Intersections: Clash of cultures hits the writing world
Last month, Lionel Shriver spoke at a writer’s festival earlier about her problems with the accusation of cultural appropriation in the world of writing, setting off a debate that is still going strong about “who gets to write what.”
“The kind of fiction we are ‘allowed’ to write is 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,” she said. “I am hopeful that the concept of ‘cultural appropriation’ is a passing fad.”
I haven’t been able to stop thinking about what was said and the many comments, as well as op-eds that followed, especially because, as an Armenian American, I am actually part of the ethnic group she directly referenced in her speech and novel “We Need to Talk About Kevin.”
Her novel, which was later made into a film starring Tilda Swinton, centers on the character Eva Khatchadourian, a travel writer and publisher, whose son goes on to commit a school massacre.
During her speech at the writer’s festival, Shriver referenced a letter she received from an Armenian-American reader who objected to her narrator, saying that he felt “her ethnicity disparaged his community.”
“I took pains to explain that I knew something about Armenian heritage,” Shriver said she wrote back, “because my best friend in the states was Armenian, and I also thought there was something dark and aggrieved in the culture of the Armenian diaspora that was atmospherically germane to that book. Besides, I despaired, everyone in the U.S. has an ethnic background of some sort, and she had to be something.”
This explanation took me aback. As a writer of nonfiction who regularly enters and reports on various ethnic, religious and social communities, I would hope I’m entering these often sacred spaces with context, nuance and a strong sense of respect — things that are important to me mostly because of my own background and the intergenerational trauma that comes with it. So I don’t think that just because I’m not from a specific community, I can’t write about it.
It’s true that limiting people to only write about what they innately know is just as segregating as people not taking a sensitive approach to writing about what they have not lived.
For me, the difference lies in approach, understanding and the representation of people as complex, living, three-dimensional human beings, something which I feel Shriver did not, or care to do — whether it was toward Armenian Americans in her book, where an Armenian-American character appeared because “she had to be something” or the comment she made about her disdain for cultural appropriation, insensitively wearing a sombrero during her speech to illustrate her dislike of the accusation of cultural appropriation.
But this is an issue that isn’t just steeped in representation as fictional or nonfictional characters, it is one where the world of publishing is still very much entangled in privilege and power, where authors and writers who can bring more complex characters to life don’t get the opportunity to do so.
Perhaps novelist Viet Thanh Nguyen said it best in a recent L.A. Times op-ed: “For centuries, though, the job was easier for white writers who could get published and who could say anything they wanted about anyone, anywhere. Now those people who were written about are writing back and speaking out. They demand a conversation, they criticize, and sometimes they are too sensitive. But they are not silencing anyone. The ones who are truly silenced are the ones who cannot get published.”
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LIANA AGHAJANIAN is a Los Angeles-based journalist whose work has appeared in L.A. Weekly, Paste magazine, New America Media, Eurasianet and The Atlantic. She may be reached at liana.agh@gmail.com.