Word: kenan
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Dates: during 2000-2009
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...surprisingly, Tims Creek is much like Chinquapin, N.C., the impoverished outpost where Kenan grew up "going to hog killings one minute and watching Star Trek the next." He was sent there at six weeks old by his parents, who were unmarried and residing in New York, to be reared by his great-aunt. His upbringing became the collective endeavor of a group of elderly relatives with abiding faith in both religion and folklore who spent endless hours telling fantastical stories--"tales of ghost dogs and people rising from the dead." The residue of these stories has found its way into...
...Kenan does not, however, shy away from reinterpreting the sacred texts. While Faulkner explored the remnants of a failed white aristocracy, Kenan is concerned mainly with Tims Creek's black population, descendants of the former slaves who founded the town. This network of working-class families, introduced in his novel A Visitation of Spirits (1989) and the short-story collection Let the Dead Bury Their Dead (1992), recurs in the novel he is currently writing, Fire and the Baptism, due early next year. It is a community clinging to the traditions of the past while grappling with the pressures...
...things I have always taken issue with in Southern literature is that it is almost all rooted in social realism," says Kenan. "I grew up around people who took the Bible literally, and still do." So in college, when Kenan first read such South American authors as Gabriel Garcia Marquez, he abandoned his plans to be a physicist and turned to writing. "When I encountered writers who wrote about spirits like they would changing a carburetor, I realized you can come at this form from an entirely different vantage point...
...attempts to transform himself into a bird to escape the ostracism he will face if his homosexuality is exposed in his religious community. Instead he unleashes an army of demons that haunt him as he is haunted by what he sees as his sin. It is with Horace that Kenan claims the most affinity, and his plight seems a supernatural rendering of Kenan's experience of coming to terms with his own homosexuality in a culture where it was "never talked about but always a shadow...
...Kenan welcomes the passing of certain aspects of that rigid culture. "The monolith of the black church, for example, has some outdated ways of thinking that can hold a people back," he says. At the same time, he laments the demise of those elements that have proved so nurturing, particularly Chinquapin's understanding of family. "Because of slavery, the idea of nuclear family didn't exist among black Americans," says Kenan. "So people depended on a network of family, but now many of those networks are breaking down." Kenan found his nostalgia echoed across the country as he researched...