02.19.2009 | Blog : Anne Stameshkin, Blog, writing and identity
identity and responsibility
By Anne Stameshkin
In a comment to an earlier blog post, Celeste asked the following questions, which deserve a discussion of their own:
I think this is an issue that writers of any minority group–-religious, ethnic, and so on–-face: must we write about our “own” group? Do we have a responsibility to write about our own group? And, on the flip side, if we write only about our own group, do we limit ourselves unnecessarily? Do we risk being dismissed by a larger audience?
Thoughts?
Does anyone really think about those things when they write, or do they just write about what is interesting to them and then worry about responsibility* and audience limitations later? Also, should a writer change his or her interests for the prospect of a larger audience?
*A writer can be held to no other responsibility other than to entertain his or her audience.
I feel a little stupid commenting on this discussion, since I’m the one that started it, but I did want to clarify. Speaking only for myself, of course, I *try* not to think about these things while I’m writing–when I get an idea, I go with it, whatever it’s about. But at the same time, it’s pretty damn hard NOT to think about these issues as you write, and certainly afterwards.
Okay, yes, if you’re good enough, you’ll be able to convince readers of your characters and their world–they’ll buy it. The fiction will work. But if you’re part of a specific group–Chinese, Jewish, female, gay, what have you–people will have assumptions about you and your subject matter, whether that’s fair or not. I’m of Chinese descent, so if I write about white suburban Americans, people may question whether I know what I’m talking about. They’ll have a harder time buying into the fiction just because of my name. Here’s a more obvious example: what if I write about the Rwandan genocide, or street children in Nairobi, or a poor black family living on the Gulf Coast? Of course I’m allowed to write those stories. But I’m going to have to work harder to be convincing, right off the bat, because like it or not, readers make assumptions about what they think you know, and what you “ought” to be writing about.
Should that change what we write about? No. Write what moves you, the stories that stick in your brain. I don’t think I ever advocated changing your interests to gain a larger audience, and I certainly didn’t intend to. But here’s the other side. Let’s say I write a book about a Chinese-American character, not because I feel I should, but because that’s a story that interested me. Because I happen to be Chinese, I’m going to be seen as Speaking For My Group. I’m going to be pegged as a Minority Writer, like Amy Tan or Maxine Hong Kingston, A Writer Writing To Provide A Minority Voice. Even if that’s not at all my intention, it’s a label that will get applied. Ask any minority writer out there. If people are going to see you as Representative Of Your Culture, you’re getting responsibility whether you like it or not. It’s hard *not* to be aware of that as a working writer.
As I said before, I don’t have any answers, and I certainly don’t have any policy recommendations for other writers out there. But that doesn’t mean these questions aren’t worth raising and discussing. To dismiss them is to dismiss some of the realities–practical, intellectual, and aesthetic–that many writers face.
(As for the responsibility of the writer–I can’t quite agree that a writer’s only responsibility is to entertain his or her audience. Yes, entertainment is one of the most important things we do (tips hat to Michael Chabon). But if entertainment is IT, writing is a pretty small field. We’re not trying to say anything? To get at any larger truths? To portray a reality, a feeling, an experience, with emotional accuracy? To make the reader feel or think anything new, different, unsettling?)
Thank you for elaborating your point!
I hesitated addressing your question with more questions, but those questions were my initial reaction. I asked the first one because, as a person of mixed ethnicity with no strong religious beliefs, I have never felt beholden to any specific group when I write. Perhaps that’s because I don’t solidly identify with any particular group. Also, my name would never peg me to any one group: in an Irish/Puerto Rican/Roman Catholic family, I somehow landed very Jewish-sounding first and middle names (Joel Benjamin) that lose their associative power when attached to my blandly English surname.
Where you state, “They’ll have a harder time buying into the fiction just because of my name,” Celeste Ng, I clearly see your point. I am reminded of George Eliot, the masculine pen name Mary Anne Evans employed partly to ensure her work would be taken seriously. Of course, these days, a pen name would do little to mask the identity of a writer.
