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| Malina Moye @ 2018 Future of Feminism |
By Sikivu Hutchinson
Picture this. A blond white woman in a sleeveless tank
with an electric guitar graces Music Radar’s recent article shouting
out the ten leading
blues guitar players in the world. No Black women merited inclusion on the
list. Not blues powerhouse Ruthie
Foster; not mega talent shredder Malina Moye. Only three
Black men scored. In this universe, the blues long ago left the building as a uniquely
African American art form steeped in the poetry of secular lamentation, Black struggle,
and irreverence.
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| Ruthie Foster |
It’s no revelation that “eating
the other”(to use bell hooks’ term) is as Amerikkkan as apple pie and mass
deportations. In the funhouse mirror of twenty first century minstrelsy, white folks
rule blues and rock, white rap hipsters have become yawningly pro forma, and
white women hawking border chic in flavor of the month novels like American
Dirt are anointed to speak for the brown downtrodden.
Like many women of color writers, I was outraged when
I heard about the gushing adulation, Oprah Book Club endorsement, and obscene
payday that American Dirt writer Jeanine Cummins received for her fetishized
portrait of Mexican immigrant life. Shutting down the Cummins’ hype machine, Latinx
writers Myriam
Gurba and Esmeralda
Bermudez dubbed the book an empty narco-thriller that trotted out racist,
sexist stereotypes about Mexican immigrant communities for the white gaze. The organized
backlash against Cummins’ gringa brownface ghost abduction of Mexican
bodies was a rare instance when the longstanding grievances of women of color about
white supremacy in the literary establishment had swift, national
repercussions. Cummins’ book tour was cancelled, and Latinx writers from the #DignidadLiteraria
group reportedly got her publisher to commit
to increasing Latinx staff representation as well as book acquisitions. After
the cancelation, some in the media attempted to portray Cummins as the victim
of angry Latinas with pitchforks. Her wounded chagrin was reminiscent of the
white fragility sweepstakes which arose after author Kathryn Stockett was slammed
by Black writers about her Mammy-splaining novel The Help. In that
instance, white gatekeepers wasted no time securing film rights and bankrolling
a movie that showcased the pride of Miss Ann’s Hollywood lording over noble Negroes
in a deep Jim Crow South notably devoid of civil rights activists.
When Black, Latinx, indigenous, and Asian novelists
and fiction writers scrape to get by, shrug off rejection after rejection, and
see white folks get outsized acclaim for writing about communities of color it
confirms that nothing has changed in literary plantation politics. It’s estimated
that nearly 80% of publishers are white, and that the majority of acquisitions
editors are white women (most of whom probably fall all over themselves to denounce
Trump). This divide between liberal
window dressing and the reality of plantation lit politics is underscored by publishing’s
neoliberal bottom line. As poet Shivana
Sookdeo notes,
“Without support for the marginalised already within publishing, from
living wages to protection from backlash, you can’t attract more. Without that
growth of the workforce, you can’t effectively safeguard against exploitative
works. Without those safeguards, you make it even more inhospitable for diverse
talent. Then you’re back at square one, publishing establishment, safe, whiter
voices because the entire chain has been neglected.”
So who shells out crazy ducats for the Black gaze on
white America?
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| Rosetta Tharpe |
Picture this. Decades after her death at twenty seven from
a drug overdose in 1970, the legacy of Janis Joplin still looms Godzilla-large
over women’s history in rock music. Joplin was the first white woman musical colonist
to ride her ear-bleeding, angsty rip-offs of Black blues standards to big bucks
stardom and notoriety. Post crash and burn, Joplin has been the subject of
umpteen biopics, documentaries, books (a new biography just dropped in October),
musicals, and gushing odes to her own peculiar brand of parasitic white woman
alchemy. While Joplin’s cottage industry
rolls on, it’s been only recently that the queer Black women rock and blues
pioneers Joplin stole from—musicians like Bessie Smith, Ma Rainey, and Rosetta
Tharpe—have received mainstream recognition for their trailblazing impact on
American music.
I started writing my long delayed (!), forthcoming novel Rock ‘n’
Roll Heretic: The Life and Times of Rory Tharpe out of my lifelong, ride or
die love for all types of rock music (from Son House to Tharpe to Memphis
Minnie to Band of Gypsys to Sonic Youth to Neil to Jimi to Love to PJ Harvey to
Parliament/Funkadelic to King Crimson to Malina Moye to Brittany Howard), as
well as the desire to explore the theft of Black creativity in a genre whose Black
origins were hijacked by corporate America. One of the novel’s central themes is
the artistic travails of Black women rendered invisible by the genre’s
association with Alpha male whiteness in the post-British invasion era. The
lived experience of working, Black women musicians are rarely captured in fiction.
Thus, I wanted to explore the everyday challenges,
failures, and quiet triumphs of being a Black woman guitarist on the road
playing dive bars and middling concert halls in the day-to-day grind of trying
to keep a band together and the bills paid. Loosely based on Rosetta Tharpe—a
gospel guitar titan criticized for embracing secular rock, blues, and country
music—my protagonist grapples with the PTSD of sexual abuse, sexist/racist discrimination
by record labels, promoters, and managers, and getting old in a youth-driven 1970s
pop music culture. Fronting a band of men, she navigates a cutthroat record
industry that chews up and spits out Black musicians who don’t fit neatly into
accepted radio formats and hyper-feminized marketing images that appeal to
white consumers. Like Rosetta Tharpe, Rory is a queer musician in a notoriously
homophobic, testosterone-driven world. She’s also losing faith in god amidst a
wave of prosperity gospel Black evangelicalism. While her “star” is waning, she
comes into conflict with a Joplin-esque white artist who tries to capitalize on
her outlier status to add street cred “spice” to her own career.
The novel allowed me to pose a number of central questions
about female creativity within the context of extreme generational and
religious trauma. For example, how do Black women musicians self-determine in
shark infested professional waters? What role does women’s ambivalent desires
play in forging complicated, often toxic artistic relationships? How did older Black
women resist in a multi-billion dollar industry that sucked up Black ingenuity while
deifying white male rock “gods”? And, finally, how do Black women artists
navigate depression, as well as persistent thoughts of death and dying, when
they’re expected to buck up and be self-sacrificing superwomen?
Many women of color fiction writers know this syndrome
all too well. Writing outlier fiction—often in a snarling void, often pushing up
a Sisyphean hill of preconceived, reductive notions about the Black imagination—is
a tightrope walk. After years of rejections, deflections, games, and crickets
from the publishing industry (e.g., being told things like, “[your short story]
was among the finest pieces we
received. [but] it did not exactly suit our needs at this time”) I self-publish
most of my books. I can’t wait for the literary gatekeepers to give my voice “permission”
or validation. As Alice Walker once said, “I write not only what I want to
read, but I write the things that I should have been able to read”. I write for
Black girls on a mad wanderlust quest for signs of themselves in the heart of
dirty Americana.
Sikivu Hutchinson is the author of Moral Combat:
Black Atheists, Gender Politics, and the Values Wars and the forthcoming Humanists in the Hood:
Unapologetically Black, Feminist, and Heretical, Due April 2020, as well as Rock ‘N’ RollHeretic: The Life and Times of Rory Tharpe (Infidel Books, 2020). @sikivuhutch
