Citizenship and Composite Counterstories

Donald Quist | November 2023

Donald Quist

I have long been concerned with what the United States of America owes its citizens. My mind is preoccupied with identifying gaps between the violent disparities endured by Black and marginalized communities and the rhetoric of official government documents and municipal records that establish protections for those within the nation’s borders. My creative work centers on sharing truths experienced by minority communities as a means of interrogating narratives that reinforce systems of oppression. My analytical approach to the writing of prose, and particularly fiction, has been shaped by scholarship and research in critical race theory. Many critics and academics adopt methodologies from critical race theory to examine the continued racial discrimination and social disparities in the United States, especially after the Civil Rights movement. Likewise, I apply these frameworks through storytelling. In invented narratives, I aim to engage in the practice of counterstorytelling as defined by critical race theorists such as Daniella Cook and Adrienne Dixson. In their landmark essay, “Writing Critical Race Theory and Method,” Cook and Dixson use a critical race lens to examine the experiences of African American educators in their efforts to rebuild New Orleans schools post-Katrina. The authors propose an approach to writing race research that engenders “composite counterstorytelling,” looking specifically at how counterstories composed of varying parts and elements communicate racialized constructions in American institutions. Cook and Dixson outline the aspects and potential for counterstorytelling:

1.              Provides psychic preservation by not silencing the experiences of the oppressed and thus exposing neglected evidence.

2.              Challenges normative reality through an exchange that overcomes ethnocentrism and the dysconscious conviction of viewing the world one way.

3.              Privileges the voices of people of color as the basis for understanding how race and racism function.

4.              Purposefully attempts to disrupt liberal ideology.

Recognizing how counterstories provide, challenge, privilege and disrupt, I felt composite counterstorytelling was a methodology I could broaden and apply to my creative examinations of citizenship in the United States. I sought out examples of other authors already engaging in this work and how they approached counternarratives to dominant American ideologies. I found myself focused on the concept of compositing, thinking of a text narrative as an assemblage of elements.

I am attracted to fictional stories that feature and highlight legal and official texts or documents. Many of my favorite creative writers such as Percival Everett, Zinzi Clemmons, and John Edgar Wideman blur the divisions between narrative invention, research, and reporting to produce stories that examine the social and geographical politics of their homelands. As a narrative approach, inserting nonfiction documents into fiction can be a means of responding to realities in a way that mobilizes social movement and political action. These authors subvert genre conventions to undermine national narratives that endanger the life and liberty of marginalized populations. There is reason to center novels that challenge genre conventions in discussions about narratives that reject isolationism, reinvent national narratives, give access to new, global identities, and allow reflections on global challenges. There is reason to ask how using historical artifacts and documents in fiction might allow authors to highlight truths experienced by marginalized communities. How might disrupting imagined stories with legal documents and historical texts make space for the interrogation of social injustices? There is precedent throughout the twentieth century of Black authors and writers of color blurring the dominant structures of U.S. fiction to interrogate disparities. Notably, many of these writers insert nonfiction documents into their narratives to critique how marginalized citizens are excluded from their rights to equal protection granted by the Fourteenth Amendment to the U.S. Constitution. I argue that a composite counterstorytelling approach in fiction can interrogate the false American ideology that there is a common nationality and a universal national belief that all U.S. citizens are equal and entitled to unalienable rights. 

A Brief History of Composite Counterstorytelling and Differentiations in Citizenship

Differentiations in citizenship have been at the center of counterstorytelling practices in literature since the seventeenth century—women-centered stories and slave narratives. Accordingly, a theme identified among many authors of U.S. fiction are counternarrative texts that piece together elements true and imagined to respond to the ways in which sovereignty can delineate who are, and who are not, granted the right to life, liberty, and government protection. This practice has become increasingly common following the end of World War II. Post-1945, Black and Indigenous soldiers returned from battle abroad and began to fight for the rights promised to them as American citizens. Within the nexus of the Civil Rights Movement and the Black Power Movement, there was greater appreciation for novels that employed less conventional structures to explore the ways in which the U.S. fails to offer adequate support and protection to so many of its citizens, including veterans of color. Genre-blurring books like Jean Toomer’s Cane, having been unsuccessful on its initial release in 1923 during the Harlem Renaissance, gained new appreciation with its hardcover reprinting in 1967, in a political climate where larger segments of the U.S. population were questioning the proposed values of the nation. Toomer’s novel gained new fans and encouraged a generation of writers. 

