From Women Writers, Women’s Books:
I was recently in the NPR studios in New York to participate in the show, 1A’s, panel discussion on the enduring American Dirt kerfuffle, specifically, “What The Controversy Over ‘American Dirt’ Tells Us About Publishing And Authorship.”
Seated in the studio with me was Vox culture writer, Constance Grady, and from two remote locations we were joined by Mexican-American translator, poet and author, David Bowles, and K. Tempest Bradford, a writer and the instructor of “Writing The Other” workshops.
All three had distinct and individual takes on the controversy over American Dirt, and the conversation, led by host Todd Zwillich, focused on two main issues: the publishing industry’s lack of diversity in both opportunity and representation of Latin voices (diverse voices in general), and the pushback against authors taking on stories and characters outside their own cultures.
. . . .
Why was I there?
As the author of The Alchemy of Noise [She Writes Press, 2019], a novel centered on an interracial relationship struggling under the weight of culture clashes, familial acrimony, and the devastation of a violent arrest, my publishing experience had some relevance to the issues at hand: I was a white author diving into and exploring the lives of several and varied characters outside my own culture.
The bulk of the 1A conversation focused on three things: the lack of representation of Latinx writers in the publishing world, the hyperbolic support of a white author telling a Mexican story while Mexican writers are disproportionately excluded from those rarefied opportunities, and the opinion of many Latinx writers that “she got it wrong,” with stereotypical characters, inaccurate depictions of both country and culture, in a story written “for the white gaze,” as one Latinx author put it.
Those angles, widely covered and outside my purview, still rumble today. David Bowles recently put a call out on Twitter: “If you’re Mexican, Mexican American, or otherwise intimately familiar with Mexico, I’m hoping you’ll ‘sign up’ below to look closely and critically at a single chapter,” rejecting the notion “that we’re blowing up a couple of inaccuracies to condemn the whole book.”
I, however, was brought in to talk about the second issue of the debate: is the demand for #OwnVoices equity and the fear of “appropriation” fostering censorship and a growing concern amongst authors that they cannot venture anywhere outside their own cultures? To me, that’s as important an issue as the first, with the potential to have long-ranging impact on the artistic freedom of all writers.
. . . .
The questions asked of me specifically had mostly to do with my experience as a white author pushing a novel with diverse characters, an experience, I made clear, that was wildly divergent from that of Jeanine Cummins, American Dirt’s author. Not only was there no bidding war, no seven-figure advance; no intense publicity campaign, A-list endorsements, or Oprah pick, but even with two well-received and previously published (albeit, self—) novels, even with a story considered topical and relevant, even with accolades from a wide range of industry-connected readers, I could not—to use a phrase relevant to my story—get arrested. In a nutshell, I was repeatedly told, not by one but many agents from topline literary agencies, that I would be unable to get my book published:
- “Your whiteness is kind of a problem,” one agent wrote: “This is a well written and serious novel that could not be more current but there may be an issue of whose voice gets to represent race.”
- Another admitted she “didn’t have the courage” to take on a book that “might stir controversy.”
- A third stated that her rejection was “because of all the concerns about ‘cultural appropriation’ these days. These are brutal times in fiction,” she wrote, “and I’m not comfortable representing a book, no matter how good or worthy, in which that issue is present.”
- A fourth (a white male) felt the black male protagonist “didn’t sound black enough.” I’ll just leave that one there…
But the overriding message was clear: I was a white author; I could not include black characters in prominent roles in my book and expect to be published. At a writer’s conference I attended in 2018, I heard that same admonition repeated to countless white authors with diverse characters and storylines. Not only did I find this appalling, but it was daunting to me on a personal level, having spent years writing, researching, interviewing, and fine-tuning a book that was vetted by a wide swath of writers, activists, readers, and opinion leaders from both the black and white communities, and deemed “right.”
. . . .
But the question asked—whose voice gets to tell stories of race?—was left unanswered, and I wanted to answer it:
Everyone’s voice.
From our individual, unique, and creative points of view, we each have a stake in chronicling the world in which we live or or the ones we imagine. Our cultures, our diverse experiences, the spectrum of characters we create cannot be monotone, homogenized, or “one cultured.” Our world isn’t; why should our stories be?
My journey also differed from Cummins’ in the genesis of my story; Alchemy’s fictional narrative was extrapolated from personal experience. Years earlier I’d been in a long-term relationship with a man of color, intimately involved with the people in his life and the caustic experiences he endured. I possessed “learned-perspective,” a unique angle from which to dig into pervasive issues of race, and, given our culture’s continuing battles with white privilege, police profiling, and social injustice, the story remained painfully relevant. So I created characters to whom I gave many of the obstacles we had faced, and told the story as authentically, honestly, and sensitively as I could.
. . . .
