“A quintessential black literary hero” and other influences on Jabari Asim’s first novel

Only the Strong
by Jabari Asim
(Agate Publishing, 2015)

Our series of guest blog posts by writers of fiction, history, essays, and poetry continues today with a contribution by Jabari Asim, whose debut novel Only the Strong was published in May. Below, Asim cites some of the key influences on his novel, which is set in Gateway City, a fictional Midwestern metropolis that bears more than a passing similarity to the author’s native St. Louis.

I Can’t Wait on God, Albert French. French’s 1998 novel mines the alleys and streets of Pittsburgh’s Homewood community for its story of crime, passion, and missed opportunities. The setting and its many residents compete for center stage, and they are distinctively and vividly drawn. Characters like Dicky Bird, Willet, and Mack Jack strut and swagger through a rigidly segregated 1950s world, navigating darkness, bellowing trains, gossip, and swaying hips. French devotes descriptive attention to every character who deserves it, including those whose doom seems a foregone conclusion.

Devil in a Blue Dress, Walter Mosley. Like the playwright August Wilson, Mosley has few peers when it comes to using language to illuminate the experience of black men in America. His exchanges between his black male characters, whether hostile or warm-hearted, are reliably revelatory while retaining the veracity of street-honed poetry. Equal parts strength and vulnerability, Easy Rawlins is a quintessential black literary hero.

The Street
by Ann Petry
(Houghton Mifflin, 1946)

The Street, Ann Petry. I’ve always admired Petry’s focus on what I like to call the hard-working middle, black people at neither extreme of human behavior who generally escape notice, toiling away at dead-end jobs as world-changing events unfold all around them. Lutie Johnson, the central figure in Petry’s best-known novel, anticipates the hapless protagonists of Stevie Wonder’s “Living for the City,” vulnerable to urban predations and institutional racism even as she works earnestly to better her circumstances.

I Sailed With Magellan, Stuart Dybek. I first encountered Dybek’s work in Childhood and Other Stories. I admired his unapologetic affection for the working-class youngsters wandering Chicago’s unyielding streets. I Sailed With Magellan influenced A Taste of Honey, my own collection of linked stories, and continued to resonate while I worked on Only the Strong. He mixes the gritty and the elegiac with the kind of consummate ease that I was aiming for.

The Book of Numbers, Robert Deane Pharr. Pharr’s novel, set in 1935 in an unnamed Southern town, shines with the author’s knowledge of “underground economies.” His knack for the telling detail fuels his persuasive chronicle of two men’s quick rise to top of the local numbers racket. Dave Green and Blueboy Harris are both fascinating figures, but Blueboy, the older of the two, intrigues me most. Ananias Goode, the crime boss in Only the Strong, has some of Blueboy’s worldly-wise cynicism. In Goode’s blistering tirades, I hear some of Blueboy’s hardboiled philosophy: “I ain’t no wise man, but I been everywhere and done everything a black man can do in this white bastards’ world. And you are welcome to any facts I mighta picked up.”

Empire Falls, Richard Russo. At first glance, Russo’s lily-white New England town may appear to have little in common with the all-black, Midwestern neighborhood at the center of Only the Strong. But the residents of Empire Falls, while not confined by systemic racism and strictly enforced racial segregation, must also cope with isolation of a sort. I admired Russo’s careful plotting as his characters struggled on the margins, coping with economic decline and long-simmering conflicts that come to a boil. He keeps firm hold of multiple narrative strands that would prove overwhelming in less dexterous hands.

We Can’t Breathe, Ronald Fair. I first discovered Ronald Fair when I was in college, voraciously devouring The Hog Butcher (about the fatal police shooting of an unarmed black youth), World of Nothing, and We Can’t Breathe. In the latter, readers get to spend five years with Ernie Johnson, a young black boy growing up in 1930s Chicago. Ernie’s South Side neighborhood has much in common with my North Gateway, despite the distance of several decades. I learned from Fair’s skillful use of situational humor to leaven his unblinking portrayal of elements often found in novels about life in the inner city, including racism, violence, and predatory policemen.

Jabari Asim is an associate professor of creative writing at Emerson College and the executive editor of The Crisis, the official magazine of the NAACP. His previous publications include the short story collection A Taste of Honey (2010) and several works of nonfiction. Writing in the Washington Post, Gerald Early called Only the Strong “affecting, even touching, in telling something about the way black people live,” while Madison Smart Bell has praised its “deceptively light handling of desperately serious subject matter,” and hailed Asim as “a writer to watch.”

