Write the Other Well

A conversation about identity, confrontation, and the righteous mind.

All people are “other” to me, in some varying degree. Some I agree with; some I vehemently do not. That disagreement may regard what to eat, sexual mores, or laws we want to keep or dispose of. It might look like race, gender, sex, class, resources, religion, or nationality. In our partisan age of identity politics and philosophies, we have become adept at skewering each other over our differences and boiling people down to the bones of their appearance and group affiliations. We make a reduction sauce out of the complexity of human experience, expression, and ethics.

So the question I ask today is how do we represent others well in our stories?

In full disclosure, I don’t always get it right. I live with four people. They are my closest family, knit to my genes and soul, and yet I get their stories wrong all the time. I make assumptions. I misread. I mischaracterize. I project my desires and experiences onto them. I make power plays to get my way.

I also have an identical twin sister, with whom I shared a womb and eighteen years of close proximity. We often find we are thinking similar things or going through similar experiences in the same timeframe even though we live seven hundred miles apart. But I get her story wrong too. If I misrepresent those with whom I am closest and who share my race, economics, and faith, how can we possibly write about those whose core values and systems are antagonistic to ours?

Some say the answer is to avoid representing anyone other than those with whom I have direct experience. Others say avoid telling a story that rightly belongs in the mouth or pen of a minority or oppressed voice. And still others say don’t exploit, don’t flatten, and don’t appropriate the identity and experience of another.

All of these answers are helpful, but I believe they ultimately fall short.

This article will be far from a definitive answer to this pervasive question, but rather a discussion to ignite thought about being artists and humans in God’s good world. Because just as I must try to get my family’s stories imperfectly right so we can love and grow and live in harmony, we must try to write the other well—not pleasantly (story is about conflict not accolade), not even always authentically (I promise we’re all much less interesting in real life than on the page; artifice can be good)—but with dignity, good intent, and a mind open to wonder.

Steal, Exploit, and Appropriate

Naturally, writers and the “other” have barriers between them. No mind reader or person-to-person telepathy has yet been invented, so truly getting someone’s experience right firsthand is impossible. We all experience the world differently, with different privileges, reactions, education, and bodies. Different situations and symbols mean different things to different people. And differences cause fear and conflict. But part of storytelling is getting on the same page with someone else and have our brains engage together—as author, reader, and fictional characters.

Identity politics asks that we refrain from impersonating anyone’s culture or experience. But fiction, by necessity, steals, exploits, and appropriates other people’s idiosyncrasies. The best storytellers often spend hours and years observing the behavior, language, and body movements of others to create the appearance of authentic (but fictional) people and creature characters. When we limit what each person can write, especially when we limit the perspectives and identities an author can adopt to only those the author lives, we make a fiction “in danger of becoming so hedged, so circumscribed, so tippy-toe, that we’d indeed be better off not writing the anodyne drivel to begin with.”[1] And if we take this idea to the extreme, we are left with only memoir.

Some critics have encouraged authors to be careful they are “representing characters, not using them for [the] plot” or “exploiting” them.[2] On the face of it, the argument sounds noble, but iconoclast writer Lionel Shriver calls this a “false dichotomy.” Responding to a reviewer’s comments on white male author Chris Cleave’s book Little Bee, a story about a young Nigerian girl, Shriver notes, “of course he’s using them for his plot! How could he not? They are his characters, to be manipulated at his whim, to fulfill whatever purpose he cares to put them to.” And again, “Of course he’s exploiting her. It’s his book, and he made her up. The character is his creature, to be exploited up a storm. Yet the reviewer chides that ‘special care should be taken with a story that’s not implicitly yours to tell.’”[3]

I understand the reviewer’s caution. In a world where the haves take from the have-nots and the privileged few fill all the publishing slots, we should be cautioned to avoid taking what isn’t ours. But whose story is it? Isn’t it the story of imagination? And should the onus be on the writer to get an entire culture exactly right or on the readers and publishers to reject poor portrayals that paint with reduction sauce rather than expand understanding of the complex other? Perhaps the onus should be on all three as we work together to discover one another? But we need freedom to make mistakes. By all means, call us out for the misrepresentations, write poor reviews, but don’t bury a book before it hits the shelves because of identity politics alone.

Fiction writers must write about others in ways that steal, exploit, and appropriate; we can explore identity and try to bridge the divide between cultures and groups no other way. Without writing about the other, our books will continue to have homogenous characters, segregate society, and fail to represent the diverse and rich people in our cities, communities, and rural areas. While we absolutely need more diverse writers and less-privileged voices to show majority culture its blind spots, even the less-privileged must write imperfectly about the other.

Become Aware of Your Righteous Mind

Perhaps what is needed is for writers to do a better job seeing and hearing the authentic other than we have in the past. We have greater access to global cultures and a diverse society than our predecessors. Our era is ripe for pushback against power structures that have defined whose story is worth telling and which characters can be protagonists. But we will create better characters only if we can learn to understand them on their terms rather than ours.

