All about Skin (2 page)

And so
All about Skin
was born.

Special thanks to Opal Moore, Maria Acosta Cruz, Sandra Govan, Veronica Watson, Sharan Strange, Winston Napier, Kathleen Cleaver, our parents, our mentors from our MFA programs (Solstice of Pine Manor College and New York University), and to the following publications:

 

Epigraph: “Introduction,” copyright 1999 by Amy Tan, from
The Best American Short Stories
(Houghton Mifflin Harcourt, 1999). Reprinted by permission of Houghton Mifflin Company Publishing Company. All rights reserved.

“Aida,” copyright 2012 by Patricia Engel. First published in
Harvard Review
43 (Winter 2012).

“Fairness,” copyright 2012 by Chinelo Okparanta. First published in
Subtropics
14 (Spring/Summer 2012). Reprinted in
Happiness, Like Water
, copyright 2013 by Chinelo Okparanta (Houghton Mifflin Harcourt, 2013). Reprinted by permission of Houghton Mifflin Harcourt Publishing Company. All rights reserved.

“Pita Delicious,” originally published as “Gideon,” copyright 2007 by ZZ Packer. First published in
The Book of Other People
, edited by Zadie Smith (Penguin Books, 2007).

“Candidate,” copyright 2012 by Amina Gautier. First published in
Crazyhorse
82 (2012).

“How to Leave the Midwest,” copyright 2009 by Renee Simms. First published in
Oregon Literary Review
4, no. 2 (Summer/Fall 2009).

“A Different Story,” copyright 2010 by Ivelisse Rodriguez. First published in
Quercus Review
10 (2010).

“American Child,” copyright 2006 by Manjula Menon. First published in
North American Review
, March/April 2006.

“Sirens,” copyright 2013 by Joshunda Sanders. First published in
Bellevue Literary Review
13, no. 2 (Fall 2013).

“Just the Way She Does the Things,” copyright 2010 by Jennine Capó Crucet. First published in
Los Angeles Review
8 (Fall 2010).

“The Rapture,” copyright 2013 by Emily Raboteau. First published in
Creative Writing: Writers on Writing
, edited by Amal Chatterjee (The Professional and Higher Partnership Ltd, 2012). Reprinted by permission of the publisher and editor.

“The Lost Ones,” copyright 2011 by Aracelis González Asendorf. First published in
Kweli Journal
, December 2011.

“Noelia and Amparo,” copyright 2013 by Glendaliz Camacho. First published in the
Southern Pacific Review
, July 4, 2013.

“A Strange People,” copyright 2008 by Mecca Jamilah Sullivan. First published in
Crab Orchard Review
14, no. 1 (Winter 2008).

“Beautiful Things,” copyright 2004 by Jacqueline Bishop. First published in
Margin: Exploring Modern Magical Realism
(Spring 2004).

“Lady Chatterley's Mansion,” copyright 2008 by Unoma Azuah. First published in
The Length of Light: A Collection of Short Stories
(VDM Verlag Dr. Müller, 2008). Reprinted in the
New Black Magazine
, May 1, 2010.

“All about Skin,” copyright 2012 by Xu Xi. First published in the
Kenyon Review
's KROnline 9, no. 2 (Spring 2012).

 

 

T
he subtitle of this anthology includes terms that have become loaded with meaning in contemporary society: “women,” “color,” “fiction.”

In a world that has grown increasingly knowledgeable about the complexity of gender identity, we can wonder what it means to declare oneself “woman”; we can also debate what it means to identify as a “person of color” in the United States, where the Pew Center reports that in the last decade, “racial and ethnic minorities accounted for 91.7 percent of the nation's population growth.” Finally, twenty-plus years of postmodern theory have dismantled traditional ideas about authorship and truth, and so we may very well ask ourselves: what does it mean to write fiction?

Nearly thirty-three years after the publication of Cherríe Moraga and Gloria Evangelina Anzaldúa's landmark anthology
This Bridge Called My Back: Writings by Radical Women of Color
, the popularity of Twitter hashtags such as #notyourasiansidekick, #solitaryisforwhite women, or #blackpowerisforblackmen reveals that contemporary discourse continues to focus exclusively on one's gender or race but rarely on both. Today, women writers of color are not “unlikely to be friends of people in high literary places,” as Anzaldúa would put it, but several flourishing new talents still deserve much greater attention. To that end, we decided that the usefulness of acknowledging the work of these gifted individuals justifies the use of the term “women of color”; furthermore, we felt that whatever the emotional truth in their writing, these writers' abilities to imagine entirely new worlds necessitates the use of the word “fiction.”