Previously in this series:
“Influences” posts by Deborah Baker, Kate Christensen, Jennifer Gilmore, Lauren Groff, Lev Grossman, Jane Hirschfield, Alan Heathcock, Adam Levin, Dawn McGuire, Dinaw Mengestu, Jim Moore, Manuel Muñoz, Maggie Nelson, Viet Thanh Nguyen, Geoffrey O’Brien, Arthur Phillips, Carl Phillips, Karen Russell, Timothy Schaffert, Philip Schultz, Mark Statman, Emma Straub, J. Courtney Sullivan, Ellen Ullman, and Adam Wilson

Brooklyn Book Festival 2011: Mark Strand, Jhumpa Lahiri, Walter Mosley, Colson Whitehead

On Sunday, September 18, thousands of readers flocked to Brooklyn’s Borough Hall and surrounding venues to hear some 260 writers who had come to read and discuss their work on more than one hundred panels at the sixth annual Brooklyn Book Festival. Every hour twelve free events competed for the attention of the decision-addled attendees.

Pulitzer Prize–winning poet Mark Strand joined Jean Valentine, Tina Chang, Justin Long-Moton, and Alice Quinn on the windy outdoor stage opposite the steps of Borough Hall to wake up the early morning crowd with recitations. Strand's brisk reading of “Dream Testicles, Vanished Vaginas” certainly did that. “I like reading this in a public place,” he chuckled.

Listen to Mark Strand read three of his poems:


Each year the festival gives its BoBi Award to “an author whose body of work exemplifies or speaks to the spirit of Brooklyn and has had a broad impact on the field of literature.” This year the award went to the Brooklyn resident Jhumpa Lahiri. Lahiri read from her second, untitled novel to a packed audience at St. Ann and the Holy Trinity Church and then discussed her writing with critic Liesl Schillinger. Lahiri explained that she had been working on the novel for fourteen years, even while she published two collections of stories, the Pulitzer Prize–winning The Interpreter of Maladies (1999) and Unaccustomed Earth (2008), and her first novel, The Namesake (2003). Asked if she writes for a hyphenated-American audience, Lahiri responded, “I don’t know. I write to answer questions I have about my life.”

On Saturday night St. Francis College, which hosted many of the festival’s events, announced that Jonathan Dee, a festival participant, won the second annual St. Francis College Literary Award for his novel The Privileges. The $50,000 prize is “aimed at encouraging mid-career authors to continue honing their craft.” “So much of being a writer is about disappointment and discouragement,” Dee said in accepting the award. “Tonight I feel the exact opposite. I feel nothing but encouraged.”

In another session at St. Ann’s previous BoBi winner Walter Mosley joined Irish writer Eoin Colfer to discuss “Gumshoes.” After Mosley read a chapter from his new Leonid McGill novel, All I Did Was Shoot My Man (coming in January), Los Angeles Times book critic David L. Ulin asked him about the draw of crime fiction and how it works. Mosley expounded on what the genre allows him to do:

Crime fiction . . . allows you a view into worlds that you might not see otherwise. Let’s say you were going to write a story about an undocumented laborer in Central California and how he died and how he lived. If you write the story straightforward like that what you do is that you get readers who are interested in that. But if the way you got into that story was from a Chicano detective who is hired by somebody in the area to find out who indeed killed the boss of all these workers then all of a sudden you have a much larger group. You can reach much further by putting something in crime fiction because a lot of people read crime fiction and they don’t care where it happens. They don’t care who’s in it. They care about the resolution of the crime because that’s what’s important to them. But in doing that you’re able to talk about a much broader world and bring people into that.

Listen to Walter Mosley talk about crime fiction:


By most accounts the most sought after ticket was to “Apocalypse Now and Then What?” which featured Tananarive Due reading from My Soul to Take, the latest in her series of African Immortals novels; Patrick Somerville, who read “No Sun” from his story collection The Universe in Miniature in Miniature; and Colson Whitehead, reading from his highly anticipated new novel, Zone One, due out in October. Whitehead took pains to set up his reading: “Zone One is an autobiographical novel based on my time clearing out zombies from downtown Manhattan. . . Some people dream about being naked in public. For me it’s zombies. Sometimes I get bit. Sometimes I make it to the human settlement.” By writing about his dreams Whitehead hoped to exorcise them, “and I’ve been 90% successful.”

Also of interest:

• Read other reports on Brooklyn Book Festival 2011 from The New Yorker, McBrooklyn, and Publishers Weekly
• BoBi winner John Ashbery with Paul Auster at the 2010 Brooklyn Book Festival, a previous Reader’s Almanac post

Related LOA works: American Religious Poems: An Anthology by Harold Bloom (includes two poems by Mark Strand); Becoming Americans: Four Centuries of Immigrant Writing (includes “The Third and Final Continent” from Jhumpa Lahiri’s The Interpreter of Maladies); Writing Los Angeles: A Literary Anthology (includes an excerpt from Walter Mosley’s Devil in a Blue Dress) and Writing New York: A Literary Anthology (includes an excerpt from The Colossus of New York by Colson Whitehead)