Erasure

Content Warning: The source text discusses racism, violence, sexual violence, anti-Black biases, anti-gay biases, and suicide. It also includes racist and sexist slurs that the guide reproduces only in direct quotations.

Erasure is a metafictional satire of the stereotypical views that define and regulate African American literature and Black artistic expression. Monk is enraged when he visits a bookstore and sees that Juanita May Jenkins’s novel, titled We’s Lives in Da Ghetto, is a bestseller that is admired by critics and readers alike. This novel is about marginalized Black Americans and makes a spectacle of their misery, which infuriates Monk. The characters in Jenkins’s novel are plagued by lack of education, poverty, and criminality, and publishers consider this the only possible representation of the African American experience. While reading excerpts of this novel, Monk feels “the reality of popular culture” as a “real slap in the face” since it hits him that this is the only type of Black narrative that the American public expects and accepts (29). He personally considers the book idiotic and thinks of the author as “a hack” who does not know how to write well.

In contrast to Jenkins’s novel’s success, Monk’s newest book—which is a retelling of a Greek tragedy—is constantly rejected by publishers because they do not think it is “Black enough.” He notices that even his older books are shelved under the African American studies section of a bookstore rather than in the contemporary fiction section, even though their subject matter has nothing to do with African American studies; Monk seethes against the fact that his own identity as a Black man dictates the kind of fiction he is expected to write. When his agent presses him to write something more marketable, his frustration as a writer grows. The stereotypes that dominate the literary industry exasperate him because, as a Black man, he does not identify with such stories. He describes his emotions about this, saying: “I was screaming inside, complaining that I didn’t sound like that, that my mother didn’t sound like that, that my father didn’t sound like that” (61). In response, Monk writes My Pafology, a satirical novel on the lines of Jenkins’s “ghetto” novel. By doing this, Monk intends to point out the ridiculousness of Black stereotypes that exist in popular culture by making his characters into caricatures. He also wants to reveal the hypocrisy of popular culture through writing a superficial and underdeveloped narrative.

In My Pafology, Monk satirizes many of the stereotypes around Black masculinity and Black life through the character of Van Go Jenkins, the protagonist of the novel. In the opening of My Pafology, Van states: “My name is Van Go Jenkins and I’m nineteen years old and I don’t give a fuck about nobody, not you, not my Mama, not the man” (66). He is a young Black man who lives in a rough neighborhood with his mother and sister. The household is poor and Van’s father is absent. Van’s mother runs the house and Monk depicts it as dysfunctional. She cannot control her son’s violent tendencies and Van does not consider her a proper mother. While Van lacks a father figure, he embodies the stereotype of Black hypermasculinity. He styles himself on the “gangsta” image that is connected to criminality and gang violence and proliferates in popular culture. In My Pafology, Monk also plays with the historically racist view of Black men as rapists. Van disregards and objectifies women, referring to them as “bitches” and raping them easily and often to satisfy his desire for control and power. He is also a young father with four children from four different women. He fails as a father, which is a role that he has inherited from his own father. In this way, Van and his father represent the idea of Black fatherhood being a failure. Ultimately, Van cannot escape himself. He resorts to murder out of rage and is arrested by the police. While Monk does not disregard the reality of Black marginalization and pain, he critiques narratives that commodify Black people’s problems, obscure the sociopolitical structures that produce them, and define Black experience solely through suffering and trauma. The satire in My Pafology lies in the familiarity of the narrative and characters; popular culture teems with stories like Van’s, which is what Monk intends to lampoon. That My Pafology garners so much critical success in Monk’s world shows a pessimism about the ability to lampoon the damage of racism in the world of literature through literature.