A Very Old Man with Enormous Wings

Several years ago, during one of his rare and poorly attended public appearances, the Author was asked a question that he did not, in the moment, understand. The question — delivered from “out of the blue” during a discussion of the Author’s mostly unknown work — was: “Do you believe in empathy?” The Author initially mistook this for a question about his stylistic proclivities; it seemed to be an accusation, that is, that the Author’s work was devoid of empathy, which perceived accusation the Author immediately began defending himself against, offering up some confused thoughts about how postmodern or experimental literature had saved him, and how texts that were often perceived as cold or sterile often seemed to him, the Author, to be deeply empathetic. Fortunately, the Q & A moved in another direction and the Author did not have to rescue whatever cold and sterile story he had read that evening from the slings and arrows of that particular small and disgruntled audience. But later, while driving home in darkness, his low-performance automobile devouring the lines of the highway as if in a desperate search for their origin, the Author realized what he had been asked.

The writer Zadie Smith — one of the American Suffering Project’s greatest essayists, in the Author’s humble opinion — recently published, in the New York Review of Books, a piece entitled, “Fascinated to Presume: In Defense of Fiction.” It compares the way we read now, in our current climate of identity-driven indignation, to the way literature has/had been read for several prior centuries. Smith points out that the idea of “cultural appropriation” is fairly new to literature. Until recently, that is, writers were encouraged or even expected to attempt to imagine what other lives were like. In fact, this is the reason many writers became writers. The compulsive need to know what was happening inside of other humans, to see the similarities between the way others suffered and the way we suffered… these were the leaping off point for fiction, which was often a project of radical empathy. In Smith’s words:

“I felt I was Jane Eyre and Celie and Mr. Biswas and David Copperfield. Our autobiographical coordinates rarely matched. I’d never had a friend die of consumption or been raped by my father or lived in Trinidad or the Deep South or the nineteenth century. But I’d been sad and lost, sometimes desperate, often confused. It was on the basis of such flimsy emotional clues that I found myself feeling with these imaginary strangers: feeling with them, for them, alongside them and through them, extrapolating from my own emotions, which, though strikingly minor when compared to the high dramas of fiction, still bore some relation to them, as all human feelings do. “

What the Author was being asked by the audience member at his own highly forgettable event was whether or not he believed writers have “the right” to empathy. Because as Smith notes, in the current climate we are largely expected to “stay in our lanes.” If the Author, as “a cis-gendered white male” were to write from the point of view of a person of color or a queer person or a person living with a disability outside of the Author’s immediate experience, it would essentially be perceived as a literary identity-crime. The Author has seen writers punished for this felony, as surely have the half-dozen half-interested readers of Poets & Suicides. The American Dirt controversy is one good example of this phenomenon at work. Its story of a migrant Mexican woman and her son on the run for the US border was met with massive criticism. It was cultural appropriation at its worst, a book that engaged in “brownface,” incorporating a nominally Mexican perspective that was written by a woman who — as recently as 2016 — identified as “white.” In performing this act of cross-cultural other-imagining, the writer had stolen this story away from its rightful owner(s), engaged in stereotyping, and made it more difficult for the people with the experience to share this story “correctly” to do so. Not only was the writer destroyed for her insolence; the book’s cover design was criticized as wearing suffering as a fashion statement, its publishers were vilified for failing to properly vet its author’s “credentials,” and reviewers of the book — who had initially fawned — retracted their initial reactions and replaced them with crowd-pleasing condemnation.

