Opinion | The Post-Trump Future of Literature - The New York Times https://www.nytimes.com/2020/12/22/opinion/fiction-poetry-trump...

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Opinion

The Post-Trump Future of

Literature
What will writers do when the outrage is over? Will they go back to writing
about flowers and moons?

By Viet Thanh Nguyen

Contributing Opinion Writer

Dec. 22, 2020

This article is part of Let's Start Over, an Opinion series

on what life will look like in 2021.

Donald Trump is an anti-literary president. It’s clear that the man doesn’t
read, outside of highly diluted briefings and tweets. He’s missing a core
element needed for literature: empathy.

The election of Joe Biden and Kamala Harris signals a return to empathy in
2021. But empathy’s only an emotion, and we should never mistake it for
action. Barack Obama’s warmth didn’t reorient the world toward justice as
much as some of us would have liked. Nonetheless, the literary world

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embraced him. It took Mr. Trump to awaken it to politics.

Many writers, like me, texted voters, donated to activist causes, got into
bitter fights on social media and wrote Op-Eds attacking the Trump
administration. Their political fervor impressed me. But if these writers
retreat to their pre-Trump selves, then the lessons of this era will have not
been learned at all.

American literature has a troubled relationship to politics. The mainstream

— poetry and fiction written by white, well-educated people and regulated by
a reviewing, publishing and gate-keeping apparatus that is mostly white and
privileged — tends to be apolitical. Most American literati associate politics
in literature with social realism, propaganda and all the other supposed evils
of Communist and socialist literature, missing the galvanizing aesthetics of
political writers like Aimé Césaire, Richard Wright and Gloria Anzaldúa.

To the extent that mainstream publishing wants to be political, it focuses on

nonfiction books about things like elections, insider tell-alls and presidential
memoirs. Other political targets that are acceptable to white liberal interests:
the environment, veganism, education.

But Mr. Trump destroyed the ability of white writers to dwell in the apolitical.
Everyone had to make a choice, especially in the face of a pandemic and the
killing of George Floyd, both of which brought the life-or-death costs of
systemic racism and economic inequality into painful focus.

But in 2021, will writers, especially white writers, take a deep breath of relief
and retreat back to the politics of the apolitical, which is to say a retreat back
to white privilege?

Explicit politics in American poetry and fiction has mostly been left to the
marginalized: writers of color, queer and trans writers, feminist writers,
anticolonial writers.

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That a number of major literary awards in recent years have gone to such
writers indicates two things: First, they are writing some of the most
compelling works in American literature; and second, literary awards
function as symbolic reparations in a country that isn’t yet capable of real
reparations.

It’s easier to give Charles Yu a National Book Award for “Interior

Chinatown,” a hilarious and scathing critique of Hollywood’s racist
representations of Asian-Americans, than it is to actually transform
Hollywood. It’s also easier for the publishing industry to give marginalized
writers awards than to change its hiring practices. James Baldwin wrote in
1953 that this “world is white no longer, and it will never be white again,” but
a publishing industry whose editorial staff is 85 percent white, and whose
fiction list is 95 percent white, is still quite white.

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In the Biden era, will the publishing industry do more than feel bad about
that and commit to hiring a diverse group of editors and interns and building
a pipeline for future diverse leadership?

“Diversity” itself, unless it occurs at every level of an industry, and unless it

meaningfully changes an aesthetic practice, is a fairly empty form of politics.
This is one of the big critiques of the Obama presidency. For all that one can
blame Republican intransigence, Mr. Obama was fairly moderate, someone
who tinkered with the military-industrial complex rather than transformed it.

That much of the literary world was willing to give Mr. Obama’s drone strike
and deportation policies a pass, partly because he was such a literary,
empathetic president, indicates some of the hollowness of liberalism and

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multiculturalism. Empathy, their emotional signature, is perfectly compatible

with killing people overseas — many of them innocent — and backing up a
police and carceral system that disproportionately harms Black, Indigenous
and other people of color and the poor. It turns out that a president can have
a taste for both drone strikes and annual reading lists heavy on multicultural
literature.

And here, marginalized writers who tell stories about marginalized

populations do not get a pass. Take immigrant literature. During the
xenophobic Trump years, when immigrants and refugees were demonized,
simply standing up for immigrants became a politically worthwhile cause.
But so much of immigrant literature, despite bringing attention to the racial,
cultural and economic difficulties that immigrants face, also ultimately
affirms an American dream that is sometimes lofty and aspirational, and at
other times a mask for the structural inequities of a settler colonial state.
Most Americans have never heard of settler colonialism, much less used it to
describe their country. That’s because Americans prefer to call settler
colonialism the American dream.

Too much of immigrant and multicultural literature fails to rip off that mask.
Yet the politicization of these populations does pose a threat to the white
nation that Mr. Trump represents. White identity politics has always been the
dominant politics of this country, but so long as it was ascendant and
unthreatened, it was never explicitly white. It was simply normative, and
most white writers (and white people) never questioned the normativity of
whiteness. But the long, incomplete march toward racial equality from 1865
to the present has slowly eroded white dominance, with the most significant
rupture occurring during the war in Vietnam.

Writers not only marched against the war, they wrote against it. Among
white American writers, poets like Robert Lowell were the first to protest,
along with prose writers like Susan Sontag and Norman Mailer.

