Manifesto

Introduction

Before I begin this in earnest, I should talk about the process by which my conclusions and thoughts were arrived and the source of the inquiry as well as doing my best to lay out my biases that will mostly likely become uncomfortably apparent as this continues.

I have spent the past couple of months researching cultural appropriation and representation in literature and then writing this manifesto. It is important to note that my research was lacking in sources about historical examples of cultural appropriation, which is an important angle to understanding and thinking about appropriation, and something I should do more research on in the future.

I am a cis white male from Massachusetts. I am an excessively privileged person who has lived his entire life in a privileged white liberal bubble. As such I am affected by both a lack of exposure to other cultures and opinions, but also by the white liberal savior fantasy where we think we are helpful and important to ending racism, no matter how true that actually is. I should also mention that I am a Unitarian Universalist a religion that is in many ways built on taking the rituals and traditions of other cultures for our uses, brushing up and past the imaginary line that makes it appropriation.

Cultural Appropriation

Cultural appropriation is the taking of another culture’s property without permission. Each of those terms, especially the idea of getting permission from a culture, is difficult to define and give room for a lot of variation and difference that can make it difficult to name cultural appropriation when it happens and easy to call out stuff as appropriation when it isn’t problematic. Fiction writing, as Lionel Shriver said, is inherently built around the taking of experiences that are not our own and crafting them into stories, which  can easily be called appropriation by its widest definition. Though the whole thing is a giant ball of muddy confusing questions, there are a few things I can say with some certainty in regards to the issue.

The questions are important: Culture is built on stories, the stories we tell each other, the stories we believe we are living, the stories we tell of our histories and the stories we go to for comfort and enjoyment. As such the questions of who is telling those stories and who is being given credit for telling those stories is important. When our fiction tends to only explicitly talks about black people when crimes or drugs are involved, we begin to believe that black people are criminals and do drugs. In our multicultural world we need to be able to hear different voices and cultures and not have them drowned out by what the dominant culture thinks they should be saying. As a member of the dominant culture that wants to tell stories it is very important for me to question the cultural impact of those stories and whose voices I might be drowning out. While my stories will most likely fall into some obscure corner of our culture where they wither away into nothing, they are still a part of our culture that can very easily cover up other voices that should be heard.

There are ways to write respectfully about other cultures: Setting aside for a moment the questions of whether people who aren’t members of a culture should tell stories about other cultures it is important to note that there are ways to tell stories about other cultures without resorting to stereotypes and imagined understandings of other cultures. When people witness and listen to other cultures they can gain an understanding that can be molded into wonderful respectful depictions of those cultures in a story. Peter Hobbs’s book In the Orchard, the Swallows is a great example of that. The book is set in Pakistan and touches on the political situation in Pakistan as well as the beauty of the land and villages there. Peter Hobbs is an englishman who doesn’t have any Pakistani heritage. While I myself have never been to Pakistan or learned about the country or its people and am not well suited to say if the book is an accurate depiction of Pakistan, the country came through as a beautiful troubled place. The book deals with corruption and cruelty among the people with power in Pakistan, but didn’t make any statements about how Pakistan was an awful place, instead he judges the cruelty on a personal level talking about the cruelty humans are capable when they have power and are bored out of their minds. Pakistani people, who are far better judges than me, also like the book, author Kamila Shamsie called it “one of the novels [she] loves.” She also talks about how the book is written without any arrogance or feeling that he is entitled to tell that story. The ability to approach other settings, cultures, and subjects respectfully and humbly is an important skill and necessary to the kind of understanding I was talking about. However it is just the bare minimum requirement in writing about minority cultures and groups, as even when one is respectful, socio-economic factors and our imperialist history raise other issues in writing those stories.

The wider cultural context of work needs to be considered: The writing world is one where my privilege will make it more likely for me to be published than people from underrepresented minorities. Publishers can be biased in whose work they accept and higher education, where writers can gain the skills, connections and style that helps them get published, can be stifling for people of color. As Junot Diaz talks about in MFA vs. POC the overwhelming white presence in college writing workshops, can dismiss, ignore, drown out and insult the voices of people of culture. The workshops are filled with white students and white teachers, who don’t respect the experiences of people of color, or see them as the basis for real literature. As such if I were to write a story about another culture then I could be drowning out those cultures voices who struggle to get published. My voice is not all that unique as much as I might think it is and if its presence in the writing world could help drown out other more unique voices, voices like that of Athena who Diaz talks about, then I need to seriously question whether that is worth it. Our culture needs to have more opportunities for different voices to get heard to help our society move past our issues about race, gender, sexual orientation, and disability.

