My novel, A Beautiful Land, tells the story of a land that is physically beautiful but once was a place of terror. As I wrote the book, a windstorm was blowing in the literary world concerning cultural appropriation. I was caught in that squall. I am not complaining—I put myself there. Though I am from the United States, I set A Beautiful Land in a world suggestive of East Africa, a region I had only visited and studied but now was choosing to inhabit through fiction.
Fiction writing is a curious journey of the human imagination, one that can transport the writer far from home, while simultaneously plunging them deep into their own unconscious mind. Writers may feel caught in an odd paradox when they are asked to defend their right to journey widely because they know that, in some meaningful sense, they never venture far from home. That said, a story that ultimately explores the self may be told by way of characters and settings that have every appearance of being foreign to the writer’s life experience. While both investigating and hiding from the self, writers dress and position their characters in a panoply of skin colors, ethnicities, time periods, mental conditions, and locations. In doing so, they raise questions about appropriation of stories that, some argue, belong to others.
“Someone else is telling my story”: that statement is a forceful protest. A powerful sense of ownership attaches to certain life stories. A person identified with a story rooted in place or group may want to say, “This story, these events and emotions, they are mine. They belong to me, and to no one else.” Not all stories evoke fierce feelings of ownership; which ones might? Stories relating the experience of people who historically have been disenfranchised are among those likely to be held as precious; these are the stories around which the cultural appropriation argument has swirled, although very proud, privileged people who center their identities on particular national or group narratives can also be protective of their stories. Much has been stolen from long-dispossessed groups. From that position of loss, the idea of someone taking my story easily infuriates. If your people have been denied a voice in many forums—if their history has been unwritten, falsified, or removed from library shelves—then to have command of that voice and the means to broadcast it are of profound value.
We should note here that not everyone whose story is difficult and historically underappreciated will advance a stern caution against cultural appropriation. Also present in human beings is the impulse to ask, even implore, trusted interlocutors who possess strong voices and access to an audience to, “Tell my story; please show the world what happened to me.” The important thing then is the story itself, not the identity of the writer.
People fail to tell their own stories for a variety of reasons. Some cannot find the language. Others may be too shackled by pain, or shame, to revisit their past: consider, for example, a person with a crippling mental illness or one who is a victim of sexual abuse. In some instances, a story can only be told by an outsider, because the protagonist is dead or in some other way silenced or is incapable or uninterested in telling the story. Perhaps the protagonist is unready to speak, as in the case of a child. Abused or enslaved people often occupy a position of inescapable silence. They may be prohibited from speech or may not have access to the resources needed to share a story widely: the pulpit, for example, or the publishing house; at times, not even a pencil and paper or the ability to write can be had. The reality of restricted resources for storytelling has formed part of the argument and anger over cultural appropriation.
A critic of writerly appropriation might say, “Give to the rightful owner of the story the access they need to do the telling.” Accomplishing that is crucial, but writing stories is not a zero-sum game in which my relating a story in my voice means you cannot tell it in yours. Stories can have multiple narrators and iterations. Some benefit from varied recitals and fictional representations, from many voices speaking. It’s true that publisher access or funds for the business of publication can be zero-sum, but the individual writers at work penning fiction do not control those resources.
While keeping in mind the natural possessiveness over those stories that seem uniquely derived from one’s culture and history, let me look more closely at the question of what it means to tell “someone else’s story.”
Determining to whom a story rightly belongs is a difficult task. Important questions exist about what it even means to belong to a certain cultural group. Where do we draw the lines between existing groups, and how do we assign membership and say who is in and who is out, who has valid connections within the collective and who does not? How does a person go about establishing what cultural or ethnic group they belong to, what stories they own? Does another person define that for me or is the judgment my own? If it is my assessment, do I look only at the most evident, surface characteristics that describe me, for example, skin color, gender, and country of origin? If my group membership is decided by others, from the outside, how finely will they cut the cloth? Will I be licensed as a reformed Jew to write about the orthodox? Can an African American create on the page a person born and raised in Nigeria who has never set foot in the New World? Can a writer not burdened by mental illness conjure a character whose life is dominated by anorexia?
If I look at the various influences on my own life, I am stymied by the question, “To whom do I belong?” and the associated questions, “What stories are mine? What culture or ethnicity can I bring to life in fiction without appropriating another’s identity?” My skin is white. I was born in Chicago, Illinois. Is that all that matters in the determination of belonging? I am Jewish as well, and that complicates the issue of whiteness. White supremacists rage at the idea of including Jews within their tribe. Whatever their pigmentation, Jews, they insist, are not White. Must I pound on the door to be admitted to the group? Would I want to be allowed entry? So with whom do I belong? Only with Jewish people from the American Midwest? If I am an atheist, does that narrow my field further? And what if I am in good health, can I explore the experience of schizophrenia through a fictional character? If I hear well, can I create a deaf protagonist? Membership in any of these groups helps define personal identity. Creating characters from within them requires care and, likely, significant research, but should the effort be barred?
