generally accepted narrative?
*In a former gig, I worked with a wide range of publishers of market research. What I found is that methods vary from house to house, and the people publishing the reports have very different ideas of what constitutes research. My favorite houses were the ones who dedicated a lot of time to polling and primary research – they normally had the most solid and informative reports. Other houses just kind of accepted any old write up as fact. I once read a report on the urban youth market that cited no polling, interviews, or focus groups, but referenced BET.com and AllHipHop.com forums as the only sources from where they gathered information. I laughed for days.
Carmen Van Kerckhove is co-founder and president of
Big Man wrote:
Yo, this was mad long, but dammit it was good.
I don’t read street lit, kind of like I don’t listen to certain types of rap.
Seems like the book game is the new rap game and everbody is trafficking in the same plots to make cash. That’s life.
(And I’m one of those few black cats who reads fantasy as well. But, dammit, it’s getting harder and harder to find quality.)
Posted 29 Jul 2009 at 11:49 am ¶
Latoya Peterson wrote:
@Big Man –
LOL, I tried to warn y’all by marking it [Essay].
Seems like the book game is the new rap game and everbody is trafficking in the same plots to make cash. That’s life.
Agreed.
What fantasy are you reading, BTW?
Posted 29 Jul 2009 at 11:54 am ¶
morgan wrote:
Great article. I currently live in Harlem and see Street Lit peddled up and down the blocks everyday. While i appreciate the hustle involved in getting one’s work published and successfully inserting oneself into the market, i’d have to whole heartedly agree with Terri McMillan’s take on the genre. I read to expand my mind, to learn, to be entertained in a smart and challenging way. To me, Street lit is just as annoying as bad hip-hop like Soldja Boy and any of the other young men and women who use tired ’street logic’ templates to make work that does not enlighten. Colloquial terms, excessive sex and excessive violence perpetuates the stereotypes already highlighted in some hip-hop acts in a new media. I”m sorry, i just can’t get
In regards to Kara Walker. She is an amazingly talented artist who uses these images to spark conversations about how the grotesque truth of our country’s past must not be forgotten. The use of sex and violence in much of her work draws the viewer in to come to terms with the conflicting mindsets of those living on plantations during the era of slavery. It is used in a poignant and purposeful way. Yes, it is used to spark controversy, but i do not think it is doing so at the expense of current stereotypes.
Posted 29 Jul 2009 at 11:55 am ¶
June wrote:
Nalo Hopkinson writes great sci-fi. So Long Been Dreaming is sci fi and fantasy by writers of colour:
http://nalohopkinson.com/
Posted 29 Jul 2009 at 12:59 pm ¶
9jah wrote:
Latoya – very interesting read. If black people created contemporary cinema, we would whip ourselves into a guilt ridden frenzy over how all the sex and violence reflects internalization of white stereotypes. If we created porn, we would have committed mass suicide. Broyard (and whomever else) needs to get over herself with contextualization etc. Consumers, only, can dictate what holds the greatest value to them and apparently it ain’t contextualization! I don’t see urban black folks engaging in street lit fantasy as any more peculiar, significant or predictive of anything than folks being really into slasher, bomb ‘em up tarantino type films.
Posted 29 Jul 2009 at 2:06 pm ¶
N wrote:
Ooh. My mom and her best friend are librarians and one of my closest friends is one. Mom happens to work with kids and I had the pleasure of getting some free Snoop Dog books from the library, she ordered them then realized they were TOO street for kids. I also get the wonderful job of reading the “ghetto” books for her and voting yay or nay for the kids.
Its stressful, to say the least, when you want people to read and buy books and be literate. You don’t want to discourage reading but come on!! To me it is like saying that a diet of Twinkies and Kool-Aid is ok because at least its food. Really?
I don’t want to read blaxpoitation books. However, just like the Pine Sol Lady and Madea do nothing for me and reflect no reality of mine, but appeal to people I know who see themselves and their loved ones in them; people relate to the books and like simply seeing their world.
