She turned to face the crowd
Yassmin Abdel-Magied tells us why it was so important for her to walk out on Lionel Shriver’s talk.
As I stood up, my heart began to race. I could feel the eyes of the hundreds of audience members on my back: questioning, querying, judging.
I turned to face the crowd, lifted up my chin and walked down the main aisle, my pace deliberate. “Look back into the audience,” a friend had texted me moments earlier, “and let them see your face.”
The faces around me blurred. As my heels thudded against they grey plastic of the flooring, harmonising with the beat of the adrenaline pumping through my veins, my mind was blank save for one question.
“How is this happening?”
Histrionic much?
Shriver said things Abdel-Magied disagreed with and disliked, but the histrionics make it sound as if she said something frankly evil, and she didn’t.
So what did happen? What did Shriver say in her keynote that could drive a woman who has heard every slur under the sun to discard social convention and make such an obviously political exit?
Nothing. That’s the thing.
On and on it went. Rather than focus on the ultimate question around how we can know an experience we have not had, the argument became a tirade. It became about the fact that a white man should be able to write the experience of a young Nigerian woman and if he sells millions and does a “decent” job — in the eyes of a white woman — he should not be questioned or pilloried in any way. It became about mocking those who ask people to seek permission to use their stories. It became a celebration of the unfettered exploitation of the experiences of others, under the guise of fiction.
Again – how does anyone go about asking permission to tell a story about someone from An Other Community? Someone fictional? If you’re to dense to notice that that’s not something anyone can do, because there is no Bureau of Community Permission, and if there were it wouldn’t be able to speak for any particular community anyway. This idea that one should get “a community’s” permission to write about a fictional member of said community is just an absurdity. Shriver made fun of it. No doubt that was annoying to many, but it wasn’t a crime.
It’s not always OK if a white guy writes the story of a Nigerian woman because the actual Nigerian woman can’t get published or reviewed to begin with. It’s not always OK if a straight white woman writes the story of a queer Indigenous man, because when was the last time you heard a queer Indigenous man tell his own story? How is it that said straight white woman will profit from an experience that is not hers, and those with the actual experience never be provided the opportunity?
That’s not how that works. Preventing a white guy from writing the story of a Nigerian woman won’t get a Nigerian woman published. It won’t do anything. Whether or not a Nigerian woman gets published is a separate thing. It’s not like a place on a lifeboat that means someone else drowns. I want to see lots of Nigerian women tell their stories and get published, and yes I would rather read their accounts of Nigerian lives than the accounts of people who don’t know anything about it – but all the same an outsider writing about people doesn’t remove their chance to write about themselves. It’s not necessary and it’s not productive to make a ferocious rule about it, and then pitch fits when someone says the rule is stupid.
Abdul-Magied:
Shriver didn’t say anything about “selling millions.” She did not suggest that financial or artistic success have anything to do with whether or not it’s all right for a writer to write about people outside of her “identity” group.
Questioned or pilloried–as though those were two similar things.
Gah. This woman is an awful ambassador for her point of view.
It’s interesting because I’ve enjoyed Alastair Reynolds Blue Remembered Earth and it’s sequel. There we have a white welsh male (straight as far as I’m aware) writing in the voices of African, women and gay characters.
The reviews I’ve seen that mention cultural appropriation seem to feel that he has managed to side step completely fucking things up. I wonder who he got permission from?
Do authors writing about zombies and vampires need the permission of the Undead Community? It would probably be a good idea ; you don’t want to piss those guys off.
Undead, yes; unperson, no.
Sure, it’s not always ok for an X to talk about Y, but obviously it is not always bad either. The white guy might be inept and callous and ignorant, but might also be talented and knowledgeable. The Nigerian has the benefit of actually experiencing first hand what it is to be a Nigerian women, but might be a vapid and boring writer.
It is lamentable that a large amount of the world is set up to benefit white men, I wish all had the same opportunity to be heard as the white men doing the audience-hogging, but putting writers in a sort of ‘subject matter strait-jacket’ doesn’t fix this.
#4
<3
Harriet Beecher Stowe?
It isn’t likely that many people paid attention to Abdel-Magied’s exit. If anybody did I would expect their main idea, if they had one, to be that she was headed to the bathroom. Methinks this woman is just a trifle too self-absorbed.
The general question is one I’ve actually got into a few fights with fiction author friends about. It started when one of them wrote, or thought about writing, a first person story with a soldier protagonist. This person is not a soldier, has never been a soldier, and doesn’t know any soldiers. I work with a few, and have discovered that the tacit knowledge of a soldier is enormous, and weird (‘see the colour of that guy’s tie? that means he was in X regiment, and this is what that signifies/connotes’). So I wondered how this person could ‘legitimately’ tell a story from the point of view of someone with this huge base of tacit knowledge, which would colour their entire internal monologue, without having that tacit knowledge themself.
