American Blurt: The quest for the hot take is not good for literature

I have humble goals nowadays with this blog, but even those humble goals seem to get waylaid. I had planned to blog through the O.Henry Anthology, but unlike last year, I was only going to blog stories I really connected with, rather than the whole thing. So it was supposed to be easier on me. But after reading Rachael Kondo's "Girl of Few Seasons," the fourth story in the anthology, I got a little sidetracked. Then I got a lot sidetracked, and this post is the result of that sideways meandering. I didn't really have strong feelings about Kondo's story either way, and I could have just passed it by, but I was interested in Kondo's use in the story of Hawaiian Pidgin, also known as Hawaii Creole English. I wondered whether she might have been a user of the language at home, or if she had just used it in a story. Most of the use of HCE in the story was pretty light, the kinds of things most people who live in Hawaii (I lived there for four years in the 90s) pick up and use casually, stuff like "pau hana."

It turns out Kondo has written engagingly and thoughtfully on the subject of using HCE in literature. Pidgin is, in fact, part of her heritage. Her grandmother was among those Japanese imported laborers who helped create the language we now have, although it has morphed from what her grandmother once spoke. The use in Kondo's story of HCE was the story's biggest success; she used it to effectively establish scene and tone. It wasn't overdone, and it felt like it belonged.

Still, I wondered whether there might be some who would take offense to her use of HCE. Although Kondo's grandmother spoke it at home, I get the sense Kondo herself doesn't, or at least not beyond the casual level of most Hawaii residents. She--to her credit, with a great deal of honesty--explains how she grew up programmed to think that speaking "correct" English put her family on a level above the kids around her who spoke HCE. Although her understanding of the language has since matured greatly, I don't get the sense she speaks HCE at home currently much more than any resident of Hawaii. (Even the most foreign haole who lives there for a while will eventually pick up at least some.)

Last year, I wrote about a controversy within literary circles that erupted when a white poet wrote about the experiences of a (possibly) black homeless man. Some readers took offense to the poem's use of what they viewed as African-American Vernacular English. More accurately, they seemed to take offense to the poet's use of AAVE, charging (without proving) that the language was inaccurate and exploitative. Kondo's story, however, didn't seem to enrage anyone. Not that I thought it should, but I wondered rather vaguely why this story didn't, but a poem like "How To" did.

Maybe one of the reasons Kondo's story didn't cause any controversy is because Hawaiians seem to be pretty chill about the use of racial stereotypes. This photo is a comedian born with the name Shawn Kaui Hill, who, using the stage name "Bu La'ia," was all over Hawaiian TV when I lived there in the 90s. As you can see, he is wearing an afro wig and has a tooth blacked out. I was always shocked by his act and the fact it was considered so non-offensive, he was used in commercials doing his over-the-top goofy pidgin schtick. If nobody objected to this, it's hard to believe anyone would object to a story like "Girl of Few Seasons," which is obviously aiming for a sensitive portrayal of characters who speak HCE. It likely wouldn't matter to the community that the writer isn't fully a native speaker.  

American Dirt

I'd have just passed on from thinking about this story without feeling the need to write anything about it, but then the whole public storm surrounding American Dirt happened, and I've been mired in thinking about that and trying in vain to write about it ever since. It's a bit of a personal issue for me. I'm a white, male author who writes a lot of his stories from the point-of-view of people of color. To me, there's nothing exploitative about this. I'm a translator. I'm fascinated by the people I've come in contact with as a translator. I've bought my access to their stories the hard way, by putting in the work to learn other languages and cultures. But some of the dialogue online about Dirt seemed to take the same assumption some took about the poem "How To": if you aren't yourself a member of the same racial and socio-economic community as the characters you write about, you shouldn't write about them, ever. As a guy who wrote this story about an Ethiopian maid and this story about an Ethiopian-American runner and this story about a couple of Eritrean refugees and this story about an Ethiopian-American translator dating a Korean girl, I was sort of dismayed by some of the posts I saw about this book.

