On Impatience with Historical Innocence: My Own and Others’

I’m tired these days of folks saying things like “I’m here to learn from you,” which seems taken from some Progressive greeting card or a session with their therapist. I maintain that grown people of all races should have a passing familiarity with the history of this country.

That’s why a current sentence I’m encountering way too many times sends me from irritation to near-rage: “What’s happening right now is just like in The Handmaid’s Tale!”

Like so much on the internet, this statement probably started with one person, then someone else stole it, and now, it’s being passed around like a profound, earth-shattering new observation.

But though it might be new, this reference to The Handmaid’s Tale not profound. It’s not correct, either, because The Handmaid’s Tale is fiction, fiction that has appropriated the lived experiences of Black women since the sixteenth century in this place now renamed the United States, which makes The Handmaid’s Tale problematic.

There are plenty of novels that I have loved that later proved equally problematic. For example, as a kid, I loved James Clavell’s Shogun: A Novel of Japan, though it exhibits disturbing Orientalism. I loved Richard Wright’s Native Son, though the Black male protagonist murders not one but two women, and the second one—a Black woman after he intimately assaults her. (Yes, I’m using a euphemism here. If you’re grown, you know what I’m talking about.)

And I really, really loved Margaret Atwood’s The Handmaid’s Tale. I loved this novel so much that when others trashed the book or the Hulu series by the same name, I defended Atwood’s intentions.

I argued that the series departed from the book—and that wasn’t Atwood’s fault. I reminded Black women, readers, that Atwood had described Gilead as a White Supremacist fascist theocracy. (Atwood gives all of three—two?—to the expulsion of Black folks from Gilead.) I got into arguments—albeit briefly—with the Black women ripping both the book and the series apart. They didn’t get it, I argued. Atwood meant well.

Now, I am so embarrassed that I defended both the book and the series. I’m not truly sure that Atwood meant well because she’s had plenty of time to speak on the history of Black women, but she hasn’t.

I think I took some criticism towards Atwood personally because I write books, too, and I’ve made some funky mistakes myself.

For example, when I was writing my first novel, I didn’t spend the same amount of time with my Queer characters as I did my cishet ones. I didn’t feel comfortable at the time, because as someone who reads many scholarly texts, I always like to rest on terra firma when writing any prose. When my novel came out in 2021, I tried to justify why I didn’t do a deep dive into my Queer character’s life, a young Black woman named Coco.

Although I still absolutely love my novel, as someone who is now working on three other works of fiction, I understand why I shouldn’t have avoided writing what I wasn’t sure about—for isn’t that the whole point of writing, to head to a place where you don’t know you’re going? And imagine how ridiculous it sounds that I was in “unfamiliar territory” while writing about my novel's historical characters of the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries!

Fortunately, I understand what I did wrong—even before I published my novel, I knew I would return to Coco’s story. She deserved that. (Yes, I think of my characters as real people.) Right when the book went to press, I had a dream about Coco, so I woke up and started writing about her. (My dreams are essential to my writing process.)

This is what brings me back to The Handmaid’s Tale and my extreme disappointment with not only the book but also the series—again, I’m not the first person to voice my disappointment, but I may be only one of a few who passionately loved both the series and the book and who has now changed their mind.

Nearly three months into what is rapidly becoming an authoritarian, White supremacy, anti-woman, anti -Queer, anti-Trans nation—that would be our nation, the United States-- I’ve found that I have little patience these days for White people who maintain what James Baldwin called innocence about the place where we find ourselves. This impatience includes Margaret Atwood and her fans.

Atwood is admittedly a genius. Yet I have searched for any discussion of the actual history of enslaved Black women in The Handmaid’s Tale in her interviews about the novel, that the portions of forced intimacy and the theft of the handmaid’s children are not “dystopian” but the actual, documented history of enslaved African American women. I have found no mention.

After the draft argument forecasting the overturning of Roe v. Wade in 2022, Atwood published a piece where she designated forced reproduction as “slavery” without once mentioning the history of Black women in the country. There is no mention of “race,” no mention of “African American,” and no mention of “Black.” I was not only shocked by Atwood, but I was shocked that someone had green-lighted this apparent historical erasure of the lived experiences of people of African descent around the globe.

Given my oversights in my own novel, I can forgive the Margaret Atwood of forty years ago, when her book first came out—but you mean to tell me that after all this time she hasn’t figured out the Africana history she overlooked? Not just overlooked but erased?

Again, I have a book coming out, so maybe I shouldn’t wade into this fray, but we are in the middle of a national crisis in the United States, and the last thing we need is Black folks making nice over this kind of issue, especially when it’s popping up everywhere.

So let me remind us that we have gone through many of our current issues before, not in fiction but in reality:

The diminishing—and outright erasure—of African Americans’ intellectual accomplishments and abilities from anti-DEI initiatives by the current administration of the White House recalls the White Supremacist proto-eugenics “scholarship” of Josiah C. Nott and Louis Agassiz.

The disappearing of immigrants—both documented and undocumented—from their homes, cars, and neighborhoods, and then shipped overseas recalls the transatlantic as well as internal slave trades written about in John Blassingame’s The Slave Community: Plantation Life in the Antebellum South and Marcus Rediker’s The Slave Ship: A Human History, as well as historical autobiographies of Olaudah Equiano’s The Interesting Narrative of the Life of Olaudah Equiano, or Gustavus Vassa, The African. Written by Himself and Belinda Sutton’s “Petition,” wherein she writes that she was “paying her devotions to the great Orisa” when she was kidnapped into slavery. (Perhaps the first documented reference to a non-Abrahamic religion written by an African in North America.)

White men’s intimate assault of Black women, forced breeding, and theft of Black women’s children have been widely written about, going back to autobiographies such as Harriet Jacobs’ Incidents in the Life of a Slave Girl. Written by Herself, the Works Progress/Projects Administration (WPA) narratives of formerly enslaved Africans Americans recorded in the 1930s and 1940s, the family oral traditions of millions of Black folks, and documented scholarship of academics.

And yet, we get White women saying such things online: “This is just like what happened in The Handmaid’s Tale.”

No, this is just like what happened to African American women.

But guess what? We Black women are still here. We survived these horrible events; the least you can do is acknowledge that.

Instead of Atwood and her legions of White female fans erasing the history of Black women, why not try going back and reading that history? But don’t ask me to teach you: the (online) library is free. Teach yourself—because you won’t just need those lessons in the future. You need those lessons right now.