Ishmael Reeds’ experimental novel Mumbo Jumbo came in 1972, following the 1969 paperback edition of Cane and the armed takeover of the Willard Straight Hall student union building at Cornell University in response to racism on campus. The narrative revolves around “Jes Grew” a viral personification of Blackness and the African Diaspora. A pair of 1920s Voodoo practitioners in New York City fight to discover the origins of “Jes Grew” before a secret society of white supremacists ends the spread of African American culture. Reed employs a composite approach to his counternarrative, disrupting the fiction with film script format, photographs of Art, and historical documents to build a geopolitical assemblage. The book’s incorporation of disparate elements undermines western genre conventions while also subverting the histories of western civilization on which white hegemony is founded. This work leads readers to question what segments of America’s population are not granted the right to preserve their cultural traditions and share their heritage. Reed’s contemporary, Fran Ross, published her novel Oreo in 1974. Oreo confronts disparities experienced by Black citizens of mixed race in urban America. As the protagonist searches for her birth father through episodic adventures that carry her from Philadelphia to New York City, Ross breaks the formality of the narrative with math equations, menus, print advertisements, diagrams, and standardized tests. These texts demonstrate how, by disrupting fiction with nonfiction artifacts and documents, authors can prompt readers of U.S. fiction to expose, rethink, and deconstruct encoded messages of cultural texts (like the U.S. Constitution and Bill of Rights) that are universalizing and exclusionary. 

One can see a composite counterstorytelling approach echoed in the novels of John Edgar Wideman, in the way his fiction floats in and out of memoir to examine state-sanctioned violence against Black bodies. There is a similar approach in Dogeaters (1990), how Jessica Hagedorn punctuates her narratives about the Philippines with historical documents including passages from Associated Press articles and quotes from Filipino politicians, prompting U.S. readers to consider similar injustices in America. Similarly, Colson Whitehead’s The Underground Railroad, a 2016 Pulitzer Prize-winning novel about the legacy of differentiated citizenship in America, is interjected with real warrants for runaway slaves from the digital collections of the University of North Carolina at Greensboro. Likewise, What We Lose (2017) by Zinzi Clemmons, includes nonfiction artifacts (photographs, charts, diagrams, quotes and citations) to aid its examination of race, citizenship, colorism, and African migration to the US.

This critical approach to fiction is not about resolution. By subverting genre conventions and muddying the divisions between fact and fiction with counternarratives that incorporate nonfiction texts like legal documents, these writers follow through on a need for creative writing that provides us space to, as poet and theorist Gloria Anzuldúa said in Light in the Dark/Luz en lo Oscuro: Rewriting Identity, Spirituality, Reality, remap “our priorities—figuring out exactly what we believe in, what our lives mean, and what our purpose is as individuals, as a nation, and as world citizens.” These stories are more concerned with identifying sites for intervention; a method more concerned with interrogating conventions and revealing the limitless intersections of being rather than offering resolution. They point out the gaps between what we say and what we do and leave it to the reader to consider how we might build better bridges. 

Percival Everett: Composite Counterstorytelling in Practice

When looking for contemporary fiction that best exemplifies how highlighting legal and official texts or documents can interrogate disparities between the rights assumed by U.S. citizenship, I discovered Percival Everett’s 1996 novel, Watershed. As a model of composite counterstorytelling in practice, Watershed effectively employs real topographical reports, secondary sources detailing FBI interventions of Civil Rights organizations, and excerpts from treaties between the United States government and several Indian nations, to examine differentiations among the right to equal protection among U.S. citizens and nationals.

