Telling Another's Story

I was recently introduced to a play called Gloria by Branden Jacobs-Jenkins. The first act follows the inner workings of a magazine publisher, showing stereotypical work interactions: small talk, snide remarks, and bickering over who gets to write the big article about a deceased singer. The mediocrity of their day is broken when one coworker—awkward, friendless, office-freak Gloria—snaps and shoots several of her coworkers before killing herself. Act two follows the survivors as they try to put their lives back together and deal with their trauma, while at the same time the whole office—even coworkers who weren’t there that day—scrambles to make a profit by publishing the tragic story of what happened. Carrying the tension of the deceased songwriter over into the tension of deceased Gloria, Jenkins poses a great question of our time: whose stories do we really have the right to tell?

With society’s growing awareness of cultural appropriation, tabloids, reporters, and the internet are all very quick to call out any insensitivity toward cultural distinctions, to the point that any cultural experience or adornment outside one’s own is sacrosanct and unavailable to explore by outsiders. The line for what constitutes cultural appropriation is hazy and leaves many thinking that perhaps trying to engage with other cultures is just not worth the effort. Why try if you’re just going to get vilified, right? Especially as writers, we are left with a lot of questions. Can I write the story of an Asian if I’m white? Can I write about a Jewish boy if I’m a Catholic woman? Can I even write the other sex at all without “appropriating” or misrepresenting?

Let us take a step back and ask ourselves, why do we tell stories? Stories are how we understand our world, recognize patterns, and find meaning in the stories we live. Stories are what bind us together in the common human experience and remind us that we are not alone. To be a writer is to carry, in part, the weight of this responsibility.

We choose our stories based on the message we want to explore with our readers. Do we want to show them beauty or truth or forgiveness? These themes and emotional needs are not only found in our culture or our life experience; they flow across all cultural or religious differences and give us a bond to those who have lived experiences we never will. They tie me to the powerful businessman in Hong Kong, the schoolteacher in Dubai, the baseball player in Los Angeles—all living lives the others can only imagine. Yet each life is a story to be told. And the story I want to tell may read more poignantly from one of their voices, their grocery store, their backyard. In our diverse world, choosing to write from diverse viewpoints should increase empathy and an ability to see beyond ourselves for me and my readers.

So what stories am I allowed to tell? Can I write a story about the baseball player, even though I have never lived that experience? The question is not of legality—there are no laws telling me I cannot—but one of integrity. Integrity is the key ingredient I must bring to the table if I want to write anything that is not strictly autobiographical. I as the writer have a responsibility to present characters who are not stereotypes, to do my research and be accurate, and to not merely exploit their differences for my personal gain.

I am responsible to involve cultures that are foreign to me in the development of their stories. Stories do not occur in a vacuum—they are always about someone and always affect someone. The people I depict (as a cultural group) should have a say in how they are depicted, and it is my job to interact with the culture or context I portray to respect their many voices. Because, even if I am the one writing it, it is still their story. A story written from the perspective of a black baseball player that sounds like a blackface mockery has missed the mark.

When we tell another’s story, we cannot extricate their full voice and replace it with something flat and thin. Our purpose, hopefully, is not to take stories away from someone else or dominate their place in the market. We write to open up new avenues of storytelling, to tell stories that have not been told before and stretch our readers’ boundaries. We speak to create a space for others to speak also.

When the public reads my work, I will be responsible to their inevitable opinions. But my ultimate responsibility as a story teller is to tell.

Author Grace Paley received negative reactions to stories she wrote “in a black voice” though she was white, and she responded with wisdom:

But what’s a writer for? The whole point is to put yourself into other lives, other heads—writers have always done that. If you screw up, so someone will tell you, that’s all... Men have so often written about women without knowing the reality of their lives, and worse, without being interested in that daily reality.[i]

To put another person’s story on the page or screen is the calling of a writer. And we indeed need to broaden the diversity of our writers that are published and celebrated. There are people from across the state or the country or the globe who look to our stories to see themselves and interpret the world. And they deserve to hear the stories of their lives from their eyes, not just ours. But the answer is not to restrict storytelling to only one’s own identity group; the answer is to tell diverse stories better.

[i] Castellani, Christopher. "Who Gets to Tell Your Story?" The New Republic. January 27, 2016. Accessed May 30, 2019. https://newrepublic.com/article/128397/gets-tell-story.