I learned to lie as a matter of self preservation. When I say that I have little regard for the line between reality and the perceived unreal, I’m really saying that this is a distinction that has had little regard for my safety. Why must I preserve what won’t save me? For this line, I wish for attenuation. I wish to move this line in a direction that allows a more inclusive history—history being an archive with many curators. A record that is written and spoken and felt.
In one tradition I grew up with, history comes from the French, l’histoire, which means story. I’m starting with a joke about my proximity to whiteness to remind you that despite how I may be perceived, I am writing in a tradition that begins here in the United States, in an ecotone between cultures. I am reaching toward stories given to me across decades. Frequently the original telling is in Tagalog, and a loved one is offering a friendly translation. When I approach a memory (mine or someone else’s), I have to ask: Can this story still recognize me as an extension of itself?
There’s a critique of modern political conservatism by composer Frank Wilhoit that I find useful when considering the formal structure of how we distinguish cultural realities. I think it’s worth noting that this critique comes from a fellow artist and not a political scientist:
“Conservatism consists of exactly one proposition, to wit: There must be in-groups whom the law protects but does not bind, alongside out-groups whom the law binds but does not protect.”
Can we consider how this description of conservative political values has parallels to how we discuss art, especially work by writers and artists who are Black, Indigenous or people of color? Simply by centering a non-white point of view, art and literature face critiques which suggest they do not engage with “universal” themes. The work is deemed illegible. Last year, I heard about at least two different editors translating multilingual texts into English without first consulting the authors. This is in addition to the number of workshops and editors that ask for a friend or a student to include a glossary of terms or a footnote to explain culture or language for a presumably white audience. A judgment made in the name of accessibility because we are taught to fear the reader who might resent or abandon a work that does not grant full and immediate access.
How often is an audience’s confusion not the result of the work, but the result of the reader’s refusal to be pushed from the center? If you have always been part of an in-group whom society centers, protects, and does not bind, what is your reaction when you are portrayed as the out-group?
I think Wilhoit’s critique of conservatism is particularly helpful when we consider Barthe’s concept of ‘exnomination,’ which is when we work from the assumption that the ruling class is the normative, presumed subject of one’s story. More directly, when we aren’t told a character’s race or background, we assume we’re reading about a middle class white character. But when another identity is named and centered, some portion of the audience expresses discomfort with the work’s identity politics, a critique bell hooks recognized in 1992:
“Those progressive white individuals who are particularly critical of ‘essentialist’ notions of identity when writing about mass culture, race, and gender have not focused their critiques on white identity and the way essentialism informs representations of whiteness. It is always the non-white, or in some cases the non-hetersexual Other, who is guilty of essentialism.”
This guilt regarding essentialism originates with (and is assigned by) an audience who desires race without context, a kind of appropriation of difference which hooks goes on to describe would “thereby erase knowledge of the specific historical and cultural context of Black experience from which cultural production and distinct Black styles emerge.” Central to my thinking as a writer is the difference between race being decontextualized and race being defamiliarized. Without context, we lose history and the possibility of future political change. But to be defamiliarized—to approach our sense of the self and the Other anew–opens the possibility to critique one’s desires and, in turn, use this recognition to inform political engagement.
When I engage with hybridity—of genre, of form—I’m making a choice that resonates with my lived experiences, but I’m also choosing to reject the validating structures that might make my story legible. I want to confront the audience as a person unfamiliar to them. I’m acknowledging that centering a “universal” real isn’t a safe practice. Poet Jessica Q. Stark offers an explanation of this predicament. In an interview with Poetry Northwest, she writes:
“I want the importance of these stories to be accessible, tactile. But the book is such a flawed medium, isn’t it? It’s so arrogant, like any container. And to write truthfully I feel I must invite some occlusion, some deep failure to contain it all.”
I recently had the opportunity to ask her a follow-up question: How do you resist the urge to please an audience who wants complete information? I drafted the question, but in front of a live audience, I didn’t ask Stark. I feared our conversation would be shaped by the audience as much as each other. It’s difficult, isn’t it? But it’s essential to remember the tenets of one’s own practice. I’m choosing to tell the stories I’m tangential to as well as my relationship to who has told me this story and who I’m telling it to. If I allow the confusion of one audience, who can I allow to feel the narrative protection of being centered?
As writers, many of us have found a text that offers us this protection—a favorite work that allows us a rare mirror of our experiences. I know this because of how many of us love Baldwin’s quote which surfaces between news stories and advertisements on my Instagram from time to time:
“You read something which you thought only happened to you, and you discover that it happened 100 years ago to Dostoyevsky. This is a very great liberation for the suffering, struggling person, who always thinks that he is alone. This is why art is important. Art would not be important if life were not important, and life is important.”
In my previous career as a librarian, we more formally discussed how books offer “mirrors and windows” for different human experiences. The terms evoke the joy of self recognition (the mirror) and a sense of discovery and delight through the reader’s consumption of the unknown (the window). I, however, am not interested in the window. Saeed Jones, in a conversation with Ingrid Rojas Contreras, once said:
“The reason a lot of people read nonfiction and memoir reading is because they are cultural tourists and they want to try on your skin… They believe that is the pathway to some form of betterment. And I don’t think that is entirely noble but I also think it’s unavoidable.”
How open must the collective “we”—the “we” I’ve invented to tie myself back to the stories I most need, be to the reader?
When discussing my fears about audience with Annie Wenstrup, she asked an important question: “Who is the good readership for?” I’ve noticed that a common critique of my work is that it can be inaccessible or lack resonance. As a reluctant reader, or someone who finds it difficult to read purely for pleasure, I have actually found this true of most books that others love. Lately, I wonder if my past reluctance as a reader is linked to being part of an audience who is largely ignored or “uncentered” because of how we prioritize “universal” stories legible to a white audience. Who is my readership for? And then, who is my reader? are questions that have allowed me to decenter literature that never centered me. I do this with the certainty that there are many of us who have read from the sidelines, never feeling that we were allowed to imagine ourselves or our families as main characters.