The actual story, not the story you'd get on Twitter

My dismay had something to do with how I came to learn about it mostly through posts I saw on Twitter. I'm not going to dignify the posts I saw by re-posting them, but I think they're probably good examples of the inherent limitations of Twitter. It's a great place to recommend thoughtful pieces posted elsewhere, and you can show your support or dislike for the story in an abbreviated form, but almost anytime anyone tries to express something substantive about real ideas, it inevitably gets turned into exaggeration and gratuitous provocation. The quest for traffic, clicks, and overall relevance leads to always looking for a hot take. It's not enough to say that a book may have meant well, but the decision by the publishing industry and Oprah to turn the book into a pampered darling is puzzling, given that there are far better treatments of the same subject by more talented writers who know the subject better. You have to instead scream about how white writers can never, ever write about people of color because it's always exploitative and appropriative.

Among all the heat created by Twitter, I managed to find a bit of light on Latino USA, which interviewed four people, including the author. There is also a nice chronology of the controversy on their page, including how one particularly stinging attack on the book by Myriam Gurba came to be. How it all went down was something like this:

-American newsrooms started getting advanced copies of American Dirt in late 2019. There were blurbs from respected authors, including Don Winslow, who called the book "A Grapes of Wrath for our time." The author praised writer Luis Urrea in the introduction, whom she said she read thoroughly as part of her research.
-Some Latina writers also praised the novel, including Sandra Cisneros, Julia Alvarez, and Reyna Grande.
-Myriam Gurba wrote a fierce take-down of the book, but had a hard time getting it published, because, according to what she says she was told, she was too negative.
-After the book came out, nothing much happened, but then Oprah put it in her book club, which is about the best thing that can happen to a writer as far as sales go.
-At that point, people actually started to notice not only Gurba's criticism, but that of other Latinx writers as well.
-Some people, like actress Salma Hayek, took back their support for the book. One person who did not retract her support was House on Mango Street author Sandra Cisneros, who insisted she thought the book had merit.
-Twitter lost its mind.

The rest of this long post, condensed

When you actually listen to the four people on Latino USA, you'll find that even the most strident of them (Gurba) isn't saying anything like "white people shouldn't write about people of color." That's Twitter dumbing down the conversation. I think literary figures should be very careful of how they interact with Twitter to keep from being part of the dumbing down the medium often leads to.

The longer version

I'll start by condensing what Gurba, Cisneros, Luis Urrea, and the author of American Dirt herself said about the controversy during the hour-long Latino USA program. I think everyone had at least a decent point or two.

Gurba: The book is trash. It wasn't well researched, it was schlock, it traded on a certain version of Mexico that only exist in the uneducated white imagination. She doesn't buy that this book needs to exist in order to humanize Mexicans to Americans who otherwise wouldn't engage with a book like this (i.e., who wouldn't read a book by a writer with a Latino name). She feels Mexicans are capable of telling their own stories. Ultimately, she says she wouldn't have been so angry about the book if it hadn't been billed as such worthy fare, if it hadn't been compared to Steinbeck. If it had been sold as a narco-romance piece of mierda instead, she wouldn't have fretted about it.

My take: In many of her comments, she is presenting her beef as with the publishing industry even more than with the book. She's right, of course. It's mystifying why some books become media darlings and some get gently ignored. There have been great books about the border already, none of which got the media push this pulp novel did. I do think her piece is a little heavy on its joy in Spanglish swear words and a little light on actual literary criticism and interaction with the text. It's going for the hot take, and as a result, it's not great criticism. Instead, it's a polemic about a number of things, only one of which is this book. She starts off her essay by saying that when she tells gringos her father was a publicist in Mexico, their eyes get wide, meaning they are all surprised Mexico even has publicists. I have to wonder if she is intentionally seeking out the stupidest white people on the planet. Starting off in this way makes me think that, even though she said her objection isn't to who wrote it but how she wrote it, it's also maybe a little bit about who wrote it.

