James Baldwin's Another Country by Kim McLarin

Author:Kim McLarin
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: IG Publishing
Published: 2020-02-14T16:00:00+00:00

PART FOUR

Sex and Sexuality

MANY YEARS AGO, I RECEIVED an email from an editor who was putting together an anthology of erotic stories by Black writers and who wanted to count me in. I was first astonished, then bewildered, then a little nervous. Just because I wrote fiction did not mean I could write erotic fiction. These are two similar but distinct efforts, involving the same raw material but producing different results. It’s a little like asking a logger to whittle a hummingbird. Nevertheless, she persisted. So I sat down at my laptop with the window shades drawn. Eventually I delivered what must surely be the least-erotic erotic short story in history. It centers around what was apparently a real and pressing question at the time: was every white man who tried to get me in bed really just expressing “jungle fever” (I hate that term but as an appropriately despicable shorthand for the behavior I am referencing it will do). The story I produced was (is) so terrible I am surprised the editor accepted it. She must have been trying to fill out the book. Unfortunately, it seems to possess a half-life to rival uranium, popping up on Google searches of my name. When I was dating postdivorce I dreaded the day a man would confess, over a glass of wine, to having found a list of my books and ordered that one (usually only that one).

“I hope that doesn’t embarrass you,” the man would say, sort of hoping it would.

“I’m not embarrassed.” I would smile, sadly. “But you’re going to be disappointed.”

Reader: he always, always was.

There is very little sex in my novels, as far as I remember. Maybe a scene or two in my first novel, less in the second and, if I had to guess, none in the third. To confirm these estimates, I would have to sit down and actually read my old work, but that is not happening. Nothing is more painful to a writer than revisiting the scene of a long-ago, never-to-be-repeated crime. Or maybe that’s just me.

I’m guessing there’s not much sex in my novels because I recall, more than the books themselves, the person I was when I was writing them: a harried young mother of young children, a recovering Pentecostal, a woman not much interested in sex. The characters in my fiction are concerned with identity and self-actualization (for lack of a better term) and, yes, also with love, love, love in all its forms and facets. Sex goes along with one particular kind of love, with Eros (the Greeks were so smart to differentiate the word; we fail ourselves by not following them) and so, in my novels, sex is acknowledged as an important part of the human erotic experience (I think). But any sex that takes place in my fiction is neither casual nor transformative. It’s kinda just … sex. My goal in writing sex scenes was to get out as quickly as possible and avoid placing my work into contention for the Bad Sex in Fiction Award.

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