The fraught terrain
Kenan Malik considers the “cultural appropriation” question.
“What insults my soul,” Zadie Smith has written, “is the idea… that we can and should write only about people who are fundamentally ‘like’ us: racially, sexually, genetically, nationally, politically, personally.”
Both as novelist and essayist, Smith is one of the most subtle guides to the fraught terrain of culture and identity. The problem of “cultural appropriation” – writers and artists being called out for having stepped beyond their permitted cultural boundaries to explore themes about people who are not “fundamentally ‘like’ us” – is an issue that particularly troubles her. Too often these days, on opening a book or on viewing a painting, we are as likely to ask: “Did the author or painter have the cultural right to engage with that subject?” or: “Does he or she possess the right identity?” as: “Is it any good?”
There’s maybe a third track though, to do not with a cultural right or the right identity but sufficiency of knowledge. “Write what you know” has long been a commandment of writing schools and the like (along with “show don’t tell” which is also a questionable rule), and while it’s simplistic or just wrong in many ways (it rules out all fantasy and magic realism for a start), it’s not completely wrong.
It’s far from completely right though. “Literary” fiction now is far too full of people chatting over coffee plus descriptions of clothes and living rooms and too empty of most of life. Writing only about what you know [personally, from experience] equals writing about not much.
Back to Kenan.
So it is with the latest cultural firestorm over Jeanine Cummins’s novel American Dirt, which tells the story of a mother and son, Lydia and Luca, forced to flee their home in Acapulco and join the migrant trail to America after their family is slaughtered by a drugs cartel. Cummins wants Americans to stop seeing migrants as a “faceless brown mass” and to bear witness to the “tragedy of our making on our southern border”.
The novel’s supporters have hailed it as a Great American Novel, even the new The Grapes of Wrath. Its detractors point to the fact that Cummins is non-Mexican and that this wasn’t a story that was hers to tell, which is why she gets it all wrong.
The thing is though, The Grapes of Wrath isn’t all that good. It’s powerful, and gripping, and of interest historically, but as a piece of writing it’s not great. I’ve never felt particularly confident about Steinbeck’s imagination of his Dust Bowl farmers.
But was it wrong for him to write it? Was he taking up space that could have been filled by a novel written by an actual Dust Bowl farmer? If so, were there any such novels written by Dust Bowl farmers? I have a feeling they were all too busy trying to survive to write a novel about their efforts to survive. Wasn’t it possibly a good thing that a novelist who had the time and resources to write a novel about those efforts did so?
Kenan says Cummins’s novel is pretty bad as a novel, but that’s not really the issue.
Most of the anger about the novel has been generated, though, not by how Cummins writes but by who she is. Not Mexican. Not migrant. White.
Cummins herself sets up her critics’ argument in an author’s note: “I worried that as a non-migrant and non-Mexican I had no business writing a book set almost entirely in Mexico, set almost entirely among migrants.” She “wished someone slightly browner than me would write it”.
But in the meantime is it actually wrong for her to write it?
What both sides seem to have forgotten is what fiction is for. Fiction, as Smith observed in the inaugural Philip Roth lecture in 2016, “is a way of asking… what if I was different than I am?” Today, though, she notes elsewhere: “The old – and never especially helpful – adage write what you know has morphed into something more like a threat: stay in your lane.” To do so, Smith insists, is to deny the very possibility of fiction.
There you go. Zadie Smith and I are of one mind on this subject. “Write what you know” is hideously parochial at best, and “stay in your lane” is even more so.
… the context of the debate is a literary and artistic culture that increasingly does insist that people should stay in their lanes. “Where did the new orthodoxy arise that writers must only set stories within their own country of origin or nationality?” the writer Aminatta Forna has asked. In trying to constrain the imagination by identity, she points out, it’s not the privileged but those on the margins who most lose out. The “white male writer” is called simply “writer”; all other others have to be “hyphenated”, writing, in Nesrine Malik’s words, “as a”: as a woman, as a Muslim, as an immigrant.
Certainly, puncture the absurd hype around American Dirt as a novel that reveals the truth about the treatment of immigrants. Certainly, celebrate the Mexican and Latinx writers, from Luis Alberto Urrea to Valeria Luiselli (whose poetic, haunting Lost Children Archive has just been published in paperback), who have long explored the stories of migration with subtlety and power.
But let us not create gated cultures in which only those of the right identity have permission to use their imaginations. For, as novelist Kamila Shamsie tweeted (in response to another controversy over cultural appropriation): “ ‘You – other – are unimaginable’ is a far more problematic attitude than ‘You are imaginable’.” She might have added, “even if imagined badly”.
One exchange of views:
But was “woke people police boundaries” a fair précis of Kenan’s point? Hardly.
I do think we have an obligation to learn what we can if we are writing about other cultures or people not like us, but yeah, if we can’t write about something we don’t know, then science fiction, fantasy, westerns, romances…all of them probably should shut up. And men should never include women characters (which would greatly diminish many works of literature, to shut out women).
