Why Fiction?
November 1, 2022
I have recently crossed a year into writing fiction. I’m careful not to talk about the project in detail because it is still growing and manifesting itself. The characters are still becoming. But, I can say that writing is challenging. I’ve found it requires discipline in the truest sense of the word and has only been sustained by my inquiry. I plan writing into my day, but mostly the desire to write springs itself upon me. Writers have described this in many ways, but I particularly appreciate Morrison’s description of this desire as compulsion that has a use. For me, the desire to understand a thing created the discipline to write. So, I want to attempt to contextualize my fiction by its compulsion. I recognize I could be writing the project, instead of this letter. However, the act of reflecting is critical in my writing process. It helps the ideas come more smoothly and more accurately. I am striving for accuracy, because the implications of my fiction are critical to my people, to justice and liberation. My fiction is a function of freedom and must be handled as such.
For me, the desire to understand a thing created the discipline to write. So, I want to attempt to contextualize my fiction by its compulsion. I recognize I could be writing the project, instead of this letter. However, the act of reflecting is critical in my writing process.
A year ago, my Uncle Rudolph came by the house and brought with him materials he had been collecting for years about our family’s history. Census data and photographs and all kinds of documentation which quickly revealed to my father, brother, and me that we were more than foreign to this land, we were also native to it. This knowledge turned my world quite literally upside down, but I wasn’t entirely sure why. With what was I wrestling? What did it now mean to have this piece of knowledge? What did it mean in the context of my lived experience and in the nuance of my relationships with the land I live on, with the United States, with other nations and their people? And where could I witness its manifestation in my life? Questions upon questions arose — the compulsion.
My fiction is but one corner of the room of my writing, although I spend much time there. I first began writing poetry in grade school, exploring forms like the Haiku and acrostic poems, forms that created structure without diminishing possibility. Poetry was my free place to explore the world around me. Then, I began writing in essay, which is not exclusive to poetry. I suppose as the name for the form suggests I believed I had something to say, something on my mind, an inquiry, a compulsion. Yet, essay and poetry could not alone help me. Fiction is work of the imagination and to do my work I must live in the imagination, a dynamic place of real possibility; where characters take a life of their own and teach me something I did not know at the start; where my experience and knowledge become more reliable than the historical erasure by white supremacists.
Fiction is work of the imagination and to do my work I must live in the imagination, a dynamic place of real possibility; where characters take a life of their own and teach me something I did not know at the start; where my experience and knowledge become more reliable than the historical erasure by white supremacists.
I could quote Morrison's “The Site of Memory” (and if you have not read this essay you should stop reading this and go read that then come back), but I must consider the qualifications of imagination to establish distinction and get to the point of my writing. What my Uncle Rudolph provided was clues toward answers of what I call the Indigenous African American race. What does it mean to be Indigenous African American? Especially in the context of Virginia which necessitates the consideration of the relationships between native tribes such as the Mattaponi tribe, Pamunkey tribe, Chicakhominy tribe, as well as English occupants and African hostages in the time of Indigenous dispossession, chattel slavery, and war. Many records were burned, stolen, uncared for and there was widespread de jure prohibition and de facto prohibition of reading and writing to people ubiquitous in the land. The memory of the time was left to exist in the oration, long before the permittance of a written record.
The tales live on in families, in relationships, in heart postures and beliefs. The imagination is the place I can begin to think about harmony. It is the place I can begin to understand what freedom can look like. It is the place where everything I have learned is ready for me to use so that I might explore what is both certainly painful and powerfully necessary. I believe this is why this project is being sustained thus far.
Now, I’ll get back to it.
