Paisley Rekdal - Appropriate: A Provocation

APPROPRIATE

A Provocation

Paisley Rekdal

For my father,

who opened my mind to a world of books

Contents

APPROPRIATE

D ear X:

You asked at the end of last class whether I had an essay I might share with you about cultural appropriation. You asked because of the tense note on which our workshop ended the discussion of your poem, a monologue in the voice of a Black nurse who worked in your White grandmothers home in Georgia. Your poem was meant to be a complex double portrait of both the Black caregiver and your White grandmother, and the racist logic and history that bound them both. Did you, a young White person, the child of people you freely admitted had been shaped by racist beliefs, have any claim or relationship to this voice? Our workshop worried this question for an hour without resolving it. And while our discussion never devolved, as I was concerned it might, into open hostility, it also didnt make anyone feel better for having participated in it, nor did it settle the questions your poem raised to anyones satisfaction. You still wanted, you said, an answer. Frankly, so do I.

I could tell by your subdued demeanor when you approached me that you were afraid your poem had caused pain, and that there might be some future, perhaps public, fallout for it. Perhaps there will be. I assume there wont, because your classmates took the poem and you with pretty good humor, respect, and patience, even when they disagreedsometimes vehementlywith the poem itself. All of us acknowledged that authorial intentions dont finally matter to how we read a creative work that fails, but what does it mean for a poem like yours to fail, exactly? And what are the implications if we said your poem had succeeded? When we write in the voice of people unlike ourselves, what do we risk besides the possibility of getting certain facts, histories, and perspectives wrong? And was your poem, to certain audiences, perhaps always meant, if not to fail, then to be seen as an ethical lapse?

You should know how many other students Ive taught over the years whose work has raised the same questions, X. You should know, too, how much I respect the ways you took your classmates criticism during our discussion. You didnt lash out or sulk, you didnt try to justify or explain anything away. You sat and listened, perhaps the hardest thing to do when a group of strangers ponders whether your words and images, and by implication you, are inherently racist. Your desire to get it right, as you expressed yesterday afternoon, was everywhere evident in your response to your classmates concerns, and it requires that I now find the right essay to address your question around the ethics of creative expression. While I have a number of articles and books I recommend reading, I cant think of one that speaks to a young writer trying to probe the limitations of her imagination, one who is both open-minded about the question of appropriation and also, reasonably, terrified. I know when you and other students ask me for such an essay, you are asking if I can find the single argument that would either rationalize or dismiss the practice; you are asking me to tell you how cultural appropriation is generally defined, why and if writers think its always wrong, whether its been done well before in literature and how. This is an essay I imagine the other students in our class would want to read after our conversation; its an essay that I, as a writer, have never found.

Like many writers today, I believe writing in the voice of someone outside my subject position surely crosses a line, but which one, exactly? Writing is mastered over the course of a life, and perhaps you suspect the truth of mastery, which is that its achieved by both practicing and unlearning the lessons teachers like me drill into you at school, lessons that, while they lay the groundwork for producing good stories and poems, prove insufficient for creating our greatest work, which often disrupts the messages weve been taught. As writers, we absorb much of our technique through reading, more so than through class discussion, and yet books, too, fall short when it comes to determining just what is the right kind of appropriation to attempt, since so much of writing is appropriative, and so much of appropriative writing is historically contextualized. Here is where the workshop might have stepped in with good advice, but as you yourself have seen, people would rather gnaw off the fingers of their right hand than talk through the tangled arguments around cultural appropriation.

Because what were really talking about with cultural appropriation, X, is identity, and while we all have identities, few of us are prepared to unravel the Gordian knot of social realities, history, and fantasy that constitute a self and its attendant ideas of race, ethnicity, gender, sexuality, or even physical or mental ability, let alone discuss what an accurate representation of any of these selves might look like on the page. And the more you and I think about identity, the more we might discover that cultural appropriation is less a question of staying in ones lane, as one of your classmates put it, than an evolving conversation we must have around privilege and aesthetic fashion in literary practice.

In a literary world dominated by both writing-workshop culture and social media, many writers hone their aesthetics under the intoxicating influence of ego and shame: how to win your instructors or classmates approval, how to avoid vilification on Twitter, how to get a book published before you turn twenty-five. But ego and shame reject nuance in favor of outrage or thinkpieces gone viral on the Internet, which purport to offer guidance but more often than not mine our own latent seams of insecurity, bolstering the suspicion that, no matter what choice we make, what ideas we agree with and what writers we strive to imitate, that choice is always wrong. Its another reason I think our class discussion about cultural appropriation felt so fraught; not only do we each see very smart people around us quick and free to judge, we see them quick to make these judgments public, and to make their object of judgmentourselves, potentiallythe object of derision.

Im not here to judge. I dont want to revisit the successes or failures of your poem, X, but to examine with you the strategies employed by other writers whove written outside their own identities. I want to do justice to your question, which asks me to consider what literary practices constitute cultural appropriation, and whether such practices are always wrong. I want to think carefully about why some works of literature feel exploitative while others dont. I want to talk about literary prestige and cultural power, and I want to consider how racism and prejudice affect our very idea of the free or human imagination. Most important, I want to offer you some tools to answer this question for yourself, because the fact is you might reject some or all of my arguments, and I think these disagreements, while uncomfortable, are ultimately good, and will be returned to as you develop as an artist. The ideas that I express here, X, are ideas of a moment; I have not always held these ideas myself, and I may not continue to hold them as the world in which we live revises itself. You, too, will change your mind. Because the questions you and I have around cultural appropriation cannot be asked and answered only once: they must be asked and answered every year, every decade we work as writers. Power isnt static. Race and gender arent static. Nothing about our identities, our political presence, and social meaning in the world remains stable. So long as we change, the questions we hold around representation change with us, and what we take as fundamental aesthetic precepts now will be unfashionable, even embarrassing, to future generations.