The Author, by the way, dipped into the book and found its writing facile and unconvincing. But he did not at any point think the writer “had no right” to the material. That sort of thinking would immediately invalidate so many of the Author’s favorite texts. There could be no Anna Karenina, for example. No Huck Finn. No Madame Bovary, no Middlemarch. Or in a more contemporary vein, no Cloud Atlas, no Autobiography of Red, no McGlue. If we were all to “stay in our lane,” then the very idea of empathy (to return to the question that the Author did not process as a question about cultural appropriation, because in the moment he had naively presumed that the urge toward empathy was a given in fiction and that the social/racial/cultural identity of characters was the writer’s prerogative) would drop out of fiction’s equation, and works once (rightly) championed for their complexity and ambition would be relegated to the scrapheap of insolent and/or amoral proselytizing. Only black women could write about black women. Only white men could write about white men. Only transgender individuals could write about transgender individuals. (The Author is unsure where the bottom of this logical mineshaft resides… could only steel workers writer about steel workers? could only doctors write about doctors? could only people with diabetes write about people with diabetes?) Leaving aside the REAL problem of this way of seeing and thinking (which we will get to in a moment), there are some immediate surface-level contradictions that the Author cannot seem to resolve. If it is true that a white woman has no way of understanding the experience of a Mexican woman, then how could that same white woman READ the story of a Mexican woman and expect to glean anything from it? How could that white woman be friends with a Mexican woman in any genuine way, if their experiences did not overlap and they could not extrapolate each other’s inner lives from their own? It would seem that the “stay in your lane” mentality is not only a blockade on what we can write, but a blockade on what we can read. Because if a white woman CAN read and understand and FEEL the authentic story of a Mexican woman as written by a Mexican woman, it would seem to imply that all the circuitry required for empathy EXISTS within that white woman, and that she ought to be able to at least take a good stab at writing convincingly from the point of view of that Mexican woman. And if the white woman can do that — if she can leap across the divide of consciousness to see what it is like for another human being trapped in her own phenomenological cage — why shouldn’t she? Don’t we want a world in which we are attempting to understand each other?

Could a Mexican woman who had known only hardship, who had in fact fled her country with her son in an attempt to get across the border and escape horrific violence… could that woman write about a middle-class Mexican-American woman suffering from subtle forms of systemic racism, as experienced at, say, the middle-class woman’s children’s soccer practices? The Author is honestly not sure that the moral calculus at play in “stay in your lane” would allow it. Surely the very idea of intersectionality was meant to be a little more complex than this.

The Author, by the way, is NOT arguing against publishing diversity, which the Author believes in deeply. We need more books by people of color, more books by non-binary writers, more books that take into account the complex intersectional identities of all sorts of non-white, non-cis, non-male writers. But this seems, to the Author, to be a different issue than the “stay in your lane” bugbear. Publishing diversity is about, well… publishing, and the industry has an obligation to share and hold up the voices of those who have long been marginalized and ignored by what has been yet another white patriarchal system for as long as it’s existed. But the “stay in your lane” philosophy is more insidious. It discourages writers of all stripes from attempting to understand people, and in so doing runs counter to the very idea of literature. It takes the beauty and mystery of art and reduces it to yet another series of sociopolitical talking points.

(And of course all of this ignores the entire enormous landscape of what we might broadly call “speculative fiction.” How dare Kafka write about a man who has become an insect when he has never been an insect himself. Why did the young Marquez think he could write about an old man with enormous wings? Had he ever flown?)

The real problem, though, as far as the Author is concerned, is that the broad application of the “rules” regarding cultural appropriation in fiction creates additional divisions in an increasingly divided world, a world that is blind to the ephemerality of our species and the dire emergency of a planet on the brink of apocalyptic horribleness. Dire problems of climate change, viral pandemics (yes, the plural is intentional), drought and famine, not to mention the completely inevitable asteroid strikes and supervolcano eruptions, are shared problems. They belong to the human race. The Author will often read the short Carl Sagan sermon, “The Pale Blue Dot,” because its sage reminder that our fate is a shared fate helps the Author breathe. As the collective nature of our greatest problems becomes more unavoidable, literature’s retreat into smaller and smaller identity boxes seems almost perverse. What we need right now is empathy, a willingness to shatter divides and join each other in a collective fight for our species’ very existence. (“What’s that? You’re a Haitian transgender mermaid? Cool — want to help me put this fire out?”)

The Author is well aware of the tautological objection to this mode of thinking, and we at Poets & Suicides would worry for him, if we believed anyone would actually read this entry in the P & S compendium. That objection looks like this: “Isn’t your entire argument itself based on your white privilege?” To which the Author feels obliged to point out that pain is pain, that suffering is suffering, and that no one out here is having a good time.

We appreciate your (non)interest in these matters. And will mention, in conclusion, that the Author’s forthcoming novel, ANTHROPICA (Animal Riot Press, September 1 2020) includes characters that are not white males, though there ought to be enough white males for the Author to maintain his street cred. Alis grave nil. May language release you from its lies.