I'm the last stop on our journey towards James Hannaham.
I'll try to be quick, but it's hard.
There's so much I want to say, but I'll
try to focus on the book.
In the opening scene of James Hannaham's most recent novel,
Delicious Foods, the reader meets
the book's African American protagonist, Eddie,
who is fleeing in a stolen car from
some violent undisclosed trauma that cost him both his hands.
As Eddie's story unwinds, the reader
learns his injury occurred as a result of his escape
from an agribusiness in Louisiana,
where he and his addict mother lived in forced servitude.
Thus, Hannaham's second novel establishes itself
as a modern day variation of the neo-slave narrative
and upends the reader's expectations page after page.
To begin, the horrors that James recounts
do not take place in some remote past, but in 1994,
if my calculations are correct.
The story of Eddie and his mother,
Darlene, is actually inspired by real events,
the case of Bulls-Hit Farm in Hastings, Florida,
where overseers controlled Black workers with crack and alcohol,
exactly as the book describes.
Through Hannaham's deft storytelling,
the characters' predicaments become
linked not only to the ravages of late capitalism,
but to addiction, to the devastating legacy of Jim Crow
violence, to a racist justice system.
Eddie's mother, for example, Darlene, on first glance
a stereotypical addict, turns to drug
after her activist husband is murdered by white supremacists
and the police refused to investigate his killing.
In the example of Eddie himself, Hannaham
has explained in interviews was inspired some
by the trope of the "magical Negro," the hard-working friend
to white folks in Hollywood movies.
In fact, soon after we meet Eddie
on the road driving with his bloodied stumps,
he finds a home and a job marketing his trauma
to sympathetic white people with a business card that reads,
a handyman without hands.
And I would be remiss to not mention in any intro
to this novel that the drug crack actually
becomes a character within it.
It's a character named Scotty who narrates whole passages
in a voice that The New York Times
reviewer called a cross between Kit Williams and the devil.
But for all the way it thwarts our expectations,
moving from devastating to gruesome to hilarious
in a matter of pages, Hannaham's novel does so in order
to provoke us, to challenge us, to wake us out
of our complicity.
It's work that reminds us that we are not post-race, not
even post-slavery, still trying to see ourselves and be seen.
It struck me that one of Hannaham's early descriptions
of Eddie's family might serve as an appropriate description
for our nation at this time, and I quote.
"Everyone wandered around like children in a funhouse.
They could hardly see one another across the corners,
and what they could see was completely distorted."
Hannaham's work gives us a clearer view of what we've been
and who we are.
12 years ago, I met James Hannaham for the first time
as a fellow student in a grad seminar
at UT Austin about the neo-slave narrative.
The class for me was an introduction to writers--
to the canon of the writers who included
Toni Morrison and Ishmael Reed, a canon
that I probably should have guessed
at the time you were going to write yourself into,
James Hannaham, which is what you did only 12 years later.
Among many other things, that class
was an introduction for me to James Hannaham's intelligence,
humor, and generosity.
And it gives me incredible pleasure tonight
to introduce you to him and his work.
James Hannaham.
[APPLAUSE]