I think this is less post than rant.
I read an interesting post on Racialicious last week, from the point of view of an MFA student who has realized that writers of color are, largely, not being taught to new practitioners of the craft. Even blockbuster authors like Toni Morrison are relegated to Ethnic Studies curricula:
To me it feels like writers of colour are being made homecoming queen, but never getting invited to a single party. Lit of colour is celebrated in the awards circle, yet its continuing ghettoisation despite the prizes is puzzling and depressing.
Is the literary colour divide wider than we thought?
This is certainly food for thought. It’s one thing (a great thing!) to win awards and sell novels. It’s another thing entirely to be, as the author puts it, “ghettoized”. Very telling was a conversation she relates:
In conversation with Mat Johnson earlier this year, he told me that he likes teaching at VONA* because he feels that sometimes writers of colour don’t get as much out of creative writing workshops as their non-POC peers. This is because the level of critique they get from said peers is thin, Johnson says, with the justification that people are loathe to critique writing that describes an experience they themselves haven’t had.
This really, really threw me for a loop. This is advanced as a reason not to read or critique writing by authors of color — because the reader hasn’t shared the author’s experience?
Do some people only read books that confirm their own experiences and world views? Of course. But it’s just lazy to assume that a book can’t possibly jibe with one’s own experience just because the author is not exactly like the reader.
Case in point: The Brief Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao, Junot Díaz’s Pulitzer Prize-winning novel. It begins in a Dominican-American family in the 1970s, and weaves in and out of time, place, and perspective. I have no personal connections to that community, and yet I could not shake the feeling that Diaz was telling huge chunks of my own story.
But I really don’t need to come up with specific examples, do I? Because the argument that books by writers from other cultures are inaccessible is a flimsy excuse for exclusion. After all, there are entire genres that depend on creating a world within a completely alien culture. (See: science fiction, fantasy, historical fiction, et cetera.) Also…AARGH!
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