by Charing Ball
As a teenager I dabbled a little – okay a lot – in what is now referred to as Street Lit. Back then, I really didn’t view books about urban life as separate from traditional forms of African-American literature. For me, they were black books by black authors and that was good enough for me.
Nevertheless, I can remember fondly those times that I would sit in my bedroom, reading books by Omar Tyree. My favorite had to be Flyy Girl, which was about a sassy, hip teenage girl from Philly who had a thing for boys, hanging out in the streets, hip-hop and more boys. As an urban youth who lived in the same neighborhood as the main character Tracey Ellison, who talked the same street lingo as she did and who even walked the same hallways of a high school she was said to have graduated, I could appreciate seeing at least a small portion of myself reflected on the pages of the book.
Prior to my foray into Street Lit, reading mostly involved whatever novels were available on my mother’s bookshelves, which included the works of Terry McMillan, E. Lynn Harris and Eric Jerome Dickey. And although I enjoyed hearing the tales of affluent black people, jet-setting around the world with fabulous careers, Flyy Girls and stories like that were more relatable to me – after all, Philadelphia is no Hamptons.
Apparently, I am not alone in my appreciation of the genre as Sonia Sanchez, as noted in a recent interview for The Root, expressed her delight that people are not only reading, but writing Street Lit. She said, “I think reading is better than watching the “idiot box” because what it says is that the spirit of fire and the spirit of words resides in all of us, and we are going to express it in many ways.”
Yet, even with the ringing endorsement from the literature world’s most prolific writer, Street Lit (Urban Lit, Ghetto fiction or the countless other names it is now known by) still remains one of the most contentious as well as the most profitable genres around. Today, the genre dominates eight spots on the African American Literature Book Club top 20 list for June 2010 and held spots on the best sellers list for 2009.
Writers such as Teri Woods, Miasha Coleman, K’wan and Shannon Holmes have been plucked from the literal bowels of African American sections of chain-bookstores to not only outsell classics black authors such as Toni Morrison and Richard Wright but even more mainstream authors such as Dan Brown. And in a time when brick and mortar bookstores are slowly becoming a thing of the past, a number of black-owned bookstores have been able to keep the lights on thanks to the demands for Street Lit.
But the genre does have its naysayers, mainly from other African American writers, who display outright animosity towards some of the content themes, which includes hustlers, pimps, thugs, hood rats and baby mamas. In an 2008 op-ed piece in the Washington Post, Bernice McFadden, author of Sugar, spoke about how more celebrated and better verse writers have been pushed for some of the negative images of the community. “Mainstream publishing houses contort themselves to acquire books that glorify wanton sex, drugs and crime. This fiction, known as street-lit or hip-hop fiction, most often reinforces the stereotypical trademarks African Americans have fought hard to overcome,” she said.
Poor grammar and editing as well as the cover art of most of these novels, which often includes scantily clad women, draped over cars and bushels of money, admittedly are less to be desired. However what many of its detractors fail to realize is that often times than most, the genre displays a street sensibility and language, which is often heard throughout these urban environments, where the stories themselves are set.
Not everyone is a black scholar from an Ivy League University, writing about Toni Morrison’s Womanist Discourse in The Bluest Eye. Some within the community are everyday blue-collar folks on welfare with prison records and baby mama drama. They may not possess the academic flare of many celebrated black writers but they do have a pen, some paper and a juicy story to tell. So what is so wrong with showing the full range of our diverse experiences within pages of a book?
Perhaps many of the writers complaining about the lack of support from mainstream publishing companies should pay attention to the entrepreneurial spirit exhibited by many of these Street Lit authors, who have been able to self-published, hustle thousands of copies of their books at every street festival, bus stop and barber shop and beauty salon before cutting lucrative deals with more established publishers. Some like Vicki Stringer, founder of Triple Crown Publications, have used Street Lit as a way to find more positive alternatives than the life they once had in the streets.
And as Sanchez said, the greatest reason to support the genre is it gets people reading and writing. People just like my sister-in-law, who is not only a devoted reader of Street Lit novels, but has taken to penning her own novel as well. Like many of the characters in the books, her background is one filled with hardship and the kind of craziness that residing in North Philly public housing could only deliver. And much like the writers who created the characters, she was able to direct her anguish and triumph onto paper.
Besides the writing, she has hired her own editor, produced her own book cover and already has two local black-owned bookstores lined up to distribute her work. Not bad for someone who hadn’t finished high school.
