"Raceless" Writing and Difference: Ann Petry's Country Place and the African-American Literary Canon

Abstract

A 1998 Toni Morrison television interview begins smoothly enough, but veers onto rocky terrain when interviewer Jana Wendt lobbies Morrison with a series of questions about status of people in her fiction. You have in your writing certainly marginalized whites, Wendt asserts. Why are they of no particular interest to you? Her question is curious for many reasons, most immediately because occasion for interview is 1998 publication of Morrison's Paradise, a novel that begins with unforgettable line: They shoot girl first. Morrison makes no other direct references to race in Paradise for purpose of demonstrating to readers that a character's race can be the least amount of information to know about a person. (1) Morrison's subtle attempts to complicate our understanding of racial difference and its relationship to writing are lost on Jana Wendt seems concerned only with literal, quantitative representations of bodies. Morrison responds to Wendt's inquiry with admirable patience: was interested in another kind of literature that was not just confrontational, versus white. I was really interested in readership. She sees a connection between her literary ambitions and achievements of music, and she argues for a space that is not invaded by white gaze. Wendt persists: You don't think you will ever change and write books that incorporate lives into them substantially? Morrison appears to lose some patience: have done. Substantially? Wendt asks doubtfully. What's left of Morrison's patience evaporates: You can't understand how powerfully racist that question is, can you? The interviewer swallows. Morrison continues, Because you could never ask a author, 'When are you going to write about people?' ... Even inquiry comes from position of being in center ... and saying, 'Is it ever possible that you will enter mainstream?' It's inconceivable that where I already am is mainstream. An embarrassed Jana Wendt rushes to correct herself: Oh no, that wasn't implication of my question ... It's question of subject of your narrative, whether you want to alter parameters of it, whether you see any benefit in doing that. Morrison responds, not by alerting Wendt to fact that her novels are necessarily saturated with ideas about whiteness: supremacy is directly responsible for self-hatred that ravages Breedlove family in The Bluest Eye; for horrible choice forced upon Sethe in Beloved; it is boundary that both delimits and enables fife in Bottom in Sula. Neither does Morrison enlighten Wendt to fact that American subjectivity is always already incontestably mulatto, to use off-quoted words of Albert Murray, blackness and whiteness being inherently mutually constitutive. (2) Instead Morrison attempts to satisfy her interviewer by creating an analogy between her predicament as an African-American writer and that of a Russian writer, who writes about Russia, in Russian, for Russians. The fact that Russian writing is translated and enjoyed by non-Russians is a plus, Morrison explains, but Russian writer is not obliged to consider writing about French people, or Americans, or anybody. Seemingly satisfied, Wendt moves on. (3) This exchange between Toni Morrison and Jana Wendt is emblematic of predicament of African-American writer has perennially found her subject matter, as well as her subjectivity, under scrutiny. Doubtless, first moment of African-American creative production was followed immediately by a second moment of interrogation by critics and supporters, equally unbelieving. In Zora Neale Hurston: A Literary Biography, Robert Hemenway characterizes as arrogant biases that have been central to criticism of novels, one of them being that a black author must transcend race in order to write universally. …