Trey Ellis - Platitudes

Platitudes

Trey Ellis is most famous for his first work of metafiction called Platitudes.The metafictional component of Platitudes helps the reader explore the New Black Aesthetic by portraying one story in which the two fictional authors, Dewayne and Isshee, embody two different ideas and perspectives on how black should be expressed and another story of two characters’ struggle to fit into the white world as a “cultural mulatto”. In Platitudes, the story begins with an experimental Black writer by the name of Dewayne Wellington. He is trying to figure out how to write his novel. He scoffs at the mainstream image of "authentic blackness" by creating the character Earle, a chubby teenage New Yorker who only thinks about sex (that he is not having) and academics. This is a departure from the stereotypical young black male who is assumed to only care about girls/sex, basketball, and hip hop music. He is in all sense what Ellis calls the cultural mulatto. Earle is a black 16-year-old who lives and attends school in the wealthy neighborhoods of the Upper West Side, Manhattan. While Earle is phenotypically black, he is quite assimilated into white culture. While most of his surroundings and relationships are with white people, Earle is also portrayed as a nerd which is often regarded as having “white” attributes as well as being someone who is intelligent, lacks social skills, and has a hyper-focus on a particular field, in Earle’s case that is computer programming. However, Earle tries to explore his black roots when he visits the diner in Harlem where he meets Dorothy for the first time. Dorothy is the attractive female character Dewayne creates. She attends the private St. Rita’s School for Girls in Manhattan. Although she lives in inner-city, Harlem, she socializes and attends school on the primarily white side of the city. Dorothy is a part of the popular crowd at school and wants to live the wealthy lifestyle despite her background. Dorothy is considered a "cultural mulatto" because she is someone who is able to thrive in the white world while still embracing her racial identity. She is comfortable among her white friends and even has some power and status among them, but she is also aware of her black identity and how she differs from her them. After asking for advice on how to write his novel, Dewayne encounters Isshee Ayam, an African American feminist writer. She ridicules his works and attempts to "correct" his mistakes by creating her own renditions of the story with more feminist elements. She changes the setting of the story to rural Lowndes County, Georgia as well as most of the characters' traits. As the story goes on, Wellington compromises some of his original ideas to accommodate some of Ayam's preferences. The two narratives of Dewayne and Isshee begin to align as the authors’ writing styles and stories reflect each others’ styles and beliefs. By altering the story in accordance to both of the authors’ writing styles and beliefs of how the black characters should be portrayed, Ellis expresses the concept that there is no one black identity that can be defined. Instead, blackness should be defined separately in the case of each person’s life through their interactions with the culture and his or her experiences. Along with the aligning of the two stories, a relationship buds between Dewayne Wellington and Isshee Ayam. All in all, a majority of the events that happen in the story of Earle and Dorothy are an indirect reflection of the dynamics of Dewayne Wellington's relationship with Isshee Ayam. In the end, as Earle and Dorothy reconnect and consummate their relationship, Isshee and Dewayne do as well when Isshee visits Dewayne in the last chapter of the novel. Earle uses Isshee's and Dewayne's novel and of two characters who provide examples of the cultural mulatto to portray the "new black aesthetic" and the absence of a single black identity.

One theme of the novel is the question of how to represent blackness. This theme is portrayed in the novel through the conflict between Dewayne and Ishee. The two characters argue on how they think black people should be represented in their works. While Dewayne's style is postmodern and depicts atypical forms of blackness, Ishee's style is more traditional and characters are like those found in many works of African American literature. An example of this is found in a comparison of Earle's mother in Dewayne's version of the story vs. in Ishee's. The disparity in how the two authors choose to represent the black matriarch echoes the differences in style between different schools of black thinkers present in the time the book was written. Even in what they serve to their children, these two mothers depict the differences in representation that the two authors espouse. Through the conclusion reached between the two characters, Ellis seems to suggest that a synthesis of these two styles should be worked toward. It is only when Dewayne and Ishee reconcile their differences and give in to their feelings for one another that the conclusion of the story they are writing can be reached. Far from the postmodern beating out the traditional, or the experimental taking a back seat to the realist, the honest black experience of the time can only be told through a combination of the two approaches.