Blackout in the Great White North

I’ve decided to post my paper from last month’s “Race, Ethnicity, and Publishing” conference here on my blog. Unfortunately, I don’t have time this month to expand this essay, though I know it would benefit from input from Canadian publishers. I’m still hopeful that this topic will get the attention it deserves at a conference of its own. For now, this is all I have to offer. (This essay only considers English language novels that were authored by African Canadians and published by Canadian presses.)

“Blackout in the Great White North:

Responding to Racism & Erasure in the Canadian Children’s Publishing Industry”

      

Whenever I speak publicly about the children’s publishing industry, I feel the need to start with a confession. I am an academic but I am also an author; my third book for young readers was published in February, and I only began researching racism in publishing after surviving a decade of rejection as a young writer. In fact, I turned to the academy when I finally accepted the fact that I was not going to sell my first novel for a six-figure advance. My academic training allows me to think critically—if not dispassionately—about race and representation within the field of children’s literature. I know that for some, my critique of the publishing industry will automatically be dismissed as “sour grapes,” and it is true that I likely never would have investigated the players in this game had I succeeded in placing more of my manuscripts. As it is, despite winning a number of awards, about 80% of my work remains unpublished, and I admit that I began studying the industry in order to understand how so many editors could praise my writing and yet refuse to publish my work.

When I discovered that only 3% of children’s book authors published annually in the US were black, I abandoned my naïve assumption that publishing was a matter of merit; thanks to statistics compiled by the Cooperative Children’s Book Center, I now had proof that the problem was institutional and systemic. Whatever the world might think about my so-called “bad attitude,” there was something much bigger and more sinister at play; black writers in North America face much steeper odds than the average white writer. As John K. Young explains in Black Writers, White Publishers: Marketplace Politics in Twentieth-Century African American Literature (2006), “…what sets the white publisher-black author relationship apart is the underlying social structure that transforms the usual unequal relationship into an extension of a much deeper cultural dynamic. The predominantly white publishing industry reflects and often reinforces the racial divide that has always defined American society” (4).

Satisfied that I had discovered the ugly truth about racism in US children’s publishing, I turned my attention to Canada, land of my birth. This paper was supposed to be about the responses to racism & erasure in the Canadian children’s publishing industry, but since I began speaking and writing on the subject two years ago, I haven’t detected much of a response at all. I reached out to academics and librarians in Canada and proposed a symposium on multicultural children’s literature; the idea was taken up by the Children’s Studies Program at York University, but I believe they have since postponed the event indefinitely. And so the “blackout” that I reference in the title of my paper refers both to the relative exclusion of black writers from the Canadian literary scene, but also the disinclination of certain members of the publishing community to publicly acknowledge that a problem exists.

This conference paper actually started out as an article I wrote in the summer of 2011 at the request of Quill & Quire, “the” magazine of the Canadian book trade. When I shared with them my research on African Canadian children’s literature, an editor immediately expressed interest and asked me to write something. I turned in an essay within a week, but months later the editor stopped returning my emails, apparently having a change of heart. In January, a colleague asked for Black History Month submissions for the blog of the Canadian Federation of the Humanities and Social Sciences; I reworked my piece for Quill & Quire but to my surprise, this second editor made a number of changes to my essay, including the title, which went from “Achieving Excellence & Avoiding Annihilation” to “Gatekeepers and Border Crossings: Celebrating Canada’s Talented Black Writers.”

It was not my intention then, nor is it my intention now, to “celebrate” the talent of African Canadian writers; indeed, I worry that well-intentioned boosterism too often takes the place of rigorous critiques of novels by black Canadians, and I have no desire to contribute to that trend. Instead I would like to explore the challenges faced by African Canadian novelists, drawing upon my own perspective as an expatriate writer as well as the experiences of eight black authors whom I interviewed via email. This paper will address the “difficult miracle” of becoming a black author in the Great White North, and will conclude with some suggestions for broadening the path to publication.