I’m a civil engineer–just walking down the street my internal monologue might contain the random passing thoughts that those windows are beautifully proportioned, if you’re not careful that tree will push up those paving stones, funny that building looks Georgian but the cornerstone says 1847, that grate is terrible for bicycle wheels…I mentioned to another writer that just looking around the room we were in I see things he doesn’t see. He replied that he saw things I didn’t see; I explained to him that I’m sure that was true, but I wasn’t writing a novel with him as the protagonist. To prove my point (at least to myself) I (very amateurishly) wrote the same scene (a potential client walks into an office) from the first person perspective of a lawyer, a clothes buyer and a hairdresser–each would describe this person in their head in a different way, noticing different things and making different kinds of immediate assessments.
So how do you do it, and how do you do it ‘legitimately’? Are there some identities that are just too challenging, or off the table, to write as internal first person narratives (obviously you can write anyone you want to as an outside observer; we can all observe anyone)? I’d posit that soldiers should be off limits to nonsoldiers. Maybe doctors. Possibly parents, though most of us know intimately what it’s like to HAVE parents. Maybe people suffering from some chronic diseases. I was impressed by the way the author wrote what appears to be (though I think it’s not directly stated) an autistic first person narrator in this novel:
https://www.amazon.com/Ivory-Mike-Resnick/dp/159102546X
There are lines like ‘I noticed she was wearing the same dress she wore three days ago’–something I know I wouldn’t notice.
Maybe I just take fiction too seriously. I know I do–there are huge parts of the world and human experience that I know only through fiction, and I’m perhaps unreasonably bothered to think that this knowledge was made up.
Her mother thought she was overreacting. She attributes that to her mother’s upbringing. No possibility that her mother might disagree with her for valid reasons. This is another effect of this brand of identity politics: everyone in the group is supposed to think the same thing. Those who dissent must be pitied as brainwashed by the oppressor.
guest @ 9 – very interesting points. I would say it depends on selection: on what the writer selects to write about the soldier’s or engineer’s story. I think the kind of writing that would need a lot of implicit or tacit knowledge is a very detailed stream of consciousness kind, and that’s not how most fiction is. People don’t run through their tacit knowledge at all times. I think writers with good imaginations and capacities for projecting themselves into other (imagined) minds can write about Others by omitting that kind of knowledge.
Like George Eliot’s Lydgate, for example. She did include a good bit about medical science of Lydgate’s day (the time of the Reform Bill, decades before she was writing), but she also wrote about other aspects of Lydgate’s consciousness.
“Write what you know” has long been a dictum, but it’s also long been an irritation to many writers. Some swear by it (and many of them are parochial and dull) and some defy it – some well, some badly.
Mind you…it’s true that most fiction really isn’t about work, and what you talk about is probably a big part of why it’s not.
‘Mind you…it’s true that most fiction really isn’t about work, and what you talk about is probably a big part of why it’s not.’ Ha–good point. But I guess what I’m getting at is that there are certain identities, for want of a better word, that strongly permeate every thought a person has–it could be occupation, it could be where I’m from (I know that as a Californian simply the way I describe things is different from the way the people around me would see them), your religious background, whatever. And I may be overestimating the strength of particular occupations/backgrounds/physical or mental conditions–everyone sees the world based on the combination of our circumstances; how can you replicate that for someone else?
I’m not necessarily talking about stream of consciousness writing–what particularly strikes me about this problem is describing, say, your surroundings from a first person point of view. ‘I went to the address–it was a big stone house with lots of steps up to the front door; I hoped there was a rear entrance I could use.’ ‘I went to the address–it was an elegant Beaux Arts townhouse with a split staircase up to the panelled oak front door.’ ‘I went to the address–it was some rich guy’s house with lots of bling stuck all over the front.’ Depends on who you are, how you see the world, where you’re from, what you know, what vocabulary (technical, regional, cultural) you have in your lexicon.
There’s also the reverse problem, I think, of overresearching–I’ve read a few novels with a fictional Isaac Newton in them, for example, and many authors who use him as a character try to toss in as much as they know about him as they possibly can, up to quoting his actual words in inappropriate contexts.
I know I’m being weirdly pedantic and prescriptive here–people have been telling others’ stories from other points of view for millennia–but this question genuinely does bother me.
