via Washington Post: Opinion | Limiting what novelists can write about won’t help readers
“Fiction is where I go to tell the truth,” the late, great Pat Conroy once said. In his acclaimed novels, Conroy cut close to the bone, exposing human truths that left readers breathless with painful recognition.
Lucky for him and his readers, Conroy’s death in 2016 meant he was spared the pre-publication censorship that fiction writers face today. He escaped the full force of the steamrolling appropriation-and-sensitivity movement currently in vogue.
“Publish or perish” in this new age of you-can’t-say-that has been retooled as publish and perish. Certain words are essentially verboten — “plantation,” for one. But at the heart of the new restrictions is the notion that novelists can’t (or shouldn’t) write in the voice of someone whose experience and heart they cannot know. This means that Whites should write only about White characters, Latinos about Latinos, Asians about Asians and so on.
The hashtag #OwnVoices helps young adult readers find books in which the characters and the author share the same identity. Publishing houses now employ “sensitivity readers.” Google Docs offers a featurethat assists users in making their work more “inclusive.”
Most writers and agents agree that America’s new literary Dark Age began with Jeanine Cummins’s “American Dirt.” This 2020 novel, about an undocumented immigrant to the United States who was forced to flee Mexico with her son after her journalist husband exposed a local drug kingpin, was an Oprah’s Book Club selection and a New York Times bestseller that sold 3 million copies worldwide in 37 languages. What could go wrong?
Everything. Some Mexican Americans panned the book for containing stereotypes. The heroine, critics said, seemed like a “pearl-clutching American tourist,” and the Spanish seemed generated by Google Translate. Perhaps most egregious, Cummins wasn’t Latina enough. She’s from New Jersey, and her only connection to her protagonist is a Puerto Rican grandmother. Her book tour was canceled.
Such developments might be well-intentioned, but you know what they say about the road to hell. When Alberto Gullaba Jr. turned in his first novel, “University Thugs,” about a young Black man with a criminal record trying to navigate an elite university struggling with race issues, his agent was excited. That is, until Gullaba told him, “Hey, no, man, I’m not Black, I’m Filipino.”
“Oh.”
A British sensitivity reader with the correct pigmentation was brought in to read Gullaba’s manuscript, whereupon his agency asked, “By the way, can you make the main character Filipino?” Gullaba elected to adopt the pen name Free Chef and self-published on Amazon.
Yes, of course, I considered not writing this column. Why invite the wrath of the overly sensitive? Because truth demands it. Civilization requires a forceful response to the growing imperative to mitigate negative feelings by shielding people from unpleasant truths with wiggle words that cloud rather than reveal. The books I’ve read (and reread) that hold a place in my heart hurt me, made me cry, made me laugh and kept me awake long past the last page. “Sophie’s Choice” and “The Confessions of Nat Turner” clobbered me. Could William Styron be published today? He wrote in the voices of women, Jews, African Americans and plantation owners. How could he know their hearts and minds? The way writers always have: by employing their fertile imaginations, mining their own experiences and applying their craft to find a deeper way of seeing things so that readers might also see them (and ourselves) better.