I have on some occasions written about dark-skinned people—some who are African American but also Jamaicans and Africans. I have asked myself why I am drawn to write about people of color, though I am white-skinned. I think I am attracted there because an African American woman was the person I loved most in my early life. Her presence in my family was largely a function of white privilege and structural racism. That is inarguable. So is the fact that I loved her and lost her abruptly and helplessly and something in my spirit and memory continues to seek her. If that is not my story, what is? What story do I then have? Maybe mine is a story that shouldn’t have been, but it was; it happened. If when writing fiction, I feel impelled to try to inhabit the experience of an African American woman who is separated from a loved child, or one who walks away from a child she tends but does not love (or, in the case of A Beautiful Land, of a Black woman who steals a child), am I trespassing where I have no right to go? Or am I legitimately exploring where my life has taken me? I am trying to say here that the notion of certain stories belonging only to those people assigned or claiming ownership by virtue of race, gender, ethnicity and the like may be lacking the nuance it deserves.
Stories are not neatly divided one from the other. They don’t come in self-contained packets; they intertwine just as people’s lives do. If I want to weave a story around a murdered Black man I conjured after I grimaced over the police murder of George Floyd, I likely will invent a Derek Chauvin, too—a murderer—in order to explore what forces brought these lives to tragic intersection. But how can I inhabit two such different people, whose roots are in distinct worlds? Surely, I cannot belong to both those communities. Yet, history molded these two characters into inextricable halves of an important whole, so should a writer amputate core pieces of the story in order not to trespass? Ironically, the fiction writer isn’t likely to stir complaints of cultural appropriation for trying to inhabit the psyche of someone modeled from Derek Chauvin, no matter what racial, ethnic, or class divide might separate writer and fictional character. No one is likely to defend the gates to that castle, no one wants to dwell there and say, “This place is mine; keep out.” The fiction writer would likely elicit protest for humanizing a character reminiscent of Chauvin by considering him deeply or with compassion, but not for appropriating his story.
To appropriate is to take (something) for one’s own use, typically without the owner’s permission. The writer’s activity often fits that definition. In my mind, the nature of the “use” is the key to assessing the writer’s work. Is the use constructive and creative or is it destructive?
Profound good, and serious harm, have come from writers telling stories of places they have never physically visited or belonged, so the nature of the “use” of material matters. Stories are used by writers in a variety of ways. We might use a story to draw attention to suffering or to pose important questions, for example, about the drivers of ethnic violence in a particular community or the suffering of schizophrenic people at the hands of those ill-informed about the illness. If the fiction writer is attempting to engage readers in a serious exploration, then the journey, I believe, is one worth taking.
Even when pursuing such worthwhile and valid aims, writers need to stay alert to less admirable impulses—for instance, we might use our images of another community in order to build our fiction on the weak foundation of stereotypes, or we might use another’s history to express some reflexive, perhaps ignorant judgment that dehumanizes people we fear or with whom we choose not to identify. Are we dressing our characters in foreign garb because we don’t want to recognize ourselves or our families in certain actions or attitudes; we don’t want to know that the other is self? It is also possible that our fiction flows from an urge to steal what seems rich and vibrant—enviably so—but is not our own. I might be tempted to commit that theft in the way I might look in the mirror, feel plain, and try to put on a sequined coat in order to feel more attractive. The impulse to dress in bright colors or elaborate embroidery may be harmless in the world of fashion, but if your dazzling coat is a story, then before you don it you should look at who else might call it “mine;” you should consider as well whether the essence of what you want to say could be said while wearing a more familiar cloak.
If we grant the writer a conditional passport to travel, even to foreign lands, what then protects the person who feels that the writer has told their story? The power retained for those to whom a story “belongs” lies in their right and power to criticize. If I write about a world I don’t occupy physically or a people with whom I share little history, the reader—from whatever background—is entirely free to say that I didn’t understand my subject and have produced poor, even offensive, writing. To say that a writer failed (or partially failed) in representing a particular group, place, or history is the reader’s prerogative. It is better, I think, to exercise that privilege than to deny the writer the license to try to get it right, to open doors, to shine a light.
A writer restricted to telling only of events they have personally experienced can barely make it around the block. Our literature would be enormously constricted by that limit. If we value good literature, we might not want to abort its creation. The world’s literature would be a moth-eaten garment if we deleted all the instances of cross-cultural adventuring. In a 2016 article, novelist and critic, Philip Hensher, said, “…any attempt to put a stop to very good writing, on the grounds of prejudice, or of extra-literary moral grounds, is deplorable because it might succeed.” Novelist Lionel Shriver maintained in a 2016 speech, entitled Fiction and Identity Politics, “The ultimate endpoint of keeping our mitts off experience that doesn’t belong to us is that there is no fiction.” Writers are, by occupation and nature, scavengers, hoarders, and thieves. Still, they need not be scoundrels. If they are capable writers, they can be like the lockpicker who assists the person locked out of their own home. Valuable indeed.
Susan Beth Miller
Susan Beth Miller is a novelist, psychology writer, and practicing clinical psychologist who lives and works in Ann Arbor, Michigan. Her novels are Indigo Rose and A Beautiful Land. Her young adult novel, By the Way, I Love You, will be published by Boyle&Dalton in the fall of 2024
