Songs My Relationship Will Never Resemble

The sandwichboy and I will never be:

The Space Between, Dave Matthews Band
My Immortal, Evanescence
Call And Answer, Barenaked Ladies
Long Time Running, The Tragically Hip
Brick, Ben Folds Five

I want us to be:

At Last, Etta James
Lost Together, Blue Rodeo
Lucky, Bif Naked
Emperor Penguin, The Tragically Hip
I Can't Wait to Get Off Work, Tom Waits

This is not a meme. Just a thought.

Goodnight, internet.

A Few Thoughts on Cultural Appropriation

So I'm in a crowded bar last night, having drinks with a few people we haven't seen in a while, and one of them brings up the concept of cultural appropriation. She's getting (back?) into writing for the first time in years; she just finished law school, and is in that short period in a lawyer's life where she actually has some time to herself before being called to the bar. She's uncomfortable, she says, with the idea of writing characters of different races and cultures because she can't possibly understand the experience of living that way, and cites as example a French book about the Rwandan genocide which she found horribly racist, yet which won all kinds of awards.

What I said to her was (I fear) dismissed because she knows I write genre and therefore found my advice non-applicable, even though I tried to explain that what I'm working on these days is more like magical realism, modern-day urban fantasy than second-world fantasy. I'm not inventing races or cultures these days. My work is based in the real world ('cause I'm a lazypants).

This is not a post about that dismissal.

What I said to her was that the whole business of wringing your hands over cultural appropriation seems like...well, a load of bull. Here's my reasoning why. People, all the people everywhere, all work off the same basic emotional responses. We are all happy, sad, cranky, tender, etc. We all have the same base reactions in our lives, and every person everywhere can understand those base reactions. What a cultural difference essentially is, in terms of characterization, is social structure and upbringing defining which stimuli elicit which reactions. Different things may well make me happy than will make someone in Hong Kong or Somalia or Belarus or Argentina happy. Different things will be taken as rude or transgressive, and thus elicit different reactions. Different expectations are in place.

The stimuli are different, and the stimuli are key. But the reactions are still the same. (This is the important part. That's why I bolded it.)

So, in my mind, the act of writing a character who isn't an early-twenties Canadian Jew-turned-agnostic bohemian writer type (that's me, for the folks playing along) is merely an act of logically or intuitively identifying which stimulus should pair with which reaction. It's a game of Hunt-the-Squid: based on who this person is, what their damage is, and what their upbringing was like, where can I poke them that'll make them scream? It'll be different than a character of X Culture, but it's still a poke and it's still a scream. That work is below sea level* work. What shows in the story is the reactions to those events, to those stimuli.

And we can write reactions, right? We know what happy/sad/angry feels like. Funny, looks like we're set.

Frankly, I don't think you even need a Masters degree in whatever culture you're writing, either. Obviously you want a familiarity, because research is good and looking like a fool is not. But culture is only part of a person: the other is indivudual personality. People in every culture and environment are every day choosing to accept or reject the ideas around them, which surprisingly enough, turns the character of different culture into just another character you're writing, with their own personal baggage and ideas.

And this character, like every other character you write, is your character. You can write them well, you can write them poorly, but you cannot write your own damned character wrong. There is no wrong. Do not let anyone tell you that someone you created is wrong, and do not believe for a second that you are so cool that whatever unpublished work you're writing will somehow influence the thinking of generations to come on people of another culture, and cause race wars that will destroy the planet. None of us are that cool. The people of that other culture have voices and pens too, and they sure as hell have the capability to stick up for themselves if they take issue with that character.

This is how literary dialogue is born. And literary dialogue...that's our lifeblood. That's us talking about the ideas and issues of our time instead of sticking them in the back corner of the cupboard to molder and fester and rot and grow poisonous, because we don't feel we have the right** to discuss them.

In summary: Fuck that noise.



* Below sea level as in the iceberg metaphor for worldbuilding or research, where 90% of the work you do doesn't make it into the actual text, just informs the story. Versus the 10% that occurs in the actual text of the story.

**For the word right, tentatively substitute responsibility if you are of the school who believes art should be a tool for social change.