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Content Warning: The text references racism, sexism, anti-Black biases, anti-gay biases, violence, and sexual violence. It also includes swear words, as well as racist and sexist slurs that the guide reproduces only in direct quotations.
Van Go Jenkins is a 19-year-old Black man. He lives with his mother and baby sister, Tardreece, in a marginalized neighborhood in Los Angeles. He dreams that his mother calls him “human slough” and he stabs her. Then, he ponders which one of his children he must go visit.
Van says he does not “give a fuck” about the world or anybody in it (65). For him, the world sucks. He has four children with four different women. One of his little boys has Down Syndrome. He decides to visit him and his mother, thinking that he might have sex with her. Outside in the neighborhood, he looks at his former school and recalls a fight with another student who called his penis “too small.” This fight was the reason Van did not graduate. He thinks he could have a good job and money if he had finished high school. Then, he comes across an intoxicated man. The man tells Van he knows him and asks about his mother. Van gets angry and tells him he will punch him. Then, Cleona, his son’s mother, comes out of the school, and she speaks to a young man in a Jeep. Van asks her to let him see his son and hints that he will give her some money for their child. Van thinks he has two selves in him: One tells him to leave Cleona alone so she can finish high school and work toward her dream job of becoming a nurse; the other tells him to not care about her and to simply treat her as a sex object.
They go to Cleona’s house and Van asks when her mother is going to return. She asks for the money he promised her, but instead, he rapes her. He states that this makes him feel “powerful.” Cleona says she hates him, and he tells her that she will always be “his woman” (72). She then tells him that he is not the father of her son. Cleona begins screaming that he raped her, but Van laughs and leaves.
Van meets his friends Yellow and Tito at a pool hall. They bet on the scores between Yellow and another man who is playing. Then, Van begins arguing with that man because he calls him a boy, and the man pulls out a gun. Van leaves with his friends, but he says he needs to get a gun himself. He says he is going to rob a Korean man’s store with it. Van argues with Yellow about this, and they swear at each other. Van complains that his friends do not support him, and they all agree that they are “homeboys.” Later, Van tells Tito that Yellow acts like “a punk” (77). Van wonders how much a gun might cost.
As he walks home, he sees a Black woman whom he calls a “real fine sister” outside a nice car (77). When she sees him, she points a pepper spray at him. Van tells her to relax. She tells him to back off and then leaves. Van gets angry and curses at her.
Van returns home and argues with his mother, cursing at her. She tells him to be careful with his language and to stop hanging out with Tito. Van curses at her again. He thinks: “I hate my mama and I love my mama” (79). He thinks about how he raped Cleona and congratulates himself. Then, he watches a show on television called the Snookie Cane Show; Van knows the show’s producers pay people to tell their painful stories on air. He goes to the kitchen and argues with his mother about the food. His mother raises a knife at him, and he leaves.
Van walks alone into the neighborhood at night. He sees a police car patrolling. He thinks about his mother again, and then he thinks about how he hates his father who abandoned them; Van does not know where his father is. He goes to the playground and sees the man in the Jeep who was speaking to Cleona earlier and fights with him. They hit each other and some of the man’s friends run to them. Van beats them up, too. Then, he hears a police car coming and runs away.
Van returns home and goes to bed. He thinks about his children: “I loves my babies. I hates my babies” (82). At night, he dreams he is on an island with many beautiful women around him. Then, he sees that his penis is small. One woman’s face transforms into his mother’s, and he stabs her.
The next morning, his mother tells him about a potential job to chauffeur for a white man in West Hollywood. She gives him a paper with the address on it. Then, Van asks her if his father is in prison. She does not answer, and he leaves.
Van is late to his job at a warehouse and his boss fires him because he has not shown up in three days. So, Van decides to go try for the job his mother told him about. He thinks that he could make some money, buy a gun, go to Mexico, and find a Mexican woman.
When arrives at the house, he sees the man’s beautiful cars. He finds the man, Mr. Dalton, and sees that he is in fact Black. Van tells him he is there for a job and the man directs him to the housekeeper, Lois, a Black woman. She is a friend of his mother’s, and she tells him he is going to help with the house, cleaning and washing the cars. Van admires the luxurious house and then begins working.
After work, Van meets Tito and Yellow at the pool hall. He tells them about his new job. They speculate on what Mr. Dalton might do for a living. Tito tells Van to make a list of all the precious things in the house so that they can rob him.
Later, Van sees a young woman walking by and talks to her. He flirts with her, and Tito tells him to be careful because she is a minor. Van thinks he can have sex with her and “make baby number five” (91). He asks her if she wants a baby, and she says everybody does.
Van goes to the girl’s house where her uncle is asleep, holding a gun. They go to her bedroom, and she kisses Van. He then comments on her small breasts. They have sex, and then Van tells her he cannot go out with her because she is too young. She gets angry and starts to cry. Her uncle wakes up and begins arguing with Van. The girl says Van raped her. Van manages to escape, but the girl’s uncle chases him.