On the bright side, working harder to be more convincing would likely make you a better writer than someone who felt they didn’t have to rely too heavily on imagination (and perhaps research) because they have been identified by readers as being part of the group the writer chose as his or her subject and therefore an expert. And if your efforts did place you outside they realm of readers’ expectations, they could hardly keep you pegged as a minority writer.
But wouldn’t the same hold true for writers in the majority? Wouldn’t a white suburban man or woman writing a novel about a rural Chinese family face the same scrutiny?
Concerning responsibility:
1) Entertainment is really anything that pleases, and I would include getting at larger truths, et al under the banner “things from which readers get pleasure.” I should have been more specific, though. I should have explained.
2) “If people are going to see you as Representative Of Your Culture, you’re getting responsibility whether you like it or not.” –I do agree with this. You will be held responsible if you are seen as a representative of your culture, trusted with defining your culture for the larger world. It would be an enviable problem to have.
PS: I hope you don’t think I was dismissing your questions. They are truly thought-provoking. I would not have given my two cents if I thought otherwise.
What an interesting discussion! I have a lot to say and it’s all rather jumbled, but I’ll try to marshall my thoughts into some coherent pattern.
I do definitely think about responsibility when I’m writing, and I don’t even try not to. So there you go, now we have a fuller spectrum here: someone who doesn’t think about it until after the work is done, someone who tries not to but does think about it, and someone who encourages herself to think about it. I don’t think any one of these positions is inherently superior to the others; they’re different ways of approaching art, all equally valid. I should say that I agree with you, Joel, that a writer’s primary responsibility is to tell a good story, and that anytime you feel yourself sacrificing the story to a supposedly higher purpose, that’s probably a bad sign. I do think writing to send a specific Message almost always results in awful work. But having said that, I also think the way one approaches this question has a lot to do with why one writes in the first place, and how much that has to do with one’s “identity,” and what that “identity” constitutes in one’s mind. I definitely don’t change my interests/subject for the prospect of a larger audience; if anything, I’ve deliberately done the opposite. But I’m largely driven by my identity when I write, and I don’t think I would’ve become a writer if I hadn’t grown up ethnic Indian in a country that marginalises ethnic Indians. It’s very much a part of my “identity” to think about race all the time — at least as frequently as a teenage boy thinks about sex, I honestly believe — and so if I tried to write without thinking about “responsibility,” I’d have to actively repress my natural thoughts. This is going to sound silly and melodramatic, but in fact when I write, I *am* always thinking of My People, always thinking about how they would tell the story if they told it themselves, what they will think of *my* telling, why it matters at all that I’m telling it.
In the last year I’ve also had much occasion to think about Representing My Culture, because Celeste is right — people assign you that responsibility automatically if you’re a Minority Writer (all these labels!). The more I think about it, the more it occurs to me that my main problem with this expectation is that the people who harbour it have a very different definition of Representing than I do — actually, I *do* think I represent my culture, in the same way that EVERY SINGLE WRITER represents theirs. You can’t really write WITHOUT representing your culture (whatever that is — your culture isn’t necessarily apparent from what you look like, and it isn’t necessarily monolithic either), can you? Doesn’t Julian Barnes represent his culture? Didn’t Thomas Hardy represent his? I think the problem arises when people expect Minority Writers to give them an encyclopaedic overview of their Culture, and when only this kind of overview counts as representation to them. If you write about a working-class family, they’ll say, Wait, aren’t there middle-class people in your Culture too? If you write about a single mother, they’ll say, Wait, but isn’t divorce fairly rare in your Culture? This doesn’t seem to happen to writers in the majority, at least not in the same way: maybe you’re right, Joel, that a sixty-year-old white man in Ohio writing about a Korean family might be seen to lack some crucial credibility, but certainly, if a sixty-year-old white man in Ohio chooses to write about a small farming community in Ohio, people in, say, New Delhi or Singapore don’t denounce him with cries of “But what about the spoiled rich kids in California? You didn’t write about those, and I’ve SEEN them on TV! And you’ve also left out New York Jews!”