I like Terry Pratchett and Douglas Adams and Robert Heinlein. I truly believe Arrakis is a real place and that I may actually be a Bene Gesserit witch. So you kinda know where I’m coming from. But I don’t know how to determine what art is worthwhile and who should be making that determination.
I mean, I think chitlins and mac and cheese and mofongo and fried catfish are harmful, but is it my place to tell people to stop eating it? What about creme brulee and marbled beef and all that stuff?
So I will say, I choose to avoid that stuff like the plague and my personal feelings are that it is crap. But that doesn’t mean it IS crap, and even if it is, a lil crap now and then is ok. Because I certainly indulge in crap of some sort or another, just not certain *ahem* types of crap. Meaning, I don’t want to let class cause me to condemn certain crap while accepting other crap.
I guess I feel like there is room to consume some Ubran Lit, but lets not make a DIET of it.
Posted 29 Jul 2009 at 2:26 pm ¶
Latoya Peterson wrote:
@9jah –
But how much of what is available determines the market? I think I may have to do a follow up to this post, probably around the time when I write more on manga.
For example, I make selections from and purchase the manga I find in stores. But what I’d actually prefer is josei manga, titles that are hard to come by in the US. However, I am still in the market for a quick read, so I make do with what’s available. Is this me making a conscious selection, or me defaulting?
@N -
Hmm. I wouldn’t voluntarily live on Arrakis – sandworms creep me out. And if you’re part of the Bene Gesserit, does that mean you can recite their religious doctrine? It seems quite complicated. I’m still trying to commit the litany on fear to memory.
I think the bigger issue with these types of conversations is that nothing, on it’s own, is that big of a deal. So people read a little street lit – so what? The problem is when street lit comes to stand in for literature in an already stressed and misunderstood market. I think that becomes the issue.
Posted 29 Jul 2009 at 2:34 pm ¶
N wrote:
@Latoya
The litany against fear rules. I haven’t memorized anything other than that,mostly, I’m meddlesome and think I know it all and sometimes I hear my mom and grandmom’s voices in my head.The BG really don’t believe in religion so much as manipulate it for their own good.
Sandworms are ok, but deserts in general suck and a still suit- that’s just NASTY.
I agree that we don’t want subpar writing to be seen as literature. I am all in favor of nonstandard dialects and code switching, for example, my problem is when people speak nonstandard dialects and are unaware of it. So I do worry that people will read pulp fiction, street lit etc and feel they are “well read” because they are unaware of the relative quality, not of content, but of writing -structure and so on, of the books they read.
Posted 29 Jul 2009 at 3:22 pm ¶
Renina wrote:
Kara Walker & Street Lit Latoya? Wow.
What does it say about the our society that our two most popular Black cultural products are symbolized by Waynes, “I want to fuck every girl in the world” and Maisha’s “Secret Society?”
While what is happening in hip hop is happening in street lit, they have different nuances.
Rappers want Black kids respect and white kids cash.
Street lit writers just want Black teens/Ladies cash.
Teen white girls have the Gossip girl genre. In fact in Barnes yesterday I saw a white teen lit book titled, “Hollywood is like High School with Money.” Word?
In popular media there is a prevailing narrative that teen White girls are (a combo of) shallow, money hungry and self centered. What part of the game is that? Gossip Girl. MTV Reality Shows and the dating shows evidence this.
Regarding Black art, one will not become rich Affirming
Black humanity. In fact, the people who dedicated their lives to doing so were killed for it. MLK. Medger Evers. And thousands of other unspoken Beloveds, whose names I don’t know.
The three most material aspects of your piece are:
1. When the young women told Eisa that they didn’t know anyone who lives the lives of the people in the books.
2. One of the larger themes emerging around the street lit debates relate to how street lit is changing the landscape of black literature
3. I would posit that street lit is popular because it tapped into an overlooked market – a person that would not necessarily describe themselves as “a reader” but still likes to be entertained.
