David Mura - A Strangers Journey: Race, Identity, and Narrative Craft in Writing

A Strangers Journey

A Strangers Journey

RACE, IDENTITY, AND NARRATIVE CRAFT IN WRITING

David Mura

Portions of this book have appeared in the following publications:

Gulf Coast Literary Journal, Kartika Review, The AWP Chronicle, Journal of Creative Writing Studies, 2040 Review, GrubWrites, and on my blog, Secret Colors (blog.davidmura.com).

Rumi poem from Unseen Rain: Quatrains of Rumi, translated by John Moyne and Coleman Barks, 1986 by Coleman Barks. Reprinted by arrangement with The Permissions Company, Inc., on behalf of Shambhala Publications Inc., Boulder, Colorado, www.shambhala.com.

Writing and Reading Race, RIT Scholar Works 2016

2018 by the University of Georgia Press

Athens, Georgia 30602

www.ugapress.org

All rights reserved

Set in 10/13.5 Quadraat Regular

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Printed digitally

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

Names: Mura, David, author.

Title: A strangers journey : race, identity, and narrative craft in writing / David Mura.

Other titles: Race, identity, and narrative craft in writing

Description: Athens : The University of Georgia Press, 2018. | Includes bibliographical references.

Identifiers: LCCN 2017058467 | ISBN 9780820353685 (hardcover : alk. paper) | ISBN 9780820353463 (pbk. : alk. paper) | ISBN 9780820353456 (ebook)

Subjects: LCSH: Creative writing. | FictionTechnique. | Autobiography. | Literature and race.

Classification: LCC PN187 .M87 2018 | DDC 808.3dc23 LC record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2017058467

With great gratitude, for JAMES BALDWIN, LUCILLE CLIFTON, EDWARD SAID, and WAKAKO YAMAUCHI

The earliest essays in this book were written just before Barack Hussein Obama was elected president, bringing some deluded persons to declare a postracial America. I write this introduction just after the 2016 election, in a nation where Michael Brown and Ferguson, Freddie Gray, Baltimore, and Black Lives Matter are now juxtaposed against the rampant racism, xenophobia, religious bigotry, and sexism of Donald Trumps election.

How does a book on creative writing fit into such a context? Some might believe such matters have little to do with teaching creative writing. In part, I hope what Ive written here will convince such people to reexamine their beliefs.

The purpose of this book is to instruct writers about their craft, particularly fiction writers and writers of memoir as well as creative writing teachers. In composing the book, Ive considered how writers of color have altered our literary tradition and the ways writers practice their craft. One key shift has involved an increased focus on the issues of identity.

At the same time, many of the principles in this book are timeless, particularly in terms of narrative construction in fiction and memoir. And yet, in my instruction, Ive encountered many writers, even graduates from prestigious MFA programs, who have not been taught the basic elements of story.

The book also explores the newly evolved aesthetic principles of memoir, which has emerged in recent decades as an established genre. In the process, I examine how memoirists can learn from fiction and how fiction writers can learn from memoir.

To a large extent, these essays stem from my own experiences teaching at the Voices of Our Nations Arts Foundation (VONA), the Loft, and the Stonecoast MFA program. The book also reflects my work as a memoirist, fiction writer, and poet and the ways my writing has interrogated my own identity as a Sansei, a third-generation Japanese American.

In a sense, this book can be viewed as my third memoir, another recounting of my own strangers journey, to use a term from James Baldwin. Significantly, as I have undergone my own personal journey concerning my identity, the society in which I live has also been undergoing transformations regarding the issues of race and identity, not just within politics but perhaps even more so within culture and its practices.

To explain what I mean by this, let me cite Jeff Chang, the Asian American critic who wrote the hugely influential Cant Stop Wont Stop: A History of the Hip-Hop Generation. In his second book, Who We Be: The Colorization of America, Chang examines the issues of race over the last fifty years, the postcivil rights era, within the context of cultural change. The book explores moments like the Black Arts Movement, the advent of multiculturalism, and the so-called culture wars; the election of Obama and the proclamationand quick retractionof a postracial America; the shifts in demographics and immigration politics; battles over textbooks and ethnic studies; and the rise of hip-hop. Changs book is a must-read for anyone involved with the issues of race or culture. In his introduction, he writes:

Here is where artists and those who work and play in the culture enter. They help people to see what cannot yet be seen, hear the unheard, tell the untold. They make change feel not just possible, but inevitable. Every moment of major social change requires a collective leap of imagination. Change presents itself not only in spontaneous and organized expressions of unrest and risk, but in explosions of mass creativity.

So those interested in transforming society might assert: cultural change always precedes political change. Put another way, political change is the last manifestation of cultural shifts that have already occurred.

Sometime around 2040, the United States will no longer be a white majority country. No racial group will constitute the majority. Artists of color, who are re-creating the past, exploring the present, and creating the future, know what it means to be a racial minority in America. This knowledge is embedded within our identities, experiences, and imaginations; we speak and write from that knowledge. That knowledge is out there for white artists to share, but whether they will avail themselves of that knowledge is another question, one theyll have to answer if theyre going to prepare themselves for the America that is surely coming and is, in many ways, already here.

The most recent U.S. election bears strong evidence that a large number of whites still desperately cling to a national identity in which racism and the assertion of white dominance and supremacy remain the norm and in which sexism, homophobia, religious bigotry, and xenophobia are not just accepted but touted. Chang wrote Who We Be in the time of Obamas presidency, so in late November 2016, his prophecy about political change remains thata prophecy. But the work of artistsseeing the not yet seen, hearing the unheard, telling the untoldremains.

When I was younger, I was educated in an English PhD program where I read no writers of color, and the current literary issues arising from the increased diversity in American and world literature were not present. But as T. S. Eliot has instructed, each new work and author added to a tradition shifts our view of the whole tradition, alters our understanding of both the present and the past. This shift is occurring now both through the work of individual writers of color and through changes in our literary and intellectual paradigms.