The book follows Robert Hawks, a Black hydrologist who gets involved in a violent water dispute between federal government agencies and a coalition of Native American political activists. The murder of two FBI agents near Robert’s vacation home in the mountains north of Denver, Colorado, disrupt his restful fishing trip. When he unknowingly offers a ride to one of the suspects of the killing, a resident of the fictional Plata Indian Reservation, Robert becomes an accomplice. As the book progresses, Robert aligns himself with the Plata and allies of the American Indian Revolution. Throughout the novel, Everett includes passages, images, and summaries of nonfiction texts that contextualize the conflicts of the narrative within a real-world history of U.S. legislation that strips away the equal right to protection from segments of the country’s population. The fragmented structure and interjections of legal documents help expand the significance of scenes like the exchange between Robert Hawks and Dicky Kills Enemy, a member of a Native American militia that has uncovered a toxic dumping ground in the Plata mountains and a dam engineered, presumably by the American government, to direct contaminated water into the local reservation. Robert decides to join their fight and explains that he feels an ethical responsibility to respond to the potential murder of dozens of people. Dicky corrects him:

“You can’t murder Indians,” Dicky said. 

“What?”

“Murder is a legal concept. You can kill an Indian, but you can’t murder one. You’ve got to have a law against it before it’s murder.” 

In Dicky’s estimation, Robert may feel a moral obligation to aid the Plata Reservation but it is not a result of an ethical imperative established by social contracts agreed to by citizens and ruling powers. Dicky identifies a gap between American rhetoric about equal rights to protection and the absence of legal documentation which extends those rights to his population. He inhabits a position within a country without laws that promise him safety. This position embodies the Homo Sacer as defined by Italian philosopher Giorgio Agamben. In his work, Homo Sacer: Sovereign Power and Bare Life, Agamben examines the notion of humankind as a political animal. Drawing from Michel Foucault’s concept of biopolitics, Walter Benjamin’s focus on mere life, Carl Schmitt’s thoughts on the state of exception, and Hannah Arendt’s notion of statelessness, Agamben reflects on sovereignty as the political animal’s exercise of power over life. He explains the phenomenon of treating specific groups within a society as exceptions—Homo Sacer, taken from Roman law, a figure who is banned and may be killed by anybody. As Agamben writes: 

He has been excluded from the religious community and from all political life: he cannot participate in the rites of his gens, nor (if he has been declared infamis et intestabilis) can he perform a juridically valid act. What is more, his entire existence is reduced to bare life stripped of every right by virtue of the fact that anyone can kill him without committing homicide; he can save himself only in perpetual flight or a foreign land. 

Agamben’s words elaborate the concept of differentiated citizenship, expanding understanding of the ways in which governing bodies strip the right to equal protection from populations within its own borders. The above passage can apply to ways the United States government has excluded Native Americans. 

To substantiate the claim that Native Americans do not share the same rights to equal protection as other U.S. citizens, Everett incorporates large elements of nonfiction. On the page, Dicky’s dialogue is followed by a line break and then an excerpt from a U.S. treaty declaring that “All animosities for past grievances” by indigenous Americans “shall henceforth cease.” This conveys a frustrating conflict experienced by many from native communities of belonging. Here is a legislative statute that demands a population dismiss their grievances for past transgressions committed against their community. The appearance of the article within the narrative conveys a dark irony as the characters in the novel are facing a current atrocity. In Watershed, Everett uses excerpts from treaties between the United States government and various Indian nations to highlight how laws that define native rights to protection as inalienable and indefeasible also reinforce differentiations between what Agamben would refer to as active and passive citizenship. Take, for example, the following article that appears within the novel:

Article 11. The aforesaid tribe acknowledges its dependence on the Government of the United States, and promises to be friendly with all the citizens thereof, and to commit no depredations or other violence upon such citizens. And should any one or more violate this pledge, and the fact be proved to the satisfaction of the President, the property shall be returned, or, in default thereof, or if injured or destroyed, compensation may be made by the Government out of the annuities. The aforesaid tribe is hereby bound to deliver such offenders to the proper authorities for trial and punishment, and are held responsible, in its tribal capacity to make reparations for depredations so committed.