Another dynamic that goes along with that is what I, as a white woman writer have experienced: You must include people from other cultures. You must embrace diversity. You cannot write only about white people, no matter what, even if your work is inherently about a community that is undeniably white. You MUST, MUST, MUST, NO NOT OPTIONAL, MUST include the other.
Then, when you include the other, it’s HOW DARE YOU WRITE ABOUT SOMEONE WHO IS MARGINALIZED AND NOT LIKE YOU.
I have not, by the way, seen this same thing typically leveled at the male writers who were sitting in the same collection of writers as I, writing about topics from a white male point of view, with white male characters dominating, and the only other characters being white females. Even when the writing was sexist and nasty and the female characters exist only as objects for the male gaze. The males will be praised for writing about “tough, gritty subjects” and “writing women well”.
In short, it is another STFU to white women (they will find another way to say STFU for non-white women, of course).
The problem with Bertram’s proposal is that it doesn’t really resolve the issue. Rather, it just shuts down what he deems to be politically incorrect art. If there are good stories out there I presume publishers want to publish and sell them regardless of the ethnicity of the author.
As for the novel not being very good as a novel, so what? A lot of best-sellers aren’t in fact great novels but people still buy and read them with pleasure and it’s pretty snobbish to look down one’s nose at them, IMO. I thought one of the best selling novels of the 1990s, The Bridges of Madison County, was trite stuff but it sold millions and actually ended up being done as a decent movie, showing why the story had appeal.
Well, you can call it snobbish to say bad novels are bad, just as you can call it snobbish to say bad food is bad, bad coffee is bad, bad music is bad, bad anything is bad…but why? Why is it wrong (snobbish) to say a novel is bad?
It’s not wrong to criticize what’s bad about a work of art. Sometimes I do think critics focus overmuch on what’s bad about a novel or a movie or even food and don’t acknowledge why it still may have appeal.
Ah yes, I get that. That’s why I tried to be specific about what appeals in Grapes of Wrath while still saying the writing itself isn’t very good. I’m sort of hyper-alert about bad writing. I suppose that’s a kind of snobbery, but one that has its uses. Maybe.
Based on what I’ve heard of the novel and the synopses I’ve read of the plot (warning, I haven’t read it and am relying on second hand accounts), it sounds like a pretty basic airport pulp book. Part of the blame surely lies with the publishers, who decided to market it as a grapes of wrath-esque story of immigration for our time. Thankfully many latin american authors and pundits I’ve crossed are focusing more on why the publishing industry doesn’t do more to boost latin american authors that are also telling these stories.
Not apropos to Ophelia’s main point, there are some humorous cultural mistakes in the novel (e.g., the well off middle-class protagonist being shocked that winter sports like skiing exists, for example, which is quite funny since I was at a ski field by the border recently and a large number of patrons had Mexican license plates, plus mountains and snow are found throughout Mexico).
Like, why Velveeta may have appeal to those of us who couldn’t afford real cheese when we were kids, and grew up on Velveeta? ;-)
I do think we should have a right to say what’s bad about something, but recognizing that there really isn’t an objective measure of bad or good in art. I think most bestsellers aren’t good books, but I also realize there are reasons why people like them. That doesn’t mean I need to note why people like them, since what I am expressing is my opinion, and the good may not be there in my opinion. I read countless reviews of books that I hated because they were written by aging male novelists who took the opportunity to create young nubile women who have the only goal in life of getting naked and falling into bed with overweight, balding, middle-aged men who are married to other women. I can say it is a bad novel, even though there may be good things in it, because I spent the entire time reading it cringing in disgust or horror; that doesn’t change the views of the other readers, but I don’t need to acknowledge that. There are usually plenty of people crowing about the good if they like the novel.
The funny thing is, this never works both ways. People who criticize works favored by the intelligentsia, works often recognized as good and literate but seen as pretentious or boring by the critics or other readers, are not told they need to recognize the good in an art film, a literary work, a profound work of art that is seen as highbrow, or the food favored by the foodies or other people who scorn peanut butter and hot dogs (like me). They are free to crap all over everything we like.
Until it goes both ways, I refuse to acknowledge that I must always point out why it might have appeal to others..
Velveeta has it’s uses though. As a kid my mom made great grilled cheese sandwiches with Velveeta because it melts so well.
As for problematic writing that still has virtues, I think of how John Updike was pretty sexist when it came to women, but how he could WRITE a novel.
Zadie Smith is one of the best British writers. Her criticism is excellent – she mixes her knowledge of the classics along with stuff like rap culture. I’ve just read her latest novel Swingtime which has plenty of scenes in a village in Gambia, West Africa, with the narrator’s employer, a Madonna superstar, ostentatiously financing a school there, with all the problems this brings, and the narrator’s friendship with Hawa, a lively young teacher who loves to dance, and has a place in the easy-going Muslim village, but who picks up with jihadist types. Zadie S can move from multi-cultural London to a poor village and the westernising city.
