Randall Kenan’s New Book, The Fire Next Time
I first read Randall Kenan’s book of short stories Let The Dead Bury Their Dead (published in 1992) back in 1995 and thought then (and still do) that it was one of the best story collections I had ever read. Terry McMillan once described Kenan as “our black Marquez. He weaves myth, folktales, magic, and reality like no one else I know, and doesn’t miss a beat” and indeed his early fiction contains interesting expiremental elements like the use of footnotes in the title story which is several years before David Foster Wallace would famously use the same technique in his own iconoclastic writing. If you have ever read Kenan’s short story The Strange and Tragic Ballad of Mabel Pearsall you might be tempted to call him the black James Joyce for Mabel’s false epiphany toward the end of that brilliant and disturbing story. His fiction is simply vibrant, ferocious, and transcendent in ways that may remind you of Georgia writer Flannery O’Connor.
It’s a shame that a writer as talented as Kenan is so little known. Even in his home state of North Carolina I met many native tar heelers who hadn’t heard of him either. Other books you should know by Kenan: James Baldwin: American Writer; Walking on Water: Black American Lives at the Turn of the 21st Century; A Visitation of Spirits, and Let the Dead Bury Their Dead. He has received a Guggenheim, a Whiting Writers Award, the Sherwood Anderson Award, the John Dos Passos Award, and the Rome Prize from the American Academy of Arts and Letters. He teaches at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill.
About The Fire This Time
Kenan’s title is a take-off on James Baldwin’s, The Fire Next Time, and deals with the complex subject matter of racial division. But Kenan’s view is much more upbeat than what a reader might expect. I know once when I described my own work as southern lit that a (white) student looked at me with unmistakable disgust. I asked her why she didn’t like southern writing and she said, “I’m sick of reading stuff about race. Southern writing only seems to deal with racial issues.” That’s an unfair and inaccurate charge in my view, but race and religion in this country are difficult subjects to ignore. Kenan is upbeat about this subject of race and points out the accomplishments of astrophysicist Neil DeGrasse Tyson and Pulitzer Prize-winning journalist Robin Givham (among others) and “little is made of their obvious, undeniable blackness.” He discusses other subjects of cultural importance such as AIDS, Hip Hop, and the role of the Church in the black community as well.
Feel free to write about Kenan’s work in the comment section. Or, consider the unavoidable subject of race whether it is in fiction, memoir, nonfiction, and our American culture at large. Is Southern writing only concerned with race?
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