The article features a kind of double-speak common among U.S. legislation that aims to ratify democratic ideals of inclusivity within a U.S. history of systemic exclusion among populations within U.S. borders. The legislation recognizes the tribes’ forced dependence on U.S. infrastructure but demands courteousness from the indigenous population when interacting with citizens. This creates a division among the U.S. definitions of citizenship. The article betrays how legislation works to ensure that not all those born within the country are active members entitled to protection. The language is more concerned with violence committed by Native Americans against those with more recognized citizenship. The statute formalizes a lawful seizure of tribal property by the executive branch of the U.S., and discusses trial and punishment of offenders without a discussion of presumed innocence until proven guilty. There is no mention of potential penalty against citizens that violate members of the tribe—considered U.S. nationals due to their birth within the country’s borders. Agamben identifies government statutes like this as “a simple restriction of the democratic and egalitarian principle, in flagrant contradiction to the spirit and letter of the declarations.” The rhetoric in the articles cited in Watershed exemplify Agamben’s observations on sovereignty and biopolitics since the Roman age, what he calls a “constant need to redefine the threshold in life that distinguishes and separates what is inside from what is outside.” 

The first section of the Fourteenth Amendment to the U.S. Constitution states that “All persons born or naturalized in the United States, and subject to the jurisdiction thereof, are citizens of the United States and of the State wherein they reside.” The legislation goes on to establish protective clauses for citizens against the state, declaring that no governing body within the nation’s borders shall, “make or enforce any law which shall abridge the privileges or immunities of citizens of the United States; nor shall any State deprive any person of life, liberty, or property, without due process of law; nor deny to any person within its jurisdiction the equal protection of the laws.” These declarations stand in opposition to much of what the character of Robert Hawks witnesses in Watershed. When Dicky Kills Enemy and other affiliates of the American Indian Revolution first tell Robert about the existence of a toxic dumping ground and a dam diverting the contaminants to the Plata Reservation, Robert initially feels a sense of doubt. But soon he considers the revelation of the watershed conspiracy against a history of crimes committed by the government against Americans of color. Everett writes:

I didn’t believe what he was telling me, but I didn’t know why I didn’t believe him. The government was doing secret experiments, like the Tuskegee thing, all the time, and I realized that that was the scariest part of all, that in spite of knowledge of past transgressions, I still resisted belief in a new one, somehow believing that my country was somehow me, maybe. But it wasn’t my country. 

Here Robert recalls the “40-year Tuskegee Study of Untreated Syphilis in the Negro Male.” Conducted between 1932 and 1972 by the U.S. Public Health Service, the study involved 600 African American men. The men were offered free medical care for their participation. 399 of the subjects had latent syphilis while 201 were not afflicted. Those with the disease were not informed about their diagnosis by the medical professionals conducting the study. When the administrators of the U.S. Public Health Service lost funding for treatment of the subject, observation of the 600 men continued without notifying them that they would no longer receive real healthcare. After the study revealed that penicillin was successful in treating syphilis, the subjects were not given the antibiotic. Although the Black men of the Tuskegee Syphilis Study were told that the project would only last six months, the men were monitored by the U.S. Public Health Service for forty years. The unethical standards of the study eventually led to the passing of the National Research Act of 1974, which requires researchers to gain voluntary informed consent from all taking part in studies done or funded by the Department of Health, Education, and Welfare (DHEW). The act also requires that all government-supported studies using human subjects must be approved by the institutional review boards. By referencing this real-life study, Everett reminds the reader that Robert Hawks, as a Black man, has also shared a position of Homo Sacer for most of America’s history. Those from the same communities of belonging as Robert Hawks and the members of the Plata reservation have been continually denied the right to equal protection from their government due to laws and initiatives meant to reinforce the strength of America’s sovereignty. 

