Strictly in the Interests of Plausibility: Introduction

I like thinking of the painting chosen for the cover of this issue as a visual representation of our theme of
Borderlands. The artist, A. Artidor, is Haitian, contemporary, and not very well-known. My co-editor and I came across it in a Haitian art gallery on the island of Guadeloupe. It is a small (16" x 18") oil on masonite, and its more or less realistic representation of historical subject matter is typical of one of several groups of younger artists from Cap-Haitien.

The painting is skillfully executed -- it appears to accomplish exactly what the artist set out to accomplish. The colors, although bright and lavish, are nonetheless delicate and precisely arranged, laid down entirely and pointedly without shadow under the savage noontime Caribbean sun, suggesting that the painting could not have been made by an artist who had not lived in the harsh light of the New World -- or, let us say, the non-European world. And had not experienced its stark unromantic darkness as well, for it is a narrative, the one in which everyone steps on his own shadow -- a Haitian High Noon.

The painting dramatizes a particularly poignant, even if briefly triumphant, moment in the history of the European enslavement of Africans in the Americas. The perspective, the narrative point of view, is that of a modern Haitian descendent of slaves. His portrayal of a single moment in time, Toussaint L'Ouverture's acceptance of Napoleon's first diplomatic representatives to a newly independent Haiti alludes, like a good Chekhovian short story, to an unspeakable time past and a horrifying, bitter time to come. It is unsentimental, ironic, and morally exact.

The victorious ex-slave Toussaint and his empress are portrayed not as heroic, god-like figures out of African (or Roman, Napoleonic, or Washingtonian) mythology, but as mere mortals standing at last on a level plane with the temporarily defeated Europeans, who, despite their past crimes, are pictured as no less mortal than they. The physical scene is native to the Americas -- cacti, mountains, tropical forest, Caribbean sky -- but the figures are wearing the costumes of late eighteenth-century European aristocrats, and they are all clearly aware of the momentousness of the occasion and are trying, not without a little stiffness, to play their appropriate roles.

There is a sad, brilliant symmetry to the painting -- the African man and woman particularized in all their humanity (I especially like Toussaint's sideburns), and facing them the pair of European men, equally particularized, equally human; the elaborate Parisian tailoring, ruffles, bustles, and epaulets on the four figures, and the bare, ruined plantation on which they stand; the reversal of political conventions, in which for the first time white Europeans are requesting recognition from black Americans (by means of documents written in French, however), and the persistence of ancient diplomatic forms and niceties; the angelic blue sky above and the demonic land below, and the four poor, forked creatures between. It is a purely democratic moment specific to the imagination of those Americans (north, south, and meso-) whose history has been most characterized by powerlessness and oppression, and it has been captured by the artist with humor, compassion, and profound sadness. From his height in
Cap-Haitien, he stands on a borderland, looks both ways in time, and it is as if he sees too much.

These, then, are the qualities that I have looked for among the hundreds of fiction manuscripts generously submitted for this issue of
Ploughshares. Are they aesthetic qualities? one might ask. Or political? The answer, of course, is neither and both. Increasingly, however, in recent years I have found it difficult to generate much affection for fiction that portrays American society and history as monoracial, monocultural, and monolingual, with no significant gender or class barriers. Fiction that gives the lie to life. Simply, it has no plausibility for me, even though I myself am a white Protestant middle-class heterosexual male. In search of plausibility, then, if not the simple truth, I have been drawn more and more to fiction by writers who see themselves as situated in a society that puts every American man and woman on the borders of race, culture, language, gender, and class, and who view their world not from the privileged center of their own private Idaho, but from out there on the edges, where they are obliged to look both ways, as if at a dangerous crossing, and say what they see coming.

We still want our fiction writers to walk along the road with Balzac's mirror in hand reflecting back what's on every side, but we don't want them showing us merely the little of it that we've already seen. We want our writers to say what has been, until the moment we read it, known to us and yet unsayable. If it's a matter of preferring writers whose work speaks the truth about the known and as yet unsaid thing, I suppose that's aesthetics. But as Doris Lessing says, "Things change at the edges," and insofar as I myself want things to change, and I do, for this world as presently constituted is intolerable, then my ongoing affection for work written "on the edge" is political. I am still sufficiently optimistic to believe that if enough decent people see how bad things are on the borders, they will begin to change things there. And perhaps someday the center itself will be affected, however slightly. Perhaps someday it will not hold after all.

The stories and narratives (for some of them are in no conventional sense "stories") that I've selected here are in formal and stylistic terms wildly different from one another. They run the gamut from dead-on realism to hyper-text performance art, from strictly construed historical fiction to hermetic meditation. They are as long as seventeen pages and as short as one. White voices, black voices, male and female, with narrators speaking African-American English, Hispanic-American English, and Anglo-American English, talking high church and low, downtown and up -- : these are the voices that daily surround us; and because they come to us, not from some dreamed-of center where no one in America lives anymore, but from the inescapable borderlands, they speak for us all.