Racism is perhaps one of the most difficult things to write about. We can write about sex or money more easily. Very few works of art have successfully tackled this subject without sentimentality or brutality.
No one believes he is racist or even prejudiced in any way. The old joke, “Some of my best friends are Jews,” is perhaps no longer indicative of how people think about the Other. Yet somewhere deep within us we may still have some lingering prejudice of one kind or another.
Certainly, for those of us born in societies where injustice existed blatantly and was sanctioned by law, it is perhaps most difficult. Growing up in apartheid South Africa I was acutely conscious, as children are, of the injustices around me. Once, I heard my mother, an otherwise generous and kind woman, tell our tall, elderly, and dignified Zulu servant, who had brought us up, to “Clean up this cupboard, John, it smells Zulu,” and John bent down from his great height and cleaned the cupboard in silence. It is a moment I will never forget.
This kind of incomprehension or lack of empathy seems almost impossible to contemplate today. Consequently I sallied forth, escaping my country as fast as I could at seventeen, but leaving burdened with guilt and determined to right the wrongs of an unjust society, which simply turned out to be another form of prejudice.
I remember offering a colleague who was studying writing with me at Columbia and who happened to be black, to write her thesis, which she was struggling with, for her.
“Why would you do that?” she asked me, looking aghast.
Indeed.
One of the first writing classes I taught at the YMCA was on the novella. I started with Toni Morrison’s “Bluest Eye,” and went on to Conrad’s “Heart of Darkness.” My boss, who happened to be black, no doubt wishing to keep an eye on this neophyte, was present at this class and protested, “I almost threw this book across the room!” I remember her saying.
I said something about taking into consideration the time and place and the literary value of the work and offered up that we were moving onto Thomas Mann’s “ Death in Venice.” One of the gay students in the class said that was not much better.
So how to get it right?
Yet, surely, one of the best ways to understand that all human beings are basically alike, is by reading the great literature from different classes, colors, and countries. As a young girl I read “Writing Black” by Richard Rive, a man of mixed race who grew up in District Six in the Cape and wrote of his experiences, so that I was able to identify with him completely. Also as an adolescent in South Africa, I read Ralph Ellison’s “Invisible Man” and again found myself, an adolescent girl in apartheid South Africa, identifying with this American man of color. Stories can help us step into the shoes of someone who belongs not just to another race but another time and place.
Writing historical fiction and researching the lives of people so different from my own: an aristocrat of the eighteenth century who lived through the French revolution and became a dairy farmer in this country in a book called “Bluebird or the Invention of Happiness; ” Charlotte Bronte on the moors of northern England writing her masterpiece, in “Becoming Jane Eyre;” and even Freud, himself, in 1900 in Vienna, struggling with one of his early patients, in “Dreaming for Freud” what struck me most was the fact that these brave women: the Marquise de la Tour du Pin, mother of six children all of whom died except for one son, Charlotte Bronte whose sisters and brother died so young, and even the brilliant Freud who startled his contempories with his radical theories, was not unlike myself or you: we have many of the same desires: for recognition, love, and life, the same curiosity, the same need to know the Other.
Sheila Kohler is the author of many books including the recent Dreaming for Freud.
