Somehow, I managed to pull off a Jedi mind-trick: I convinced two entirely separate book clubs to read the same book: Little Bee by Chris Cleave. I knew nothing of the book before I selected it, only that the book jacket promised “a truly special story.”
A couple sentences later, the jacket reads:
“This is the story of two women.”
A story about two women by Chris Cleave.
Plenty of people named Chris aren’t men—and I’ve worked with two of them myself. I flipped to the back of the book to look at the author portrait to see that Chris Cleave is a White Englishman. I shrugged and started the book. I still had his very English smile in the back of my mind as I read the first line:
“Most days I wish I was a British pound coin instead of an African girl.”
This book better be damn good, I think to myself, continuing on.
Whether it’s men writing women or stories about predominantly white/straight people having token “minorities”, mainstream media hasn’t been great at writing the “Other.” Now, with better access to media from around the world, increased visibility of minority voices, and identification of some classic authors as minorities themselves, we can read from a diverse array of authors—if that’s what we want. There are, of course, many ways to do that: the local library is a good place to start. I wish to turn my attention from reading the Other to a different issue: writing the Other.
First, some housekeeping: Merriam-Webster defines “Other” as: one considered by members of a dominant group as alien, exotic, threatening, or inferior (as because of different racial, sexual, or cultural characteristics). What I mean by “writing the Other” is not that I (or anyone who chooses to write about minorities) believe that these groups are alien, exotic, threatening, or inferior but that society has deemed them so in one way or another. It is also important to note that someone who falls into these categories may not have experienced othering, or recognized that othering has occurred, on an interpersonal level. Lastly, someone (like me, for example) can belong to an “othered” group and “other” people within their in-group (i.e. other South Asian women), and be “othered” by the same in-group.
Is the word “Other” starting to sound weird to you?
I don’t think that writing the Other is inherently problematic. After all, the ideal story is filled with different types of characters; and if you are writing fiction, especially fiction that takes place in a huge, diverse country like the United States, I would argue that you are doing a disservice to your readers, yourself, and the art of literature, if your characters all hold dominant identities and/or the identities that you yourself hold.
However, writing the Other, even when well-intentioned, can lead to media that at best is cringeworthy and at worst is traumatizing. There is still debate as to whether Mark Twain was racist or anti-racist vis-a-vis his depiction of Jim in the Adventures of Huckleberry Finn. It only takes one reading of a book like Percival Evertt’s James, a retelling of Huck Finn in which the titular character (based on “Jim” in the original novel) is a man of action, agency, wants and needs. In other words, he, and the other Black characters in the book, are written as people rather than as caricatures.
Little Bee pleasantly surprised me in that I felt like the main characters—one African woman and one White woman—were well-rounded; in other words, women of action, agency, wants, and needs. This story reminded me of two books, also about immigrants: On Fragile Waves by E. Lily Yu and White Teeth by Zadie Smith. Regardless of what I thought about the novel as a whole, all three of them contained successful depictions of writing the “Other”. I will caveat that this is my opinion as a lay reader. Aside from some common cultural denominators I share with the Iqbal family in White Teeth, I can’t speak to the actual authenticity of these cultural depictions. They certainly felt like real people; and, the author treated their depictions with respect.
Without writing the Other, these books, and countless others, would not be possible. Hawthorne writes of a single mother’s adultery in The Scarlet Letter. A woman wrote the gay romance novels that would later be adapted into Heated Rivalry. Writers without children create characters who are parents. They write about eras long gone and sometimes even times that never existed. Yet sometimes we bristle at the idea of an author writing too much out of their own experience.
The book Yellowface by R.F. Kuang follows a struggling White author who has the opportunity to write a bestseller—but her publishers think she should try to appear more “Asian” to help avoid backlash and sell the novel, which is about Chinese laborers in World War I. This is a gross simplification of the book, but my point here is that there might be some truth in the idea that we want people to come from certain identities when writing about certain topics.
It is important to acknowledge one’s positionality when writing anything, even a work of fiction. But I don’t think holding a certain identity automatically makes you more knowledgeable about a certain topic or a certain kind of person. The authors I mentioned above have done a tremendous amount of research for their novels. Their editors, publishers, and maybe even sensitivity readers provided feedback on their characters. Writing characters who feel real requires hard work, talent, and above all a strong sense of empathy and curiosity for others’ lived experiences. If we accept the alternative, that people should just stick to writing people who are like them, we end up with a different kind of problem.
American Fiction, a film based on Percival Everett’s novel Erasure, follows a Black writer whose work is rejected because his work isn’t “Black” enough. Conversely, work by his Black colleagues that is filled with Black stereotypes and cliches is praised by the public and by literary elites alike. When we pigeonhole people into writing only about their identities and experiences, we not only stifle creativity: we risk perpetuating stereotypes and causing harm.
American Fiction/Erasure and Yellowface call into question the assumptions, expectations, and attitudes of the contemporary American literati. You know, the kind of people who read in coffeeshops, who regularly update their GoodReads, who can read for half an hour straight without reaching for their phone.
Those are my kind of people.
As a writer, I hope to learn from those before me who successfully wrote the Other. There are resources that tackle diversity from characterization to the art of storytelling itself. Like any skill, writing the Other will take practice. I envision myself making mistakes and integrating criticism. But in writing, as in everyday life, all a well-intentioned person can do is try their best.