Clarissa Abson (23) is a young woman who knows what she wants and is not afraid to ask for it. So when she approaches Zane, the bestselling author of black erotica in the United States, at a book signing in midtown Manhattan, she dictates a simple, clear inscription.
”Wishing you much hellified sex,” writes Zane on the inside cover of Abson’s book. What qualifies as hellified sex? ”Freaky shit,” says Abson, with a laugh that threatens to drown out the city traffic. ”Screaming and shouting and hanging off the chandeliers and shit.”
Zane’s is a literary world in which ”dicks throb”, ”pussies flood” and nipples stand to attention. It is a world of pre-cum, cum, post-coital, 69s and 72s (a 69 with three fingers up the bum, if you’re interested). To call it porn, says Zane, would be inaccurate: ”Porn is just straight sex. My books have a story. If you took the sex out of it, you’d still have the story.”
This is true. In one of Zane’s best-known works, Addicted, about Zoe Reynard, a successful businesswoman who discovers she is a sex addict, the protagonist does not lose her virginity until page 83. Still, since in two instances it takes only 13 pages between Zoe meeting a man for the first time and him performing cunnilingus on her, it is fair to say that there wouldn’t be an awful lot of story left without the sex.
Having sold more than 2,5-million books, Zane has entered a hugely lucrative world in which the central theme — sex — is sufficiently universal that she has been translated into Japanese, Danish and Greek.
In April, she held the number one and two spots on the bestseller list of Essence (a magazine aimed at black women), above Nobel prize-winner Toni Morrison.
Zane’s is a world in which the characters, plotlines and language belong to Black America. Pity the Japanese translator who had to offer a faithful rendition of: ”No matter how hoochie I tried to be, she out-hoochied me every single time. She had on a skin-can’t-get-no-tighter-unless-you-embed-the-clothes-in-your-ass-tight black sundress and some black leather pumps.”
Until recently, nobody knew what Zane looked like because she refused to be photographed. She still refuses to divulge her real name. ”My family knows what I do, but I’m married with children,” she says. ”I chose to do this, but they didn’t.”
Then people started masquerading as Zane. In Atlanta and Los Angeles, impostors showed up at book signings claiming they were Zane. One was even a man. Zane had to come out, and she decided to do it in style. In late July she started a ”love bus tour”, taking her to 10 cities over three weeks, with her husband and children coming with her for some of the way.
Zane is one of a kind. A 37-year-old former scout leader and president of a parent and teacher association who lives in suburban Maryland, she describes herself as a ”homebody”.
Her books are part of a genre that is undergoing a vigorous resurgence: fictional works in which middle-class African-American women work hard and play even harder, asserting both financial and sexual independence as they negotiate hectic jobs and frantic love lives.
Such themes are not new. Terry McMillan, author of Waiting to Exhale and How Stella Got Her Groove Back, has trod this path before, as have Bebe Moore Campbell and rapper and broadcaster Sister Souljah with her novel The Coldest Winter Ever.
None is quite as raunchy as Zane’s, but a few come close and all share the same unapologetic blend of race, sex and class, packaged into pulp fiction. If there is a theme running through them, it does not concern racism or sexism, but sex and conspicuous consumption.
On page one of Bling, for instance, we learn that Lamont Jackson is wearing a Brioni suit and Bulgari aftershave; in Cosmopolitan Girls, we know that Lindsay Bradley drives a BMW 325i; Sexual Healing starts with Lydia Beaucoup and Acey Allen swigging Taittinger.
If there is a feminist message in these books, it is not obvious.
”There is a stigma around black women’s sexuality,” says Tricia Rose, professor of American Studies at the University of California, ”which is often used as a marker of morality within the black community, where the church is so dominant, and beyond.”
To call it ”black chick lit” is a misnomer, since that would suggest that the books represent a sub-genre of ”white chick lit” — an attempt to inject melanin into Sex and the City or Bridget Jones’s Diary, whose principal and even secondary characters are all white.
Generally the genre is no more racially self-conscious than, say, Sex and the City, where, in a city less than half white, black people are more or less invisible.
The demand for these books appears to have emerged quite autonomously from their white counterparts, like a parallel universe mirroring the segregation that prevails throughout the US. This is notably true of Zane’s success — she has never even seen Sex and the City, nor had most of her fans at the book signing.
She set up a website on AOL and received 8 000 hits in the first three weeks. AOL took it down because of the bad language. Zane started moving it around and writing more. In 1999 she set up Eroticanoir.com — an e-zine with sex advice and dirty jokes, as well as a few stories every month.
Then she used black distributors to get her books out to street stalls and black bookstores, where they began to be noticed.
She was already a phenomenon when the all-too-white publishing world began to notice. Some approached her, offering six figures for more books with less explicit sex. She turned them down.
Her father is a theologian, her mother a schoolteacher. One day, out with her mother, she nipped into a drug store and bought a copy of Essence magazine. She showed her mother the bestseller list, on which Zane featured prominently.
”Zane, who’s Zane?” asked her mother. Zane confessed all and her mother bought a book and read it.
”She told me the language and the sex was a bit much, but that was all.” Her father knows but has not, to her knowledge, read a book, and she doesn’t expect him to.
Every now and then, when it looks as though her name might get out or her renown as a sex writer complicates matters, her husband reminds her that ”this is the hell you created”. And while her father hasn’t mentioned her work, he did suggest they go on a writing weekend together.
Zane had to say no: ”I’m not sure I could concentrate enough if I knew that my dad was in the next room, writing about religion.” — Â