As announced inarticle from last week, we return to the theme of cultural appropriation with an important intervention that sets the tone for those who consider this idea an aberration for the arts and culture. It certainly is if taken, on a theoretical level and in the battle of ideas, beyond its legitimate applications to its extreme questionable radicalizations. There is no master of culture, perhaps if there are shareholders, these could be those who created the single elements that went into determining it, but no one can claim ownership over culture per se. Paraphrasing a famous statement by Rousseau about it, he can say that freedom ends and something much less pleasant begins when someone creates a fence and says "this is mine, don't enter or pay to enter". And the concept of cultural appropriation does just that.
To you Lionel Shriver
The well-known American writer – now a subject of her British Majesty – has a fatal attraction for sensitive and dangerous subjects. Baptized Margaret, she wanted to change her name to Lionel, which, more than the daisy, adapts to her, in fact, leonine nature. It already begins with an act of cultural appropriation! As an openly libertarian, feminist and iconoclast author, she has no qualms about writing, speaking and squabbling about controversial cases and topics of which she very often does not have direct experience. Another act of cultural appropriation! For this reason that concept infuriates her.
In an article in the "New York Times", which invited her to express herself politically, she declared: "In London they consider me an ultra conversationalist. When I fly to New York I transform myself, without having changed my opinions, into a leftist radical”. In fact, Shriver is a perfect synthesis between the "Wall Street Journal" in economic matters and the "Guardian" in those of civil rights. She abhors any form of regulation in the economic field, she hates taxes, she criticizes the welfare state and health care reform, but she wants to decriminalize assisted suicide, prostitution and the use, not only of marijuana, but of all drugs. She defends pornography and especially has broken ties with all the anti-abortion libertarians, like Rand Paul (who might have been her choice in politics), as well as with those who oppose same-sex marriage. Also in the "New York Times" he wrote: "I am not the only American forced to repeatedly vote Democrat because the republican social agenda is retrograde, if not downright moody - at the cost of giving my involuntary endorsement of deceptive and onerous solutions to problems of America”.
From 1987 to today, Lionel Shriver has written 14 novels, 3 of which have been translated into Italian by Piemme. Most famously,… And now let's talk about Kevin (2003), have been added – for a few months in the Italian edition – The Mandibles. A family, 2029-2047 (2016) and The Standing Chandelier (2017) a merciless and harsh novel about the impossibility of friendship between a straight man and a woman. Already in a previous novel, The Big Brother, had explored another impossibility, that of having a very obese family member and having to fight between normality and both the personal and social consequences of that condition.
The organizers of the Brisbane Writers festival (Australia) invited Shriver to give the opening speech of the 2016 edition proposing the theme "Fiction and Identity Politics". Below is the Italian translation of some passages from Shriver's speech on September 8, 2016, published in the original language by the "Guardian". Enjoy the reading!
The Sunday story, "The Big Obese", available at FirstArt, is by Lionel Shriver.
Ithe sombrero is it theft?
Well! Let's start with a storm in a glass of water. We go to Bowdoin College in Brunswick, Maine. At the beginning of 2016, two students organized the end-of-year party on the theme "Tequila for a friend". The hosts treated guests to a sombrero, which was widely worn throughout the evening.
Campus-wide outrage erupted when photos of the party began circulating on social media. Administrators have launched an investigation into this "act of ethnic stereotyping." Partygoers were pilloried, while the two organizers were expelled from their dormitory and subsequently impeached. Bowdoin's student newspaper criticized the lack of "empathy" of all attendees.
The moral of the sombrero scandal is clear: you shouldn't wear other people's hats. Yet that's what we writers are paid to do, right? Step into other people's shoes and try on their hats.
