Stories for Chip (6 page)

I was also enthralled, though to a lesser extent, by the Dakota-verse and its black superheroes, particularly Virgil Hawkins, a.k.a. Static, which seemingly has nothing to do with Delany. I identified with Virgil because he was locked in the “friend zone” with his best friend Frieda Goren and had no luck with dating, much like me in high school. However, his sharp-witted Static alter ego gifted him with self-confidence. Now, I could not channel electricity, but my intelligence worked to my own advantage in college through the bad poetry that I wrote from time to time. Imagine my fury and pain upon learning that an aunt of mine had thrown my cherished Milestone Comics collection (
Static
,
Icon
,
Hardware
,
Blood Syndicate
,
Kobalt
,
Xombi
, and
Shadow Cabinet
) in the trash when she moved to Atlanta! I practically owned every issue of that seminal line. In fact, my first publication was a letter of the month in the
Hardware
fan column
Hard Words
. Milestone even sent me a gold-foiled issue of
Hardware
. I'd love to get my hands on one of those again.

I could have sworn the letter appeared in issue 15. My chagrin at learning it was not hit me pretty hard. I bought a copy of this issue online and it was not there!

In hindsight, I should have never stored my comics and baseball card collections at my aunt's apartment in Baton Rouge.

Anyway, I had no idea that Delany wrote two issues of
Wonder Woman
and was so heavily invested in comics as a paraliterature. In his own words, Delany has “always liked comic books—which is the understatement of the age” because “of the unique things that comics can do” in providing the “visual realization” of storytelling (
Silent Interviews
85-6). I did not discover this fact about Delany until much later in my doctoral studies at the University of Iowa, when I bought and read some of Delany's philosophical works at Prairie Lights Books in Iowa City, such as
Silent Interviews: On Language, Race, Sex, Science Fiction, and Some Comics
(1994) and
Shorter Views: Queer Thoughts & The Politics of the Paraliterary
(1999). My scholarly inclinations and ambitions might have turned to the speculative much sooner if I had known this information about Delany sooner. I would not have been so intimidated by the man's brilliance as a thinker and would have discovered his penchant for beautifully crafted sentences as a fiction writer so much earlier.

*Unbeknownst to Delany, he came to my rescue during the fall semester of 2000 at the University of Iowa. I was newly married, trapped in a particular way of thinking about mainstream literature, and taking a particularly intensive early twentieth century readings course in American fiction with a top professor, who I thought was tough, fair, and even likeable in his altruistic, colorblind way. The class had to read twenty influential texts in a fourteen-week semester. When you have to read Theodore Dreiser's
An American Tragedy
(1925), an eight-hundred-fifty-six page naturalist novel, in the forty-eight hours between your Monday and Wednesday class meeting times while teaching two courses of your own, you know the class is tough. I must say that I tremendously enjoyed Dreiser's book because of its influence on Richard Wright's classic black social protest novel
Native Son
(1940).

Nonetheless, I painfully recall the moment I discovered my professor was racist. A silver Ford Taurus had just backed into my wife's raisin-pearl 1999 Honda Accord. A dear white friend and classmate of mine, who carpooled with me from the Emerald Court apartment complex for the class, made for the perfect witness as the police accident report was filed. I did not know that he would be witnessing two events on that day. Needless to say, we arrived late for class with the most valid of excuses. My friend was treated with respect upon entering, while I received a cold shoulder and an unnerving glare from this white professor. Bear in mind, I was the only black student in this particular class of fifteen. It made me extremely uneasy for the rest of the class period and reticent to participate, which was unusual, given my gregarious nature.

