NARRATIVE ESSAY:
Although he has established
his reputation as the author of books that incisively explore places and the
people within them, Eddy L. Harris has claimed that he is not a travel
writer. His deeply penetrating accounts are searches for his own identity
and the identity of blacks in general in various contexts, and how places
either embrace or alienate black culture. For his literary efforts, Harris
has gathered material first-hand from his own lengthy immersions into the
geography, culture, history, and mindset of places ranging from unstable
African countries, to New York City's famed Harlem, to the legendary
Mississippi River.
Harris has traveled great
distances, endured hardships, and even put his own life at risk in order to
capture the essence of the black experience in different settings throughout
the world. He has had a gun drawn on him because he brushed a man who was
blocking his way on a city sidewalk, threatened by potentially fatal
diseases in remote African villages, lived as a nomad in foreign territories
where no one spoke English, and survived alone in the wilderness for weeks
at a time. All of these experiences have been preserved and eloquently
transformed into literature in his four acclaimed works of non-fiction.
Harris has stressed that
complete immersion in a location is the only way to close the gap between
insider and outsider. He feels that even his long habitations were not long
enough to find out everything he wanted to know. As he wrote in Native
Stranger: A Black American's Journey into the Heart of Africa, "It would
perhaps be better to live and travel like the tortoise, who spends the 150
years of its life moving slowly, learning intimately every inch of ground it
covers. Going so far and so fast as I was going, a traveler sees the world
rush by like streaks of rain on the windscreen of a speeding car...The best
I could hope for was to stand back from the tableau and absorb it, to let
the myriad impressions come together and offer an image."
Much of Harris' literary
focus has been devoted to discovering the essence of the black experience
and how it has been affected by forced emigration from Africa, its exposure
to American culture, and the impact blacks have had on white culture in the
United States. He has also been outspoken about what he considers the
futility of American blacks who think of themselves as transplanted
Africans. "Africa is not our home," he wrote in Native Stranger. "Should the
volcano erupt, we will have no place but the United States. If it isn't
going to work there, if we can't make it work there, it isn't going to
work."
While growing up in Harlem
and the suburbs outside of St. Louis, Harris got an early taste of the power
of storytelling. As a child he would sit mesmerized by his father's many
stories, the truth of them often stretched beyond the breaking point for
dramatic effect. In 1994, he told Crisis that his "passion for wanting to
write comes from a passion to tell stories like my father." Harris also
credits his stable family life for helping him avoid the pitfalls that
claimed many other blacks who grew up impoverished and surrounded by crime
and drugs. His parents also taught him a great deal about black history and
his own family's connections to the slavery of the past, which further
sparked his interest in writing about the black experience.
After graduating from college
in 1977, Harris began his long journey toward developing his skills as a
writer. According to an article in Crisis, he attributes his development
during this period to the continuing financial support of his father, which
allowed him to survive periods when money was tight. Harris hit his literary
stride with the publication of Mississippi Solo in 1988, a book based on his
trip down the entire length of the Mississippi River. The trip was an
especially ambitious venture for Harris, who had had little experience in
the wilderness. "It was an impetuous plan, and one for which I was quite
ill-prepared," he wrote in a 1997 article in Outside magazine. "I'd scarcely
been in a canoe before. I'd been camping twice in my entire life." Harris
experienced danger throughout the trip, from a pack of wild dogs who trapped
him in his tent to a pair of racist white hunters whom he had to chase away
with a shot from his pistol.
In 1992, Harris chronicled
his extensive trip through Africa from Tunisia to South Africa in the
critically-acclaimed Native Stranger, a trip where "he encountered
astonishing kindness, appalling cruelty, great wealth and even greater
poverty, disease, corruption--all the usual suspects in any postcolonial
African lineup," according to Malcolm Jones, Jr., in Newsweek. During his
adventures in Africa, Harris had to cross the border from Mauritania into
Senegal during a harrowing period of ethnic cleansing, was arrested in
Liberia, and had to bribe his way into Nigeria. His health was compromised
by bouts with malaria and diarrhea, not to mention filth whose magnitude far
exceeded anything in his experience. In his review of the book in Black
Enterprise, Herb Boyd said that Harris "eloquently conveys impressions of
the myth, magic and mystery of the ancestors he desperately wants to know,
but cannot, because of cultural differences."
In Native Stranger, Harris
concentrated on finding links between himself and the land of his
forefathers. "Although I am not African, there is a line that connects that
place with this one, the place we come from and the place we find
ourselves," wrote Harris about the continent. He added, "I love this place
and resent it at the same time, and Africa reciprocates, trapped as we both
are in this middle ground somewhere between black and white, past and
future."
Following the release of
Native Stranger, he published South of Haunted Dreams: A Ride Through
Slavery's Old Back Yard in 1993. To complete this work, he rode a motorcycle
across the American South, encountering both prejudice and kindness from
strangers along the way. Harris filled the book with fascinating insights on
everything from modern-day racism to why his slave ancestors didn't fight
more strongly to win their freedom. "With honesty and humor, Harris lets the
reader in on the fears, disappointments and joys this journey home brings,"
wrote Elsie B. Washington in her review of the book in Essence.
Perhaps Harris's most
challenging experience was the two years he spent in Harlem, an experience
that fueled his next book, Still Life in Harlem, which was published in 1997
and hailed by Booklist as "a powerful memoir of Harlem life and those who
live there." Exposure to the drug- and crime-riddled ruins of a once-vibrant
black culture had a profound effect on Harris. Some of the events he
witnessed in Harlem made him ashamed of his own race, most notably when he
was awakened in the middle of the night by a man beating a woman in the
street below his apartment. "In the few moments of my indecision I told
myself that enough was enough, told myself that I wanted no longer to be
black if this is how black men behaved, told myself that I wanted nothing
more to do with a world without beauty in it, and that cared not for
beauty," he said in an interview for Salon on the Internet.
While acknowledging the role
of prejudice in the devastation of Harlem, Harris also stressed his
resentment of blacks who abandoned Harlem once they achieved success. "I
looked out my window and could see the dentist who lived on the corner, the
piano teacher, a whole range of people I could grow up to be or not be," he
told Salon about the disparity of his own early youth in Harlem and what he
saw there as an adult. "I had all these choices. Now when you look at the
black community, at least what we consider the black community --the
hard-core urban centers-- all these role models have disappeared. It leaves
only the gangster and drug dealer for kids to see. There are no decent jobs
there anymore, no factories, nothing but the guy on the corner selling
drugs."
Having traveled more than
10,000 miles on two continents in order to gather material for his books,
Harris shows no sign of stopping his exploration of the black experience. He
hopes to continue venturing into new territory, both literary and
geographic, as he strives to shatter black stereotypes. Harris has made it
clear that he thinks black culture has more of an influence on American
culture than many people think. "I think the essence of this culture extends
from the contributions of black people," he told Crisis. "So I think being
black is really cool." As he added in his interview with Salon, "If you come
up to me at a cocktail party, I want it to be impossible for you to make
assumptions about me because my skin is black and I'm tall and I wear a
beard."
SOURCES:
PERIODICALS
