FORMER EDITORIAL
1st Dec 2005
The Fiction that Urban Forgot
This month saw me return to urban fiction, a topic which for some reason -like a good book- I can’t seem to put down.
Perhaps it’s because I keep asking myself; what’s it all about?
Or perhaps, it’s because even when I do take a closer look, I still don’t entirely get it –that’s my confession for the month.Amongst the discoveries I have made is the very contemporary nature of the term, spanning as it does 1990 to the present. And yes, in 1992 Victor Headley's Yardie, published by Steve Pope & Dotun Adebayo of XPress, really did open a new chapter in black fiction.
Yardie, was the first of a set of novels featuring black characters, almost to the exclusion of everyone else. As the marketing hype might have it:
‘books for black people, featuring the lives of black people, written and produced by black people.’
The reality was probably different. Certainly, new authors emerged and some had lived the life they wrote about; a black readership was recaptured, as novels were promoted on the streets, in clubs and other environs, mirroring the places they portrayed. But, though new and appealing, these books were often written by men, had crime as a central theme and used morality as a counter, stressing the negative impact of bad choices on the family.
If crime, sex and violence occupy one genre in the field of Urban Fiction – gangsta fiction you might call it -, another genre contains books about relationships, sex and love. Baby Father by Patrick Augustus, first published in 1994, also by XPress, is a ground breaking example of the type (we could call it urban love). These books go much further in recognising the predominantly female readership of Urban Fiction, tackling relationships between men and women, the wider female role in society and at home, and the challenges modern times pose to men. xpress.co.ukAnd so it is that 13 years later in the UK, the term Urban Fiction has been slowly established, albeit heavily associated with a single publishing house.
In the United States, which boasts a far more aggressive commercial culture, it’s slightly different. "I was in the US recently and saw for myself the rapid expansion of so-called 'urban fiction'. I think, originally, the term described a type of fiction emerging from the African American inner cities, that was gritty, immediate, 'street', and both produced and distributed very quickly, almost reminiscent of 'pulp' fiction." Says Vastiana Belfon, Publisher at Brown Skin Books.
Vastiana feels, "the great benefit was the democratisation of publishing. From my point of view, it was great to see literature on sale by street vendors on the Harlem sidewalks. The phenomenon really seemed to be opening the publishing and bookselling industry to the masses."
Despite this, she doesn’t feel that the US is ahead of Britain. "While in the US, I constantly felt that this was not such a new phenomenon for us British. After all, what many see as 'urban fiction' is just the material that a publisher like The X Press has been producing for years." brownskinbooks.comOmar Tyree, author of Flyy Girl (1997, Simon & Schuster) and 12 other novels and who describes himself as, "..the author of books that are meaningful to the community, what we need to learn in life and understand about ourselves," has another view.
Omar defines Urban Fiction as, "…created written material produced over the last 20 years from the cultural perspective of American blacks and latinos who live in big US cities."
He goes on to describe himself as, "the new God Father of Urban Fiction; before my books hit the scene in the early 90’s, dealing with the hip hop generation and culture you have to go back 30 years to Iceberg slim and Donald Goines. Flyy Girl and Capital City (1993, Conquering Books) are the books many new writers of urban will quote as the first they read."Perhaps both views are correct, in that the term does share commonalities between Britain and certain cities in the US. The difference merely being the explosion that’s taken place in the States, due to the faster commercialisation (multiple publishing houses), and the greater establishment of self-publishing (more people doing it for themselves).
But though a Brand has been established (fresh, new, black), some - Mike Phillips (London Crossings, 2001, Continuum International Publishing Group) for example - have argued that the label, aside from raising the profile of black writing as a marketable force, has seen the peddling of negative stereo-types about black lives.
"..more recently, though, the term seems to have been taken over and used to cover any African American publishing so that many of the chain stores have sections headed 'urban fiction' that encompass everything from Zadie Smith and Claude Brown to 'gangsta' fiction. Also, some of the literary agents I spoke to complained that, because so many of the mainstream publishers were jumping on the bandwagon - and there's a lot of money to be made - it was becoming difficult to sell any other type of African American writing." Comments Vastina.
To some extent, this is echoed by Emanuel Carpenter (author of A Job Ain’t Nothing But Work 2003, Publish America) who describes himself as a writer of multiple genres and isn’t particularly keen to have his work classified under any catch-all-banner. Emanuel’s novels have taken ‘real-life’ relationships between African-American men and women as a key theme.
"Nowadays urban fiction is all about street-lit and ‘you go girl’ books," he says, "perhaps, tomorrow it’ll be about other things,".that are of interest to people living in urban spaces. "My books aren’t street-lit and are probably the direct opposite of ‘you go girl’ novels," Emanuel claims, going on to describe his work as appealing to those truly interested in the relationships, ups, downs and all of African-Americans. emanuelcarpenter.com
So perhaps whatever we discover about urban fiction, it’s important to remember it represents just a movement in a many coloured and shaded collection of contemporary fiction.
Brown Skin Books, for example, is about to break the mould once again, with its new series of erotic thrillers due out 2006. Not to mention the many authors whose works get up and stand up for themselves. Connie Briscoe, Sisters and Lovers, 1996, Harper Collins© editor@unheardwords.com, 2005 (all rights reserved)