Naming the Problem

Last summer, after returning from a cross-border trip to Toronto, a friend of mine asked: “What’s wrong with Canada?” It’s a question she and I have considered over the years as we’ve worked to establish ourselves as black women writers and scholars in New York City. Rosamond S. King is a poet/performance artist/activist/academic. I met her in graduate school at NYU, where she wrote her dissertation on Caribbean immigrant literature, including texts by Dionne Brand and Austin Clarke.

It was both surprising and embarrassing for me to find that many graduate students in the United States knew more about African Canadian literature than I did. I read no black-authored books as a child growing up in Toronto, and in high school was exposed to “classics” written primarily by white American authors (e.g. Catcher in the Rye, A Streetcar Named Desire, The Great Gatsby, To Kill a Mockingbird.). The few black-authored novels I had access to also came from the US, and so in 1994 when I decided to pursue my dream of becoming a writer, I left Canada with barely a backward glance, convinced that my best chance of success was on the other side of the border.

In some ways, it’s reassuring to know that my African American friends also sense something “wrong” when they venture into the Great White North. Most bookstores carry few if any black-authored books, and African Canadians seem satisfied with—or resigned to—having limited literary offerings for themselves and their children. Blacks in the US don’t always realize their relatively privileged position in relation to other members of the African diaspora; compared to Canada, African Americans represent a much larger percentage of a much larger nation, and while many challenges remain, they have a long tradition of highlighting African American talent and resisting racism and social exclusion in publishing and other spheres of life.

When the 2012 Coretta Scott King Book Awards were announced recently, my American community of book bloggers, librarians, and educators bemoaned the fact that the same black children’s book authors and illustrators seem to win the CSKs year after year. My colleagues here in the US have to be reminded that there are countries where not enough books are published annually to even sustain such an award. A prize for the best children’s book written or illustrated by a black artist is a luxury that the Canadian publishing industry cannot afford and to which, I suspect, it does not aspire.

Book awards are meant to celebrate excellence, but can excellence emerge from a small and/or stagnant pool? I call this phenomenon the “big fish, small pond” syndrome, which ensures that a handful of authors are celebrated while emerging talent often is left undiscovered and/or undeveloped. Indian author/activist Arundhati Roy calls this the “new racism,” which she explains using this brilliant analogy:

Every year, the National Turkey Federation presents the US president with a turkey for Thanksgiving. Every year, in a show of ceremonial magnanimity, the president spares that particular bird (and eats another one). After receiving the presidential pardon, the Chosen One is sent to Frying Pan Park in Virginia to live out its natural life. The rest of the 50 million turkeys raised for Thanksgiving are slaughtered and eaten on Thanksgiving Day. ConAgra Foods, the company that has won the Presidential Turkey contract, says it trains the lucky birds to be sociable, to interact with dignitaries, school children and the press.

That’s how new racism in the corporate era works. A few carefully bred turkeys – the local elites of various countries, a community of wealthy immigrants, investment bankers, the occasional Colin Powell, or Condoleezza Rice, some singers, some writers (like myself) –  are given absolution and a pass to Frying Pan Park.

The remaining millions lose their jobs, are evicted from their homes, have their water and electricity connections cut, and die of AIDS. Basically, they’re for the pot. But the fortunate fowls in Frying Pan Park are doing fine.

If the Canadian publishing industry only opens the gate for two or three black novelists each year, what happens to all the other talented and aspiring writers? According to my research, thirty-one novels written by twenty African Canadian authors have been published in Canada since the start of the twenty-first century – and only four of the twenty were by first-time authors. A rather astonishing percentage of those novels have won or been nominated for major literary awards, including Esi Edugyan’s Half Blood Blues, which won the 2011 Giller Prize. Yet can you name three black Canadian women novelists under the age of forty? I can’t. I couldn’t do it when I emigrated in 1994, and I still can’t do it now that I’m nearing forty myself. I can name black women novelists from the UK (e.g. Helen Oyeyemi, Diana Evans, Zadie Smith) and the US (e.g. Jesmyn Ward, N.K. Jemisin, Heidi Durrow). I adore the novels of Chimamanda Ngozie Adichie, an amazingly talented writer from Nigeria. But when I think about young black Canadian women novelists, I draw an unsettling blank.