I have a thought about these questions.
The largest one looms in progressive spaces:
Is their work causing more harm than good? Are they perpetuating rather than challenging stereotypes? And what is the ultimate responsibility of a black artist?
I would encourage all of us to think about your questions using Gramsci who argues,
“The working class needed to develop a culture of its own, which would overthrow the notion that bourgeois values represented ‘natural’ or ‘normal’ values for society, and would attract the oppressed and intellectual classes to the cause of the proletariat.”
We need our own thinkers and our own writers, because if it is left up to the folks w/ the Dope Boy mentality or to the Mainstream Media, Gender Progressive Black Affirming Art will Not get made.
For the past three weeks, I have been thinking about the roles that Black women play in all of this. The ways in which we, ourselves are complicit in perpetuating these images for a pay check. By virtue of our industry jobs. There arn’t many of us, but there are enough of us that we could form a mighty powerful group. The only reason why I haven’t posted it, is because a friend questioned me and asked how useful would such a piece be if I didn’t offer solutions.
Thinking, thinking, solutions, solutions.
Posted 29 Jul 2009 at 3:44 pm ¶
kenda wrote:
Great post, Latoya. I don’t have a problem with street lit so much as I take issue with the general paucity of books showing the range of the black experience. If Miasha’s books were paired with other works showing black people in different circumstances/of different walks of life, I wouldn’t be bothered at all. Unfortunately, the seemingly singular popularity of this genre only perpetuates the narrow narrative of what black culture is and isn’t.
Posted 29 Jul 2009 at 3:58 pm ¶
Marcus Kwame wrote:
This was a really interesting post. At the risk of sounding like a hater, this fact troubles me: “urban fiction not only outsells classics by black authors such as Richard Wright, Ralph Ellison, Zora Neale Hurston, Toni Morrison, and Alice Walker”
Again, not to be a hater, but what happened to paying dues? These literary greats paved the way and had the heart to beautifully put the Black experience into words. There is art in their words. With an open mind, I bet today’s kids could find much to relate to in “Invisible Man.” Incidentally, a couple years ago when I picked up a new copy of Invisible Man at Borders it was sitting next to 50 cent’s novel on the shelf. I found the juxtaposition interesting.
As someone who works with kids, I find the lack of editing in street lit troubling. It’s one thing if the dialogue is not grammatically correct. I don’t think that even Terry McMillan would argue that. But people need to learn how to write. Black people used to risk beatings and/or death for reading and writing. It’s not a good look for kids to be looking up to writers who don’t take pride in their craft and the art of painting pictures with words. I appreciate the hustle ethic of these authors. I really do, but you can keep it “real” and know how to write at the same time.
I’m truly not trying to hate though. If people dig street lit, that’s great. I’d just like to see the same readers checking out Ellison, Baldwin, Morrison, Walker, Wright, and all the others that came before. Respect the architects.
Posted 29 Jul 2009 at 4:55 pm ¶
NancyP wrote:
OK, let’s talk history. The dominance of book/magazine-specific stores in book-selling is relatively new. Consider Dickens and Trollope – these authors’ novels were written as serials in magazines. The magazines were hawked on the street much as newspapers are today. “Pulp fiction” has had a long history of being sold in a range of outlets. The modern paperback (pre-WWII) was originally designed to be sold in rotating racks placed in drugstores, general stores/ “five and dime” stores, etc. Mass-market paperbacks, particularly “genre” novels, are still displayed in grocery stores. It doesn’t surprise me that the street-lit authors are going where the readers are, rather than expecting them to show up in bookstores.
I assume that these books are pretty much equivalent to novelizations of movies, novels set in the worlds of movie and TV series sci-fi (Star Trek and Star Wars), series romance novels, etc. The reader is looking to kill an afternoon, without mental challenge. A lot of pulp readers do read literary novels as well, and mood and reading environment has a lot to do with choice of reading matter. I am not going to read some “experimental” novel while taking the commuter bus.
