OU blog

Personal Blogs

New photo

Steve’s Bookers: Paul Beatty THE SELLOUT

Visible to anyone in the world
Edited by Steve Bamlett, Tuesday, 9 Aug 2016, 15:06

This is difficult, because despite my total agreement with the critical positivity surrounding this book, I found it hard to read. That may be, I think, either because I have a poor sense of humour (and I have to admit I couldn’t even read Russell Kane’s novel about the nature of humour despite being a 'fan') or  - because this book very correctly designates me as not its audience.

Near the end, a black comedian doing ‘stand-up’ in a club notices that his humour is being enjoyed by a white couple. Whilst Beatty’s narrator tries to explain, the comedian turns on the couple:

Do I look like I’m fucking joking with you? This shit ain’t for you. Understand?

And maybe, it’s true what Beatty says: ‘if white people didn’t feel the need to sit up front all the damn time it never would have happened.’

Here is a book that looks very directly at the functions humour serves in divided societies and why we continue to have jokes about black people, Jewish people, older people and gay people. And, it is difficult to ‘laugh’ at the exploits of this narrator, who takes on his father’s role of serving humour and counselling (He calls himself the ‘nigger-whisperer’) to an oppressed group, you might have thought would see their situation as something that is absolutely NOT ‘funny’.

And, it reminds you of James Baldwin – ‘Giovanni’s Room’ (the gay novel) mentioned on p. 130 – and the agony and anger of his response to the oppression he lived with all his life. Yet to convey agony through humour (and people seem to think this is what the book does) walks a tight-rope. The dilemma is picked up in a political meeting wherein segregation, against white people, is re-introduced. The narrator hears another black man shout: ‘Nigger, whose side you on’ (254).

Yet the book is about, in some way, the persistence of ‘sides’ and the dangers for the oppressed of forgetting that or accepting a fantasy of progress to integration (as I think happens in Reeves’ contribution to this year’s Booker list). This an edgy book about representations of black and white that are not comfortable for anyone.

The white couple watching humour of ‘unmitigated blackness’ seem to expect of the black comedian that he represent racism as nothing really to do with them and perhaps as just a historical relic. The book SHOWS it is not – and, I have to admit, my discomfort with it (the N____ word onwards) is a reflection on this and my discomfort with what sometimes feels like collusion with it, despite my self-conscious ‘anti-racist’ values.

 I shouldn’t and mustn’t feel as if this book put me on the first row of readers who read it though.

If you are unsure whether you could feel as I do and you are white like me, try to have a straight-forward reaction to the black and white butterfly story of evolution told as a stand-up joke (p. 132) or know what to make of a point like: ‘maybe nonthreatening African-American actors are overrepresented on television. (139)’ You have to decide though! Do we need to be threatened? What does it mean to be threatened?

Most difficult of all is to know how to react to the funniest character of all in the novel, ‘Hominy Jenkins’, who played a subservient ‘Boy’ so long in so many films, his screen credits ‘read like a suicide note.’ This is said, at the moment when Hominy has nearly succeeded in hanging himself. Hominy loved those days of Alabama under segregation: ‘I’m your nigger for life, and that’s it.

And as an ‘older’ gay man’ (though white), I began to feel some of the pain of careless misrepresentation, with its recall of real Ku Klux Clan Alabama, in that scene, where: ‘I cut the self-lynching drama queen down’.

This is the best example of what the humour is like (though I’ve cut it – read the whole pp.74-75) and its proximity to Baldwinesque  pain. I wouldn’t honestly want to read it again and I don’t know what that says about me: Hominy is:

…, buck naked and hanging by his neck from a wooden beam. …The noose was a bungee cord stretched to its bike rack limit, so much so that if he’d worn anything bigger than a size-eight shoe, his toes would have touched the ground. … I had half a mind to let him die.

“Cut my penis off and stuff it in my mouth, “he rasped with what air was left in his lung.

Apparently, asphyxiation makes your penis hard, and his brown member sprouted like a twig from a frizzy snowball of shock-white pubic hair. Like an antique whirligig, he kicked about frantically as much from his simultaneous attempt to burn himself in effigy as from the paucity of oxygen reaching his already-Alzheimered brain. …Taking my sweet time, because I knew that racist Negro stereotypes, like Bebe’s kids, don’t die. They multiply.

Beatty’s fans compare him to Johnathan Swift – and, if I could read Swift either, I’d agree. To see the need to change we need to feel the cruelty of what we are dealing with in the present moment, as, indeed, Swift knew.

This is brilliant but ….. can I bear that it and ‘he’ pluck’:  ‘out (my) subconscious and beat (me) silly with it, not until (I am) unrecognizable, but until (I am) recognizable’ (286). The ugliness of racism we inherit – but let’s face it in ourselves -  PERHAPS we also sustain it. But, yet again, is this just showing off a white man’s ‘sensitivity’ as if it were what avoiding racism was all about! Oh, dear!!!!

All the best

Steve


Permalink Add your comment
Share post