[0:00]filmoirs. I think once asked you the question, can you imagine writing a novel that's not centered about race.
[0:10]And you said absolutely. Yes. Will you? That's what he asked me. I think, uh, see, I answered the question he didn't pose. You know, um, Tolstoy writes about race.
[0:27]Yeah. All the time. Um, so does Zola, so does James Joyce.
[0:36]Now, if anybody can go up to an imaginary James Joyce and say, you write about race all the time.
[0:46]It's central in your novels. When are you going to write about what?
[0:53]Because, you see, the person who asks that question doesn't understand that he is also, he or she is also raced.
[1:02]So to ask me when am I going to stop and or when if I can is to ask a question that, you know, in a sense is its own answer.
[1:14]Yes, I can write about white people, white people can write about black people.
[1:19]Anything can happen in art. There are no boundaries there.
[1:24]Having to do it or having to prove that I can do it is what was embarrassing or insulting.
[1:32]In this book, I did. It was insulting that people help me understand. What was insulting?
[1:37]The the idea that you felt like you had to prove that you could write without.
[1:42]He the question was posed as though it were a desirable thing to do.
[1:46]Right. To write about white people or to write not about race, that's what that means to me.
[1:51]Right. Um, and that it was a difficult thing to do, a higher level of artistic endeavor, or it was more important, uh, and that I was still writing about marginal people, and why don't I come into the mainstream.
[2:06]Why don't you importing too much into the question? Maybe. I think so. Well, what else could it be, Charlie?
[2:14]What, what does that mean? What does that question mean? You tell me. If I'm making too much. I don't know. I mean, I don't know that you I don't think it probably means, I didn't ask the question so I don't think it probably means, but I don't think it had to do about you were marginalizing by not writing about.
[2:36]It only works if I can go to William Styron, well, maybe not William Styron because he has done it. Um, somebody major white and say as a journalist, Can you write about black people?
[2:53]That's right. Can I say that?
[2:59]What kind of question is that to put to Ed Doctorow, who has done it, by the way.
[3:02]That's true. But I mean, if I can say, when are you going to write about black people, to a white writer, if that's a legitimate question to a white writer, then it is a legitimate question to me. I just don't think it is.
[3:18]In other words, it's not a literary question. It has nothing to do with the literary imagination.
[3:27]It's a sociological question that should not be put to me.
[3:31]I couldn't ask that of any writer who was, you know, I wouldn't ask it of a black writer when you're going to write about white people.
[3:40]Now, maybe I'm wrong, you can tell me now or later, if I've blown it up all out of proportion.
[3:46]I don't think so. I just don't know what the question means except what I think it means.
[3:53]You think it may just be a little question, a little curious, you know, small incidental question.
[3:57]When, when are you going to.
[4:01]Maybe I'm responding because I have had reviews in the past that have accused me of not writing about white people.
[4:10]I remember a review of Sula in which the reviewer said, this is all well and good, but one day, she, meaning me, will have to face up to the real responsibilities and get mature and write about the real uh confrontation for black people, which is white people.
[4:31]As though our lives have no meaning and no depth without the white gaze.
[4:40]And I've spent my entire writing life trying to make sure that the white gaze was not the dominant one in any of my books.
[4:52]And the people who helped me most arrive at that kind of language were African writers.
[5:00]Chinua Achebe. Bessie Head.
[5:04]Those writers who could assume the centrality of their race because they were Africans.
[5:13]And they didn't explain anything to white people.
[5:20]Those questions were incomprehensible to them, those questions that I would have as a minority living in an all white country like the United States.
[5:28]But when I read, uh, the poetry of Cesare, or the poetry of Sengor, or the novels, particularly, things fall apart was more important to me than anything.
[5:39]Only because there was a language, there was a posture, there were the parameters, I could step in now, and I didn't have to be consumed by or be concerned by the white gaze.
[5:54]That was the liberation for me. It has nothing to do with who reads the books.
[5:58]Everyone, I hope, of any race, any gender, any country.
[6:04]But my sovereignty and my authority as a racialized person had to be struck immediately with the very first book.
[6:17]And it was strange because in this country, many books, particularly then, in the 40s, 50s, you could feel the address of the narrator over my shoulder talking to somebody else.
[6:29]Talking to somebody white. I could tell because they're explaining things that they didn't have to explain if they were talking to me.
[6:40]It was that. So this is a it's profound for me.
[6:46]So that I may be, you may be right. Maybe I'm overdramatizing the whole question, which was innocent enough because the problem of being free to write the way you wish to without this other racialized gaze, is a serious one for an African American writer.
[7:07]Very serious. I think this is one of those times where what you just said, you gave an ennobled an answer, regardless of the significance of the question.
[7:18]Well, that's good.
