This week, writer/filmmaker Ava DuVernay premieres her
documentary The 13th, which explores the history of and profound racial bias in
our system of mass incarceration, at the New York Film Festival. (It
debuts on Netflix and some theaters Oct. 7.)
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| Director Ava DuVernay |
Also premiering this week: the Netflix series Luke Cage, where
showrunner/writer Cheo Hodari Coker chose to make Cage’s superhero costume a
hoodie as a way to honor Trayvon Martin and bring racial bias to light. (Not to mention how rare black superheroes on TV have been.) Both
approaches are an act of artistic revolution.
What makes art
“revolutionary”?
My first experience with revolutionary art was Alex Haley’s
Roots. I read it when I was 11, and Kunta Kinte’s defiance gave me air and
light. I began recording my own family’s oral histories and hand-writing a
story about a young girl’s experience on the Middle Passage. Haley gave me the
desire to better understand my world and a mission to try to right the wrongs of
history--through my writing.
Today’s social-minded writers
and artists are faced with a prime opportunity to help change the narratives of
exclusion and disempowerment and create the stories WE think should be told to
help build a better world.
When we think of social justice activists, we often think of
people like my parents--my father, John Due, still a civil rights attorney at
81, or my late mother, Patricia Stephens Due, who spent 49 days in jail after a
sit-in at Woolworth’s lunch counter in 1960 and was arrested multiple arrests
in the 1960s. Or, we think of the Black Lives Matter movement and other
activists staging protests in Charlotte and across the country. Or San
Francisco 49ers quarterback Colin Kaepernick refusing to stand for the National
Anthem.
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| My mother arrested in 1963 |
Whether or not we attend a protest or ever leave our
computers, artists are revolutionaries too. But how can we create
world-changing art without Message overwhelming Story? What are effective
storytelling techniques to help readers embrace your passions? How can your own
work be more inclusive? How do you write The Other?
Starting Oct. 7, my husband and collaborator, Steven Barnes,
and I are offering a six-week webinar course: “Revolutionary Art: Writing for
Social Justice.” With a combination of lectures, recorded interviews, and appearances
by artists such as writer/producer Reggie Hudlin, six 90-minute segments will
help artists gain clarity on the ways art can be revolutionary and help advance
the national conversation on social justice. (Since
all sessions are recorded, students can listen when they have time and take the
course at their own pace.)
Check out the registration page here and listen to a freesample recording from a previous teleseminar on art and social justice. (If you
sign up now, you can still register at the introductory price.)
My novel-in-progress has been one of my most emotionally difficult
writing projects, but one I think could also be important: it’s about a 12-year-old
boy sent to a children’s prison in Florida in 1950. The novel will have ghosts,
but the true horror is in the prison system itself, the quiet bureaucracy, and
a town’s conspiracy of silence. (This novel was inspired by the real-lifeDozier School for Boys, where my great-uncle died in 1937.)
Although
it’s a historical novel, I hope readers will see the many parallels between Jim
Crow criminal justice and our criminal justice system today.
My short story collection, Ghost Summer—which just won a British Fantasy Award—introduces this
novel’s fictitious town of Gracetown, where history lives in the soil and my
characters must battle monsters both from without and within. Not all of the
stories in the collection are set in Gracetown or have social justice themes,
but all of them raise questions about what it means to be human—and since black
characters have historically been so underrepresented in literature, even a
declaration of humanity is a still a revolutionary act.
What does your revolutionary
art look like?
Even as I grew up hearing stories of my mother’s heroism in
the face of teargas and taunts, she made sure I understood that art is an
important tool in activism. She knew I wanted to be a writer from the age of
four, and she pointed out that the NAACP assigned a lot of resources to the
Beverly/Hills Hollywood in the 1960s because the civil rights organization
understood the importance of IMAGERY and STORIES to help create change. My
respect for my parents and their passion for civil rights was so great that if
they had even hinted that writing was a waste of time, I might not be a writer.
My parents believed I could raise my voice in my own way.
You can too.
Writing for social justice need not be literal—like N.K.
Jemisin’s novel The Fifth Season,
which recently won a Hugo Award and is packed with imaginative fantasy world-building—but
was inspired by Ferguson. And often, the mere insertion of characters from disenfranchised
populations in our art can have a profound impact on creating new narratives.
We are superheroes. We are wizards. We are world-changers.
Steve and I both have taught extensively: I’m currently
teaching Afrofuturism at UCLA, I’m on the faculty for the summertime VONA
writers’ workshop for writers of color, and I’ve lectured at the
Geneva Writers Conference. We both just returned from lecturing on a fantastic
Caribbean cruise for writers, where we found a tribe of writers of all races
and background who want to make a difference. Next March, I’ll be honored to appear with Dr. Angela Davis and other panelists at Black Women Rise in West Palm Beach, Florida.
I sign petitions, write letters, and contribute to causes
when I can, but my primary voice is through my art. And in striving to make my
characters as real and human as possible in the face of unimaginable odds, I
hope to present a blueprint for change for all of us.
The course starts soon. Listen to the free sample and read
what we’re offering. And please pass on our URL to a friend: www.createthenarrative.com. Hope
to see you there!
Tananarive Due is an
American Book Award winner, NAACP Image Award Winner, and British Fantasy Award
winner. She teaches Afrofuturism at UCLA. Her website is www.tananarivedue.com.