Over the past couple of years I’ve found myself writing extensively about my childhood in Canada and my subsequent efforts to “decolonize” my imagination. I started my blog to advocate for greater equity and inclusion in the United States publishing industry, but soon realized that the situation was actually much worse for blacks in Canada. I dedicated my latest novel, Ship of Souls, to my cousin’s son, Kodie. He’s not yet twelve but his childhood in twenty-first century Canada is looking a lot like my own childhood of the 1970s and ’80s. His white mother and black father are no longer together, and this brown-skinned child is growing up outside of Toronto in an all-white environment. I send him books from the US that offer Kodie a mirror in which he can see himself, but I resent the fact that his mother can’t walk into a local bookstore or library and find Canadian books that do the same.

Last year I began to compile a bibliography on my blog and discovered that, of the 500 English-language books published for children in Canada each year, on average only three are written by black authors. Since 2000, of the nearly thirty novels featuring a black protagonist, only two depict black children living in contemporary Canada. Outraged (though not especially surprised), I wrote an essay, “Navigating the Great White North: Representations of Blackness in Canadian Young Adult Literature,” in which I examined this “symbolic annihilation” of black youth:

I detect a disturbing focus on people of colour who are represented as distinctly not Canadian, not living within the country’s borders, and not active in the current historical moment; blacks specifically are imagined as foreigners and/or figures from the distant past rather than established/integrated members of the national “mosaic.”

…instead of reflecting this racially diverse nation, books for young readers published in Canada during the first decade of the twenty-first century paint a picture of a country devoid of black citizens.

…black youth appear as fugitive and/or former slaves or as impoverished Africans grappling with violence and disease. Why is it so difficult for authors of any race to situate black teens in contemporary Canada? Why do so many authors prefer to see blacks as “eternal slaves” seeking sanctuary in “the promised land?” And what effect does the erasure of black teens from the contemporary Canadian landscape have on young readers?

I worry that, like me, Kodie will grow up not dreaming in color, not imagining himself as worthy of assuming the starring role in literature (as protagonist and/or author). Right now he has aspirations of becoming a writer and I’ll do what I can to help him realize that goal. But I’m not a very good role model since I never managed to get my own books published in Canada, and ultimately chose to leave rather than blaze a trail that successive generations might follow.

The Difficult Miracle of Black Canadian Writers

            In her 1986 essay, “The Difficult Miracle of Black Poetry in America: Something Like a Sonnet for Phillis Wheatley,” African American poet/activist June Jordan marvels at the daring and determination of black writers to express their truths in a land that is hostile to their existence as anything other than slaves:

…the difficult miracle of Black poetry in America, is that we have been rejected and we are frequently dismissed as “political” or “topical” or “sloganeering” and “crude” and ‘insignificant” because…we have persisted for freedom…We will write, published or not, however we may…of the terror and the hungering and the quandaries of our African lives on this North American soil. And as long as we study white literature, as long as we assimilate the English language and its implicit English values, as long as we allude and defer to gods we “neither sought nor knew,” as long as we…remain the children of slavery, as long as we do not come of age and attempt, then to speak the truth of our difficult maturity in an alien place, then we will be beloved, and sheltered, and published.

But not otherwise. And yet we persist.

