Negrophobia is a Racy Tale Of Flesh, Freaks and Fear

"Negrophobia is a work of fiction, a product of the author's imagination. Any resemblance to any person, living or dead, is purely coincidental. Negrohobia is a work of fiction. Every word is true. Fuck you. The author."

So begins Darius James' first novel, a cartoonish, surreal sendup of racial stereotypes and American culture. Like these prefacing remarks, the book is hard-hitting and hilarious.

The heroine of the novel is a "teen sex-bomb blond" named Bubbles Brazil. Bubbles is a bad girl, a former Rocky Horror Picture Show groupie who has become a die-hard peacenik ("I was no phony...l was bona fide. I sucked off Jerry Gracia."). But despite her commitment to hippiedom, Bubbles still has a lot of internalized racism knocking around in her drug-addled brain. So her Black maid, who is a sort of cross between Aunt Jemima and Medusa, puts a voodoo spell on Bubbies, giving her a mysterious case of 'negrophobia."

Bubble is plunged into a hallucinatory, gory and frequently pornographic world of outrageously sterotyped Black characters. James' jokes hurtle by at a furious pace: Bubbles travels to the Isle of the Unrestrained Negroes, negotiates the Cave of the Flaming Tar Babies and survives attacks from the Flapjack Ninja-kilers from Hell, some Negroid Vomitoids and a lascivious crew of Muppet B-Boys.

Negrohobia echoes Alice in Wonderland in places (one section is entitled "Down the Rabbitt's Rectum") and Dante's Inferno in others (Bubbles falls through the concentric underwater circles of the Harlem River which is populated with the floating corpses of pimps, numbers runners and crackheads). At times, the novel approaches the off-Kilter horror of those classic with its manic, madcap parade of freakish characters.

This intensity can be overwhelming. The novel is structured as a screenplay, and while this form is strikingly visual, it also makes for a jerky and disjointed narrative. At times, the story line seems about to collapse under the weight of all the explosive jokes and images. But what Negrohobia lacks in coherence it make up for in energy and inventiveness. James pulls no punches with his caricatures; both black and white concepts of race are adeptly, savagely satirized. He gets in especially sharp jabs at Black nationalism with his screeching Uncle H. Rap Remus, a preacher who leads his congregation in chanting, "All whyte people pitch over and die now!..Puke blood! Swell up! Turn purple!"

James presents white racism as equally laughable in a scene in which Walt Disney calls for the extermination of Blacks. Disney's gruesome speech combines echoes of Pinocchio, Martin Luther King Jr. and the KKK: "I wished upon a star--that one day wondrous shopping mall, beneath the red hills of Georgia, the sons of former slave owners would dine on the sons of former salves, secure in the knowledge that their silverware was safe from theft."

James is a brave writer, and he pushes his stereotypes to grotesque limits. At an all-Black school, for example, "throngs of students congest the corridor smoking resinous Rasta spliffs, snorting smack from tiny, waxed-paper sacks; drinking pints of Wild Irish Rose; sucking tubes of crack; fighting with razors; firing pistols; dry-humping each other against lockers; hawking stolen goods; miscarrying half-formed fetuses; singing gospel; and wailing the blues."

In passages like these, he brilliantly exposes the absurdity of stereotyped notions of racial difference. In interviews, James has said that he wants to reclaim those negative images: "It's my belief that in order for racism not to have a real psychic effect, Black people who are victims of racism have to take back the imagery of racism and turn it on those who use it against them."

Negrophobia: An Urban Parable

by Darius James

Citadel Underground Books $15.95

Whether or not you agree with the premise, James' book is a stunning enactment of that reclaiming task. he 'takes back" the images of race with a sometimes shocking enthusiasm. As the book continues, the scenes get more sickeningly violent, more graphically erotic, more ludicrous.

The avalanche of unsettling images is both revolting and, eventually, redemptive. Bubbies' case of negrophobia forces her to explore the underside of American culture; her trip through a hell of inhuman caricatures forces the reader to confront the ugly, distorted and hateful manner in which Blacks have traditionally been resented in this country.

By the end of the book, Bubbies has passed through a sort of looking glass of the her own, leaving behind an insane world where color contains the only meaning to emerge into a new landscape where it has none. No longer the "blond bomb," her face retains no vestige of race--it is a "mesh of shadows." It is a test of James' power and versatility that he manages to sustain this visionary moment as well as the earlier absurdity. With Negrohobia, he has produced an assured and devestatingly funny first novel.