you’re f*cking unknowable!

on 'american fiction' (2024)

The time difference between my brother Robert Jones Jr and I meant his recommendation to watch American Fiction buzzed my Whatsapp at 3:24am. night-owl that I am, I was already awake to respond with gusto. I'd known of Percival Everett’s Erasure, but most recently (and funnily) it had been mentioned in a literary group-chat heavily populated with white writers.

With this context as the ignition, I suspect this is going to be less a review of American Fiction – a film that balances thought-provocation and entertainment with dope synchronicity – and more an unhinged rant about the movie’s inquiries – one distilled most concentratedly in the conversation between Sintara Golden (Issa Rae) and Monk (Jeffery Wright).

For those who haven’t seen it and wanna know what the hell I’m getting at: Cord Jefferson’s American Fiction follows Thelonious 'Monk' Ellison, a Black author and professor struggling to garner commercial success with his classically inflected prose. At the same time, Sintara Golden’s book, We’s Lives in Da Ghetto rises to popularity, motivating Monk to pen a piss-take novel called My Pafology. Monk masquerades as a wanted fugitive-cum-author under the pseudonym Stagg R. Leigh and, of course, his book immediately garners industry interest. At the same time, his lecturing life presents an opportunity to judge a prestigious book award… alongside Sintara. Stagg. R. Leigh’s book turns up in the judging process and becomes a point of contention between the judges.

Finally, Monk and Sintara find themselves in a room alone together.

Their conversation is the film’s true climax.

Sure you’re anticipating, wondering how the revelation of Monk’s fraudulence is gonna blow up in his face. But Monk spends so much of his time and energy being tortured by Sintara’s success, embittered by his own lack of it. A fat chunk of his frustration is towards the spun myths that the world abides by. and he’s the only one that can see through how fucked and flimsy they are. The singular genius shepherd condemned to a lifetime surrounded by illiterate sheep who won’t just listen to him.

If you’re any sort of artist, struggling in any sort of way – you’ll probably relate to Monk here. Gratitude is such an important, internal practice but not necessarily a bulletproof one. There will always be times when you look around and someone’s mid-work is getting recognition and you will question the taste-buds of everyone who allowed such midness to thrive.

Monk’s gripes are along such veins, though he is chiefly concerned with presentations of (anti-)Blackness, considering how we (Black people) are seen (by white people). He’s tired of Black stories as “trauma porn”. Sintara announces, “I don’t think there’s anything wrong with giving the market what it wants,” explaining that We’s Lives in Da Ghetto was cobbled from real-life interviews with people whose internal worlds truly look like her book. Monk expresses that we are more than tales of poverty, of rapping, of slavery, of murder by police brutality. That there is such potential of Black people in America, to which Sintara articulates the truly devastating line: “potential is what people see when they think what is in front of them isn’t good enough”.

Their discussion, whether at its natural end or not, is rendered unhaveable by another white judge returning to the room.

The re-entrance of a white person into the room is fascinating; how both characters recoil, mitigating their intensity, such a ubiquitous movement of resignation, recognisable even across the pond and i’ve been reflecting on this phenomena in the face of more Black creations entering the mainstream zeitgeist.

The truth is, Monk and Sintara needed more time to speak to one another without the suffocating atmosphere of white surveillance. Because there, are the only ways we can push past the gaze. A disembodied five minutes isn’t enough to reflect collectively, articulate meaningfully, to parry with one another, to burrow deep enough and find a necessary consensus. There is a version of the movie where Monk and Sintara are stuck together for 90+ minutes, confined to a tight-knit echo-chamber where they must candidly confront the advantages and pitfalls of their decided ideologies, rapping amongst themselves. how lovely it would be to see! In this hypothetical version of American Fiction, I’m reminded of Regina King’s One Night in Miami (2020).

Yet, there is an itchy feeling I get when it comes to the rising prominence in sharing experiences of such media.

Sometimes, when i’m at the theatre or the cinema or an art gallery watching a Black production, there is a palpable shift, where the art halts any pretence of universality and specifies its Blackness, as if the language dial turns to “i’m speaking to my niggas now” and i’ve observed in myself, quite a few times, a discomfort from being in proximity to white audience members when that happens, having this profound and intimate connection with a piece of art and looking around to see nods of agreement that don’t really get it, can never really get it. I can't lie! I get perturbed.

Monk and Sintara’s conversation is that nugget of hyper-Blackness that I just… wanna hide. I want to protect it. I don’t wanna take it outside. There's a reason One Night in Miami takes place in an undisclosed motel room. The concealment keeps it safe, keeps it at home (home being a literal space of Black occupancy or any secure location populated with trusted people), unmarred by the weathering of oppressor logics because it’s way richer when it’s not exposed to such air.

It is likely my fear of theft – or maybe my understanding that theft is less a matter of morality and more of opportunity in the logical mind of whiteness – that is responsible for my squeamishness, because such existential experiences of theft are what both of these characters, Monk and Sintara, are articulating about their relationship to a fundamental truth: that the distorted lens of the white gaze renders Blackness its own fiction.

At its most aggressive, that fiction is a stereotype.

Picture: a Black person eating a leg of chicken. a persistent stereotype. how are we, the ones reduced with our fullness “taken away”, meant to combat this? some might say not to eat chicken in places where someone white might see. some may say, “fuck it, eat the chicken!” – a declaration of non-caring that immediately dies in the mouth because even in vocalising, even in conceptualising consumption as an act of rebellion is an expenditure of energetic currency on an action that requires ZERO rebellion! How exhausting! To have to politicise the act of eating! Of yamming down something fucking delicious!

the true freedom arrives from a genuinely achieved carelessness, one where the intellectual understanding that the fictions held by others aren’t real can prevail so thoroughly that you can just be present in the act of eating for the sake of eating, you can be fully immersed in the art you’re publicly experiencing and maintaining only an intimate connection with it, truly unconcerned with the evil eye that might be on you or the (mis)judgements of others. “being unbothered” as a spiritual practice.

These things shouldn’t have to be a journey of divine enlightenment. but they are.

American Fiction considers how one exists, should exist, or portray existence within the heart of empire. How do we wish to be presented? what is the price of those presentations? What does the “we” even look like?

And in the blurred background of these inquiries, unsnarling at their question marks; and the multiverse of answers whose timelines will never truly be solved, and never fully satisfy you, or me, or any Black person – is a love story, the sort of love story that might be the greatest one ever told if the camera just nudged itself towards the sunshine of Lorraine (Myra Lucretia Taylor) and Maynard (Raymond Anthony Thomas) for a little longer.

These two old family friends of Monk who are unconcerned with his honourable struggle to elevate the perception of Black people in the white imagination’s panopticon, too affectionate in their bones to let Monk’s brother Clifford (Sterling K. Brown) squirm in the homophobic shame he inherited from his mother (Leslie Uggams) and too caring in their values to let the unresolved uncertainty of his father’s (non)acceptance linger in their presence.

It is in their micro-romance that Monk and Sintara’s philosophies braid, the need for resolution dissolves in the eyes that Maynard has for Lorraine when he lays them on her for the first time in lord knows how long, while they tenderise the air between one another with oh so few words, brimming with the Janusian wonder of a fond history and a promising future. This is where none of the questions matter, none of the perceptions, none of the protections from theft. Monk is right. Sintara is right. But none of them are as right as Lorraine and Maynard – who are just living, man. Just loving. And that’s the beautiful truth of the whole thing.