I’ve recently had a friend say something to me that I found so galling, so preposterous, so ignorant, frankly, that I just had to write about it. Granted, this isn’t the first time I’m speaking about this, I’ve been mentioning this in my reviews over time. Trying to do my share in raging against this inane notion of appropriation in literature.
This is a recent PC police invention that gets bandied around a lot and usually has the word cultural preceding it. Cultural appropriation is a huge no no nowadays. Because everyone has apparently forgot the definition of fiction which is based in invention. So, the idea is that no one can speak for another person until they have (literally) walked in their shoes, meaning in a PC ideal men would only be able to write male characters, white people only white characters, etc. This can be expended, exponentially, and that’s why it’s so dangerous. Because we’re talking about a form of censorship, however well meaning, which isn’t ok. Like so many things these days, this all goes back to race. The loudest voices in the cultural appropriation camp were heard recently when American Dirt came out and the white author has dared (dared, they tell you) to write from a Mexican perspective. Mind you, Oprah LOVED this book, but that’s the wrong race. Mind you, the author has since reveled that she had a Latin American abuela (that’s grandmother to those who rage before they learn), but it wasn’t enough. She simply wasn’t brown enough or the right kind of brown to tell the tale. The tale she imagined…because she’s a fictional writer and that is literally her job. They had to cancel her book tour for safety concerns. There should not be safety concerns when it comes to books. Maybe some incendiary sort of books, but not books like this. And at any rate, what's all this huffing and puffing really about? The author, whatever color her skin is, with this book is raising awareness of the immigration crisis. Should that be the bottom line? Or is it somehow invalidated because she makes a profit from selling her book? Well, by that logic you can also discount most public speakers of any media format. If this is about the plight of Latin American immigrants...than the protesting crybabies should be pleased the message is getting out there. If this is about appeasing one's preciously heightened and finely tuned to present day social media preset sensibilities...that's another matter. So anyway, what I’m trying to say is this…in this day and age of rampant political correctness and the now two generations of the increasingly snowflakey namby pamby thin skinned adultbabies everyone and it seems everyone has their own precious trauma and for some reason everyone assumes some sort of weird monopoly on it. Which means that only fellow members of their trauma club can write about what they’ve gone through. The rest are apparently lying liars and, worse yet, cultural appropriators. In fact, the reason my friend was so upset is that she found out that the book she was reading about a girl whose father dies at an early age, like hers did, was in fact written by a man with two living parents. She liked the book until she found that out, but once she did, she felt backstabbed or something and went into a how dare you mode. Write what you know, she says. My friend is an intelligent person, mind you, just a stereotypical product of her generation, a proper millennial in all respects, whose innate faith in her personal specialness has somehow led her to misinterpret what fiction is or how it works. I reminded her that fiction is FICTION, it is quite literally an imaginative narrative. If the author does their job well and the reader finds their inventions relatable, that's just a testament to the author's power of talent, empathy, imagination, etc. To think that only people who have had certain experiences have the right to write about them seems extremely limiting and, franky, kind of morally wrong. And the thing is, there's already a genre out there where you don't have to deal with any of it, one that will not let you down or cheat you or trick you into false relatability. Nonfiction. Where all experiences are true, real and authentic...or so they claim. There are literally about a gazillion memoirs out there where you can read about a death of a parent and know for a fact those people are speaking from experience. They may be neither more emotionally engaging nor more relatable than the fictional accounts, but at least they'll be from the same trauma club, as it were. I dislike memoirs as a genre. I’ve barely found any that were actually good reading and not look at me, look at me whines. But it is a popular genre, so people are obviously getting a lot out of it, relating, emoting, etc. And that’s great. Maybe it’ll engage them enough so that they’ll stay away from proper fiction and not muddy the waters for the rest of us just trying to find a good imaginary story to disappear into.
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