Counternarratives
by John Keene
New Directions
978-0811224345
320 pages, hardcover, $24.95
The vast body of queer literature subsumes themes of otherness, identity, and clashes between marginalized groups and oppressive forces within society. As a subgenre of queer literature, black queer literature commixes the traits of the former with those present within African American literature: colonization, racism, and emancipation most notably. It is from these traditions that John Keene’s new book, Counternarratives: Stories and Novellas, emerges. Counternarratives draws immediate comparison to the works of Ismael Reed, Samuel R. Delany, E. L. Doctorow, and Jorge Luis Borges, writers whose dexterous prose and agile plot twisting styles rebelled against conventional prose and gave future writers carte blanche to play with form, style, and narrative. The chain of counternarratives contained within Keene’s rich text span the course of several centuries and locations within Afro-diaspora. The slave trade, the Civil War, and prominent figures of the Harlem Renaissance—familiar sites of political and artistic investigation within African American literature—take presence within this sturdy text. From the sequence of these vantage points, Keene wrests narrative power from the grasp of patriarchal culture and tosses it into the hands of racial and sexual minorities. The painstakingly detailed works within Keene’s text, thick with centuries of historical, literary, and artistic artifacts, prompts readers to open themselves to the infinite realities thriving within counternarrative.
As a writer, Keene revels in the fertile landscape of history. Drawing upon newspaper articles, interrogations, and a host of other primary historical documents, Keene deftly merges the historical with the fictive in his works, calling into the question Western culture’s collective understanding of history and the authors of the historical narratives lauded and reproduced throughout Western culture. What Keene constructs in Counternarratives is a weighty, cerebral, yet thriving project of cultural reclamation, one that all groups that exist within the periphery of marginalization and beyond the rigid boundaries of expected or and accepted prose can find their mirror and gain from its reflection.
Historical retelling, the act of seizing upon common narratives and reinterpreting them through the gaze and voice of those deemed subaltern, is itself an act of queering, an act of rebellion and reclamation. This idea permeates each of the stories in Counternarratives, yet finds its greatest expression in “Rivers,” a story told from the first person perspective of Jim, the second half of Mark Twain’s American literature’s iconic duo from the classic novel The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn. Older and scarred from the ravages of slavery and his eventual escape to freedom, Jim confronts an adult Huckleberry Finn in an effort to gain answers and satisfaction from the boy, now young man, who represents a system of oppression that consigned him to bondage before he gained to courage to escape. Their reunion lays bare the staggering complex of feelings and ideas associated with the primary text, the characters that inhabit it, and readers’ historical rendering of both the novel and the era from which these characters emerged.
Keene—whose previous work Annotations merged poetry and prose to create a work that is both meditative and illuminative—drops his readers into the middle of uncharted territory, surging readers through the sweep of Western history. Much like the characters in Counternarratives’ first offering, a tale of colonization and enslavement that catapults readers back to seventeenth century Brazil, this purposeful and well-rendered collection exhorts readers to empower themselves not only through the imaginative and skillfully crafted pages of its text, but through investigations of their own narratives.
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Jarrett Neal is the author of What Color Is Your Hoodie? Essays on Black Gay Identity, recently released from Chelsea Station Editions. He earned a BA in English from Northwestern University and an MFA in Writing from the School of the Art Institute of Chicago. His fiction, poetry, and essays have appeared in Chelsea Station, The Gay and Lesbian Review, Requited Journal, The Good Men Project, and other publications, including the Lambda Literary Award-nominated anthologies For Colored Boys Who Have Considered Suicide When the Rainbow Is Still Not Enough and Black Gay Genius: Answering Joseph Beam’s Call. He lives in Oak Park, IL.