There have been a few times over the course of my life where I have been so deeply annoyed that I can’t keep my mouth shut. I admit that I’m being a little bit of a hater, but I will also admit I don’t really care.
A couple months ago, I was reading Fran Ross’ 1974 novel Oreo. It is, to be a bit reductive, a postmodern retelling of the myth of Theseus starring a biracial Black girl named Christine (nicknamed Oreo). She travels to New York City in an attempt to find her absent, Jewish father. The novel is not what annoys me; it is one of my favorites, and I’m not just saying that because I’m the same genre of mixed as the protagonist. I was annoyed by the foreword that accompanies the 2015 edition of the novel. This foreword by author Danzy Senna is, to put it frankly, anti-Black. It also demonstrates an ongoing problem among scholars and reviewers of Black literature.
Senna’s foreword spends many of its words trying to suss out why Oreo was not critically acclaimed in its time. She begins by discussing her initial reading of the novel, writing, “Oreo came to me in this context like a strange uncanny dream about the future that was really the past. That is, it read like a novel not from 1974 but from the near future—a book whose appearance I was still waiting for” (xii). What does this statement mean? Does Senna mean to suggest that Black women had not produced complex works of satire before Ross, or that she herself was unfamiliar with them? Obviously it is untrue that Ross was unique in her ability to produce great satire. In the afterword to the same edition of Oreo, Harryette Mullen makes a direct connection between Oreo and the 1859 novel Our Nig: or, Sketches from the life of a Free Black by Harriet E. Wilson. Our Nig similarly plays with genre conventions in order to make a commentary on the hypocrisy of northern abolitionists who still held racist attitudes. Mullen further places Ross’ work in conversation with other writers in the Black Arts Movement, something which would have undoubtedly influenced Ross in her writing. This contrast between foreword and afterword makes me wonder about how Senna imagines Ross’ relationship to other Black writers in her time. While I cannot say definitively which one of us is correct about Ross’ connection to other Black art, I can say that, unlike Senna’s projected idea of it, Oreo is not a novel about racial insecurity.
Why do I claim this? Because Senna has demonstrated that she has read insecurity into the text, and has subsequently projected it onto Ross herself. Senna introduces her (and her peers’) relationship to Blackness as follows: “We, too, had been born post-Civil Rights Movement, post-Loving, post-soul, post-everything. We were suspicious of militancy, black or otherwise, suspicious of claims to authenticity, racial or otherwise” (xii). This is an admission that she is in a social position that allows her to live without worrying about anti-Blackness. That she later describes herself as a “cultural mulatto,” in the words of Trey Ellis, reveals that she is socially distanced from those who are not able to phase in and out of white spaces as they choose. I find it baffling why someone who is openly of this social position would make authoritative claims about what Black Americans are and are not willing to accept. This is projected onto Ross when Senna describes her author’s portrait. “She belonged to our world. Her Blackness was our blackness” (xii). I find this claim dubious at best.
Senna’s answer as to why Oreo fell off after its initial publication is equally baffling and revealing of her underlying insecurity. She compares Oreo to Roots: The Saga of An American Family by Alex Haley, which was published two years later. She writes that Roots, “…looks towards the past. It offers black people an origin story, an imagined moment of racial purity.” In contrast, Oreo is a novel rooted in, “gleeful miscegenation” (xiii). The idea that Oreo was not well received because the protagonist is biracial is frankly, ridiculous. It does not take a particularly deep dive into American literature to realize that in general, American authors have been consistently obsessed with bi-and multiracial people for centuries. Ross, in fact, satirizes this literary tradition through her careful depiction of Oreo’s racial identity. First of all, it is made clear that Oreo’s nickname does not come from any perceived whiteness while acknowledging that this is the typical understanding of it. Further, throughout Oreo’s journey, she is perceived as Black by both Black and non-Black people she meets on her journey. She is, “dark brown-skinned,” (Ross 5, 37), and is in fact darker than most of her named family members despite having one white parent. I would place Senna at a 1 on Oreo’s color scale. At the risk of appearing too “militant,” as Senna would put it, but I cannot help but scoff at the notion that a woman who is functionally white would claim to see her “Blackness” reflected in this work.
Despite dedicating myself to this act of litebrite on litebrite violence, I would like to make it clear that I do not think that Danzy Senna is uniquely annoying. I see her foreword as the result of common practices among Black scholars. These practices can collectively be understood to fall under the project of canon building. Senna was correct in identifying that Oreo does not neatly fit into notions of a Black literary canon, but she is incorrect in her reasons why. Oreo fell off because of its complicated politics that punch up at those with marginal social power, people like scholars of Black literature who fail to see how they’re not so different from the white scholars who delegitimize their work. It does not take much effort to unpack Oreo’s political statements, and I will not denigrate the scholars of the 1970’s by suggesting that they were incapable of doing so. I will however denigrate them by suggesting that their focus on canon building caused them to consistently overlook works that were not appropriate for the canon they wanted to build. Even now, I find that this project dominates our academic discourse to the extent that scholars are still wasting time asking what does and does not count as Black literature.
Perhaps I am being naïve, but it seems to me that a better use of our time and resources would be engaging with art and literature on its own merits rather than entering into an endless competition with white people. That’s what canon building is, at the end of the day. We must have a real, legitimate canon because that’s what white people have. This idea is most apparent in Senna’s foreword when she writes that Oreo, “has all the hallmarks of a postmodern novel.” This statement, while factually correct, is rendered anti-Black by Senna’s elaboration that, “It feels in many ways more in line stylistically, aesthetically, with Thomas Pynchon and Kurt Vonnegut than with Sonia Sanchez and Ntozake Shange, to name two other Black female writers of Ross’ time” (xiv). Beyond suggesting that postmodern literature is a wholly white genre, which it is not, this classification paints Oreo as a novel that rejects Blackness and Black art, that it was written with no awareness of the ways that anti-Blackness persists even among those who consider themselves allies to the anti-racist cause. This is a disgusting misreading of the text that suggests that Ross’ prose was “too white,” that sophisticated satire is outside of the realm of possibility for Black writers beyond a select few. In attempting to condemn Oreo’s non-placement within the Black literary canon, Senna has fed into the same harmful ideas of legitimacy that ended up marginalizing Ross and other writers like her.
So what is to be done? We must refuse to accept insecure, anti-Black readings of Black literature when we see them. In addition we must, going forward, let go of the idea that our duty as scholars is to establish a canon of Black literature. If this is something that is going to happen, it will happen over time as we continue to revisit and respond to work from our past and our present. We cannot continue to hold ourselves to the standards of white institutions while realizing that those of us who have access to power within those institutions have the ability to resist the urge to legitimize before we understand. Oreo is not worth reading because of how it does or does not align with our ideas of what Black literature is supposed to be. We cannot and will not be liberated by comparing ourselves to and attempting to recreate oppressive institutions. My position as a graduate student and composition instructor will not allow me to singlehandedly end anti-Blackness, nor will my work as a fiction writer. Instead of wasting my energy trying to turn my job into something that it simply is not, I can dedicate myself to engaging with Black art on the basis that it is worth engaging with. I do not need to prove that worth to anyone.
Sam Taub (they/them) is a writer and MA student based in Detroit. Their work can be found in the upcoming game ValiDate and on Twitter: @slampora