Class was over when the moment of micro-aggression burst forth. While I was standing next to my friend, this particular professor had the temerity to say, “Never mind the car accident, Mr. Lavender.” (This was the only time I was ever called “Mr. Lavender” by an Iowa professor instead of “Isiah”—which was more typical of the campus's laidback Midwestern atmosphere.) He continued, “I'm concerned with your insistence upon using reader response theory in your journals, whereas your peers are offering much more sophisticated arguments utilizing the likes of French and German philosophers such as Foucault and Derrida, as well as Nietzsche and Heidegger.” Reader response theory focuses on the individual reader and his/her experience of the text, whereas other literary theories focus on the form of the work or its content or the author or the period in which it is written, or any other number of esoteric ideas. This professor implied that I was not smart enough to apply more popular theories to texts such as post-structuralism, with its emphasis on the destabilized or decentered meanings of authors separated from their texts in order to investigate others sources (like readers, culture, class, politics, race, religion, gender, etc.) for value in the books at hand. His remarks were belittling to me, as if to imply that my level of education was on a ninth grade level like Richard Wright's
³
—that my education was inadequate at best and that I didn't belong at Iowa.

Talk about a gut punch! This man utilized all the power and privilege granted him in everyday life by his white skin to reduce my intellect, to make me feel small, to humiliate me in front of my friend, and to alienate me from the program. And I am certain he was unware of the power of his words and the extent to which they harmed me because further classes went on as before, with the exception that I no longer participated in discussions. I no longer had the desire to try out my ideas in a roomful of my peers—a devastating thing for the intellectual growth of a budding scholar. I am definitely not Frederick Douglass, but he acted like the slave-breaker Mr. Covey! Douglass captured exactly how I felt at that moment in his monumental
Narrative of the Life of Frederick Douglass
: “My natural elasticity was crushed, my intellect languished, the disposition to read departed, the cheerful spark that lingered about my eye died…and behold a man transformed into a brute!” (73).

I remember the stunned and sympathetic look my friend gave me; I remember leaving the classroom and sitting in the stairwell feeling stupid, inconsequential, and disoriented while my buddy tried to console me with an expletive-laced diatribe against that particular professor's intellectual abuse; and most of all I remember discovering Delany's essay “Racism and Science Fiction” (1999) a short time later, reprinted in the back of Sheree R. Thomas's
Dark Matter: A Century of Speculative Literature from the African Diaspora
(2000), while writing my first ever book review for
Science Fiction Studies
.
⁴
Delany scrutinizes racism's systemic structure while tracing his own predecessors and successors in speculative fiction. He then shares a couple particular examples of racism from his own early career before offering possible ways of dismantling racism in science fiction by encouraging minorities to participate at conferences through panel discussions, open race dialogues involving writers and readers of different races, and confronting white comfort zones established by centuries of oppression.

Delany explains two moments of straightforward racism in his early career. First, the legendary editor John W. Campbell, Jr.—commonly recognized as the shaper of the Golden Age of Science Fiction (1939-1948) through his editing of
Astounding Science Fiction
magazine and handling his stable of writers (Isaac Asimov, Robert A. Heinlein, and A. E. Van Vogt)—rejected Delany's novel
Nova
(1968) for serialization because it had a black main character. Campbell spurned
Nova
after Delany won two consecutive Nebula Awards for best novel in 1967 (
Babel-17
[1966]) and 1968 (
The Einstein Intersection
[1967]) simply because Delany was black. In fact, Campbell was publicly hostile to conceding “civil rights for African-Americans” according to Albert Berger (187). Likewise, Gary Westfahl reveals how everybody in the science fiction community knew how “Campbell was a racist, a bigot, a sexist, and an anti-Semite” (50). At that point in American history, Delany was forced to accept Campbell's racial intolerance in order to have a long and illustrious career.

The second occasion occurred when Isaac Asimov flippantly called Delany a Negro in a private conversation at the 1968 Nebula Awards Banquet. Context matters here, because Delany had just been pilloried by the award presenter (who had not yet read Delany's winning novel
The Einstein Intersection
) in front of science fiction's leading lights as well as the author's mother, sister, friend, and wife. Delany's short story “Aye, and Gomorrah…” (1967) won the next award to be presented at that ceremony, too. While everyone applauded Delany as he left the podium and made his way to his banquet table, Asimov pulled him aside, leaned in and stated, “‘You know, Chip, we only voted you those awards because you're a Negro…!'” (390) According to Delany, Asimov merely attempts to lighten the mood and ironize the tension with his well-known acerbic wit and really meant that race had nothing to do with Delany's victory, only the writing's high quality. Still, Delany never forgets this moment and recognizes that “the racial situation, permeable as it might sometimes seem (and it is, yes, highly permeable) is nevertheless your total surround” (391).

