April 1992
Meet Randall Kenan:
"Southern writing is changing;
it has to change"
Interview by H.B. Grace
Though Randall Kenan is a young writer, he has learned not to rest on his laurels. In this case those laurels are the praises his first novel, A Visitation of Spirits (Anchor, $8.95) continues to receive. "The novel is only an entree," he says from his family's home in Chinquapin, North Carolina. "One of the more important things I learned (from a writer's standpoint) while working at Knopf is that you can't linger on your last book. You have to keep moving."
The strength of his new collection of stories, Let the Dead Bury Their Dead (Harcourt Brace Jovanovich, $19.95), will show that Kenan has all but slackened his pace, and the craft of its title story proves just how fast he's advancing. Let the Dead Bury Their Dead concludes the collection as a historical account of the origins of Tims Creek, the town in which the other stories take place, and indeed Kenan presents the story as a book unto itself, written by the Right Reverend James Malachai Greene and edited by Reginald Gregory Kain who allows Kenan to reprint the history alongside his stories. However, a closer reading will show that these men are themselves characters created by Kenan, and that the book, despite its carefuly constructed title page and introduction, is entirely Kenan's fabrication.
"The story started inside A Visitation of Spirits, but got too out of hand. I began playing with the melding of fiction and fact which was not central to the story line of the novel, but which I found very interesting." Readers too will find it interesting that the author cites books yet to be published, footnotes regional names and uses for the persimmon tree, and tells additional stories within his documentation of the characters' accounts. The annotations of the Reverend Greene and Reginald Kain are clearly delineated, but just how much of the story is Randall Kenan's conjuring and how much reality is hard to say. The story becomes an artful trope of itself, raising big questions about how much of history is fact and how much fiction.
"I've had both confirming and critical reports from my colleagues and friends about this interweaving of fact and fiction. Some people question its usefulness. But [Let the Dead Bury Their Dead] is the longest [story] physically, it concerns the community where many of the other stories in the collection take place, and it pulls together what I am trying to create in the book. It underscores how all fiction is lies and hopefully a lot more."
Precisely what Kenan is creating involves both a strong sense of community and a deep questioning of traditional sexuality. We don't commonly find explicit sex scenes alongside mainstays of Southern writing, such as a strong sense of place and family history, and particularly not in the short story genre. Kenan, however, has no qualms with being candid, even graphic, for the needs of his fiction.
Despite Kenan's bold, but careful handling of sometimes steamy scenes, it isn't the sex which Kenan emphasizes so much as the passion, confusion, obsession, and betrayal common to sexual unions. In "Cornsilk" Aaron has to deal with his sister's decision to end their incestuous meetings, a loss similar to the one the Right Reverend Barden suffers in "Ragnarok! The Day the Gods Die" when he must conduct the funeral for the love of his illicit affair. One of the most poignant and well-crafted stories concerns Miss Maggie MacGowan Williams's attempts to understand her deceased gay grandson during a weekend visit from his lover, and one of the most genuine relationships in the collection occurs between Dean, a young white man, and Raymond, the wealthy black man Dean is bribed to frame.
Kenan is comfortable with complex relationships like these, and as his novel and a couple of stories in this collection indicate, he has a particular understanding of homosexuality. Still, he stands firm against becoming the voice for any one movement. "I don't see myself as a voice for gay rights. David Leavitt's Family Dancing broke some important barriers in the early '80s for treating homosexual relationships in fiction. I see myself trying to break some of those same barriers in the South in a way similar to writers like Rita Mae Brown.
"Southern writing is changing; it has to change. The South is really the only region that still holds any cultural unity, with the exception of perhaps New England; but as the region changes, so do the writers and thus so does the literature. I do consider myself a black writer and a Southern writer. I am black and I grew up in the South -- my roots are here -- and I write. I'll be interested to see where the changes happen both in the region and in the literature."
With more authors like Kenan, Southern writing could return to some of its more grotesque origins. The fact that each of these stories are connected by a sense of the deceased is not the only trait reminiscent of Poe. In "Clarence and the Dead," a three-year-old boy speaks with the dead and is peculiarly connected to a talking hog, and in "Things of This World" a sagacious Asian falls from the sky into John Edgar's yard, eventually to "take him home."
"The kind of elements of the bizarre which come up in those first two stories certainly were not written with Poe in mind, but perhaps there is a connection somewhere. I mean, the theme of death which seems so obvious now running through the stories was initially purely organic. My editor was the first to notice it -- very serendipitous that the story which I began the collection with would wind up grounding it so solidly without my consciously meaning to.
"I grew up wanting to be a physicist. All through high school I was interested in the sciences and I read lots of science fiction, and well, that has influenced my writing to some degree, perhaps more so in A Visitation of Spirits, but certainly to some extent also with these stories. Perhaps Poe is not so far from science fiction."
At any rate, common to writers in most genres, Kenan is attracted to the power of language. "Because the majority of what I read until college [at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill] was science fiction, I took a writing course with Max Steele thinking I wanted to write in that genre. Max doesn't care too much for science fiction, though, and he kept putting me on to a variety of good books which were quite foreign to me at the time. I was surprised to see the other possibilities for fiction, and I read a lot, and I became enthralled by what you can create with words."
What's ahead for Kenan? "Now I'm working on a non-fiction book about black America. I'm asking if there is such a thing, if there really is a continuity of culture among blacks across the country, and if so, what makes up that culture. It's been a great trip traveling across the country -- I've met a lot of great people -- but it's also a bit tiring. Still, I'm glad to be working on another book."
H.B. Grace writes and raises chickens in Chapel Hill, N.C.
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