Imagining the other: do you have the right?

[pegkerr]

Here's an intriguing story of the "literary fraud" of Rahila Khan. Those of you who know the story of James Tiptree, Jr. might find it interesting. I've heard this story before, although I have not read Down the Road, Worlds Away. Has anyone on this list read it?

I thought about this issue an awful lot while I was writing Swans. In fact, it made me wonder whether I should write the book at all. It was a part of my very serious consideration of the question of whether I should re-tell the story using the hemophilia angle or the gay angle. What could I, a (mostly) heterosexual chick from the suburbs bring to the story of a young urban gay man? Did I have the right to tell that story? Of course, I wasn't trying to pass myself off as a gay male writer, but hey, wouldn't it be more appropriate (let's admit the real issue: safer) to just write the book using the hemophilia angle instead?

I don't know why writing from the viewpoint of a gay man seemed to me so much more risky or inherently off-limits to me than imagining myself to be a prisoner on the moon, or a gemcutter capable of doing magic, or a young woman who had toads coming out of her mouth whenever she spoke, all characters I've successfully written. Maybe because it touched upon matters of human sexuality, which was scary for me anyway, descendent of Puritans that I am. Finally I decided not to worry about it. A number of conversations led to that decision: huladavid was one of my early consultants and urged me not to be afraid for that reason. Jenna Felice was another (dear Jenna, how we all miss you). I was speaking to her specifically not about the gay angle, but about whether I had the right to write about such a painful topic as AIDS when I hadn't been touched by it directly, certainly not as much as she had. I asked her seriously whether I had the right to write it instead of her, when she knew so much more about AIDS and had suffered so greatly from its horrors (Jenna lost close family members--her whole childhood, really--to the disease). And she pointed that out that she was too close to the story, so maybe I was the better person to write it.

So, with permission from Jenna and huladavid, I did it. And I'm glad I did (and I'm so glad that Jenna had a chance to read it and tell me she loved it before she died so tragically young.) Ironically, writing Elias turned out to be easier than writing Eliza, because I used limited third for Elias's viewpoint so I got more into his mind. He felt like more of a friend by the end of the book. Eliza, on the other hand, was written in omniscient (more remote). These fears were really irrational, and this thing that worried me so turned out not to really be an issue after all. I don't think I'll have quite that kind of fear again.

Of course, I have all sorts of different irrational fears that interfere with my writing the book I'm working on now: it's not like I'm going to be running out of irrational fears anytime soon. I seem to be a veritable fountain of them. What a pain to be such a neurotic writer. As I get back into the swing of the ice palace book, I'll tell you about some of them. And you'll get to tell me, just as huladavid and Jenna did, that I'm being silly.

Comments

[em-h.livejournal.com]

I don't know why writing from the viewpoint of a gay man seemed to me so much more risky or inherently off-limits to me than imagining myself to be a prisoner on the moon, or a gemcutter capable of doing magic, or a young woman who had toads coming out of her mouth whenever she spoke, all characters I've successfully written.

I think it's because a prisoner on the moon is never going to turn to you in a cafe and say, "I'm angry at the way you falsified my lived experience." Whereas -- had you done it badly -- a gay man might.

I've had a lot of the same fears about writing characters who come from other cultures -- East Timorese, Bosnian. It's more worrying than the more fantastic scenarios exactly because there are real people around to judge against their real lives.

Like you, I went ahead and wrote, and have had nothing but positive feedback from the people who are actually from those cultural backgrounds. I think in a way it's good to be worried, though -- it makes us more aware of our responsibility to be accurate and respectful about other people's lives.

[vass]

Hear, hear.

There's an opposite risk, too. A prisoner on the moon is never going to turn to you in a cafe and say "I'm angry at how you ignored and invalidated my life experience." Which is a danger with *only* writing what you know, by a narrow interpretation. By which I mean, Peg, you didn't know Elias before, and now you do - because you wrote about him.