Do novelists need to have a specific ethnicity to write characters from that background, or be of the same sexual orientation as their protagonist? Photo / 123RF
Novelists are coming under fire if they write characters of a different race, sex or sexuality to themselves.
When the Canadian author Paul Carlucci set out to write a novel about his country in the 1830s, he wanted to convey the brutality of that era. “It’s a story about people behaving very nastily towards one another,” he says. “I thought it was important because we have a mainstream version of Canadian history that is ‘We’re gentle people, we’re not like the Americans!’ and it’s fundamentally untrue.”
His novel, The Voyageur, is a coming-of-age story about a stockboy who falls in love with a fur trapper and follows him into the wilderness, where he ends up with a band of poachers. Initially Carlucci, 41, was pleased to receive an offer from a small Canadian press in 2020, but soon the publisher’s conditions mounted. In particular there were concerns about a secondary character from the indigenous Odawa, so Carlucci, who is white, agreed to have a sensitivity reader from the community to check the portrayal was accurate.
“I got their notes — and they were ridiculous,” Carlucci recalls. “He could not discern between authorial voice and characterisation, so when I have characters saying shitty things to one another, he thinks it’s me, and says it’s offensive. If I’d followed this advice I would have portrayed an 1830s Canada that is more racially just than it is today. It would have been sanitised.”
Carlucci claims that eventually the sensitivity reader objected to the Odawa character, Miigwan, almost entirely, arguing that he was too manipulative — which ran against the group’s cultural teachings — and that he “essentially must either be white or without moral complications”. Carlucci’s deal with the publisher later fell through, but the novel will now be released in the UK next year by Swift Press, a company making its name by publishing “cancelled” authors and books its rivals will not.
Carlucci’s experience reflects a growing debate within the books industry about who has the right to tell which stories. Do novelists need to have a specific ethnicity to write characters from that background, or be of the same sexual orientation as their protagonist? Must they have experienced a trauma — such as rape — to put it on the page?
The debate is the extent to which novelists should have freedom of imagination, or whether they should write only what they know — their “lived experience” — when it comes to race, culture, disability, sexuality or traumatic events. Almost all novelists have a middle position, believing that while they should be free to write across boundaries, to avoid simply producing clones of themselves on the page, with that comes a duty to avoid stereotypes. The concern, however, is that publishers are now so worried about sparking outrage that they are restricting what novelists write, and authors are self-censoring.
Three of our most acclaimed novelists, the Nigerian author Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie and the Booker prizewinners Bernardine Evaristo and Kazuo Ishiguro, have all expressed their opposition to these pressures. “If we take this to its logical conclusion, could it not almost be the end of novels?” one writer asked. “Sure, we’ll still have memoir — but in my novels I imagine other people’s experiences. If I can’t do that, then why would I write?”
The debate around “lived experience” initially took hold in the world of young adult fiction within the past decade, but it has since spread to novels aimed at adults and now even, as Carlucci’s experience shows, to historical fiction. It has also crossed the Atlantic, arriving from the US and Canada into the UK publishing industry.
The argument had been bubbling away until the publication of American Dirt in 2020 brought it to boiling point. Jeanine Cummins’s thriller, an Oprah’s Book Club pick, is about a middle-class bookshop owner from Mexico who finds herself having to flee her homeland after a cartel murders most of her family. Cummins, who has a Puerto Rican grandmother, had previously described herself as white, but subsequently said she was “Latinx”.
The criticism of it came in two parts: first, that Cummins had written a story that was not hers, one about Mexican migrants that she didn’t have the cultural experience to tell; second, that she had not done it convincingly. Myriam Gurba, a Mexican-American author and visual artist, dismissed it as belonging to the “great American tradition of . . . appropriating genius works by people of colour, slapping a coat of mayonesa on them to make palatable to [American] tastebuds . . . [and] repackaging them for mass racially ‘colourblind’ consumption”.
Others felt that Cummins had been given the money and profile that equally — or even more — talented Latina authors deserved, such as Yxta Maya Murray or Erika L Sánchez. Then, at a dinner for the novel’s launch, the table decorations included barbed wire made from twigs to mimic its cover, a decision many found tasteless. A backlash followed, and her book tour was cancelled. The book was nonetheless a huge hit, selling more than two million copies.
That wasn’t because of, or in spite of, the controversy — most people who bought it would have no idea about that,” the managing director of one publishing house argues. “Very few authors can write a book that is quite that gripping. There’s a weird notion that there are lots of incredible books lying around, but that they’re not being bought because of racism, say. In reality incredible books are rare, and when they do come along in commercial fiction, publishing is usually good at spotting them.”
She adds that critics ignored any positive impact of the book. “It was read by many Conservative women in middle America — people who may have been very anti-immigration from Mexico who may now think differently. Do people also think that [the abolitionist] Harriet Beecher Stowe shouldn’t have written Uncle Tom’s Cabin — which helped end slavery? To me the message to writers should be: write what you want — as long as it isn’t relying on awful racist stereotypes — but if you get it wrong, expect fair criticism.”
