I don’t have a pithy title for this, sorry. And to be honest, I didn’t want to write it. I still don’t. I saw Lionel Shriver had an interview in the Times about ‘this entire hoo-ha’ and I thought, no, I just don’t have the energy for anything more to do with her. I read it anyway, because I’m a masochist. I’m responding here for a number of reasons: 1) it’s garbage worth refuting 2) I don’t want her to have the last word, and 3) I read a couple of unrelated (yet tangential) pieces which demonstrated anew how important this subject is. I know further press will only help her so I’m not sending this anywhere. I’m writing this for me, and for every other POC who is too damn tired. To that end, I’m going to use a somewhat problematic ‘we’ throughout. Forgive me.
Let’s go through this shit heap of an interview, bit by bit (with no disrespect intended to Nate Hopper, who did a valiant job attempting to get Shriver to see reason.) In response to criticism of her speech, she says this:
Nowhere did Yassmin or any of the other critics, including myself, suggest personal injury. Nor did any of us say that due to an imagined injury, we couldn’t discuss it further. In fact, despite the blatant and insulting stupidity of her speech, we all got up and attacked the ideas at work. But apparently none of that counted, she didn’t read “much of it” anyway, only “bits and pieces”, and was content instead to dismiss us without regard to our discourse. We have to be able to attack ideas — just not her own, clearly.
I’m going to break the next little chunk of her obstinance into small pieces so we can unpack it. Beginning with:
Apparently if white people aren’t allowed to write ethnic characters (which, again, no one is saying, but assume for a second that’s true), no one would read books about people who are different. This is such a perfect little Freudian slip. In Shriver’s world, do people of colour not publish books? Actually, it’s true that very few do, but she only made this point by accident. In an industry where nearly 80% of the workers are straight white women, this is not a surprise. In any case, even if everyone was only allowed to write fiction featuring their own cultures — such a horrible, dystopic vision I know — to say you wouldn’t be able to read books about people who are different is ridiculous. You’d have that choice, it would just be written by those different people. Shocking, I know.
For the millionth time, no one’s saying that should be the case, I’m just pointing out the logical fallacies in her borderline incoherent arguments. She goes on to say, [then]:
Why would anyone want to be members of a collective? In this case, none of us were given a choice, lady. You become aware of that very early on as a kid. How you’ll always be on the outside, and for a time when you’re there, looking in, you want nothing more than to be in, until you notice all the other people outside, how alike yet wonderfully different you all are, and you take comfort in each other. There is comfort in numbers, and there is comfort in being seen, in being known. As for it being in our interest, of course it is! What are unions if not examples of the power of collectives?
But there’s more to it than that. I remember sitting down with one of my cousins, one day. He was considerably older than me and grew up in a different, wealthier branch of the family. We were meeting for the first time, in a trendy restaurant, in a trendy area. He used to be an investment banker and was now managing a hedge fund or something like that. I jokingly mentioned that all I could see were white people, as I was uncomfortable in my old bulky raincoat; I looked and felt poor, out of place. He was startled. ‘I hadn’t noticed,’ he said. ‘I don’t look at it like that — I’m not an outsider here. I live around the corner, and no one treats me any different. But I don’t go anywhere else, I like to stay here, in my bubble.’
I thought, that’s because you’re rich. I thought, that’s because wealth is its own language and so long as you’re speaking it loudly enough, you can live in that little bubble and run away from your culture. Pretend it doesn’t exist. I thought, my god I hope he stays wealthy, hope his bubble is never burst. So, despite what I said earlier, it’s true that you can — sorta — unchoose your identity. Class is the great re-maker of people, though sometimes the new labels don’t stick so well, or the writing gets faded, or people don’t see it in the dark of a concert, and suddenly, you’re back where you were as a kid. On the outside. Wishing you knew the names of the people there still.
And therefore ignore them? The fuck? Are you saying that if our culture isn’t in your hands, you’ll straight up ignore it? Like you wouldn’t read about different people anymore if white people weren’t writing it? Are you for real? Everywhere in this interview and this speech, Shriver sets up false dichotomies, false choices and this is a perfect example of that. As if you’d have the gall to say you would ignore us if we didn’t let you exploit us (which, incidentally, isn’t a choice available to us anyway, because as has already been noted, the industry is run by white people, so even her outrage is bullshit).
