Lionel Shriver’s full speech: ‘I hope the concept of cultural appropriation is a passing fad’

Seriously, we have people questioning whether its appropriate for white people to eat pad Thai. Turnabout, then: I guess that means that as a native of North Carolina, I can ban the Thais from eating barbecue. (I bet theyd swap.)

This same sensibility is coming to a bookstore near you. Because who is the appropriator par excellence, really? Who assumes other peoples voices, accents, patois, and distinctive idioms? Who literally puts words into the mouths of people different from themselves? Who dares to get inside the very heads of strangers, who has the chutzpah to project thoughts and feelings into the minds of others, who steals their very souls? Who is a professional kidnapper? Who swipes every sight, smell, sensation, or overheard conversation like a kid in a candy store, and sometimes take notes the better to purloin whole worlds? Who is the premier pickpocket of the arts?

The fiction writer, thats who.

This is a disrespectful vocation by its nature prying, voyeuristic, kleptomaniacal, and presumptuous. And that is fiction writing at its best. When Truman Capote wrote from the perspective of condemned murderers from a lower economic class than his own, he had some gall. But writing fiction takes gall.

As for the culture polices obsession with authenticity, fiction is inherently inauthentic. Its fake. Its self-confessedly fake; that is the nature of the form, which is about people who dont exist and events that didnt happen. The name of the game is not whether your novel honours reality; its all about what you can get away with.

In his 2009 novel Little Bee, Chris Cleave, who as it happens is participating in this festival, dared to write from the point of view of a 14-year-old Nigerian girl, though he is male, white, and British. Ill remain neutral on whether he got away with it in literary terms, because I havent read the book yet.

But in principle, I admire his courage if only because he invited this kind of ethical forensics in a review out of San Francisco: When a white male author writes as a young Nigerian girl, is it an act of empathy, or identity theft? the reviewer asked. When an author pretends to be someone he is not, he does it to tell a story outside of his own experiential range. But he has to in turn be careful that he is representing his characters, not using them for his plot.

Hold it. OK, hes necessarily representing his characters, by portraying them on the page. But of course hes 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.

This same reviewer recapitulated Cleaves obligation to show that hes representing [the girl], rather than exploiting her. Again, a false dichotomy.

Of course hes exploiting her. Its 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 thats not implicitly yours to tell and worries that Cleave pushes his own boundaries maybe further than they were meant to go.

What stories are implicitly ours to tell, and what boundaries around our own lives are we mandated to remain within? I would argue that any story you can make yours is yours to tell, and trying to push the boundaries of the authors personal experience is part of a fiction writers job.

Im hoping that crime writers, for example, dont all have personal experience of committing murder. Me, Ive depicted a high school killing spree, and I hate to break it to you: Ive never shot fatal arrows through seven kids, a teacher, and a cafeteria worker, either. We make things up, we chance our arms, sometimes we do a little research, but in the end its still about what we can get away with what we can put over on our readers.

Because the ultimate endpoint of keeping out mitts off experience that doesnt belong to us is that there is no fiction. Someone like me only permits herself to write from the perspective of a straight white female born in North Carolina, closing on sixty, able-bodied but with bad knees, skint for years but finally able to buy the odd new shirt. All thats left is memoir.

And heres the bugbear, heres where we really cant win. At the same time that were to write about only the few toys that landed in our playpen, were also upbraided for failing to portray in our fiction a population that is sufficiently various.

My most recent novel The Mandibleswas taken to task by one reviewer for addressing an America that is straight and white. It happens that this is a multigenerational family saga about a white family. I wasnt instinctively inclined to insert a transvestite or bisexual, with issues that might distract from my central subject matter of apocalyptic economics. Yet the implication of this criticism is that we novelists need to plug in representatives of a variety of groups in our cast of characters, as if filling out the entering class of freshmen at a university with strict diversity requirements.