I haven’t got to the question of whether writing about our own group limits us unnecessarily — even if we don’t care about limiting our audience, can it limit is artistically? But my wrists are tired. I’ll be back later, if people are still reading
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I have two thing to say about this. First, I totally agree with almost all the points that have been made, even the ones that slightly contradict each other. I especially agree with Preeta’s point that “the problem arises when people expect Minority Writers to give them an encyclopaedic overview of their Culture, and when only this kind of overview counts as representation to them.” I am guilty of this all the time as a reader, but I think it’s very hard not be. I want to engage with literature from all over the world/from tons of different persepctives, but I only have a limited amount of time. So it’s very tempting to read Orhan Pamuk’s novel Snow and think, okay Turkey, I gotcha! and think afterwards that I have some better understanding of that culture. (Thanks for the education on Mayalsia, P! All set on that!) And I DO, but it’s imperfect, of course, but I don’t always (or ever) have time to read a whole spectrum of viewpoints, so things end up becoming more or less representational; perhaps not an overview, but enough so that I feel I can mouth off at dinner parties. And so this is indubitably a real part of the anxiety writers of any group experience, that people like me will use them for more than they intended.
Second, the act of literary ventriloquism is one of my favorite parts of reading fiction. Sometimes I think about it more than others, though, and when it’s done really really well, I stop thinking about it entirely. This idea that writing what you don’t know can be as powerful as writing what you do, because your imagination is that powerful, and whether that perspective is “authentic” ceases to matter quite so much, as long as the goal is not for it to be authentic, but to tell a good story. But sometimes I flip back and forth on this. One example is Alexander McCall Smith (it’s been a season of lighter reading for me…) Like or loath him, the man can tell a story, and his two most popular series he speaks as 1) a female detective in Botswana and 2) a female philosopher in Scotland. There are times reading both these series when I think, as a woman, it is crazy how right on this guy is, and there are other times when I think, how does he have the balls? He’s STILL pretty right on, yes I think so, no do I?
Arguably if I read less A. McCall S. I could spend more time widening my knowledge of Turkey. Maybe this post is just trying to excuse my unfocused bookshelf. But how boring would it be to just read American Women’s Literature because it Speaks To Me? So if the consequence of widening my reading some but never never enough is that writers are anxious I will will over-rely on their work to represent their culture, that anxiety is valid, and yet, Joel is right: this is an enviable position to be in, as long as writers don’t take themselves too seriously. But that’s hardly ever a problem anyway, right?
Joel, thanks so much for writing again–now I can see that I very much agree with what you have to say. Especially this: “On the bright side, working harder to be more convincing would likely make you a better writer than someone who felt they didn’t have to rely too heavily on imagination (and perhaps research) because they have been identified by readers as being part of the group the writer chose as his or her subject and therefore an expert.” I could give examples here, but won’t, of writers who I think coast along based on who they are, and not on the quality of their writing.
I do think you’re right, too, that the problem exists for writers in the majority, but it’s quite different, and Preeta hit the nail on the head in her comment. For some reason, minority writers are seen as speaking for ALL of their people, and if they don’t give an encyclopedic overview of their country, they’re doing something wrong.* And yet usually, a writer in the majority isn’t expected to speak for ALL of anybody. A white suburban man or woman writing a novel about a rural Chinese family would certainly face the same scrutiny–is this fiction believable? Does it feel real? Does it work?–but won’t be expected to speak about all of China the way a Chinese writer might. They aren’t saddled with the responsibility of representing a whole culture, perhaps because it’s not their own. And as Preeta says, a writer from the majority, writing about the majority, is almost never subjected to these kinds of questions of representation. I don’t know why this is, but it seems to be the case.
And thanks too for clarifying what you meant about entertainment. (I admit I thought for a moment you might have been dismissive, but see now that’s not the case–and I should have known better, anyway!) Your new definition makes much more sense to me, and I think I agree with your underlying point, which is that fiction should primarily tell a good story, and be concerned with a supposedly higher purpose only incidentally (if at all). I guess whether the questions of responsibility come in during the writing process, after, or not at all, that’s the most important thing to keep in mind.
And there’s still that question Preeta posed: whether writing about our own group limits us unnecessarily, or artistically. I’m curious to know what others think about this.
