Is American Fiction true to life? Yes, and Black British authors have some hair-raising stories of their own
During an early scene in acclaimed new film American Fiction, the protagonist Monk – played by Jeffrey Wright – wanders into a reading at a literary event by fellow author Sintara Golden (Issa Rae) of her new best seller We’s Lives in Da Ghetto.
Monk, who has just left his own sparsely attended panel, watches as a packed, mostly-white audience sit enraptured by Sintara’s words. “Yo Sharonda!,” Sintara begins, switching abruptly into a comically 'hood' drawl. “Girl, you be pregnant again?!” The camera slowly zooms into Monk’s face – his eyebrows crinkle, the sides of his mouth turn down. His disdain is silent, but evident.
The now Oscar-nominated film, former journalist Cord Jefferson’s directorial debut and based on Percival Everett’s 2001 novel Erasure, takes satirical aim at the publishing industry’s obsession with reducing Black writers to offensive clichés to pander to white audiences – as one character bluntly summarises, “white publishers feeding Black trauma porn”.
It follows Thelonious “Monk” Ellison, a jaded, middle-class Black novelist who rails against the industry’s elevation of books that peddle violence and present a monolithic view of Blackness over what he sees as his own more rarefied literary pursuits.
To prove his point, he mischievously writes his own 'ghetto' novel under a pseudonym, rampant with the most outrageous Black clichés he can think
