Editorial: Street Lit Takes a Hit
An African American author raps the genre, but librarians defend it
Francine Fialkoff, Editor -- Library Journal, 2/1/2006
Urban fiction, street lit, ghetto fiction, gangsta lit, whatever you call it, this gritty genre of African American writing is enormously popular, both in bookstores and libraries. It's not popular, however, with African American writer Nick Chiles. A longtime education reporter, pop author (with his wife Denene Millner), and now editor-in-chief of Odyssey Couleur, a travel magazine, Chiles blasted the genre in a New York Times Op-Ed published last month (January 4). He'd gone to the Borders at a mall near his home in Snellville, GA, outside Atlanta. There he found his books and those of other African American authors lumped together with street lit.
“[A]ll I could see was lurid book jackets displaying all forms of brown flesh, usually half naked...often accompanied by guns and other symbols of criminal life. I felt as if I was walking into a pornography shop.... We were all represented under [African American Literature], the whole community of black authors—from me to Terry McMillan and Toni Morrison...surrounded and swallowed whole...by an overwhelming wave of titles and jackets that I wouldn't want my 13-year-old son to see....”
Chiles's son may not be seeing street lit, but kids not much older than he is certainly are reading it. At Seattle Public Library, readers range from about 14 years old to 34 years old, says reader services librarian David Wright. Wright covers street lit pioneers in this issue of LJ. “It's in high demand and not exclusively by African Americans, though most [readers] are,” says Wright. Not far from where Chiles lives, at De Kalb County Public Library in Decatur, librarian Claudia Medori says, “Our branches that have the largest African American populations have been asking for more of the street writers.”
While Chiles deplores these novels for “glamoriz[ing] black criminals,” Wright describes them as “tragic morality tales, without a hint of preachiness.” The few street lit novels I've read fit that mold: in K'wan's Street Dreams, the “good” bad guys end up dealing crack but still believe there's a chance they'll get out of the ghetto. They die trying but take a lot of baddies down with them. K'wan's Hoodlum is a street lit version of The Godfather, with the college-boy son drawn into the gangster life when his father and brother are on the receiving end of a “hit.”
As far as I can tell, street lit isn't any more prurient or violent than most popular fiction currently on display. Romances have moved much closer to soft porn, killer thrillers detail violence graphically. Some street lit is truly revelatory, some may be just grade B standard fare, but we need to evaluate street lit just as we would anything else we consider for libraries, within the context of its genre. Maybe the covers are “lurid,” as Chiles contends, but plenty of novels carry pretty lurid jackets. Should we be judging books solely by their covers? As Wright says, “There isn't much I could say about African American street literature that I couldn't say about any other current fiction.”
Book Review Editor Barbara Hoffert concurs. On the LJ blog In the Bookroom (www.libraryjournal.com/bookroom; 9/22/05), posted after she led a panel featuring street lit authors, Hoffert noted, “[R]eading made a difference in their young lives, and writing rescued their older selves from sometimes harrowing circumstances.... [A] book like [Y. Blak Moore's] Slipping or Hoodlum does what literature should do. It shows us that writing really matters.”
So, Mr. Chiles, you may have a problem with street lit. In the library world, we don't. Seattle's Wright has immersed himself in street lit so he can talk knowledgeably to his patrons. “It's very satisfying when we know what [our users] are talking about, when we can tell them about authors they don't know. Then we exist for them,” says Wright. “Often these are people who don't read a whole lot else, but some of them are avid readers who read anything they can get their hands on, from [James] Baldwin to urban lit. We'd have no business being in the business of librarianship if we didn't serve the interests of our patrons.”