Re: soldiers. Tom Clancy was never in the military, but many of my military and ex-military friends seem to like his books.
guest, no, it’s interesting. I do know what you mean, and I have thought about it a lot. (For a long time I thought I wanted to write fiction.)
I think one reason I think it works when it does work is because (as I’ve mentioned often) I was an obsessive pretender as a kid. I was just always Being someone else. That sort of habituated me to thinking one can do that. I think the two states of mind are the same – and when you get a writer with the right kind and amount of empathy and imagination and whatever else is necessary, the result is…something worth having. It’s not of course a literal snapshot of a mind other than the author’s, but then even autobiography or diary isn’t a literal snapshot of the writer’s mind. It’s all selection, it’s all approximate, it’s all error-ridden, but when it’s good it’s not nothing.
‘I think one reason I think it works when it does work is because (as I’ve mentioned often) I was an obsessive pretender as a kid. I was just always Being someone else. That sort of habituated me to thinking one can do that.’
OK, I get that. And of course you’re right that some people are going to be better and more practiced at ‘Being someone else’ than others. Another thing I’m getting from what you wrote is that I just have to get a grip on the fact that I’m not reading ‘a story about an x’ but rather ‘a story about how the author writing the story imagines an x is’, which doesn’t have to be a bad thing. Thanks for adding to my store of understanding about this.
I’d actually say you have to do both. You have to get a grip on the fact that you’re not reading ‘a story about an x’ but rather ‘a story about how the author writing the story imagines an x is’ AND you have to forget that and believe you are reading a story about an x. Willing suspension of disbelief.
With good ones, that is. With bad ones it’s not worth the effort to suspend disbelief.
I love this conversation.
@guest
Good writers can do that–communicate the character through what they see and how they describe it in their interior monologue or whatever. The good ones are probably more likely to do their research, too. But of course it makes no sense to make a rule that “only good writers get to write about X (unless they’re personally experienced with it).” Aside from the obvious problem of who gets to decide who’s worthy, it’s wrong to cripple the imagination like that. How does anyone become any good if they’re not allowed to take chances and maybe fall on their face?
You can always criticise the work if it’s done badly.
guest, how do you deal with unreliable narrators?
I think a lot of people–younger me was one of them–could do with better education on how to read fiction, specifically, how to distance yourself just enough so you don’t feel assaulted by tough material.
In this connection I always think of black kids reading Huckleberry Finn. I empathize with the parents who want to censor it or keep it off the curriculum (and strongly disagree about the censorship.)
I know I eventually learned distancing techniques on my own. Can’t say how, or how to teach it, but I bet it can be done by people more knowledgable than I am. And before graduate school–people outside of advanced English Lit should be able to engage tough material.
LM – my English teacher at high school talked about the need to suspend disbelief to enable the story to be told as the writer wished it. I guess you could also talk about suspending belief in some contexts. His point was that reading was not passive, it required the reader to create mental space to enable the story to be told. Once you’d given that a fair go you could decide whether you liked the story, agreed with the authors particular approach or position etc.
My younger sister had a teacher who just threw books at the class and told them to read. She hates ALL SF and Fantasy because it’s ‘not real’, but will happily read other forms of fiction. While appropriation is totally a thing if you drew a Venn diagram of people like my sister and people like Abdel-Magied there would be an overlap. It comes from a place where thoughts and beliefs are so internalised that not only can they not accept the thoughts of others, but they can’t accept that another can begin to perceive their own thoughts and experiences.
Rob, I’m thinking of the sensitive black kid reading HF, with the word “nigger” on every page, or the child abuse survivor reading Lolita–material that can have painful emotional impact. I mean ok, trigger warnings provide a head’s up, but that’s all they do, and if you’re not in a class, or in a class that uses them, you won’t get even that.
I used to be easily–I know it’s an overused word but, yeah, triggered–by stuff I read. I soldiered on because I found reading worth the pain, and eventually I learned to deal. I’m not sure how I did it, though. It’s not like I’m all Ms. Impervious (or Ms. Well Adjusted) in other respects! I suspect it’s a learned skill, even if I can’t articulate it.
I was just thinking of this book the other day, which I love:
http://postmodernmystery.com/mysteries_of_winterthurn.html
But I never took any information from it about, say, turn of the century New England. If I read a novel with a setting or situation that I’m not familiar with in real life, what’s in that novel will end up being my default/placeholder knowledge about that setting or situation. So, for example, maybe everything I know about antique dealers comes from reading Jonathan Gash. If it turns out that Jonathan Gash isn’t an antique dealer, and doesn’t know any, but is drawing on thirdhand knowledge to create an image of one that is perfectly convincing to someone who knows nothing about the subject, then that’s a whole area of knowledge in my own head that’s been constructed inside a hall of mirrors, and it does bother me to think that that might be true. If you ARE an antique dealer, you know how close Jonathan Gash is to portraying your own experience, or experiences that you’re familiar with, but if you aren’t you have nothing to compare it to.
