How Subtext Plays a Part in Every Day Life and How you Can Use it in Your Writing to Recession-Proof Your Money

“No one can dubb you with dignity. That’s yours to claim.”
Odetta
Recently, a friend I’ll call Lisa related how her husband, who is on a new job (after returning to work after a 3-year retirement), missed out on the boss’s wife’s baby shower.
Dumfounded, her husband told Lisa, “Nobody sent out a memo about the baby shower.”
In turn, Lisa told him, “No one’s going to tell you about the occasions to score brownie points with the boss. You’ve got to learn to read the memos that no one sends out.”
In other words, Lisa was talking about learning to read between the lines—to understand all the social nuances of office politics.
I use this example to show how life is always operating on two levels. We can all benefit from this remark.I still chuckle at this saying.
Looking back, Corporate America never sends out a memo on their jobs saying, “We will promote the white person over the black person,” but they do.
They never send out a memo saying, “We will lay you off first. You’re last hired, first fired,” when it comes to Black people, but it happens. (Within the last two weeks, I’ve gotten six calls from people who have been laid off.)
When I worked for a social service bureaucracy, during the LA uprising on April 29, 1992, there was an elusive memo that went out that said in a subtle way, “For worker safety, you do not have to make home calls.” (Of course, this was only meant for the white social workers.)
Okay, I’ll admit we saw and didn’t see the memo, and like an urban myth, it never materialized again. As Black case workers who were generally on the front lines in the field, we stayed so overwhelmed with our nose to the grind, no one bothered to save this memo, and try as we might, we couldn’t find it again.
In fictional writing, this is called subtext. The dictionary’s definition is: the underlying or implicit meaning, as of a literary work. If you really want to add depth to your stories, add the element of subtext.
As black people, we all need to learn to read subtext in the media, in the news, in our lives.
There’s a saying in Ebonics. “You never know about the goods under the hood.”
This is your subtext. It is the element which adds literary value to your story. It is what we don’t talk about and what’s beneath the surface. This is real life. All the things we don’t say. For example, it could be that many of us are afraid there is terrestrial life out there that we don’t acknowledge. Even the government doesn’t want to acknowledge it.
To quote W.E.B. Dubois, “It is a peculiar sensation, this double-consciousness, this sense of always looking at one's self through the eyes of others, of measuring one's soul by the tape of a world that looks on in amused contempt and pity.”
The early Black writers tried to explain themselves to white America, so they always felt self-conscious—that double-consciousness.
Since the 1960’s, Black books have been written for Black readers to understand themselves and our place in the world.
As writers, never return to that point of explaining who you are, because believe it or not, our writings are still universal. They show the yearning of the human heart.
Use subtext in your writing and you will develop a way to recession-proof your money.
So as Black people, writers, we have to love ourselves and give ourselves our own self-respect and dignity.