- Share This Post
- 1
- submit
- 11
-
Sparkle (0)
I wrote a post on my blog last month about a disturbing book review I read a few months ago. The reviewer dismissed Heidi W. Durrow's novel, The Girl Who Fell From the Sky because he couldn't relate to the biracial protagonist:
Durrow herself is biracial, and she writes capably on this subject. Still, she doesn’t always succeed in making you feel for her characters or believe her plot. Or perhaps I failed to more completely identify because I’m a white man. Other readers may be more powerfully moved, feeling to the bone the slights, grievances and complications that escape me.
I wrote that perhaps the reviewer shouldn't have reviewed the book -- or the magazine in which it was published shouldn't have published the review. Or perhaps the reviewer should have passed it on to someone who had a bit more objectivity. The reviewer gave the book 63 out of 100, and I wondered if the mark reflected the reviewer's inability to look outside his own navel. Just sayin.'
The review really bothered me, in part because I have lived in a world where the majority of books I was required to read in public school, high school, and university were written by white people. I have also reviewed books and music composed by white and non-black folks, and it never occurred to me to turn down a gig because I did not "comprehend" their life experiences. I can't afford to do that. If I did, I wouldn't have anything to write.
As a writer who just completed a non-fiction book, it worries me that, while I am confident in my subject matter, my book could be immediately dismissed because the reviewer does not know or care about the experiences of black women in the metal and hardcore music scene. It's a possibility, and one that I will eventually have to face.
Thea Lim, the deputy editor at Racialicious, recently responded to a writer who wondered if writers automatically write for "their own" -- that is to say, whether Black, Latino, White and Asian writers write for their ethno-cultural communities, assuming that the readers will look like they do. Do the characters in the book automatically come from the same ethno-cultural background as the writer? Says the questioner:
.... when I write fiction, I write white characters. When I read fiction I read them as white characters unless/until I am expressly told otherwise. This feels like an ignorant move on my part but at the same time, I feel that that’s what I do because I am white, and that people of other ethnicities read fiction as their ethnicity (or perhaps not, since the field is dominated a lot by dead white guys, but that’s another issue), and they write characters as their ethnicity.
Lim responds that she doesn't believe that white writers are consciously writing for "their own;" but that white writers' idea of what constitutes the "general public" means that essentially, they are writing for people they feel share their background and experiences. The thought that they have to write to an audience who does not share their cultural background is not even a consideration. Those who, because of economical, ethno-cultural or socio-economical differences, have lived lives completely opposite to the writer's (lives often not positively acknowledged in the public sphere) are invisible. These white writers assume that their "general public" MUST have these commonalities. These writers do not have to alter their narrative ... but POC writers do. From Lim's response:
Sidebar: I tend to have very little patience with white readers who tell me they didn’t like a piece of lit of color because they felt it “didn’t speak to them” or “it made them feel bad.” Readers of color learn the contortions necessary to be able to take part in Great Literature which may, in its whiteness, act as if we do not exist. Considering the amount of daily work this requires, I don’t think it is too much to ask of white readers that they twist their heads around every now and then to try and meet literature of color where it is.
I believe it is possible that people -- who want to -- can read, understand and learn about other cultures through books. In school, it seems to me, that is why we read the books we did. I certainly could not relate to Huckleberry Finn, and wondered why my teacher freely used the
