A Forecast for Blackness: The Work of Victor LaValle

Abstract

A Forecast for BlacknessThe Work of Victor LaValle Aisha Sabatini Sloan When Nina Simone and Weldon Irvine, Jr. wrote the song, "To be Young, Gifted, and Black," I wonder if they had any idea what kind of monsters they were spawning. I don't mean this derogatorily. That sweet, earnest song created in honor of the playwright and activist Lorraine Hansberry garnered a spirit of love and support for generations of black children to come, but it also opened up the possibility for the kind of offspring that could defy, embarrass, and dishonor the best intentions of their creators. They will be young, gifted for sure, and in some way or another black (or, as LaValle calls Obama, "blackish.") But will their gifts match the sweet hopes, aesthetic tendencies, and social vision of the elders who made their privilege possible? Absolutely not. Who even knew that a black sci-fi nerd was possible in 1970? To be young, gifted, and black in the work of Victor LaValle, as it turns out, is to be a kind of compassionate Frankenstein, a patchwork quilt of cultural influences and coping mechanisms no civil rights activist in his or her right mind could have imagined. Victor LaValle's most recent novel stars a protagonist, Ricky Rice, who we see in a series of terrifying, and periodically unethical, stances: standing in a dark stairwell listening to the screams of his childhood friends as they are shot at close range; stealing the gun off of an injured cop to sell for heroin; dying in a basement while wild cats gnaw at his body. I take great pleasure imagining Nina Simone's face responding to some of these scenarios. Her face and, more importantly, the mumbling under her breath. LaValle himself is the son of a Ugandan mother and a white American father. He grew up headbanging to heavy metal music alongside "a Persian kid, a Korean, a couple of white guys" in one of the most internationally diverse areas in the world: Queens, New York. His influences include horror films and his website bears the approval of hip hop artistcum-actor Mos Def, who sees Big Machine as "the first great book of the next America." What kind of book is this? One where, three quarters of the way through, you find yourself nodding along without the slightest shiver of disbelief as the protagonist realizes he is pregnant with an angel. The fetus is growing between the man's shoulder blades. To be young, gifted, and black to Victor LaValle means taking a risk: no longer portraying the most flattering sides of blackness, not worried whether or not his work will be taken seriously. LaValle tells one interviewer that he wanted to create black characters engaged in the plot of a Bruce Willis film, and that his revision strategy is to remove any section of work that was not fun to write. Only the most virulent, well-groomed, robustly nourished self-esteem could get away with such a thing. And get away he does. The result feels like a culturally legitimate accident. [End Page 979] The history of pain in black culture is on par with the ridiculous violence in a bad action film—and so it makes sense that these characters endure this degree of torture while still pulling through. He creates a startlingly accurate portrayal of all that pain while admitting in an article for Bookforum that he is tired of all the dourness and doomsaying; of the grimace that's required whenever we discuss [black nationalism] and blackness in general; of the countless humorless men and women who scold every impulse toward comfort or laughter or, dare I say it, optimism. I'm sick of the same old forecast for blackness: gloom followed by clouds of hail. ("Beyond the Skin Trade") I began reading Big Machine at the bar of a Detroit eatery called Cass Café. Here, in the ruins of what the media likes to deem America's most dejected wasteland, a waitress placed a plate of wasabi-garnished vegetarian egg rolls with a side of sautéed Swiss chard in front of me, along with a bottle of micro-brewed...