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In the aftermath of the war, however, the politicization of white writers faded,
even if the politicization of writers of color did not. By the 1980s, the political
energies of writers of color were focused on what became known as identity
politics and multiculturalism, the demand for more inclusive reading lists
and syllabuses and prizes. The counteroffensive against these efforts led to
the “culture wars,” with defenders of the Western (white) canon arguing that
multiculturalism was eroding the foundations of American culture.

The multiculturalists mostly won that fight, but Mr. Trump was the
continuation of the conservative counterattack. Mr. Trump clearly wanted to
roll back the American timeline to the 1950s, or maybe even to 1882, the year
of the Chinese Exclusion Act.

What he tried to do politically and economically, he also tried to do culturally

with his Executive Order on Combating Race and Sex Stereotyping, which
prohibited federal agencies and any organization receiving federal funding
from talking with employees about white privilege or providing diversity,
equity and inclusion training. “Critical race theory” became Mr. Trump’s
particular target of ire. He intuited correctly that illuminating whiteness is
threatening for those who have rested comfortably in unquestioned
whiteness, both conservatives and liberals, a point that the poet Claudia
Rankine drives home in her 2020 book “Just Us.”

Jess Row makes a similar point in his recent book of essays, “White Flights,”
where he shows how deeply entrenched whiteness is in American literature
and how it can be traced directly to the country’s foundational sins of
conquest, genocide and slavery. The Nobel Prize lecture by this year’s
winner for literature, the poet Louise Glück, succinctly illustrates Mr. Row’s
point. She talks about poems that were meaningful to her as a child but that
are also problematic depictions of Black servitude and plantation life, an
issue that Ms. Glück simply elides.

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So-called genre literature has been better than so-called literary fiction and
poetry when it comes to the kind of critical and political work that unsettles
whiteness and reveals the legacies of colonialism. Smart crime writers, for
example, are often political because they know that an individual crime is a
manifestation of a society that has committed wholesale crimes.

Some recent examples: Don Winslow, in his trilogy of novels about the drug
wars culminating in “The Border,” directly links those drug wars to military
conflicts the country has fought or enabled, from Vietnam to Guatemala.
Steph Cha in “Your House Will Pay” approaches the Los Angeles riots
through a murder mystery that focuses on the relations between Blacks and
Koreans, rather than their relations to the white power structure that set
them up for conflict. Attica Locke in “Heaven, My Home” continues the
adventures of Darren Mathews, a Black Texas Ranger, as he investigates
crimes that boil up from America’s caldron of racism and desire.

The past four years have been marked by strong works of political poetry,
like Layli Long Soldier’s “Whereas,” which confronts the United States’
treatment of Native people past and present, and Solmaz Sharif’s “Look,”
which draws its vocabulary from an American military dictionary in order to
throw sand in the eyes of this country’s high-tech war machine.

The inability of American writers and liberals to fully confront this war
machine, especially when it was helmed by Democratic presidents, is
testimony to what little mark was left by the literary insurgency against the
war in Vietnam. Besides genre writers, it’s mostly been veteran writers like
Elliot Ackerman, Matt Gallagher and Phil Klay who have written about the
Forever War. This is because most Americans are insulated from the
deployment of the war machine and prefer not to think about their
implication in it.

For Native peoples, however, the history of the American military is

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omnipresent. Natalie Diaz, in “Postcolonial Love Poem,” raises the question

of whether the United States even is postcolonial, and if so, for whom.
Perhaps for white people, who would rather forget colonialism, but not for
Native people who are still fighting it.

So what will 2021 bring forth from the literary world?

Hopefully more poems like Noor Hindi’s 2020 clarion call “Fuck Your Lecture
on Craft, My People Are Dying,” which simultaneously attacks M.F.A. culture
and crosses the brightest red line in American politics: Palestine. For all the
liberal pearl-clutching about “cancel culture,” which is just a bruising
exercise in civic society and free speech, the real cancellation on this issue
has come from the state. It’s no surprise that there has been no collective
(white) liberal uprising against Mr. Trump’s executive order last year to
crack down on criticism of Israel on college campuses, which is a form of
state censorship, or against the efforts of many legislators to do the same.

The United States, as a settler colonial society that disavows its settler
colonial origins and present, sees a like-minded ally in Israel. The only
Americans — many of Palestinian descent — getting canceled by being fired,
denied tenure or threatened with lawsuits are the ones who denounce Israeli
settler colonialism and speak out for the Palestinian people.

Lectures on craft, including the craft of multiculturalism, can be insipid when

contrasted with politics of this kind. My problem with “craft” is not only that
it’s not even art, but also that it’s espoused by writers who speak of the labor
of craft and the workshop but who generally have no theory of labor, its
exploitation or the writer as worker. No surprise that writers without such a
theory have little to say about politics, and why the norm for writing
workshops is not to deal with politics.

“Colonizers write about flowers,” Ms. Hindi writes. “I want to be like those
poets who care about the moon. Palestinians don’t see the moon from jail

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cells and prisons.”

This is my kind of poem.

“I know I’m American because when I walk into a room something dies,” Ms.
Hindi writes. “When I die, I promise to haunt you forever.”

Writers like Ms. Hindi are an exception in many workshops, where they are
often forced to explain themselves to the normative center of an apolitical
literature. But this poem doesn’t explain anything, and that’s one of the
reasons it’s on fire.

“One day, I’ll write about the flowers like we own them.”

Someone give Noor Hindi a book contract.

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