I assume she does write what she knows – she’s from a mixed-race family in London and no doubt has visited Gambia. I wonder how many of her contemporaries would dare tackle such themes?
And Caryl Churchill wrote a play (Mad Forest) about the Romanian Revolution which was well regarded in Romania. She spent a long time there, talked to people, got to know the place, and used their stories and words to craft her play. By getting to know her subject, she was able to write effectively about it.
I haven’t read American Dirt. I did listen to the review and discussion about the book on RNZ the other day. The reviewer felt that it was good literature and was clearly very thoroughly researched. A fair bit of the discussion touched on whether there was cultural appropriation and whether this was acceptable.
The reviewer made the points that:
Some of the Spanish phrasing used was perhaps not fully idiomatic and that a Hispanic author may have dome a better job of this.
That some of the characters could be argued to be ciphers, rather than unique.
But despite this, the book had a powerful story to tell that is founded on the actual events and experiences of migrants that have been well documented.
The reviewer also touched on criticism from some Hispanic authors and critics that the story did not reflect their reality of living in Mexico or Latin America. That may well be true, but not being a victim of drug violence or a forced migrant doesn’t, to me, invalidate the writing about this by others, regardless of that person circumstances. If others have a different experience of their home country, they can after all write about it.
Stories such as this are fundamentally human stories, not mexican, black, white or vietnamese stories. To say that someone should not write such works is to try to fragment the human experience and discussion of it into meaningless fragments. Think about it. A Hispanic sex-trafficked woman can’t write a book about being sex-trafficked because it doesn’t reflect the experience of a Romanian woman who has been trafficked. I couldn’t write about growing up in poverty in a single parent family because I didn’t fall into drugs and criminality? The splitting becomes intolerable. If you can’t write about the experience of others, you can’t feel the compassion and empathy needed to fully appreciate the writings of any particular group either. I say bullshit to that.
My view is that a writer should do their best. If that’s poor, consign their work to the bin and move on to someone who does a better job.
Haven’t tried to read it since high school, when I really bumped up against the way the dialogue was written. All that “we et good tha’ night, didnt’we Pa?” stuff annoyed me. Not to mention that my English teacher insisted that there wasn’t a socialist message in the book, which… yeah, not buying that.
iknklast @7,
Oh, hell yes. I’ve taken to calling this “reverse snobbery,” in which the point is to dismiss the very notion of quality as elitist nonsense.
Rob @ 11 – Tom Sutcliffe and guests talked about it on Saturday Review a few weeks back, too, and said the same sort of thing. They talked about the appropriation issue and whether it is an issue or not, and also about the years of research Cummins did. They mostly thought it was pretty good, if I remember correctly.
It’s topics like this, and your analysis of them, that make coffee at Macrina’s with you so very enjoyable, not to mention a great read in the early morning hours when the cats wake me up.
Ophelia @5
Jesusfuckonastick, would but more would be so.
There is a demand for ‘authenticity’ which undermines the integrity of literature. A book is burdened with being THE ‘official’ word on a topic. Grapes of Wrath is one, For Whom the Bell Tolls another. We don’t really learn the history of the Depression/Dustbowl, nor the Spanish Civil War through these lenses.
Jame’s Frey’s A Million Little Pieces was pushed as the ‘official, authentic’ word about addiction, but every alcoholic/addict I know spotted it as a fake within the first few pages.
We have decades of embarrassment over Authentic Works produced by mountebanks like Frey:
The Hand that Signed the Paper by ‘Helen Demidenko.’
The Education of Little Tree by ‘Forrest Carter’
Famous All Over Town by ‘Danny Santiago’
The list ought to be extendable, these came to mind off hand.
I suppose the justification for this stuff is that actual Mexican immigrants/marginalized people/whatever should be able to get published and read instead of the writers that the wokesters disapprove of. I wonder though, other than harassing people like Cummins, what exactly are Chris Bertram and other folks involved in this dust-up doing to help these marginalized writers get their work seen? My guess is “nothing”. So “woke people police boundaries” in fact is the story, because that’s the most accurate description of what’s happening.
The letter that some group of identity policing writers sent to Oprah declared that we must “imagine responsibly”. I’m tempted to found a new literary society right now and copyright “Imagine Irresponsibly” as our motto. Or maybe “My literature will be problematic or it will be bullshit”.
My husband, a librarian who is a teetotaler and never experimented with addictive substances, spotted it as fake within the first few pages. His librarian buddies told him he was ignorant. He laughed last.
Literature that is problematic has been crucial in the history of literature.
James @ 14 – Aw, thanks, and sorry the cats woke you up so early!
A few more fakes to add to John’s list @ 16 –
Misha Defonseca’s Misha: A Memoir Of The Holocaust Years.
Herman Rosenblat’s Angel at the Fence.
Benjamin Wilkomirski’s Fragments: Memories of a Wartime Childhood.
I knew about the third and googled to find the author’s name, and doing so turned up the other two.