Lately, I’ve been searching blogs and literary magazines for discussions of street literature (or hip hop or ghetto or urban literature, whatever you want to call it) and coming up short. There are no real literary conversations being published in reputable magazines that I was able to find and only a handful of relevant blogs, all of which blast the literature in favor of more aesthetic writing by and about African Americans. And I get that. I’m for that. Anybody who walks into a bookstore and isn’t disheartened immediately by the type of literature taking up most of the space on the shelves in the African American section of bookstores should be ashamed of him/herself. But…we should also be encouraged and excited by the opportunity to create a new conversation around black literature.
The culture of African American literature being so rich in so many areas there is no one single definition of what it means to be or to write black in America; so, by default there can be no one single definition of what is black literature, except to say that in general the term applies to literature written by black people about black people and their peculiar experiences. Even that definition is broad and debatable. Looking at the canon reveals an eclectic mix of writers, formally educated and not, slaves to Ph.D-educated scholars. All of them wrote eloquently about the black experience, arguing for and asserting the humanity of black people in general and black men specifically. Much of the writing is homogenous in that respect.
The problem writers and critics are having with street literature seems to be in the motive. In an interview by Taylor Nix, for urbanbooksource.com, noted author Nick Chiles argues that the writers are not writing for the sake and beauty of the written word; instead, they are writing as a means to an end, for the same reason it seems anybody in the hip hop industry does anything, money, cheddar, lettuce, whatever they’re calling it these days. No argument there either. But the fact remains that capitalism rules the roost here in the good old U.S. of A. It isn’t going anywhere, which means that as long as street lit is selling, publishers are going to sell it. The question is not why are publishing houses selling the literature. In my estimation they are doing what any good company driven by profit margins does, making a profit. However, they can’t make a profit unless someone is buying the product. We shouldn’t be mad at the writers or the publishers. We should be concerned about the consumer. They are the ones making the literature profitable for the writers and publishers. Whatever those stories are selling, young people are buying by the busload. Rather than demonize the literature and chalk it up to one more thing hip hop has tainted, we should be trying to figure out what it’s saying to our young people that nobody else seems to be saying.
Most critical discussion on the hip hop culture either ignores the street literature, misrepresents it or demeans it. Rarely, if ever, does the discussion lean toward what it is and how we are going to deal with its presence in our actual and literary community. However, most of black academia have no desire to discuss it, let alone attack it. Its rude presentation, poor editing and underdeveloped plot lines leave it open for attack as reputable literature worthy of the academy’s attention. The writers themselves exist in the margins of an already marginalized society. Cora Daniels mentions street literature and its writers briefly in her study of hip hop culture, "Ghetto Nation" but her attitude clearly suggests that she would rather not have to deal with it or its writers at all. The basis of her disdain seems to rest in the “ghetto” nature of their public behavior and the street level quality of their narratives. Daniels and Chiles,while not the only dissenters in the crowd, exemplify the elitist attitude rampant in the literary circles regarding this literature and its writers. The attitude in black academia in particular is that if we ignore it it will just go away. So far, that hasn’t been the case. To hear librarians and bookstore managers tell it, this stuff is more popular than ever and getting more popular by the moment.
Recently, I pulled up my suburban Cleveland library’s internet home page to find a large, multi color announcement that the library had purchased a great deal of new urban literature. The announcement was rather apologetic that titles had been hard to find and that the library staff hoped that this new influx of titles would make things easier for people looking for such titles. The included authors were the likes of Nikki Turner, Vickie Stringer and Omar Tyree. In researching this article I went to our city’s main library where in the catalog they listed a myriad of street lit titles. I thought I had gone to heaven in terms of my research bounty. However, not a single one of the titles I needed was on the shelf. The librarian confessed with a wan smile and a nearly invisible shrug that they can’t keep the books on the shelves. I had this same experience in urban and suburban libraries all over Cleveland.