Several of those who weighed in on American Dirt stated categorically that white authors—or any authors, for that matter—should be unlimited in who and what they can write about, but if they do venture into cultures outside their own, they’ve got to get it right: Do the work, check the work, vet the work; honor the nuances and sensibilities they’re writing about. This stance has been stated by many of the Latinx writers who took umbrage with Cummins (who, they felt, didn’t get it right), as well as countless black authors who’ve also addressed the tilt toward censorship in the drive for greater inclusivity and the right to tell their own stories.
Link to the rest at Women Writers, Women’s Books
PG wonders who gets to be the expert about a specific fictional character who is designed to be unique and original?
The critiques come from those who claim the character of a different ethnic background from the author is not realistic. Setting aside the fact that the character doesn’t exist, she/he is fictional, aren’t all the authenticity critics projecting their own opinions and experiences and criticizing the book and author if the fictional character is different from them.
Does every Latino who crosses the border in the United States illegally have the same experiences? And does each of these individuals respond the same way to their life experiences? Is each one shaped and formed into an identical illegal Latino?
Is anyone permitted to be an individual, a combination of their background, culture, genetics, childhood, unique experiences and responses to those experiences? Is any fictional character permitted to be created out of their fictional background?
Authors have been appropriating from others who are much different than they are for a very, very, very long time. PG suggests it is impossible to identify the first author to have done this sort of thing.
Endless examples come to mind – Charles Dickens writing about Miss Havisham, Mark Twain writing about Huckleberry Finn, Pearl Buck writing about Chinese peasants, Margaret Mitchell writing about slaves and slaveowners in the Civil War era, Victor Hugo writing about the impoverished thieves of Paris.
PG also is not persuaded that there are a limited number of books and stories and that they are spread throughout humanity such that if an Anglo author writes about a black woman, somehow a black author somewhere won’t be able to write about a black woman because that story has already been written and no one wants to read more than one story about a black woman.
PG posits that political correctness in general is a weapon devised to silence those who some groups of people don’t like. PG doesn’t know when or where it began, but it certainly was a technique used by the Bolsheviks and the Nazis, among others.
It’s not just a matter of preventing a privileged Anglo author from writing about a fictional Asian individual, it’s about preventing an Anglo author from writing or speaking about a whole range of issues in order to avoid any sort of criticism. It has little to do with artistic or literary merit and everything to do with exerting control and dominating others.
And the beat goes on.
Another catfight gets noticed:
https://www.msn.com/en-us/entertainment/books/my-dark-vanessa-was-an-oprah-s-book-club-pick-then-it-was-abruptly-dropped/ar-BB10NbJZ
For each one the mainstream media notices, there’s a dozen being ignored by indies. 😀
is the demand for #OwnVoices equity and the fear of “appropriation” fostering censorship and a growing concern amongst authors that they cannot venture anywhere outside their own cultures?
Of course it is. And those concerned authors will shuffle off to do something they find more meaningful. Meanwhile, unconcerned authors will take their place and market share. Follow the money.
Amazon now has American Dirt at #9 in hardcover, and #27 on Kindle. That’s a lot of money to follow.
God Bless the free market, for it cares nothing about what I know I deserve.
Lets hear it for genre fantasy and scifi, where no one can try to tell me to let the magic creatures and the aliens tell their own stories.
And hurrah for indie publishing…
Same goes for Neanderthals! (the actual extinct hominid species)
Folks are overthinking this.
The only principle at issue is money.
Who makes it and who doesn’t.
If the “right” people make the money it doesn’t matter how factually correct the book might be.
Lots of examples come to mind, in and out of publishing, but it all boils down to who got the money.
I will perhaps overtheorize and overintellectualize by objecting that the entire controversy is archly antiintellectual. And as a nerd, I object to that (it’s why I disdain an awful lot of 80s music that “celebrates” small-town kids and their unengaged, unamibitious, blue-collar-is-the-only-collar attitude).
One has to jump back one level in what passes for “reasoning” in the get-it-right chain to see the problem. That level is this: What is a valid and sound means of having the information to get it right? The more-extreme “antiappropriationists” — those who claim that authors of racial/gender/ethnicity/whatever background x can never properly include prominent characters of racial/gender/ethnicity/whatever background y — are necessarily denying the value of anything except personal experience. To some extent, that meme has some validity, but generally only for certain specific types of experience (e.g., civilians and even career enlisted military don’t really “get” what is behind The Mask of Command, and even reading that book that barely scratches the surface and does so primarily at the flag-officer level, so it won’t help all that much). The real problem with that meme, though, is that it’s prone to overgeneralization… and, more dangerously, to the deductive fallacy. “The burden of command” is not comparable in scope to “the authentic Latinx experience.”
Conversely, authors (as a group) have a strong tendency to be very selective in how they research anything. The current RWA foofery comes down to what appears to be at least in part a major research failure by the author of the book Milan rightly criticized as using racially stereotyping descriptive language. Said author, however, has never “shown her work” — a claim was made that the language and descriptions were authentic for the time period being depicted, but the backup for that authenticity has never been disclosed.
