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Chapter 2
Themes
Key
LitCharts assigns a color and icon to each theme in Erasure, which you can use to track the themes throughout the work.
Race and Identity
Familial Obligation vs. Personal Needs
Artistic Integrity vs. Commercial Success
Authenticity
Summary
Analysis
Monk returns to his hotel to find a death threat written on a bookmark: “I’ll kill you, you mimetic Philistine.” The next day, he visits his sister’s clinic in Southeast D.C. He introduces himself to the receptionist, Yvonne, as Lisa’s brother. “The writer brother,” exclaims Yvonne. Monk takes a seat next to a young woman with long blue fingernails. She holds a young boy in her lap. The woman asks what kind of books Monk writes. He says “novels,” then amends this to “stories.” The woman says her cousin gave her Their Eyes Were Watching God to read, and she liked it. She liked Cane, too. Monk asks the woman if she went to college, and she laughs as she tells him she didn’t even finish high school. They stop talking then, and Monk feels like the stupid one for having assumed, wrongly, that the woman would be stupid.
Monk seems indifferent to (or perhaps even energized by) the death threat, presumably left by Gimbel. Whether by choice or as a coping mechanism, he has learned to let others’ disapproval motivate rather than discourage him. Monk’s interaction with the woman in the waiting room sheds light on his own racial bias: he unjustly (and incorrectly) assumed the woman was stupid and uneducated due to her race and class, when in fact she is quite well read and insightful. This complicates Monk’s earlier, self-proclaimed disbelief in race—perhaps his rejection of race reflects his own confusion and conflicted feelings about his own racial identity, or even his internalized racism, than it does his ire at the stereotypes society (and the publishing industry in particular) attaches to him due to his Blackness.
Themes
While Monk waits for Lisa to be finished with her work, he recalls being 15 and attending his first real party. It was during the summer, in a part of Annapolis he’d never been to before. His friend Doug Glass took him. The other boys at the party have names like Clevon and Reggie, and they tease him mercilessly when they learn his name is Monk. Later, Monk tries to dance with a beautiful girl named Tina, but he becomes horribly self-conscious, especially after he gets an erection, and he runs from the house all the way to the city dock.
This memory gives readers insight into how Monk’s formative experiences have influenced his ideas about race and his racial identity as an adult. It seems that the embarrassment and social rejection he faced for not being “Black enough” as an adolescent has contributed toward the self-proclaimed disbelief in race he has assumed as an adult.
Themes
Monk spots Bill at the city dock, on the family boat with some of his friends, and he asks to hang out with them. Bill is annoyed but says yes. The other boys act awkward and eventually leave. Monk asks if he ruined Bill’s party, but Bill says not to worry about it.
It's not clear when or why Monk lost touch with Bill, whom this scene presents as an empathetic and patient brother to Monk, offering Monk support and a sense of safety after Monk’s embarrassing experience at the party.
Themes
Back in the present, Lisa and Monk grab lunch. Monk mentions the woman with the blue fingernails from the waiting room. Lisa says the woman’s name is Tamika Jones and that her kids are named Mystery and Fantasy.
The detail of Tamika’s children being named Mystery and Fantasy—names that stereotypically suggest a lower-class, uneducated background—clashes with Monk’s sense of Tamika as an intelligent, if downtrodden, woman, further complicating Monk’s ideas about race, racial identity, and stereotypes.
Themes
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After lunch, Monk and Lisa head to a bookstore to pick up a book for one of Lisa’s coworkers who recently had a baby. Monk wanders into the Contemporary Fiction section in search of his own books but doesn’t find them there. Instead, he finds them shelved in the African American Studies section—seemingly just because they were written by a Black author. Monk is about to say something to a staff member, but then he spots a poster for an upcoming reading of Juanita Mae Jenkins’s We’s Lives In Da Ghetto. He reads the opening paragraph, which is written in exaggerated Black vernacular. Lisa returns just then and asks Monk what’s wrong, but Monk brushes off the question, and they leave. Lisa offers to loan Monk her car for the afternoon if he drops her off at work first, and he agrees.
The placement of Monk’s books in the African American Studies section of the bookstore visually represents the pigeonholing he experiences from the publishing industry, which concludes that his works must be “Black” in subject matter simply because he is a Black author. He loathes authors like Jenkins who choose to capitalize on this pigeonholing, essentially writing stereotypical works about the so-called “Black” experience to satisfy the industry, sacrificing their artistic integrity in the process.
Themes