Short fiction, in particular, creates a unique challenge for writers; short stories can be difficult to publish and produce few financial rewards, so prose writers of limited financial means often turn to the more lucrative novel or autobiography. The financial obstacles associated with publishing short fiction are a reality for contemporary writers, but they were especially harsh for early twentieth-century women writers of color. In the United States, a lack of economic or educational opportunities severely limited these writers' literary production, and the writing that was produced was mainly autobiographical in scope. Prior to the 1920s, formerly enslaved African American women such as Harriet Ann Jacobs (Linda Brent) and Hannah Bond, and Harriet E. Wilson, a mixed-race indentured servant, wrote either autobiographies or autobiographical novels that focused on gendered racial oppression. Effie Waller Smith, an African American woman whose short fiction appeared in
Putnam's Magazine
in the early 1900s, is an example of the rare woman of color who was able to publish short stories, but even still, Smith stopped publishing at the tender age of thirty-eight (though she lived to be eighty).

Latina and Asian writers also faced discrimination. In the early nineteenth century, Puerto Rican activist-writer Luisa Capetillo published short fiction in between campaigning for suffrage for women and for better work conditions for laborers. Capetillo, the author of
Mi opinión sobre las libertades, derechos y deberes de la mujer
(My opinion on the liberties, rights and duties of the woman) and
Influencias de las ideas modernas
(Influences of modern ideas), wrote essays, plays, poems, and short fiction.

Three years after Capetillo's birth, the Chinese Exclusion Act (1882– 1943), which prohibited Chinese laborers from immigrating to the United States, became federal law. Still, despite the racial oppression that Chinese Americans faced, two sisters of Chinese and British heritage—Edith Maude Eaton and Winnifred Eaton—became noteworthy writers. Edith Eaton published
Mrs. Spring Fragrance
(1912), a collection of short stories, while Winnifred Eaton (Onoto Watanna) authored a series of successful novels and saw the publication of her short stories (“Maneuvers of O-Yasu-san,” “Delia Dissents”) in the
Saturday Evening Post
and in
Harper's
(“The Wrench of Chance”).

The 1920s brought women's suffrage and a short-term economic boom; the resulting financial opportunities produced the Harlem Renaissance, a black literary movement, and allowed African American– focused magazines, such as
Crisis
and
Opportunity
, to flourish. The women publishing short fiction in those magazines include the multiracial writers Angelina Weld Grimké (whose father was biracial and whose mother was European American) and Nella Larsen (who was of Afro-Caribbean and Danish descent), as well as African American writers such as Jessie Redmon Fauset, Dorothy West, and most notably Zora Neale Hurston, who published several short stories in addition to her masterpiece,
Their Eyes Were Watching God
.

The Great Depression that followed the roaring twenties made survival, let alone literary production, challenging for an artist of any race, but particularly so for a woman artist of color. The world had to wait until after World War II to read work by women writers of color, and World War II revealed increasing discrimination against Japanese Americans. Japanese American writer Hisaye Yamamoto and her family were held in an internment camp. After her release, Yamamoto's fiction appeared in a number of literary magazines, with three stories (“Seventeen Syllables,” “The Brown House,” and “Epithalamium”) being declared “Distinctive Short Stories” by the
Best American
anthology series, and her short story “Yoneko's Earthquake” receiving recognition as one of the
Best American Short Stories
of 1952. The post–World War II period also saw the emergence of Ann Petry, the first black woman to write a best-selling novel,
The Street
. Today, Petry is still best known for
The Street
, but she also published several short stories, which have been the subject of recent critical attention.

Still, it wasn't until the 1970s and 1980s that readers could finally enjoy a large outpouring of short fiction by women writers of color. In 1983 African American writer Alice Walker received the Pulitzer Prize for her novel
The Color Purple
, but in the early 1970s and 1980s, she also published short fiction, including the collections
In Love and Trouble: Stories of Black Women
(1973) and
You Can't Keep a Good Woman Down: Stories
(1981). During this time period, other African American writers also received a great deal of critical attention: Toni Cade Bambara received acclaim for her 1972 short-story collection
Gorilla, My Love
while her famous editor, the Nobel Prize winner Toni Morrison, who published her widely anthologized short story “Recitatif ” in 1983, is more widely known for her novels than her short stories.

