Awkward Prose and Satirical Didacticism

So begins Issa Rae's memoir, The Misadventures of Awkward Black Girl. Her opening line immediately confronts readers with awkwardness, which she uses to complicate representations of Black girlhood and challenge boundaries of Black essentialism, respectability, and stereotype. The short, matter-of-fact statement begins Rae's memoir with a direct admission of her abject state as an awkward Black girl.1 Awkwardness, a defining affect of the twenty-first century, especially within comedy, is often described as drawing from the grotesque and compelling viewers to turn away from abjection in horror and disgust.2 Yet, Rae's memoir embraces awkward Black girl abjection. Although she has cited the influence of Tina Fey's 30 Rock character Liz Lemon, her memoir follows a tradition of Black women performers like Moms Mabley, Whoopi Goldberg, Wanda Sykes, and Tiffany Haddish who manipulate the compulsion to look at Black female abjection instead of turning away.3 Leveraging how Blackness disrupts the cringe of awkwardness, she shares abject experiences: eating alone, dating interracially, dancing, and arguing with a disabled stripper online.4 Her Blackness becomes one source of abjection and not the sole defining one.

Rae's memoir anticipates the desire to look and uses it to achieve opaque interiority. In Poetics of Relation, anti-colonial theorist Édouard Glissant insists upon what he describes as "the right to opacity" — "the right of difference . . . a subsistence within an irreducible singularity."5 Rae's memoir presents both anecdotes and authoritative statements, but she undermines her representative authority on awkward Black girlness to reject how others employ reductive historical stereotypes. Her memoir insists that not only does the awkward Black girl exist, she exists beyond what you think you need to — and what you think you can — know to understand her existence. To this end, Rae unabashedly acknowledges the cyberspace as a site of sexual awakening, one that allows her to subvert dominant codes stereotyping her as hypersexual.6 

Misadventures uses what I call awkward prose and satirical didacticism. I treat the memoir as a stylized experiment in awkward prose — a colloquial and conversational stream of consciousness replete with all-caps outbursts, catalogs of rhetorical questions, conversational ellipses, invective, and onomatopoeia — narrating "all the awkward, the embarrassing, the disappointing, the frustrating moments that have made" Rae.7 In this way, she curates her awkward encounters first as interior lessons she learns then didactic ones from which the reader can learn. But Rae deploys satirical didacticism to effect a "right to opacity" that renders a singular awkward Black girl who cannot be used to define, know, or limit Black girl awkwardness. Instead, she confronts readers with their own awkward, cringeworthy reliance on stereotype. The lesson, then, that both Rae and her readers learn, is one of interiority.  

The memoir's introduction closes with lines intimating what Rae hopes readers will gain from it and speaks to her satirical didacticism. She proclaims, "whether you're an awkward black girl or a confident white guy, my hope is that you'll learn from my mistakes and, at the very least, laugh at my misgivings."8 Her correlative conjunction, "whether . . . or . . . ," runs the entire hierarchical structure from awkward black girl to confident white guy, marking the distance between the two and collapsing the structures of power built on the transparency of stereotypes. Building on the shared affect of awkwardness and the desire to know the "awkward Black girl," Rae brings the reader, even the "confident white guy," face-to-face with the racist stereotypes undergirding what knowledge readers think they already possess. What they are actually led to reflect on, as she satirizes expectations of Blackness, are the ways they attempt to deny her irreducibility.

The seemingly random way Rae renders her anecdotes prompts the precaution, "don't even bother trying to keep up; I don't blame you for your confusion."9 Rae's irreverence for time, space, and place upsets the reader's ability to assign more value to one specific experience of awkward abjection over another, establishing a form of hierarchical disruption. The memoir, a model of temporal irreverence, consists of nineteen anecdotal stories ranging from topics like body image and hair to Senegalese heritage and dating experiences. It also includes four sections of "Awkward Black Girl Guides": "Public Grazing," "Connecting with Other Blacks," "Black Women & Asian Men," and "When Coworkers Attack." The inclusion of these guides performs work similar to other twenty-first century popular satirical forms, lampooning prescriptive and knowable Blackness through satirical didacticism. As much as the titles of these humorous texts, such as Baratunde Thurston's How to Be Black (2012) and damali ayo How to Rent a Negro (2005), insinuate a desire to teach, they actually enact a process of unlearning. The satirical didacticism shaping their mode of writing subverts the idea that within the pages of their work one will come to understand or somehow know Blackness.

