All about Skin

All about Skin

Short Fiction
by Women of Color

Edited by

Jina Ortiz

and

Rochelle Spencer

The University of Wisconsin Press

 

 

Publication of this volume has been made possible, in part, through support from the Anonymous Fund of the College of Letters and Science at the University of Wisconsin–Madison.

 

 

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Copyright © 2014 by the Board of Regents of the University of Wisconsin System

Foreword © 2014 by Helena María Viramontes

All rights reserved. Except in the case of brief quotations embedded in critical articles and reviews, no part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, transmitted in any format or by any means—digital, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording, or otherwise—or conveyed via the Internet or a website without written permission of the University of Wisconsin Press. Rights inquiries should be directed to
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.

Printed in the United States of America

 

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

All about skin: short fiction by women of color / edited by Jina Ortiz and Rochelle Spencer.

pages       cm

ISBN 978-0-299-30194-1 (pbk.: alk. paper)

ISBN 978-0-299-30193-4 (e-book)

1. Short stories—Women authors.    2. Short stories—Minority authors.

3. Minority women in literature.

I. Ortiz, Jina, editor of compilation.     II. Spencer, Rochelle (Writer), editor of compilation.

PN6120.92.W65A45           2014

823´.01089287—dc23

2014007452

Foreword

Helena María Viramontes

Preface

Rochelle Spencer

Acknowledgments

Introduction

Part 1 Coming-of-Age

Aida

Patricia Engel

Fairness

Chinelo Okparanta

Pita Delicious

ZZ Packer

Candidate

Amina Gautier

How to Leave the Midwest

Renee Simms

The Perfect Subject

Ramola D

A Different Story

Ivelisse Rodriguez

Part 2 Reinvention

American Child

Manjula Menon

Arcadia

Hope Wabuke

Sirens

Joshunda Sanders

Just the Way She Does the Things

Jennine Capó Crucet

The Great Pretenders

Ashley Young

A Penny, a Pound

Princess Joy L. Perry

Part 3 Borderlands

The Accidents of a Veronica

Toni Margarita Plummer

The Rapture

Emily Raboteau

The Lost Ones

Aracelis González Asendorf

Noelia and Amparo

Glendaliz Camacho

A Strange People

Mecca Jamilah Sullivan

Lillian Is an Ordinary Child

Metta Sáma

Entropy 20:12

Learkana Chong

Beautiful Things

Jacqueline Bishop

Lady Chatterley's Mansion

Unoma Azuah

All about Skin

Xu Xi

Contributors

Helena María Viramontes

In the years charting the cultural shifts forced upon the country by the waves of activism and political movements of the sixties and seventies, we women writers of color came to understand that publishing houses remained slow in capturing the ever-changing, ever-inquiring flux of the times, nor were they interested in publishing our blooming
flor y canto
of resistance—our lyricisms performed in revolutionary celebration, our artistic offerings of flowering hope. In those years, one could hardly find a collection of women short fiction writers, much less women writers of color. Case in point: On my book shelf, I have two collections discovered and purchased as a feminism student and undergraduate attending Immaculate Heart College, the first one titled
By and about Women: An Anthology of Short Fiction
, edited by Beth Kline Schneiderman and published in 1973. Of the nineteen fine women writers selected for inclusion, only one, Gwendolyn Brooks, is a writer of color. Also published in 1973 was the collection
No More Masks! An Anthology of Poems by Women
, edited by Florence Howe and Ellen Bass, which was more inclusive, with a number of African American poets selected for inclusion, undoubtedly reflecting the black/white racial representational binary of the times. I did not fault these editors, and in fact pay tribute to their efforts. In 1973 I was extremely content to have discovered these books and was grateful for such important contributions to my well being as a woman beginning her overtures into literature.

And yet …

Where were the others of color? In those years of erasure, we women writers wrote poems on the backs of market receipts in the privacy of a bathroom, mimeographed stories to mail to one another, developed support groups for self-expression with such seriousness we bent our lives into midnights so as to light our world with words, because most of us believed, especially we writers of color, that our lives depended on it. This has surely become a cliché, but people, many of them women, were being beaten in the streets, stripped of their dignity, spit upon with unashamed hatred, bludgeoned with unfair laws, yet maintained a profound belief in our ability to change our cultural, racial, sexual, economic, and judicial injustices with words and practice. Since telling stories was our first engagement in democracy, we women writers of color are, have been, and will continue to be instrumental in the public area of labor strikes and civil rights; we maintain half of the ethnicity-identified self-determination and continue to fearlessly challenge the inhospitable heterosexual norms, providing consciousness-raising empowerment for past, present, and future generations. Little wonder why the seminal and game-changing collection edited by Cherríe Moraga and Gloria Anzaldúa was titled
This Bridge Called My Back
. For we knew, we women writers of color, that we could create the bridge and have the resiliency to brave the treacherous accountability for the spiritual health of our neighborhood, our community, our country, and our planet.