The west has a long history of taking what we want from non europeans. As bell hooks talks about that consumption of the other has moved from the more physical, land, food, labor, and wealth to the taking of experiences and culture, using the idea of the Other for sexual pleasure, the appropriation of those cultures, and the taking of the way those cultures are perceived. No matter how well I might do it, my writing about other cultures is a part of western cultures taking of other cultures stories, which needs to be changed as we try to get away from our imperialist history. I currently don’t think I should write any sort of story about another culture or minority group, as I don’t have any experience through which to write it, but that could well change in my life and I don’t know what I would want to do if that did change. I also don’t know if I should try to get published at all as my fears of doing harm to the world through drowning out another voice, goes against my desire to be published. Right now, I can’t really can’t say an answer,  but for better or for worse I am not currently close to getting published in any serious way so I have time to think about that question and come to some decision.

On the use of loaded derogatory terms and phrases:

I remember when I first read On Writing by Stephen King in tenth grade, King talking about how he has been accused of being racist, sexist, homophobic, and all sorts of other things because of the things his character's said and did in his books. He said that he was not those things himself, but still had his characters do and say the things they said. That touches on two things of importance. The first is the separation of the author and their characters. An author is not racist, sexist, homophobic, etc., because their characters are. It is much harder and more complex to deem an author’s biases or isms. They reveal themselves through the roles that characters play in the stories and in how the author treats different characters differently based on their race, gender, sexual orientation or other Other status.

The other thing that’s important about what King said is the use of loaded words and phrases by authors. Words have incredible power, something that as an aspiring writer, I believe in rather heavily. As a white cis male I don’t understand the full meaning behind those slurs, I have never had them used to describe me and have no personal understanding of the history of oppression and hatred that have built up their power. As such I think it is important that I refrain from using them as much as possible. They aren’t the sort of things that should be used for shock value or to add authenticity or grit to a story. I should also remember to never think that I have the right to use such words because others do. That is a trap that people fall into by thinking that they aren’t bigoted and they aren’t going to use it in an offensive way so therefore they can use as they will because others, most often members of the group the word was targeted at, do. I don’t think I will ever write anything where these words use could really be justified, though that might change in the rest of my life.

Handling criticism, failure and being offensive/prejudiced:

I am going to make mistakes in my writing and have my problematic biases and -isms bleed into my work. Any piece of writing I publish will have issues and problems that I was unable to edit out. If I ever get to any degree of success people will criticize said flaws. More immediately, people I show my work to for criticism will criticize it. My writing is something that I am, and will remain to be extremely emotional about, as it is something that I created for the world which I both love and think is awful and worthless. The work is a reflection of myself and often I conflate it with my own identity.  Because of all that, it is easy be overprotective of my work and be confrontational about criticisms against it. That behavior is bad and can lead to annoying my peers and losing both friends who are willing to look at my work, and the short term benefit of being able to listen to others thoughts on my work and how to improve it.

The problem becomes worse when dealing with sensitive subjects that I am not as comfortable writing about or problems in my writing around the representation of minority groups or characters. In those situations it is extremely important to listen to criticisms on my work and its representations of minority characters. It is through listening and conversing that one is able to grow and improve one’s writing ability as well as deal with one’s biases and privilege. Minorities often struggle when speaking out against poor representations and stereotypes because of how it requires facing down the dominant culture. The overwhelming whiteness and maleness of the literary world is only now really beginning to loosen enough for people to speak out against long standing issues, such as the Me Too movement that is currently bringing to light the long history of male domination in hollywood and the literary world. As such it is important to be open to criticism to let that criticism get out into the world with as little hassle as possible.