Throughout Watershed, Robert must interrogate his own sense of belonging to the communities into which he has been born. The present action of the narration, set in the 1990s, is often disrupted by Robert’s memories of growing up during the Civil Rights Movement. The systemic racism Robert witnesses across three decades to the novel’s present, complicates ideals about the U.S. government’s progression towards racial equality. Everett seems to argue that the victimization of certain citizens will never fully end because of how America has built and modeled its sovereignty. This is echoed by Agamben:

...the river of biopolitics that gave homo sacer his life runs its course in a hidden, but continuous fashion. It is almost as if, starting from a certain point, every decisive political event were double-sided: the spaces, the liberties, and the rights won by individuals in their conflicts with central powers always simultaneously prepared a tacit but increasing inscription of individuals’ lives within the state order thus offering a new and more dreadful foundation for the very sovereign power from which they wanted to liberate themselves. 

The Homo Sacer’s fight for equal rights, like the right to protection, the struggle to experience full citizenship, will never be realized because the nation’s foundation depends on differentiations in citizenship. In this sense, attempts to become more active citizens, to contribute to a sovereignty’s success, can strip away their cultural and individual freedoms.

The disruption of his geopolitical fiction with legal truths creates a space for the author and others to, in Agamben’s words, reckon with, elude, or deceive their differentiated citizenship. By constructing a counterstory composed of varying disparate nonfiction elements, Everett can reflect common truths experienced by many Black and Indigenous people of color residents of the U.S. Through the implementation of a composite counterstory, Everett can interrogate his relationship with national powers that demand allegiance while exposing him and other marginalized people to unconditioned threats of death. 

Composite Counterstorytelling: Furthering the Definition

Attempting to better understand and deploy composite counterstorytelling techniques within my own work, I considered ways to pull together varied texts and narratives into a shared space on the page that would allow for more nuanced and expansive reflections on nationality, class, and location. Having studied examples of how composite counterstorytelling approaches have benefited contemporary multicultural narratives concerned with citizenship, I explored other fields of cultural and literary criticism to build a more extensive definition of the method. I have recognized a considerable overlap in theme and concepts between theorists of critical race studies, queer theory, and postcolonial scholarship. Author and critical theorist Homi Bhabha’s perspective on hybridity featured in an interview with Jonathan Rutherford, published in 1990, expands the concept of composite storytelling. Bhabha says, “The notion of hybridity . . . is about the fact that in any particular political struggle, new sites are always being opened up, and if you keep referring those new sites to old principles, then you are not actually able to participate in them fully and productively and creatively.” This feels deftly applicable to written narratives as sites of intervention. Hybridization, like the disruption of fiction with nonfiction texts, can productively explore blurry struggles for equal rights among varying, and blending, communities of citizenship. 

My aim for my own work is to create an assemblage, as defined by Anzaldúa, contemporary philosopher Michael DeLanda, and theorist Jasbir Puar. In this scene I attempt to “encompass not only ongoing attempts to destabilize identities and grids, but also the forces that continue to mandate and enforce them.” African American Studies professor Alexander G. Weheliye, drawing on DeLanda, argues that “assemblages are inherently productive, entering into polyvalent becomings to produce and give expression to previously nonexistent realities, thoughts, bodies, affects, spaces, actions, ideas, and so on.” In A Thousand Plateaus, the origins of assemblage as a theoretical framework, Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari stress the situatedness and the indeterminacy of identity; that there is no way to objectively demarcate gender, class, race or nationality. Despite the existence of documents that attempt to delineate the national framework of a government and its citizens, works of composite disruptions that incorporate nonfiction artifacts into fiction about citizenship, reveal these delineations can never be definitive.

In The Wretched of the Earth, postcolonial theorist Franz Fanon encourages artists, critics, and scholars to “endeavor to invent a man in full.” Homi Bhabha, in his introduction to Fanon’s writing, suggests that this be done by freeing citizens from “univocal choice” and producing projects of futurity that reject bipolar tensions, rejects a single this or that, a here or there, a then or now, or a fact and fiction. Through the practice of composite counterstorytelling, the disruption of fiction with nonfiction, writers of U.S. counternarratives accomplish this effort. These blurring projects of futurity inhabit indeterminate spaces as a means of inventing a person, a people, a community of belonging, in full. 