Since American Dirt the debate around “cultural appropriation” in novels has intensified, as has the squeamishness of publishers. Mark Richards, who co-founded Swift Press in 2020, says: “Everyone in publishing knows that this is stopping novelists from writing the books they want. It is having a really chilling effect on what authors write, or whether they write at all.”
Yet the battle over “lived experience” remains one largely fought behind closed doors. This is an industry in which rejection is frequent, and writers may not know the real reason that their work isn’t making it to print. There are also some notable exceptions. One of the many criticisms of John Boyne’s 2006 children’s book The Boy in the Striped Pyjamas was that he, an Irish writer, had no familial links to the Holocaust. Yet its bestseller status ensured he could last year publish a sequel, All the Broken Places.
However, despite a culture of silence there is no question that the “lived experience” movement is having an impact. A literary agent tells me about a novel written from two perspectives — a white husband and his wife from an ethnic minority background — where a sensitivity reader flagged concerns that the author was himself a white man. Another author was forced to relocate a novel thousands of miles away because she did not grow up in the country where it was initially set.
A novelist who recently submitted a book set in the ancient world, with a protagonist who was forced to work in a brothel as a child, was asked whether he had experience of child sexual abuse himself; when he said he hadn’t, one publisher withdrew its interest.
Some authors now feel hemmed in, caught between a desire to show the world as it is yet wary of facing criticism for portraying characters from backgrounds different from their own. “But if you set a novel in contemporary London and you have three white characters, that would be criticised too — so aren’t you damned if you do and damned if you don’t?” one novelist asks.
Prominent writers are beginning to speak out against this pressure. In her Reith lecture on freedom of speech last year, Adichie argued that literature was “in peril because of social censure”. She said: “There are writers who want to write novels about sensitive subjects but are held back by the spectre of social censure. Publishers are wary of committing secular blasphemy.”
In 2021 Evaristo called the idea that authors could not write outside their own experience “ridiculous”. Then in October Ishiguro stressed that he believed authors must be able to write about cultures and from perspectives that are not their own. Ishiguro, who was born in Japan but came to Britain with his parents when he was five, told the Evening Standard: “There is a fundamental thing that I would stand by, which is the freedom of creative people to be able to write from the point of view of whomever they wish. It’s for the audience or the critics to say this is rubbish and he or she doesn’t know what they’re doing.”
Ishiguro said part of the problem with the idea that an author can only write about an issue, culture or perspective if that is their “lived experience” is that it implies there are no values that unite humans across disparate ways of life. “Are we so defined by identities that we have nothing in common with the next group?”
The worry for many in publishing is that in the noble pursuit of ensuring that portrayals of diverse characters are well executed, writers are being reined in, that they’re not able to use their imagination fully. Ishiguro argued this could have a stifling effect: “Then you ask: is art possible at all? Why write a novel if you are only trying to address the people in your own group?”
Uncle Tom’s Cabin by Harriet Beecher Stowe
Written by a white anti-slavery campaigner, Uncle Tom’s Cabin is often described as one of the catalysts for the American Civil War. Beecher Stowe focused on the character of Uncle Tom, a black slave. The book was the bestselling novel of the 19th century in the US. However, it has also been criticised for popularising negative stereotypes of black people, especially the idea of a racial predisposition to subservience.
Lolita by Vladimir Nabokov
Publishers repeatedly turned down this controversial story of a middle-aged man’s obsession with a 12-year-old girl before it was finally printed in 1955. In 2019 Dan Franklin, then the associate publisher at Jonathan Cape, said that he wouldn’t be able to publish the novel now, given that, with social media, “you can organise outrage at the drop of a hat”. Might a similar novel by a woman and taking in the girl’s perspective be printable post #MeToo? Putney, the acclaimed 2018 novel by Sofka Zinovieff, suggests so.
The Human Stain by Philip Roth
Roth’s 2000 novel — the final part of a loose trilogy — has a focus on race. The character of Coleman Silk, played in the 2003 film adaptation by Anthony Hopkins is a former professor forced to resign after he is accused of making a racist comment to his students. The twist — and skip ahead now if you don’t want the ending ruined — is that Silk has only been “passing” as a white Jewish man like Roth: he is actually African-American.
The Boy in the Striped Pyjamas by John Boyne
The Irish writer’s 2006 children’s novel is the story of two boys who become friends through Auschwitz’s fence. Boyne is neither descended from Holocaust survivors nor Jewish. Many readers falsely assumed it was a true story. The Auschwitz-Birkenau Museum said in 2020 that it should be avoided “by anyone who studies or teaches … the Holocaust”. The criticism did not stop the publication of a sequel, All the Broken Places, last year.
Written by: Rosamund Urwin
© The Times of London
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