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Writer's picture Verdant
Mar 3112 min read

"Who's life is it anyway?"​Should we write about cultures that are not our own?

Updated: 4 days ago


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Inspiration vs. Appropriation - How can writers and readers meet in the middle?

“You err most tellingly in failing to distinguish between my silences and the silences of a being such as Friday. Friday has no command of words and therefore no defence against being reshaped day by day…with the desires of others.” (pg. 121 Foe). 


These words are uttered by Susan Barton, the protagonist in JM Coetzee’s Foe. Foe is a reworking of Robinson Crusoe, where a female narrator who traverses cultures takes the lead. Here she argues for her right to write herself into literary existence. Foe (Daniel Defoe) wishes to tell her story, but he demands greedily for her to reveal more; more of her heritage, more of her history. In a sense Foe wants to appropriate her story for his own gain, yet she mutes the parts she wishes. It is her story after all. The sadness is that she speaks on behalf of Friday, an African slave whose tongue has been cut out by Moorish pirates. Her silences are her decision, whereas the “being”, Friday has no choice. He is whatever she or Foe wants him to be. Like Oprah Winfrey said to the Duchess: “Were you silent or were you silenced”. That is really what is at play when authors appropriate the other1. When fact informs fiction and fiction borrows from fact, all factions require a say. There must be an equilibrium. There has never been a balance historically. When an author performs cosplay with another culture’s mores, a conversation with that culture needs to be had. Whether this conversation is implicit (via examination), or explicit (through experience) engagement needs to occur. Engagement not for political reasons, or to annoy any Karen’s out there but more so that the author can write a decent book that enlivens the imagination and does not insult the intelligence of their audience. 


 There has been plenty of research on the representation of the other in fiction, mostly from brown or poor people, as they are usually the ones most misrepresented: Fanon, Said, Bhabha, Achebe etc…While the term ‘the other’ can be used to describe any characters who are different in background to ‘the self’2 or the author, it is usually in reference to ‘mainstream’ writers writing about characters from marginalised groups. 


 “hashtag#cultural hashtag#appropriation" can make some readers and writers balk, sigh or cheer dependent on what their motivations are. Their reaction could also depend on where their political allegiances lie, how they were nurtured and their cultural influences. Cultural appropriation can be summarised as the buying or theft of cultural ideas, property, styles etc...from one cultural group by another. Authors are usually parasitical by nature, and they are usually poor, but stealing a culture is never right. 


 There is another lesser-known term "hashtag#hegemonic hashtag#discourse" which probably creates a less-polarised reaction, not only because it sounds like it's from a textbook, but that it isn't found in the mainstream media. There is, however, a strong link between the two terms. In fact hashtag#hegemony could be what is creating the tension between apparent constrictions to freedom of expression and cultural appropriation in the first place. So, what exactly is it? 


 Antonio Gramsci saw it as the subaltern's cultural voices being silenced by the bourgeoisie, the symbolic Machiavellian "prince" of his time. In a sense the bourgeoisies' economic power and social status ensured that they were the one who told the stories, about everyone, but mainly consumed by themselves. Foucault's view on hegemony is more apolitical3 and takes the view of individuals. Foucault investigated how there are "modes of objectification", which transform "human beings into subjects". Who makes us the subjects of our own lives? Why those who write us into and out of existence, of course! According to Foucault, power always has an aim. In literature: the power is in the pen and the fight for that pen is frequent. 

Does dipping your quill into someone else's blood to write their story mean you are culturally appropriating them? Always. Is cultural appropriation tag a bad thing? Not necessarily. Is it the pirate that cuts out the tongue of "the other", like Coetzee's Foe does to Friday? Nope. Does being labelled culture thief mean "you’re not supposed to try on other people’s hats" even though you're "paid to do"it? Not really, as authors are not paid to steal. Is there a way of ethically using culture appropriation within your creative process? Of course. However, if you're busy being a magpie, lifting the cultural shiny things from the fecund farms of the underprivileged and underrepresented, offering nothing back and then expecting their gratitude for your "promotion" then maybe you should approach appropriation with caution. This is an age where people should not be shut down for their ideas and thoughts, but this is an age where we should be ready to take views from all angles and take care in how we deliver our stories that are not our own. 