Van heads toward the pool hall when a Jeep filled with the group of young men he beat up at the park starts chasing him. Van runs, going into an abandoned building. There, he once again encounters the drunk man who asks about his mother. He tells Van not to be like him and hurt his mother. Van becomes furious and leaves. Later, he finds Tito at the pool hall. Tito asks Van what happened, but Van does not want to tell him, and they argue. Tito tells him that having sex with teenagers and having babies does not make him a man.
The next morning, Van plans how he will buy a gun; he thinks he will need to work for about two weeks to collect enough money for it. When telling his mother about his new job, he refers to Dalton by a racial slur, and she tells him not to. Then, they refer to each other by the same racial slur and laugh. Van leaves for work.
On the bus, he tries to speak to a white woman who avoids him. He asks her if she is afraid he might go to her work and say hello to her.
When Van arrives at Dalton’s mansion, Lois tells him he is late. He goes to the garage and admires Dalton’s expensive cars. Van drives one out of the garage and likes it. Then, Dalton’s daughter, Penelope, appears and swims at the pool. Van looks at her and likes her body. Penelope talks to him and asks him to drive her to town to do some shopping. Lois disapproves, but they leave together.
Van drives Penelope into Santa Monica and they pick up a friend of hers named Roger. Penelope and Roger ask Van to take them to “the hood” to play basketball or eat chicken. Penelope says that her father invests in “the hood,” giving loans and providing affordable legal services. Roger calls him a “loan shark.” Van sees people staring at him as he drives into the neighborhood in a nice car. He thinks he looks like a chauffeur and doesn’t like it. Roger tells him that it is okay if he did not finish high school because there are no jobs anyway. Penelope suggests that her father could help him get a basketball scholarship. Van follows them into a diner.
Later, Van drives again; Penelope and Roger have gotten drunk. Roger tells him to stop so he can go buy weed from someone. Van parks the car and waits, and then the young man with the Jeep parks behind Van, and they fight. When Roger returns, Van drives away. Van tells Roger he must get Penelope home, so Roger gets out of the car.
Back at Dalton’s, Penelope asks Van to take her to the pool house. He leaves her on the couch, almost unconscious. He looks at her body and thinks he hates her and her father because they are like white people. Then, Van rapes her.
The next morning, Van’s little sister runs into his room. She tells him that somebody from the Snookie Cane Show is on the phone. Van picks up and the person on the other end tells him he has been invited to the show by somebody who has a crush on him. Van likes that he is going to be on national TV, and he gets ready to go to the TV studio. He thinks: “I feels big” (110).
Van goes to the studio with his mother and sister. The woman who leads him into the studio asks him what kind of music he likes, and he says rap. On the stage, Van sees his four children and their mothers: Cleona, Sharinda, Reynisha, and Robertarina. The audience boos him. The presenter announces the show’s title for that day: “You gave me the baby, Now where’s the money” (113). Van and the mothers of his children argue and swear at each other on TV. The women say he never gives them money for his children. Van admits nothing. People from the audience comment that Van has an issue with his manhood. A man named Mad Dog appears, saying he is Sharinda’s new partner. He says he loves her child as his own. Van swears at him. Van’s mother is in the audience, and she is crying. The show’s presenter says that Van does not respect women. She adds that there is an allegation of rape against him. Two police men walk toward Van. He jumps and runs. They chase him, but he escapes, running across the highway.
After escaping from the police, Van wanders in the streets. After a while, Reynisha appears and threatens him with a gun. He manages to wrestle the handgun from her and tells her she is lucky to be the mother of his child. He runs away with the gun.
Van heads downtown and decides to rob the Korean man’s store. He thinks the man owes him because he once threatened to call the police on him. Van goes to the store and threatens the man with the gun, asking for the money from his safe. When the man tries to pull out a shotgun, Van shoots him in the head. Then, he takes the money and leaves. He eats at a diner and wanders in the alleys again.
After some time, he meets the drunk man again. The man once again asks about Van’s mother and tells Van to look at his face and think. Then, the man tells him that he is his father. Van asks him where he has been all this time, and the man says he was just trying to survive. Van looks at him and feels enraged. He sees himself in the man and says that neither of them is worth anything. Van thinks: “My only cure gone be death” (123). He shoots the man. Then, he falls asleep and dreams that a white man who trains him for a basketball team is laughing at him. Van runs around a court and realizes that he has no shoes on and is bleeding. Then, he sees his father running beside him. His father says they are worth something.