The second guide, "Connecting with Other Blacks," subverts attempts to authenticate a particular mode of Blackness:

Rae delineates infinite intersections of Black identities. She makes fun of those who try, including herself, to assume a definitive air of authority about Blackness. She declares herself the "self-appointed representative" of the ABG. Yet, she destabilizes her authority with the italicized "every" and qualifying "almost" to stress the impossibility of achieving that feat, calling into question the reliability of the guides and emphasizing the mutability and opacity of Blackness. The italicization of "every" is supposed to emphasize Rae's ability to know and typify the wide gamut of Blackness. Instead, in the context of "almost" and the "take note" aside, "every" becomes an exaggeration — a signal of her inability to deliver a definitive guide. The language satirizes the notion that Blackness can be defined as it cuts and undercuts what it professes to teach the reader.

Rae's introduction makes plain her commitment to teaching through autobiography; however, Rae's satirical didacticism undermines this commitment as misleading. As Darryl Dickson-Carr explains, African American literature follows a

Rae's inclusion of ABG guides speaks to the degenerative mode of writing characterizing African American satire and ironically underscores Rae's refusal to construct herself as a definitive authority on Black girl awkwardness, or, indeed, Blackness itself. The didactic nature of the guides teases with the promise of clear categorizations of Blackness only to insist on opacity as it draws attention to how transparency relies on the perpetuation of representative stereotypes.

Millennial Talk: Speaking Across Discursive Communities

The title of the first chapter, "A/S/L," internet chatroom slang for "age, sex, location," situates Rae as a Millennial for whom technology has indelibly altered the terms for social interaction. Her ability to gain an audience for her work depended on her access to virtual spaces. Early in life, Rae found cyberspaces to be democratic sites of creation, allowing her to "resist the imposition of dominant ways of knowing and looking."11 She could, for example, fashion herself as a sexual being even as society used her Blackness and awkwardness outside of the virtual domain to impose undesirability and hypersexuality on her. From the age of eleven, Rae had been using the virtual as a way to explore selfhood and to fill the lack of imaginative space available to represent Black women's interiority.

She muses, "YouTube has revolutionized content creation . . . If it weren't for social media, I don't know that black women would even be a fully formed blip on the radar."12 Indeed, she got her professional break on YouTube through her web series, The Mis-Adventures of Awkward Black Girl. There are two seasons of the show, each with twelve episodes. Episode One, airing February 2011, is only three minutes and forty seconds long, while the final episode of the first season is almost a full half hour. The shooting quality of the first half of the first season demonstrates the constraints of Rae's budget. To extend the show and improve the quality, she executed a Kickstarter fundraising campaign halfway through the season. Episode Seven, "The Date," opens with a "thank you" note to fans who already contributed and the warning, "if we don't hit our target goal by Aug 11^th this will be the LAST episode of the season."13 The campaign successfully raised $56,000 — $16,000 over her initial goal.14 Its success speaks to the popularity of her series, the strength of her fan base, and points to the dearth of diverse representations of Blackness that audiences clearly desire.

Rae's memoir offers a very different representation of an awkward Black girl than the YouTube series. It accesses several discursive communities through a discussion of Rae's Senegalese American identity, class status, education, Millennial predicament, and relationship to American popular culture.15 Rae brings these communities into one distinct place without erasing their difference through an awkward prose that unsettles and disrupts any attempt to fix or be familiar with Black girl awkwardness. Rae's satire engages on multiple levels with distinctively Black female discursive communities but, it also exceeds them. Alongside the proclivity of awkwardness to make people turn away (if less so in concert with Black abjection), it also, as Adam Kotsko writes, "spreads. You can't observe an awkward situation without being drawn in: you are made to feel awkward as well, even if it is probably to a lesser degree."16 One is never sure of its direction. Awkwardness is directionally challenged and therefore able to account for the intersectional rendering of interior and intimate representations of Black women, despite some audiences' lack of connection to a particular community of discourse.