Posted 29 Jul 2009 at 7:18 pm ¶
ashlynn wrote:
As a YA black author, as I first entered the literary world, I came upon this very scenario. My work within the context of a largely black publishing entity would most likely not fly It would most likely be successful in the mainstream, but then as I wrote, I would have to tread the subject of race for fear of alienating a large group of potential readers who might not pick it up if race came across too heavily. I spent four long years walking that tightrope. Not pleasant.
My largest gripe with street lit was the grammatical aesthetic, so I’m glad you brought it up. I would read books and have to groan, “HAS NO ONE EVER HEARD OF BETA?! ” Granted, most street lit authors have to do much of the work themselves, and perhaps in the crush of creation and distribution, grammar plays second fiddle. But honestly, finding someone who can sit down and do a good spell check cannot be that impossible. It’s entirely frustrating because many readers, especially youth, will absorb that and accept that grammar is not important…and little do they know, if they aspire to higher learning, they are facing an awful wake up call.
So, speaking of absorbing and accepting. Grammar is not the only problem there. Young people get hooked on this ridiculous notion that living the good life is name brands, status, and good dick. That hustling will take you far. Even when the story doesn’t end happily, the draw of the spoils that the book spends most of the time describing is still ingrained within the reader’s mindset. Why is there this dichotomy in black literature where you can either be a Zora Neale or a Nikki Turner? Why must you make this choice between being the elite or the street?
Posted 29 Jul 2009 at 8:24 pm ¶
Adrianna wrote:
I get the need for that kind of lit, but we know that mainstream Book publishing company is going to only market the crap out of it . Eventually the market will saturate then crash and burn . Or we are only going to get those book published and on bookshelves .The other black authors that write great literature will have to sell their stuff on the street. The world upside down.
Also @N and Latoya
I recite the Litany against fear to myself ,before living my home and to walk into the wild wild streets of Haiti ( the short version). lol I so wish I was Bene Geseritt ! The Weirding way and the voice would be a great help to deal with sexist jerks.
ViVa La Dune !
Posted 30 Jul 2009 at 5:43 am ¶
Eva wrote:
A few weeks ago I was at the Harlem book fair and there was a lot of street lit there, too much. Though I do respect the hustle of some of these authors, every single book I picked up almost had the same four swear words on the first page.
I don’t want to consider myself a hater but, I’m black, I have an education and a good job, I want to read about people like me.
Posted 30 Jul 2009 at 8:56 am ¶
Lisa wrote:
I read Miasha’s, “Mommy’s Angel,” a year or two ago and I literally dropped the book and collapsed on my bed when I was done. It blew my mind away.
Miasha is one talented bomb of a writer.
Posted 30 Jul 2009 at 9:52 am ¶
Big Man wrote:
Latoya
Well, I just finished Phillip Jose Farmer’s old school Riverworld series. I like Robin Hobb’s stuff a lot. I read pretty anything and have been since I was a kid.
Unfortunately, sci-fi and fantasy often have many of the same problems as street lit. It’s tough to find good characters and stories.
However, I do enjoy Orson Scott Card’s work, and re-read his only book with a black hero, Magic Street, the other day and still thought it was pretty good.
Posted 30 Jul 2009 at 3:08 pm ¶
Urban Sista wrote:
This issue with street lit isn’t street lit — it’s that there are fewer and fewer options for anyone who doesn’t write or read street lit.
Just like rap — a few years ago, you could find a variety of rappers. We had De La Soul, A Tribe Called Quest, Kid ‘n’ Play, LL Cool J, Luke, NWA — you could choose what you wanted to hear and there was room for everyone. Now, we have Lil Wayne and Soulja Boy and his ilk fouling up the airwaves and few other options.
