In one of his lighter moments, T S Eliot – who made his living as an editor – once conceded that ”some editors are failed writers.” He then added, mischievously, “but so are most writers.” Eliot’s quip is worth remembering when trying to make sense of a controversy sparked by the novelist Lionel Shriver at the recent Brisbane Writers Festival. Shriver, a white American woman, set out a rousing defence of “cultural appropriation” – which takes place when authors use characters, voices and stories from traditions that don’t belong to them. (The West Indian novelist Caryl Phillips, for example, once wrote a short novel called The Nature of Blood in which he imagined the Holocaust through the eyes of a young Jewish girl.) Shriver’s keynote address on ‘Fiction and Identity Politics’ belittled the culture police’s obsession with “authenticity” and countered that fiction writing is a “disrespectful vocation by its nature – prying, voyeuristic, kleptomaniacal, and presumptuous.”
In recent years, particularly within universities, cultural appropriation has become a lightning rod for much larger debates about the kind of institutional racism that groups like Black Lives Matter are trying to confront, and reform. Within this context the careless adoption or manipulation of cultural symbols has, understandably, become a sensitive issue. Casual attempts to co-opt other cultures often elicit accusations of racism and stereotyping. On the other hand, there are undeniably occasions in which well-intentioned political correctness seems to overtake common sense. Shriver cites the case of students at Bowdoin College, Maine, who were forced to apologise for hosting a tequila-themed party at which guests donned miniature sombreros. She notes that university administrators threatened the organizers with an investigation for their “act of ethnic stereotyping”, and that they were “ejected from their dorm and later impeached” and that the student newspaper denounced the revellers’ “lack of ‘basic empathy.”’
As Shriver spoke, Yassmin Abdel-Magied, an Australian author of Sudanese and Egyptian parentage made a public exit from the room. Afterwards she chided Shriver for celebrating the “unfettered exploitation of the experiences of others, under the guise of fiction.” “Rather than focus on the ultimate question around how we can know an experience we have not had, the argument became a tirade,” lamented Abdel-Magied, pointing out that “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.”
Abdel-Magied correctly touches on the vexed question of whether it is fair for a “straight white woman” to pen the story of “a queer Indigenous man”, and profit from it, when “those with the actual experience [would] never be provided the opportunity [to tell their own story].” Separately, Yen-Rong, another young Australian writer, notes that “The publishing industry is chock full of white men, and advocating for their ‘right’ to write from the perspective of someone in a marginalised position takes opportunities away from those with authentic experiences to share. In other words, the subaltern continues to be silenced, and still cannot speak.”
However irreconcilable these views seem at first blush, there is a sense in which they approach a similar problem from different angles. Shriver joked that if, as an author, she couldn’t trespass into the lives of others “all I could write about would be smart-alecky 59-year-old 5-foot-2-inch white women from North Carolina.” In a more serious vein she argued that what really matters is not whether material has borrowed but serves the fiction in which it appears. If it does, then the theft can be justified, at least aesthetically. As she puts it: “The name of the game is not whether your novel honours reality; it’s all about what you can get away with.” This, surely, was the point of Eliot’s witticism: fiction is hard work, much harder than most people realise, and few writers succeed at it, no matter how earnestly they try.
Decades earlier, in a critical essay, Eliot wrote that “Immature poets imitate; mature poets steal; bad poets deface what they take, and good poets make it into something better, or at least something different.” This offers a middle ground between Shriver and Abdel-Magied, especially when the appropriated property involves experiences that are unfamiliar to a mainstream audience. On the rare occasions when authors thread their way through the labyrinthine consciousness of someone completely different to them – whether in a book like What is the What, Dave Eggers’ “autobiography” of a Sudanese refugee, or Shriver’s unsettling novel We Have To Talk About Kevin – remarkable fictions can emerge. More commonly, we get lesser writers who may know their subjects intimately, and address themselves to similar material, but lack the imaginative force and literary skill to create compelling fictions.
The first wave of serious writers to emerge from the independent Caribbean (among them Edward Kamau Brathwaite, Wilson Harris, George Lamming, Roger Mais, Una Marson, Edgar Mittelholzer, V S Naipaul, Jean Rhys, Sam Selvon and Derek Walcott) faced exactly the same kind of patronising neglect that Abdel-Magied and Yen-Rong complain of, but they outlasted the condescension of their British peers and eventually won the respect of a literary establishment which, ironically, preferred their cultural sophistication to the lowbrow philistinism of many British novelists of the day. Today, most of these writers enjoy a canonical status that would have been barely imaginable in their youth. In the republic of letters, as elsewhere, truth is the daughter of time.
The Brisbane Writers Festival granted a “right of reply” for authors offended by Shriver’s speech by arranging a rebuttal that coincided with the session to promote her new novel, The Mandibles. Sadly this event missed the chance for dialogue that could have illustrated the truth in both positions, and our responsibility not only to let writers wander freely through our increasingly multicultural world, but also to ensure that we don’t allow a customary neglect of emerging artists to obscure or diminish the potential of their work.
