Subversive Writing Styles
Subversive writing styles are a personal favourite of mine in 2020. I enjoy reading about people, their struggles and how they try to shape the world around them with provocative writing. There really is no better example of this that I can think of other than Paul Beatty’s The Sellout.
The Sellout won the Booker Prize in 2016. Oneworld Publications published the novel after Beatty received 18 rejection letters. Although this might seem like a typical story you would hear in the world of publishing, Beatty’s writing style might be the reason why.
Now, I will say that I love this novel. I think that it does something in the way only literature can, however, Beatty’s mix of poetry, prose and slang sprinkled with hundreds (maybe even thousands) of references is difficult to read and understand. I have spent upwards of a year thinking about the novel and how the sentences are structured to try and explain what language does, and it’s difficult.
I think Beatty, in a way, breaks the fourth wall when he says:
“Unmitigated Blackness is essays passing for fiction. It’s the realization that there are no absolutes, except when there are.” — 277
This acknowledgement of subversive writing at the end pushed me to go back and re-read the novel. Again. And, again.
Subversive Narratives through Farming
It doesn’t sound that cool, but trust me when I say that what Beatty does structurally is layered in such a complex structure that it’s hard even to describe what has been done.
The main character is named “Me”, but for the sake of clarity, I am going to use the nickname his ex- and then later in the novel current-girlfriend gave him: Bonbon. So, Bonbon is a farmer in a former Californian city called Dickens. Dickens is gentrified and turned into a part of growing Los Angeles, and he wants it back. This element of the story plays into the idea of how space can help people form aspects of their identity, and the novel details this throughout. Beatty mentions in a 2017 interview during the Sydney Writer’s Festival how the fictional city was inspired by two areas near Los Angeles: Watts and Compton. These are neighbourhoods that are demographically majority African American.
These neighbourhoods also allow residential agriculture which becomes the main carrier for subversive structures in the writing. What do I mean when I say this? Well, let me show you an example:
“I’m a farmer, and farmers are natural segregationists. We separate the wheat from the chaff. I’m not Rudolf Hess, P.W. Botha, Capitol Records, or present-day U.S. of A. Those motherfuckers segregate because they want to hold on to power. I’m a farmer: we segregate in an effort to give every tree, every plant, every poor Mexican, every poor nigger, a chance for equal access to sunlight and water; we make sure every living organism has room to breathe”
Here, Beatty layers farmers with segregationists. Contextually, Bonbon, our main character, is trying to segregate Dickens from Los Angeles (racially segregate) to bring the city back, so this makes sense. What comes afterwards is the argument. We separate the wheat from the chaff is about racial demographics: the wheat is coded for those who are white and the chaff for those who are not.
Bonbon, as a farmer, would literally separate the wheat (the inside of the plant used for flour) from the chaff (the inedible part). The second layer is for racial coding, which is what he is trying to do in the novel by racially segregate Los Angeles from Dickens (a community that is predominantly African American). The third layer is what comes next.
The list of names he gives here are all historical figures who have become famous for establishing systems of oppression. The last name is the United States which, after the beginning of the Black Lives Matter protests, no longer comes as much of a surprise as it did when the book was published. Still, the subversive coding that the United States segregates for power in the next section is quite clear.
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It’s the next part that codes farming and subsequently, I would argue, the ability to farm in Dickens as a different type of segregation. Here, the novel argues that space enables the formation of identity independent from the racial background of a person.
Mind you, there are references on each page with around 300 pages in total, so the quotes I pull are the ones I find to illustrate the point the best, but even taking the satsuma trees that Bonbon has planted as another structure of farming would also highlight the same point I am trying to make.
Outside the City of Dickens
If Dickens represents a place where people can form an identity outside of race, then outside Dickens would reasonable be the opposite: where identities are formed based on race. Here are the first few sentences of the book:
“This may be hard to believe, coming from a black man, but I’ve never stolen anything. Never cheated on my taxes or at cards. Never snuck into the movies or failed to give back extra change to a drugstore cashier indifferent to the ways of mercantilism and minimum-wage expectations”
Instead of saying who he is, Bonbon has to tell us who he is not compared to racial stereotypes. This probably makes you uncomfortable, and I think it should because it makes Bonbon uncomfortable. It makes everyone who has been judged to be one of the above stereotypes before getting the chance to define themselves uncomfortable, which is really the point of the book. After listing more stereotypes, we come to a space outside of Dickens:
“But here I am, in the cavernous chambers of the Supreme Court of the United States of America, my car illegally and somewhat ironically parked on Constitution Avenue, my hands cuffed and crossed behind my back, my right to remain silent long since waived and said goodbye to as I sit in a thickly padded chair that, much like this country, isn’t quite as comfortable as it looks”
From the first quote I included to this one, the United States is not a good place when it comes to acceptance or equality. And, if The Sellout is indeed an essay disguised as fiction, I have a few questions for some of the reviewers.
Satire
First, let’s start with satire. Satire, according to Oxford English Dictionary is a “poem or (in later use) a novel, film, or other work of art which uses humour, irony, exaggeration, or ridicule to expose and criticize prevailing immorality or foolishness, esp. as a form of social or political commentary”.
Personally, I didn’t find The Sellout funny. Modern-day segregation, slavery and exaggerated racial stereotypes with references to lynching and abuse isn’t really humour in my mind. This is why I would argue that the satire The Sellout uses is one of irony, exaggeration and ridicule instead of humour as many reviewers have said.
To be fair, even if the reviewers were only given the first 25 pages, the “humour” involves comparing President Obama to a gorilla because he is not white (5), smoking marijuana in court (7), Holocaust references (9), group identifications for African American communities (10–13), patronising the intelligence of women (16), the presumption of guilt based on ethnicity (18–19), modern segregation (20–21) and modern slavery (23).
If you skipped over most of the list, I understand. Still, what if you bought the novel for a nice read at home after reading the reviews that have praised the novel’s humour over and over again? Or, if you wanted to get your friend or partner a nice light-hearted Christmas gift?
I mean, one of the Booker Prize judges is quoted on the back saying, “I was banned from reading in bed because I was laughing so much”. I really found no part of the novel funny. I cried at a few points after Hominy tried to kill himself because he had no identity past racism or at the end when the white couple went into the comedy show in Dickens and got kicked out because by being there, they made people uncomfortable. I cried when the sorority girl said that the one place there wasn’t racism was inside of a picture of the Obamas with their children.
Structurally, The Sellout is by far one of the most difficult and tragic novels I have read or took the time to analyse. I have written a few papers now about it because not only is it worth our time, but it does something. This world we live in is devastating to a lot of different people, and I think the thing that hurts me most is when others are ignored. Their pain is ignored. Their experiences are ignored.
I would recommend you take a chance at the book. It’s filled to bursting, but if you spend the time to decode what Beatty made, his argument is flawless.