It is extremely important to remember that any work of mine that is published is no longer mine in that it is now a part of the ocean of art that makes up American culture and as such bears responsibility for the problems in that ocean that it furthers. As such while criticism on those grounds might feel like personal attacks it is really important to not take criticisms to those patterns and trends personally, but still take responsibility for the problems in the work and work to improve myself and work past those biases.

Write What you Know?

A common mantra for writing is write what you know, which is an interesting piece of crappy advice. It is flawed in that one of the main great things about fiction is its ability to stretch our imaginations to gain empathy for others and to then share that empathy. However the aversion to cultural appropriation in some ways reasserts that mantra of telling people to not try to write what they don’t know or at least not publish those writings.

I think writing should start in stuff that we know or have experienced, some aspect of the world that we have seen or experienced in a real way. Which is the way most writing typically starts in that we see something that piques our interest and curiosity and grappling with it through a story. The strength of writing though is taking that experience or perception of the world and extrapolating it out onto your version of the world to tell a story and to talk about your beliefs about the world as well as to explore and challenge those beliefs.

Representing Without Appropriating:

As Lionel Shriver complained about writers are often held to the double standard of being expected to not appropriate other cultures in their writing, but still have good representation of our diverse society. It is difficult to walk that line, but it is doable and very important to do.

There is a difference between telling stories with a diverse cast and telling a story about diversity or a story about the struggles of being a member of a minority and dealing with prejudice. I should write stories about different people living in our diverse world, but when I write from the perspective of minority characters or about their cultures and experiences with discrimination I run into the problems with appropriation that I have talked about. For example I am willing to attempt to write a story about a woman running around town with a rifle looking for her best friend that she thinks has been kidnapped, but is actually just hiding the body of a man she killed, but I am not confident about trying to write a story about a woman dealing with the difficulties of having a leadership role in a business, while wanting to start a family and dealing with microaggressions and discrimination. As the experiences with discrimination are not one’s that I have experienced, and should thus leave to someone who has.

Fantasy and science fiction are areas where representation can be given more room without risking appropriating, in those genres authors are able to make the worlds and cultures of the characters from scratch so they aren’t speaking for an existing culture. However this can still be problematic, when authors make their cultures from stereotypes of existent cultures, as was the case with the Star Wars prequels where characters like Jar Jar Binks were drawn almost directly from stereotypes about other cultures and ethnicities.

Problematic Representation:

It is rather easy to have poor or absent representation in work. American literature has a long history of a lack of representation and, as bell hooks and Toni Morrison have written about, the usage of the Other or an Africanist presence as a metaphor or symbol to further a story’s ideas about white characters and themes like freedom, chaos, civilization, and sexuality.

There are thousands of tropes about minority groups that help to further our biases and problematic ideas about those groups. For example, the trope of a character's arc being their quest to get rid of a disability instead of learning to live with it as people with actual disabilities do(as seen in Avatar among others), promotes the idea of being disabled being an awful thing that you either get rid of or die trying instead of the truth which is that they are difficulties that you have to learn to live with, function with and have a good life with. Writing about groups that have been negatively affected by tropes in fiction has to be careful not to fall into those tropes. Even if it is well intentioned those tropes have a history of harm associated with them which makes it better to avoid or subvert them. It can be very difficult to avoid all of the tropes that are out there in the modern world so it is most important to avoid the largest worst ones that are most prevalent and most harmful. In the end though all of the tropes can’t be avoided, and the only way to really avoid falling into cliches is to make sure that character's are people first, characters with roles in the story second, and their assorted labels and identities third. When characters are people the similarities to problematic tropes are less apparent and less annoying.

While the world is definitely improving and in the past few years there have been great examples of art about different cultures that is respectful and good - the movies Coco and Moana are great examples of that - the change comes slow and requires people’s efforts to enact it by striving for good representation and challenging themselves. Both Coco and Moana were made by majority white creative teams which means that they were telling stories that didn’t come from their experiences. Importantly both of those movies had casts that were people from the ethnicities represented, but there is still room for growth in giving the people from those cultures their own chances to tell their stories.

Questions for the future:

All of the stuff that I have talked about in this has been oriented towards my thinking about how and what I should write in the future, with only a few thoughts about getting published. As I go forward I will have to start thinking about how these questions apply to any potential role I might have in the publishing world, applying for fellowships, querying agents, and other steps forward in the publishing world.