Thinking on a Different Kind of Hero

 Thinking about thinking outside the box after reading Tiphanie Yanique on Moving Beyond Traditional Hero Narratives:

JC: An early chapter in Monster in the Middle is “A Special World,” Fly’s first love story, set in Fall 2009 at George State University. The story is structured like Joseph Campbell’s hero’s journey, altering that form to suit Fly, a Black man. You even include a sly moment when Fly tries to fit himself into the hero’s journey formula for a class assignment, then tries to fit his father in. No luck. What was it like to create a fresh narrative drawn from this classic form? And to consider the overall novel from the perspective of the hero’s journey? What if the hero is a woman? What if the hero isn’t young? What if the character isn’t white?

TY: What if the heroism takes two? What if it takes a whole family? What if it takes two whole families? I am someone who likes to push on things. I consider it a great act of respect to challenge things. I am hardest on my most talented students. I am most honest with my bravest friends. I love form. And I wanted to test these fiction forms—I wanted to see how they fail and how they meet new challenges.

I don’t hate Campbell’s form. I disagree that it is universal. But once we know what it really is—about youth, about maleness, about ethnic privilege, about the individual—than we can really work with it. I tend to struggle with something until I can actually understand it. Once I get what it is for, I no longer find it frustrating. I find it liberating. I started out hating the hero’s journey for its prescriptiveness, it’s preciousness. Now I love it, because I see what is for. And I see how to make it work for my stories, and how it won’t work for my stories. That, too, embracing when needed, letting go when needed, is love.

I have been shying away from the hero altogether but there is a nagging itch about my "Chasing Ashes" where I am considering the democratic and this may be a way to scratch that itch.

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