Erasure

Content Warning: The source text discusses racism, violence, sexual violence, anti-Black biases, anti-gay biases, and suicide. It also includes racist and sexist slurs that the guide reproduces only in direct quotations.

“I have dark brown skin, curly hair, a broad nose, some of my ancestors were slaves and I have been detained by pasty white policemen in New Hampshire, Arizona and Georgia and so the society in which I live tells me I am black; that is my race. Though I am fairly athletic, I am no good at basketball. I listen to Mahler, Aretha Franklin, Charlie Parker and Ry Cooder on vinyl records and compact discs. I graduated summa cum laude from Harvard, hating every minute of it. […] While in college I was a member of the Black Panther Party, defunct as it was, mainly because I felt I had to prove I was black enough. Some people in the society in which I live, described as being black, tell me I am not black enough. Some people whom the society calls white tell me the same thing. I have heard this mainly about my novels, from editors who have rejected me and reviewers whom I have apparently confused and, on a couple of occasions, on a basketball court when upon missing a shot I muttered Egads.”

Monk introduces himself as the narrator and protagonist of the story, explaining from the start that because of his racial identity, society restricts his artistic freedom as a fiction writer. Through this description of himself, Monk attempts to normalize himself as an African American and challenge the particularities that society imposes on him. The passage indicates that Monk resists conforming to societal expectations that regulate his race and people—both Black and white—resent him for it. Society expects him to constantly perform his racial identity and not his real self.

“Linda had published one volume of predictably strange and stereotypically innovative short fictions (as she liked to call them). She’d fallen into a circle of innovative writers who had survived the sixties by publishing each others’ stories in their periodicals and each others’ books collectively, thus amassing publications, so achieving tenure at their various universities, and establishing a semblance of credibility in the so-called real world. Sadly, these people made up a good portion of the membership of the Nouveau Roman Society. They all hated me. For a couple of reasons: One was that I had published and had moderate success with a realistic novel some years earlier, and two, I made no secret, in print or radio interviews, what I thought of their work.”

Apart from his conflict with the publishing industry, Monk is also at odds with his fellow writers and the literary community. The passage, however, shows that Monk reacts against a postmodern tradition that white authors claim for themselves and further by forming a mutual admiration society rather than through any merit. Monk publicly contests their work, but they also consider him a disturbing presence because of success as a writer and his identity as an African American author.

“It used to be that I would look for the deeper meaning in everything, thinking that I was some kind of hermeneutic sleuth moving through the world, but I stopped that when I was twelve. Though I would have been unable to articulate it then, I have since come to recognize that I was abandoning any search for elucidation of what might be called subjective or thematic meaning schemes and replacing it with a mere delineation of specific case descriptions, from which I, at least, could make inferences, however unconscious, that would allow me to understand the world as it affected me. In other words, I learned to take the world as it came. In other words still, I just didn’t care.”

Monk explains his perspective on the world and society, both as a person and as an artist. He does not scrutinize life in search for meaning and does not make political statements in his writing.