You do indeed see just this brand of tokenism in television. There was a point in the latter 1990s at which suddenly every sitcom and drama in sight had to have a gay or lesbian character or couple. That was good news as a voucher of the success of the gay rights movement, but it still grew a bit tiresome: look at us, our show is so hip, one of the characters is homosexual!

Were now going through the same fashionable exercise in relation to the transgender characters in series like Transparent and Orange is the New Black.

Fine. But I still would like to reserve the right as a novelist to use only the characters that pertain to my story.

Besides: which is it to be? We have to tend our own gardens, and only write about ourselves or people just like us because we mustnt pilfer others experience, or we have to people our cast like an Id like to teach the world to sing Coca-Cola advert?

For it can be dangerous these days to go the diversity route. Especially since there seems to be a consensus on the notion that San Francisco reviewer put forward that special care should be taken with a story thats not implicitly yours to tell.

In The Mandibles, I have one secondary character, Luella, whos black. Shes married to a more central character, Douglas, the Mandible familys 97-year-old patriarch. I reasoned that Douglas, a liberal New Yorker, would credibly have left his wife for a beautiful, stately African American because arm candy of color would reflect well on him in his circle, and keep his progressive kids objections to a minimum. But in the end the joke is on Douglas, because Luella suffers from early onset dementia, while his ex-wife, staunchly of sound mind, ends up running a charity for dementia research. As the novel reaches its climax and the family is reduced to the street, theyre obliged to put the addled, disoriented Luella on a leash, to keep her from wandering off.

Behold, the reviewer in the Washington Post, who groundlessly accused this book of being racist because it doesnt toe a strict Democratic Party line in its political outlook, described the scene thus: The Mandibles are white. Luella, the single African American in the family, arrives in Brooklyn incontinent and demented. She needs to be physically restrained. As their fortunes become ever more dire and the family assembles for a perilous trek through the streets of lawless New York, shes held at the end of a leash. If The Mandibles is ever made into a film, my suggestion is that this image not be employed for the movie poster.

Your author, by implication, yearns to bring back slavery.

Thus in the world of identity politics, fiction writers better be careful. If we do choose to import representatives of protected groups, special rules apply. If a character happens to be black, they have to be treated with kid gloves, and never be placed in scenes that, taken out of context, might seem disrespectful. But thats no way to write. The burden is too great, the self-examination paralysing. The natural result of that kind of criticism in the Postis that next time I dont use any black characters, lest they do or say anything that is short of perfectly admirable and lovely.

In fact, Im reminded of a letter I received in relation to my seventh novel from an Armenian-American who objected why did I have to make the narrator of We Need to Talk About KevinArmenian? He didnt like my narrator, and felt that her ethnicity disparaged his community. I took pains to explain that I knew something about Armenian heritage, 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 US has an ethnic background of some sort, and she had to be something!

Especially for writers from traditionally privileged demographics, the message seems to be that its a whole lot safer just to make all your characters from that same demographic, so you can be as hard on them as you care to be, and do with them what you like. Availing yourself of a diverse cast, you are not free; you have inadvertently invited a host of regulations upon your head, as if just having joined the EU. Use different races, ethnicities, and minority gender identities, and you are being watched.

I confess that this climate of scrutiny has got under my skin. When I was first starting out as a novelist, I didnt hesitate to write black characters, for example, or to avail myself of black dialects, for which, having grown up in the American South, I had a pretty good ear. I am now much more anxious about depicting characters of different races, and accents make me nervous.

In describing a second-generation Mexican American whos married to one of my main characters in The Mandibles, I took care to write his dialogue in standard American English, to specify that he spoke without an accent, and to explain that he only dropped Spanish expressions tongue-in-cheek. I would certainly think twice more than twice about ever writing a whole novel, or even a goodly chunk of one, from the perspective of a character whose race is different from my own because I may sell myself as an iconoclast, but Im as anxious as the next person about attracting vitriol. But I think thats a loss. I think that indicates a contraction of my fictional universe that is not good for the books, and not good for my soul.

