One of the ugliest pieces of racecraft ever conjured in the cauldron of the human mind is the notion that great works of art should be fenced off by race like rows of a garden from hungry deer. This means that if you are black, Shakespeare does not belong to you. You can look upon his roses of youth and violets of madness, but you had better keep your hooves on that side of the fence. Shakespeare belongs to white people, specifically white British men. When he writes of forbidden young love or the ruin of unchecked ambition or the delirium of indecision, he is not tapping into shared and universal experiences.
When Shakespeare gives us Iago, Romeo, Hamlet, and Macbeth, he is not extending these gifts to the world. When he plucks his petaled lessons and wraps them into the garland of a play—those thorns of betrayal, those blossoms of love, the branching paths of what is to be or not to be—you might think you see in this something eternal and common, but this garden is for Whites Only. It is not yours to browse the thickets of verse and pluck ripe words to nourish your soul. If you want to unlock your mind with the turn of sweet speech, go find someone with black skin you can read.
I don’t know what to say about this kind of thinking. But it is of a piece with the cultural appropriation discourse. To be fair, some forms of cultural appropriation are genuinely offensive. I have always thought that dressing up as an ethnicity for Halloween is in extremely poor taste. If I see a restaurant serving Asian cuisine without crediting the country, as if the white chef behind the burners came up with it himself, I find that as disgraceful as any other kind of plagiarism. And no, I am not saying that I oppose fusion cuisine, which is a different matter.
There are many examples of cultural appropriation that deserve criticism. But every correction is an over-correction. And one of the worst examples of how the national conversation on cultural appropriation has gone stark raving mad is when people draw racial or ethnic lines around art. I take some comfort in knowing that intelligent people roundly reject this way of thinking:
This is a point that Loury has made before and often repeats. Of course I agree. How dare anyone say that the renowned Shakespeare scholar Ayanna Thompson cannot claim the work of a man she has mastered more than any living person simply because she is black? Or that the Tolstoy scholar Ani Kokobobo cannot claim the Father of Russian Realism because she is Albanian? There is a line I think of whenever this conversation comes up, so when I saw Loury’s remark this week I replied:
Saul Bellow once asked, “Where is the Tolstoy of the Zulus?”
To which Ralph Wiley replied, “Tolstoy is the Tolstoy of the Zulus.”
Amen.
Damn the fences and let the deer feed. Or trample the flowers if not. But some people disagree. Prominent among those who disagreed with my post above was a Canadian tattoo artist named José-Luis Pino, who quoted my remark and wrote, “Completely erasing any great literature they could have.” Pino thinks that by saying Tolstoy is the Tolstoy of the Zulus, Wiley is suggesting that the Zulus could never have great literature. Puzzled, I decided to engage. What follows is my exchange with Pino. His remarks are in italics.
Completely erasing any great literature they could have.
Zulu may possess a modest canon, but if we consider its kings—Vilakazi, Kunene, Nyembezi, Mhlophe, Mbopha—not one is “erased” by saying the sage of Yasnaya Polyana belongs to any Zulu as much as to my babushka—that would be the erasure.
What does Tolstoy represent?
Irrelevant. Shakespeare was a white British man of the Elizabethan era but it would be foolish to argue he belongs only to white people, or Brits, or men, or Elizabethans. He belongs to humanity. If you don’t see that, you don’t know Shakespeare.
Why don’t you wanna answer?
I just did, but do I need to use Crayons to explain this to you?
Yes please
It is racist to say black people cannot claim Shakespeare as much as white people. Racism is not good. Racism is bad. Don’t do racism.
Good thing nobody’s doing that. Side note: if someone asked “Who’s the Michael Jordan of hockey?” Most people would just answer - Wayne Gretzky. It would be silly to tell them that they should just embrace the basketball player instead of offering up their own great one…
Wow, so you didn’t even understand the point you were responding to. No, this is not about denying groups the chance to strive for greatness nor have I ever said any such thing. Toni Morrison made the exact same point, and claimed Faulkner as her own, and in my view, moved beyond him … We are all enriched by each other’s brilliance and it’s gross to draw racial lines around human beauty. Morrison not only claimed Tolstoy, but also his thoughts specifically on race!
Not what I’m saying at all. Let’s say I wanted to expand my life and have it enriched by the Tolstoy of the Zulu nation. Who would that be? I’ve already read the other Tolstoy…
Bellow’s question was Eurocentric and racist. Wiley’s retort was a refutation of such thinking. Here’s how Ta-Nehisi Coates remarked on the matter in an essay that later became Between the World and Me:
Serious history was the West, and the West was white. This was all distilled for me in a quote I once read, from the novelist Saul Bellow. I can’t remember where I read it, or when—only that I was already at Howard. “Who is the Tolstoy of the Zulus?,” Bellow quipped. Tolstoy was “white,” I understood him to say, and so Tolstoy “mattered,” like everything else that was white “mattered.” And this view of things was connected to the fear that passed through the generations, to the sense of dispossession. We were black, beyond the visible spectrum, beyond civilization. Our history was inferior because we were inferior ... It must have been around that time that I discovered an essay by Ralph Wiley in which he responded to Bellow’s quip. “Tolstoy is the Tolstoy of the Zulus,” wrote Wiley. “Unless you find a profit in fencing off universal properties of mankind into exclusive tribal ownership.” And there it was. I had accepted Bellow’s premise. In fact, Bellow was no closer to Tolstoy than I was to Nzinga. And if I were closer it would be because I chose to be, not because of destiny written in DNA. My great error was not that I had accepted someone else’s dream but that I had accepted the fact of dreams, the need for escape, and the invention of racecraft.