During the 1970s and 1980s, several contemporary Latina short-fiction writers also began publishing. Nicholasa Mohr's collection about Puerto Rican children living in the South Bronx,
El Bronx Remembered: A Novella and Stories
, was awarded the New Times Outstanding Book Award in 1975, making Mohr its first female Hispanic recipient. Judith Ortiz Cofer, who in 1994 would become the first Hispanic to win the O. Henry Prize (a prize for short fiction), published
Pegrina
(1986), a book of poetry, and
The Line of the Sun
(1987), a novel, during this era.

Mexican American writers Helena María Viramontes, Sandra Cisneros, and Denise Elia Chávez also published well-received collections of short fiction. USA Ford Fellow in Literature Viramontes published
The Moths and Other Stories
in 1985 while Sandra Cisneros's novelin-stories
The House on Mango Street
(1984) garnered the American Book Award and her collection
Woman Hollering Creek and Other Stories
(1991) received the PEN Center West Award for best fiction. Denise Elia Chávez, who would win the American Book Award in 1995, published her short-story collection
The Last of the Menu Girls
in 1986.

Asian American writers, such as Amy Tan and Maxine Hong Kingston, also received more attention in the 1970s and 1980s. In 1975 Maxine Hong Kingston published her best-known work,
The Woman Warrior: Memoirs of a Girlhood Among Ghosts
, a book of creative nonfiction that combines memoir with the elements of short fiction; fourteen years later, award-winning author Amy Tan released
The Joy Luck Club
, a collection of linked short stories that became a bestseller.

The 1990s and early 2000s witnessed the births of several exceptional writers of short fiction. Dominican writer Julia Alvarez published the critically acclaimed
How the García Girls Lost Their Accents
, a novelin-stories that inspired fellow Dominican writers Angie Cruz and Nelly Rosario. In addition, Haitian American writer Edwidge Danticat, Chinese American writers Gish Jen and Lan Samantha Chang, Indian American writers Chitra Banerjee Divakaruni and Jhumpa Lahiri, American Indian writer Louise Erdrich, and African American writers Danielle Evans, Carolyn Ferrell, and Roxane Gay have all been featured in
Best American Short Stories
and won several other prestigious prizes.

As more educational and economic opportunities open up, women writers of color continue to make strides. In
All about Skin
, we wanted to celebrate these writers and also help readers to gain a better understanding of some of the common challenges facing writers whose voices are outside the mainstream. For instance, coming-of-age, reinventing oneself, and living with various culture borders—in an often hostile or indifferent world—seem to be ongoing themes in the fiction of several women of color. For instance, we can compare Toni Cade Bambara's classic short story “Gorilla, My Love” (1972) to a new story featured in
All about Skin
, Renee Simms's “How to Leave the Midwest.” Both “Gorilla, My Love” and “How to Leave the Midwest” celebrate coming-of-age and African American girlhood, but they also remark on its challenges: the difficulties of fitting in and finding ways to let your voice be heard. Likewise, we could also discuss how the lyrical voice in Helena María Viramontes's “The Moths” (1985) compares with the melancholy tone in Patricia Engel's “Aida.” Viramontes's and Engel's stories, which explore adolescent girls dealing with the loss of a relative, suggest both the deep connections between women and also how quickly girls in working-class communities of color may have to mature and reinvent themselves. We can compare how Amy Tan's “Rules of the Game” (1985), like Manjula Menon's “American Child,” explores ideas about assimilation, tradition, and dual identities.

All about Skin: Short Fiction by Women of Color
features women writers who have received or have been nominated for prestigious prizes including the Pushcart Prize, the Iowa Short Fiction Award ( Jennine Capó Crucet is, in fact, the first Latina to win this accolade), the National Endowment for the Arts Award for Fiction (Patricia Engel), the Caine Prize for African Writing (Chinelo Okparanta was short-listed for the 2013 prize), the AWP's Grace Paley Prize for Short Fiction (Ramola D), and the Flannery O'Connor Award for Short Fiction (Amina Gautier is the second African American writer to win this award). In addition, these writers have been included in such prize-winning collections as the
O. Henry Awards
(Xu Xi, Jennine Capó Crucet) and the
Best American Short Stories
(ZZ Packer, Emily Raboteau) anthologies. Many writers selected for
All about Skin
have also received fellowships from organizations such as Yaddo, VONA, and Cave Canem, and from top MFA programs.