IN PERCIVAL EVERETT’S NOVEL Erasure, Thelonious Ellison is
a college professor who writes novels that are more praised than read.
His work’s engagement with French post-structuralists and ancient Greek
literature impresses and baffles reviewers, who wonder what those
subjects have to do with the African-American experience. Frustrated by
his latest novel’s seventh rejection and angered by the success of the
street-lit hit We’s Lives in Da Ghetto, Ellison dashes off a
novella parodying the “true, gritty real stories of [B]lack life” that
he has been advised to write. This satiric tale, which is included in Erasure
in its entirety, is peopled with stock characters like the perennially
scowling thug and the vapid baby mama. It is sent to Random House as a
protest, but to Ellison’s amazement and chagrin he is offered a
$600,000 advance for his “magnificently raw and honest” account.
Compromised, disgusted and rich, Ellison creates a reclusive, ex-con
writer persona that the literary world celebrates as a “real! live!
scary! Black male!” writer in their midst. Although Erasure
is fictional, it is dead-on about the high-octane rise of a genre often
called street lit. Also called ghetto lit, urban fiction and gangsta
lit—as well as hip-hop’s literary equivalent—it unofficially burst on
the scene in 1999. That’s when breakaway success greeted the novel The Coldest Winter Ever
penned by rapper-activist Sista Souljah. Still considered to be the one
of the best offerings in urban fiction, Souljah’s tale chronicles the
hustling life and times of Winter Santiaga, who stole clothes and
transported drugs for a living. Now considered classics, other novels
from the late ‘90s include Teri Woods’s True to the Game and Vickie Stringer’s Let That Be The Reason.
Both writers published their own books and sold them from the trunks of
their cars after collecting numerous rejections from mainstream
publishers. Since that time, Woods’s novels have grossed more than $15
million, and she is now signed with a division of Warner Books, while
Stringer has built an urban-fiction empire out of her Triple Crown
Publications. According to Essence’s bestseller
lists, which reflect data from Black bookstores across the country,
street lit accounts for almost all of the current top-selling
paperbacks. Rachelle Williams can testify to this from when she worked
at Karibu Books in suburban Maryland near Washington, D.C. “I would say
about 70 percent of the customers who came into the store bought these
books, either for themselves or to send to a family member or friend in
jail,” recalls Williams, who is now a doctoral student at the
University of Maryland and has written about the genre. SOURCE:COLORLINES