* I thought about this this morning, as I heard that Daniyal Mueenuddin would be on On Point. Here’s the tagline they used as a lead-in: “We’ll see Pakistan through the eyes of acclaimed debut author Daniyal Mueenuddin, whose stories of family and class go far beyond the headlines – from bustling city to village life.” I only got to hear the first 5 minutes, so I didn’t get to hear whether we indeed got this sweeping view of All Aspects Of Pakistan, but it seems to me this is a fairly typical way of introducing minority writers.
Oh, what a topic. I usually stay away from these conversations, especially online, because they often degenerate, but this one is so intelligent and respectful that I’m going to take a chance and jump in (side note: if any site could handle this topic thoughtfully, I’m not surprised it’s this one: I am a big fan of FWR).
Since there really are no easy answers to any of this, and we often do find ourselves caught up in more questions and contradictions than we resolve, let me add to the confusion. What does all of this mean for stories that attempt to depict what, for lack of a better phrase, I’ll call “inter-group” relationships, dynamics, interactions, etc.? And what if one “belongs,” biologically, culturally, etc. to only one of the groups one is trying to depict?
I think about this a lot, in part because the title story of my yet-unpublished collection attempts to get at some issues in black-Jewish relations. (I am a proud self-identified Jewish-American writer, and count among one of my greatest literary accomplishments to date winning a contest for fiction on Jewish themes. The diversity of “Jewish themes,” as well as themes of other “groups,” is another topic we could and probably should talk about more, in connection with the wariness with which we seem to be approaching the idea of an author’s work “representing” an entire culture. Every time I hear people refer to “New York Jews,” for instance, I am reminded of the diversity of experiences within that seemingly monolithic term. Even simply among my own Jewish extended family in the New York area.)
Let’s continue this discussion, please!
Welcome to the discussion, Erika! The reason conversations here don’t degenerate is that our august editors moderate comments (I think?), a decision I heartily endorse. I know exactly what you mean about online conversations and the levels to which they quickly sink.
Did anyone else read the recent NYT review of _The Help_? It dealt with the issue you’re talking about, Erika — “inter-group” dynamics — and though it didn’t try to name the issue or face it head-on, it’s clear that that was what the reviewer was struggling with, obliquely. I’ve thought about it as well; again, even if you don’t see yourself as primarily Representing Culture, as long as your writing is grounded in a multicultural society, the issue of inter-cultural relations is always *at least* in the background of your narrative. I can’t write about marginalised Indians without evoking the marginalisers, and I am not an “insider” when in comes to those groups. You’ll always get at least a few people from the “other” group who will say, But that isn’t how it happened. To me, that perception is valid but irrelevant: sure, that’s how you feel, but it isn’t how my characters feel, and I know there is truth in what my characters feel. Fiction is always subjective and non-exhaustive; therein lies its power, in fact.
As for the question of whether a sense of “responsibility” limits us: I know that I don’t feel limited by it; I simply don’t have any desire to write about anything else. When Updike was asked why his subject matter remained so constant throughout his career, he said:
“I really don’t think I’m alone among writers in caring about what they experienced in the first 18 years of their life. Nothing that happens to us after 20 is as free from self-consciousness, because by then we have the vocation to write. At the point where you get your writerly vocation, you diminish your receptivity to experience.”
I wouldn’t say that that’s true of all writers, but it’s definitely true for me. I guess this is all a very long-winded way of saying that you’re not limited unless you *want* to write about something else but are not allowing yourself to do so, because you feel you don’t have the authority/right. Ultimately, authority doesn’t come from your choice of subject matter. As Celeste has pointed out, lots of people write about their own group and completely lack authority. The superficial reader might not recognise that; certain types of audiences might indeed take you more seriously if you’re Thai and writing about Thailand than if you’re Thai and writing about Romania. That’s not the sort of audience we should be thinking of when we write (if we think about an audience at all). But now we’re getting into questions of how to ignore the exigencies of The Market, and that might be a whole new kettle of fish.
Thanks so much for your response, Preeta. Yes, I do think my interest in this discussion thread may have been heightened by the NYT review you’ve mentioned.