Considering the challenges they face, it is somewhat miraculous that black writers manage to get published in Canada. The eight African Canadian authors I interviewed for this paper were first asked to describe their exposure to black characters within the books they read children. Tessa McWatt, David Chariandy, Cheryl Foggo, and Suzette Mayr all expressed a love of books that started at an early age, but also reported that they found few if any representations of black children. Cheryl Foggo recalled seeing the loathsome image of Little Black Sambo in the 1960s, and stated that she “decoloured” herself in order to identify with beloved characters like Anne of Green Gables and Trixie Belden. Suzette Mayr, who also grew up in Alberta but a decade later, was drawn to British novels by E. Nesbit and Enid Blyton but also read and was deeply moved by American novels with black protagonists such as Sounder and The House of Dies Drear. David Chariandy (who grew up in the 1970s a few doors down from me in Scarborough, ON) explained that it took “a degree of imagination” for him to see himself in the books he read as a child since so few contained images of people who looked like him. Chariandy further shared that he had no role models once he decided, as a child, that he wanted to become a writer; he never met an author until reaching university, and today believes he pursued a career as a literature professor because it seemed to be “the only way for someone like me to be around books.”

Born and raised in Kenya, David Odhiambo began writing as a Canadian university student, and at that time knew only of African Canadian author Dany Laferriere who was also based in Montreal; after “a couple of polite rejections from Independent Houses,” Odhiambo’s first novel, completed at age 23, “ended up abandoned in a file cabinet”—it took ten more years for his first novel to be published. While submitting query letters to publishers for her memoir, Pourin’ Down Rain, Cheryl Foggo was told by one publisher that “there were not enough Black people in Canada to justify publishing [her] book.” Foggo eventually found a supportive small press, yet notes that despite having “many publishing credits and awards” on her resume, she was “surprised” by the trouble [she] had placing the manuscript for her recent children’s picture book, Dear Baobab.
My youngest interviewee, Zalika Reid-Benta, was recently selected by George Elliott Clarke as a “writer to watch” on the CBC Books blog. She has nonetheless decided to pursue an MFA in Creative Writing at Columbia University in NYC. Despite having competitive offers from Canadian schools, Reid-Benta said she chose to study in the US because “Canada has a very limited and Eurocentric definition of Canadian literature” and if she stayed, then her writing would “suffocate.” Shortlisted for the Random House of Canada Student Writing Award, Reid-Benta learned that her use of Jamaican “patwa” held her back: “one of the things a few of the Random House judges told me was that they loved my story but couldn’t get past the dialect and it made it harder to navigate. I have tried to write my stories without that dialect and it just doesn’t feel right to me so I’ve decided to keep it…it’s something I won’t compromise.”

I see something of myself in Zalika Reid-Benta. Like me, all the books she read as a child had white protagonists, and by the time she reached college, her role models were all writers of color based in the US. Grateful to have several mentors including George Elliott Clarke, Benta-Reid wishes there was some kind of forum for African Canadian writers. Cheryl Foggo agrees, urging that, “opportunities for professional development and networking be heavily promoted to young writers from diverse communities.”

The visibility of African Canadian authors is closely tied to the exposure their books receive in review journals and newspapers (and, to a lesser extent, I think, in the blogosphere). Despite winning numerous awards throughout his thirty-year career, George Elliott Clarke admits that he still doesn’t “feel ‘respected,’ per se.” Although his ten books of poetry have gone into multiple editions, Clarke attributes this to his work being taught at the college level: “I still find most white critics ‘grudging’ toward my work, while black critics are more favourable, but still too few.” H. Nigel Thomas concurs: “unless a book comes out with a major publisher it receives few reviews.” For Clarke, the solution is two-fold: “What is still needed is a cadre of critics who understand and appreciate the specific poetics of consciously ‘black’ articulation as well as the development of African-Canadian literary journals.”

As mentioned previously, a remarkably high percentage of books by African Canadians are nominated for and/or awarded prestigious literary prizes—according to my research, 18 of the 31 novels written by African Canadians since 2000 have been nominated for a literary prize (nearly 60%) with 7 winners (23% of the total). Does this mean that editors at Canadian presses are especially adept at identifying the very best black writers? If there is irrefutable evidence that black writers in Canada are writing at the highest level, then why haven’t their numbers increased? Cheryl Foggo notes that “it has been proven to the Canadian publishing industry that African-Canadian subject matter will sell, and…I hope this means writers of African descent in Canada can expect to be received with interest and due consideration by publishing houses.” H. Nigel Thomas is less optimistic: “Now there are few publishing options for Caribbean and African Canadian writers, fewer today than in [the] eighties and nineties or for that matter the fifties and sixties. If a publisher takes a chance on you and brings out your first book, it had better win a significant prize or you are dead on arrival.” Thomas identifies another hurdle, which is that “major publishers read manuscripts from literary agents only, and tell [those agents] which manuscripts not to send.”

