By David L. Ulin
FROM: The Los Angeles Times

Here’s a story I used to tell myself: I moved to Los Angeles to get away. From winter, for one thing, and the weight of history. To find a bit of freedom, or maybe distance. For me, now as then, the two amount to pretty much the same. Or better still, space — the space to stretch, the space to fail, the space to carve a passage for myself. In other words, the space to write.

I was wrong about this, as it turns out, but I was also correct. That’s the thing about Los Angeles: Everything we say about it is both true and false. City of sprawl and city of neighborhoods. City of the future and city of the past. This is particularly so when it comes to writing, which has long existed here along the edges — except, of course, when it has not. Film and poetry and fiction. Literature of exile, literature of place.

If I chose to do so, I could make a case that in the last 50 years or so, the writing of Los Angeles has shifted from a literature of exile to a literature of place. Until the middle of the century, its most visible work was crafted by outsiders from the East or Europe, bewildered by what they perceived as the otherness of Southern California, its sun and light, its palm trees. That all began to shift in the 1960s with the emergence of the Watts Writers Workshop and the magnificent presence of Wanda Coleman, who remains among the most essential writers Los Angeles has produced. To tell that story, though, I’d have to smooth too many edges, to overlook too much narrative complexity.

Coleman’s work, after all, reflects not only the complicated city in which she came up but also the forgotten one on which it is built. I think of Arna Bontemps recalling the Watts of his childhood in the 1931 novel “God Sends Sunday.” I think of Wallace Thurman, describing Black life at USC in “The Blacker the Berry,” published in 1929. Thurman’s novel was an inspiration for Kendrick Lamar’s 2015 song of the same name, and the colorism it portrays emerges throughout Coleman’s work as well, not least in her 2002 essay “The Riot Inside Me,” which also recalls Watts 50 years after Bontemps’ time. Read Rest of Article Here