I’m sure that Miasha is a great writer who can tell a good story. There is room for her and others who tell those stories, but the publishing houses and bookstores have to make room for every one else — including, the next great storyteller who may not write street lit.
Posted 30 Jul 2009 at 3:10 pm ¶
N wrote:
OT
Robin Hobb I love, but WHY must all sci-fi and fantasy involve TUNICS? I am weary of the whole Olden Tymes of Europe fantasy universe thing.
The Voice is quite good when one has kids.
I agree that the parameters for acceptable black art have narrowed. If its not street or hood or sassy it aint real. And like I said about the Yak ad, “real” and “street” are ok, though not quite my thing most of the time. But what about some Octavia Butler or even Langston Hughes or SOMETHING. Hell, Semple was SKREET, him and his almost divorce from Joyce and his thang with Zarita of the wild hair and loose ways.
Now, let me also say, I am not a fan of Alice Im ObtuseThereforeIAmDeep Walker. So I DO get why people may not want to read Alice or Toni or even Octavia. If skilled writers have been running the same themes and scenarios into the ground, I can see why people have a hunger for other stories, even at the expense of quality writing.
Posted 30 Jul 2009 at 3:45 pm ¶
9jah wrote:
I agree that availability shapes the market. One thought I had initially is that a vaccum may exist as concerns black lit that is not socio-cultural/political/historical (which emphasize only the racial dimensions of selfhood) and that street lit is simply what else there is. However, I am not incredibly familiar with contemporary black lit and did not feel qualified to make that assessment.
Ultimately my perspective is twofold –
(i) as you surmise, street lit content (grammatical errors aside) serves the purpose of entertainment and the bankability of the genre is itself res ipsa proof of that entertainment value. Street lit is not for me and I respect that, but neither are books on food history. My issue is that bad behavior by black folks is ultimately subsumed to, and interpreted as reflective of, the racial experience of black folks in this country. And i think that is often unhealthy. Sometimes stupid human behavior is just that.
(ii) I read the other posts and I think our frustrations are misplaced on the likes of Miasha, Lil’ Wayne, Soulja. The range of my “black” experience differs, perhaps, from Lil’ waynes. He probably cannot rap in depth about an experience that mirrors mine any more I can about his life. I cannot criticize Miasha because it is very obvious to me who needs to step in the space (and make the necessary sacrifice) to tell MY story. As far as criticism that kids will “absorb [...] and accept that grammar is not important” – since when did we absolve schools of this responsibility and place it in the hands of Miasha?? Like Al Sharpton, she does not get my taxpayer dollars. You know where we all learned to distinguish the bad grammar of street lit from “enlightened reading”? Yeah, school. Our criticisms put the cart before the horse – if the fundamentals of education, poverty etc. are addressed, the influence of the Miashas and Waynes become moot.
Sorry for the rant.
Posted 30 Jul 2009 at 6:25 pm ¶
Joseph wrote:
@LDP
This is really interesting. It reminds me of a New Yorker article I read a little more than ten years ago about the “chitlin citcuit”–a network of black playwrights and venues writing and producing “urban” live dramas, comedies and musicals. At the time Broadway was in trouble but these plays were making A LOT of money and bringing people to the theater that hadn’t ever been, which is huge for an industry that depends largely on an aging subscriber base in order to survive. This phenomenon was treated as an exotic, inexplicable, exception rather than a legitimate trend and instead of revitalizing the mainstream theater they remained on the fringe. Fast forward a decade and Tyler Perry is riding a golf cart to his gold-plated bathroom in Atlanta because he makes work that, for better or worse, speaks to people who feel unrepresented in mainstream culture.
I am not minimizing the legitimate concerns people have raised about Street Lit so far on this thread. I am well aware that the space allotted for Black writers in general is smaller in comparison and the attention paid to writers like Miasha arguably means less for say, Colson Whitehead. But… wouldn’t Whitehead’s audience be more specialized whether Miasha existed or not? The readership for “serious” literature is smaller across the board.