I am pleased and profoundly excited by another seminal and game-changing collection edited by Rochelle Spencer and Jina Ortiz and titled
All about Skin: Short Fiction by Women of Color
. Not since D. Soyini Madison's
The Woman That I Am: The Literature and Culture of Contemporary Women of Color
(1994) has there been, for me, such a remarkable and wonderful collection of mostly younger, vibrant, and astonishing voices aptly deserving of their many awards and recognition. I am so very proud and honored to be a small part of this oasis of literary work, one that cannot, will not, be permitted to be ignored, erased, or forgotten.

Many of these stories are written from the fringes of life and time with such searing imagination, it is a testament to the talent of these women writers of color—they know how to solder their words into steel girders. Through their stories, they make us live in another's
feel
of life, in another person's shoes, because they invest the inertia of words with active meaning so as to experience an empathy crucial for our survival. They are talented writers who build on sensory architecture, of the divine detail, of the forensic historical research with an ice axe of language intent on shattering Kafka's frozen seas, creating an intimacy like no other. Here Paul Auster's observation of fiction is useful: “Every novel is an equal collaboration between the writer and the reader, and it is the only place in the world where two strangers can meet on terms of absolute intimacy.” Empathy is the glue that makes the words of a writer stick to the reader, and in this era of globalization, understanding and feeling the life of another through narratives is a nonviolent act of sheer humane importance. That these women writers of color are brave enough to open up to others with their stories—opening up to those who are different from us, those we do not know or who cannot recognize our cultural terms—is also apprehending that these others, the readers, are themselves open to intimate interactions. We need to imagine so much more of this. To share stories then, imbrications then, pain and suffering then, but also hope then, in life as in art, is what these wonderful women writers of color celebrate with fearlessness, audacity, and beauty.

Rochelle Spencer

Short stories are not mini-novels. The condensed nature of the short story forces us to focus on a single moment in time, and if a story soars or falters, its achievement lies in its ability to capture a moment of understanding, that moment when the story's protagonist (and subsequently, its reader) becomes wise yet vulnerable—and breathtakingly lucid.

This isn't easy. The contrasting tensions inherent in the short story—a tightly controlled text that explores the human experience in one ephemeral moment—mean that it seldom reads like a novel. A genius (see Toni Morrison's “Recitatif,” Louise Erdrich's “Shamengwa,” or Paule Marshall's “Reena”) may produce a short fiction that spans multiple years and generations, but for most writers, the short story is a narrow, highly specific genre. Short stories are not mini-novels; they are little moments of grace.

As MFA programs proliferate, short stories' tightness and complexity have made them the dominant form for teaching fiction. Seemingly, the relative ease of writing a short story, as compared with that of writing a longer work, would make it a good choice for the working-class writer. Yet, because it is notoriously difficult to sustain a career writing short fiction, achieving mastery at the short story has become almost a luxury. In the 1970s, Toni Cade Bambara, author of the brilliant short story collection
Gorilla, My Love
, spoke often of the pressures she faced to complete her novel
The Salteaters
; more than thirty years later, the sundry writers publishing short fiction on personal blogs and websites have made it even more difficult to achieve acclaim as a writer of short stories.

Complicating matters even more for emerging short fiction writers is the fact that being anthologized is a common way of gaining recognition, and spaces in these anthologies are, of course, limited. Toni Morrison's essay “Black Matters” from her landmark study
Playing in the Dark
suggests not only that writers write about people like themselves but also that readers are drawn to protagonists who look like them. And, in a society that isn't yet postracial, this often leaves writers of color in marginalized spaces.

These odds are even more daunting for women writers of color, as traditionally, women writers have also received less attention than have male writers. (Every year, the website Vidaweb.org's “The Count” has regularly pointed out the disparity of women authors who are reviewed or published in prestigious outlets such as the
New York Review of Books, The Atlantic
, and
Harper's
.) Thus, because of limited places for publication, an anthologized story written by a woman of color is often left with the burden of representing an entire population.

Jina Ortiz and I have seen up-close how damaging this “single story” phenomenon can be. Years ago, as a young writing instructor at Spelman College, a historically black women's college, I heard a student complain that “all black women writers write the same story.” My student's attitude wasn't unique; many of her classmates felt the same way: they truly believed that there really
was
one black experience or one woman experience worth writing about, for in their high schools, that was all they had been taught. Despite being female and of color themselves, they had rarely been exposed to multicultural writing by women authors.

As new writing instructors, Jina and I found ourselves looking for anthologies featuring the short fiction of contemporary women writers of color and were at a loss. We knew meaningful fiction was being written—and garnering prizes (we were acquainted with two young writers, Emily Raboteau and ZZ Packer, whose short stories had been reprinted in
Best American Short Stories
)—but it was difficult to locate this work in one anthology.

It is one thing to complain about a problem, but it's another to do something about it. On a sleepy Saturday morning, Jina and I made a list of both brilliant women of color who were in love with the short story and the publications that rightly championed their work. We e-mailed these people and places and asked them to send us work that was contemporary, exciting, and a celebration of the short story's revelatory nature.