Whiting Award Winners
Since 1985, the Foundation has supported creative writing through the Whiting Awards, which are given annually to ten emerging writers in fiction, nonfiction, poetry, and drama.
When the future spoke—as it did every day now—it spoke through jukeboxes. In the paradise of affluence Dionne Warwick was always signing a Burt Bacharach song, as a Greek island came into view at starboard. The stars—movie actresses, pop singers, grizzled dissipated novelists, intellectual fashion designers—got hilariously drunk in ship’s bars, alternately fell half-naked down casino steps or announced their intention of filming the work of Genet or Ouspensky. The planet was their plaything. Having the power of free movement to and from anywhere, they jetted between Corfu and Bhutan and Seychelles, colliding briefly with one another to invent new psychic spaces, to share the new fun of the incandescent future.
Gil Scott-Heron has a beautiful song I wish Ta-Nehisi Coates and all of us would listen to again. It’s called “Who Will Pay Reparations on My Soul?” The title is also the refrain, but the force of the rhetorical question lies in its pithy yoking of materialism and slave capitalism to a logic that transcends the material. This is also the crux of my dissent: What can reparations mean when the damage cannot be accounted for in the only system of accounting that a society recognizes? Part of the work here is thinking about the value of human life differently. This becomes obvious when commentators—including Coates—get caught up trying to tabulate the extraordinary value of slaves held in bondage (don’t forget to convert to today’s dollars!). It shouldn’t be hard to see that doing so yields to a mentality that is itself at the root of slavery as an institution: human beings cannot and should not be quantified, monetized, valued in dollar amounts. There can be no refund check for slavery. But that doesn’t mean the question of injury evaporates, so let us ask a harder question: Who will pay reparations on my soul?
Black American music has always insisted upon soul, the value of the human spirit, and its unquenchable yearnings. It’s a value that explicitly refuses material boundaries or limitations. You hear it encoded emblematically in the old spirituals. Black voices steal away to freedom. They go to the river. They fly away. Something is owed.
Then, without any warning, Taylor could speak Abini. June and Peter could not recall a learning period, a month when the girl communicated awkwardly with the villagers. By the time June noticed her daughter speaking the native language, the girl was spitting out long sentences at her friends, laughing with them, and joining in songs and chants, and when June’s back was turned to Taylor and her friends, she could barely distinguish her daughter’s voice from those of the other children.
One night during this time my mother started asking me questions, out of the blue, about William Faulkner. She was taking a night-school course and wanted to write about the Nobel laureate from her hometown, New Albany. Why Faulkner, I asked, of all the writers in the world to care about? Why not Richard Wright, James Baldwin or Zora Neale Hurston? “We’re kin to some Faulkners,” she said. I laughed out loud and informed her that this Faulkner was white. My mother smiled and said, “So?”
I decided the caterpillar was too stupid to live. I put it into the carabid beetle’s container. The caterpillar was much larger, but it had no means of defense. The carabid sliced into it and lapped at its leaking blood. Because the caterpillar was so big, the carabid had to repeat his attack eight or ten times. The caterpillar crawled away frantically for the first few wounds, but it was so slow that its movements hardly inconvenienced the beetle drinking from its bleeding flank. After ten minutes or so the caterpillar lay still. Its jade flesh turned black as the beetle chewed and drained it.
The sky over Bombay was filled with gold and silver, masonry, bricks, steel girders, and human limbs and torsos, flying through the air as far as Crawford Market. A jeweler was sitting in his office in Jhaveri Bazaar when a bar of solid gold crashed through the roof and arrived in front of him. A steel girder flew through the air and crashed through the roof of Victoria Terminus, the main train station. A plate of iron landed on a horse and neatly decapitated the animal. Stray limbs and fragments of bodies were blown all over the docks. Bombay had never, till then, seen any wartime action. It was as if the city had been bombed.
When the future spoke—as it did every day now—it spoke through jukeboxes. In the paradise of affluence Dionne Warwick was always signing a Burt Bacharach song, as a Greek island came into view at starboard. The stars—movie actresses, pop singers, grizzled dissipated novelists, intellectual fashion designers—got hilariously drunk in ship’s bars, alternately fell half-naked down casino steps or announced their intention of filming the work of Genet or Ouspensky. The planet was their plaything. Having the power of free movement to and from anywhere, they jetted between Corfu and Bhutan and Seychelles, colliding briefly with one another to invent new psychic spaces, to share the new fun of the incandescent future.
Gil Scott-Heron has a beautiful song I wish Ta-Nehisi Coates and all of us would listen to again. It’s called “Who Will Pay Reparations on My Soul?” The title is also the refrain, but the force of the rhetorical question lies in its pithy yoking of materialism and slave capitalism to a logic that transcends the material. This is also the crux of my dissent: What can reparations mean when the damage cannot be accounted for in the only system of accounting that a society recognizes? Part of the work here is thinking about the value of human life differently. This becomes obvious when commentators—including Coates—get caught up trying to tabulate the extraordinary value of slaves held in bondage (don’t forget to convert to today’s dollars!). It shouldn’t be hard to see that doing so yields to a mentality that is itself at the root of slavery as an institution: human beings cannot and should not be quantified, monetized, valued in dollar amounts. There can be no refund check for slavery. But that doesn’t mean the question of injury evaporates, so let us ask a harder question: Who will pay reparations on my soul?
Black American music has always insisted upon soul, the value of the human spirit, and its unquenchable yearnings. It’s a value that explicitly refuses material boundaries or limitations. You hear it encoded emblematically in the old spirituals. Black voices steal away to freedom. They go to the river. They fly away. Something is owed.
Then, without any warning, Taylor could speak Abini. June and Peter could not recall a learning period, a month when the girl communicated awkwardly with the villagers. By the time June noticed her daughter speaking the native language, the girl was spitting out long sentences at her friends, laughing with them, and joining in songs and chants, and when June’s back was turned to Taylor and her friends, she could barely distinguish her daughter’s voice from those of the other children.
One night during this time my mother started asking me questions, out of the blue, about William Faulkner. She was taking a night-school course and wanted to write about the Nobel laureate from her hometown, New Albany. Why Faulkner, I asked, of all the writers in the world to care about? Why not Richard Wright, James Baldwin or Zora Neale Hurston? “We’re kin to some Faulkners,” she said. I laughed out loud and informed her that this Faulkner was white. My mother smiled and said, “So?”
I decided the caterpillar was too stupid to live. I put it into the carabid beetle’s container. The caterpillar was much larger, but it had no means of defense. The carabid sliced into it and lapped at its leaking blood. Because the caterpillar was so big, the carabid had to repeat his attack eight or ten times. The caterpillar crawled away frantically for the first few wounds, but it was so slow that its movements hardly inconvenienced the beetle drinking from its bleeding flank. After ten minutes or so the caterpillar lay still. Its jade flesh turned black as the beetle chewed and drained it.
The sky over Bombay was filled with gold and silver, masonry, bricks, steel girders, and human limbs and torsos, flying through the air as far as Crawford Market. A jeweler was sitting in his office in Jhaveri Bazaar when a bar of solid gold crashed through the roof and arrived in front of him. A steel girder flew through the air and crashed through the roof of Victoria Terminus, the main train station. A plate of iron landed on a horse and neatly decapitated the animal. Stray limbs and fragments of bodies were blown all over the docks. Bombay had never, till then, seen any wartime action. It was as if the city had been bombed.