Identity, Authorship, and the Limits of Empathy

NOTE: This blog post contains a ton of spoilers if you haven’t read Lisa Halliday’s Asymmetry or Jeanine Cummins’s American Dirt. You’ve been warned!

As I’ve immersed myself in the world of fiction the last few years, I’ve watched with what can only be called morbid fascination at the periodic flare-ups surrounding questions of identity, authorship, and representation. Fiction writing is, by definition, premised on the ability to successfully access, inhabit, and convey the interiority of others. Accordingly, novels are often lauded for providing a window onto the experiences of those quite different from ourselves, and, at their best, seem capable of inspiring empathy for “the other.” But, as many folks would argue, it seems as though it’s all been called into question by our present social justice moment whose warriors warn us daily about the fine line between uplifting someone’s story and usurping someone’s voice—especially when that someone belongs to a different racial or ethnic group. In the world of fiction writing, it really boils down to one simple question: who gets to tell whose stories? I might add: and who decides? 

Take, for example, the different critical responses to the recent publication of two novels that, at least at a superficial level, appear to have much in common: Lisa Halliday’s Asymmetry (2018) and Jeanine Cummins’s American Dirt (2020). Both novels were written by white women and both explore the lives of characters who are culturally different from them: while Halliday’s novel within a novel opens into a story about Amar, an Iraqi-American Muslim living during the Bush administration, Cummins tells the story of Lydia, a Mexican migrant who flees with her son across the border, risking life and limb to make it to America. Prior to their publication, the literary world was abuzz with anticipation, but only one survived the critics’ gauntlet. While Halliday’s book was proclaimed an unqualified success, American Dirt instead came to receive scathing reviews, its author reviled for what many critics – especially Latinx critics – saw as Cummins’s crass cultural appropriation.  How can we account for these discrepancies? In order to understand better the politics of identity in the world of fiction, we’ll need to first compare the novels in greater detail, then see how they hold up against different frameworks for “writing the other” that various authors have suggested in the last few years. In the end, I’m not entirely convinced that we can, or should, “write the other” anymore, at least not as classically conceived, but I’m getting ahead of myself…

While the multi-layered novel Asymmetry defies easy summary, most reviewers agreed that, at the heart of it, the book “poses questions about the limits of imagination and empathy,” asking “can we understand each other across lines of race, gender, nationality, and power?” This reading centers primarily around the fact that, like her fictitious doppelganger Alice (whose story opens this novel within a novel), Lisa Halliday is a white woman and yet writes from Amar’s perspective in the second half of the book. In fact, Halliday-as-Alice is overt about this moral experiment. As the first novel gives way to the second, Halliday-as-Alice converses with an immigrant hot-dog seller, musing, “For her part, Alice was starting to consider really rather seriously whether a former choirgirl from Massachusetts might be capable of conjuring the consciousness of a Muslim man” (71).In other words, Halliday-as-Alice expressly asks if a white woman can tell a brown person’s story, and then proceeds to do just that. To judge by the critical reception, the answer would appear to be yes. Asymmetry washeralded as “a dizzying debut” by The Guardian, a “literary phenomenon” by the New Yorker, and a “scorchingly intelligent” and “deft debut novel” according to New York Times book reviewer Parul Sehgal. In other words, reviewers – at least one of whom is herself a woman of color – appeared to unanimously agree that Halliday’s novel provided an example of how a white author can successfully – and appropriately – write from within the experience of an/other.

Despite having initially been touted as the literary event of 2020, Jeanine Cummins’s American Dirt received quite a different critical reception. Like Halliday, Cummins is a white woman (well, that’s how she identified until as recently as 2015 – a point we will return to) and also writes a book depicting the lives of racial “others,” in her case Mexican migrants. Few critics delivered as withering a review as the formidable Mexican-American writer Myriam Gurba, who wrote of the book:

 “Her obra de caca belongs to the great American tradition of doing the following:

1. Appropriating genius works by people of color

2. Slapping a coat of mayonesa on them to make palatable to taste buds estados-unidenses and

3. Repackaging them for mass racially “colorblind” consumption.”

Ouch. Gurba’s review (which I cannot recommend strongly enough) accuses Cummins of everything from bad writing (ie: flat characters) to major ethical lapses in judgement (ie: stereotypical clichés, racist white ignorance, casual American glib-ness, and plagiarism).  Above all, Gurba accuses Cummins of having written a book about the experience of Mexican migrants through the lens of the white gaze. At best, Gurba asserts, it “fails to convey any Mexican sensibility.” At worst, it sketches out precisely the kind of (white) racial fantasy of the Mexican other that, even in spite of the self-professed progressive intentions of its author, “serv[es] a Trumpian agenda.” While some might think Gurba’s appraisal overly critical, she wasn’t alone. American Dirtreceived a similarly stinging review from, among others, the NYT’s Parul Sehgal – who had so lavished praise on Halliday’s Asymmetry. Notably, Sehgal remarked that, in spite of the author’s good intentions and even depth of research, “Still, the book feels conspicuously like the work of an outsider,” citing for example the author’s “strange, excited fascination in commenting on gradient” 

These are damning reviews indeed, and it bears noting that the controversy was stoked by other factors. It certainly wasn’t helped by the (depending on your perspective) naïve and/or disingenuous attempts of Cummins’s publishers to “prove” that she had the “right” to tell this story. As the initial blowback gathered steam, Cummins’s publishers cited that she had a Puerto Rican grandmother on her father’s side and that she was “the wife of a formerly undocumented immigrant” (he’s from Ireland). Considering that Cummins had previously identified as white, these attempts to claim an authentic Latinx voice appeared unsavory, to say the least. And it’s possible that Cummins didn’t do herself any favors, either. For example, there’s the infamous barbed wire manicure she showed off on Twitter just weeks before the book appeared, not to mention the barbed wire centerpieces at the book launch itself. To many critics, the obsession with barbed wire aesthetics laid bare precisely the fetishization of pain and oppression that is the very hallmark of white American’s penchant for cultural appropriation. There was also a fair amount of frustration felt among Latinx writers like Luis Alberto Urrea who had struggled to break through a predominantly white industry for decades only to have a white woman rewarded with a multi-million dollar contract for telling precisely the same stories in 2020.

The kerfuffle over American Dirt in January of this year involved everyone from Oprah and Eva Longoria to Sandra Cisneros and Salma Hayek, but it was also just the latest example of a reckoning around identity, representation, and the politics of authorship in the literary world. Years before, author Jonathan Franzen had famously declared that he would never write about “race” because he doesn’t “have very many black friends” and has “never been in love with a black woman.” (Yes, the very statement alone demonstrates that he probably shouldn’t be writing about “race.”) Since Franzen’s highly-publicized pronouncement, a diverse set of authors have weighed in on the subject. Some (white authors) have balked at the proposition that our current social justice moment precludes them from writing from within different identities. Others (black and brown authors, specifically) have tried to develop best practices and guiding principles to help fellow writers do precisely that. In a series on “The Politics of Fiction” in Vulture, authors, including Laila Lalami, Victor LaValle, and N.K. Jemisin, among others, offered advice on how to successfully “write outside your identity.” All concurred that there’s no magic formula, and that writing from the inner world of someone who is racially different from you is a deeply fraught undertaking. Nearly all pointed to the paramount importance of research, acknowledging that they didn’t get it right the first time. If given the chance, many claimed they would go back and do it over again at least a bit differently. 

But of all the advice floating around out there, the framework proposed by author Alexander Chee strikes me as the most sound. In an article entitled “How to Unlearn Everything When It Comes to Writing the ‘Other,’”Chee pulls no punches, noting that the question of who gets to tell what story is “a Trojan horse, posing as reasonable artistic discourse when, in fact, many writers are not really asking for advice — they are asking if it is okay to find a way to continue as they have.” He then asserts, unequivocally: “They don’t want an answer; they want permission.” Rather than contribute to the endless discussion boards offering guidance and tips, Chee instead encourages “writers of the other” to ask themselves three essential questions before they begin a new project: 

 1.     Why do you want to write from this character’s point of view? Bottom line: “[I]f you’re not in community with people like those you want to write about, chances are you are on your way to intruding” (emphasis my own).

2.     Do you read writers from this community currently? The upshot: What has survived, what has become “canon,” is usually what’s been written by white men. The process of “recuperating” stories by women, BIPOC, and queer writers is only a few decades old. As a result, unless you, the reader, make a concerted effort, it is easy not to have a diverse collection of authors on your shelves.

3.     Why do you want to tell this story? To this, Chee added: Does this story contain a damaging stereotype of a marginalized group? Does the story need this stereotype to exist? If so, does the story need to exist?

