Ever since I was a young girl I worked through the medium of storytelling. It is a form through which I confront the reality around me, the internal conflicts I experience, the relationships in my life, and the way I see the world. When I was young I used storytelling as a mechanism to rectify incidents that took place in my life or to simply create a world in which I could revel in. When I realized at the age of 16 that I wanted to be a writer, all the incidents of my youth and adolescence suddenly made sense. My reasons for writing have changed since then: what was once a childlike pursuit of my imagination morphed into a serious desire to be seen and heard as the person I am, with the social identities I possess.
I took my first fiction class when I was a sophomore in college and I finished an upper division fiction workshop class last semester. This means we distribute our writing to the students in the course and we discuss the story on as many levels as possible. We talk about the stories on a level of effectiveness in terms of character development; believability; we offer suggestions to the writer; we connect over similar interpretations…in essence, we have a good time. We are all there because we want to be, because we are passionate about fiction writing to some degree, and because the craft as a whole is one that we believe in as a powerful mode of expression.
Despite this, I always sense a slight tension, as if there is something that is not supposed to be breached, discussed or explored in depth, and that subject to me is race. By extension, it’s also white privilege because several of the students in my class where white. To me, exploring racism and privilege on very serious, profound, and critical levels is insurmountably important, particularly in regards to fiction writing. How do you know what is your story to tell if you don’t know what you have access to because of who you already are? How do you know if your response to a story is not simply an extension of your privilege? How do we discuss the effectiveness of a story if we cannot understand the issues and the realities from which it stems?
I’ve been thinking about this a lot lately. I only write characters of color, who are more often than not, Muslim as well. This is a conscious decision on my part. It is a case that I make to myself every time I put my pen to paper— one where I claim that the narratives of people of color deserve to be just as infused with the same level of humanity, authenticity, and passion as those of white people.
But now that I am deep into this major’s course load, I am thinking about what it means to write these kinds of stories. On the one hand there is the effectiveness of the story as a story: Does it have good character development? Is the conflict plausible? Is the ambiguity good or bad? How is the diction? These sorts of questions can be debated among students in workshops, and for the most part, the students are respectful, kind, and generous in their commentary. But still, I sense this tacit expectation on the part of writers of color to write white characters; we are expected to assume that what matters are the answers to the questions I posed in this paragraph, and not necessarily the social issues that act as catalysts for the stories. But when white characters write white characters, there is no questioning of their choices: it’s expected because that is what they know best. So when what I know best is the experience of being of color, why is that then held against me?
I am considering applying to MFA programs in the fall and the words of Junot Diaz in his well-known New Yorker essay, are a constant through my mind. I worry that this dissonance between literature and social issues will be so constant of a reality that my fiction will not be understood beyond its merit as a story. This irks me because the expectation of white people to write white characters is nonexistent; they just do it and they are lauded for it. So why is it that when people of color write characters of color, they are marginalized and labeled as “minority writers?” Toni Morrison is an “African American” writer. Why not just “American?” Junot Diaz is a “Dominican Republican” writer. Why not just “American?” Jhumpa Lahiri is an “Indian American” writer? Why not just “American?” Despite the success of these writers, their work is still categorized under the label of minority writing while works by white writers are labeled as “American” literature.
Work by writers of color becomes an escapade, an opportunity for white people to try on a different culture for a little while, enjoy it, revel in the prose, and then shut the book and set it aside; the person who wrote it and the people with whom the text may resonate on a deeply personal level must then go on to live the actual reality off of which these stories are based.
Do I want to participate in this dissonance?
I want to write work that is about my people, for my people, but in a field where what matters is the effectiveness of your writing, where is the room for a discussion of race, identity, Islam, gender, etc?
I have come to the conclusion that I will have to build that space for myself, and I will invariably have to do it through the one medium that has always given me a sense of hope: writing.