Nah. It’s really not, not least of which is because it’s not fucking possible. You might get to wear colour and pain as a fictional mask, but we don’t get to wear your privilege. We don’t get your access, or your power, we get published at a fraction of the rate, we get reviewed at a fraction of the rate, we are disproportionately poor, disproportionately under-educated, unhealthy, dying earlier, unfairly surveilled, you name it. For some stats on the literature front, look here. For some real-life stats, look here. This is by no means comprehensive, just what I happened to re-read today.
I’m elaborating on these fronts, because Shriver actually says “why are the people in the minority voiceless?” And then goes on to say there’s nothing stopping us from publishing our stories. “There are all kinds of publishers”, guys! We got this! Why don’t we got this already? Silly minorities! As a microcosm of the issue, let’s take a quick peek at a recent survey of SFF publications.
I’ma trust y’all and say this doesn’t need expanding on. Okay, moving on to the next nugget of nonsense:
Sweet zombie Jesus. It’s one way because of colonialism, and we grew up in your culture, not the other way around. English is my first language, by the fucking way, but also, I didn’t have a choice in it, and this is an especially bullshit example for you to pull out of your magic hat — sorry, sombrero of bigotry — given how many of us have heard “fucking speak English ya dirty [insert racist epithet here]”. Or heard a (barely) more civilised example of it spouted by senators. Various right-wing governments have wanted to make it the national language, both here and in the States. The point here is also that even if all of us didn’t grow up in a racist white colonial culture, and we all wrote white characters, there would still be lifetimes-worth of all-white literature and film and music and TV, so it would hardly matter because the balance in representation still wouldn’t be skewed.
It matters the other way around for what should by now be obvious reasons.
“One of my big problems with identity politics is that I reject their idea of identity. I think that they’re embracing a prison. And I want everyone to get out.”
Now we get to the crux of it. The prison. The inside and the outside. Shriver isn’t wrong here, she’s correct in identifying the prison, and it’s a perfect analogy. I have often thought that it must be truly horrifying to be a white person today. Imagine waking up one day and realising that, for the entirety of your life, without your knowing it, you had been a prison guard. And that behind the doors in the hallway you’d been walking through, whistling and chatting with pals, there had been bodies, so many bodies, killed, or just shut away, voices and histories muffled, distorted, and ultimately forgotten.
There is a certain uncomplicated ease in being wronged (one of the few available to people of colour, generally). For the privileged but socially and politically aware white person, however, this one aspect is hideously complicated and uncomfortable. How do you reckon with it? I have no fucking idea. Sure wish one of you would write about it. But anyway, back to the prison. Here’s the weird but pertinent thing about prison in real life: once you’ve been in, society forever treats you differently, so even if we did ‘get out’, via class access for example, you can never get away from the tag ‘convict’.
Another thing I have read and heard — and I’m uncertain how much of this is true, so if someone has more info on it, shoot me a link please — is that many long-term prisoners prefer it on the inside. It makes sense to them in a way the world doesn’t anymore. They’re accepted there in a way the world doesn’t accept them.
So here we have a prison guard looking in, saying, why won’t you come out? (As if all the institutionalised barriers would magically fall away thereafter). And we’re all looking out saying fuck off, we’ve found each other here, we know each other here. Look how well we’ve decorated the joint. My uncle hand-stitched that rug there. My aunty painted that mural. My cousin is singing these hymns. And you want to take that rug, that mural, that song, or at least the stylings, and profit from it while calling it an ‘exchange’. (Like prison populations too, it goes without saying we can do great harm to each other. We are not one homogenous entity).
Is there a danger in sticking to the prison, however much a home we’ve made of it? Maybe. We’re not even close to having to answer that question, however. Putting aside the belaboured metaphors, this is all another way of one white person saying ‘we’re in a post-racial society, do whatever you want’ and us saying, ‘no, we’re really fucking not, we’re still bombing Arab countries, the mess made of Africa is still being ignored and the US is about to elect a white supremacist, all before we even get into societal inequalities here, so stop fucking saying it just because you want it to be true so you don’t have to reckon with your own failures.’