Hopefully I’m aware that my hazy knowledge of something I have no personal experience with comes from some half-remembered fiction I once read, but I’m not always consciously aware of that–I may just think ‘oh yeah, I read somewhere that x is true, and in the absence of any other information that’s all I know about it’.
AFAIK, Shakespeare was not Jewish or black or Danish or even Venetian.
LM, I never got into HF as a kid. The stories and vernacular were both too foreign for reference and not different enough to be inspiring to me at that time. I haven’t gone back because there are just too many authors I do want to read and don’t have time for.
Obviously some works are going to be challenging, even offensive to some/many readers, putting aside even the requirement for the blank slate reading I described above. Does it make sense if I claim that is a different thing again? In any event, what I said above should not be taken as saying people should not form a negative opinion or even be offended or angry about a work or even the author. There are layers of things to consider. The right to expression, the right to not be denigrated. Competence of the thought and writing, context and intent. I know intent is not magic, but it does have a place.
Some works are regarded as classics, but become tainted over time because societies attitudes move on. At that point the analysis becomes one of is the work of literary merit on the one hand and on the other a cultural record of attitudes we now discard on the other; or, is the work of literary merit, but actually so tainted by the authors racism (or whatever) over and above the society of the day that it deserves to be assigned to the dustbin of history. One affords much greater scope for discussion, thought and analysis than the other. Uncomfortable, challenging or even unpleasant thought that is.
I certainly don’t have any hard and fast rules or boundaries to apply. Just those rambling thoughts and case by case analysis. I certainly feel uncomfortable around people who seem to know exactly where every boundary lies all of the time.
steve v – and he did a hatchet job on both Shylock and Macbeth! Throw all his works in the bin!
I’ll just throw this out there at the risk of being tiresome – Rob I think you should give Huck Finn a shot. It’s one of those “classics” that fully deserves its reputation. (Until the very end. It notoriously goes off the rails at the end, which is a rather big failing, but before that…it’s truly remarkable.) The part where Huck lives with his terrible drunken father and despite all the abuse is partly happy to get away from respectable people…the part with the feuding families deluded by too much Walter Scott…the part where Huck plays a cruel trick on Jim and Jim explains why cruel tricks suck…the part where the town big wheel murders a drunk guy who pisses him off one time too many…above all the part where Jim wrestles with his conscience over “stealing” Jim from the woman who was so kind to him…
It shouldn’t be missed.
Sorry for being tiresome.
@guest
I love Mysteries of Winterthurn! Have you read The Accursed?
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Accursed_(Oates_novel)
Ophelia @25, not tiresome but… [gazes longingly at stack of books waiting to be read]. Oh well, I’ll add it to the list. ;-)
Rob, I second Ophelia.
I think everybody should read Huckleberry Finn (and Lolita). I’m saying that books–sometimes the best books!–can be painful to read, but there must be mental skills that people learn that help them distance themselves so they can read them.
A tad overstated, and I would never say “we ought to read only,” but I think Kafka was on to something:
I surrender! It’s on my list.
Incidentally, if it wasn’t clear above, I absolutely agree that writing should have the ability to be discomforting as well as a snuggly blanket.
@sailor
Yes. I’ve given dozens of talks and have been to hundreds. Someone always walks out at some point, to use the bathroom, to answer their phone, because they are bored… Nobody thinks even once about it, not even – in my case, at least – the speaker.
As a writer myself, I would answer that question this way: research. Which would involve talking with someone in that field. Letting them guide you. Don’t be afraid to show your story to someone who can critique it. But don’t be afraid to stretch yourself. Writers are good at writing; soldiers are good at soldiering. There may be some who do both, but in reality, just because you have that tacit knowledge doesn’t mean you are able to spin it into a fascinating story.
Most writers I know (and I know a lot) spend at least part of their time researching what they are writing. The one interesting thing I see is that, when they research, they will spend hours with lawyers, police, soldiers, whatever…but never even stop by the office of a scientist if they are writing scientists. They all (the writers I know personally) write scientists from the movies, books, and other popular media they are familiar with. Strange anecdote, I know. Why? I don’t know. Maybe they’re afraid they can’t understand scientists, or maybe they think everyone else has done such a good job that they have an accurate view of what science is. Do I think non-scientists should avoid writing scientists? No. Just do the same work you would do with a police man or a soldier.