The chapter "Halfrican" is spliced with French, Wolof, and copious references to American popular culture that mirror the interstitial position Rae occupies. In one exchange with an uncle sojourning at her house in Los Angeles for an extended stay, Rae notes the "the language barrier" between them and reconstructs it in the text.17 Her uncle, who "resembles an African Redd Foxx" and a "Senegalese Jabba the Hutt" asks her to find nail clippers and clip his toes.18 Although she abides by what she believes is the necessary level of Senegalese hospitality and respect in a way that signals cultural difference rather than grotesque disgust, her prose presents interior thought through a parenthetical, imagined retort: "('I ain't doin' dick! F!@# yo' toes')."19 She describes him saying something in Wolof that she "didn't want to understand" and muses, "I knew what I didn't want to do, but if I refused, would that be a grave sign of disrespect?"20 Rae's awkward encounter, with its inclusion of untranslated "French-Wolof-hybrid" words, references to mainstream and Black American cultural icons, and inner dialogue, spreads: it speaks across discursive communities to register the "irreducible singularity" of and tension between her Black American teenager attitude and the offices of her familial responsibility.21

Rae also marks this irreducibility in the chapter, "The Struggle," when she expresses frustration with the lack of nuanced Black life in mainstream American media and popular culture, where "people outside [her] ethnicity have the audacity to question how "down" she is "because of the bleak, stereotypical picture pop culture has painted of black women" or where Black people have the audacity to tell other Blacks "'we don't do that'" because of views "derived from (mostly negative) stereotypes shaped by popular culture."22

Rae presents an example as "SITUATION #1."23 These breaks in narrative mark a turn from her generalized observations to actual experiences that carry an irreducible singularity. Yet, the capitalized word "SITUATION" simultaneously marks how she draws on stereotype to render those episodes as replicable and experienced by other awkward Black girls. Highlights how these situations are legible precisely because of her and the reader's knowledge of popular Black stereotypes, she then undermines that knowledge with the introduction of awkwardness.

"SITUATION #1" details Rae's need to defend her Blackness against an attack from a "white, male classmate" who called "Puff Daddy wack, yo," asked if she "even heard of [insert Random Underground rapper]," and "rattl[ed] of the names of make-believe-sounding MCs . . . as though [her] credibility as a black person relied on [her] knowledge of hip-hop culture."24 Rae's awkward prose, with the bracketed phrase, undermines the authority of her classmate. His challenge, in the grand scheme of things, becomes insignificant, so much so that she cannot recall his full performance. 

Still, Rae feels the pressure to lie about knowing said underground rapper, which prompts her classmate to ask her to name some of the unknown artist's songs, "perhaps because he saw through me."25 The expectation to perform her Blackness forces Rae into a transparency that reduces her difference to "the Bad Boy label clique as this boy seemingly claimed [her] black card as his own."26

Rae's awkward prose not only refuses to authorize the white male classmate's knowledge as something that can invalidate her Blackness, but also her own awkward investment in defending it, "(who did I think I was? Puff Daughter?)."27 She communicates the full gravity of having to prove one's racial authenticity even as her prose undermines the absurd basis on which authenticity is supposedly established. Her rhetorical questions first signal her need to unlearn Black stereotypes and then the need of her white male classmate and readers of her memoir to do the same.

Published in 2001, Angela Nissel's The Broke Diaries may have pioneered the genre but Rae's work has paved both the virtual and comedic space for other Black women artists seeking a right to opacity.28 Samantha Irby's work — collections of personal stories about sex, disability, and more — grew out of her blog.29 Quinta Bronson's 2 memoir, She Memes Well, also points to cyberspace as that which made her legible and irreducible. All of these women write from that vexed intersection, at once instructive and opaque, contagious and untranslatable, where awkwardness and Blackness meet.

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Keyana Parks (@phdkey) spent two years as a Visiting Assistant Professor of English at Kenyon College after graduating from the University of Pennsylvania in 2019. She is excited to join the English Department at the University of Massachusetts, Boston in Fall 2021. She is currently writing her monograph, The Real Absurd: Black Women Writers and the Satiric Mode. 

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