In Thirdspace of Sovereignty, Political Science professor Kevin Bruyneel points out that, “the invocation of spatial and temporal boundaries is a common practice of American political actors and institutions when trying to secure colonial power on” Black and Indigenous populations. Therefore, a break from genre rules established and propagated by colonial and white hegemonic institutions can be a means of resistance. To put it another way, including nonfictional artifacts, texts, and legal documents in fiction can be a methodology for dismembering and rebuilding as a means of healing and addressing disparities. Through stylistic approaches that incorporate facts in fiction, writers, primarily authors of color, have established a tradition of assemblage in fiction that allows for more nuanced interpretations of intersections among U.S. identities and reflections on differentiated citizenship; a tradition of form-bending works that incorporate fragmentation and disruption of genre, breaking the common understandings of form, and in doing so, challenging readers to question specific facets of American identity. Composite counterstories that do not tend to concern themselves with the possibility of building post-racial societies—no resolution—but are committed to prompting further sites of intervention. 

Composite Counterstorytelling as a Continued Device

In the essay “Art, as Device,” Viktor Shklovsky argues that “this thing we call art exists in order to restore the sensation of life, in order to make us feel things, in order to make a stone stony.” Following this suggestion, composite counterstorytelling practices a kind of estrangement, a distancing effect in prose that guides readers towards really seeing the subject and not merely recognizing it. Shklovsky urges authors to use craft to distance the reader from things that have been experienced several times, suggesting that art has different ways of re-sensitizing things. Estrangement from a subject complicates a reader’s understanding of that subject. This method prompts readers to notice and engage in a more complex perception. While Shklovsky’s method avoids common explanations and cliched expressions, the urge to call a subject by its common name, composite counterstorytelling can go further. By distancing a work of literary fiction from conventions of the form and customs of genre by inserting nonfiction elements, an author can prompt an estrangement for the reader from communities of belonging and create opportunities to reexamine those identities. Composite counterstories, as acts of estrangement, are an effort to take apart and restructure the workings of political forces to account for, include, and empower minority identities. Thus, this is an effective method for representing experiences that had previously been overlooked, excluded, and/or unimaginable by the dominant white colonial culture.

Frantz Fanon’s discussion of Black and indigenous populations in The Wretched of the Earth contributes to an understanding of the estranging effects of composite counterstorytelling. He writes, “The colonized, underdeveloped man is today a political creature in the most global sense of the term.” While Fanon’s use of “underdeveloped man” reinforces gendered and colonial hierarchies, employing his point about populations colonized by foreign nations can expand Agamben’s observations. Fanon also provides an explanation for the effectiveness of nonfiction elements in fictional counternarratives, stating, “Truth is what hastens the dislocation of the colonial regime, what fosters the emergence of the nation. Truth is what protects the ‘natives’ and undoes the foreigners.” Disrupting fiction with nonfiction artifacts can be a method of decentralizing ruling powers.

The Fourteenth Amendment to the U.S. Constitution promises the right to equal protection to citizens and suggests that this promise is universal: one nation, with one class of citizenship with privileges extending to everyone born within the country’s borders. However, fictional counternarratives that employ nonfiction elements, as works of estrangement and assemblage, reveal gaps between the nation’s rhetoric and the realities faced by marginalized populations within its borders. Besides illustrating that “social entities are not made up of bipolar oppositions,” the muddy and complex arrangements employed in composite counterstories, “place parameters like race, sex, age, nationality, etc., into relief.” Composite counter-storytelling as a Creative Writing strategy is well-equipped to aid the interrogation of differentiations in citizenship and the ways in which texts and documents that are meant to establish universal protections so often vary between U.S. populations.

Donald Quist is author of two essay collections, Harbors, a Foreword INDIES Bronze Winner and International Book Awards Finalist, and To Those Bounded. He has a linked story collection, For Other Ghosts. His writing has appeared in AGNI, North American Review, Michigan Quarterly Review, Poets & Writers, and The Rumpus. He is creator of the online nonfiction series PAST TEN. Donald has received fellowships from Sundress Academy for the Arts and Kimbilio Fiction. He serves as faculty for the MFA in Writing at Alma College and is an assistant professor of creative nonfiction at the University of Missouri.