That last injunction is particularly salient. To my mind, it’s where social justice and “writing the other” experience a meeting of the minds. Social justice advocates learned long ago that “empathy” alone is not enough to have meaningful dialogue or effect lasting change; that, in order to be in community with others different from ourselves, empathy is merely the starting point. How easy it is for conversations to veer from “I seek to understand you” to “I understand you and so I now speak for you.” To limit those slippages, folks in the field of social justice have developed a number of ground rules whenever a group seeks to engage in dialogue and be in community with one another. For example, a common norm for discussions enjoins all to “speak from the I perspective,” as in only speak about your own experiences, not someone else’s. But what would that mean to a fiction writer, whose craft demands they occupy someone else’s subjectivity? Unlike Franzen, Chee doesn’t discount entirely the possibility that these two things can be reconciled. But he does ask the would-be “writer of the other” to pause, to examine themselves, their motivations, their backgrounds, and their own histories. Chee asks them to actively engage in self-reflection before putting pen to paper, which is of course also the starting point for anyone who wishes to participate meaningfully in social justice work, as well.

In the final analysis, did Halliday meet all of Chee’s criteria? Who knows. Chee’s framework requires us to know far more about a writer’s process than certainly I – an avid though amateur reader – am capable of gleaning from casual internet sleuthing. From my own reading, I can say that I was personally struck by what I perceived as strong research, particularly the portions of the book that are set in Iraq. Moreover Halliday, unlike Cummins, seemed invested in critically highlighting how American politics shaped – and didn’t shape – the circumstances of her main characters’ lives. For instance, though Bush blares on the radio in the background of Alice’s story, the military actions of the Bush administration shape the entire existence of Amar and his family in the second half of the book. I believe there is a strong argument to be made that Halliday wanted the reader to consider those asymmetries of power – that what forms the backdrop to a casual love affair between two white Americans in part one of the book dramatically shapes the lifeworld, and chances of Iraqis and Iraqi-Americans in part two. In so doing, she criticizes white American ignorance in the face of so much brown pain caused in our name.

And to be honest, writers can get away with an awful lot if, as Parul Sehgal says, they do so “responsibly and well.” For my own part, I found Halliday’s writing experiment to be stylistically interesting, creative, and intelligent. Parts one and two of the book offer, among other things, a meditation on how writers draw from their own experiences, how they braid their lives into those of their characters. These choices inspire artistic appreciation, to be sure. But they also suggest a certain moral argument for our times: they suggest to the reader how the life-world of an Alice can, at times, bear a striking resemblance to that of an Amar and in so doing they challenge us to see the moments where their humanity – and ours – overlaps. This, I believe, is why Halliday’s novel won such widespread acclaim.

A comparison between the two novels could easily end there, but I think there’s one further layer of this story to consider. The fact is that, apart from Sehgal, I could find no other critics of color who had written about Asymmetry. Sure, I’m a woman of color, but I’m neither Iraqi nor Muslim, and I’m certainly no trained literary critic. As the recurring controversies in the world of fiction have revealed over and over again, the publishing industry – like most major industries – is overwhelmingly white, as much as 80% white according to one 2015 survey. As such, books about racial “others” are necessarily subject to little examination from people of color who may very well be best equipped to detect writing that verges on the culturally appropriative. What does this mean for Halliday’s book? While I for one certainly admire what I see as the research, artistry, and moral experiment that Asymmetry represents, I nevertheless lack the specific cultural context necessary to engage with it at the level that so many Latinx critics were able to engage with Cummins’s book. At the end of the day, it’s not just about the ability of authors to “write the other.” It’s also about the systemic whiteness of an industry that greenlights projects it shouldn’t and that fails to see promise in the work of writers of color.

A final point on the subject: while it’s true that Halliday framed her novel as an experiment, asking can a white woman tell a brown man’s story, there are some critics out there who might argue that this is the wrong question entirely. Rather, they might contend that the question is should a white person tell the story of a person of color at all, and they might answer with a resounding “no.” For my own part, I don’t favor all or nothing arguments. I do, however, favor any opportunities to engage in self-examination. With Chee’s framework in mind, then, I might instead suggest the following: If a white author wishes urgently to write about “race,” they need look no further than themselves. It’s a faulty assumption that “race” and a “racial experience” is something only people of color have. As Chee counsels his own students, if you seek to cross boundaries, first cross the boundaries that lie within. What might it look like, sound like, feel like to tell a story that self-consciously and critically analyzes whiteness in America today? At its best, that’s what Asymmetry got right. And those are the novels that I’d look forward to reading.