Carlene Hatcher Polite


Carlene Hatcher Polite was an American writer. She was avid fan of Fyodor Dostoevsky and Gabriel Garcia-Marquez's work. She was a cousin of Toni Morrison.

Early life

Carlene Hatcher trained at the Martha Graham Center of Contemporary Dance and then danced professionally from 1955 to 1963 in New York and Detroit. She also worked for civil rights organizations, including the Detroit Council for Human Rights and the NAACP.

Writer

In 1964, Polite moved to Paris where her first book The Flagellants was published in French in 1966, and was subsequently published in English in 1967. The book received critical acclaim, with Mel Watkins in The New York Times Book Review stating it was "a complex, scathing and often brilliant depiction of the disintegration of a black couple’s relationship," and that it "was among the first fictional works by a black woman to focus directly on the theme of the sometimes bitter antagonism between black men and women."
Polite published her second book Sister X and the Victims of Foul Play, about the investigation into the death of a black nightclub dancer in Paris, in 1975. After two novels, Polite decided that she had said all that she needed to say in fiction, and purposefully did not publish anything else though she continued to write.

Later years

Polite joined the University at Buffalo in 1971, where she taught creative writing, African American history and literature until her retirement in 2000. She became tenured and served on several notable committees, as well as chairing the American Studies Department for a short while. She was famous at the University for her teaching style. She possessed a near-encyclopedic knowledge of a variety of subjects that included race, gender, history, sexuality, spirituality, religion, quantum mechanics, sports and theater. She was notable for wearing unique and stylish garments.
Her classroom assignments often centered on books such as The African Origin of Civilization by Cheikh Anta Diop, Stolen Legacy by George G.M. James and other Afrocentric works.
Her writing assignments included four standard papers, one page each that served as mid-term and final papers—centering on being in love, falling out of love, and being the opposite gender. In her tenure at the university, she only used two teaching assistants, feeling that their personal abilities, writing interests and knowledge were sufficient for her classroom needs.
She died December 7, 2009.

Selected works