Ma Pafology by Stagg R Leigh

Title: Ma Pafology

Author: Stagg R Leigh (Thelonius Ellison (“call me Monk”))

Publisher: Random House 

Source book: Erasure by Percival Everett

Thelonius Ellison’s books are unreadable and boring. Retellings of Euripides and parodies of French poststructuralists (whatever that means). One reviewer wonders what his reworking of Aeschylus’s The Persians has to do with the African-American experience. [Why a black writer should be compelled to write exclusively about the black experience I don’t really know. But then I am a white woman so what do I know?]

The press asks why he isn’t writing gritty novels about real black lives. Although Leigh has dark brown skin and a broad nose, and has been detained by white police officers in three states, some people don’t think he’s black enough. His grandfather and father, sister and brother are doctors. Ellison graduated from Harvard, he’s good at maths, but he can’t dance and can’t play basketball.

Ellison can’t find his books in the literature or contemporary fiction sections in the bookshop. He is angry that he finds his book in the African-American Studies section. [Quite beside the point but misfiling is not uncommon: a distant cousin of mine wrote a family history called Walled Gardens: Scenes from an Anglo-Irish Childhood. My mother ordered it from a local bookshop which totally lost the book because they had filed it under Gardening].

Anyway, in the bookshop Ellison sees a poster advertising a reading by Juanita Mae Jenkins “author of the runaway bestseller We’s Lives in Da Ghetto”. 

“My fahvre be gone since time I’s borned and it be just me an’ my momma an’ my baby brover Juneboy” Monk reads a review in a major glossy that praises Jenkins’ novel for its ‘haunting verisimilitude’. Ellison’s latest manuscript has been rejected for the 17th time, and by the time he’s seen Jenkins on a chat show where the black woman host has chosen Jenkins’ novel for her book club, he’s really fed up.

Using a nom de plume he writes a book called Ma Pafology “My name is Van Go Jenkins and I’m 19 years old and I don’t give a fuck about nobody, not you, not my Momma, not the man.The world don’t give a fuck about nobody, so why should I?”

70 odd pages later Van Go’s crime spree ends in his brutal arrest; “The cameras be full of me. I’m on TV.”

Naturally Random House offers a huge advance on this authentic novel and Ellison becomes Stagg R Leigh, renames his novel Fuck, and goes on to win an award.

Here’s a 2024 review from The Guardian of the film version of Erasure. Embedded in the article is a link to a 2003 review of the book.