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 Posted: Wed 23 Mar 2005 18:39 Post subject: Ghettoizing literature |
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| Quote: | Posted on Sun, Mar. 20, 2005
Identity refracted through the lens of fiction
By Amy Chen
CONTRA COSTA TIMES
EMILY RABOTEAU loathes Cabbage Patch Kids.
When Raboteauwas in third grade, her parents gave her two for Christmas -- one that was black like her father, the other white like her mother.
"Kids would ask 'Why do you have a black doll?' as if it were something to be ashamed about. I ended up hating both dolls," says Raboteau, now 28 and the author of "The Professor's Daughter."
Raboteau relives her sense of shame and search for acceptance through the character of Emma Boudreaux, the daughter of a black Princeton University professor and a white mother.
In the first chapter, 8-year-old Emma accompanies her mother on a last-minute quest for Stork Baby, the must-have toy of the holiday season.
The white dolls have a two-week waiting list, a Toys "R" Us clerk tells them. The black dolls are in storage.
"It didn't seem like they were as good," Raboteau writes.
As with Emma, Raboteau has struggled to find her niche.
"My book wasn't around when I needed to read it, but maybe it might help people now who are wondering 'Where do I fit in a society when I'm not categorically black or white?'" Raboteau says during a recent stop in San Francisco to promote her novel.
Outsider mentality
Raboteau's battle to belong started early.
As a professor's daughter raised in Princeton, N.J., Raboteau says her light complexion and wavy hair "made people uneasy because they couldn't pigeonhole me. I always had a sense of being watched and observed whenever I was out with my family ... I had kids in class ask me what it's like to have a black father, as if there was something wrong with that. I started to think there was something wrong with me."
The outsider mentality followed her from high school to college. While majoring in English at Yale University, Raboteau focused on studying African-American literature. As in high school, Raboteau flourished academically, but floundered socially.
"It was hard to feel like I belonged to the black community because I didn't really look black," she says.
After graduating in 1998, Raboteau enrolled at New York University to earn her master of fine arts in creative writing.
Her short story "Bernie and Me" won the 2001 Chicago Tribune's Nelson Algren Award for Short Fiction and attracted an agent's attention.
She graduated in 2002, spending four months the following summer in Brazil to finish expanding the story into a novel.
In "The Professor's Daughter," Emma analyzes her biracial background while burdened by a family secret: A lynch mob killed her paternal grandfather when her father was still a boy.
Decades later, Emma's father ditches her mother for a black graduate student. Then Bernie, Emma's older brother and best friend, electrocutes himself and falls into a coma. Her mother wallows in depression, and Emma falls apart before learning how to piece herself back together.
Where fact ends
Readers often ask Raboteau how much she based her novel on reality.
Raboteau explains that her father really is a Princeton professor, but has never run off with a student. She has an older brother and two younger brothers, none of whom have been in a coma like Bernie. Her grandfather was murdered, but the details of his death remain a mystery.
"I feel like what I wrote was very true, even though I made a lot of it up," Raboteau says. "I feel like in the end, if the story is amazing, it shouldn't matter how much is fact or fiction."
Even so, Raboteau did not let her parents read the novel until she finished writing it. "I was afraid they would disown me," she says, laughing. "I think every parent's worst fear is that their kid will grow up and write a book that will air the family's dirty laundry."
Raboteau, who is single, now teaches creative writing at City College of New York in Harlem. Not long after Sept. 11, 2001, Raboteau exited a subway station in Brooklyn on her way home. Out of nowhere, a man threw a glass bottle at her, striking her in the head and drawing blood.
"He thought I was Muslim and told me in expletive terms to get out of the country," Raboteau says. "It was a scary time, not just because of buildings collapsing but also because people were afraid of me."
Obstacle course
As with the Cabbage Patch Kids incident, Raboteau fictionalized the post-Sept. 11 confrontation in her book.
"Being light-skinned, this was my first time with racial profiling," she says. "I didn't enjoy it, but I'm glad it happened. Now I can empathize with the countless times my father has been pulled over."
With her first novel now in bookstores, Raboteau has discovered another obstacle. She laments how booksellers are shelving "The Professor's Daughter" as African-American interest, a category she thinks should not even exist.
"It's a way of ghettoizing literature," Raboteau says. "You don't see a section for Caucasian literature ... That brand is exactly what I'm arguing against in this book. It's a form of institutional racism. These are the kinds of things people don't question."
But in the six years it took to write "The Professor's Daughter," Raboteau has finally concluded that there is not something wrong with her as her childhood classmates once made her believe.
"Although I still get asked the question 'What are you?' it no longer bothers me as much," Raboteau says. "I realize the question itself is silly."
Reach Amy Chen at achen@cctimes.com or 925-977-8471.
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