According to the latest fad, which has quickly spread far beyond university campuses, any tradition, any experience, any custom, any way of doing and saying things associated with a minority or a disadvantaged group is taboo. Look, but don't touch. All those who fit into a wide range of 'identities' – ethnicities, nationalities, races, sexual and gender categories, underprivileged and disabled classes – are encouraged to consider their experience as intellectual property and to consider the attempts of others groups to take part in their experiences and traditions, either actively or through imagination, a form of theft.
What it would never be nato
Then, if the writers had respected the precept not to touch what belongs to groups other than their own, we would not have Under the volcano by Malcolm Lowry and we wouldn't even have most of Graham Greene's novels, many of which are set in what for the English Nobel Prize winner were foreign countries, populated by real foreigners who speak and behave like foreigners.
In his masterpiece, The English passengerMatthew Kneale should have refrained from including chapters written in the Aboriginal language, although these are some of the richest and most convincing parts of the novel. If Dalton Trumbo had scrupled to describe the condition of a person trapped in a body without arms, legs and face, why was he not in that condition – Trumbo, in fact, had not fought in World War I, much less been there mutilated and therefore lacked first-hand experience of the solitary condition of a paraplegic – we would not have had the disturbing 1938 classic, And Johnny took the shotgun.
We wouldn't even have Maria McCann's contemporary erotic masterpiece, As Meat Loves Salt – in which a heterosexual lady writes of a same-sex love affair between two men during the English Civil War. Though the book is more nonfiction than fiction, it's worth noting that we wouldn't have had either Black Like Me of 1961. To write it the white journalist John Howard Griffin had committed the unforgivable sin of darkening his skin to pass himself off as a black man. However, having darkened his skin – a kind of reverse Michael Jackson operation – Griffin had discovered how a black person lived in the segregated Southern environment. It would have been excoriated today, but that book had a major social impact on the black men's civil rights movement.
Who owns the culture?
The author of Who Owns Culture? Authenticity and Appropriation in American LawSusan Scafidi, a law professor at Fordham University, who for the record is white, defines cultural appropriation as “taking intellectual property, traditional knowledge, cultural expressions or artifacts from someone else's culture without permission. This can include the unauthorized use of dance, dress, music, language, folklore, cuisine, traditional medicine, religious symbols, etc. of another culture”.
What strikes me about this definition is the expression “without permission”. How do we fiction writers seek "permission" to use a character of another race or culture, or employ the language of a group to which we do not belong? What are we doing? Shall we set up a stall on a street corner and approach passers-by for permission to employ an Indonesian character in chapter twelve?
I am therefore confident that the concept of "cultural appropriation" is a passing fad, a sort of transitory hypersensitivity: the contact between people with different backgrounds, who rub against each other and exchange ideas and behaviours, is one of the more fruitful and fascinating than modern urban life.
This same hyper-sensitivity, however, is also arriving in bookstores. Let's ask ourselves: who is the mastermind par excellence? It is someone who borrows other people's own voices, language, feelings and idioms. It is someone who literally puts words into the mouths of people other than him or her. It's who dares to get inside the heads of strangers. It's who has the cheek to project thoughts and feelings into the minds of others, stealing their most intimate thoughts. It is one who absorbs, like a child in a candy store, every sight, smell, sensation or conversation in order to be able to appropriate those sensations. In short, who is this professional of the serial robbery? Who is the first pickpocket of the arts? It's The Storyteller, that's who the thief is.
And now let's talk about “authity"
That of the novelist, by its very nature, is a disrespectful, indiscreet, voyeuristic, kleptomaniac and presumptuous vocation. And these are precisely the characteristics of fiction at its highest stage. When Truman Capote told stories from the point of view of murderers and death row inmates or from those of an economic class below his own, he had a lot of guts. But writing stories takes a lot of guts.
