Editor’s Note: W. Ralph Eubanks is the author of the new book “A Place Like Mississippi: A Journey Through a Real and Imagined Literary Landscape” (Timber Press), as well as “Ever Is a Long Time” and “The House at the End of the Road.” He is a visiting professor of English and Southern Studies at the University of Mississippi. The views expressed here are his. View more opinion on CNN.
Last year, the late Randall Kenan spoke at the University of Mississippi about his work as a writer and the role of the writer in society. Kenan said, “for a community to change they have to understand the devastation they are wreaking on certain people.”
Yes, Georgia flipped blue because of a massive voter enfranchisement effort. But I like to think that it was also the groundbreaking work of Georgia writers, from James Alan McPherson and Alice Walker to Tayari Jones, who all created a literary culture in their home state that helped its populace begin to see the devastation that was being imposed on many of its citizens. Southern writing today embraces a variety of identities and perspectives, and even includes writers who are Southern transplants as well as natives, revealing how those who choose to live in the South must also inhabit the very idea of the South – and not just its political realm – in order to change it.
Moving from a nation enraptured by White supremacy to one of anti-racism means shifting not only the calculus of elective politics but also the cultural narrative. Political strategy may change representation, but culture holds the promise to transform hearts and minds. An empathetic Southern electorate engaged with the literary culture of the region holds an even greater potential to alter the political landscape.
What we read can change how we vote, how we perceive changes in public policy, and how we examine and probe the world around us. A recent study even suggests that literary fiction helps to actively engage its readers with cultural discourse. And contemporary Southern writing, particularly from my native Mississippi, confronts the realities and complexities of our current moment and provides a window into the power of storytelling to foster cultural change.
In the post-integration era, Southern writing has become emboldened not only to examine the past but to begin to re-imagine the Southern future. Literature serves as a clarifying force that creates cultural discussions that allow us to see the past more clearly, understand how the past intersects with the present, and to imagine a transformative future.
Southern writers like William Faulkner, Eudora Welty and Lillian Smith stand as part of a tradition of writing against cultural orthodoxy, given that the very places they wrote about have a long history of racial conflict and strife. Yes, Faulkner struggled with the issue of race, with his appeals in Life magazine in 1956 to “go slow” during the Civil Rights Movement. But as Michael Gorra notes about Faulkner in his recent book “The Saddest Words,” “Few historians and fewer novelists of his day saw the hobbling vainglorious past so clearly.”
Where Faulkner stumbled on race, Eudora Welty stood up. I would even argue that Welty’s story “Where is the Voice Coming From?”, which explored the tortured mind of Medgar Evers’s killer, was more influential in changing the minds of White moderates on the question of race in Mississippi than any politician.
Welty wrote the story the same night that she learned of Evers’ murder and always said it was the only piece of writing she ever wrote in anger. When she heard the news of the murder, it occurred to her that she knew what was going on in the mind of the man who pulled the trigger. She knew because she had lived all of her life where it happened and also understood that her Southern readers would recognize the voice of the murderer.
While it seems that in much of the deep South as if Southern politics has not made a sustained ideological shift in the past half-century – yes, the recent water crisis in Jackson is partly fueled by a complex combination of racism, White flight and political gerrymandering – Southern writing has changed and reveals how ideas hold the power to change culture.
Southern writing has successfully moved outside of the long shadow cast by John Crowe Ransom and his vigilant band of Agrarian poets at Vanderbilt. This group of White Southern male writers were all determined to define the very idea of what it meant to be Southern. When they wrote “I’ll Take My Stand” in 1930, the South’s past and Whiteness were sacraments that defined southern identity.
A new generation of Southern writers – who are of varying ethnicities and not just straight White men – are providing new cultural scripts for what it means to be Southern, and those scripts are being embraced by the young Southerners who read them. These writers have placed the old agrarian ideal where it belongs: in the dustbin of history.
In Mississippi, our poets, novelists and narrative nonfiction writers understand that it is part of their job to challenge and move Mississippi forward, particularly on a landscape where Trump flags remain as prominent as the Confederate canton once was on the state flag. In his 2016 essay “What I Pledge Allegiance to,” Kiese Laymon challenges every Mississippian and every American to “reckon with the possibility that there will never be any liberty, peace, and justice for all unless we accept that America, like Mississippi, is not clean.”
In my own classes at the University of Mississippi, I have witnessed how Jesmyn Ward’s writing forces my students to think about ways to make Mississippi a place that reckons with its past honestly. When Ward relates the unconnected deaths of five young men in four years in her memoir “Men We Reaped,” students quickly realize the story she tells demands attention. The works of poets like Beth Ann Fennelly, Aimee Nezhukumatathil and Natasha Trethewey have helped my students engage with the natural beauty of Mississippi as well as its historical oversights and scars.
Reading Trethewey’s “Native Guard,” with its mixture of poetry based on both the historical and the personal, helps students see how a poem can get its power from its sense of justice, not just its language. As Trethewey said in a 2004 interview about her Pulitzer Prize-winning collection, “I began to think about myself and of Mississippi history and the idea of native, I saw a way to explore the tension evident in being a native of a place that has denied the full citizenship of many native sons and daughters.”
The work of all of these writers shows us that if Southerners can examine the scars rendered by our past and present, we can also see them as powerful and learn from them. But these same writers also teach us that if we ignore and neglect our scars, they are merely outward signs of our woundedness and that those wounds will never heal as long as we ignore them.
From where I sit as a literature and Southern Studies professor, political change begins with active engagement with ideas. In every class I teach, my unspoken goal is for students to understand how storytelling holds the power to change the way we look at the world.
At the end of each semester, I see evidence of this power. As one of my students wrote in reaction to a semester of reading contemporary Southern writers on race, memory and identity, “The truth of historical events have been covered up in most textbooks and even by my teachers, whom I believed would always reveal the truth to me,” she wrote. “This consciousness to protect the minds of younger adults has not only negatively affected the way younger adults view the world, but it has also damaged the amount of trust placed in the education system.”
While some have argued that the empathy elicited by literature is short-lived, I have seen it transform student’s perspectives on the world. It is reading and hearing comments like these from my students that I have come to realize that engagement with literature and culture must also be part of the strategy for moving the South and this country forward.
The landscape of the South evokes ideas of truth, memory and race, even when the omnipresent memorials to the Lost Cause that dot its terrain seek to obscure truth. Understanding Southern place, landscape, history and literature holds transformative powers for readers. It is time Americans came to realize that a story about race set in Mississippi is as much about the sins of the nation as it is about the sins of the Magnolia state. That is why the South – and particularly Southern literature – holds the power to create social change. Our writers don’t just hold up a mirror to the region. Through their exploration of the region’s past and the present, they are helping to understand and change the nation.