The next morning, Van wakes up in the empty building. He walks through the alleys and arrives at the back of the pool hall. He falls asleep again, and later, he goes inside. Tito and Yellow are playing pool. Yellow tells Van that they constantly show him on television. Van says he plans to go to Mexico. Tito says the police are looking for him and there is a reward for his capture. Tito’s father spots Van and is ready to call the police. Van threatens him with a gun. He asks for Tito’s father’s car keys. After he gets the keys, he keeps the gun pointed at the men and warns them to not call the police.
Van drives around, trying to escape, until the car chase begins. A helicopter and a few police cars are all chasing him. Van thinks: “They always be comin” (128). He stops and enters a post office, threatening the people inside with his gun and asking them to get down. He keeps these people as hostages while the police are outside. He takes a blond girl, puts the gun to her head, and goes outside yelling at the police that he wants a new car and some money. There are TV cameras recording him. After Van goes back inside, the police call on the phone, but Van says he is not giving up. The police ask him to let at least some hostages out, and he does. Then, Van becomes anxious and thinks “it be everybody fault” (130). He goes out again with the blond girl, heading toward the car. The police officers all point their guns at him. Van tries to get the girl into the car but she cannot crawl inside. Then, he hears a gunshot and thinks that he has been shot. The police run to him, and then they grab him and kick him. He does not care and smiles at the cameras, thinking he is on TV again. He looks into the cameras and says hello to his mother and sister.
Racism in the Publishing Industry and Popular Culture doesn’t offer space for the type of fiction that Monk wants to write. As a Black author, he is pigeonholed into a certain category by the publishing industry and is only expected to focus his writing on African American struggles. His newest work, which is a retelling of Greek myths, doesn’t conform to the industry’s expectations of what an African American writer should write about. The novel is constantly rejected, with publishers complaining that it isn’t “Black enough.” In response to his literary environment, Monk begins writing My Pafology; it is his attempt to satirize the stereotypical Black narratives that the publishing industry expects of Black writers.
Through this satirical work, Monk also points out that racism within the publishing industry commodifies Black suffering and pain by only promoting a certain type of Black narrative. Within My Pafology, Monk shows that this same attitude is prevalent in popular culture, too, by writing in the scenes in which Van goes on the TV show. While Van likes to be on television and receive attention, the show exploits his pain and poverty. It shows him failing in his role as a father, and it invites his children’s mothers to publicly speak about their abandonment and financial struggles. The show’s entire premise is that it portrays Black people’s suffering as entertainment. Yet, Van enjoys being on TV, perceiving it as fame. In this way, Monk points out that people like Van have bought into depictions of Black people in popular media, and they end up assuming the role that popular culture thrusts on them.
By embedding My Pafology within Erasure, the novel’s text within a text structure demonstrates its metafictional aspects. The theme of Satirizing African American Stereotypes in Literature recurs as My Pafology is a parody of the putative authentic Black narrative. Monk writes it under a different name to distance himself from it since he detests the story and the style that he writes it in. However, his pseudonym, Stagg R. Leigh, becomes a symbol—it is the writer’s persona that questions the author’s connection with his work.
Van Go Jenkins, the protagonist of My Pafology, embodies the dominant stereotypes of Black masculinity and Monk portrays him as the epitome of the “gangsta” image. Van is a young Black man who lives in a marginalized African American neighborhood in Los Angeles, which he characterizes as “the hood” (102). Monk intentionally misspells the numbered chapters in the novel to show how Van speaks in the Black vernacular. He lives in a dysfunctional household with his mother and sister, he never knew his father who is supposed to be an outcast, and his mother struggles to maintain her home while having troubling relationships with men. Despite being only 19 years old, Van is a father of four children from four different women and cares little about them. In this way, Monk parodies stereotypical portrayals of African American families led by single women and abandoned by men. Van’s greatest enemy is “the man,” a pun on white masculinity. He explains that he does not “give a fuck about nobody: because “[t]he world don’t give a fuck about nobody” (66). However, the novel ruminates on Van’s troubles and reactions against society without any depiction of the sociopolitical structures that define his experience. Monk paints Van as a “pathological victim” of his own nature, which, according to Monk, makes his portrayal racist.
Van is also a misogynist and is very violent. The author comically writes the instances where he and his friend swear at each other, filling a page with the phrase “fuck you” (75). This once again parodies the way that popular culture depicts relationships between young Black men. Van is also exaggeratedly concerned with his manhood, and he becomes furious when somebody undermines his masculinity, saying, “My dick be twice as big as his. I jump up and knee the fucka in his balls” (67). He objectifies women to justify his masculine identity and he addresses them using the words “bitch” and “ho.” Women become his victims and he rapes them to feel “powerful” and affirm his maleness. In this way, Monk plays with popular depictions of young Black men who show their power through violence and objectifying women. His sexual violence also highlights the stereotypical view of Black men as rapists, which derives from a long history of racism and oppression. The novel only emphasizes Van’s rage and he channels this uncritically. Van is clearly marginalized by society but he becomes a stereotypical caricature—a hyperbolic and superficial character.
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