And while I accept that Mexicans can tell their own stories just fine, thank you very much, my life's work is in translation, and it is possible that a white writer who really does the work (which American Dirt did not do) to understand his subject may be more successful translating that work into the target audience's idiom than a Mexican writer. When I translate Korean to English, what I really want is to have a native Korean speaker who learned English and a native English speaker who learned Korean working together. Those produce the best overall translations. I think stories in the real world might also work best if we had natives of multiple worlds trying to speak to certain topics. Of course, the problem with American audiences is that we tend to only lean on the work "in translation," the one from the writer who comes from our own community. It's hard to even get Americans to watch a movie that has subtitles.

Cisneros: If you've never heard Cisneros speak, her voice is a little distracting. She's got kind of a Mickey Mouse squeaky voice. And some of what she said was a little nuts. She had a valid point that there's room for more than one person's story. A white lady can tell a story about the border and so can a Chicana from Matamorros and so can a Chinese journalist from Chengdu. What she's mostly been criticized for is saying that American Dirt is necessary because some people just wouldn't read a book by someone with a Latino name. At first, I didn't think that's what she was saying in the interview. I thought she was saying someone would read Dirt because it was a trashy beach novel but they might not read someone like Reyna Grande because it's "serious" fiction. But the interviewer asked if she meant people wouldn't read someone with a Spanish name, and Cisneros agreed that's what she meant.

My take: Cisneros is definitely wrong to co-sign the publishing industry pushing a book about Mexico by a white lady if they're only doing it because they think they can sell that better than a book by someone named Hernandez.

While I agree that there ought to be enough room for everyone to tell their story, I wonder if the fact that pragmatically, there really isn't enough room for everyone is part of why Gurba is so angry. There can only be so many Oprah Book Club books. If this one gets in, there won't be room for a Latinx writer to get a book about the border onto her list. The book industry's quest for equality sometimes helps writers of color, but it can also hurt them. A publisher might not take on a second Chinese-American writer if they already have one who sells well, because they'd think they'd be cannibalizing their own sales. Ethnic groups are sales niches to them, and there's a zero sum game competing for the dollars of a shrinking pool of readers. If a Latinx writer wrote a book about the border this year, nobody would touch it, because we already have one of those. It's kind of easy for Cisneros to talk about there being room for everyone when she's living off the royalties of a book that has sold millions of copies to school children. I have to really ask myself, if I ever really break through, am I possibly making my voice the one American readers will read on certain topics, and if so, is that right? Like most writers, I couldn't stop writing if I tried (I've tried! I'm trying right now!), so I doubt this concern will make me stop, but it ought to sober up my dreams a bit.


Urrea: Luis Alberto Urrea has written a couple of stunning books about the border. They were non-fiction. The best-known is The Devil's Highway. That book is a generation old now. A few people have pointed out that American Dirt seems to plagiarize from Urrea.  Luis spoke slowly during this interview, audibly a little angry, I think, which is probably as strong an indictment of this book as any I can imagine. Luis was an instructor of mine for a poetry class in graduate school. He's as gentle a man as I've ever met. So if someone has made him upset, that person likely really did something wrong. Anyhow, Luis spoke mostly about his sense of violation, because his research had been lived research. "I buried that person," he said about a child in a scene that American Dirt most obviously "borrows" from. Urrea, however, also was the most overt in making it clear that the problem isn't that Cummins is white. "Lots of people have written great stuff about the border from an Anglo perspective," Urrea said. The problem was that the book was derivative and lazy.

My take: I love Luis.

Cummins herself: I totally get that the publishing industry is unfair to people of color. The frustration I'm hearing is totally fair. But I'm not responsible for all that. I wish people would talk about the book and not the industry.

My take: I read one chapter of her book. It wasn't good. Nothing is fair. Publishing is stupid. Publishers are idiots. I don't hate her for writing a bad book. I hate the game, not the player.

This all comes home for me

If you get away from Twitter, everyone seems to be saying the right things. The problem isn't that she's white. It's not who wrote it, but how she wrote it. But I can't help sympathizing with Cummins in one way. She says she wrote an earlier version of the book with a white narrator who was observing, rather than writing from the perspective of the immigrant herself. She later tore that version up and started over, because "who cares what I have to say, really?" In other words, she was more interested in the people she had researched than she was in her own role as researcher.