Whatever our response to it, we cannot deny that the phenomenon of hip hop or street lit is taking over the imagination of young African American readers and while it is not the kind of literature we would like to encourage our children to read, it is what they are choosing for themselves. One argument suggests that we are lowering our standards by being “happy” that at least our young people are reading, that what they read is as important as the act itself. And I agree. But that argument has an inverse hypothesis with which I also agree, that by looking at what our young people are choosing for themselves we can get an insider’s view of how they interpret their world. As rap music is making moguls out of men who might otherwise be selling drugs or joining gangs it is important to know what world view they bring to a table they have heretofore been denied access. The books in the library are often dog-eared and tattered from overuse if they even come back once they’ve been checked out. Their popularity is undeniable. The question is why? And the answer is simple. This literature speaks to an experience and from the looks of its popularity it speaks to a very popular experience. Most of the people reading black street lit are black people. In an informal and random “poll” I stood inside the African American literature section of my local bookstore and asked different women why they read the literature (the readers I met were overwhelmingly female). I even had my 19 year old daughter poll her friends around the country. The response was universal, paraphrased here for easier digestion, they said, “ It’s like reading about people I know.” There are a lot of women who, good or bad, right or wrong, see themselves and their friends in these texts. What are we doing about that?
The argument about what literature is suppose to do has waged throughout history. In black academic circles it has been taken up by such theorists as DuBois and Hughes and Wright and Baldwin and many others. Black literature has always had the lugubrious task of speaking for the people, whether or not that was the author’s intent. It chronicles the struggle, records the history and defines the people. In the black literary canon there is no room for art for art’s sake. It must be revolutionary because it will always be read as revolutionary.
Historically, the revolution and the canon have been in sync. This synchronicity has occurred primarily because the revolution is comprised of the counter culture (black culture) vs. mainstream culture (European). Black literature fought its way to acceptance by the mainstream thereby validating the peculiar institutions and experience associated with blackness in America. As the canon was forming, the black literati and the black community were a single entity fighting a common enemy. That no longer seems to be the case.
Black critics of black literature, relatively speaking, are a new phenomenon. The first real black critical expression didn’t occur until the early part of the twentieth century, literally a century after the first black writing appeared. Those critics had the hearty task of reaching back and thinking on everything that had been written and viewed through the dominant Eurocentric perspective and re-viewing it with a black consciousness, the consciousness with which it had been written. All literature was useful and relevant because all of it was necessary to create a complete pastiche of experiences that make up black life in America.
DuBois and his colleagues as the original gatekeepers of the African American literary canon had the daunting task of slaying the great white dragon which was keeping the gates of the American literary canon closed to us and our experiences. Someone needed to acknowledge the black experience. Someone needed to decode the messages hidden in plain sight in the writings of our ancestors. We were in the middle of shaping a culture which had to fight tooth and nail for what in other cultures was the obvious. The stereotypes and public perceptions of black people and their intelligence were such that anything that evolved into a public conversation needed to be guarded carefully as everything was used to define the whole. We have all been the victim of that experience. So yeah, the gatekeepers were justifiably concerned about what we let pass for literature. We were still fighting for legitimacy and that legitimacy would be measured against the standard which had been created in part to foil black America’s attempts to assimilate. The black literary canon at that time was all about proving that the standard was achievable.
It is fair to say that all the literature by black people which made its way into the hands of black people had been given a certified stamp of approval, even in periphery ways. It was literature because the critics took time with it and shaped it so that it was understood as black literature even in the face of mainstream opposition.
That is not to say that we should begin classifying this literature among the greats. It is not. But it has captured the attention of our youth and it has an literary ancestral history which can help us open the door to the kind of literature that will enhance their understanding of themselves. It is simply to say that the investigation process is hampered by academic opinion. Black academics don’t want to deal with the fact that street lit is outselling their strongly edited, well written canonical fiction because it says something unseemly about the direction of black progress. It undermines the struggle. It exposes our readership and therefore our community as “common”. We feel threatened. After all, as a literate community we have worked very hard to establish our right to be taken seriously in the greater literate community.
The gatekeepers now are those who compile anthologies and who teach African American literature and African American studies, courses that validate our arrival on the American literary landscape and announce our value as a culture to the world. It is understandable, then, why street lit is so problematic. While many of them are focusing on hip hop as a viable discussion of the evolution of African American culture, just as many are locking arms at the gates.
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