The Right to Write

Last month, American novelist Lionel Shriver delivered a speech at the Brisbane Writers Festival considered so offensive that officials publicly renounced her remarks and delayed putting up a video of her speech on their website. In her speech, which she delivered while wearing a sombrero, she argued that a fear of cultural appropriation shouldn’t prevent authors from writing fiction. Shriver later delivered a bitter retort to her opposition, saying that she was unfairly attacked for trying to keep the art of writing alive.

Yet Shriver’s critics saw her speech as an effort to discredit a righteous movement against cultural appropriation, a term that refers to a situation in which a dominant culture adopts cultural customs from other, often oppressed groups. Yassmin Abdel-Magied, an Australian author, was the loudest of her critics, calling Shriver’s speech “a celebration of the unfettered exploitation of the experiences of others, under the guise of fiction.”

Abdel-Magied raises a valid point. White authors are often guilty of misrepresenting cultures other than their own in their work or perpetuating harmful stereotypes. But often this is extended illogically by condemning any author who writes about a culture other than his or her own.

An example is Justine Larbalestier’s novel, “Liar,” which was published in 2009. It tells the story of a compulsive liar named Micah, whose boyfriend mysteriously dies. Micah is black, but her racial identity is not a major theme in the story. Yet, readers and critics couldn’t get past the fact that the book was produced by a white author and a white publisher.

There was criticism over the tiniest of details, including the way Micah describes her hair as “nappy.” The term “nappy” has long been a derogatory term used to describe black hair, though recently, black people have been embracing it more frequently. But apparently, its usage by a white author is inherently disrespectful, even though Larbalestier and her team (which included black and white editors and publishers) agreed that “nappy” was a word that a character like Micah would use to describe her own hair. Readers accused her of cultural appropriation, as well as perpetuating the stereotype that black girls have inferior moral characters to lighter-skinned girls, because Micah is a compulsive liar.

As a Korean-American, I can neither claim to understand the “correct” usage of words like “nappy,” nor will I. But the bigger issue here is that both readers and writers are so invested in the idea that authors should stay within the boundaries of their own cultures that they are focusing less on the actual content of a book and more on the author’s background. Limiting an author to write only about his or her own culture is detrimental for literature as a whole.

A comment thread on Larbalestier’s blog hosted accusations that Larbalestier was trying to say that all black girls are inferior and immoral, as if Micah represented all black characters in fiction. This is partly because there is such a lack of representation of non-white characters, so the few books that exist about them seem to claim that all people of a certain race are just like the characters in the books. The solution here is to increase representation so that one character from one book doesn’t represent their entire race. However, making non-white characters more prevalent doesn’t necessitate disallowing white authors to write about them.

It’s indisputable that white authors and publishers control their industry. The Cooperative Children’s Book Center reported that 37 percent of the U.S. population was considered to be comprised of people of color in 2014, while 10 percent of children’s books in the past decade have contained “multiracial content.” Allowing white authors to write about cultures that they were not born into, in conjunction with publishing more work by non-white authors, will help diversify the experiences represented in literature, particularly in fiction.

Welcoming white authors to write about experiences that are not their own can seem dangerous because it may result in the white authors’ works dominating those of other authors. For example, Adam Johnson, the white author of a book on North Korea called “The Orphan Master’s Son,” won the Pulitzer Prize for fiction in 2013. Suki Kim, the Korean-American author of the novel “Without You, There Is No Us,” which is based on her experience of working as an English teacher in North Korea, was angered by the award, stating that Johnson “did not speak Korean and had spent only three days in North Korea,” according to The New York Times.

While organizations should be careful to represent a diverse group of authors when granting awards, claiming that novels written by someone outside of a certain culture aren’t deserving of recognition is just as wrong. A person’s ability to conduct research and write effectively should be more important than the color of their skin.

Those who strongly oppose cultural appropriation claim that when it comes to history, and especially fiction, authors “steal” another culture as their own. But writing shouldn’t be considered thievery; it should be a medium through which the experiences of underrepresented cultures can be carefully explored. While in the short run, preventing authors from writing about things that they have not experienced may seem like just a fight against cultural appropriation, in the long run, it will only further perpetuate divides between people.

The job of an author, especially one that writes fiction, is ultimately to tell a story. When an author does that, he or she doesn’t have the right to twist history or unfairly represent an entire culture, but should be allowed to write a story to which they feel emotionally connected. That’s where the battle should lie—not over whether or not people can write about experiences that they have not had, but in how they should go about doing it.