I can sympathize. I write my fair share of stories about white people in middle class situations, but I really love stories about people who are different from me. They're more interesting than I am. I like stories about Ethiopians and Eritreans and Koreans and Latino migrant workers and the kids from Baltimore Mrs. Heretic taught. Sometimes, when I write about them, I do it from the point of view of the white observer. I did that in this story, about a white father trying to figure things out when his family adopts a black girl. That was an easy way into the story for me, because I've really played that role in my life. That's actually the way I know the "character" I got that story from. But I don't always do that. When I told a story about an Eritrean woman at a refuge center in Italy who needs to decide whether to abort the child she was impregnated with by rape from a kidnapper during her flight from Eritrea, I didn't tell it from the perspective of the white nurse aid worker. I told it from the POV of the girl, Hiwet. Why? I don't know. In my mind, I saw her. A story from the POV of the nurse would have been about craft and technique and how to tell a story through learned details. The story I told was about the girl, what happened to her, and what she did about it. I didn't want a complicated story. I wanted to keep it simple. That felt more respectful to what she went through, and what so many real people like her went through.

I've told stories about Koreans and been told by white editors that they thought I was falling back on cliches. I don't believe they'd have told me that if my name was Pak Nam Won. I think they assume lack of authenticity on my part. Most white editors have no idea what authenticity in a Korean character would look like. One editor responded to a story by telling me he asked his brother who has been to Korea if he thought a Korean would act the way I made her act in a story, and the brother said no. How do I get anywhere with that kind of refusal to accept an ethos I've actually worked to earn?

The winning book

I'm now the lead fiction editor for the Washington Writers' Publishing House, the small press that published my own book a few years ago. We publish one poetry book and one fiction book a year. We recently picked this year's winning fiction book, The Rest of the World, by Adam Schwartz.

Like many presses, ours is always looking to try to bring some fairness to publishing by actively looking to publish writers of color. However, we also run a blind contest, meaning we don't know anything about the writers when we're reading their work. We have to pick based on what's on the page. When I was reading Adam's book, I was blown away by a few of the stories. Even though this year had the best crop of books since I started judging the contest three years ago, I knew his was the winner. Four of six judges agreed with me. The two who didn't still thought it was tied for first or in second.

The stories are largely about young people of color in Baltimore, most of whom are living in tough circumstances. I knew the stories rang true, as did the occasional use of dialect, because I've spent enough time with the kids Mrs. Heretic used to teach in Baltimore to have a decent sense of authenticity. I was really excited, because I thought we had a book by a person of color that was a stunner.

I was stunned myself when I realized, after picking the book, that it was written by a white guy. But that white guy came by his authenticity through hard work. He's been a teacher in Baltimore for twenty-two years. I had the chance to meet with Adam recently. His love for his kids is real, and that's what powered his fiction. He has an ear for the language his kids use because he loves them and he pays attention.

I had picked the book blind, so I knew I had to pick it even after I knew who Adam was. But I was worried. Would anyone criticize the press for an American Dirt kind of publication?

It wasn't an idle concern. Adam has recently faced something like that. He got a story (one of the stories that's in the book) accepted for publication in a pretty good journal. The editor said she loved it and he was all set to go. But then, she showed the story to a "sensitivity reader" who found problems on every page. The reader thought Adam was preying on negative stereotypes of poor, black kids. I've read the story. I don't understand how having a story with a young, black man in tough circumstances is the same as trafficking in negative stereotypes. And I don't believe a black writer would have to face these questions about authenticity.

Adam shouldn't have to, either. He's a teacher of young, black kids, many of whom have stories that would crush your heart to hear. That's not white imagination. It's black reality, a reality Adam lives in and does his part every day to try to turn around. Mrs. Heretic still has never recovered from teaching in Baltimore, because her poor, empathetic heart couldn't stop sharing in the trauma of her students, until it became her trauma, too. Adam's not an outsider to the communities he writes about. He's a vital part of those communities.