Lionel Shriver bemoaned that she as a Californian, straight Caucasian female received criticism for writing as African American character and a Mexican American (devoid of any accented dialogue, thankfully) in her novel The Mandibles. There are few things that are troubling, two of the most notable is that Douglas, the 97-year-old patriarch of the Mandible family divorces his Caucasian wife for some younger, chocolate-coloured arm Candy (Luella). In the end the "joke" is on Douglas (according to Shriver), as Luella ends up having early on-set dementia, while his ex-wife is mentally stable and has set up a charity for dementia research. In one scene Luella is so mentally deprived that she needs to be controlled on a leash in a busy Brooklyn Street. Maybe Shriver hadn't intended to echo images of slavery here or villainise the single black character in her novel. Either way she has a right to. It's her story, isn’t it. But therefore, we also have a right to question her methods and intentions: Did she research African American women (not saying she has to know or speak to any)? Did she speak to any experts in the field of dementia or mental illness? Ok, so now I understand why The Mandibles in the first place. 


When you are coming from a dominant space and producing characters of marginalized people, they can become exoticized specters of themselves. In Oroonoko by Aphra Ben, the reader is presented with a noble African prince who has been tricked into slavery in Suriname. The narration flips between first and third person, but he’s always told through the limited perspective of a European, female narrator. Behn depicts Oroonoko as a valiant warrior and lover who leads a slave rebellion.  It seems she did have some experience in Suriname, and she may have experienced or met enslaved people. Furthermore, the narrative style is quite typical of its time. Therefore, there isn’t much issue with the story nor the development of his character (he is hers to exploit, again) but the physical depiction of Oroonoko is simply weird and seems erroneous. Oroonoko has a “Nose was rising and Roman, instead of African and flat”. His slave's name is also Caesar. Behn knew her audience. She knew what they would accept and tolerate. I wonder how the novel may have changed if she met or spoke to a real-life West African prince? How might that have challenged her and her target audience’s perception of what a tragic hero should look like? 

Around thirty years later Daniel Defoe wrote Robinson Crusoe. It reads like a haphazard autobiography. After Crusoe sets sail from England, he is enslaved by Moors (yes, those damn black pirates again), escapes with a boy named Xury, sells Xury to Portuguese sailors in exchange for his own freedom and ends up being shipwrecked on an island near Venezuela, after a plan to kidnap Africans goes wrong.  The island is full of cannibals and prisoners.  Crusoe saves a prisoner that he names Friday (as they met on a Friday), teaches him English and converts him to Christianity (a religion he has only recently put his own energy into). Given the context in which this novel was written this is quite a palatable and an acceptable series of events. Interestingly, it is the Miskito man Friday that takes on another culture through cultural assimilation, though he is coerced via the slave-master dynamic between himself and Crusoe. The cannibals are even given some empathy, as Defoe makes Crusoe question, through a cultural relativist lens, whether he has the right to think that cannibalism is disgusting.  It is their tradition after all. Calling Robinson Crusoe, a handbook for hegemony is a cheap shot, given the context of composition and the context of the contemporary audience and the author. What we can learn from this tale is how historical development can help us when writing or knowing about the other. Defoe and Behn were adventurers in their minds and physically. They visited the places they were writing about, which is a start. It may have helped if they met the people they were writing about and had empathy and humility to develop the other people in their novels.  This was hundreds of years ago. In a globalised, digitalized world do creators have any excuse to depict the other in such a spectacularly lazy manner? No. 


 Some might say Shriver's right. It seems strange that in the world of literary fiction a reader would seek authenticity. In a mainstream world increasingly searching for “authenticity” from authors, does an author need to write from what they know, or are they “allowed” to write from what they imagine or dream? Of course, JRR Tolkein did not live with any Orcs and JK Rowling did not dine any death eaters, nor did Rushie not talk to any angels, but these stories are fantasy (a bigger leap from reality than most fiction). Is cultural appropriation appropriate when writing fiction? It can be said that the nature of an author's job is "prying, voyeuristic, kleptomaniacal, and presumptuous" but lifting identities of others and spitting them out raw isn't creative writing. Identity is important to people. Like Yen Roon Wong states “It’s easy to say that ‘Asian isn’t an identity’ when you haven’t experienced what it’s like to have to confront racism (both casual and overt) in your everyday life.” Identity can be tossed around and played with by the privileged.  Shriver may have a point saying that characters are the authors to be "exploited" (what a grossly inappropriate word) but what about when those characters are blatant and rudimentary, echoing stereotypes? Like blackface. An author cannot complain. When an author is finished writing a novel, the writing belongs to the readers... 


 When writing as the other we must ask ourselves: what are we trying to achieve? Before one sets onto the task one should ask themselves : have I examined my own privilege and my own limitations? Will I have the empathy and humility to deliver a story that feels true and is not a grotesque stereotype? 