This notion of total surround applies to all people of color, particularly blacks in America. Delany's essay brought it home to me in stunning clarity. Consequently, I now understood what had happened to me in that English Philosophy Building classroom. This professor apparently did not realize the nature of his assault on my spirit, but I had yet another racial awakening and this time in the ivory tower of academia—the totality of this racial surround is profoundly real everywhere!

Delany's words proved the salve my nascent critical mind needed for recovery from this most bitter experience of my otherwise halcyon days on the U of I campus. “Racism and Science Fiction” changed the course of my graduate career. Truthfully, his brave decision to record these instances has clearly influenced generations of writers, readers, and scholars; it teaches us to stand up and speak out. Just consider his Clarion Writers' Workshop student Nalo Hopkinson, and the confrontational and instructional nature of her chapbook
Report from Planet Midnight
(2012).

I happened to be at the March 2010 International Conference of the Fantastic in the Arts, where Hopkinson first performed “Report from Planet Midnight” as the Guest of Honor speech. (In fact, I, along with Patricia Melzer and Kim Surkan, proposed the conference theme that year—Race and the Fantastic.) With a bunch of blue alien people/creature images from various films flashing on the screen behind her as she stood at the podium, Nalo looked up at us. Then her chin bounced of her collarbone and she was possessed by this alien ambassador. Here's a partial transcript of her speech:

Since none of the images of real people from your world show blue-skinned beings, we can only theorize about what these images symbolize or eulogise. Perhaps a race of yours that has gone extinct, or that self-destructed. Perhaps it is a race that has gone into voluntary seclusion, maybe as an attempt at self-protection. The more pessimistic among us fear that this is a race being kept in isolation, for what horrendous planet-wide crime we shudder to imagine; or that it is a race of earlier sentient beings that you have exterminated. Whatever the truth of the matter, we're sure you realize why it is of extreme importance to us to learn whether imprisonment, extinction, and mythologizing are your only methods of dealing with interspecies conflict.

Here are some of the other communications with which we're having trouble:

You say: “I'm not racist.”

Primary translation: “I can wade through feces without getting any of it on me.”

Secondary translation: “My shit don't stink.” (36)

I was riveted by her performance and by her courage in delivering this fierce message to those particular members of the science fiction community, a largely white audience of writers and scholars. Surely some people did not understand the importance of this moment, but she received a standing ovation. And I believe that somehow, in some kind of way, Samuel R. Delany laid the groundwork for that moment.

*Of all Delany's writing “Racism and Science Fiction” unquestionably has had the greatest, profoundest, most emotional impact on me as a human being. But the essay which yielded the most influence over my critical thinking is “About 5,750 Words,” published in Delany's first critical text,
The Jewel-Hinged Jaw: Notes on the Language of Science Fiction
(1977). I return again and again in my own thinking and scholarship to his notion of subjunctivity, the word-by-word corrective reading process used to analyze the literal metaphors of science fiction. Delany models a literalized metaphor with the sentence “The red sun is high, the blue low,” by examining each word of this sentence through subjunctivity and how it only makes sense as science fiction (
Jewel
7). He does the same thing with the image of a “winged dog” and the images of other writers like Heinlein and Philip K. Dick (
Jewel
12). As Delany argues, “The particular verbal freedom of SF, coupled with the corrective process [subjunctivity] that allows the whole range of the physically explainable universe, can produce the most violent leaps of imagery. For not only does it throw us worlds away, it specifies how we got there” (
Jewel
12). In this respect, comprehending science fiction comes down to understanding its language and how words are used differently from mainstream literature to create alien environments. Delany's critical writing functions as one of my ideal sounding boards for my explorations of race and racism in an otherwise white genre in my own book
Race in American Science Fiction
(2011).