That incident with the journal wasn't the only time he's faced these kinds of accusations. At a writer's conference, he workshopped the same story. He told me about a fourth of the class was openly hostile to it, calling it "voyeuristic" and an example of the "white gaze." (If there's one thing that's worse for literary criticism than Twitter, it's mediocre intellects who only half understand the jargon of literary theory.) One person cornered him after the session to tell him he shouldn't write about people of color.

This was all for a story whose underlying main plot point came right from a student Adam had. This wasn't a white guy watching rap music videos about gangsters on his couch and letting his imagination run wild. In the words Luis Urrea used, Adam "buried that kid." Adam earned his stories by living within both physical and emotional hearing distance of their origins, then applying a caring and intelligent mind to shaping them.

All that matters is if the story is good

The most-read post I've ever written on this blog was about Danielle Evans's short story "Boys Go to Jupiter," about a white girl who wears a Confederate flag bikini. The third most-read post I've ever written was about Danielle Evans's "Richard of York Gave Battle in Vain," about a couple of white, emotionally challenged women. Nobody questions whether she ought to be writing about white people as a black writer. Nobody questions whether she is exploiting negative white stereotypes.

The reason nobody questions Evans isn't some reverse racism. It's because Evans absolutely killed those two stories. Her authority to write about white women comes from writing them really well, nothing else.

I'd like the same authority for myself when I write about the people I do, including some people of color. I don't believe there's any kind of reverse racist code keeping me from it, but I do think that for people like me, trying to get our foot in the door, we face a lot of people who don't know the difference between fake authenticity and real, so they rely on the identity of the author to help them. They will make assumptions. There's a reason Michael Derrick Hudson couldn't get a poem published until he said his name was Yi-Fen Chou. Again, I don't think it's an affirmative action program as much as it's befuddled editors, looking for something they haven't seen before, swamped with work that largely seems of roughly equal quality, and looking for some kind of clue to help them out.

I don't want to be mistaken as saying I think the industry is stacked against white men. It obviously isn't. There are numbers to back that up. But getting into the industry is tough for a white guy writing particular kinds of work. I'm as disturbed as anyone when the wrong novel by a white writer writing about people of color gets support it doesn't deserve. It's bad for me. A novel like American Dirt getting unfairly praised, supported, and rewarded--and then lambasted--will only make the top of the industry less likely to pick works like this. The bottom of the industry is likely to follow suit, in a crude, robotic, and likely not very thoughtful way. (Adam Schwartz pitched a similar book to the one we're publishing to an editor before. She said she loved it, but "couldn't think of publishing it in this climate.")

This isn't a manifesto of white male grievance. It's not Matthew Binder's piece. I want to see publishing (if it survives at all) pushing more stories by people of color, not for abstract reasons, but because people of color are so often the right people to tell stories. I don't believe white men are in trouble, or unfairly pushed out of writing. This isn't about any of those things. It's about how gatekeepers pick crap, and how this affects people at the bottom. It's about how for every American Dirt, a book written by someone without the bona fides to tell it that gets unjustified support, there's an Adam Schwartz, being told he doesn't deserve to tell a story he clearly does. It's about how quickly a rational, nuanced discussion of the role of white writers in telling stories of people of color beomes "shut up, cracker," on social media, and how social media then becomes the only version of the discussion that exists.

At the bottom of all this is the quest for the hot take, the spicy take-down. Hot takes have been an unfortunate part of academic life for centuries, as critics writing about literature people have been reading and commenting on for hundreds of years try to find something new to say. Twitter is just a very condensed version of academic nonsense. But unlike academic work, which most people ignore, Twitter drives sales, which means that as vapid as the discourse on Twitter is, publishers can't afford to ignore it. We all have a part to play in not feeding into talk that's more for public consumption than serious talk about serious issues. When we feed that beast, we help contribute to the production of more bad literature from a shaky and uncertain industry. More importantly, we bring literature down to the level of pop culture, or worse, a cheap imitation of wannabe pop culture, every bit as pathetic as a church trying to look relevant by running commercials about how hip it is.