I agree with Wiley and Coates. You consider such thinking “erasure” and have taken the opposite position, fencing off the universal beauty of the soul into racial tribes. I agree with Coates that such analysis is racist.
Years before this, in an essay for The Atlantic titled “Tolstoy is the Tolstoy of the Zulus,” Coates wrote, “I wish Ralph Wiley was with us. I am pretty sure I owe him more than I can even know.”
Again, I agree with the man. But based on your remarks, you think Coates is guilty of the “erasure” of black writers, which I find to be an amusing claim. But I don’t have anything more to say about the issue … and I’ve run out of Crayons explaining this to you.
But I do have more to say on the issue to you, dear reader. I simply sensed that the above exchange was going nowhere. As a matter of fact, after my last remark, Pino told me that I did not in fact agree with Coates. But for my good-faith readers, let us think a little further.
Consider his remark that if we say Wayne Gretzky is the Michael Jordan of hockey, “it would be silly to tell them that they should just embrace the basketball player instead of offering up their own great one.” I am no hockey fan, yet Gretzky is indeed the Jordan of the sport, this much I know. But what kind of sense is it supposed to make to hear this and conclude that Gretzky should never have played hockey because Jordan already existed? These men do not play the same sport, whereas Tolstoy and the Zulu figures I noted are all writers.
Before I continue, let confess something. My list of Zulu writers included the father of Zulu literature Benedict Wallet Vilakazi, arguably the greatest South African poet Mazisi Kunene, the writer and Zulu oral preservationist Sibusiso Nyembezi, and the storyteller Gcina Mhlophe. I also listed the name Mbopha, a reference to Mbopha kaSithayi, who was involved in the assassination of King Shaka Zulu. But Mbopha is not known for making any literary contributions. I think I confused him with Thomas Mofolo, whose 1907 book Traveller to the East was the first novel published in an African language. But Mofolo was not Zulu. He was Sesotho. So, my bad.
In any event, let me steelman Pino’s argument by choosing an athlete in the same sport as Jordan. Yes, it would be silly to tell Los Angeles Lakers fans they should just embrace Jordan instead of their own LeBron James. But even this version of the argument fails because no one is saying that the Zulus cannot outperform Tolstoy. LeBron James can never be Michael Jordan. But many people believe he is even better. The Zulu can never post a Tolstoy. But they have already posted Vilakazi and maybe one day they will produce a writer greater than Tolstoy. Let’s call him Sipho Dlamini, two common Zulu names. That day, we will ask who is the Sipho Dlamini of Russia?
Pino falls into the same trap as Coates, drinking the racist potion Bellow served up. He reads the question “Who is the Tolstoy of the Zulus?” as suggesting that the Zulus have no writers of equal stature. That is what Bellow meant. It also happens to be a fact. Then Pino takes a leap and imagines that the question also implies that the Zulus never will. Any great literature they could have is completely erased, he says. But this probably true. The Zulu people are unlikely to ever produce a writer like Tolstoy simply because the odds are extremely slim that any nation will produce a Tolstoy, and slimmer still for some cultures in particular.
The Yanomami of the Amazon will never produce a Dante. The uncontacted Sentinelese of the Andaman and Nicobar Islands will never produce a Cervantes. Bellow had something of a point. There is a reason Russia produced so many literary titans—Dostoevsky, Pushkin, Chekhov, Gogol, Turgenev, Gorky, Bulgakov, Pasternak, Solzhenitsyn—and the Sentinelese produced not a single one. Nor have they produced any significant inventions, made any scientific breakthroughs, or painted any masterpieces. And they almost certainly never will. They will never build a Taj Mahal and no one among them will compose a Jupiter Symphony.
But no matter. There is already a Taj Mahal if they wish to make the journey and Mozart already gave us the Jupiter Symphony if they would like to hear it—if they do then it will be theirs as much as anyone born and bred in Salzburg. But perhaps I am pushing the argument too far. Loury did say “as a man of the West” and certain art is arguably inaccessible for someone who knows nothing of the West. But Bellow, Loury, and Wiley are talking about racial and ethnic fences. So the general point stands.
When I quote the line, “Tolstoy is the Tolstoy of the Zulus,” and Pino replies that this is “completely erasing any great literature they could have had,” he thinks that what is being said is that Tolstoy is the GOAT of Russian and Zulu literature. Why read the Tolstoy of the Zulus when you have already read Tolstoy, he asks. But Wiley is not even suggesting that Tolstoy is the GOAT of Russian literature. Dostoevsky is a strong contender for the title, not to mention the father of Russian literature—Pushkin.
What Tolstoy achieved is unique in the world of literature. There is no Zulu Tolstoy. There is no Russian Vilakazi either. Let us never erect fences around the gardens of human beauty. Tolstoy is the Tolstoy of the Zulus. Vilakazi is the Vilakazi of the Russians.