On Genre and Freedom in the Essay

I should say I didn’t know I was writing something as formal as the essay; I thought I just abandoned all sorts of formalities. The formalities of writing – the novel, with its structure; the short story, with its structure – it seemed unable to contain the things that I wanted to say. The supposed rules of these various forms had so excluded things that they shouldn’t have, the reality of some of us, and so I couldn’t imagine thinking I was writing an essay. If I was writing an essay, then I would think of the essays that had been presented to me – Montaigne, for instance. I grew up with a colonial education, so following rules was very important, and of course the following of rules in a colonial situation is meant to keep you in your place, and, somehow, you could never get the rules one hundred percent right no matter what effort you made.

Long ago, from the beginning, not even with any political consciousness or any thought, I started to write what I thought. I remember the first piece of fiction I gave Mr [William] Shawn to read was a short story called ‘Girl’ – I gave it to him and I said: this is what my writing is, and I walked out of his office. And I thought I’d never hear from him. He hardly ever came down to the writers’ floor – the eighteenth floor – and shortly after he came down and was just full of praise.

But I was prepared to do what I thought and for it to be rejected. I was prepared for that. I was going to write the way I wanted, say something that I wanted to say in the form I wanted to say it in. I didn’t care what the precedents were – instinctively, I knew the precedents did not include a voice of a person with my background. That was the first piece of fiction, but even before that I had written a piece of reporting about the Ali–Foreman fight, ‘The Rumble in the Jungle’.