“Writing difference is a challenge, particularly in fiction. How do men write women and vice versa? How do writers of one race or ethnicity write about people of another race or ethnicity? More important, how do writers tackle difference without reducing their characters to caricatures or stereotypes?” Roxane Gay reviews Joyce Carol Oates‘s The Sacrifice and simultaneously explains how to write difference well. Hint: it “demands empathy, an ability to respect the humanity of those you mean to represent.”
How To: Write Difference
tl;dr
It’s the last day to vote on panels at SXSW interactive 2013. So if you wanna hear how our editor in chief, C. Max Magee, and our friends Andrew Womack, from The Morning News, and Kevin Nguyen, from The Bygone Bureau, have changed the game with independent long form digital publishing, you better cast your vote today.
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Cain’s Campaign Cash
Bloomberg and Talking Points Memo raise questions about Herman Cain’s practice of using campaign funds to buy his own book, This is Herman Cain! My Journey to the White House, from a motivational speaking company that he runs. (via)
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Guernica Talks to Robert Thurman
“Look, if you meet someone with one leg, are you going to sit and revile them for not having the other leg? No, you’re going to be happy that they have the one and praise them for it. And get them thinking about how can we substitute for the one that’s lacking. Which are you going to do?” Robert Thurman quoting the Dalai Lama on embracing the positive in an interview in Guernica, where Thurman speaks about nonviolent resistance, the potential for a demilitarized world, and his friendship with the Dalai Lama.
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The Road on Which You Are Traveling Is a Very Bad Road
New York Times travel editor Monica Drake recounts visiting Antigua after reading Jamaica Kincaid’s A Small Place—a sharp critique of tourism and the colonialist narrative around the island. As she puts it, “For all the drama of its history, […] the beauty of the place, the very thing that bewitches its tourists, renders it a time capsule to its residents.”
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Stay Away from the Semicolon
“The Crested Asterisk camouflages itself in poor syntax, relying on this tactic to confuse its predators and prey. It is the only specimen known to cause injury by way of over-emphasis.” Introducing a field guide to rare punctuation.
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Donald Barthelme’s Reading List
The Believer posts a 2003 essay featuring Donald Barthelme’s reading list, which came secondhand to Kevin Moffett, a self-professed non-reader: “Barthelme’s only guidance, passed on by Padgett Powell, one of Barthelme’s former students at the University of Houston and my teacher at the time, was to attack the books ‘in no particular order, just read them,’ which is exactly what I, in my confident illiteracy, resolved to do.” (via The Paris Review)
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Lest the hasty reader think this is article is about how to actually write about people different from oneself, the link is to a review of a book that stupendously fails to do it.
Or rather Joe, the link is to a review by Roxane Gay, who calls Joyce Carol Oates “deeply offensive” for not writing about black people in the right way (a way in which, apparently, only Roxane Gay is privileged to).
@Mygod
Considering she provides some examples of books that write across the racial divide, I’m not sure your parenthetical is charitable.
Although you could maybe take issue with the examples she provided. Southern Cross the Dog is a Southern Gothic novel about a black man written by an Asian American who has never even visited Mississippi. Considering the many imaginative leaps Cheng was already making, Gay may have been more generous with her assessment than she would have been in a strictly realist approach, such as Oates’. Round House is written by Erdrich, a native American, but almost all the characters are Native American except a handful of secondary characters (including the villain) are white. So that strikes me as an odd example for Gay to pick.
I don’t think Gay’s position is indefensible at all, just that her examples are somewhat strange. I wonder what she thinks of Styron’s Confessions of Nat Turner.
It’ll be interesting to see if other authors or critics, particularly black writers/critics, will respond to Gay’s review.
Oops. Please excuse the typos.
@Ross – thanks for the detailed reply. To be a little clearer about it – while Roxane Gay does indicate that there writers who can write across “the racial divide,” I was implying that I don’t see how Gay has more claim to being an arbiter than Oates.
In other words, there’s a bad faith at work here – wherein Gay assumes she knows “the correct racial fiction” and Oates has clearly failed whatever definitional line Gay thinks is clear, I strongly doubt that the definition holds up under any scrutiny. This is unfortunate, because if it’s this easy for a good author like Oates to be accused of racism (which is the underlying message here, or at least, an accusation of drastic racial insensitivity) the less people will write novels with a diverse cast.
Another perspective on Oates and difference:
http://www.buzzfeed.com/mchadburn/wonderland-woman#.lw5KRA4REV
@Robin Thanks, that was a welcome counterpart.
I myself think that Oates can be critiqued as much as one likes from a literary standpoint but accusing her of a lack of empathy and then saying she writes “deeply offensive” works about race is pretty much the definition of insanity, or rather, the definition of the “if you’re not on my side in my exact way you’re expressing ancient evils” mode of argument that people like Gay fall into at the drop of a hat.