Writing under the pseudonym Edward Schlosser on Vox, the author of the essay Im a Liberal Professor, and My Liberal Students Scare Me describes higher educations current climate of fear and its heavily policed discourse of semantic sensitivity and I am concerned that this touchy ethos, in which offendedness is used as a weapon, has spread far beyond academia, in part thanks to social media.

Why, its largely in order to keep from losing my fictional mojo that I stay off Facebook and Twitter, which could surely install an instinctive self-censorship out of fear of attack. Ten years ago, I gave the opening address of this same festival, in which I maintained that fiction writers have a vested interest in protecting everyones right to offend others because if hurting someone elses feelings even inadvertently is sufficient justification for muzzling, there will always be someone out there who is miffed by what you say, and freedom of speech is dead. With the rise of identity politics, which privileges a subjective sense of injury as actionable basis for prosecution, that is a battle that in the decade since I last spoke in Brisbane weve been losing.

Worse: the lefts embrace of gotcha hypersensitivity inevitably invites backlash. Donald Trump appeals to people who have had it up to their eyeballs with being told what they can and cannot say. Pushing back against a mainstream culture of speak-no-evil suppression, they lash out in defiance, and then what they say is pretty appalling.

Regarding identity politics, whats especially saddened me in my recent career is a trend toward rejecting the advocacy of anyone who does not belong to the group. In 2013, I published Big Brother, a novel that grew out of my loss of my own older brother, who in 2009 died from the complications of morbid obesity. I was moved to write the book not only from grief, but also sympathy: in the years before his death, as my brother grew heavier, I saw how dreadfully other people treated him how he would be seated off in a corner of a restaurant, how the staff would roll their eyes at each other after hed ordered, though he hadnt requested more food than anyone else.

I was wildly impatient with the way we assess peoples characters these days in accordance with their weight, and tried to get on the page my dismay at how much energy people waste on this matter, sometimes anguishing for years over a few excess pounds. Both author and book were on the side of the angels, or so you would think.

But in my events to promote Big Brother, I started to notice a pattern. Most of the people buying the book in the signing queue were thin. Especially in the US, fat is now one of those issues where you either have to be one of us, or youre the enemy. I verified this when I had a long email correspondence with a Healthy at Any Size activist, who was incensed by the novel, which she hadnt even read. Which she refused to read. No amount of explaining that the novel was on her side, that it was a book that was terribly pained by the way heavy people are treated and how unfairly they are judged, could overcome the scrawny authors photo on the flap.

She and her colleagues in the fat rights movement did not want my advocacy. I could not weigh in on this material because I did not belong to the club. I found this an artistic, political, and even commercial disappointment because in the US and the UK, if only skinny-minnies will buy your book, youve evaporated the pool of prospective consumers to a puddle.

I worry that the clamorous world of identity politics is also undermining the very causes its activists claim to back. As a fiction writer, yeah, I do sometimes deem my narrator an Armenian. But thats only by way of a start. Merely being Armenian is not to have a character as I understand the word.

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, thats sort of all they were: Chinese. Which isnt enough.

I made this same point in relation to gender in Melbourne last week: both as writers and as people, we should be seeking to push beyond the constraining categories into which we have been arbitrarily dropped by birth. If we embrace narrow group-based identities too fiercely, we cling to the very cages in which others would seek to trap us. We pigeonhole ourselves. We limit our own notion of who we are, and in presenting ourselves as one of a membership, a representative of our type, an ambassador of an amalgam, we ask not to be seen.

The reading and writing of fiction is obviously driven in part by a desire to look inward, to be self-examining, reflective. But the form is also born of a desperation to break free of the claustrophobia of our own experience.

The spirit of good fiction is one of exploration, generosity, curiosity, audacity, and compassion. Writing during the day and reading when I go to bed at night, I find it an enormous relief to escape the confines of my own head. Even if novels and short stories only do so 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.