Three local writers are planning to open a new space in Long Beach dedicated to the written work of BIPOC (Black Indigenous People of Color).
“This really is a grassroots movement to return writing to community,” Giovanni’s Room co-founder Jasmin L. Roberts said. “And in particular to create space for folks who have felt excluded from the writing and publishing and media industry in the past.”
Giovanni’s Room takes its name from the title of a 1956 novel by James Baldwin.
Giovanni’s Room aims to create space for writers of color
Founders Roberts, Myriam Gurba and Danielle Broadway formed Giovanni’s Room in response to the frustrations and obstacles they and other writers of color they knew had experienced in the overwhelmingly white writing and publishing industry.
“We spent a lot of time, sort of during our quarantine days, sitting in peoples’ living rooms and talking about writing and talking about the writing community and the publishing industry and we started, I mean, venting,” Roberts said. “Venting about what spaces exist for us, and what spaces feel exclusive. And then Giovanni’s Room was born.”
Roberts, Gurba and Broadway are still fundraising and looking for a location for Giovanni’s Room. Once it opens, they plan to host workshops, open mics, and give writers a space where they can work collaboratively or alone.
“Among my hopes for Giovanni’s Room is a space that functions much more like a mutual aid society,” co-founder Myriam Gurba said in a YouTube video. “Rather than a cut-throat competitive workshop space or a space where we’re very concerned with the market and with industry.”
According to the 2019 Diversity Baseline Survey by Lee & Low Books, 76% of those working in the publishing industry are white.
The same survey also found that 80% of book reviewers are white.
“I’ve spent a lot of time in the writing community and writing space,” Roberts said in a YouTube video. “And it has mostly been white.”
According to statistics gathered from the U.S. Census Bureau by Data USA, 80.7% of those employed as authors and writers are white.
Gurba is well known for criticizing the publishing industry, and the written work it churns out. In 2019, amid an echo chamber of support and endorsement for the narco-thriller novel American Dirt by Jeanine Cummins, Gurba set off an avalanche of criticism following a critique she wrote about the book.
The feminist magazine that originally asked Gurba to write the critique wanted to kill the story after reading it, saying Gurba did not have the fame necessary to write something so mean, she said.
Instead, it was eventually published by Tropic of Meta and blew up, with numerous critics agreeing with Gurba’s assertion that American Dirt was “a book overflowing with sloppy Mexican stereotypes meant to stir pleasure through pity.”
Notably, while promoting American Dirt, Cummins posted photos on Twitter of a barbed wire manicure design and party centerpieces designed to look like cement walls with barbed wire.
Backlash for speaking about racism
During the inaugural reading of Giovanni’s Room at Page Against the Machine book store on Saturday, Sept. 25, Gurba shared an essay she wrote in response to a threatening online message an angry white man had sent her about her critique of American Dirt. In it, he expressed his desire for Gurba’s life to end.
The message sent to Gurba is included in a zine published by Giovanni’s Room, in a section titled “The Hate Mail Chronicles,” that contains copies of messages by white people deriding the works of Roberts, Gurba and Broadway.
In response to an article Broadway wrote for Parents Magazine titled “How to Teach the History of Racism in Science Class,” in which she suggests teaching the history of Henrietta Lacks and the Tuskegee Study in science class to help children understand medical racism, a Twitter user wrote “What the [expletive] [expletive] [expletive] is this?”
Another commenter on Twitter wrote “[Danielle Broadway] apparently enjoys ‘Racism’ so much that she thinks we need to teach our children about it.”
A third comment included in the zine reads, “After reading [Danielle Broadway’s] article, it’s easy to figure out her game. It’s not enough for her that we teach these terrible parts of our history (and the worlds), she still wants to instill unnecessary guilt and anguish in (at minimum) a generation of children.”
In a spoken word poem by Roberts titled “For White Poets,” they criticize the work of white poets who receive accolades and praise from other white people for writing about racism they’ve never experienced.
Online comments in response to the poem include, “Why is she bashing people ‘just for being white’ when they are [technically] helping this country get better on racism?” and “I think Roberts intentionally misunderstands the motivation of white poets who try to combat racism through poetry; is it so hard to believe they just want racism to stop?”
Similar to Cummins, the commenters under Roberts’ work seem to believe the good intentions of white writers who write about other communities should be taken at face value.
“At worst, we perceive them as an invading mob of resource-draining criminals, and, at best, a sort of helpless, impoverished, faceless brown mass, clamoring for help at our doorstep,” Cummins wrote in an author’s note. “We seldom think of them as our fellow human beings […] I hope to create a pause where the reader may begin to individuate.”
Cummins received a seven figure publishing deal for American Dirt.
In the author’s note Cummins also laments that she herself knows she was not the best person to tell the story of Mexican immigrants: “I wished someone slightly browner than me would write it.”
As Gurba and other critics have noted, there are numerous Mexican authors who have written about their own immigration journeys, many of whom have not received the level of publicity nor money American Dirt did.
As Roberts points out in their poem and Gurba in her essays, the careers of white writers benefit from writing about marginalized communities far more than those marginalized communities benefit from white people writing about them.
Giovanni’s Room seeks to give writers from marginalized communities a place to tell their own stories, and support each other through the often painful process of doing so.
“This is something that racially minoritized people have to be especially cautious about because we’re often urged to write about trauma,” Gurba said. “And if we do choose to do that, I think that it’s very important for us to practice not just self-care but community-based care.”
Giovanni’s Room is asking for volunteer help from the community. Those interested in volunteering can email giovannisroomlb@gmail.com.
“It really is community that makes days like this possible,” Broadway said at the inaugural reading of Giovanni’s Room.
A GoFundMe campaign has also been set up to help raise funds for Giovanni’s Room.
