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  • On Being a Black Writer in America
  • Virginia Hamilton (bio)

I write for young people in part because my rural childhood was filled with light, openness and time for my imagination to soar. I keep wonderfully clear memories from that period. And as a novelist, I am able to transform that which evolves from my own experience of living into a coherent fictional form. This may be the fundamental meaning of self-expression: the discovery by the author of new ways of expressing real sources of living that are particularly hers. Thus, writing over a period of time does indeed stand for what she has lived and what living has meant to her.

I have written twenty books for young people starting from the read-alone age to young adult age, so that now a brand new generation of the young is acquainted with them. I considered myself a fictionist although I have written biographies of the great baritone, Paul Robeson, and the fine scholar, W. E. B. Du Bois. Over the years, I have attempted through my books to bring to children and young adult readers something of value lives from the unique American black perspective, as well as to shed light on the real concerns of young people in a world in which survival becomes for them increasingly more difficult.

Through character, time and place, I've attempted to portray the essence of a race, its essential community, culture, history and traditions, which I know well, and its relation to the larger American society. I endeavor to demonstrate the nexus the black group has with all other groups, nationalities and races, the connection the American black child has with all children and to present the best of my heritage.

I consider myself a student of history as well as literature. My books generally have an historical aspect that becomes an integral part of the fictions. A novel taking place in the present will often evoke an atmosphere of former generations. We carry our pasts with us in the present through states of mind, family history and historical fact. No one source is more specific to and symbolic of my writing than the historical progression of black people across the American hopescape.

Historically, Americans have thought of themselves as egalitarian, aware at least of a constant assertion of the equality of all. We proposed a unique concept, that the young have the right to books reflecting their cultural and racial and spiritual heritage. Cultural democracy was to be the giant step on the way to equal education and the first [End Page 15] principle to the attainment of human equality. We assumed as a human right that all people have free access to information about themselves and their pasts.

While many of us hold to the same beliefs, others attempt to censor what American young people will read, by removing so-called controversial books from library shelves and, more subtly with books by and about blacks, by simply not making them available, by not purchasing them.

In some cases, works by and about blacks are said to be too sophisticated, too high art for the young. Books like my own, which are occasionally mildly experimental —with subject matter having to do with mental dissociation, graphic imagery of nuclear explosions, Amerindian and black survival in a hostile majority society, children alone and hungry for love and companionship —are said to be, and often by those adults who should know better, only for the especially gifted child. It is rather interesting that the awards some of my works have received often contribute to the apparent suspicion that the works are "art" or "literature" and therefore too difficult or too special for the usual or ordinary child. These adults would keep the young at a safe and quasi-literate level, where their response to life and to the world remains predictable and manageable. The way I counteract such backwardness is by keeping fresh my awareness of young people's keen imaginations and by responding to their needs, fears, loves and hungers in as many new ways as possible.

Whatever art I possess is a social action in itself. My view is that...

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