Elizabeth Nunez : CUNY Profiles
By Joshua Martino
There are few students of literature and creative writing luckier than those who study with Elizabeth Nunez, CUNY Distinguished Professor of English. Not only can Professor Nunez gracefully quote great writers, with a selection from John Keats or T.S. Eliot to punctuate a point; she is also a great writer herself.
Early this fall, I was delighted to find myself lost in her latest novel, Anna In-Between (Akashic Books). Critics who praised the book in Publishers Weekly and The New York Times Book Review were just as enthusiastic. Yet perhaps none of her readers or students is as grateful for her work as is Professor Nunez herself. "Books are the center of everything I do," she told me when we met in late September. "I read books, write about books, teach books, and I also write books. I feel fortunate."
The first chapters of Professor Nunez's life were written in Trinidad, where she was born and educated through high school. Opportunities beckoned from the United States, including the chance for the aspiring author to work with writers she admired at the famed Yaddo and MacDowell artist colonies. Nunez has always been writing, from her earliest days at New York University, where she earned her PhD, to her busiest years as Distinguished Professor and Provost at Medgar Evers. She has published seven novels, including Discretion (2002), Grace (2003), Prospero's Daughter (2006) and Bruised Hibiscus (2000), which won the American Book Award.
Anna In-Between, Nunez's most recent novel, is the tale of Anna Sinclair, an editor at a venerable New York book publisher. We meet Anna during her yearly visit to her parents on the Caribbean island where she grew up. But even as Anna arrives, she is lost. None of the lush tropical life or the lively people that Nunez richly describes offers Anna a sense of place. Even in her parents' house, even in her native land, Anna feels far from home.
Indeed, Anna appears to be an intruder. In once-familiar but now exotic food, and in the local patois that now sounds strange to her, Anna cannot help but stumble upon constant reminders of the culture she lost by emigrating to the United States. She even senses that she may impose on her parents' happy marriage by being unregretfully divorced and single.
Yet the actual intruder in the Sinclair home is the cancer growing in Anna's mother. Once discovered, the illness--and her mother's mortality--forces Anna to revisit wounds she hoped would heal when she left home twenty years before. Poor Anna must also face her own metastasizing sense of unbelonging. Anna cleaves to no race, no nation, and no culture; she is stuck between pride and resentment for her father, embracing and fighting her mother, happiness and loneliness; she is both the colonized and the colonizer.
To Nunez, such complexity is the stuff of good fiction. "Most people live in gray areas," she said. "Most are not comfortable to choose one side." Our lives, she believes, are comprised of the "irreconcilable opposites" of a Keats poem. Thus, although Anna finds few simple answers, Nunez's readers encounter a compelling and lifelike novel.
Like her author, Anna looks to literature to add meaning to her experiences. When the portent of death reduces her mother to tears, Anna remembers T.S. Eliot: "I have seen the eternal Footman hold my coat, and snicker/And in short, I was afraid." In our conversation, Professor Nunez quoted the same poem, "The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock," to describe how Anna is stranded between opposites:
And I have known the eyes already, known them all--
The eyes that fix you in a formulated phrase,
And when I am formulated, sprawling on a pin,
When I am pinned and wriggling on the wall,
Then how should I begin
To spit out all the butt-ends of my days and ways?
And how should I presume?
To some extent, Professor Nunez can also apply these verses to her own life, particularly to her experience as a writer. Although Professor Nunez insists that she writes for all audiences, she notes that publishers have at times seemed intent on branding her work as African-American or Caribbean-American fiction. Her previous publisher, Ballantine Books, released her first four novels under the company's African-American imprint. When those books, which featured black characters and Caribbean settings, earned acclaim from readers and reviewers of mainstream literary fiction, the publisher printed Professor Nunez's fifth novel, Prospero's Daughters (2006), under the company's main imprint. It became her most commercially successful book.
Anna's experience is related. Her parents are proud that Anna is a senior editor at the prestigious Windsor Books. Yet Anna is too ashamed to tell them that she actually edits novels published under Windsor's label for writers of color, and that her boss dismisses some of these books as "street lit" or "ghetto lit." When, at her parents' house, Anna reads a literary manuscript that contains none of the stereotypes stripped from pop culture that fill the "street lit" genre, she knows that winning her boss's approval for this novel will be almost impossible: "This is the essence of racism, Anna thinks, this refusal of people to see themselves in the lives of others whose skin color is different than theirs."
According to Professor Nunez, race-based publishing categories (even subtly racial categories like "street lit") limit authors of color. She wonders if isolating black authors into race-specific categories implies that their audiences must also be black. Because these categories are rife with commercial "street lit" books, writers of color with more literary ambitions can find it challenging to locate artistic role models. Nunez herself recalls that as a young girl who wanted to write, she could discern few Caribbean women who wrote the kinds of books she enjoyed. If not for the generosity of her mentors--notably, the writer John Oliver Killens--her only role models might have been writers whom she studied in her literature classes, like Jane Austen, brilliant authors whose experience nonetheless seemed far-removed from that of a Trinidadian girl who longed to write and publish novels.
Role models are important, Nunez believes, because writers are "always working against a lack of confidence." Nunez told me that successful authors ought to feel responsible for undiscovered talent. From finding new authors for anthologies to co-founding the National Black Writers. Conference at Medgar Evers College, Nunez strives to support up-and-comers whom other writers might treat as competition. She also mentors young writers through her teaching, although she recognizes certain limitations: "I can teach the craft of writing," she said. "But the best teachers for writers are books." Still, as teachers go, Elizabeth Nunez is indeed distinguished, as are the many books bearing her name on their covers.
