It can sometimes be troubling to hear my poetry professor ask me or one of my classmates to stop directly addressing the writer of the poem in a workshop, when what I “[should] mean to say” is “the narrator.” It’s not because anybody interrupting me for any particular reason leaves me feeling suddenly winded and at a loss of words, but because sometimes I read a poem and I understand the subject matter and can’t imagine why anybody who hasn’t lived those words would write them.
Fiction, ostensibly, knows no boundaries. A narrator can be a piece of anthropomorphic space cheese from the planet Blart, and that’s okay— so long as the space cheese eventually finds himself writhing with internal conflict or is faced with some form of troubling space cheese decision-making. The point being, writers have a lot of authority over what can happen within the confines of their book. Characters can be who they want to be, when they want to be, and nobody can say anything about it, right?
Within the realm of fiction, there has to be a line drawn. Boundaries can be overcome and character roles can be upheaved and reimagined, but somewhere there has to be something an author can’t write about. It’s sensitive, and it’s weird, but people are entitled to their own identities. One of 2017’s most praised novels was "Lincoln In The Bardo," a rewrite of a historical character, and one that we think we have a pretty good idea of. That’s okay because it does not harm, intended or not, the character that is the Honest Abe we all know (again, ostensibly) and love.
However, nobody except for Lincoln himself could have written a more characteristically Abraham Lincoln than George Saunders, and him doing a fine job is the result of what I am sure was a delicate hand that guided him through what was probably a very difficult task to accomplish. What should also be noted is that George Saunders is a Texas-born white man, and Lincoln was a Kentucky-born white man, and so despite the years between them, they have that in common. Saunders does not share an identity with any person of color, any immigrant, any woman. Therefore, regardless of the delicacy of his writing, or the beauty that emerges when his pen hits paper, does he have the right to take on any of those voices in narratives?
Is the authority of experience a sort of “You know it when you see it”
deal, or is there something more to it?I often write short stories from the male perspective; in fact, a good half of my fiction work is centered around a male protagonist. I don’t often feel wrong about doing that; it doesn’t feel out of character for me as the writer. But that’s because, in writing, there’s a definite power struggle that forms something of a pyramid. Not to be that person who builds up an entire article only to poo-poo the white man, but at the top sits a happy white man, assuming his position above all others in the room. In this case, however, the pyramid represents more than just an unjust power dynamic written out by society, it’s also a series of one-way streets from bottom-to-top. You can work your way up the pyramid, but you can’t move down.
I can write about a white man, but not a POC. I don’t share experiences, I don’t know how it feels to be black or how it feels to be “treated” black, so I don’t have the right to write about it. I shouldn’t fabricate experience, I should use my own, as a white woman, because the best kind of struggle is an honest one. For hundreds of years, white guys wrote in the voices of women, and then for another two hundred years white women wrote in the voices of a sundry of ethnic men and women. Now, the time has come for white people to step back and let all the brilliant people of color with brilliant voices be heard. There is plenty of everyday struggle in the life of a white woman, and a good amount to be found in the lives of white men— there’s no need to borrow.
