Word Pirates

Is the Orange Prize sexist? The all-woman literature prize has been won by writers I deeply admire, like Ann Patchett and Margaret Atwood. But then, here’s someone else I deeply admire–AS Byatt–saying that “such a prize was never needed.”

This is a tough issue. After all, the traditional canon of English literature is dominated by white men. Women have had a famously difficult time being taken seriously as writers. Even today, if asked who the major American novelists are, you’re going to hear a name like Philip Roth and John Updike before any woman’s name comes up. (Case in point.)

But then, one time I was in Borders. I wanted to buy Beloved by Toni Morrison as a gift for someone. I looked all over the fiction section, and couldn’t find anything by Toni Morrison. I thought, this is ridiculous. Even though Borders often neglects to carry books by writers I love (seriously, I can never find what I want from that bookstore), surely they have heard of Toni Morrison!

So I asked a clerk. And do you know where they had put Toni Morrison’s Nobel Prize-winning novels? In the African American Literature section.

And therein lies the problem with this kind of thinking. Even when you start making specialized categories for people to help them get a leg up, your group can still end up marginalized. It simply becomes the group vs. the norm–in this case, African American Literature vs. Fiction. While someone like Toni Morrison deserves to be on the same shelves as Cormac McCarthy or Thomas Hardy, there she was, sitting off in some separate shelf in a special category, and all because she’s black. To me, that’s bothersome.

Still, I’m not sure what I think about this issue. Because really, I’m more concerned that Lily Allen is an Orange Prize judge than that the prize exists at all. (Yes. Lily Allen. The singer who rambles about her weight on MySpace–you know, the one who dropped out of school at age 15?)

What do you think?

(Via Bookninja)

~ Joy