According to ethics psychologist, Dr. Jonathan Haidt, all people have a “righteous mind” that constantly calculates rightness and wrongness. We are wired to judge morality—and do so on a daily basis through intuitive cognition—but we don’t all use the same ethical grids. Western, educated, well-off liberals tend to see “a world full of separate objects, rather than relationships” (autonomy), use a morality that protects “individuals and their individual rights” and emphasize “concerns about harm and fairness.”[4] These ideas have arisen through our Western philosophical tradition and the development of our democratic ideals. Most of the rest of the world, including religious and conservative parts of Western societies, have chosen a sociocentric focus, “placing the needs of groups and institutions first, and subordinating the need of individuals.”[5] These groups have a broader moral grid that includes ethics of community and divinity.

It’s easy to see how these groups arrive at different answers for what is moral and immoral, but less easy to be “released from partisan anger”—from being “committed to reaching the conclusion that righteous anger demands: we are right, they are wrong,” Haidt says.[6] He adds,

Moral matrices bind people together and blind them to the coherence, or even existence, of other matrices. This makes it very difficult for people to consider the possibility that there might really be more than one form of moral truth, or more than one valid framework for judging people or running a society.[7]

This is not to say that all moral matrices are equally valid, good, or able to be true at the same time. Neither does understanding my own righteous mind’s blindness prescribe embracing a moral relativism; Haidt merely describes the reality of our diverse world and how we can be morally repulsed in opposite ways yet all be employing reasonable thinking and seeking after good. If we as writers are going to represent each other and our competing viewpoints and experiences well, we need to be able to see and respect the differing moral matrices of others—and why they exist.

Fell the Exasperating Barriers

We must also understand that insight into others from a “drone-like” perspective never carries the weight of experiential knowledge and connection with a people. D. Watkins recently published We Speak for Ourselves: A Word from Forgotten Black America. In it, he explores—despite so many books on race in America—why “things never really change for most black people”:

These tellers define the black experience from a drone-like perspective—they have all the insight but strangely no connection to the black people they claim they are fighting for. The primary reason is that their books and language never include the very people who live the poor black experience every day.[8]

Knowing about a people group is not the same thing as experiential connection. When we look at a people group from afar, we are prone to make two mistakes: to define all people with that identity only by that identity and to create one homogenous story for all people within a cultural group. Fiction and film writers have long been guilty of both these mistakes. We often need a shorthand to convey character, and building the other into stereotypes is a ready temptation.

Storytellers must shun the reduction that says group membership equals full identity; authentic representation requires complexity beyond group identity. Much of our commercial genre literature and film leans toward providing the accepted tropes that already sell rather than exploring the fullness of what it means to be human in different contexts and circumstances. Through well-developed characters, we must push back on this narrow definition. As Shriver writes,

Membership of a larger group is not an identity. Being Asian is not an identity. Being gay is not an identity. Being deaf, blind, or wheelchair-bound is not an identity, nor is being economically deprived. I reviewed a novel recently that I had regretfully to give a thumbs-down, though it was terribly well intended; its heart was in the right place. But in relating the Chinese immigrant experience in America, the author put forward characters that were mostly Chinese. That is, that’s sort of all they were: Chinese. Which isn’t enough.

At the same time, we must also refuse to think we have defined an entire group by encountering a single story of someone in that group. As Americanah author Chimamanda Ngozie Adichie says in her Ted Talk, “The Danger of a Single Story,” when she read about Charles Manson, she didn’t think that all white men were serial murderers because she had been exposed to so many other stories about white men as a young student in Nigeria. But most Americans have a single story about what it is to be African (continent), let alone Nigerian (country).[9]

While we tell the story of a single character, we must aspire to broaden the complex story of a people group from what has been told before. Because

“the spirit of good fiction is one of exploration, generosity, curiosity, audacity, and compassion. Even if novels and short stories only [allow us to escape the confines of our own heads] by creating an illusion, fiction helps to fell the exasperating barriers between us, and for a short while allows us to behold the astonishing reality of other people.”[10]

Confront Cultures Core-to-Core

During his military service in Korea and the writing of his first novel, The Chosen, Chaim Potok stumbled upon what he later called “core-to-core confrontation: individuals raised in the heart of one culture encountering alternate readings of the human experience that come to them from the heart of a possibly adversary culture.”[11] Raised in Brooklyn in a close-knit orthodox Jewish community, Potok received a well-pronounced morality matrix, from dietary laws to acceptable uses of personal time to a divine ethic that set apart a people group. Then, as he served as a chaplain in Korea, “there my neat world came undone in a cacophony of dilemmas and ambiguities. Farther from home than I had ever been, from that comforting world of childhood and community, I began to wonder who I was and what my culture and heritage meant to me.[12]

He began to ask the question, “Why are my answers better than those of another culture?”[13] In humbling his righteous mind, he was able to explore the way others live and think and find value where he had never known it before. He called this “culture compartmentalization,” that which “enables you to take on an antagonistic system of values and to use that part of it with which you feel most comfortable, while letting you ignore those elements toward which you feel the greatest measure of antagonism.”[14]

In today’s ideological climate, Potok’s culture compartmentalization might be decried as offensive appropriation, yet the discovery of the beauty in an antagonistic system of values and embracing what you can from it is exactly what will expand our capacity to respect one another and live in harmony. It’s how we find out that we are not the center of the universe and that we have fewer unquestionable answers to the mysteries of humanity than we thought. It’s how we hold our faith and values with open hands and trust that the best and truest of what we believe will always rise to the top when confronted by other systems.