There is also a point in saying that actually, however much of a segregation, of a prison these identity labels were meant to be, they have been turned around into a force of empowerment and actually, what’s outside of it, this vague homogenous ‘whiteness’, is pretty fucking shit and maybe we don’t want a bar of it. For more on this, I’d like to turn to one of the articles I mentioned earlier, which comes to us via Australian national treasure and Bunurong man, Bruce Pascoe. Bruce highlights a passage from one of his books that’s illuminating and I urge you all to read it.
The point is essentially that maybe we want something better, something new, or something old, before things became corrupted and distorted by imperial conquests and the pursuits of empire. White people are forever asking me online why we’re not dealing with the problems inherent in our own cultures and I always think, jesusfuckingchrist, maybe if we weren’t so busy trying to survive, trying to keep you from erasing all the good in them and us, we’d be able to deal with those flaws, the problems in our communities. When will that reprieve come?
On Racism
Inevitably, we come now to racism, and the fear of it. Whenever someone says something “controversial” (read: bigoted or racist) on the subject of cultural differences (I say cultural because as has tirelessly been pointed out, race is a construct, a man-made prison), white people bemoan the power of the word racist and how you can’t just throw it around. Frankly, I find this fucking baffling. Because it means that before they were called it, they thought they weren’t. This is the height of craziness. Because guess what? I’m racist. And you’re racist. We are all fucking racist. And not in a “we-make-fun-of-people-for-their-differences-way”, I mean in a “we-live-in-fucking-colonies-predicated-on-the-destruction-of-black-indigenous-bodies-which-is-still-invested-in-their-displacement-disempowerment-and-death” way.
In light of that, being injured because you stupidly put on a sombrero and said it and its cultural meanings were yours to do as you pleased with, then got called out for it, is a fucking laugh. We live in a racist system and part of that living has to, surely, involve reckoning with your part in it. I grew up in a racist, sexist, homophobic, transphobic society and guess what? You can’t live in a shit-filled pool without being dirty, people. Without breathing some of it in. As Junot Diaz once said, and I’m paraphrasing here, patriarchal colonialism is really damn good at outsourcing its hate. Getting us to do the work of hating our bodies, our culture, our sexuality, our gender or lack thereof. We take it all in.
This is not something you can get away from by writing woke tweets, or articles, or whatever. Undoing generational damage is a lifetime’s work. Trying to unthink, unlearn these poisons. I don’t succeed even half as often as I’d like, and sometimes, when I think of the work ahead, I am driven to despair. And yeah, I fuck it up. And yeah, you’re allowed to fuck it up too. What I’m not okay with is you pretending none of this shit is happening, that none of these doors are closed, that this ongoing, living history is dead and done, that you are not racist. You are fucking racist. Deal with it.
In Fucking Conclusion
Write whatever you want, people. One of the things I tried to say in my original criticism of Shriver is that your life should be full of diversity anyway, because people of colour are everywhere; forget about trying to put on our fictional hats, and actually engage with us in person. Fix your life before you try to “fix” your fiction. Because if you only have white friends, I’m not interested in what you “imagine” of our lives. One of the other things I tried to clarify about Yassmin’s original piece was the ethical question around access, which people were ignoring in favour of sensational nonsense. This is a question you need to ask yourself. How you answer it is your own miserable business, and I’m not really interested in it.
Why? Because I fundamentally don’t believe there will be systemic change of the kind I dream about. I have no faith in you. None. Demographics are changing and minorities won’t be minorities for too much longer so you might think I should hold out hope that time alone will work in our favour, but time is also against us, thanks to the fact that we’ve set the world on fire and the powerful elites are all gleefully, stupidly invested in pretending the flames aren’t real. Much like Shriver loves to pretend very real inequalities don’t disproportionately affect the lives and careers of people of colour, both in literature and every other field. So I’m not actually asking any of you precious white writers to do anything, to change anything, to even tweak your imagination. I’m just asking you to think about it. Ask yourself the question, at the very fucking least. Reckon with your place in the prison.
OK I’m done, good night.
Further readings:
They Pretend To Be Us While Pretending We Don’t Exist
12 Fundamentals of Writing “the Other” And the Self
Decolonise, not diversify
Who decides who gets to be a writer?
Self-Portrait of the Artist As Ungrateful Black Writer