And I really hear what you’re saying here, too: “I simply don’t have any desire to write about anything else.”
Erika, this is such an interesting question you pose: “What does all of this mean for stories that attempt to depict what, for lack of a better phrase, I’ll call “inter-group” relationships, dynamics, interactions, etc.? And what if one “belongs,” biologically, culturally, etc. to only one of the groups one is trying to depict?”
To add on to Preeta’s excellent comments, I think we have to fight the feeling that we have to be “fair” in covering these relationships, that we need to give both sides equal voice or we’re doing someone a disservice. This is kind of an extension of the expectation of the encyclopedic overview–a story probably can’t show every side of the relationship, and it shouldn’t have to. It can still be important and valuable to write about how just one group perceives the other: think about books like Invisible Man, or any number of other works that show how one group is exploited by or hates or is misunderstood by another. Of course there is another side to the story; the exploiting/hated/misunderstanding group has its own story to tell–and that might have to be another story, perhaps by another person. I think that the most any writer can be asked to do is portray “truth” on one side–the truth of your characters’ experience and/or your own experience within the group you understand best.
This is something I struggle with a lot in my own work. Though I’m ethnically Chinese, I feel much more at home in white American suburbia because of where and how I was raised, and I know a lot more about that culture. So in many ways I’m “inside” the group that I don’t seem to “belong” to, and I feel like a stranger in the group I’m supposed to “belong” to. That was a lot of scare quotes, but I say this as an example of how these concepts of groups and belonging and who you’re “supposed” to write about get blurry.
And to join in the conversation about being limited by our writing choices: I’ve been thinking about why I posed that question, and I realized that the only times I’ve ever felt limited by writing about “my” group was when I felt that choice had been imposed upon me from without. For example, I was once told in complete seriousness that I should change all the characters in a particular story to be Chinese, because (that reader felt) it would add more depth… since I was Chinese. There was a feeling of expectation, of supposed to, that made me feel the scope of what I could explore in my stories was very very small. And yet, when I decide on my own to write about aspects of being Chinese, I feel like there’s infinite subject matter and tons of room to stretch. So I think Preeta’s right (as usual)–writing about your own group needn’t be limiting if it’s the subject that grabs you. I’d add only that it’s a question still worth thinking about, because it’s sometimes hard to disentangle what we really want to write about from what we feel that we can/should write about.
Celeste, thanks so much for your thoughtful post. I’m multi-tasking (listening to the President speak right now), so let me begin by just responding to one part of your message that really jumped out as I read it: “For example, I was once told in complete seriousness that I should change all the characters in a particular story to be Chinese, because (that reader felt) it would add more depth…since *I* was Chinese.”
Where to start? I am assuming this comment came to you through a face-to-face workshop or some other setting in which the reader believed s/he knew you well enough (even beyond your name) to know that you are of Chinese descent. I say that because I find it extremely difficult to imagine someone (say, someone “blindly” judging a manuscript for a competition) even thinking of such an idea, let alone suggesting it.
Your anecdote reminds me of responses some of my writing about parent-child (especially mother-child) relationships has evoked–but only in workshops where people knew that I do not have children of my own. This kind of attitude is one of my biggest “pet peeves,” as I’ve described elsewhere (http://practicing-writing.blogspot.com/2008/06/writing-about-motherhood-childless_12.html ).
Funny thing–I’m pretty sure the TriQuarterly editor who accepted and published a story of mine (written outside any workshop) titled “Matrilineal Descent” didn’t know (and, I’d bet, probably didn’t care) if I happened to be a mother or not. For her, just reading what I’d written and knowing very little, if anything, about me, I guess the story “worked.”
On the other hand, Preeta’s comments also resonate because, as I’ve said, I do so often write about a group I do “belong” to, and I’m very happy doing so.
So I guess we return, once again, to some blurriness. And in the end, your concluding point bears repeating, because indeed “it’s sometimes hard to disentangle what we really want to write about from what we feel that we can/should write about.” (And because, it seems, there are some remarkably close-minded readers out there.)