Cultural confrontation creates tension, of course. As core systems conflict, “sometimes the tension gets out of hand, and there is bloodshed.” But “sometimes it results in creativity—books, music, art—and gold is given us to mine forever.”[15]

Fiction and other forms of art are the ways we try on another person’s hat[16] or wear someone’s eyes and shoes for a little while, and so we must. We try to get into the mind and heart and put those on too, even though those parts of the ensemble are often a tight fit. Sometimes, if we are lucky, we might be able to slide an arm through the sleeve of a mind and a finger into the pocket of a heart. Our understanding will be far from perfect but better than before we tried. When we step out of our own clothing for a bit, we gain a sense of bagginess or tightness of another person’s garments. We become aware of how scratchy or soft is the cloth they wear. We allow our neat little worlds to come undone so we can become better people.

Act

When it comes right down to it, I suspect the current pushback against perceived cultural appropriation is not really a criticism of fiction at all but a protest against the real problem: injustice between identity groups, our inability and failure to love one another well and see to the best interest of someone else as much as myself.

We’re not really arguing over fiction or food or hairstyles and dress; we’re fighting over the diminishment of people, of people being unseen, of power disparity, of generational injustice and oppression, and of talking about the problems but doing nothing sacrificial to solve them. Imagination is not the problem; hurting others by considering them with less dignity than they deserve is.

We will never solve this true dilemma with drone-like observation; we will not even solve it by reading and writing; we must step into other communities and spend time with the people. (And this incarnational presence extends to mentoring writers in under-represented groups so they can add their voices to the body of literature that moves us and pries open our minds.) Everyone must do his or her part if we really want change in our partisan, oppressive narrative. W. Somerset Maugham once wrote, “Art—if it is to be reckoned as one of the great values of life—must teach men humility, tolerance, wisdom, and magnanimity. The value of art is not beauty, but right action.”[17] So perhaps the most important answer to how shall we write well about the “other” is that if we aspire to write, we must also act. As we see the other, may we love one another.

Notes

[1] Lionel Shriver, “Lionel Shriver’s Full Speech: ‘I Hope the Concept of Cultural Appropriation Is a Passing Fad,’” The Guardian, September 13, 2016, sec. Opinion, https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2016/sep/13/lionel-shrivers-full-speech-i-hope-the-concept-of-cultural-appropriation-is-a-passing-fad.

[2] Unknown critic quoted in Shriver, “Lionel Shriver’s Full Speech.”

[3] Shriver, “Lionel Shriver’s Full Speech.”

[4] Jonathan Haidt, The Righteous Mind: Why Good People Are Divided by Politics and Religion (New York: Vintage Books, 2013), Ch. 5, http://jeffco.axis360.baker-taylor.com/Title?itemid=0009839976.

[5] Haidt, The Righteous Mind, Ch. 5.

[6] Haidt, The Righteous Mind, Ch. 5.

[7] Haidt, The Righteous Mind, Ch. 5.

[8] D. Watkins, We Speak for Ourselves: A Word from Forgotten Black America (New York: Atria Books, 2019), 4.

[9] Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie, The Danger of a Single Story, accessed June 19, 2019, https://www.ted.com/talks/chimamanda_adichie_the_danger_of_a_single_story.

[10] Shriver, “Lionel Shriver’s Full Speech.”

[11] Chaim Potok, “Forward to 25th Anniversary Edition of The Chosen,” The Chosen, 50th Anniversary edition (New York: Simon & Schuster, 2016), loc. 4286.

[12] Potok, “Forward to 25th Anniversary Edition,” loc. 4236.

[13] Chaim Potok, “Culture Confrontation in Urban America: A Writer’s Beginnings,” The Chosen, 50th Anniversary edition (New York: Simon & Schuster, 2016), loc. 4434.

[14] Chaim Potok, “The Culture Highways We Travel,” The Chosen, 50th Anniversary edition (New York: Simon & Schuster, 2016), loc. 4339.

[15] Potok, “Culture Confrontation in Urban America: A Writer’s Beginnings,” loc. 4434.

[16] Lionel Shriver, “Lionel Shriver’s Full Speech.”

[17] W. Somerset Maugham, Mr. Maugham Himself (New York: Doubleday, 1954), 673.