Addressing the issue of race in the US publishing industry, John Young contends that “Minority texts are edited, produced, and advertised as representing the ‘particular’ black experience to a ‘universal,’ implicitly white (although itself ethnically constructed) audience” (4). Young further suggests that “a concentration of money and cultural authority in mainstream publishers works to produce images of blackness that perpetuate an implicit black-white divide between authors and readers, with publishers acting as a gateway in this interaction” (6). Gatekeepers within the publishing industry, therefore, seek to satisfy the reading public’s (perceived) desire for difference: “the basic dynamic through which most twentieth-century African American literature has been produced derives from an expectation that the individual text will represent the black experience (necessarily understood as exotic) for the white, and therefore implicitly universal, audience” (12).

When David Odhiambo completed his first novel he thought to himself, “just wait till Canadians see the kind of racism my novel exposes.” But that novel never made it past the industry gatekeepers. Suzette Mayr is pleased by the success of many of her peers, but notes that “So much African-Canadian fiction is very dour, very earnest, [and] usually pretty depressing.” A wider range of stories isn’t really possible, however, when only two novels are published nationwide each year. David Chariandy submitted his first novel to the larger presses in Canada but “received no offer to publish, and was even ‘fired’ by a literary agent.” Chariandy admits that his manuscript “wasn’t quite ‘ready,’” but suspects another factor was at play:

…what I was addressing in terms of black experience in Canada was rather “new” and difficult to process in terms of conventional publishing categories. I wanted to write not an immigrant narrative, nor a story set in some darker-skinned “elsewhere,” but a story set in Canada from the perspective of the children of racial minority immigrants. Ultimately, I published my novel content with what I’d done, but not particularly optimistic about how it would be received.

Chariandy’s pessimism was fortunately unfounded: Soucouyant was a finalist for the Governor General’s Literary Award for Fiction and was short-listed for six others prizes including the Commonwealth Writers’ Prize for Best First Book.

Conclusion

Will the second decade of the 21st century look any different than the first? George Elliott Clarkeargues that African Canadians “need a national publishing infrastructure (and critical/reception apparatus) to help along emerging writers,” and H. Nigel Thomas agrees: “The solution would be for Blacks to establish publishing houses and the promotion infrastructure that makes people aware of products,” though he feels that “geography, demographics, [and] economics conjoin against” such an endeavor. Tessa McWatt believes that “Canada is a much better place for writers of African descent than many other countries (particularly the UK) as it has more small presses that support ‘marginalised’ writers.” McWatt feels that ultimately, “the problem is systemic and deeper than publishing can solve,” and that “to enhance the publishing of African-Canadian authors we need to enhance the readership. This is done in schools and communities and in families – encouraging reading of all literature at all levels.” Yet how can this happen when gatekeeping in the Canadian publishing industry limits the flow of diverse voices to a trickle?

For me, effecting change in Canadian publishing is difficult when I’ve committed myself to life in another country; as an expatriate it is challenging to organize a much-needed symposium on multicultural children’s literature – something comparable to the inaugural ‘A Is For Anansi’ conference held in 2010 at NYU. In the US I have advocated for the adoption of a Publishing Equalities Charter like the one sponsored by the Diversity In Publishing Network (DIPNET) in the UK, but my pleas have had little if any effect. I have, nonetheless, managed to launch my writing career, and I have found a community of like-minded activists who helped me to establish a childhood literacy initiative with an emphasis on purchasing multicultural books. As a black writer, I have no regrets about leaving Canada. By comparison, the US is a vast sea that is, perhaps, more perilous but ultimately more productive for me than Canada’s “small pond.”

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