 One author that I admire is Hanya Yanagihara. Her epic novel A Little Life explores the life of Jude and his friends. Jude, a lawyer with a mysterious past, ambiguous ethnicity, and unexplained health issues goes through physical and psychological trauma as he comes to terms with his own sexuality and the abuse he faced in his past. Garth Greenwell of The Atlantic suggested that A Little Life is "the long-awaited gay novel": "It engages with aesthetic modes long coded as queer: melodrama, sentimental fiction, grand opera. Lauded globally by members inside and out of the gay community and specifically well-received by the New York gay community. How does a Hawaiian female author manage to immerse herself into another life from a culture seemingly so different from hers? Not only from her imagination, the quality of her writing but from her relationships with members of that culture. One of the inspirations for this book, she says, was her best friend, Jared Hohlt, the print editor of New York magazine. He was first reader, and much of the book’s philosophy grew out of intense conversations the pair continue to have over supper each Friday night. “Jared runs in a large group of friends who have been together since university or before. They work terrifically hard at staying friends. None of them are legally married or have kids, and this book is also meant to be a homage to a different kind of adulthood, one that isn’t often celebrated in fiction, but which is adulthood, nonetheless. 


 David Eggers met Valentino Achak Deng in the United States. They began to collaborate to write about Deng’s past life as a Sudanese child refugee who immigrated to the United States under the Lost Boys of Sudan program. Their collaboration eventually became What Is the What: The Autobiography of Valentino Achak Deng. A story of a life of muddled childhood memories of Deng’s written by Eggers. 


The book is typical of Eggers' style: blending non-fictional and fictional elements into a non-fiction novel or memoir. By classifying the book as a novel, Eggers ensured he could liberally recreate conversations and manipulate time and space all why maintaining an essence of truthfulness in his storytelling. 


However, many found the novel problematic. Lee Siegel sees as much of Dave Eggers in the novel as Deng, unable to tell the two apart, saying "How strange for one man to think that he could write the story of another man, a real living man who is perfectly capable of telling his story himself—and then call it an autobiography." 


Questions of "expropriation of another man's identity" were addressed by Valentino Achak Deng and Dave Eggers in a discussion about the division between the speaker and the spoken for. After Eggers was approached with the idea, he began to prepare for the novel. He says that at this point, "we really hadn’t decided whether I was just helping Valentino write his own book, or if I was writing a book about him." Valentino points out that, "I thought I might want to write my own book, but I learned that I was not ready to do this. I was still taking classes in basic writing.” 


Dave Eggers discusses the difficulties in writing a book of this nature: 

"For a long while there, we continued doing interviews, and I gathered the material. But all along, I really didn’t know exactly what form it would finally take—whether it would be first person or third, whether it would be fiction or nonfiction. After about eighteen months of struggle with it, we settled on a fictionalized autobiography, in Valentino’s voice." Eggers explains that this choice was made because "Valentino’s voice is so distinct and unforgettable that any other authorial voice would pale by comparison. Very early on, when the book was in a more straightforward authorial voice, I missed the voice I was hearing on the tapes. So, writing in Val's voice solved both problems: I could disappear completely, and the reader would have the benefit of his very distinct voice." 


 In this example there is a clear process, engagement and a profound friendship that has enabled both voices to intermingle and create a wonderful work. The main issue is that Deng needed Eggers in the first place. How do we live in a work full of such inequity that a grown man cannot read or write to tell his culture’s story? Does he need to escape a war zone before his struggle becomes of interest to the "mainstream"? 

 If we lived in an equitable world then this methodology would be acceptable, embraced even. But we all know that historically and contemporarily there are certain human beings who have their ideas published, celebrated, and consumed as truth (in a mask of fiction) far before another kind of human being's work, due to several criteria. Those of you in a privilege position may know "the criteria" I speak of and those of you in an historically or contemporary underprivileged position know. Cultural appropriation is prevalent and necessary discussion point because of the historical implications attached to it : "The history of colonisation, where everything was taken from a people, the world over. Land, wealth, dignity … and now identity is to be taken as well?" “The blood remembers”, as Alex Wheatle says. Perhaps we shouldn't "dip our ink in someone else's blood" and write our own stories?


Fictional narratives are make-believe. Therefore, surely authors have the right to make things up, within reason? Authors of fiction are professional liars. They're always making things up and playing roles. Authors don't have to write from what they know. Gustav Flaubert wasn't a woman, but he wrote Madame Bovary, Charlotte Brontë wasn't living in a massive mansion with a bigamist and Ishiguro wasn't a white English butler in a past life. But all these books have one thing in common: they are well written. Therefore, it seems that taking different perspective needs particular care and nuance to avoid the pitfalls of crass cultural appropriation. 


 It isn't about asking permission, or which way you lean politically. It's about how steady your pen is and how avid your reading is. It's about dedication to your craft and caring about helping to craft each other. 


Works Cited 



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