The difference seems to be in the consequences: when white people embrace sexy, violent pop cheese (and there is plenty of it well beyond “Street Lit”) it is considered a fun digression and not a generalization about their entire character…. i.e. When white women read Jackie Collins at the beach or on the bus no one complains that they aren’t reading Madame Bovary.
So I cosign 9jah re: cart before the horse.
Posted 30 Jul 2009 at 9:37 pm ¶
dejamorgana wrote:
I truly think that the majority of readers all across the literary world favor the sensationalistic lowbrow stuff, the books that are screaming for the tender mercy of an editor’s touch, and the cookie-cutter plot.
I have the same feeling of despair every time I walk into the SF&F section of my bookstore: “who the hell reads all this crap, and why are writers pandering to them?” (Full disclosure: I’m a fantasy and horror writer; have sold some stories; no novel sold yet. So there’s a bit of holier-than-thou, some sour grapes, AND a little genuine artistic pride in my reactions, on top of the frustration as a reader because I just can’t find stuff I’m interested enough to shell out money for.)
I mean to say, I love some Charles de Lint-flavored urban fantasy, and I’m finding that Jim Butcher writes a good stick, but did we need fifty bajillion second-rate Queens of the New York Faerie Ffolke to write the exact same stories without the flair or the relevance? And so help me Gods, if I see ONE MORE tattooed midriff-baring vampire killer or half-wereleopard half-elf rogue dragonrider on the cover of a paperback….
Ahem. Anyway, this kind of thing has been going on for decades in SF&F – and yet, we still get a China Mieville or Charles Stross coming along every once in a while to change the whole game and win all the awards.
The same thing goes for all genres, and the giants continue to stand above the shrimps. Mediocre, cheap-thrills material outsells introspective, thematic stuff ten to one. Always has. But somehow, there’s always room for great books to shine.
Aside from all this, SF went through the exact same adolescent stage when it was just starting out as a genre, and those problems persisted through what a lot of people call the Golden Age of science fiction: the majority of the stories were trite, crappily written, xenophobic, sexist, paranoid power fantasies. And those were the good ones! Seriously, re-read Slan and tell me with a straight face that it’s as good as Catch-22 or One Hundred Years of Solitude. I will beat you to death with an inflatable lightsaber.
With all that in mind, I think the same sort of thing is happening with street lit, or urban lit, or whatever you want to call it. Eventually, this genre will produce its own Dunes and Perdido Street Stations, which probably wouldn’t have a market if there hadn’t already been a bunch of Secret Societies and Zane imitators.
Posted 31 Jul 2009 at 6:15 pm ¶
Calvin Reid wrote:
I was quoted in Ms. Broyard’s story. But I’ll repeat what I told her and what a few others have already said above, when white people read outright commercial fiction, gangster stories, mindless romances or shoot-em-ups, nobody writes a thousands of words about the end of western civilization or of whatever group they belong too.
When it comes to Street lit, there are many reasons why people like it. Mostly what I’ve heard is that people either see some reflections of themselves, no matter how far-fetched the story, or a reflection of a fantasy world that they find entertaining.
Why is this so terrible and why does this mean good black writers are being pushed aside? Commercial fiction will always spank quality lit when it comes raw popularity and sales. And the last time I looked most Americans, black or white, love to read gangster stories. Americans love outlaws and extreme individualists.
Personally I believe a love of literature begins with a love and active engagement with reading and that’s something street lit promotes like crazy.
Posted 03 Aug 2009 at 4:26 pm ¶
atlasien wrote:
@dejamorgana: I’m a huge China Mieville fan!
I also wince whenever I browse the SF&F section, because almost all the covers on display seem to feature a crappy tramp stamp on top of a pale, headless butt. What a horrible trend.
I found a Youtube video documenting it.
Posted 03 Aug 2009 at 4:56 pm ¶