Writing Across Divisions - Writing for Dignity

 Recently, I read a piece about criticism heaped on Richard North Patterson writing Black characters:

But, as he describes in an email to the Bulwark, that novel “was repeatedly rejected by major publishers because as a white author I chose to write about some of our most vexing racial problems –voter suppression, unequal law-enforcement – through the prism of three major characters, two of them Black.”

We’ve heard similar stories before. There is a vocal segment of the left that insists that this kind of fiction is a form of “cultural appropriation.” (For some reason, the fight is especially vicious in the world of Young Adult fiction.)

I have not thought of writing from the viewpoint of an African-American - certainly not from a first-person perspective. I may be emphatic, I may know facts about African-Americans, but I have not lived their lives, do to have the background. I would also not think of writing a Norwegian character, or an Indian. When I did write a Black character, I asked Black friends to read the story, to vet whether I was misrepresenting the character. This I think is cultural appropriation - disregarding cultural influences in a way that imposes my reactions as the reactions of everyone. I suspect a Buddhist will react differently than I would when confronted with the same stimuli.

I think I would be an even angrier person if I were an African-American. 

 What I do not like about this kind of thinking is it will mean Buddhists can write only about and for Buddhists; Blacks can write only for and about Blacks; whites can only write for Blacks; Russians can only write for Russians; and so on and so forth. It means Toni Morrison should never have written A Mercy. The ban should not be on crossing lines, but of crossing lines that dehumanizes, cheapens, render stereotypical a character.

The Guardian's review, The Lost Wife by Susanna Moore review – frontier journeys, points out my problem and points to a solution:

It is a complex business, as a non-Indigenous writer, to write of Indigenous lives. Moore keeps her focus sharply on Sarah’s experience: Sarah Brinton is not – as happens too often in historical fiction – a modern woman in 19th-century dress; she is firmly located in place and time, and her personality is shaped by her trials. Her relationship with Chaska – We-Chank-Wash-ta-don-pee – the Dakota man who protects her and her children, resists definition. As far as possible, Moore allows Sarah to speak for herself, while Moore understands the limitations of that perspective. But her protagonist knows what lies in store for the people of the plains: “For the Sioux, victory was never the point. It was their burning, unquenchable rage and the honour that revenge would bring them, their wrathful understanding that they would soon be driven from the prairie, that compelled them to kill,” Sarah says.

Writing a female character bothered me for the same reason: whether I could render their lives honestly. Being in a men's prison, that was troublesome - no one to challenge me on my representations. I still wonder if they do not sound like me in drag.

Which brings me to Haruki Murakami spends a year at Wellesley College. A headline that may sound out of place here. But give me a moment.

Consider what I wrote above about cultural misconceptions - I see one below:

This past semester, Murakami has been leading a faculty seminar on what his fiction says about gender. The faculty have been reading his short stories written in a woman’s voice and having free form discussion with the writer, receiving a window into Murakami’s creative process. Also present at some of the faculty seminars is Murakami’s wife, Yoko Murakami, who brings an interesting perspective to the conversation as both a woman and Murakami’s first reader. Newhouse Center Director and Professor of Japanese Eve Zimmerman, recalls in a discussion on the short story “Sleep,” “[The faculty was] basing an argument about gender on the fact that the story moves in present tense.” In the midst of this conversation, Yoko stood up and voiced a clarification. She explained that the grammar the faculty’s interpretation hinged on was not an issue in the original Japanese version. To Zimmerman, “the fact that she just stood up and said, look, let me give you another perspective, was just fantastic.”

Wellesley's faculty cannot be dummies, but they were ignorant of Japanese tenses. A cautionary note about presumptions of interpretation.

Then this paragraph about gender:

Eva McNally ’25, a student in this class, recalls when Murakami was asked about how he enters the mindset to write a female character, “he said something along the lines of ‘every man has a female factor, and every woman has a male factor.’ For him to write a female character, he has to find the female factor within himself … and the other versions [of himself] that exist within the subconsciousness.” Unlike attending a book signing or watching an interview, students were given the opportunity to engage critically with Murakami in an academic setting.

In the end, is any writer worth reading who does not give dignity to all of his characters?

Hath not a Jew eyes? Hath not a Jew hands, organs, dimensions, senses, affections, passions; fed with the same food, hurt with the same weapons, subject to the same diseases, healed by the same means, warmed and cooled by the same winter and summer as a Christian is? If you prick us do we not bleed? If you tickle us do we not laugh? If you poison us do we not die? And if you wrong us shall we not revenge? If we are like you in the rest, we will resemble you in that. If a Jew wrong a Christian, what is his humility? Revenge. If a Christian wrong a Jew, what should his sufferance be by Christian example? Why, revenge. The villainy you teach me I will execute, and it shall go hard but I will better the instruction.

— The Merchant of Venice, Act III scene 1.

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