Putting these together, I argue for a more intellectual, more scholarly, approach to finding and evaluating authenticity — on everyone’s part. Those writing about the Other need to make a sincere, scholarly effort to ensure that their information and inferences are at least plausible (“correct” is far too high a burden, and there’s a substantial body of literary theory demonstrating that “correct” is probably impossible even when we can identify “incorrect”). Those objecting to the ways that authors write about the objectors’ Other need to make a sincere, scholarly effort to ensure that their personal experiences are truly more universal than the normal human predisposition to deduce “that’s what I experienced, therefore that’s what the members of the class {my type} experienced.” Just ask James Baldwin… or better yet, go read Go Tell It On the Mountain and The Fire Next Time, and ponder them next to The Autobiography of Malcolm X, Soul on Ice, and the “Letters From a Birmingham Jail.”
I loved The Mask of Command, CE. Also The Face of Battle and everything else I have read by Keegan.
I was with you all the way until the last paragraphs, thinking to perhaps ask to copy and run on my own blog. But that last paragraph killed your argument because you went from describing a problem to presenting a solution.
In my experience, critics can often analyze a problem correctly, but the solutions they offer are more often wrong than right. Marx is a good example of this.
The first volume of his critic of capitalism hits the nail on the head. The following two volumes, compiled by Engels IIRC, illustrate why Mark never finished his work, because the answers offered were flawed. My intuition is that this was the reason why Marx never finished his work before his death.
Engels wasn’t smart enough to realize he wasn’t smart enough to finish the work.
I’m not sure what you mean by “that last paragraph… went from describing a problem to presenting a solution.” Because the last paragraph is primarily about presenting a further example of the problem, especially the string of citations at the end (hint: in what fundamental dimension of Otherness is James Baldwin distinct from Malcolm X, Eldridge Cleaver, and Dr Martin Luther King, Jr?).
A “more scholarly approach” means “actually do the research and think about it, and you might have a shot at doing better.” It’s no solution of itself; just think about the “how much research is enough” subproblem!
And if you had written that, I would have made a different comment.
What I will say is you are correct in saying (you have the tendency)… to over-theorize and over-intellectualize by objecting that the entire controversy is archly anti-intellectual.
Sorry long day. 🙂
Those writing about the Other need to make a sincere, scholarly effort to ensure that their information and inferences are at least plausible (“correct” is far too high a burden, and there’s a substantial body of literary theory demonstrating that “correct” is probably impossible even when we can identify “incorrect”).
Would that include black writers creating white characters?
Yes. It would include every writer creating characters outside of their own experience.
There’s a big blind spot in the writing (and more generally entertainment) community on this. We’ll accept excrutiatingly detailed research on the physical characteristics and process of laying two thousand miles of railroad track between St. Louis and San Francisco in the nineteenth century, and accept lovingly detailed descriptions of how surveyors chose the precise route. But we discount presenting the people involved accurately, ranging from the population we were displacing to and through the workers and the beneficiaries and everyone else. That is the source of a lot of authenticity difficulty — that the attempt to do better doesn’t even get made. And the flip side (the refusal of some people to accept that their own/their ancestors’ experiences are not universal) makes that worse.
It’s not a “solution.” It’s a more-sound method. But no methodology is truly universal across the arts.
That puts a heavy workload on Inuit American authors.
And what does “outside their own experience” mean? Is that experience defined by skin pigmentation?
Suppose my experience includes an Irish American who lives on beer and potatoes and beats his wife with a shillelagh? OK to create a character like that?
That’s when “judgment instead of ego” gets involved. There isn’t a rule or standard or bright-line-this-is-good-enough test. And that’s what people appear to want.
Agree. Best forget about the while thing. People will write about whatever they want, with whatever level of experience they have, and for whatever reason they choose. Some might not like it. OK. And we will call them all authors. And the money will flow.
If you’re going to write the ‘other’ get it right, not just what you ‘think’ might be right based on your biases.
That being said, the danger of this path is that by this logic whites should only write stories about whites, blacks about blacks (and should African Americans be allowed to write about Africa of which they have no direct knowledge in that case?), Asians about Asians, etc.
It will perpetuate the very silos which keep those of different race/creed/ethnicity apart. It will also make for very boring stories without even a passing similarity to the real world.
But who decides what’s “right”?
If members of the “other” group in question disagree about what’s right, who decides?
If one member or a group of members of the “other” group decides an author has written something “wrong,” is it just their opinion or is there some sort of authority with which they speak?
Are we certain that members of the “other” group are acting based on fact or is it possible they’re trying to exercise power for reasons isolated from the underlying writing?
Hear hear! Perfect take on this nonsense. Thanks, PG.
You’re welcome, Harvey.