As far as the obsession with cultural cleanliness and "authenticity" is concerned, fiction itself is inauthentic. It is false, it is consciously and deliberately false. Falsehood is precisely the nature of this art form that talks about people who don't exist and events that didn't but happen. It's true, but one wonders, however, what are the stories that really belong to the writers and what are the boundaries that delimit their work? I would argue that any story a writer invents about him is about him and to attempt to push the boundaries of personal experience is part of the novelist's craft. I hope that the writers of crime novels, for example, do not all have personal experience of murders and killings, as the proponents of "authenticity" would like. I myself, without being a serial killer, entered the mind of a mad murderer by representing the killing madness in And now speakIAMO by Kevin. Sorry to the purists, but I have never shot arrows that killed seven children, a teacher and an auxiliary in a high school.
We make things up, we take risks, we do some research, but in the end it's all about how we get away with it – how we can convince, or rather "fool," our readers. Because the ultimate outcome of keeping our fingers out of an experience that doesn't belong to us is that of killing fiction. All that is left is a memoir.
Paragraph 22 of "authenticity"
And here is paragraph 22 of the authenticity request; here's where we can't really win. At the same time that we will write only about our experiences in the name of "authenticity," we will be reproached for not having represented a sufficiently differentiated humanity in our stories. That's what happened with my most recent novel, Mandibles. A family, 2029-2047 [available in Italian].
Some critics chided me for not making room for diversity in my novel, but I had no desire to introduce a gay or transgender character into the narrative about a white New York family. Then there were the senseless racist criticisms of my novel by the Washington Post. It was at this point that I realized that, in a world dominated by identity politics, fiction writers have to be very careful. If they decide to represent people belonging to protected groups, they have to apply special rules, they have to do a self-examination, as if they were about to join the European Union.
A loss of creative freedom
I confess that this type of examination has also ended up in my head. When I began my career as a novelist, for example, I didn't hesitate to write about African-American characters or make use of their dialects, for which, growing up in the southern United States, I had quite an ear. Now I'm much more anxious about portraying characters of different races, and the accents make me nervous. It is precisely in order not to lose my creative inspiration that I stay off Facebook and Twitter, which could surely lead me to knee-jerk self-censorship lest I stir up a storm on Twitter. But I think all of that, when it comes down to it, is a loss. I think this is a sign of a contraction of my imagination which is not good for books and is not good for my soul either.
Membership in a larger group is not an identity. Being Asian is not an identity. Being gay is not an identity. Being deaf, blind or confined to a wheelchair is not an identity, nor is being economically disadvantaged. If we tightly embrace a group identity, we place ourselves in the very cages in which others would like to trap us. We pigeonhole ourselves. We limit our essence and, by presenting ourselves as part of a group, as representatives of one type, or ambassadors of that, or an amalgam of these things, we doom ourselves to invisibility.
The reading and writing of the stories are obviously driven by the desire to look inward, to self-examine and self-reflect. But the stories also arise from the desire to free oneself from the claustrophobia of one's own experience and begin a journey into that of others.
In the end, the distinction is not the identity but the quality of the stories
The last thing fiction writers need is restrictions on what belongs to them as writers. In a recent interview, our colleague Chris Cleave admitted: “Do I as a British citizen have the right to write the story of a Nigerian woman? … I completely agree with people who say I have no right to do this. My only explanation is that I know how to do it well."
Which brings me to the crux. Not all of us do it equally well. So it's more than plausible that writing from the point of view of, say, a mutilated lesbian from Afghanistan we fail. We don't find the right dialogue and for Pashto dialogues we depend on Google Translate. Efforts to persuasively enter the lives of people very different from us can fail: it's a fact. But perhaps rather than tearing our clothes apart, we should try to improve ourselves. After all, most fiction sucks. Most writing sucks. Most things people do suck. But that doesn't mean we shouldn't do anything, out of fear of doing something.
The answer lies in a modern cliché: failing to try to improve. Quite frankly: whatever, rather than having to frame my characters from the point of view of a slightly know-it-all North Carolina woman, over the years and six feet tall.
We, novelists, must preserve our right to wear many hats, including the sombrero.
